Roget Belfière was short and fat, but despite his bulk he could move swiftly, silent as a lizard. He needed to. There were twenty German soldiers within a spit of him, all armed and bored. Last week Jean Postif had been caught and the German soldiers poured more than a hundred 9mm bullets into him. Artoise crawled up behind Roget and touched his boot. The door to the concrete building was open; they had only the next four minutes. ‘A’ Troop was going off duty, ‘F’ Troop coming on. Kranstalt was in charge of the handover, and that meant the complete military ritual. Here in Liège, most sergeants would have let the men relax a little. Artoise nodded, smiling at the progress of Kranstalt’s tireless rigmarole. Roget beckoned for her to take shelter beside the break in the wall. She reached under one of her several jumpers and pulled out two grenades. She settled herself into the angle of the wall and Roget went, skittering over the pile of rubble with barely a sound to the doorway into the building. He rose to his feet and stepped inside. Artoise listened as Kranstalt ploughed his way laboriously through the routine, checking each man’s weapons, ammunition and stick grenades. Each man must not only declare he still was ‘in possession’ of his active service issue, he must also produce it for Kranstalt actually to see. The handover was halfway completed but there was no sign yet of Roget’s return. Artoise felt again that familiar stab of anxiety. The operation had been timed carefully, but one of the soldiers could have left just one stick grenade inside the concrete building; Kranstalt would certainly send him to get it and Roget had no back way out, no bolt hole. Artoise glanced at the door though her main preoccupation was with the soldiers; let one of them come round that corner and she’d have him playing hopscotch with a four-second fuse. On each occasion they had timed this handover Kranstalt had taken four minutes minimum, even five on one of his finicky days. Siegermann, the youngest sergeant on this post, took only long enough for each man to answer the roll call. Still no sign of Roget. Now Kranstalt was three quarters of the way through; within such a short time ‘F’ Troop would pour through that door loosening tight belts, taking off packs, starting the coffee for the short vigil before they went off duty at midnight and the locked door made entry impossible. ‘This is always the bad bit,’ Artoise thought, ‘the jobs Roget and I do together, alone, the jobs where Roget takes a chance while I watch, and keep him protected with my hands full of grenades and my throat dry as talcum powder.’ Kranstalt was about to end the parade. Damn him, he’s missed off the inspection of rifle barrels. Damn him. ‘Roget, you’re cutting it too fine.’ Three minutes and forty-five seconds since the handover started; and suddenly Roget came back, a barely discernible blur in the lighted doorway, now you see him, now you don’t, moving quickly over the stones. He dropped down beside Artoise. She, thrilled with relief and pride, reached out her hand and touched him with the back of her knuckle where it clenched, white, around the grenade. He was excited by the folder in his hand, and stuffed it into his pocket. Together they backed into the gloom of the corner and over the first low wall. Kranstalt gave the final order to dismiss; ‘F’ Troop broke ranks and clattered into the concrete building. Now it was safe to rise. ‘A’ Troop marched the other way, heading for barracks and bed with never a backward glance. Kranstalt would keep them at attention, eyes forward, all the way home. For Artoise and Roget, the long climb, over the second wall, past the oil drums, the rear of the vehicle park, up the high wall into which Muette, dieu te garde, had rammed the climbing pitons, over the roof gully between the two long buildings, down into the carpenter’s yard, out through the gate and along the alleyway. Now it should happen; everything so far has gone too well and the night has that smell of sour death. Now comes the stupid mistake you can’t plan against since you can’t anticipate it. Two bicycles had been left for them in the carpenter’s yard. They wheeled them along the alleyway. Now comes the moment for one of the cycles to have a puncture, and you can’t ride with a puncture, can you? Not that you mind damaging the tyre in your compelling haste to get away, but because it would look so damned suspicious to ride along on a flat tyre, with inner tubes practically impossible to replace. There’s nothing. Roget would have sniffed it, and he’s plodding along like a man who’s just finished a work shift and is in no hurry to get home. There’s no better man; Artoise would not have served any other but Roget. At the far end of the alleyway they mounted the bicycles and cycled away, talking quietly to each other of work-time banalities, a conversation designed to deceive and soothe any chance listener.
They arrived at the granary, a mile out of Liège on the Ardennes road, without incident. In it, among the several machines for grinding corn, was an electric motor Pieter had adapted. A coil across the terminals and other gadgets only he could understand emitted a silent radio mush whenever the motor was used. It scattered the sound of frying eggs onto any radio reception or transmission within half a mile. The Belgians cursed its interference when they were trying to listen to Radio Liège, even though the station had been taken over by the Germans and broadcast mostly propaganda and ‘acceptable’ German military music. There would have been no complaints from the Belgians had they known the motor effectively prevented the German direction finders plotting the location of the clandestine radio Roget kept in the roof of the granary. As soon as he saw them arrive, Pieter switched on the motor master switch and remained below on guard while they climbed the stairs to the small room in the joists where the corn hoist was kept. He didn’t speak to them, and only when they were sitting beneath the corn hoist did they speak to each other of where they had been.
Roget took the folder from his inside pocket and handed it to Artoise, who could read German as well as he could. The starred TOP SECRET classification was known equally to both. Inside the folder a single sheet of paper carried a list of numbers with dates and times next to each block of five. The paper had been crumpled, ready for the shredder. Artoise whistled, silently.
‘It’s all like that,’ Roget said, excited as a child with a new toy, ‘filing cabinets all round the wall.’
‘An information centre?’
‘The Signals Data Storage Unit for the entire Western Army.’ He got up, walked about, couldn’t contain himself. Artoise cast an anxious glance below, but Pieter was still on guard. ‘Important, eh?’ she said.
‘Important – it’s the most exciting thing we’ve come upon so far. When I think what is contained within that one small building…’
‘But what can we do?’ she asked, practical as ever.
‘I don’t know, but whatever it is, believe me, it will be the most substantial thing we have ever done,’ he said.
‘Kranstalt is only on duty once each fortnight on the late watch, and he’s our only chance of getting in and out.’
‘We can’t do anything in four minutes, believe me. You’d need an hour to clear that place. There’s so much stuff, there’s so much, Artoise,’ he said, his excitement rising again.
‘Surely anything we take they will miss?’
‘Burn the lot, that’s what we could do. Incendiaries, timed to go off after twelve o’clock. Think what a mess that would make of their communications systems? It would bring them to a virtual standstill for six or seven days.’
‘Yes, it would. But what then, Roget? They’d duplicate the system and start again.’
‘They’ll always start again. We can’t hope anything we ever do will prevent that. The job of the resistance is to cause delays and upheavals. We can’t win the war. The Allies will do that, with their armies. We can only skitter about beneath the surface, like rats polluting the water. There’ll always be something for us to do, Artoise, until the war ends. There’ll always be a train to blow, a railway line to cut. Don’t despair.’
He had mistaken her mood. Too excited to sit down, he paced up and down. ‘I know there’ll always be another job,’ she said, quietly, ‘but what happens when one of us makes that mistake, when they catch us, you or me?’
He walked to where she was sitting, a bulky shapeless mass beneath her coats and sweaters. No one could have called her handsome. Roget knew he could do nothing without her. He reached out and seized her hand. She gripped him with familiar vigour.
‘At least,’ he said, ‘they’ll catch us both.’ In any other man it would have been a terrible selfishness; she knew it for a reassurance that whatever might happen to her, he would hope to be there. ‘L’absence est le plus grand des maux,’ he said; and he was right; there is no greater evil.
He switched on the radio transmitter in the small black wooden box, hidden behind the dusty wall panel. When the needle registering anode current had reached its maximum he nodded and she flipped the switch that controlled the grinder. When the grinder had run for about a minute, sufficient time to persuade anyone accidentally listening to the frequency to tune away, she switched off again and he started to tap the Morse key. ‘Hello England, Hello England, Rainbow calling…’
Across the Channel, he knew not where, someone was listening…