The sudden creaking sound was quite unmistakable. Someone, somewhere above them, had just opened a shutter or a window.
Dawson’s reaction was immediate. He turned on his heel, lifting the MP40 as he did so, looking for a target. On the third floor of the house they had just passed, the shutter was still moving, pushed by a hand that instantly vanished from sight.
Michaels took a couple of paces to one side, widening the angle in case he needed to fire, and unsnapped his belt holster to remove his Webley service revolver.
But before he could aim the pistol, the end of a rifle barrel appeared in the open window above them, and a moment later the sound of a shot echoed from the buildings on both sides of the street as the man above them squeezed the trigger.
The bullet smashed into the cobbled path about 2 feet behind and to one side of Michaels, then ricocheted away somewhere.
Dawson adjusted the aim of the MP40 and sent a fusillade of half a dozen shots towards the open window. A couple of them impacted the stonework around the window, but the others appeared to penetrate the room, though at that instant he had no idea whether or not he’d hit his target.
Then it was quite obvious that he’d missed. The rifle barrel retreated briefly, then reappeared, the unseen sniper again searching for his targets.
But by then, both Michaels and Dawson had moved.
Michaels flattened himself against the side of the building, meaning that it would be almost impossible for the shooter to fire at him, or at least not without exposing the upper part of his torso to return fire. And although no pistol is designed for long-distance accuracy, the captain, his Webley aimed straight at the open window, had no doubt that he would be able to hit a man-sized target at that range.
Dawson glanced briefly at Michaels to ensure the officer was unharmed, then ran the few feet along the cobbled street until he reached the front door of the house where the sniper had set up his nest. Holding the pistol grip of his sub-machine gun in his right hand, he tried the door with his left. It was locked, predictably enough, but for a man of Dawson’s size and strength, that was never going to be much of a problem.
There’s a technique to opening a locked door, and the one method that never works is to shoulder-charge it, because that just dissipates the energy of the impact across the entire door and frame. What’s needed is a hard and focused impact on every door’s weakest point: the lock.
Dawson knew that as well as anyone. With a brief glance straight up, to ensure that the shooter wasn’t pointing his rifle straight down at him, he took a half pace back, then kicked out at the point just below the door handle with the full force of his right boot. The door creaked and cracked, but didn’t open, so he repeated the treatment one more time. This time the door swung violently inwards, wooden splinters torn from the frame as the lock, ripped bodily from the door, tumbled to the floor inside the house.
Dawson gripped and aimed his MP40 and stepped inside.
The inside of the house was more or less what he had expected. It was one of the smaller properties, the main door opening up into a single room, at one side of which a narrow staircase led to the upper floors. At the back was another door, standing wide open. Through it, he could see a sink attached to one wall, so he presumed it was a washroom or something of that sort.
The sniper had been on the third floor of the building, but Dawson was far too cautious to simply charge up the stairs. Just in case there was another man waiting somewhere on the ground floor for him to do that so that he could be shot in the back, he walked quickly around the room, looking at any alcove or space, including the small washroom, and behind any of the furniture that could possibly conceal anyone.
He heard a sudden noise behind him and spun around, bringing his weapon up to the aim, but then immediately lowered it as Michaels stepped into the room through the open doorway, his pistol held ready.
‘Go,’ the captain said. ‘I’ve got your back.’
Dawson nodded, strode across the room, which showed no signs at all of recent occupancy, and then took the stairs two at a time.
The first floor consisted of another single room, separated into a small dining area on the side overlooking the canal and with cooking equipment, two small cupboards and a sink at the opposite end. There was clearly no space there large enough to conceal a human being, so Dawson barely glanced around it before walking to the final flight of stairs, Michaels a few feet behind him, revolver in hand.
Knowing that the sniper had been positioned on the canal side of the house, Dawson climbed the stairs slowly, and backwards, his sub-machine gun pointing towards that part of the property. By the time he was halfway up the staircase, he knew that this floor was different, because the stairs terminated in a tiny hallway, off which two doors opened.
He stepped over to the door that led to the bedroom or other space from which the sniper had been firing, moved to one side in case the man was waiting in the room with his rifle pointed at the doorway, and then kicked it open.
At almost the same moment, two shots, the noises crashingly loud in the confined space, sounded from behind him, and a bullet drilled a hole straight through the internal wall less than 6 inches from his head. Despite all his precautions, he had actually been looking in the wrong direction.
He immediately dropped to a crouch and turned round, aiming the MP40, but a single glance told him that it was all over.
Captain Michaels, his Webley pistol pointing directly in front of him, stood on the third step from the top of the staircase. In the open doorway that led to the other top-floor room, a bulky shape collapsed almost gracefully to the floor, a pistol falling from the man’s right hand.
Dawson took a step forward, the sub-machine gun pointing directly at the fallen man, his finger resting lightly on the trigger. He was alert for any sign of movement, but within a few seconds it was obvious that the bullet Captain Michaels had fired had completed its deadly purpose.
‘Thank you,’ Dawson said. ‘I should have checked that room first.’
‘He was waiting for you to open the other door,’ Michaels said, a quaver in his voice, and his attention entirely focused on the man he had just shot. ‘As soon as he heard you kick it open, he pulled open this other door and pulled the trigger. I don’t think he expected to see two of us, and I shot him before he could fire again.’
Dawson stood up again and nodded his thanks.
‘Thanks, sir,’ he said again. ‘He was probably working by himself, but let me just check out this room anyway. Can you look in the other room?’
The sniper had set up his nest in what was, as Dawson had already guessed, a small bedroom, its single window protected by a pair of wooden shutters. The window was open, and he walked over to it after checking the rest of the room. He peered out and then moved the shutter. Once again the hinges, in need of some lubrication, emitted a loud creak.
‘We’re lucky he picked an unoccupied house,’ Michaels said. ‘If someone had greased those hinges, and the shutter had opened quietly, we’d have had no idea he was there. And I suppose we should also be grateful that he wasn’t a very good shot.’
‘It wouldn’t have been an easy shot from where he was,’ Dawson replied. ‘Shooting downhill from a high angle is much more difficult than shooting across level ground. If we’d decided to walk down on the other side of the canal, we’d probably both be dead by now. Or at least you would, sir.’
‘Why me?’
‘Because you’re an officer. Basic training for all snipers is to always go for the officers first, starting with the ones with the highest ranks. Just think about Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. Because he was walking the decks in his full admiral’s regalia, he had to be the prime target for the French riflemen. And he probably knew it.’
Beside the open window was a chair and a small table. A rifle – somewhat surprisingly, it was a Lee-Enfield .303, the standard British army issue – lay on the floor beside the chair, and there were three fully charged loading clips on the table.
‘Well, at least we know that he wasn’t a German sniper,’ Dawson said, ‘or not a German army sniper, because if he was he’d have been equipped with a Mauser. So I guess he was probably Dutch. But I would still have expected him to be using a European weapon, so where did he get this rifle from?’
‘They’re very good weapons, and I know a lot of hunters on the Continent, the kind of people who go after deer and wild boar, use Lee-Enfields. So maybe this man was a hunter, and this was his own rifle. I wonder who he was. And why he decided to shoot us.’
‘Let’s take a look at him,’ Dawson suggested, and they made their way over to the door of the back bedroom of the house.
The dead man was a heavily built individual with black hair and unremarkable features, his eyes wide open and staring blankly at the ceiling above. He was lying flat on his back and wearing normal civilian clothes, the front of his shirt, more or less the middle of his chest, stained deep red by a small patch of blood.
‘That’s less blood than I would have expected,’ Michaels said.
‘It looks like your shot went straight through his heart,’ Dawson pointed out. ‘Once that happens, the heart stops beating straight away, and you don’t get much bleeding.’
He bent down and picked up the pistol lying on the floor.
‘It’s a Browning,’ he said, ‘but I don’t recognize the model.’
Dawson slid the weapon into his trouser pocket, then quickly searched the dead man. He found two fully charged magazines and took them as well.
‘It never hurts to have an extra weapon,’ he said, standing up again.
He glanced at Michaels, who was looking somewhat pale.
‘Was he your first?’ Dawson asked. ‘The first person you’ve killed, I mean?’
Michaels nodded.
‘Yes,’ he replied shortly. ‘I’m not like you, Dawson. I’m a civilian who just happens to be wearing an army uniform, I’d hoped for quite a short time, though that now looks exceptionally optimistic. Apart from a few sessions on the army range near Hythe, that’s the first time I’ve ever fired that pistol, and between you and me, I’d be quite happy if I didn’t fire it again in anger.’ He paused briefly, then looked straight at the corporal. ‘What about you? Have you killed anyone?’
‘Until I joined up, no,’ Dawson said. ‘I’d never even injured anybody in the mines, and when you spend every working day messing about with explosives, that was something I was quite proud of. But since I got off that troopship in Calais, what seems like a few months ago now, I’ve pretty much lost count of the number of times I’ve had a Jerry soldier in my sights and pulled the trigger.’
‘Does it get any easier?’
‘Not really, no. All I can do, sir, is tell myself that if I didn’t kill the enemy soldier who was coming at me, then he would certainly do his best to kill me. So if it was a choice between me lying dead in the mud full of bullet holes or some other bloke, I’d pick the other bloke every time.’
Michaels smiled briefly.
‘Pragmatic as ever, Dawson,’ he said. ‘And I suppose that’s about the best we can do in this kind of situation. Did this man have any identifying papers on him?’
‘Not that I could find, sir, no. All he had in his pockets, apart from those two spare magazines, was a handkerchief and a comb. But knowing his name wouldn’t make you feel any better about killing him, believe me.’
‘It wasn’t that, Dawson. I’ll have to report this to the commander, obviously, so that he can advise the Dutch police about what happened, and if we had known the man’s name that might have been useful. If he was, for example, a known German sympathizer, that would help explain what he did, but he was probably just a disaffected Dutchman with a grudge against the British, and who thought that the German occupation would be a good thing for Holland.’
‘Well, I’ve seen nothing in this house that would tell us who he was or why he did it. Most likely, he picked this place because it was empty, and we just happened to walk into his sights.’
‘Not to worry. We’ll take the rifle and the spare ammunition with us. As you said, having an extra weapon is never a bad idea.’
They made their way down the two staircases to street level, where a small crowd of about a dozen people had gathered, obviously attracted by the sound of gunshots in the otherwise quiet neighbourhood, and where the smashed front door and small pile of 9-millimetre cartridge cases ejected from Dawson’s MP40 confirmed the location.
The corporal stepped outside first, and the sight of his muscular and battle-scarred body, plus the sub-machine gun he was carrying, virtually ensured that the group of unarmed men would step to one side to allow the two British soldiers to pass. As far as Michaels could see, there was no point in even trying to communicate with the Dutchmen. Even if some of them spoke English, the incident was over and they had more important things to do than get sidetracked into pointless discussions over what was clearly, at least in Michaels’ opinion, a very obvious case of attempted murder and self-defence.
‘Let’s get out of here, Dawson,’ he said, unslinging the Lee-Enfield just in case the situation turned against them. ‘It’s quite possible that the Dutch police will be along any time now, and what we don’t need at the moment is to get snarled up with them.’
Although the group of men assembled in the street had parted to allow Dawson and Michaels to walk away from the house, they seemed reluctant to let the matter go. An angry murmuring swept through the small crowd when they realized they were looking at two soldiers from a foreign army, and a couple of them walked over to the deserted house and stepped in through the ruined door.
Michaels looked back just as the two men disappeared inside the building, and quickened his pace.
‘In two or three minutes,’ he said, ‘they’ll find the dead body we left there, and that’s not good news. They’ll find an unarmed man shot dead, his body still warm, and they’ve just seen us leave the building. We need to get a move on.’
The group of men followed them, albeit at a distance, until they reached the end of the street and another bridge over the canal. Dawson glanced behind him as they crossed over the water.
‘Persistent bunch of buggers, aren’t they?’ he said. ‘Maybe I should fire a few rounds over their heads, make them sod off.’
‘Not a good idea. We can justify shooting that sniper, but opening up on Dutch civilians, even if you’re aiming to miss them, is very different. We just keep walking. They’ll give up eventually.’
And they did. By the time Dawson and Michaels had walked along the canal to the next bridge, not one of the curious Dutchmen was still behind them.
At the consulate, they both went in to see George Wilhoughby, who still appeared as a calm centre in the midst of the escalating chaos that was sweeping through Amsterdam.
‘Sorry to drag you all this way, Michaels,’ he began, ‘but I didn’t want to use the telephone because people have a habit of overhearing what you’re saying. You heard about the commandant, I suppose?’
‘That he was shot, sir, yes.’
‘It’s still not clear exactly who shot him or why, and we’ll probably never know for certain what happened. But it is indicative of the current state of the Dutch government and military that he was shot at all.’
The consul paused for a few moments, as if gathering his thoughts, then he smiled bleakly.
‘There’s an old expression that three people can keep a secret, as long as two of them are dead. This isn’t exactly a secret, but the same principle applies. What I’m going to tell you doesn’t leave this room, Michaels. And that applies to you, too, Dawson. Is that clearly understood?’
Both men nodded.
‘Right. We’ve been negotiating with The Hague, and Captain Tweed has been talking to the new commandant – the previous incumbent’s deputy – as well. What we’re hearing is order, followed by counter-order, followed inevitably by disorder. Nobody here in Amsterdam or in The Hague has any apparent grasp of the reality of the situation. They all seem to believe that the Allied armies here in Holland and in Belgium and France will be enough to stop the Germans in their tracks. And they’re wrong.
‘I think – and Leslie Tweed agrees with me – that we’re facing one of the biggest military defeats in history. Hitler may not be the world’s greatest military strategist, but he’s surrounded himself with generals who have already shown that they are both competent and committed, so I think the Germans are going to push our forces back across the Low Countries all the way to the coastline. And then, unless there’s some kind of a miracle, the whole bloody lot of them will be slaughtered, and there’ll be nothing to stop Hitler walking down Whitehall a couple of months later.’
‘It’s going to be that bad, you think?’ Michaels asked.
‘It is, and I do. Who’s going to stop it happening? The Yanks will probably get involved, but not any time soon, and my guess is that with the British Expeditionary Force destroyed on the beaches of France and Belgium, the war will be over within six months, so by the time the Americans decide to do anything, the whole of Western Europe will be under German control, and it’ll be too late.’
Wilhoughby stopped talking and glanced at both men, looking very slightly embarrassed.
‘Anyway, that was me standing on my soapbox, so now I’ll climb off it. The bottom line is that the first German troops will be here in Amsterdam today or tomorrow at the latest, and I think Holland will surrender within a week, more likely in two or three days. That’s why we’re packing up and leaving the consulate, and it’s why you don’t need to wait any longer for specific orders from The Hague or the new commandant.’
‘You mean we can blow the tanks immediately we get back to the depots?’ Michaels asked. ‘On your authority?’
The consul shook his head.
‘Not on my authority exactly. I still want you to wait for some sign that the Germans are right on our doorstep. If you start the demolition when it’s still relatively quiet and peaceful there’ll probably be a riot, and a pretty good chance that the locals would blame you and your men for the damage. Which would obviously be the reality of the situation. No, what I’m telling you is that the moment you are aware of any kind of activity that suggests an attack on the city is imminent, you can blow the tanks and then get you and your men out of Amsterdam. Do not wait for orders from anyone in authority, and forget the password the commandant wanted you to wait for. Just use your own judgement, and then act accordingly.’
Wilhoughby nodded encouragingly.
‘Is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Michaels replied.
‘Good. How did you get here?’
‘We had a lift for part of the journey from a van making a run from the Shell tank farm into the city. It’s about 3 miles total distance, and we walked the last bit. We had a bit of trouble along the way.’
Michaels explained about the sniper, which Wilhoughby didn’t seem either surprised, or particularly concerned, to hear about.
‘You were lucky you heard the man open the shutters,’ he said. ‘Now, don’t worry about any repercussions. I’ll have a word with the head of the local police force and tell him what happened. That should be the end of it. It’s not, by the way, the first sniper attack we’ve heard about. Presumably it’s fifth columnists or locals who’ve got real sympathy for the Germans. But whoever these men are, they seem to be targeting anyone in uniform – Dutch or from any other nation. We’ve even had a couple of local policemen shot, one of them fatally.
‘As you’ve probably noticed, this city is in the grip of a kind of madness at the moment. Most of the population have accepted that the Germans are going to overrun Holland, irrespective of what the Allied forces try to do. They also know that there’s nowhere they can go to escape. They can’t cross the North Sea, or even escape north into Scandinavia, because there are nothing like enough boats to carry them. They can’t go south into Belgium or on to France, because they know the German forces are there as well. So they’re stuck here, and I think some of them are trying to settle old scores, getting even with people they think have wronged them in the past, so the police are inevitably going to be near the top of those sorts of lists. And some of them probably think that life really will be better under the Jerries, so maybe they’re trying to do their bit to try to eliminate the opposition before they get here. Whatever the reasons, there are some very strange things happening out there, so just be careful.’
Wilhoughby nodded at Michaels, then glanced at Dawson.
‘Mind you,’ he added, ‘with the man-mountain Dawson beside you as a bullet-catcher cum bodyguard, you’re probably safer than most. Now, you can’t walk all the way back to Petroleum Haven or one of the other two tank farms, so you can use one of our cars. I’ll have to send a driver with you, because we’ll need the vehicle back here so that we can use it for our own evacuation, which we’ll probably start tomorrow morning.’
Back at the Petroleum Haven depot, nothing had changed. Captain Rochester had received no further telephone calls from the commander or anyone else. The men were fully briefed and ready to start the demolition the moment the order was given, but there still seemed to be little prospect of that happening in the near future. None of the patrols had detected any sign of hostile activity in or around the depot, and the streets in the vicinity were almost deserted.
‘Nothing to report?’ Michaels asked.
‘Nothing at all,’ Rochester confirmed, staring around and above them at the darkening skies. ‘It’s almost as if the Germans have forgotten all about Amsterdam and gone somewhere else.’
‘The one thing you can be quite sure of is that this city is very firmly in Adolf’s sights. If the first of the German land forces don’t arrive this evening, you can be pretty certain that they’ll be here tomorrow.’
Dawson had eaten a plate of food before he and Michaels had left the depot, but as there was a hot meal still available he helped himself to a plate of anonymous and somewhat greyish stew from the makeshift kitchen, taking a couple of slices of bread to help mask the taste. Tea would have washed it down better, but the only hot drink available was coffee, so he found a tin mug and half filled it with the dark and bitter liquid.
‘What the bloody hell is this meat?’ he said, as he tasted the first mouthful.
‘There was no label on the tin,’ one of the KFRE soldiers said helpfully. ‘One of the lads reckoned it was buffalo, but some of the other contenders are crocodile, kangaroo, rat, cat and warthog. Nobody thought it was beef or lamb, if that’s any help. Should have run a book on it, really.’
Though its origins were in doubt, at least the slightly suspect stew was hot and filling, and Dawson even wiped up the last of the gravy with one of his slices of bread before he tackled the coffee.
A few minutes after he’d finished his meal, Dawson heard the unmistakable sound of aircraft engines. Along with almost everyone else, he stood up and stared out to the east, which was where the sound seemed to be coming from.
Moments later, and some distance away, he spotted a German bomber aircraft of some sort, escorted by two tiny grey crosses, a pair of fighters, that were much higher up. Then a second and a third bomber lumbered into view, again with fighter escorts visible in the sky above them. Around them in the city, air raid sirens began to howl, and a couple of ack-ack guns, probably t3 or 4 miles away, began peppering the air around the German aircraft with deceptively innocent-looking puffs of dark grey flak.
But what nobody heard was the sound of bombs detonating, and a few moments later Dawson and everyone else understood the reason for that.
Captain Michaels walked briskly over to where most of the men were standing and watching the impromptu aerial display.
‘They’re not hitting us this evening,’ a KFRE soldier said. ‘So they must be going to a different target.’
‘Those bombers aren’t dropping bombs,’ Michaels said, ‘because they’re not bombers. They’re transport aircraft, and it looks to me as if they’re turning back the way they came. And that’s not good news. We can’t see anything because it’s getting dark, but the chances are that a few dozen Jerry paratroopers are on their way down to the ground right now, and these oil tanks are bound to be right at the top of the target list. So we have to work quickly. I’m going to make a couple of phone calls. In the meantime, get those charges placed on all the tanks as quickly as you can.’
‘What about the code word?’ Rochester asked.
‘Sod the code word,’ Michaels snapped. ‘That’s old news. I’m in charge of this party, and I think it’s time we got started.’
And with that Michaels continued across the yard to the administration office, while behind him his men began carrying the gun cotton demolition charges over to the tanks they had been assigned.
‘Remember,’ Captain Rochester said, ‘we have to fire the heavy oil tanks first, and don’t forget to put plenty of blankets inside the bunds below the kerosene tanks to soak up the stuff once it leaks out, because we’ll need them to cook off the heavy oil.’
‘At last,’ Dawson muttered. ‘Let’s get this done, and then let’s get out of here.’