It was a few minutes past midnight.
The billowing clouds of black smoke, tinged red by the leaping flames from the burning kerosene tanks, gave the Petroleum Haven depot the appearance of something like a vision of hell. The only good thing was that they were heading away from it, not driving towards it. As Dawson steered the lorry down the road that led away from the tank farm, the vehicle was rocked by an explosion as yet another of the kerosene tanks detonated, flying into the air before crashing back to the ground and into the pool of burning fuel inside the bund that surrounded it.
‘Job done, I reckon, sir,’ Dawson said, glancing at the image of the conflagration in the truck’s single rear-view mirror, mounted on an arm on the side of the windscreen surround.
‘I can’t argue with that,’ Rochester agreed. ‘The Jerries won’t find any fuel oil they can use there, that’s for sure.’
The Petroleum Haven tank farm was located on the southern side of the Noordzeekanaal, where the waterway turned south-east towards Amsterdam city centre. From the same location, the canal ran in an almost straight line west towards the coast and the harbour at IJmuiden, and along its southern bank were numerous inlets surrounded by the industrial buildings that characterized this part of the city. Which meant that although Dawson needed to head north-west towards IJmuiden, he was actually forced to drive south-west just to get around these obstacles.
A little over a mile from the tank farm the road split, the left-hand fork heading south towards the centre of Amsterdam. Dawson knew this, because he and Michaels had been driven down that particular road earlier that afternoon when they had been summoned to the consulate. But the right-hand lane swung west, and without hesitation that was the way he went.
‘Is this the right road?’ Rochester asked.
Dawson glanced at the officer and shrugged his ample shoulders.
‘As I said before, sir, I don’t really know, but the other fork was definitely heading the wrong way, and this does seem to be taking us in more or less the right direction. I’m also pretty sure it’s the road Captain Michaels told me to follow. There are no helpful road signs to confirm that, so we’ll just have to see where it leads.’
He drove on for another three or four hundred yards, then pulled over to the side of the road and braked the lorry to a stop.
‘Captain Michaels ordered me not to drive more than a couple of miles from the oil depot, and then to wait for him to catch us up,’ he explained. ‘Hopefully he’ll be somewhere behind us on this same road.’
Rochester nodded, but didn’t respond.
Both men stared through the windscreen at the flat landscape in front of them. To their right, the dim moonlight faintly illuminated a wide expanse of water, one of the blind-ended inlets from the Noordzeekanaal that was surrounded by dark and silent warehouses and other industrial buildings. In front of the lorry, the road ran straight for about half a mile, as far as they could tell, with a number of buildings, anonymous black shapes in the darkness, dotted along both sides of it.
‘I’d be a lot happier if we had a map,’ Dawson said, ‘or at least a compass, but the harbour on the coast isn’t that far away, and we can probably find our way there just using the moon.’ He pointed to his left, where the first quarter of the celestial body was clearly visible against the night sky. ‘It’s not the best navigational aid in the world, but it’s always roughly south of us, so if we can keep that on our left-hand side we must be heading more or less west.’
‘There were a lot of qualifiers in that sentence, Dawson,’ Rochester said, ‘but you’re right about the moon, though it will only ever give you an approximate direction to steer. I think that Captain Michaels does have a map. Perhaps that’s why he told you to wait for him to catch up.’
A few minutes later, Dawson saw a pair of headlamps in the mirror; the vehicle approaching quite quickly.
‘Something’s coming up behind us,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell what it is yet.’
Rochester moved over to the passenger side of the cab and leaned out so that he could look back down the road the way they had come.
‘I don’t think it’s a lorry,’ he said, moments later. ‘It’s too small and it’s travelling too quickly.’
Dawson picked up the MP40 from the bench seat beside him, removed the magazine to check that it was fully charged, then snapped it back into place. He already knew the sub-machine gun was ready for use, but he had always been taught to check, double-check, and then check again. Especially where weapons were concerned, because in combat your life really did depend on them.
‘Just in case this turns out to be a carload of trouble,’ he explained, in response to Rochester’s quizzical expression.
It was, but at the same time it wasn’t.
The approaching vehicle was a kind of armoured car, and the front of it looked almost as if someone had taken a regular civilian car and just bolted some armour plating over the existing bodywork. But that similarity ended where the original windscreen would have been, because behind that there were four wheels rather than the normal two, and on the top of the car was a steerable turret fitted with what looked to Dawson like a heavy machine gun. That was clearly the car’s principal weapon, but sticking through an armoured slot below the turret was the barrel of another machine gun, pointing forward. It had no windows, for obvious reasons, apart from a small pane of armoured glass where the driver had to be sitting, the protective steel flap raised to allow him to see where he was going.
‘That’s a pretty weird looking beast,’ Dawson remarked as the armoured car slowed up beside them, coming to a complete stop while the crew inside presumably inspected the lorry.
A hatch on the top of the turret opened and the head and shoulders of an officer wearing Dutch army uniform appeared. He stared at the parked lorry.
Dawson looked straight at the officer and waved his left hand in what he hoped was a friendly manner, holding the MP40 in his right, but well out of sight.
For what seemed like a long time, but was in reality only a matter of a few seconds, the Dutch officer did nothing. Then, apparently satisfied with what he was seeing, he issued orders that were inaudible to Dawson over the noise of the engines of the two vehicles, and would in any case have been incomprehensible if he had been able to hear them.
Then the officer dropped down out of sight into the turret, and moments later the armoured car accelerated away and disappeared into the distance.
‘That looked almost home-made,’ Dawson said.
‘Actually, it was made in Sweden,’ Rochester replied. ‘That was a Landsverk L-180, and it’s a commercially manufactured armoured car. I think the Dutch have bought about a dozen of them, and by all accounts it’s a pretty good and fast vehicle, despite its rather ungainly appearance. It can do about 50 miles an hour and it’s also got teeth. The weapon in the turret is a Bofors 37-millimetre autocannon, manufactured in Sweden, like the car itself. It’s designed for anti-tank use, and spits out about twelve shells a minute with an effective range of around two and a half miles. It also carries three Lewis machine guns. It’s a well-armed, tough and effective fighting vehicle, and you definitely don’t want to get on the wrong side of it.’
Dawson nodded slowly, staring at the rear of the L-180 as it drove away from them.
‘I don’t think we’ve got anything like that, have we, sir? I’ve seen tanks and trucks back home, but nothing that heavily armoured and that small.’
‘The British army has got quite a lot of armoured cars, but nothing that looks quite like the L-180. Probably the closest I can think of is a vehicle called the Morris CS9. That’s built on a truck chassis, and it’s fitted with a Boys anti-tank rifle in a turret and a .303 Bren light machine gun. It’s only got four wheels, not six, but apart from that the design is fairly similar.’
Dawson replaced the MP40 on the seat beside him.
‘Not that this would have been much use to us if the Cloggies in that armoured car hadn’t liked the look of us and decided to ventilate this lorry,’ he said, gesturing to the weapon. ‘I wonder why they didn’t at least stop to check our documents.’
‘They were probably in a hurry. And don’t forget that at night all cats are grey.’
‘What? Sir?’
‘This is a Dutch army lorry parked beside a road on the outskirts of Amsterdam, with the lights on and the engine running. In the dark, they wouldn’t have been able to see the colour of our uniforms, so they would probably have assumed we were Dutch troops and on some kind of official mission. That’s what I meant by all cats being grey at night. You can’t see colours or details in the darkness, so our identity is obscured.’
As Rochester finished speaking, the twin headlamp beams of another approaching vehicle showed in Dawson’s rear-view mirror.
‘There’s another truck or something coming up behind us,’ he reported. ‘It looks bigger than that armoured car, and a lot slower as well.’
‘You’re right,’ Rochester said, again leaning out of the passenger side of the cab and looking back down the road. ‘It’s a lorry of some kind. I just hope it’s Captain Michaels, not another bunch of Dutch soldiers.’
With a shudder from the tyres as the driver braked on the loose and broken surface of the road, the approaching truck stopped right alongside Dawson’s lorry, and Captain Michaels, sitting in the cab beside the KFRE soldier at the wheel, leaned over to talk to him and Rochester.
‘It took a bit longer than we expected to collect everyone,’ he said, ‘but they’re all on board now. Right, I’ve got a map, so we’ll take the lead. Follow behind me, but not too close. Just remember that we’re driving two lorries that we’ve technically stolen, because we should have returned them by now. So it’s quite possible that the officer in charge of that ack-ack battery might have already put out the word to detain us. That means we don’t stop for anyone or anything, unless we’re faced with a main battle tank or something. Luckily, the Dutch don’t have any main battle tanks, or any tanks at all, actually.’
Dawson nodded, then glanced at Rochester, who leaned across him to talk to Michaels.
‘But they do have some quite impressive armoured vehicles,’ he said. ‘Just so you know, we were passed by a Dutch L-180 a few minutes ago, and it carried on along this road so it has to be somewhere ahead of us. And that Bofors cannon mounted in its turret is more than enough to blow us to pieces.’
Michaels grinned at him.
‘Then we’d better hope it’s not blocking the road to IJmuiden,’ he replied. ‘Because of the present situation, we may well encounter roadblocks on the way. There’s no point in trying to talk our way through them, because we have no authority to do what we’re doing, so my plan is to just drive straight on, straight through them. These trucks will make short work of a bunch of trestles or a pole barrier. If we see anything more substantial than that, we’ll have to think again. Understood?’
Dawson and Rochester both nodded, and with a final wave Michaels sat back in his seat and gestured to the driver to proceed.
‘You heard the officer,’ Rochester said. ‘Let’s go, and keep your eyes open for any problems. Keep that MP40 next to you. I’ve got your Lee-Enfield.’
Technically, it wasn’t Dawson’s weapon, being the rifle he’d liberated from the sniper’s nest in Amsterdam, but that was just a detail. He had, reluctantly, abandoned the Mauser rifle, simply because keeping the Lee-Enfield meant he had access to the ammunition stocks carried by the KFRE troops, and he’d only had a handful of rounds left for the Mauser, and no obvious way of obtaining any more.
He put the truck into gear and began accelerating along the road to take up station behind Michaels’ truck, but a couple of hundred yards back. The road surface wasn’t particularly smooth, with numerous potholes across its entire width, and lots of loose chippings, and the driver of the leading lorry was clearly doing his best to pick a speed that offered the minimum of discomfort to his passengers and was also slow enough to allow him to avoid the bigger potholes. And that wasn’t just a matter of comfort: if one of the tyres went down a particularly deep or sharp-edged hole, there was a danger that it could get punctured, and they really had no time to stop and change a wheel.
Sometimes art imitates reality, but almost as often it’s the other way round.
The road ran straight, but only for about a quarter of a mile. Then it swung around to the north-west a short distance after a junction with another road that headed south. As Dawson steered the car towards the bend, he was suddenly aware of a brief flash of light somewhere ahead of him and to the right of the road, followed almost immediately by a sharp cracking sound.
Immediately, he hit the brake pedal, hauling down the lorry’s speed as he stared intently through the windscreen, looking for the threat that he knew was out there somewhere.
‘What’s going on?’ Rochester asked urgently.
‘That was an explosion,’ Dawson replied. ‘A small controlled detonation. The kind of charge you’d use to bring down a tree.’
Even as he said that, just above and outside the loom of the headlights he saw a dark shape moving down towards the road and, an instant later, the trunk of a quite substantial tree crashed to the ground a few tens of yards ahead of them. If he hadn’t braked, the tree would almost certainly have fallen right in front of the lorry, or maybe even on top of it.
Dawson engaged reverse gear, lifted his left foot off the clutch as he planted his right boot firmly on the accelerator pedal and then started the lorry moving backwards, holding the steering wheel straight to try and keep the vehicle on the road. Even as he did so, most of his attention was focused on the road in front of them, because that was where the danger lay.
The headlights picked out three or four shadowy figures moving around the fallen tree, and Dawson immediately recognized who they were, their somewhat peculiar-looking long jackets, which terminated in over-shorts worn outside their uniform trousers, being quite unmistakable. Michaels had used the excuse of rounding up German paratroopers to requisition the two lorries, and the soldiers Dawson was looking at right then were exactly that: German paratroopers. The convenient fiction had become the unpleasant fact. The aircraft they’d seen earlier that day had obviously been dropping paratroopers, but out to the west of the city.
‘Paratroopers,’ Rochester said.
Dawson switched off the headlights, then drove the lorry over to the left-hand side of the road.
‘Without the headlights,’ he explained, ‘they’ve got nothing to aim at, and now we aren’t in the same place where they last saw the lights.’
Rochester nodded, but didn’t reply, simply stepped out of the vehicle and yelled to the KFRE sappers in the back.
‘Everybody out. Bring your weapons.’
They heard a crackle of rifle fire as the Germans loosed a few rounds in their direction, but none of the bullets hit either the truck or the sappers.
‘Suggestions, Dawson?’ Rochester asked.
‘Get them flat on their stomachs, like in a rifle range, so they’re really small targets, and not all bunched up. Then I’ll hit the lights again. We all see the Jerries, but they won’t be able to see us. It’ll be like a shooting gallery.’
Rochester issued the orders and the sappers spread themselves out across the road, aiming their Lee-Enfields in the general direction of the German troops.
Dawson switched on the lorry’s headlights, and at the same time loosed off a burst from his MP40. He was too far away from the targets to have much chance of hitting them with such an inaccurate and small-calibre sub-machine gun, but he knew the psychological effect of being shot at by an automatic weapon.
Around the felled tree, perhaps 70 yards ahead, the figures of the German paratroopers were dimly illuminated, a couple of them aiming their Mausers towards the lorry.
Over to his right, Rochester was issuing orders.
‘Five rounds, rapid fire. Shoot when ready.’
A volley of shots rang out almost immediately as the sappers acquired their targets. Two of the Germans fell backwards and then lay still on the surface of the road, and another man doubled over, his shouts of pain clearly audible. Two of his companions dragged him away into the undergrowth that bordered that side of the road.
Then a pair of headlights appeared on the road beyond the fallen tree, and just a few seconds later they heard the sound of rifle shots from that vehicle as well.
‘That must be Michaels and the others,’ Rochester said. ‘We’ve caught the buggers in a crossfire.’
Silence fell as the sappers no longer had targets to fire at, and the noise of rifle shots from the other vehicle also ceased. But for a few minutes, nobody moved, just in case the German paratroopers reappeared.
‘I think they’ve legged it,’ Dawson said.
‘I think you’re right. Right, everybody back in the lorry.’
Just in case, Dawson kept the headlights extinguished as they approached the tree, the moonlight providing sufficient illumination for him to see where they were going. In the back of the lorry, the sappers stared out towards both sides of the road, their rifles cocked and ready for immediate use.
Beside Dawson, Rochester was alternating his attention between the fallen tree in front of them and the shrubs and undergrowth into which the paratroopers had vanished.
‘Can you get around that tree?’ he asked.
Dawson flicked on the headlights – they were now so close to the obstacle that the enemy troops would be able to see them whether or not the lights were switched on – and stared straight in front of him.
‘Not around it so much as over it,’ Dawson replied. ‘Hang on, because this bit is going to be bumpy.’
He shifted the gear lever into second, pressed the accelerator pedal down and steered over to the left-hand side of the road, towards the top of the fallen tree, where the branches would be thinner. The lorry bounced and shuddered as the wheels rolled over the obstacle, and for a few heart-stopping seconds it felt as if the engine didn’t have enough power to force the truck over it.
Dawson double-declutched into first and accelerated as hard as he could. The front wheels bounced up into the air over one of the thicker branches, and then suddenly they were through and back on the hard surface of the road.
Ahead of them, the other lorry – and it was now obvious that it was the one carrying Michaels and the rest of the sappers – backed up and turned around. Then both vehicles continued quickly along the uneven road, getting out of any possible danger as quickly as they could, though it looked as if the German paratroopers, clearly outnumbered and outgunned, and with two of their number probably dead and a third one wounded, had no stomach for continuing the fight.
Another junction came into view as the two trucks steered around the bend, again on the left –everywhere to the right was water: the inlets and associated quays and jetties of the industrial area – and Michaels’ lorry steered across the road and took the turning.
This road ended almost immediately at a T-junction, and both trucks came to a stop there. Left was due south and the road to the right headed north before turning gently towards the north-west.
‘They’re probably checking the map,’ Rochester suggested, when the lorry in front of them remained stationary for well over a minute. ‘But logically we have to turn right here.’
Which they did, a few seconds later. Then they followed the road around to the left until it straightened up to head due west, according to the position of the moon, which was all Dawson had to go by.
As the truck in front started accelerating, the distance between the two vehicles increasing, Dawson tensed at the wheel and then eased the lorry over towards the centre of the road.
‘What is it?’ Rochester demanded.
‘Lights up ahead of us,’ Dawson replied, pointing through the windscreen. ‘Maybe half a mile in front. I saw them as the other truck made the turn.’
Rochester looked where the corporal was pointing and nodded.
‘I see them. It doesn’t look like another vehicle to me.’
‘Nor to me, sir,’ Dawson agreed. ‘They seem to be stationary, and on both sides of the road, as far as I can tell. I think that’s a Dutch roadblock, so things might get a bit noisy and bumpy from now on. Again.’