‘So what’s the plan this time, sir?’ Dawson asked, standing beside Captain Michaels on the quayside at Portsmouth dockyard, only six days after they’d stepped ashore at Harwich.
He had been summoned back from his leave that afternoon; he’d decided to spend a few days at Dartford, which would allow him to get into London, and what he’d been told by a couple of cockney soldiers were the fleshpots of the East End, fairly easily, though he’d actually spent most of his time in the pubs around Dartford itself. They’d sent transport for him, albeit only an army motorcycle with a sidecar attached, a sidecar that barely accommodated his hefty frame, and then he’d been driven back to Gravesend. There, Michaels had been waiting, along with an army staff car.
They’d collected their weapons – a Webley .38 revolver for Michaels and a Lee-Enfield .303 rifle plus an identical revolver for Dawson, together with a generous supply of ammunition – then climbed into the staff car, Dawson beside the driver, as was the norm, and Michaels in the back. The MP40 Dawson had taken off a German soldier during his earlier adventure in Belgium had remained locked in the armoury at the KFRE’s Gravesend base, despite his request to take it with him. The captain had told Dawson it would be ‘inappropriate’ for him to carry it where they were going next, though he had declined to elaborate any further.
Captain Michaels had spent the drive in silence, reading his way through what Dawson assumed was some kind of an operation order; out of the corner of his eye he could see that the officer had spread a number of maps and printed documents across the unoccupied half of the rear seat of the car.
With the captain at least temporarily incommunicado, Dawson had looked at the route they were taking and tried talking to the driver, though he, too, was quite remarkably taciturn, refusing even to confirm where they were going. Dawson had already worked out that they were heading more or less south-west by looking at the position of the setting sun and the time of day, and that didn’t leave too many options. He doubted they were going to spend the night at the seaside, so he guessed that they were probably making their way towards the naval base at Portsmouth, which in turn meant that they would probably end up on a ship going somewhere. And, logically, that meant their ultimate destination was most probably France. But where exactly they were going and what they were going to do when they got there, he had no idea.
‘The plan, Dawson,’ Captain Michaels said, in answer to the corporal’s question, ‘is that we get on board the destroyer that is moored right in front of us. That ship will take us to Cherbourg, and then proceed elsewhere on other business. We will then take a short motoring holiday in France, finishing up near a town called Rouen, where we may receive further orders. Right now, that’s all I can tell you. In fact, I wasn’t supposed to tell you anything at all until we set foot on French soil, but you’d probably already worked out where we had to be going. I can’t give you any details about our tasking at the moment, but if I say it’s going to be a bit like Amsterdam, but hopefully without the bombing raids, that might give you some idea.’
‘Understood, sir,’ Dawson replied, then picked up his kitbag and followed Michaels towards the gangway of the sleek grey-painted ship. The smoke coming out of the funnel, dimly visible in the dockyard lighting, told them that its main engines were already running, and there were crowds of sailors and dockyard workers bustling around it as the vessel prepared for its imminent departure.
When Michaels showed his identification to the lieutenant at the head of the gangway, the naval officer consulted a list, nodded and then called over a couple of sailors to escort Michaels to the wardroom and Dawson to one of the crew messes. But Michaels stopped him right there.
‘We have a job to do as soon as we get across the Channel,’ he said, ‘and it’s all been a bit of a rush. I haven’t had time to properly brief my corporal, and we will need to hit the ground running when we get to Cherbourg. Is there a cabin or office somewhere that we can use during the crossing? Somewhere that we won’t be disturbed?’
The lieutenant nodded and dismissed one of the sailors he had summoned.
‘Richards, take these two men to my cabin.’ He turned back to Michaels. ‘I’ve just come on watch here and afterwards I’ll be on the bridge, and the officer I share with is also on watch, so my cabin will be empty. I hope whatever it is you’re going to France to do works out well for you.’
‘So do we, Lieutenant, so do we.’
The officer’s cabin was small and cramped, especially for two people, but they were only going to use it for a couple of hours, not live in it, so Michaels wasn’t bothered.
‘I don’t think I’d like to spend too long in a place this size,’ Dawson said. ‘If you turned round too quickly you could hit all four walls.’
‘In the navy, walls are called bulkheads,’ Michaels pointed out, ‘for reasons that probably don’t matter, and what they’d usually tell you is that there’s not enough room in here to swing a cat. And that’s a cat as in a cat-o’-nine-tails, from the old days when flogging was a part of daily life in the Royal Navy, along with all sorts of other unsavoury habits. And we won’t be here long unless something goes wrong. I think Cherbourg is less than 100 miles from Portsmouth, so the journey should only take about five or six hours in total at a destroyer’s normal cruising speed.’
Michaels opened up his own kitbag and pulled out a cardboard folder containing several maps and typed sheets of paper.
‘I really haven’t got very much to tell you about this, Dawson. The reason you’re here with me is exactly the same reason as you were recruited for the Amsterdam mission – your knowledge of explosives. And, as I personally saw in Holland, your ability to improvise, which could be vital for this operation, or rather what will follow after we’ve done our bit. The code name for what we did in Amsterdam was an XD operation, and what we’re here to do in France is exactly the same.’
‘“XD”, sir?’
‘That’s easy. It stands for “explosive demolition”. Blowing things up. What you do best.’
Michaels spread out a map of north-western France on the tiny desk bolted to one bulkhead of the cabin and pointed at Cherbourg.
‘That’s where we’ll be disembarking first thing tomorrow morning. My orders are to find a car or something there, and then motor along this route here’ – he traced a series of roads on the map with the tip of his forefinger – ‘as far as Rouen, and then drive on to Le Havre, following the River Seine.’
‘So it is a sort of motoring holiday,’ Dawson said.
‘Motoring, yes. Holiday, no. Just like in Holland, at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, we’re looking at tank farms and refineries, with a view to their total destruction.’
‘So that was the other job you said some of your KFRE soldiers were doing? When we were on the way to Amsterdam, I mean. You told me there was another op going on in Holland.’
‘Yes,’ Michaels replied, a slow smile spreading across his face. ‘It was a demolition job, yes, but there was something else they were sent to do as well.’
Dawson looked at him enquiringly, but said nothing. If Michaels wanted to tell him, he presumed that he would.
‘They were also robbing a bank.’
‘What? Sir?’
‘Robbing a bank. They were also tasked with picking up nearly forty tons of gold from a bank in Rotterdam – with the agreement of the Dutch authorities, obviously. That part of their mission was highly classified, for obvious reasons, which was why I couldn’t tell you about it earlier.’
‘And did they manage to get the gold?’
‘Yes,’ Michaels replied, somewhat wearily, ‘but there was a problem. In fact, there were several problems, like the officer in charge of the KFRE group, and his number two, and the senior naval officer in the area, all being arrested by the Dutch almost as soon as they arrived and put in jail at a military command post. They finally managed to convince the Dutch that they were English, and that they were there on an official mission. They had less trouble at the bank, and managed to get the bullion out of the vaults quite easily. They drove it to Lekhaven jetty and loaded it onto a pilot boat there, with the SNO and some naval ratings as an escort. The idea was that the boat would sail along the nearest river, the Nieuwe Waterweg, the short distance north-west to the Hook of Holland where the gold could be transferred to a destroyer for transport to Britain.’
‘But something went wrong?’ Dawson guessed.
‘Something definitely went wrong. You remember that when we’d fired the oil tanks at the Petroleum Haven tank farm we’d planned to get out of Amsterdam along the canal to IJmuiden?’
Dawson nodded.
‘But we didn’t because Commander Slater-Jones told me that the Noordzeekanaal might have been mined, and so we used a couple of lorries instead. I had my doubts about that information, but it turns out that he was probably right, because on their way up the Nieuwe Waterweg the pilot boat hit a magnetic mine and sank without trace. Everybody on board was killed, and the gold, worth millions of pounds, is now scattered somewhere across the bottom of the river.’
‘So that was the end of that,’ Dawson said. ‘A sad loss.’
‘You got that right. Anyway, back to what we’re doing here. The reason we’re going from Rouen to Le Havre is because the River Seine runs between the two cities, and the north bank of the river is lined with oil refineries and storage depots. The stocks we hit at Amsterdam and Rotterdam were really big and important, but those along the Seine are the biggest anywhere in Europe.
‘Our mission is supposed to be nothing more than reconnaissance, just to check out the various tank farms so that if the French don’t manage to stop the German advance we’ll know what we have to do to destroy them. I’ll be relying on your knowledge and whatever you can suggest that would help any future demolition operation, because if we have to do this, it’ll probably be at very short notice, with only a small number of men, and with extremely limited quantities of explosives. Again.’
‘So it’ll be Amsterdam all over again? And obviously we can’t let the bloody Jerries get their paws on these oil stocks either. But are they that close?’
‘They’re close enough to worry the British high command,’ Michaels replied, ‘and I really can’t overstress this. You’ve probably heard rumours about the Germans smashing their way across France and crushing all the Allied opposition, and most of what you’ve heard is probably true. The only real Achilles heel the Wehrmacht has is its supply of fuel. Tanks and trucks can only carry so much, even with external tanks. The faster they advance and the more ground they cover, the further back the supply convoys, the fuel tankers and ammunition trucks and all the rest of it, end up behind the front line. Eventually, a Panzer corps or whatever can go no further and has no option but to wait for the tankers to catch up.
‘But if they can get access to additional stocks of fuel somewhere, everything changes. That’s the danger, and that’s why we’ve been sent out here, to take the first step towards preventing these massive tank farms being seized by the Germans. Getting hold of even one of these would be as important to the Nazis as any military engagement. Maybe even more important.’
‘And you don’t think the French military and our lads will be able to stop them?’
Michaels shook his head decisively.
‘Between you and me, Dawson, I don’t see very much chance of the Allies doing anything to halt the German advance. I think the Jerries’ll stop when they reach the French coast, and not before. In my opinion we’re bloody lucky we’ve got the English Channel between them and us. Those twenty-odd miles of salt water are worth any number of army divisions and Royal Air Force fighter planes. Anyway, that’s why we’re heading for France again, so my advice is we both get our heads down now, while we still can, so that we’ll be rested when we land at Cherbourg.’
‘So that’s why you wanted a cabin?’ Dawson asked.
‘Not necessarily a cabin, but some space on the ship where we hopefully wouldn’t be disturbed. This is better than I was expecting, actually. I’ll take the top bunk.’
‘You sure, sir?’
‘Yes. If it gets really rough and I fall out and land on top of you I’ll just bounce off. The size you are, if you fall on me, you could kill me. So I’ll definitely take the top bunk.’