Jackdaws

At five to ten, Simon Fortescue came into the model room. He was one of the senior men at MI6, the secret intelligence department. A tall man in a pin-striped suit, he had a smoothly authoritative manner, but Paul doubted if he knew much about clandestine work in the real world. He was followed by John Graves, a nervous-looking civil servant from the Ministry of Economic Warfare, the government department that oversaw SOE. Graves wore the Whitehall uniform of black jacket and striped gray pants. Paul frowned. He had not invited Graves. “Mr. Graves!” he said sharply. “I didn’t know you had been asked to join us.”

“I’ll explain in a second,” Graves said, and he sat down on a schoolboy bench, looking flustered, and opened his briefcase.

Paul was irritated. Monty hated surprises. But Paul could not throw Graves out of the room.

A moment later, Monty walked in. He was a small man with a pointed nose and receding hair. His face was deeply lined either side of his close-clipped mustache. He was fifty-six, but looked older. Paul liked him.

Monty was so meticulous that some people became impatient with him and called him an old woman. Paul believed that Monty’s fussiness saved men’s lives.

With Monty was an American Paul did not know. Monty introduced him as General Pickford. “Where’s the chap from SUE?” Monty snapped, looking at Paul.

Graves answered, “I’m afraid he was summoned by the Prime Minister, and sends his profound apologies. I hope I’ll be able to help.”

“I doubt it,” Monty said crisply.

Paul groaned inwardly. It was a snafu, and he would be blamed. But there was something else going on here. The Brits were playing some game he did not know about. He watched them carefully, looking for clues.

Simon Fortescue said smoothly, “I’m sure I can fill in the gaps.”

Monty looked angry. He had promised General Pickford a briefing, and the key person was absent. But he did not waste time on recriminations. “In the coming battle,” he said without further ado, “the most dangerous moments will be the first.” It was unusual for him to speak of dangerous moments, Paul thought. His way was to talk as if everything would go like clockwork. “We will be hanging by our fingertips from a cliff edge for a day.” Or two days, Paul said to himself, or a week, or more. “This will be the enemy’s best opportunity. He has only to stamp on our fingers with the heel of his jackboot.”

So easy, Paul thought. Overlord was the largest military operation in human history: thousands of boats, hundreds of thousands of men, millions of dollars, tens of millions of bullets. The future of the world depended on the outcome. Yet this vast force could be repelled so easily, if things went wrong in the first few hours.

“Anything we can do to slow the enemy’s response will be of crucial importance,” Monty finished, and he looked at Graves.

“Well, F Section of SUE has more than a hundred agents in France-in fact, virtually all our people are over there,” Graves began. “And under them, of course, are thousands of French Resistance fighters. Over the last few weeks we have dropped them many hundreds of tons of guns, ammunition, and explosives.”

It was a bureaucrat’s answer, Paul thought; it said everything and nothing. Graves would have gone on, but Monty interrupted with the key question: “How effective will they be?”

The civil servant hesitated, and Fortescue jumped in. “My expectations are modest,” he said. “The performance of SOE is nothing if not uneven.”

There was a subtext here, Paul knew. The old-time professional spies at MI6 hated the newcomers of SUE with their swashbuckling style. When the Resistance struck at German installations they stirred up Gestapo investigations which then sometimes caught MI6’s people. Paul took SUE’s side: striking at the enemy was the whole point of war.

Was that the game here? A bureaucratic spat between MI6 and SOE?

“Any particular reason for your pessimism?” Monty asked Fortescue.

“Take last night’s fiasco,” Fortescue replied promptly. “A Resistance group under an SUE commander attacked a telephone exchange near Reims.”

General Pickford spoke for the first time. “I thought it was our policy not to attack telephone exchanges-we’re going to need them ourselves if the invasion is successful.”

“You’re quite right,” Monty said. “But Sainte-Cécile has been made an exception. It’s an access node for the new cable route to Germany. Most of the telephone and telex traffic between the High Command in Berlin and German forces in France passes through that building. Knocking it out wouldn’t do us much harm-we won’t be calling Germany-but would wreak havoc with the enemy’s communications.”

Pickford said, “They’ll switch to wireless communication.”

“Exactly,” said Monty. “Then we’ll be able to read their signals.”

Fortescue put in. “Thanks to our code breakers at Bletchley.”