The Joshua Inheritance

by Mark Whitcombe-Power

Genres: Historical Fiction; War & Military; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

London 1945, VE Day. And for Edward Fairfax, a strange sense of anti-climax. Newly commissioned and eager to join the fighting, it seems the war has passed him by. A sense of mystery too. 'Operation Joshua', behind enemy lines, has been a disaster. His father is blamed and threatened with court martial, yet no-one will tell Edward the truth. A sense also of impending violence. A chance meeting with the beautiful Carole Romm will cast long shadowsinto his future. As the war in Europe ends, another begins in Palestine. The birth of the State of Israel is to be marked by bitterness and bloodshed. Edward will se action, not on the battlefields of Europe as he had dreamed, but in a harsh land where the enemy is unseen, and where Jewish and Arab extremists have only one thing in common: hatred of the British Empire.

Release date: November 28, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 432

Sample

George Fairfax waved cheerfully at the German soldier as he rode past Maursmünster police station on his motorbicycle, and immediately regretted it. He was in an excellent mood after his reconnaissance in the mountains but, after four miserable years of Occupation, people did not wave at the Germans any longer, even in Alsace-Lorraine.

His embarrassment soon faded in the satisfying burble of the bike’s exhaust echoing off the stone walls of the houses as he twisted and turned through the town’s narrow cobbled streets. The place was deserted. It was a cold, damp October afternoon and those with work to do stayed inside. He turned finally into a long road lined with cheaply built red-brick workers’ cottages in little fenced gardens, where they had been hiding for the last three weeks in the last house which offered a fine view of the approach from its gable-end bedroom window. He left his bike at the side, hidden from view in a delapidated shed, let himself in through the kitchen door at the back with a key and went upstairs two at a time. The top floor squatted tight under the sloping roof and he bent his head on the turn of the stair before barging through a coarse matchboard door on the tiny landing.

Inside, a thin man in a baggy brown suit wearing a jersey under the jacket was crouched behind the bed pointing a big .45 automatic at the door, his fist clenched white round the pistol grip. The mass of grey hair on his head and the intense expression on his narrow face made him look older than his forty-five years.

‘Goddam it! Why don’t you use the agreed signal before coming in? Shit, I had the goddam set out!’ He waved the pistol furiously at a leather suitcase on the table.

‘Relax, Romm, old thing,’ Fairfax replied seriously, refusing to match the other’s temper. ‘You heard the bike, didn’t you? Who else could it have been?’

Romm snapped back, ‘And quit the goddam “old thing” routine.’ He dropped the automatic on the bed and stood up. He looked tired. Living in Occupied France, always with the threat of being caught by the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, was taking its toll, Fairfax thought. He said, ‘You shouldn’t get so worked up! You’ll wear yourself out.’

Romm did not reply. With what he knew of the area, he thought he ought to be running the operation, not this solidly built Englishman whose every action seemed guaranteed to attract the attention of the Germans.

‘Bloody cold out,’ said Fairfax and slumped down on the end of the bed. He began to unbutton his outer coat. He said, ‘Saw a lot of vans and other motors round the police station as I came through town. Wonder what the sods are up to now?’

Romm paid no attention. He went back to the suitcase on the table, opened it and looked at the B2 clandestine radio neatly fitted into four compartments inside. He checked that a Bakelite switch on the right was turned to ‘battery’, lifted a loose floorboard under the table, pulled out two wires from the hole and connected them into the set. The workman’s cottage had no mains electricity and Romm was using a truck battery hidden under the floor. Without stopping he asked, ‘Just tell me about the landing strip. Is it okay? We’ve got to get this message off right now.’

Fairfax watched him and nodded, ‘Yes, the place is perfect. No doubt about it. Even for a big twin-engined plane like the Hudson. We can bring the team in there, no difficulty. D’you want the grid?’

‘No. I’ve got it,’ Romm replied. He fished in his trouser pocket and pulled out a small rectangular object, the emergency radio crystal with a daytime frequency of 6,123 kilocycles. He plugged it into the radio at the back, in the centre compartment. ‘I knew the place up there would be okay so I’ve coded the whole message already. I wanted to be ready to send at once.’

Fairfax raised an eyebrow. ‘I know there’s nothing like local knowledge, old chap, but that’s a bit forward, eh? After all, it’s my operation.’

‘Bullshit,’ said Romm bluntly, his back to Fairfax. ‘We don’t have time to waste.’ With feverish haste, he continued to set up the radio. He reached over to the window in the gable-end wall for the aerial wires which were concealed along the roof outside, just above the gutter, and connected them inside the suitcase. Without pausing, he began to stuff the jackplugs of the headphone and Morse key into their sockets.

Fairfax watched, wondering if there was another reason why the American had been so keen to come on this operation apart from his excellent local knowledge. He shrugged. Sitting in a safe house about to send a clandestine message back to England was no place for a clash of personalities. The Germans had excellent direction-finding equipment to locate their position. He simply confirmed his earlier orders, ‘Okay. But have you told them to cancel the team till we’re ready? I want to be sure that they won’t send the boys in that bloody Hudson till I am good and ready. Are you sure you’ve got that?’

Romm nodded, one hand holding the headphone to his ear. ‘And I’ve added that we’ll confirm the grid at that time too.’ He concentrated on the tuning signal in his ear, his other hand on the knob in the suitcase.

Fairfax hesitated. The message was now rather long. One-time-pad coding was totally secure but they ran the risk of being pin-pointed. The system’s main fault was that it produced too many groups once encoded, which took a long time to tap out on the Morse key.

Romm sat down. He was ready to send, the single headphone held over one ear and his right hand on the Morse key on the right side of the radio. He began to concentrate on the scruffy piece of paper in front of him, with its lines of grouped numbers written on it in pencil. Fairfax shrugged and said, ‘Okay, Axel, send away.’

Romm nodded vaguely. He was totally absorbed in his work. Fairfax admired him for that. On the radio at any rate he was a perfectionist. Romm’s fingers began to twitch over the Morse key and the bare room filled with the precise musical cadence of the snapping key and silent puffs of breath condensed on the cold air. It was strange, Fairfax reflected, to find comfort in the mathematical beat of the Morse, an exact score of pulses, longs and shorts, but this was their only precious and vital contact with home. He turned to the grimy window under the eaves to keep watch on the empty street outside.

In a large high-ceilinged room in Paris in a secret Gestapo headquarters, three hundred cathode ray tubes glowed green in the subdued lighting and the room was filled with the hum of radio receivers. These panoramic receivers contained the very latest Telefunken electronics and constantly monitored the wavebands for every single frequency which could be used by illegal transmitters. Anywhere in Europe. Special duties signallers in the black uniforms of Department IV of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, watched the screens, calmly waiting for someone, somewhere, to give themselves away. The system was well tried and efficient. Two signallers talked in low voices but did not let their eyes stray from the screens.

A bright spot appeared on one screen. One of the signallers immediately picked up a telephone and in clipped tones he read off the frequency which had appeared on the apparatus under the screen, ‘Achtung! Sechs, eins, zwei, drei Kilohertz.’ He waited for acknowledgement the other end and put the telephone back on its cradle. At the same time, with his other hand, he set the receiver to the same frequency and a wire recorder added its noise to the humming machines around, registering every flick of Axel Romm’s fingers on his Morse key.

Two minutes later, four different direction-finding stations, at Brest in Brittany, and in Germany at Augsburg, Nuremberg and Berlin, were tuned to the same frequency and the SS signals staff were reporting exact compass azimuths back to the headquarters in Paris.

Alerted by the pickup, the Gestapo duty officer joined the two signallers in the Paris operations room. Impatiently glancing at his wristwatch, he waited as the minutes ticked past. Still the transmission continued and the wire recorder hummed. One by one the four bearings came in and four bright lines lit up across a vast map of France which covered one whole wall. They were criss-crossing a small area at the top end of the Vosges mountains, west of Strasbourg.

‘Interressant!’ the officer remarked quietly, pleased to see that earlier preparations seemed to be paying off. He snapped an order, but the signallers were already in action. The four azimuth bearings clearly marked a small area around Maursmünster about eight kilometres square, the same place they had identified in the past two weeks. They scented success. The day before, after yet another transmission from the same area, the SD had moved special direction-finding teams into three police stations in the area, disguised as telephone repair teams. They were parked up, ready to go on constant twenty-four-hour watch. The signallers grabbed a telephone each and were instantly put through to Maursmünster and Wasselnheim, five miles south. The Gestapo officer picked up another telephone to Zabern in the north.

In Maursmünster, the SD officer slammed down the telephone in the bare squad room and shouted, ‘Achtung! Raus, raus!’

‘Jawohl, Herr Standartenführer Denkmann!’

Within a minute four men in blue overalls tumbled out of the side door of the building into a square Citroën 11 van and passed the frequency to the signaller on duty inside. His fingers twiddled the dials on the radio equipment racked up in the back of the van while the driver gently eased the van on to the road.

‘Er überträgt jetzt!’ the operator exclaimed exultantly. Romm was still sending. The Citroën moved unsteadily on the cobbles and the operator struggled to get a fix, his face a mask of concentration. Behind the SD officer followed them in a Mercedes with three others wearing overcoats.

Seconds later in Paris, the light in the green tube suddenly went out and the wire recorder stopped.

‘Scheisse!’ the younger of the signallers blurted out and immediately apologised.

‘Kein Problem,’ said the duty officer indulgently. He knew that the clandestine station had only closed down while its base station in England decoded the message, worked out a reply, coded it and then sent it back. His eyes gleamed. When that message was sent, the clandestine station would have to come up again to acknowledge receipt. If the local direction-finding teams had managed to get a fix in the previous two minutes they could narrow the search to a few hundred yards or even less.

‘I hate the waiting,’ George Fairfax remarked as he stared through the little gable-end window at the damp reflections on the cobbled road. Nothing moved in the grey afternoon light but he was thankful Romm had finished sending. He had taken too long. He cursed himself. Five minutes was a maximum and they had taken seven. Two minutes too long.

Romm sat back on the wood chair, lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. ‘Don’t worry, Fairfax. The tootsies in Buckingham will have no problems decoding my message.’

‘How d’you know?’

Romm grinned. ‘Because I know one of the girls there, and I’m a good operator. They get every group first time from me, no corruptions.’

‘You could be faster.’

‘Horseshit!’ Romm snapped back angrily and Fairfax regretted making the remark. They had a long way to go together before the operation was done.

Romm had no such reservations and went on, ‘At least I follow the goddam procedures. I bet you never checked if you were being followed before you came blundering back in here?’

George Fairfax ignored him. He knew he should not have waved at the German soldier by the police station, but he was sure he would have seen anyone following him on the narrow mountain roads he had used to recce the landing strip. He checked his watch. Over twenty minutes since England received the message. They should have decoded it and sent it by landline to Baker Street. No doubt Colonel Haike was reading it at that moment. He pulled a face.

Romm started to pace up and down the little room, his steps beating out a hollow rhythm on the boards. ‘Good thing I use a battery on the radio. The Krauts sometimes switch off the mains to see if the signal stops when they get close.’

Fairfax grunted. ‘If you’re worried they’re getting that close to us, we shouldn’t be sending at all.’

‘They’ll only be close to us if they followed you!’ Romm replied and resumed pacing back and forth across the room. He was conscious this was his first operation. He was a novice compared to Fairfax, but he hated the Englishman’s casual attitude.

The Germans in the Citroën 11 which left Zabern were not quick enough to record a bearing before the transmission stopped, but the operators in Maursmünster and Wasselnheim triumphantly reported theirs on the radio. The SD officer in the Mercedes listened to the bearings on his radio, plotted them on a large-scale map of the area and nodded. There were only two plots but they tallied with previous results and indicated a poorer quarter on the west side of Maursmünster, near the railway line. He grabbed the radio to redeploy the three Citroëns to obtain the best triangulation when the transmitter came back on the air. In minutes the Citroëns and Mercedes were racing along the straight flat road towards Maursmünster.

‘Die Engländer warten auf die Antwort,’ said Standartenführer Denkmann on the radio as the big Mercedes swung round the town into position, explaining that the British agents were waiting for a reply. Following his instinct and knowledge of Maursmünster where he had been born, Denkmann instructed the other arrest teams in the Mercedes cars to road junctions where he could cut off the agents’ escape. Then they all settled down to wait.

Romm looked out of the window again. The street was quiet. His attention was distracted by the sound of a train on the railway track. He did not see a fat man in an overcoat cross the top of the road and slip out of sight into an alley between two houses.

Fairfax was looking at his watch again. An hour. One of the girls would be encoding the reply. Without looking round at Romm he said sharply, ‘You should sit down and get ready to receive. We’re off the second this is over. Time we left this nasty little house.’

Romm sat down at the radio. ‘You’re only saying that because it’s somewhere I suggested.’

Fairfax sighed and said nothing. Romm was probably right. But they had spent too long in the same place. That was dangerous and he felt guilty about it.

Romm put on the headphone and listened to the burbling noises on the ether. Somewhere out there was a message from him. It seemed odd that it was coming from England, from safety straight into the heart of Occupied Europe where they were surrounded by enemies.

In Paris, the bright spot lit up again on the green screen and at once the wire recorder began to hum. Simultaneously the equipment in the three Citroëns in the streets of Maursmünster registered the signal and the radio net buzzed with activity as the SD radio operators alerted the arrest teams and the three apparently overweight men deployed on foot with field meters hidden under their overcoats. Everyone waited expectantly for the clandestine station to acknowledge England’s reply. At that moment, speed and pin-point accuracy would be vital or the agents would get away.

Romm was totally absorbed, listening and writing down the letter and numbers of the reply message. Fairfax paid no attention. The message was meaningless till it was decoded. He stared through the dirty windowpanes.

Behind him Romm’s fingers started working the Morse key, tapping out his acknowledgement.

At once, the SD radio net rippled with messages of alert, like a spider’s web around the fly. This time all three Citroën operators fixed the location and the three men on foot began to walk with poorly disguised urgency along the pavements round the houses by the railway. Every few seconds they checked the meters on their wrists, made to look like watches, to see if they were getting closer or further away from the signal.

George Fairfax began to relax. Soon they would be away from the claustrophobic little house. He enjoyed being in France when he was active, like that afternoon checking out the landing strip in the hills for the Commando team to join them later, but he hated being cooped up while the Germans used invisible scientific trickery to locate him. He frowned. Romm seemed to be taking a long time to acknowledge base station’s reply. As he turned to cut him off, he caught sight of a man in a large grey overcoat sixty yards distant at the top of the street.

‘Gestapo! Stop sending!’ he shouted as he glimpsed another man behind the first.

‘I don’t goddam believe it,’ Romm said in astonishment. He stepped across the short distance to the window and leaned over Fairfax to see for himself.

‘Shove off!’ Fairfax shouted, shaking him away. ‘Get that bloody set packed up and leave me to deal with this.’ He pulled a Sterling sub-machine-gun from under the pillow on the bed, flicked off the safety catch and gripped the long black silencer on the end of the SMG as he aimed at the nearest man. He knew Romm would need all the time he could give him to get away.

Romm had the set dismantled in seconds and crushed the lid shut on the wires. ‘What about the aerials?’

The two men in overcoats were walking briskly up the road towards the house. Beyond them Fairfax saw a large black Mercedes saloon turn slowly round the corner.

‘Do you want to clamber on to the roof and fetch them? For God’s sake, get away and we’ll meet at the emergency rendezvous as planned.’

Romm glared at him for a moment and was gone, crashing down the wooden stairs three at a time. George Fairfax heard the kitchen door slam and then his attention was diverted by the Germans in the street. One nearest the house pointed into the gardens. George Fairfax picked him up in his sights, squeezed the trigger and shot him dead.

The other Germans never heard the dull noise of the silenced SMG or the thin glass in the window which crumpled round the bullet hole, like shattered ice, and fell in slivers from the sill. They stared at the dead man, unable to tell where the attack was coming from while George Fairfax smoothly switched his aim to the Mercedes and fired again. The crump of metal inside his SMG was drowned by the Mercedes’ windscreen exploding and the shouts of the men inside. The driver collapsed over his wheel and Fairfax shot two others before the car careered out of his sight through a fence into one of the gardens. With no more targets in view, George Fairfax decided it was time to move.

Outside, there was chaos. One German on the road had spotted the broken gable window and was screaming at the others to fire at it. As George Fairfax tumbled out of the kitchen door and sprinted up the garden, a volley of bullets found their mark on the little room upstairs ripping the woodwork to shreds and tearing plaster from the ceiling.

George stopped breathless at the top of the garden. He looked back, gasping fresh air into his lungs and wishing he was younger. At least he had got the action he wanted, he told himself ironically, though he was far from out of danger yet. Two Gestapo men in suits ran round the back of the house next door and he opened fire at them at once. That was the way Romm had gone and at all costs he had to dissuade them from following him. Romm had the radio and, so long as he escaped, the operation could go on. The two men disappeared from view. He thought he had hit them but the light was fading and he could not be sure. He swung over the fence and ran through rough grass and brambles towards the railway regretting he had ever agreed to stay in the little house. It would be too easy for the Germans to cut him off on the embankment.

He stopped again. The shouting was coming closer and several bullets smacked overhead. At least he had drawn them his way. Romm should get away and the worsening light would suit them both. Even the best soldiers shot too high in the dark. He ran on underneath the embankment and an increasing weight of fire began to whine in his direction. As long as they did not have dogs. If he could cross the line, he had a chance, through the woods on the other side and then into the hills.

But before he ran for it, he knew he must make certain of drawing all the Germans in his direction. It would be fatal if the radio and codes fell into German hands. He looked for a target. Three men in suits were climbing over the broken wooden fence about fifty yards away. He shot one in the stomach and fired a burst at the others when they dived for cover. He was rewarded with a mass of gunfire over his head at the embankment. The Germans could not hear his SMG firing but they were taking casualties.

Doubled up, he ran on a short way while the Germans plucked up courage to follow. Between breaths he sympathised. It was no fun chasing a gunman who could not be seen or even located by the sound of his firing. He glanced round. The Germans were firing as they came, to give themselves courage. George Fairfax forced himself not to think of bullets and scrambled up the stones to the embankment. He reached the top and slipped on the wet granite ballast, recovered his balance and was hit. The bullet struck him only a glancing blow on the side of his knee but it felt like being smacked with a sledgehammer. He went down at once, cursing at the pain, but rolled and pulled himself over the railway lines and down the other side of the embankment.

‘Halt!’

He looked up. Through the gloom, a patrol of grey-uniformed Wehrmacht soldiers approached, drawn by the shooting and knowing they were in dead ground from the fire the other side of the railway embankment. They were well spaced out among the trees covering each other as they moved. Experienced troops.

George Fairfax dropped his Sterling and hoped that Romm had had more luck.

Colonel Haike marched briskly up the pavement from his office in Whitehall through Trafalgar Square to Pall Mall, wrapped inside a heavy black coat with the velvet collar turned up to his bowler hat. He had been brought up to believe that hands in pockets was sloppy, so he swung his arms vigorously and occasionally beat his gloved hands together to keep the circulation going. He hoped the Allied bombers attacking German troops in the Ardennes were enjoying the same brilliant blue skies as London that day and he longed for spring. Spring, summer and the end of the war. He stamped his feet as he walked and wiggled his frozen toes inside nothing more robust than a slim pair of hand-made black brogues, wishing he had worn something thicker than silk socks. He was relieved when he reached his club, the Travellers, at No. 106 Pall Mall.

The porter greeted him, ‘Morning, sir!’ and they exchanged views on the weather. Colonel Haike nipped up the steps into the hall where he reluctantly stripped off his coat. The club was never kept particularly warm and after nearly six years of war there was a shortage of fuel. He strode through the pillared hall straightening his dark pin-stripe suit and adjusting his Guards tie. With automatic gestures he smoothed his neat black moustache and hair which he kept brushed straight back from a sharp widow’s peak, then pushed back his cuff and checked his watch. He was precisely on time and decided to go straight up to lunch.

John Peregrine Fullerton, also in a dark suit, was already waiting for him at a members’ table in one corner of the long dining-room and reading the club wine list. As soon as he saw Colonel Haike he stood up and they shook hands like old friends.

‘Septimus, my dear chap,’ said Fullerton effusively. ‘Good to see you.’

Colonel Haike disliked displays of bonhomie almost as much as he disliked Fullerton’s smooth Foreign Office manner but they had known each other a long time and had worked together during the previous year. He extracted his hand from the other’s grasp and replied, ‘Yes, indeed, John. I hope I haven’t kept you waiting?’

‘Not at all, dear chap,’ said Fullerton easily as they both sat down. ‘I did get here a little early and spent an agreeable half-hour chatting to a newish member of the club called Philby. Very nice young chap, I’d say.’

‘Recruited into your lot from MO-1(SP),’ said Colonel Haike as he began to study the scanty menu.

‘Yes,’ agreed Fullerton, irritated that Haike knew. ‘I think he’s got a future in the Firm.’

Colonel Haike grunted dismissively, so Fullerton decided to plunge straight into the reason for meeting quietly in the club outside their respective offices. Leaning slightly forward across the polished mahogany table he said in a low voice, ‘There’s going to be an internal inquiry on “Joshua”. They’re looking for a scapegoat.’

He had the satisfaction of seeing Colonel Haike look up sharply.

‘What?’

Fullerton deliberately put a finger to his lips and disguised the gesture by scratching his nose. ‘Yes. They’re not happy that the Hudson was lost to enemy flak. There have been serious irregularities.’

‘What’re you talking about?’ asked Colonel Haike, his dark eyes watching Fullerton’s expression very closely indeed.

‘Let’s order,’ said Fullerton waving for the head waiter. He wanted to let Haike stew for a moment. They ordered steak and kidney pie, a speciality of the Travellers even under tight food rationing, and Fullerton chose a fine d’Angludet 1928 claret. Throughout the war he had refused to let the Germans upset his passion for good wine and was delighted that their imminent defeat meant the French vineyards could get back to full production again. Thinking of Operation Joshua, he remarked to the wine waiter, ‘Perhaps now the Germans have been flung out of Alsace we’ll see some more of those very elegant white wines which I enjoy so much.’

The wine waiter smiled dutifully and slid away, and Colonel Haike spoke at once, ‘What the devil is going on?’

Fullerton was delighted with the reaction to his news but the situation was serious for both of them. He frowned.

‘No-one knows exactly, and the problem is that we should. The whole area has been liberated by the Americans, Patton’s Third Army, and yet the chaps on Joshua have not surfaced as we expected them to. The Hudson flew in at the start of November with the entire Commando team, as you know, but it never returned. We all assumed it was hit by enemy ack-ack, or fighters, or crashed in the mountains. However, there’s been no sign of anyone on the operation at all. Except, that is, the American member.’

‘Axel Romm,’ said Colonel Haike. ‘I never thought he should have been allowed to go. Your department was quite insistent, though.’ He enjoyed scoring a point of his own.

Fullerton said defensively, ‘Romm’s knowledge of the area was impeccable. And he was fluent. He lived there before the war.’

‘That’s probably what let them down,’ Colonel Haike put in. In his view, emotional attachments to people or places were far too dangerous on operations. ‘I did warn you, old chap.’

Fullerton switched tack and retorted, ‘The problem seems to have been less in the choice of personnel than with signals procedures from the field.’ He had the satisfaction of seeing Haike go immediately on the defensive.

Haike said carefully, ‘I admit we’ve heard nothing from them since the end of November. We assumed that Romm and Fairfax are either both still alive, but prisoners somewhere in Germany, or both dead. What’s new to change that?’

Fullerton delayed his reply while the wine waiter opened the claret for him. He tasted it, enjoying the rich flavour as much as the look of frustration on Haike’s face. The wine was poured and Haike was about to speak when Fullerton explained, ‘Romm’s report has shed new light. He blames George Fairfax for betraying the whole set-up to the Germans. Way back in October.’

Colonel Haike was appalled. He gasped, ‘You mean we sent the Hudson to a German reception party?’

Fullerton nodded grimly. ‘Looks like it.’

They both sat silent for several moments. Haike fiddled with his tie and Fullerton twisted the stem of his wine glass. He continued, ‘The dates in Romm’s report make it clear that the Germans must have been running the radio themselves. They signalled us to send the Hudson in November and we obligingly sent fourteen men to their deaths or a Gestapo prison.’ The waiter interrupted with the steak and kidney and Fullerton began to eat at once, exclaiming, ‘This is excellent!’

Colonel Haike was still grappling with the revelation that the whole operation had been compromised. He demanded incredulously, ‘What about the security checks on the signals?’

‘They were all there. I’ve looked,’ said Fullerton. ‘They stand out like a pikestaff, in retrospect of course, and you overlooked the whole lot, Septimus.’ He forked in a mouthful of pie and sipped more wine, watching Haike start his food with automatic gestures and a distant look in his eyes.

‘You chose the bloody radio operator,’ said Haike sharply but his accusation was without malice. He was on delicate ground and needed support.

‘I agree.’

Colonel Haike covered his surprise at Fullerton’s consent. He detected a measure of compromise, even complicity, and