Читать книгу A Game for Heroes - Jack Higgins, Justin Richards - Страница 12

The beach below the cottage on the cliffs two miles from Lizard Point, was blocked by the usual tangle of rusting barbed wire and the notice half-way down the track warned of mines.

It was an empty threat and something of a joke in the area, for the sergeant in charge of the operation, back in 1940, a local man, had seen little point in ruining one of the best surf fishing beaches in Cornwall.

It was thanks to this that I was able to swim from its white sands on that fine early April morning. It was unbelievably warm for the time of the year and the war had ceased to exist for me, was almost over anyway. I swam towards the spear of rock, climbed out and rested for a while.

Mary sat at her easel half-way along the beach, an old straw hat shading her from the sun, and painted the headland for what must have been the tenth time, although she argued that it always looked different, depending on her mood. She turned and looked out to sea searching for me, then waved. I waved back, dived in and started to swim for the shore.

She was waiting for me, a towel ready in one hand, my eye patch in the other. Not that my scarred face bothered her particularly. She had been a nurse too long for that, but she knew it still bothered me.

I dried my face, pulled on the patch and grinned.

‘Marvellous out there. You should try it.’

‘No thanks. Ask me again around July. I’ll go up and see about lunch, Owen. Don’t be long.’

She gave me a light kiss on the forehead and I watched her go through the wire and start up the path, aware of a kind of nostalgic affection and nothing more than that, which made me feel guilty on occasion.

We had met as students before the war and when they had carried me into that military hospital in Surrey five months previously pumped full of drugs and barely conscious, hers had been the first face I had seen on waking. Her husband had been killed in action, navigating a Lancaster in the Dresden raid. We had been living together for three months now, ever since my discharge from hospital.

I took my time about dressing, then walked across to the easel. She’d only got as far as the sketching stage with this one, but it was good – damned good. I picked up a piece of charcoal and tried a line or two myself, but without much success. Where perspective is concerned, two eyes are better than one and although I seemed to have adjusted in most things, I had a feeling that my painting days were over.

I lay down on the sand and pillowed my head in my hands, narrowing that one good eye to focus on a razorbill that dropped through space for a perfect landing on the cliff face.

It was all so incredibly peaceful. Only the sea rushing in, the cry of a gull, a white cloud drifting. Who was I, then? Owen Morgan, sometime artist – of sorts. Novelist – very much so. Poet – debatable. Soldier, walker-in-darkness, hired bravo, cut-throat. It all depended on your point of view. And what was I doing caught in this pleasant limbo where one day eased into another and the horizon’s rumble was thunder and not guns?

I must have slept, but only briefly. A gull cried harshly bringing me back to life. I was instantly awake, a habit hard come by in dark places, and got to my feet. If I didn’t look sharp there would be Mary seeking me, the dinner burning and the devil to pay.

I went through the wire and started up the path, head down. I had barely reached the warning notice when a voice called, ‘You down there!’

I glanced up, squinting into the sun and saw an American army officer standing on the brow of the hill, although who or what he was, it was impossible to say from that position with the sun behind him.

‘I want a word with you,’ he said.

It wasn’t a request, but an order delivered in fine Bostonian tones, the kind of voice you get in New England and nowhere else in America and usually from a member of that happy little band whose ancestors stampeded to be first ashore from the Mayflower. I didn’t like his voice and I didn’t like him for all sorts of excellent reasons so I didn’t bother to reply.

He spoke again with an edge of exasperation to his voice. ‘I am looking for Colonel Morgan. They told me at the house that he would be down on the beach. Have you seen him?’

Looking back on it now, I can find every excuse for him. He was gazing down on a small, dark man, badly in need of a shave and the old blue Guernsey sweater and the black eye patch didn’t help. And neither, I suppose, did the gold ring I was wearing in my left ear at the insistence of Jack Trelawney, the landlord of the Queen’s Arms up the road towards Falmouth, who believed implicitly that it would improve my sight and had pierced my ear lobe on one memorable evening with a darning needle and the assistance of half a bottle of pre-war Scotch.

He moved down out of the sun and close enough for me to see that he was a major by rank which wasn’t surprising when one considered his medals. DSC and Silver Star with Oak Leaf clusters for a second award which could mean everything or nothing. As someone once observed, only the man who holds an award knows what it is really worth and only the people who fought with him in the same battle can guess. On the other hand, when he came a little closer so that I could read the shoulder flash, I saw that he was a Ranger, and I’d always heard that there was little to choose between them and our own Commandos.

‘Have you seen him?’ he demanded patiently.

He was lovely. A sort of turn-of-the century American abroad having difficulty with the peasantry, straight out of the pages of Henry James.

‘Well, now, that would be a difficult question to answer,’ I answered in a fair to middling Cornish accent.

‘You’d better buck your ideas up then, hadn’t you?’

The hard Scots voice came as something of a surprise as did the hand that grabbed me by the shoulder and swung me round. Another Ranger, a master sergeant this time which made the Scots accent all the more intriguing. He had a raw, bony face and hard eyes that were swollen by the scar tissue of the prize fighter. A bad man to cross on a fine April morning.

‘Come on, laddie, start trying a little harder,’ he bellowed and shook me like a rat.

A good, tough soldier, just the man for a foray by night or a bridgehead landing under fire, but I had existed, survived for five years, in a world he had never known. A world where strength was not enough and courage was not enough. Where each new day came as a miracle. One survived, mainly by not caring whether one did or not.

I placed a hand on the hand that held me, twisted exactly as prescribed by a Japanese gentleman at a pleasant old country house in Surrey in the spring of 1940 and dropped to one knee. He rolled twenty feet down the hill into a gorse bush.

I looked up at the major and smiled gently. ‘He made a mistake. Don’t let him make another.’

He stared at me, puzzled, and then something clicked in his eyes. He knew then, I think, but before he could say anything, the master sergeant was coming back up the slope with the speed of a wounded bear. When he was about six feet away, my hand came out of my hip pocket holding the old spring blade gutting knife I’d picked up on that first job back in Brittany in the second year of the war.

There was a nasty click when I pressed the button and the blade jumped into view. He stopped dead in his tracks, then crouched and started to move close.

‘Grant, stay where you are! That’s an order!’ the major cut in crisply.

Grant still crouched, glaring at me, murder in his eyes and then another voice called, high and clear, ‘Owen, for heaven’s sake; what on earth’s going on down there?’

The man who hurried down the track was in his sixties with snow-white hair, a long, rather ugly face and steel-rimmed spectacles. He wore an old Burberry and carried an umbrella and resembled to a remarkable degree the public image of an Oxford don. Which was exactly what he had been when we first met, although his talents had run to darker ends since those golden days.

I put up my knife and groaned. ‘Oh, no, not you, Henry. Anything but that.’

Major Edward Arnold Fitzgerald and his Highland-American bully-boy moved stiffly away after Henry’s formal introduction and I shook my head.

‘The trouble with Fitzgerald’s kind is that they can never take a man as they find him.’

Henry’s eyebrows went up. ‘But my dear Owen, that is precisely what he did do. Have you glanced in the mirror lately? I should have thought it unlikely that there is more than one half-colonel in His Majesty’s service at the moment sporting a gold ring in his left ear.’

‘You always did say I was an individualist,’ I reminded him. ‘How’s the war going?’

‘I understand the 1st Commando Brigade reached Luneburg yesterday.’

‘They’ll be thinking of crossing the Elbe next.’

He nodded. ‘I expect so.’

We sat on an outcrop of rock and he produced a tin of a rather exotic Turkish cigarette he favoured and offered me one.

‘You gave me one of those damned things the first time we met,’ I said. ‘Remember? The rough island boy up to Oxford for an education.’

He smiled faintly and with just a trace of sadness. ‘A long time ago, Owen. A lot of water under the bridge.’

‘And what will you do when it’s all over?’ I asked. ‘Go back to being Henry Brandon, Fellow of All Souls, and everything that goes with it?’

He shrugged. ‘One should never go back to anything, Owen. I don’t think it’s possible.’

‘What you really mean is that you don’t want to.’

‘Do you?’

And as usual, with unfailing accuracy, he had touched the most tender spot of all.

‘Go back to what?’ I replied with some bitterness.

‘Now don’t start feeling sorry for yourself. It doesn’t become you. I read this novel of yours the other day. I understand it’s into its fourth printing in as many weeks. Remarkable.’

‘Which means you didn’t like it.’

‘Does it matter? It must be making you a .great deal of money.’

Which it was and for that I was duly grateful, and yet he had annoyed me, only vaguely perhaps, but enough to unsettle me.

He took a deep breath of good salt air and flung his arms wide.

‘It’s really quite beautiful, Owen. Quite beautiful. I envy you your life here – and I’m glad you and Mary Barton got together. You must have been very good for each other.’

And there was more than a grain of truth in that. During the six weeks in hospital when I couldn’t see at all, I’d dictated my book to her, the one driving passion that had prevented me from going mad.

‘I’m very grateful to Mary,’ I said. ‘I owe her more than I can ever repay.’

‘But you don’t love her?’

Once again he went straight to the heart of things with deadly accuracy and I stood up and flicked what was left of my cigarette over the edge of the cliff.

‘All right, Henry, let’s get down to it. What do you want?’

‘It’s quite simple really,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a job for you.’

I stared at him, thunderstruck, then laughed harshly. ‘You’ve got to be joking. The war’s over. It can’t last more than another couple of months in Europe – you know that as well as I do.’

‘On the mainland – yes, but the Channel Islands could prove to be something else again.’

I frowned and he held up a hand. ‘No, let me explain. For some months now Naval Force 135 has been preparing Operation Nest Egg, the liberation of the Channel Islands, but it’s an operation that is planned to take place only when the German garrison has surrendered. It’s our hope that it will not be necessary for us to fight our way ashore. The results for the civilian population of the islands could be catastrophic.’

‘And you think they might still try to hold out after defeat in Europe?’

‘Let’s put it this way. Vice-Admiral Huffmeier, the Commander in the Channel Islands, seems to show every intention of going down fighting. On the night of March the 8th he mounted a commando raid of his own and attacked Granville with two minesweepers. They destroyed three ships and a hell of a lot of dockside equipment into the bargain. When Doenitz congratulated him, Huffmeier signalled that he had every hope of being able to hang on in the Channel Islands for another year.’

‘Could he be bluffing?’

Henry took off his spectacles and polished them carefully with his handkerchief. ‘For years, Hitler has poured men and equipment into the islands. His great fear was that we might invade there first as a springboard to Europe.’

‘So he was wrong. Doesn’t that make them something of a dead letter?’

‘The strongest fortifications in the world, Owen,’ he said calmly. ‘The same number of strong points and batteries as they had to defend the entire European coast from Dieppe to St Nazaire. Add to that a garrison of something like forty thousand troops and you’ll see what I mean.’

‘So what am I supposed to do about it?’

‘Go home, Owen,’ he said. ‘Go back to St Pierre. I’d have thought you would have enjoyed that.’