Mark

The journey back to the safe house proved uneventful. The four of them hurried along, following behind Johnson through narrow, twisting alleyways, their boots scraping on the rough cobblestones. The scar-faced Corporal had spent the last week scouting these back streets and crooked pathways, building up a map of the ones least patrolled by German soldiers. It confined their path to the smallest and oldest streets, but kept them out of sight of the occupiers. Brick and stone buildings stretched up around them, pressing close on either side. Mark could trail his fingers over the rough stone to his left and right at the same time without stretching. Few doors and even fewer windows marked these walls, and most that they saw stood boarded up with thick planks. The looming buildings blocked most of the evening light and deadened sound, draping the four men in shadow and silence.

They weren’t alone. People stirred in some of those shadows as they hustled past, hollow eyes following them. The poor, the disabled, the undesirables and the just plain unlucky congregated here. Makeshift shanties, made of blankets and scrap wood, stood wherever it was driest. The German soldiers had made abortive attempts to clear them out, but all that accomplished was to spread them around. Short of killing them, the occupying forces couldn't get rid of them, and it hadn’t come to that yet…at least not here.

Mark would have liked to have stopped, to have done something…but what could he offer these folks? It’d be like spitting into the Thames to ease a drought. The team hurried on without speaking, their hats pulled low over their eyes, trying to avoid notice. The alley denizens made little noise of their own, beyond a quiet cough or groan. They watched the men pass without comment, slumped in their nests, silent witnesses to the city's continued fall. Where they congregated, the alleys stank of stale piss and rot. Passing a crumpled form stiller than all the others, Mark saw Wight cross himself.

Past the handful of unfortunates, the alley turned one more time. Around the corner, two piles of refuse marked their destination. A door lay hidden, deeply recessed in the wall between the stacks of garbage. It was a heavy stout thing of age darkened wood, a full foot shorter than Mark. It had a twisted, rusted handle set over a keyhole, and bands of thick iron wrapped the planks together. Sergeant MacDougal knocked hard against the dark wood three times, paused, and then knocked twice more. A long moment passed, and then the scrape of a heavy bolt drawing back answered him.

The door edged open to reveal a sallow, middle aged man peering out. Deep-set eyes, lidded with suspicion, flicked between each of them in turn. Lank black hair framed a narrow face, grown shaggy with stubble. He said nothing, and did not move out of the way.

"Were you planning on letting us in, Francois," MacDougal growled. "Or were you planning on standing there all bloody day admiring us?"

“That depends,” he drawled, eyes roving over them. “Were you followed?” He spoke English with a heavy French accent, words drawn out and accented in strange places.

"No." MacDougal's reply was short and clipped, as though he considered the question a personal insult.

The man pursed his thin lips, looking as though he'd like to ask the Sergeant how he could be sure. Instead, he swung the door the rest of the way open and stood aside. His eyes probed the alley as they entered, a pistol held against the side of his leg. MacDougal led the way, and the team filed through after him, stooping low under the door's frame. Mark was last; he let his shoulder knock into Francois’ as he entered, rather than squeezing to allow the man room. Francois' eyes flickered at that, the impassive facade cracking for an instant in a flash of annoyance. Mark offered him an insincerely apologetic grin in return, straightening in the dim confines.

Stand in the way, and you’ll get run over. I’m not going to tip-toe around you. The others could coddle Francois’ eccentricities, but Mark wouldn’t.

The interior of the house was dim, but large enough to accommodate the whole team, if only barely. Most of the light came from a few kerosene lamps, and a small, smudgy fire flickering in the hearth. A few spindly wooden chairs that looked to be as old as Mark’s grandad sat around the room, on top of a threadbare rug. A single stuffed armchair provided the most comfortable seat in the room, but Francois had permanent claim of it, marking it with a book settled on the cushion. Home, sweet home.

Francois closed the door, leaning into it with one shoulder to wedge the bolt back into place. “The mission was a success, then?” He asked. His heavy accent grated on Mark, the vowels all wrong for anything that wasn’t pure Parisian French. His grammar was word perfect; how hard could it be to work on the accent a little bit? Just enough so that it didn’t sound like a bad parody, that was all Mark was asking for. After all, if a Suffolk farm boy like Mark could learn a good French accent, then surely Francois could do the same. At the least, he could do them all the courtesy of not sneering his way through every word of English he spoke. Or hell, he could just speak French to them. The man had sorted through all of his options, and then picked the most obnoxious of the lot.

The room held one other occupant, curled up like a beetle on a chair in the far corner. A table filled with bits and pieces of junk, scrap metal, and coils of wire sat before him. Rogers, their communications specialist. He'd taken apart some piece of electronics, and its components lay spread out across the table. He held a small screwdriver in one hand, and had another tucked behind his ear, sharing real estate with the only hair he had left on his head. Now he turned, pushing a small pair of spectacles back up his snub nose and waiting for MacDougal to answer Francois’ question.

The sergeant shrugged out of his coat, meaty shoulders rising and falling. “We knocked the station out, but we may have garnered more attention than is damn well healthy for us.” MacDougal caught Mark’s gaze and held it before going on. “We’ll have to lay low for a bit.”

Rogers nodded at that, seeming to miss the byplay. His spectacles wobbled, slipping back down their perch. “Anything else you want me to pass on to the home office?

MacDougal paused, considering. “We’ll go quiet for eight days, and then see how things look.”

Rogers raised one eyebrow at that—that was longer than any “vacation” they’d had so far. He turned back to his desk and flipped a ratty blanket covered in dust back, exposing a radio and headset. Sliding the headset on, he knocked his spectacles down as he got ready to send the message. He produced a small notebook and a pencil from his shirt pocket and flipped through it. Using the ciphers in that little book, he would encode the message into something unintelligible to listening ears before sending it.

Mark winced. Eight days was a long time for the five of them to spend locked in this dingy house. Francois could come and go as he pleased, so they'd be spared spending the whole time with him, at least, but the rest of them would be stuck here.

Flopping down in a rickety chair behind Rogers, Mark looked at the Frenchman. He’d met them, as arranged by their own intelligence forces, after they dropped outside of Paris. The plan had been for him to bring them into the city, to a safe house, and then connect them with members of the French Resistance operating in the city.

They’d never made it further than the safe house. Francois insisted that the Resistance would meet with the British agents as soon as they determined that it was safe, but weeks had passed without any communication. Finally, the Resistance had responded, but only to pass on a message via Francois about the electrical station.

It all felt like a test to Mark, and he glowered at Francois as the older man settled back into his chair and picked his book back up. Next to him, he heard Rogers tapping out the message on the radio. Anyone listening to the right frequency would hear it, but without the corresponding code book at the home office it would all be gibberish. They sent reports back every day, but the messages were always brief and had to be laboriously coded and decoded. Rogers kept the little codebook with him at all times, never more than a few steps from the hearth. If they were ever discovered, it was destined for the flames. Mark figured that was overkill; if the Germans found them, the codes would be the least of their problems.

Eight days of doing nothing. He pulled a deck of cards out of his pocket and shuffled them on his knee with a sigh. They made a satisfying sound, crisp and clean, as they snapped together. Wight settled in across from him, pulling another of the mismatched chairs over with a clatter.

Mark grinned up at him. “Want to grab Johnson and pick up the bridge game from yesterday?” He split the two halves of the deck again and bent them against each other until the cards fell into place. “With eight days to work with, I’ll bet we’ll actually finish a game.”

Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

Wight considered the deck in Mark’s hands, his mustache twitching. “Maybe later. I’m still trying to figure out how you’re cheating. Chess?”

“I can’t stand chess,” Mark scowled. “It’s so…regimented.”

Rogers piped up from Mark’s left without looking around. “You just don’t like it because you always lose.” The message sent, he was back to fiddling with the parts in front of him, headphones cocked over one ear in case a response came right away.

“It’s not that,” Mark insisted. “It’s that every game is the same. With cards, every draw is different, and that’s what makes it exciting.”

Rogers turned around at that to stare at Mark pointedly over his spectacles. “In just the first pair of moves, you have 400 possible positions in chess. By the second set of moves, that number jumps to something like…two hundred thousand, I think?” He shook his head. “You get the point; chess has just as much variation as cards do.”

“Okay, but only if Wight doesn’t do the same thing every game!”

Wight smiled broadly, stretching the mustache on his lip to a thin line. “The day it quits working every time on you, I’ll quit using it.”

Mark was preparing a truly scathing retort when a heavy hand descended on his shoulder and squeezed, hard enough to cut him off. He looked up with a start. How had MacDougal gotten behind him? No one that big should move that quietly. The sergeant’s fingers felt like tree roots, and Mark fought not to twist away as they probed down into the joint of his shoulder. “I’ll jump in the bridge game,” He said mildly, his fingers burrowing into Mark’s flesh. “I just need to debrief Mark before we get started. Johnson, why don’t you shuffle and deal while we talk?”

MacDougal kept his face perfectly bland, but the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. Johnson gave Mark a pitying look as he took the deck, and Rogers and Wight busied themselves looking anywhere else as the sergeant steered Mark towards the stairs.

Not so Francois. Across the room, the Frenchman was settled into his overstuffed armchair. A pistol rested on the table beside him, and he had his book open in his lap, the cover faded and worn to illegibility. He never joined them for cards, and generally seemed content to pretend the five British soldiers did not exist. Now he looked up to meet Mark’s eye, a faint sardonic twist to his mouth. Mark could feel heat rising in his chest at the sight. Something on his face must have given his irritation away, because the twist grew into a smirk. As Sergeant MacDougal marched him up the steps he could feel Francois’s gaze on his back the whole way.

Three flights of stairs later, they emerged onto the flat-topped roof of the building. A chest-high brick parapet ran the perimeter, lending the roof the air of a balcony. Dusk was falling; the sun already gone behind the horizon, but it was still bright after the dim confines of the basement. The profile of the distant Eiffel Tower thrust up over the city, across the river Siene. He knew a Nazi flag, emblazoned with a huge swastika, waved there. Francois had told them that when the Germans had occupied the city, the lift operators had cut the cables to spite the invaders. A few German soldiers had been given the dubious honor of climbing the tower to lower the French Tricolors, and lugging a massive Reichskriegsflagge commissioned for a replacement up with them. Fastened in place with chains, the flag had been so large that the force of the winds at the top of the tower tore it loose mere hours later. The unlucky sods had been forced to climb it all over again, with a more modest flag in tow.

Mark turned to look at his sergeant, bracing himself for a fight. If he was going to get chewed out, at least he could at least give a good account of himself. He would not flinch. But MacDougal wasn’t even looking at him. Instead, he was rolling a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, looking north. Mark knew that the Seine curved that way, looping back on itself before flowing west out of Paris to the English Channel. He couldn't see the river itself, but here and there a faint glimmer of reflected sunlight showed between the buildings. MacDougal produced a pack of matches from a pocket of his coat and lit one with a snap of his fingers. Light flared in his hand, bathing his face in a brief, orange glow as he puffed the cigarette to light.

Mark grimaced. He hated the smell of tobacco smoke. He remembered his father smoking, burning through a pouch every week. He'd roll the cigarettes the same way that MacDougal did in his hands, getting the shape right. Heavy hands, and rough, gritty with ash where they had caught Mark across the face. He remembered stumbling away, nose full of the smell of blood and tobacco.

Standing with his back to the parapet put him downwind of the Sergeant, and in moments, the smoke wreathed him in a pungent haze. It might have been deliberate, but MacDougal gave no sign that he noticed or cared for Mark's discomfort. The faint breeze carried a hint of a chill night with it, but did nothing to clear the smoke from the rooftop.

Mark stayed quiet, waiting for MacDougal to say something. The older man leaned his elbows on the parapet, looking out over the city and puffing on his cigarette for interminable minutes, silent and still. Mark fidgeted, then took one shuffling step to the side to try and get clear of the worst of the smoke.

“You know it took me three years to learn passable French?” MacDougal said, not turning.

Mark stopped his careful shuffling, caught off guard. The blasted smoke seemed to be following him. “Sir?”

“Three years. And you learned it in about…what, six months?”

This was not how Mark had expected this conversation to go. “About that long…” he ventured cautiously, watching his sergeant for a hint on what he was supposed to say. “I learned some from my mother, growing up.”

The grizzled lines of the other man’s face betrayed nothing. MacDougal took a long drag from his cigarette and exhaled through his nose. Lit from below by the orange glow of the cigarette’s ember, it gave his worn face a draconic cast. “Most everyone recruited for special operations already knows a bit, but you learned faster than anyone I’ve ever seen. Great accent, too. And you’ve learned pretty good German in that same time, again, nearly flawless on the accent.” The shadows around them stretched into insubstantiality as the sun dipped out of sight. MacDougal turned to regard Mark, cigarette dangling from his lower lip, his expression weary. He took the cigarette in his left hand before continuing, gesturing with it.

“You pick up languages as natural as breathing, you have a natural instinct for combat, and you’re the finest demolitions man I’ve ever seen.” Mark felt himself swelling and started to grin. About time! He would have sworn it was impossible to please this man.

“You are also,” MacDougal continued, staring Mark full in the face, “an idiot, and likely to get yourself or someone in your command killed for no point or purpose.”

Mark blinked, and an instant later MacDougal had him by the collar, the cigarette tossed carelessly to one side, still smoldering. It spun down into the gathering dark, trailing embers and smoke. Mark staggered backwards, off balance, and found himself pushed up against the stairwell door.

“What,” MacDougal hissed his last lungful of cigarette smoke into Mark’s face, “was that stunt with the shit cart?”

The sudden ferocity knocked the air out of Mark’s lungs, leaving him struggling for breath to reply. He took a gasp of smoke-filled air that left him coughing incoherently. MacDougal plowed on over his feeble protests, snarling his fury. “What could possibly have been going through your head to make you think that was a good idea? Assuming there was anything going through your head to begin with!”

That stung. Mark got a hand up between the two of them and pushed hard on the burly sergeant’s chest, loosening the other man’s grip a little. He didn’t try for more than that; it would be embarrassingly fruitless. “I was thinking that I didn’t want to be caught with the munitions if we were stopped, sir.” The ‘sir’ came out with more bite than was probably wise, and MacDougal’s fingers tightened on his lapel, threatening to tear the fabric. A smarter man, he knew, would have stopped talking there, but Mark pressed on. “I figured the second explosion would help cover our escape! It would sow more confusion, more chaos while we…we…”

Mark trailed off, realizing, too late, that with every word he spoke he was drawing closer and closer to MacDougal, the Sergeant’s strength inexorably overwhelming his own until they were nose to nose. MacDougal dropped his tone to a low growl, full of quiet menace. “You’re as full of shit as that cart was. More. If you were worried about being possibly found with the explosives, then why did you carry them away from the target?” Mark opened his mouth to reply, but MacDougal ground on right over his objections. “So that’s bullshit. As for a second explosion to cover our escape…we had the earlier diversionary blasts, already occupying the soldiers. So, I don’t buy that either.”

The edge in the older man’s voice sent a shiver down the back of Mark’s neck, and the hard glint in his superior officer’s eyes killed the next half-formed excuse on his tongue. He felt a tickle of worry in the pit of his stomach.

It must have shown, because MacDougal grunted and loosened his grip. “You want to know what I think happened? I think you saw that manure cart on the way in and you thought it’d be fun to blow it up.” He pushed Mark away and pulled out another cigarette. “I think you thought you’d find some justification later.” Mark winced. “I think you figured it would just bloody well work out, ‘cause things always do, right?” He lit it, cupping the match in his hands against the wind before turning back to look at Mark again, and the weight of that disappointed gaze hit Mark like a six-foot iron pry bar. “And I think you didn’t think for one second that two explosions going off one after another might draw a straight line that would point right to us, and to our escape route. You put all of us in danger.”

Silence fell between them. The sun was now well and truly set, and the ember of the new cigarette gleamed in his sergeant’s eyes. Mark fought to hold that burning gaze and found he could not. He looked down at the wooden planks of the roof, flushing, not daring to look back up.

MacDougal’s voice was quieter when he continued, but no softer. “Go back down and play cards. You’re confined to quarters until I decide you’re worth the trouble of letting you back out again.”