Don't Look Back: SOE Circuit Fortunae Book 1 Read online

  Don’t Look Back

  SOE Circuit Fortunae Book 1

  Thomas Wood

  BoleynBennett Publishing

  Copyright © 2020 by Thomas Wood

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Thomas Wood

  Cover Design by Olly at MoreVisual Ltd.

  Visit my website at www.ThomasWoodBooks.com

  Printed in the United Kingdom

  First Printing: July 2020

  by

  BoleynBennett Publishing

  The Circuit Fortunae Series

  Into the Storm (Prequel)

  Don’t Look Back

  Playing with Fire

  Close Quarters

  Other series by Thomas Wood

  Gliders over Normandy

  The Trench Raiders

  Alfie Lewis Thrillers

  Before you start, have you read ‘Into the Storm’ the prequel novella to this series?

  If you haven’t and would like to, free of charge, simply head to:

  ThomasWoodBooks.com/intothestorm

  It’s easy to download to all devices!

  1

  “Get back down there!”

  I found myself standing at the entrance of the underground station, completely bewildered by everything that was going on around me.

  “Oi! Bring me that stretcher! Now! Quickly!”

  The bombs that fell seemed to do so in groups of four or five, a volley of incandescent rage and fury, only to be superseded by the next and the next. With every explosion came the knee-shattering tremor, that bullied me in such a way that I thought it a wonder that I was still standing on my own two feet.

  Crump. Thump. Smash.

  Miss. Miss. Hit.

  I watched as the orangey glows of sunrise, which was not due for another ten hours or so, began to make ground behind the tops of buildings that surrounded this part of London. The furious swarm of wasps slowly trundled directly overhead, their tones one of terror and yet some sort of calming consistency. I listened to their pitch for a moment, trying my hardest to guess at their speed and altitude, but failing in the most miserable of manners.

  The noise of the bomber engines was the only thing that did not seem to vary, for what felt like hours, the constant hum the only backdrop to the awful cacophony of noise that raged all around.

  The bell that rang out, without ceasing, was only a part of my conscious mind, as the men of the AFS began their nightly appointment in hell. I watched as the men, boys some of them, leapt from the vehicle that they were travelling in, and began rolling out the insufficient hoses, that were apparently supposed to douse all of the flames that licked around the street corners and over the tops of the roofs.

  There seemed like there would be no hope for this part of London.

  As the droning engines began to rescind into the darkness, the screams and shouts of people, crawling out from every crack and crevice, got louder and louder, each voice wanting, needing, to be heard above all the others.

  The bombs that screamed were due to miss me, but the one that was on its way to me was the one that would hiss. By the time the noise had registered in my mind as one of danger, it was already too late.

  The young boys of the AFS were already buried beneath a pile of rubble and brick, their truck lying precariously on its side, with one man already screaming out to get the thing off his lower body.

  I staggered around for a moment or two, a mouthful of dust and dirt settling on my tongue and a heavy application of sand-coloured ash sticking to the front of my body.

  “Johnny! You okay, Johnny?”

  I blinked enthusiastically two or three times over, as much as I dared, trying to flush out the dust caught in my pupils and to refocus my eyesight. I still could not see his face all that well, but I recognised the voice well enough. Besides, I was certain that he was the only chap around who would have known my name.

  His voice, rowdy and over the top at the best of times, spat through into my consciousness as he repeated his question to me for the second time.

  He had only been a few paces behind me on the stairs, tailing me ever since I had leapt up from where I was sitting and, decided to see for myself what was happening in the skies of London.

  It was the first time that we had left one another’s side for more than a few seconds in what felt like months, and within an instant, I had taken the debris of a one-hundred-pound German bomb to my face.

  My ears burned so much that I found it almost impossible to distinguish the various sounds that were still so prevalent in the air. But the one that I could not force to one side was the ferocious crackling and roaring of flames, as they rose together, to grip onto anything worth burning, and vanquishing them in a matter of seconds.

  “Can you hear me, old fruit? Are you alright?” his voice was quintessentially British, even in the face of all the chaos and danger that raged around us both.

  I was mightily pleased that he was alongside me, as he had become an anchor to my wellbeing for the past couple of months, the storms of which would have threatened to shake many man-made anchors.

  “Yes…Yes, I’m alright. Do I look alright?”

  “You’ve looked unwell since the day I met you, Johnny. But, for you anyway, I’d say you look half-decent.”

  I found myself laughing wholeheartedly at what he had said, not because it was a witty putdown or hilarious quip, but out of an exhausted relief that, for now, I was still alive.

  The falling bombs had slowed to a nothingness now, just the occasional thump many miles away as bombs were jettisoned or an unexploded ordnance suddenly ejected into life.

  “Is that it then? Is that all they can throw at us?” Mike was almost ecstatic that we had survived our very first air raid. “If that is what they’ve been dropping on us then it was hardly anything to write home about, was it?”

  “You’ll be lucky, son,” rasped a wrinkled face, as he lit a cigarette between his cracked lips. His head bowed slightly as he leant over the flame, revealing the letter ‘W’ painted quite hastily on his helmet.

  He looked up at us both, inspecting the wings that adorned our rather dusty chests.

  “Your lot need to buck their ideas up. Come up with something to stop them before they get anywhere near here. You understand me? Make sure you pass the message along…no one listens to the likes of us.”

  “We’ll pass it along, mate.”

  “They’ll be back. Might be five minutes. Could be two hours. But you can guarantee the beggars will be back. You’ll see. Either of you two want a fag?”

  “Go on then,” muttered Mike, taking the box of cigarettes and accompanying matches. He had taken up the habit at the dispersal shed in Boscombe Down, and hadn’t quite been able to shake the habit since. He seemed to think that the things were following him around, rather than him chasing them down.

  “Why are they waiting?” I asked, received with a confused look on the warden’s face. “Why do they wait? I mean to say that they know where London is, why wouldn’t they send all their bombers over in one go?”

  “Because,” he muttered, removing the cigarette from his mouth, “them lot weren’t dropping ‘igh explosives. There were som
e in there I grant you, but mainly they was incendiaries that were coming down.”

  “So?”

  “So…” he repeated, taking a hasty drag of his cigarette and appearing frustrated that he was interrupted again. “They let the incendiaries take ‘old, then their muckers come in behind. London’s ablaze like the Great Fire again. They can’t miss.”

  His words hit home like a sledgehammer to my gut. If the devastation I had just witnessed was nothing more than a preliminary raid, then what we were about to receive was going to be all the more hellish.

  “Michael,” my voice was weak and pathetic, so much so that the warden didn’t care enough to look up at me. Fortunately, Mike did. “Never mind. Don’t worry.”

  Something had stopped me from saying what I had to say, but I could not quite pinpoint what it was. There was a chance that what I was about to say could have distracted us both from what we were meant to be doing, or even worse, he might not have cared whatsoever.

  There was something in that momentary glance that he had gifted me, that had lasted for not more than two seconds, that quelled every fear that was harboured in my heart, and several others that were hiding away in other parts of my body. It was the same look that I had received from cockpit to cockpit as we stood on standing points, readying ourselves to intercept the enemy. All of which seemed so long ago now that it was almost irrelevant.

  “Oi! You three! Gi’us a hand over ‘ere would you? Got a family stuck down ‘ere!”

  “They dead or alive?” called out the warden, tossing his cigarette to one side as if it hadn’t been the most precious thing to him a few moments ago.

  “One of ‘em is alive. Not sure about any of the others. Just help, would you?”

  To begin with, I stopped every time a shard of glass managed to penetrate my skin, the rose-coloured beads dribbling down my palms captivating me for seconds at a time. Before too long however, the beads were so abundant they could be ignored, the pain decreased and the ability to shovel away at the rubble with nothing more than my palms grew rapidly. Particularly after the first body was recovered.

  The young boy, who was pulled from the pile of brick and dust that we worked on, could not have been more than eleven or twelve. His fringe was short and shockingly blonde, infused with a healthy dosage of greying dust. It looked almost as if he was sleeping.

  There was no sign of anything untoward, other than the fact that the building he was sheltering in had collapsed all around him. For all I knew, he hadn’t even heard the hiss as the bomb hit his house. It would have all been over rather quick for him.

  His small, fractured body was laid out in what was left of the street, a warden’s jacket hastily pulled over his upper body to keep him from the cold.

  I thought that I would be stopped dead in my tracks at the sight of a child, perished, but in actuality it did nothing but spur me on further, to find the rest of his family so that they may be reunited in some backwards way.

  I heaved at a burdensome lump of brick, a chunk of it still staying intact and clinging to what had been its former purpose. As I strained, I caught sight of a finger, just a nail at first but, as I let the brick tumble down towards the street, a whole hand came into view.

  It was reaching up into the sky as if trying to gasp for air or find some source of light. I gripped it. It was still warm.

  The skin was smooth and, despite a gushing wound from the palm, quite pleasant to the touch.

  Tears rushed to my eyes as I gripped onto it, still no closer to knowing whose hand it was that I was clutching hold of, or whether they were alive or not.

  “Over here!” I sobbed, as I pictured the young boy’s sister or brother, in a similar state to their sibling.

  “Alive?” called out another voice, one that I did not recognise.

  Instinctively, I looked down at the small hand that I held in my embrace, willing it to give me some sort of an answer.

  “Alive?” I whispered gently into the night, as a teardrop fell onto the young hand, washing some of the grime away.

  At first, there did not seem to be anything, but then, as another tear fell onto it, I thought I saw the hand twitch. Then, I felt it, there was a squeeze. Whoever it was that was at the other end of this hand, was very much alive.

  “Alive!” I belted at the top of my lungs, not relinquishing my grip in the slightest. “Alive!”

  Carefully, the men around me began to pull gently at the surrounding bricks and debris, as if each one was resting on the victim’s head.

  I, on the other hand, refused to move. Whoever it was under there would need me, they would want to know that there was always someone connected to the outside world. They would no longer feel trapped or forgotten.

  Then, as quickly as the bombs had fallen, a face was revealed, a timid, battered face. The bruises had engulfed her face quicker than I thought they could do, her features so swollen that I was surprised that the debris hadn’t simply lifted from her head as they bulged.

  Even with all the blood and bruises, I could tell that the young girl, no older than four or five, was in the possession of a captivating beauty. Her nose was small and unobtrusive, her cheeks, made worse by the swelling, puffed up so much that she looked like a balloon.

  But it was her eyes, her deep green eyes, that I had locked myself onto. They were beautifully bright, so bright that the searchlights that scanned the skies seemed dull in comparison.

  Still clutching hold of my hand, she was lifted from the pit that she was in and carted to an awaiting ambulance, which was already full to bursting with other casualties of the night.

  As she perched herself down next to two elderly gentlemen, who seemed more frustrated that their night down the pub had been interrupted, she kissed my hand.

  “Fank you, Mister. I’m going to tell my brother all about you in the morning.”

  “I know you will, sweetheart. I know. You stay safe now, okay? Promise me?”

  “I pwomise, Mister.”

  I looked at her for a few more moments, before the tears threatened to roll down my cheeks and I was forced to turn away. I couldn’t have anyone seeing a pilot acting in the way that I was.

  “You okay, Johnny?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine, Mike. But I tell you one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s the last time we visit that cinema.”

  2

  Even as I sat in the middle of a scene of peace and tranquillity, the echoes of the past refused to leave my scarred mind, as I played the soundscape of times gone by over in my head, over and over again. They never stopped.

  It was an unusually warm mid-October afternoon, especially when the recent weather was taken into consideration, and I took great joy from being able to sit outside, by the slow-flowing stream, throwing the odd stick and stone into its icy waters. It was warm, but not warm enough to peep my toes into, so I was more than content to simply dangle my limbs over the bank and wait for the summer.

  It was a long time to go until the summer of 1941, but I could only hope that it would be far better than its counterpart of 1940.

  As the sun began its final descent into the fragrant colours of the winter months, I allowed my eyelids to meet halfway, just kissing each other, like a long-separated couple on their reunion.

  No, not now. Not here.

  My lungs ached as I took a deep breath of Cornish air into my body, causing me to flinch ever so slightly. It still hurt, in more ways than one.

  I ran my hands over the backs of my arms, gently caressing the skin that was slowly healing from its wounds. The inflammation was going down, but it remained as tender as if it had been burned just yesterday.

  Somehow, the never-ending sound of water trickling its way around defiant rocks began to soothe me. It made me feel almost human again. I enjoyed its company, the way in which it was there for nothing but a fleeting moment, enough time to make me happy, before continuing on its journey once more. It didn’t seem to hang around
all that much. It was quite like my own life in many ways.

  I let the noise filter through my ears even more, as the downward stream continued to work away at the sharp and jagged edges of the rocks that lay around its banks. I had long been fascinated by that kind of geology, the way that if a stone was to sit in the path of oncoming water for long enough, it would become smooth, almost void of any imperfections whatsoever. It was what I needed right now.

  Go on, do it. Why not?

  I pulled myself upright, forcing the reunited eyelids to part once more for the time being. It was okay, the two lovers would be in one another’s embrace once again before too long, no matter how much I wanted them to stay apart.

  It was four-forty in the afternoon. Plenty of time until dinner was served.

  I looked back towards the house. No one seemed to stir. There was no movement around the grounds, no minute heads bobbing around in the windows. It was what had attracted me to this place when I had seen the advertisement in the local paper, despite what connotations it had attached to it.

  It was an old, Victorian farmhouse, the grey-stone walls rising high over three floors, quite unlike any other building in the near vicinity. Its rooms were airy and large, with spectacular views over the surrounding fields, that greeted me every morning that I rose.

  I got up earlier these days, about four in the morning, more often than not in time to watch as the infant sun began to peer over the edge of the horizon, as if enquiring as to whether it could rise or not. I enjoyed those times, when not a soul was awake themselves yet, when I had time to be alone, with my thoughts and memories, that no one else could mar. No more than they already were anyway.

  I often took the time to consciously forget the dream that had haunted me, so often a distortion of the living nightmare that I was in.