The Executioner Read online

  I leapt through the door and pulled the MP40 up into the aim. The bed was on the far side of the room, similar to where the telephone man had been, but my target was laying stretched out on his bed, suddenly rising as soon as he realised that the figure in his room was not a friendly one, nor was he in some sort of dream. He sat on the end of his bed for a moment, simply staring down the barrel of the gun, apparently resigned to the fact that he must die at that specific moment in time.

  Despite the fact that he had been asleep not ten seconds ago, he seemed completely awake, not even the hint of a sleep hangover that I so often experienced every time I rose from my slumber.

  I took a quick look around the room. There was an opened case at the foot of his bed, some of his belongings and socks hanging precariously from it, his uniform hanging proudly from a hook next to it. A gramophone was stationed on a table by the door, with accompanying letters and pieces of paper that he had failed to file away before he put his head down earlier on.

  He stared at the gun and I was apparently taking too long to do what was expected, as he notched his head upwards to look me straight in the eyes. He was in his mid-forties, the greying, unkempt hair that stuck up in all manner of directions and the tired eyes were more than a subtle indicator of this man’s age. He had numerous creases and wrinkles all over his face, which I presumed he had garnered from years of torment and violence that he had served in the German army.

  My eyes were suddenly distracted by the face of a young girl on the stool that served as his bedside cabinet. She was a young, blonde girl, with the deepest blue eyes and the most innocent of features. She must have been around seven or eight, with her mother standing proudly beside her, waving at her father wherever he might be stationed in the world.

  I had looked at the picture for far too long, as I felt the gun wrench upwards and a solid fist smashed my nose from its position, sending blood instantly flying from it like a volcanic eruption. I staggered backwards as I released my grip on the gun, surrendering it completely to his control. He took too long himself to bring it around and into a position where he could pull the trigger and I delivered one of my finest right-hand hooks to just under his jaw, sending teeth flying from the lower quadrant of his mouth. He fell backwards onto his bed and I pulled my pistol from my trousers and stormed my way over to him, where I was clubbed suddenly by the back end of the MP40, stars instantly bursting in my eyes as I did so.

  Ray suddenly appeared in the doorway, pistol up and ready to fire at the German before I stepped into his way.

  “No,” I hissed violently, my lips suddenly swelling up nicely and my nose beginning to throb unbearably, “he’s mine.”

  I brought the pistol up into the firing position and began to take up an adequate amount of pressure on the trigger, which suddenly fell away quicker than a mortar round to the floor. I waited for half a second more, which he took as an opportunity to repeat what he had just said.

  “Alfie Lewis?”

  I stopped thinking as soon as he said my name, nothing went through it apart from putting a bullet through this man’s skull.

  “Alfie. I know that you were set up. Your partner was given up to us. You were set up. Stop.”

  I took a step back from him and my hand quivered as I struggled to pull the trigger. How had he known my name? How had he known what had happened? The conspiracy in my mind deepened to new depths as my mind whirred about what was going on. Had this all been a set up? Had it been an elaborate plot to get me killed? Everything suddenly felt too easy on this assignment. Switching the generator off had been like flicking a switch to an interior light. The door to his room had been unlocked and had practically invited me in. It all seemed like a set up in that moment.

  “How does he know your name?” Ray practically shouted, completely disregarding the fact that we were still in a very precarious environment.

  “I…I don’t know…” I said, not taking my eyes off the German for a second.

  “You’re lying, how do you know him?!”

  “I don’t know him I swear! I was sent here to kill him! He’s my target!”

  “Take me with you, Alfie. I have information. Vital information. Your government would want to know. Take me and I’ll tell you.”

  My mind whizzed for a moment, trying to take in everything that I could and attempting to make some sort of decision in what was one of the most messed up situations ever known to man. I debated with my own thoughts for what felt like an eternity, trying to weigh up how this man had known who I was and what he might possibly have to trade with the British government.

  Could this all be a test? Could this, as my first assignment with MI9, be a way of trying to see if I would still dispatch of a target, even though he was trying to get inside my head? No, I told myself, it was an incredibly high-cost test, with Jacques, Julien and an entire bomber crew giving up their lives for this operation already. It had to be a live op, he had to be a legitimate target.

  Nothing made sense to me, and I was surprised at the way I was looking at the German compassionately, not wanting to take him with me but at the same time, not wanting to put a bullet in his brain either.

  “Tell me what you know now, or you won’t see your little girl again,” I managed to utter, despite myself.

  “No. You take me with you and then I’ll talk.” The conviction with which he spoke, especially when faced with the fact that he might never see his daughter again, somehow managed to convince me that he had genuine intelligence to share with me. How else, I asked myself, would he have known who I was? How else would he have known that Cécile had been compromised?

  “Okay, I’ll take you. But you’re going to need to get dressed. I’m not taking you like that.”

  “No way are you taking him! I won’t let you. What’s this about being sent here to kill him? That wasn’t our objective.” Ray shouted in my face, as he brought his pistol up with a renewed vigour, changing his aim from the German and pointing square in between my eyes.

  “Just who exactly are you?”

  20

  “I’m not letting you leave with him! He’s a Kraut!”

  “Ray, you’ve got to let us go, it’s my job!”

  “No…you were here to kill him. You drop him and then we’ll leave. After that you can tell me who you really are.”

  My head pounded in unison with my nose, the blood that had started dripping from it was now a sticky mess all over my top lip, I must have been quite the sight.

  “If you ain’t going to kill him, I’ll do it myself,” he said, swinging the pistol round and up into the face of the Standartenführer. At first, I didn’t think he was going to do it, neither did he. But he began to squeeze the trigger and I could see that the pad of his finger was getting incredibly close to the point where a round would be ejected and my target, turned confidante, would be subjected to an explosion of pain, as the bullet burrowed its way through his skull, leaving brain matter scattered all over the ceiling.

  In such a confined space, the ear ripping bang was almost unbearable, to the point where I thought I would never hear another noise ever again. I panted, and I found that my eyes were shut as I forced the sick back down my throat and pulled myself together.

  “You better be telling the truth,” I said, not looking at the Standartenführer for a moment, but focusing instead on Ray’s body. I had shot in near point-blank range, but the small nine-millimetre round that had been ejected from my pistol had not had the motivation to carry on and pass through the other side of his neck, it was still lodged inside him somewhere. He floundered around on the floor, completely unaware that we were even in the room with him, it was just himself and the hole in the side of his neck that he was desperately trying to plug with one of his fingers.

  “I am. You can trust me, pass me his weapon.” I didn’t really have too much of a choice right now, there was a number of enemy soldiers all gagging to get their teeth into some action and some maniac had started shooting inside
the building they were in. I grabbed the MP40 from the floor, stepping over Ray’s jerking body as he lost pint after pint of blood, and peered around the door.

  No one was coming just yet, but I figured it wouldn’t be too long before someone came obligingly to the officer’s room to check on his welfare.

  “Get dressed,” I said to him, keeping my eye on the noisy room from earlier on, “quickly. Don’t mess me about.”

  He began shuffling about, pulling his uniform on as I kept watch over the doorway, nervously awaiting the impending arrival of soldiers to check out what all the noise was.

  A head appeared around the doorway, peering out cautiously into the corridor, before making his way over to the telephone exchange room. The inevitable shout as he found his friend knocked unconscious, with great bruises glaring from the sides of his cheeks was crackled and scared, bolting back to the room to presumably pick up his weapon and carry on the search.

  Just as he retreated back into the room, chairs scraping over the floor as they all rose to do the same, an ear-splitting bang filled the night sky, lighting up the inside of the building more than the lights could ever do.

  The bang was followed by another and another, each pause in between filled with a roar as the fireball grew in strength before resorting to a smouldering wreckage.

  The bodies inside the room stopped. A near perfect silence descended on the airfield once again, this time one of utter disbelief, before they began scrambling around, even more urgently than previously, before rushing out of the building altogether, completely forgetting about the man out cold in the room across the way.

  I counted four bodies leaving the building, each one of them pulling on their helmet or readying their weapon as they prepared for the action they’d thought would never come.

  “Friends of yours?” said the Standartenführer as he began buckling up his tunic and fiddling with his belt.

  “They were,” I said lethargically, as I began thinking of what I would tell them had happened to Ray if they happened to ask. Then again, I thought as I stood there, it was unlikely that I would ever be able to talk to them again, especially as I would now have a German in tow and expect them not to shoot him.

  He began fumbling around with the suitcase, folding up the photograph of his wife and daughter that had been on his bedside.

  “No, none of that. We don’t have time.”

  “I have papers, intelligence. Your people will need to see them.”

  “Okay, but nothing else. We need to leave before this all dies down.”

  I knew the others would be preparing their grenades and readying their weapons for an almighty firefight, while simultaneously preparing to exfiltrate and make for the wooded area about five miles south, that we had earmarked as our rendezvous point. From there, together, we would make it to Louis’ place and begin our life as evaders in enemy territory.

  But that plan was all out of the window now. I would be taking this man, first to the woods where I had buried some of my kit, before trying to get out of this country with him by my side. Not an easy task by anyone’s standards.

  They all had orders to leave with or without me, as soon as those charges had kicked off, it had become every man for himself. They wouldn’t be waiting at the wall for me and I hoped that they wouldn’t be waiting at the wall for Ray either, otherwise they really were going to be putting their lives in danger.

  “Right. Come on, let’s go,” I said forcefully, pushing myself from the room and over Ray’s corpse. I pulled the MP40 up into a better firing position as I left the room, walking confidently over the loud wooden flooring as I made for the door, checking each room with a swift flick of the head and weapon, in case someone was standing in the doorway ready to blast my guts out. There was no one, just the communications man who was still stretched out on his desk, blood pouring from a wound at the top of his head, some from his nose, the rest dribbling from his mouth. The poor bloke was going to have one almighty headache when he woke up in the morning.

  Explosions and cracks began thumping their way to my ears even more intensely as I pulled the front door open, men running in every direction with no real knowledge of what was going on. I couldn’t even tell whose side they were on.

  Our plan had worked tremendously. All six of the fighters that were sitting on their dispersal points were smouldering nicely, their wings looking like they had simply been snapped off and dropped to the ground. The petrol tanker was aflame, billowing jet-black smoke high into the air, but also smothering everyone at ground level at the same time.

  The hangars had gone up wonderfully, not destroyed completely, but whatever was stored inside would soon be wanting to burn down the building too if it wasn’t quickly brought under control.

  Explosions from grenades still rang out every now and then, but there was a distinct lack of any small arms fire. I wondered for a second whether they had already got out, exfiltrated before the charges had even gone off, and effectively left me on my own in an enemy stronghold.

  But then I realised why they hadn’t started firing yet, the Germans weren’t firing at them. We had managed to fool them into believing that it was an air raid. Quite how a silent aircraft with no engines had managed to sneak up on them, drop a plethora of bombs with pinpoint accuracy, before disappearing off into the night sky had happened was unexplainable, but it hadn’t stopped them from flicking their searchlights on and to begin sounding their siren.

  As the wails began to shriek through the night air, the searchlights began to focus everyone’s attention to the inky blackness that was above them, wispy clouds intermixed with the dirty black pillar that began flying towards the sky. Men sprinted for their posts at the anti-aircraft guns, ready to blast anything that moved out of the sky, even if it was just a gull.

  Then, a crack. Just one, quite solitary but an unmistakeable crack of a well-aimed rifle shot. As if acting as a starting pistol to the world’s deadliest race, every man that I could see out in the open began charging towards the control tower, apparently where the shot had rung out from, at which point the whole night sky seemed to erupt with brilliant flashes of whites and oranges, as rifles and machine guns exploded into action. Tracer rounds zipped through the air violently, in all directions, and I felt bad for underestimating the ability of the soldiers I was with. Somehow, they had managed to get their hands on a German machine gun and were putting up an almighty fight as the airfield erupted around them.

  “Right, where are we going?” I screamed at him, desperately wanting to be heard over the din of the airfield as it erupted into action.

  Tracer had now begun appearing on the far side of the airfield, and it appeared that another group had managed to acquire a second machine gun and were now using it to devastating effects behind the group of soldiers that were attacking the first gun.

  We desperately needed to get moving because, if these boys carried on, there wouldn’t be any men left to fight and my cover would be blown immediately. We would have the first Allied airfield in the whole of France for well over a year.

  I made a mental note to take to Jimmy when I got back to Britain that it was entirely possible to requisition an entire airfield with just a handful of men, if the need arose for whatever reason in the future. I liked to think that one day the Allies would make a return to this part of the world and I hoped that I would be able to play a small part in that by making a suggestion such as this.

  A round suddenly whizzed past my skull and had I been two paces behind, like I had been a second before, the bullet would have taken me down with a lethal accuracy. My natural instinct was to make for cover, or at least drop to one knee as I scanned the area for where the round had originated from, but I had to override any sense of humanness, I would just have to keep moving.

  I pondered whether it had been a German-aimed round at me that had just missed me by inches, or a British one, both of them with valid reasons for having a pop at me.

  “Over there!” the Stan
dartenführer hollered, “I have a car! We can probably get out that way!”

  I tried to acknowledge him, but another round kicked into the ground just by my right foot and fortunately spun off in a direction other than into my flesh.

  The shooter was ducking down behind a pile of sandbags, which I assumed must have been some sort of open air raid shelter, for those caught short out on the airstrip when our planes screamed in.

  I pulled the gun into my shoulder and began squeezing off a few rounds and I watched, quite surprised, as sand began flying up in all directions causing a mini explosion of its own. The Standartenführer led the way, leading us straight towards the man in the dugout.

  As we neared, I pulled a grenade from my pocket and went through the motions of priming the thing, keeping it in my hand for two seconds before tossing it over the bags and into the trench below.

  I couldn’t tell if I’d got the poor man, but a fine cloud of dust and muddied earth sprayed up as it exploded, making my ears go pop as the detonation reached my eardrums. I heard nothing of the man after that, but then again, I didn’t hear much of anything at all, the grenade had made a horrifying tinny noise begin to squeal in my ear, the sounds of the world diluted by the agonising scream of my eardrums.

  I turned to shout at my German companion, but he was too busy brutally firing on his own men, who were using a car as cover to lay down some rounds on their attackers. I found myself thinking that it must have been our intended ride as he hared towards it, throwing himself against the body of the car with such a clatter that even I was able to hear it.

  “Get in! Get in!” He bellowed at me, opening the door to the driver’s side. I dove in, dragging myself to the far side to allow him to drive.

  His suitcase clattered me in the side of the skull as he tossed it in as nonchalantly as a grenade, before it fell onto my lap almost perfectly. My cheek began to ache as the force threatened to rip at the stitches that held my cheek together, reigniting the burning feeling that had so often frequented my face now.