A Game for Heroes. Jack Higgins
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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.’
2
St Pierre is the most outlying of the Channel Islands and fourth in size. During the eighteen-fifties the British Government, alarmed by the development by the French of a strong naval base at Cherbourg, embarked on a plan which was designed to make Alderney into the Gibraltar of the North. Most of the workers imported to labour on the fortifications were Irish fleeing the effects of the famine in their unhappy country.
A similar scheme, though on a less ambitious scale, was mounted in St Pierre. A breakwater was constructed to enlarge the harbour at Charlottestown and four naval forts were built at various points on the coast.
The labour force, as far as St Pierre was concerned, was imported from South Wales which explains that strange mixture of Welsh and French and English to be found on the island and accounts for the fact that my father, and I following him, had a name like Owen Morgan although my mother, God rest her soul, had been born Antoinette Rozel and spoke French for preference to me until the day she died.
Standing there now on the Lizard cliffs, I stared out to sea south-west to Brittany beyond the horizon, to the Golfe de St Malo and St Pierre and for the briefest of moments, a fugue in time, I saw the grey-green island again, those granite cliffs splashed with bird lime, sea birds crying, wheeling in great clouds, razorbills, shags, gulls, oyster-catchers and my own especial favourite, the storm petrel. And there was laughter, too, faintly on the wind and I seemed to see again a young girl, skin browned by summer’s heat, long hair flying as she ran from the barefoot fisher boy. Simone. I could almost reach out and touch her.
Instead, a hand on the arm brought me back to life. I turned and found Henry at my side, a slight, quizzical frown on his face. ‘Will you go, Owen?’
For five and a half years I had done this man’s bidding, had lived in constant danger of my life, had lied, cheated, killed, murdered, until my very nature seemed to have changed. After that final bloody business in the Vosges Mountains, the eight-day battle with crack SS fighting troops that had left me maimed for life, I had thought such days over, gone for ever. And now, my heart was beginning to pound, my throat to go dry.
‘I’m going to tell you something, Henry,’ I said, and when I lit a cigarette, my hands were trembling. ‘I’ve been lying here in the sun for some considerable time now, trying to write and failing, trying to love one of the finest women I’ve met in my life and failing at that also. I’ve got a good friend up the road who supplies me with all the pre-war Scotch I can drink, but I seem to have lost my taste for it. I slept better on the run in France, in the blackest days of ’41, than I do now. Would you say that any of that made any kind of sense at all?’
‘My dear Owen, it’s quite simple. You enjoyed every single minute of it. Walking the knife-edge between life and death was meat and drink to you. You have lived more in one day working for me, really lived with action and passion as a man should, than you could have in a lifetime of writing bad poetry and popular novels. That’s why you will