Double Cross Blind by Joel N. Ross

Author:Joel N. Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307278517
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2006-07-24T16:00:00+00:00

DUCKBLIND TINKLED HER bicycle bell at a group of soldiers manning an antiaircraft battery. One of them whistled, and she waved and wobbled on her bike. Not yet dusk, but the Luftwaffe would be calling tonight, and the thrill of anticipation tingled on the back of her neck: the crump-crump thoom of high explosive, the smoke and dust glowing in a green haze over the city, spotlights veering crazily, the panic and the fear and the courage.

The air-raid sirens would rise and fall over the sound of aeroplanes straining against the sky. She cared little for the bland thrum of the engine—it was nothing to the abrupt shattering release of explosive, the short, sharp shriek of a young man, the groan of a broken building about to collapse.

She found a lonely spot—a row of narrow brick buildings that had been leveled, behind which was a stone wall disinterred by the archaeology of explosion. She brushed the stones carefully and sat, watching the skies.

There were hours and hours before she needed to be in place for her first action of any importance in England. It would be her third action, if one counted settling Mr. Pentham so that she might have his house, and meeting the silly little man in the shiny waistcoat at the bomb site. She didn’t count them. They hadn’t been prepared and— Oh! Or fourth, if one counted gathering intelligence on Tom Wall, as Bookbinder had requested in the shiny waistcoat man’s message.

Tonight was different. Tonight was cat and mouse . . . and nobody knew which player had been given which role. She slipped off the wall and brushed her skirt clean. She wasn’t perfectly happy with her plan for the meeting tonight. Oh, it would do—it was utterly adequate. But how tiresome adequacy was.

The sun finally set, and the raid began. She jingled her bell at a Messerschmitt burping overhead and circled the meeting point. She spiraled closer, and there was a thoom behind her ear. She was shoved aside by an invisible hand. She hit the curb and fell off the bicycle, sprawled on the road.

Another thoom, and another! She stood and craned her neck skyward. The earth rumbled beneath her. She was still and silent and safe—she was the audience for whom the raid had been orchestrated. First the HE bombs, to rip the roofs from buildings, then the incendiaries, to burn what was exposed. . . .

An idea flickered on Schmetterling wings, a far more dramatic plan. The ack-ack shells flew and burst. She smiled and righted her bicycle, then rode toward the wreckage. The fire was red-yellow; it breathed hot billows of hazy smoke and silhouetted the rooftops and chimney pots. It glowed over firemen, over ambulance drivers with stretchers and rescuers digging in the rubble.

She rode and rode, and all the people were so solemn and frightened and driven and brave . . . and oh! Green folds of silk looped over a garden wall.

The parachuted bombs were modified sea mines, weighted so the trip wire faced downward, to explode on the surface with maximum damage.

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