Those Who Dare - [Raiding Forces 01] Read online

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Splendid! Nice to meet you at last, Major. We are always on the scout for people who want to do their part—and who have the initiative to actually figure out some way to go out and do it.”

  The meeting was over almost as fast as it started. Captain Lady Jane Seaborn and Major Randal went downstairs, around the corner, and across the street to No. 2 Caxton Street, next door to St. Ermin’s Hotel, to meet Major Lawrence Grand, the head of Section D. He was the man that, as Captain Lady Seaborn had briefed Major Randal, they most needed to impress.

  When they walked into Major Grand’s office, Major Randal’s first thought was that he looked like what you might expect someone in the secret agent business to look like, especially if you watched a lot of campy Hollywood movies. The major was nattily attired in a beautifully tailored Savile Row suit in navy blue pinstripe, with a red carnation pinned to the lapel. In his teeth he was clenching a long, ivory cigarette holder containing a custom-blended cigarette, hand-rolled to his personal specifications. There was a pair of smoked-lens glasses lying on his desk.

  This meeting was the opposite of the one with the brigadier, lasting well over an hour. Major Randal was grilled on every aspect of the raising, organization, training, and operations of Raiding Forces.

  Major Grand took his time. The questions he asked were penetrating and illuminating. He listened carefully, evaluating every word of Major Randal’s answers. The head of Section D was thorough and patient. It was the type of interview, Major Randal realized, in which Major Grand obtained a lot of information but did not give much away in return.

  Finally, the debonair spymaster asked, “What is it, exactly, you want from me?”

  On cue, Major Randal piped up as if it were his idea in the first place. “We’re here to explore the possibility of joint operations, Major Grand. You supply the targets; we hit ‘em.”

  “Are you going round to see Slocum?” the section chief asked Captain Lady Seaborn casually.

  She nodded.

  “Lieutenant Commander Slocum is our man in charge of the Transportation Section, on loan from the navy,” Major Grand explained. “Afraid we have had a rather bad run of luck from the sea side of things. Winds, tides, storms, equipment failures, faulty navigation—all those kinds of things. You name it, we have traveled down the entire gauntlet of nautical misfortune.

  “You should be a bit of fresh air for Slocum. He tried sixteen times to insert one of my agents into Brittany by sea before giving up.

  “Now that I think about it, actually, maybe it is not such a great idea after all for you to go see the commander,” Major Grand said. “He just might tend to view you as a competitor. No good would come from that, what? But not to worry. I think it fair to say you can look forward to Section D finding suitable employment for your services without involving the Transportation Section.”

  Major Grand beamed a moment, looking off into the distance as if lost in thought, then said, “Now, Randal, old boy, tell me what it is I can do for you as a token of my goodwill—cement our future relationship and all that sort of thing. No one has ever come to see me who did not ask for something sooner rather than later.”

  Captain Lady Seaborn had specifically cautioned him not to ask for or to accept anything from anyone without a signal from her. Because Major Randal did not get any such signal he dodged the question. “If you have any spare destroyers or a submarine you could loan ...”

  Major Grand laughed. “Afraid we do not even have a canoe at our disposal at the present time. We have to beg or borrow for every operation. Our man Slocum always has to go through navy channels to requisition what he needs. He is a stickler about following navy regulations to the letter. All that takes time, uses up reams of paper, gets us ensnared in miles of red tape, and, as likely as not, results in our being told we cannot have whatever it is we indent for. Dreadfully tedious, that!

  “Now, Randal, you waltz in here today, casually mention you have a motorized yacht, a crew, trained raiding men who have actually gone across the blue and carried out several operations, one of which was spectacularly successful—oh yes, and all qualified parachutists to boot—and then you volunteer to work for Section D with no visible strings attached. As an added sweetener, you do not seem to be much concerned about red tape or going through channels. You just go and do it. Truth be known, it is about all I can do to keep from leaping right over this desk and kissing you on the cheek this very instant. Surely I can perform some small service for you in return, as an act of good faith. Everybody needs something, and most seem to think I am some sort of magician.”

  Major Randal glanced at Captain Lady Seaborn. She gave him a small, almost imperceptible nod.

  “Pistols. My men are armed with Webley revolvers originally designed for shooting Fuzzy-Wuzzies,” Major Randal said, hoping it was a small enough request. “We could use automatics.”

  “Fifty do for starters?”

  “Perfect”

  “You are staying at the Bradford, I presume? I shall have them brought around in the next day or two. Abracadabra! Hey! Presto! See how easy that was? Now I feel much better.”

  As they were getting up to leave, Major Grand added, “Lady Jane, I must say you do make a smashing captain of Royal Marines. Actually, I was not aware the Marines even had a women’s auxiliary. Absolutely marvelous uniform. You two have been visiting Pembroke’s, I see. How is old Chatterley holding up these days?”

  As Major Grand walked with them out of the building, Major Randal inquired, “Was that true about trying sixteen times to put one agent ashore in France?”

  “Yes, absolutely. The navy tried one more time, unsuccessfully.”

  Once they were alone out on the street, Captain Lady Seaborn explained, “There has been conjecture that Slocum may be putting the Admiralty’s agenda ahead of SOE’s. The navy wants total, iron-fisted control of all boat traffic across the English Channel, and they are livid about the existence of ‘private navies’ chartered to operate outside their supervision. If we demonstrate the ability to put agents and military stores ashore in occupied France by sea, Raiding Forces will have inked its first client.”

  “Can’t do any worse than SOE’s doing,” Major Randal said.

  “My thoughts, exactly.”

  ~ * ~

  21

  NEVER-NEVER LAND

  THE REST OF THE WEEK WAS SPENT IN A MIND-NUMBING SERIES of meetings. Captain the Lady Jane Seaborn had done her advance work; her contacts were impressive. She had unrestricted access and knew how to navigate the maze of London’s wartime bureaucracy. Officers of all grades went out of their way to treat her as a very important person.

  Nine secret intelligence organizations were in operation in Great Britain, and the Royal Marines captain and Major John Randal met with them all, except those engaged in purely signals intelligence gathering. The one glaring exception was that they did not go anywhere near “Broadway,” the Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI-6.

  While it was impossible to keep all the players straight, Major Randal was beginning to develop a picture of the shadowy world of British covert operations. What he saw was a fascinating, behind-the-scenes peek into the never-never land of espionage, intrigue, subversion, and black propaganda, rarely seen by outsiders.

  The clandestine services had been hurriedly expanded due to the war, with urgent demands pouring in from every direction for intelligence gathering, sabotage, and unconventional special operations. Every intelligence officer they met with seemed to be promoting his own personal agenda; no two organizations appeared to be operating off the same plan. In a couple of cases, separate divisions located in the same building within the same agency were gearing up to fight their own private wars with completely different objectives, clearly at odds with each other.

  There was little-to-no interservice cooperation on the military side, and even less collaboration between the clandestine services. Empire building, bureaucratic wranglin
g, turf wars, and nasty political infighting were much in evidence.

  While some organizations had overlapping missions, others did not seem to have a clear idea of what their mission was exactly. A great deal of time and energy appeared to be spent on mystifying, misleading, and confusing one another instead of the enemy. The only common denominator Major Randal observed was lack of experience. The imperial intelligence community in 1940 was a textbook example of government bureaucracy run amok.

  One thing came across loud and clear: Great Britain had a considerable amount of catching up to do if it was to have any hope of competing against the sophisticated Nazi intelligence apparatus that had already cast its invisible web worldwide. In stark contrast, the British reveled in a cheery, chaotic, comic opera atmosphere of slapstick, casual, nonprofessionalism, all the while exuding a misplaced confidence in their ability to cope and somehow muddle through.

  The Admiralty was an interesting place to visit because it was the Royal Navy’s strategic operations center as well as an administrative headquarters. The Royal Navy had undergone a radical change of heart in the relatively short time since Major Randal had accompanied Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke on the first raid, and was now openly hostile to small-scale raiding. The navy had concluded that Commando operations were a drain on its overstretched resources.

  After the youngish lieutenant commander they met with stole a peek at his elegant gold Patek Philippe watch for perhaps the third time, Captain Lady Seaborn’s eyes blazed and she abruptly stood up. “Quite sorry to have been such an imposition today, Commander.”

  As they stalked out she drawled, loud enough for the startled officer to hear and in a tone dripping contempt, “The Razor’s right. The navy used to have wooden ships and iron men, but now they have iron ships and wooden men.”

  The Royal Air Force, at one time the most innovative organization of all the British armed services, turned out to be the most egocentric and wrong-minded outfit Major Randal and Captain Lady Seaborn met with all week. The RAF was not interested in cooperating with any other service—army, navy, Combined Operations, or intelligence—and was serenely confident that air power had some mystical ability to win the war all by itself. To be fair, Major Randal concluded, the Royal Navy was defending its turf; the RAF did not have any excuse except self-delusion.

  The wing commander of the Air Intelligence Section sniffed dismissively at the idea of Raiding Forces attacking German airfields on the coast of France in order to destroy Luftwaffe fighters on the ground. “Major, there simply is no target a small party of Commandos can attack that we are not able to deal with much more effectively with aerial bombs,” he said, cutting another meeting short.

  Major Randal wondered if the hard-pressed Hurricane and Spitfire pilots in the Blind Eye would have been as quick to reject the offer.

  The top-secret Political Warfare Executive of the Economic Ministry of Defense turned out to be an interesting group of people, composed of academics, scientists, intellectuals, economists, bankers, and captains of industry. There were even a few well-known former pacifists thrown into the mix. About the only criterion for being assigned was that you had to be an acknowledged success in your civilian field of endeavor.

  PWE’s sole agenda was to win the war as quickly as possible so that staff could quickly get their highly successful civilian lives back on track with the minimum amount of disruption. In short, its mission was to destroy the Nazis’ will to fight and to discombobulate the German economy. The personnel assigned to PWE were willing to consider anything: Everything was on the table, nothing was too outlandish, and no idea was off-limits.

  At present, PWE was in the earliest, most preliminary organizational stage, and while not ready to begin discussing specific missions, PWE staff indicated that several projects were in development. They were delighted to learn about Strategic Raiding Force’s availability for joint special operations and quick to admit they were going to have a pressing need for what they jokingly referred to as “you knuckle-dragger types” to do their dirty work.

  At least, Major Randal thought they were joking. He liked the PWE people right from the start. It was a case of opposites attracting.

  As an organization, PWE was imbued with an oversized sense of humor. With perfectly straight faces they told Major Randal that the only operation going at the moment—besides the pornography—was a propaganda effort to convince the Germans the Royal Navy had “imported two hundred man-eating sharks from Australia and plopped them into the English Channel to eat Nazi invaders.” They were not kidding; that is exactly what PWE was telling the Germans on nightly pirate radio broadcasts.

  PWE was the only organization to conduct its initial meeting with Captain Lady Seaborn and Major Randal by committee. Jointly it was agreed to formalize their relationship by having Captain Lady Seaborn appointed immediately to act as liaison between Political Warfare Executive and Strategic Raiding Force. Major Randal volunteered to provide special operations advisers to work in-house with PWE staff, once PWE was ready to begin planning specific direct-action missions.

  Walking out of the building, an obviously delighted Captain Lady Seaborn explained, “PWE has an even higher priority than SOE does. Once this mob get their show up and running, they’re going to be a law unto themselves. You did very well in there. The idea of Raiding Force military advisors was wonderful.”

  The next stop was the fledgling Escape & Evasion Organization, located in Room 900 of the War Office. In prewar days, Room 900 was the “Tea Room”—not where they served the tea, but the closet where the service staff mixed it. MI-9’s office location explained everything Major Randal needed to know about where it stood on the War Office priority totem pole. The room still smelled of tea.

  The officer they met with was a captain wearing the badges of the South Wales Borderers and a thousand-yard stare. The captain had been captured and sent to a prison camp, had managed to escape, and then had made his way across France by a variety of means.

  Currently, the entire MI-9 organization consisted of only three people: the officer commanding, who was away at the time on other business, the captain, and one Chilian secretary. But it had big plans to bring out the large number of British Expeditionary Force troops still on the loose in France—escapees and evaders from the other occupied countries and downed RAF pilots and aircrews. Additionally, MI-9 was planning to teach escape and evasion techniques throughout the military system to those in occupations that made them the most likely to be captured, and to manufacture escape and evasion aides and devices for those who would be in harm’s way.

  The problem was, how to get started. No one was expressing much interest in what they were tasked to accomplish—except the RAF, which was actively looking for ways to retrieve highly valuable pilots and flight crews shot down on missions over the Continent in order to return them to flying duty. The general idea was for MI-9 to set up clandestine escape lines in occupied France and other countries, to move evaders overland to the coast for pickup and eventual return to the United Kingdom by sea.

  There was nothing MI-9 could offer Raiding Forces in the way of missions, because they did not have any. There was also the rather obvious problem of a conflict in mission statement; they were, after all, lifesavers, not life takers.

  Out of the blue, Major Randal interjected, “I think we can help you. When MI-9 is ready to begin extracting evaders from the Continent, Raiding Forces will provide capable men to go along and act as your covering party.”

  The South Wales Borderers officer looked at him like a man who held the winning lottery ticket. Major Randal continued. “Raiding Forces has a forty-foot, high-speed yacht assigned. In the event MI-9 ever has high-grade, top-priority evaders who need to be brought out of France in a hurry, we’ll go over and pull them for you.”

  When they walked out of the War Office, Captain Lady Seaborn was beaming. “Nicely done, John. Your idea to provide Raiding Forces personnel as security for their extraction operati
ons was an offer MI-9 literally cannot refuse, and the suggestion that Raiding Forces is available to bring out their high-priority evaders on short notice was even better. Now they have something of value to go out and sell to the services. What a marvelous development.”

  “I like what MI-9 is trying to do,” Major Randal said simply, “and I want to be a part of it.”

  “You will be. MI-9’s commanding officer, Major Norman Crockatt, is a dear friend. I know Norman is going to be tickled pink!”

  Considering some of the sessions he had sat in over the last few days, Major Randal was not convinced things were all that terrific, but he decided he really liked it when Lady Jane was this happy.

  ~ * ~

  22

  ON HIS MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE

  FOR MAJOR JOHN RANDAL, THIS DAY’S MEETING WAS THE MOST important of the lot, though there was no way to actually know for sure at the time, since it was an episode straight out of Through the Looking-Glass.

  In the morning when he came downstairs to link up with Captain Lady Jane Seaborn, he was surprised to find her sitting in the morning room with a spiffy-looking Captain Terry “Zorro” Stone, who was superbly turned out in his best uniform.