They broke into the Labard warehouse just after dark. Used an old piece of iron to pry a padlock off a side entry, groped their way up an ancient wooden staircase to the top floor. Found a window with a space between the board and the frame, kicked it a little wider, and got a view of the Calais harbor.
Fedin had been right about the date—full moon on the seventeenth. They counted forty troop transports anchored out in the harbor, six more in position for boarding on the wharf. Trucks pulled in, piled high with wooden ammunition boxes. The first invasion wave would be loaded the following morning, then, that night, they would sail for England.
“This is it,” Fedin said, staring intently at the activity in the harbor. “I hope they have something ready on the other side.”
“The English abandoned a lot of weapons on the beach at Dunkirk,” de Milja said. “That was three months ago—I wonder how much of it they’ve been able to replace. Some, not all. Every farmer has his shotgun, of course. Which is just what they thought would happen in France, but farmers with shotguns can’t do much about artillery.”
A broad-beamed tugboat came chugging into the harbor from the direction of the Calais canals. It was pushing three barges from a position on the port side and almost to the stern of the last barge. The tug, built for moving bargeloads of coal among the Rhine ports, made rapid way into the harbor.
“They’re going across in that?” Fedin said.
“If the water stays calm.”
“What about the Royal Navy?”
“The Germans must feel they can neutralize it for forty-eight hours—after that it doesn’t matter. And if the Luftwaffe can get the advantage in the air over the Channel, the Royal Navy can’t do a thing.”
De Milja watched the harbor in silence. The activity wasn’t frantic, but there were thirty operations going on at once, ships moving about, trucks arriving and departing—all of it steady and certain, nobody was smoking or standing around. All nonmilitary ships had been tied up in the small pleasure-boat harbor that adjoined the main dock areas of the city. The name of one of the ships was familiar—he had to think for a moment before he realized why. The rusty freighter with flaking black paint was, according to the letters fading away on her hull, the Malacca Princess. Grand name for an old tramp, de Milja thought. It had appeared on one of the carbons Martagne had given them—a schedule of commercial shipping traffic expected to enter or depart the port of Calais over the period 9/14/40 to 9/21/40, with a brief description of each cargo manifest.
The first British attack came at 10:15.
Assault aircraft—built to work near the ground—engines screaming as they flashed across the harbor. Beauforts, de Milja thought. Perhaps a dozen. One flew into the side of a warehouse, and by the yellow flash of that impact de Milja saw another, cartwheeling twice over the surface of the water. The Germans were waiting for this attack—the stutter of heavy machine guns and the deeper, two-stroke drumming of the antiaircraft cannon rang in de Milja’s ears, then deafened him. The Beauforts attacked at one hundred feet, carrying four five-hundredpound bombs apiece, four dives each if they lasted that long.
There were ME-109s above them, nightfighters, one of them followed a Beaufort right down the chute, guns blazing, in such hot pursuit it chased its quarry through a cloud of machine-gun tracer. Moments later, a pair of green flares came floating down, illuminating an airman hanging limp from a parachute, which settled gently on the calm sea then disappeared as the flares hit the water.
Two minutes, no more. The sound faded away, de Milja’s hearing came back in time to make out the low wail of an all-clear siren. In the moonlight a single barge settled slowly into the water, a single transport steamer burned, firefighters with hoses silhouetted in its flames.
“Do you have a gun?” de Milja said to Fedin.
“This,” Fedin said. A Walther P-38, a German officer’s side arm. De Milja extended his hand. Fedin, after a puzzled moment, gave him the pistol.
“What . . . ?”
De Milja didn’t answer.
The second British attack came at 11:16.
A chess game somewhere, in offices below ground, linked to radio towers, British air controllers moving a castle here, a knight there. Blind chess. With command-and-control sometimes functioning, sometimes not. Now and then everybody simply had to improvise, to do whatever seemed best. De Milja had seen plenty of that in Poland, where it hadn’t worked. A lot of dead, brave people is what you got from that.
The RAF pilots—British and South African, Canadian, Czech, and Polish—were something beyond brave. They flew into the firestorm a second time, and a number of them paid for it. Perhaps, this time out, the controllers had shifted a flight of Spitfires to keep the 109s away from the assault aircraft. Which left the docks in London unprotected when the Junkers and Heinkels flew over, and that was the chess game. The Calais docks on fire—the London docks on fire in exchange. As de Milja watched the raid play itself out, two searchlights nailed a wounded Beaufort trying to sneak home a few feet above the water. De Milja didn’t see the 109 that did the job; the Beaufort simply grew a blossom of white fire behind the cockpit, then hit the water in a cloud of steam and spray.
De Milja’s hands ached, he had to pull them free of the windowsill he’d been holding. Only a single siren now, a fire truck somewhere in Calais. Not needed at the docks because nothing was on fire. The transport had been saved—though the barge hit in the 10:15 attack had now apparently sunk into the harbor ooze. Probably it would be salvaged, raised and repaired, used to run ammunition across the Channel to the British beaches. Maybe in a week or so, de Milja thought, as London held out valiantly—as had Warsaw—while around the world people gathered close to their radios to hear, through the static and the sirens, the British pleading for help in their last hours.
De Milja stepped back from the window. “One last thing to try,” he said.
General Fedin understood him perfectly—he’d been at war, one way or another, for forty years. “I would be honored to accompany you,” he said.
“Better if you stay here,” de Milja said.
Fedin nodded stiffly. He might have saluted, but how—the salute of which country, which army? De Milja moved toward the door, for a moment a dim shape in the darkness of the warehouse, then gone. The last Fedin heard of him was footsteps descending the old wooden staircase.
Not long, maybe fifteen minutes, from the Labard warehouse to the docks. He moved quickly, low and tight to the buildings, a strange elation in his heart. He circled a burning garage, avoided a street where flames rolled black and orange from the upper windows of a workers’ tenement. Faded into a doorway when a German vehicle—a sinister armored car, some kind of SS troop in black uniforms hanging off it— came rumbling slowly around a corner.
In the distance, a low, muttering thunder. Weather or bombs. Probably the latter. The RAF hammering away at Boulogne, or Ostende, or Dunkirk. Staggering its attacks, in and out like a boxer. They would be at it all night on this coast, as long as the planes and pilots held out.
The port was a maze—a jumble of streets, then harbors with rock jetties, miles of them, drydocks and spillways, sagging wood fence and high, stone walls. At the main entry, under the port de calais sign, the security people had cut through their own barbed wire and shoved the stanchions back against the brick walls of the guardhouse. It wasn’t security they wanted that night, they wanted speed, fire trucks and ambulances in and out. Then, at first light, after the bomb damage was cleaned up, there were troops and ammunition and equipment to load up. As de Milja watched from cover, a truck sped through the gate, bouncing on the cobbles, never slowing down. Nonetheless, he waited. Saw the glint of a helmet through the window of the guardhouse. Moved off to try somewhere else.