Aurore Read online

  AURORE

  Graham Hurley

  www.headofzeus.com

  About Aurore

  SUMMER 1943

  OPERATION AURORE

  Barely half of the Bomber Command’s aircrews survive a full tour, but wireless operator Billy Angell has beaten the odds and completed his 30th – and final – mission. Now, Billy is due two-weeks leave, a posting to a training squadron and a six-month exemption from active duty.

  Except that MI5 need an airman to drop into Nazi-occupied France.

  MI5 are interested in Hélène Lafosse, a frenchwoman keeping unusual company in her small family château in the depths of the Touraine. Hélène has begun an affair with a senior Abwehr intelligence officer, who, in return, has turned a blind eye to the succession of Jews, refugees, resistance fighters and downed Allied airmen to whom she offers shelter. MI5 believe they can exploit this relationship and plant a false lead about the anticipated Allied invasion of northern France.

  It falls to Billy, playing a downed airman, to find Hélène, to win her confidence and to plant a lie that will only make sense to her German lover. But this time, Billy isn’t flying at 20,000 feet and he won’t be able to escape the incendiary consequences of his actions.

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About Aurore

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prelude

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Two

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part Three

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part Four

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  About Graham Hurley

  About the Wars Within Series

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  To Chris

  With thanks for Civray-sur-Esves

  ‘À la guerre comme à la guerre…’

  Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage,

  lover of Coco Chanel

  PRELUDE

  August 1930. A new decade. High summer in Bristol and a storm in the offing after three days of searing heat wave. Daytime access to the theatre was through the battered stage door, the one the actors used.

  Billy had spent the morning polishing the brasswork in the dress circle. Now, he gazed at the rickety ladder that led into the roof space above the wings. He could hear the murmur of voices on the main stage, two actors in rehearsal, one of them Irene, the woman who would change his life forever.

  He got to the top of the ladder and stepped into the darkness. It felt mysterious, enveloping, impenetrable. The borrowed torch was all but useless. He gave it a shake, then another, and in the dirty yellow light he was finally able to look round.

  Huge wooden trusses above his head, heavily cobwebbed. A tiny splinter of sky where a slate had shifted. And off to the left his first glimpse of what he’d come to find: the long wooden gully, gently inclined, supported on trestles and tarred inside for reasons he could only guess at. At fourteen years old, Billy Angell was in love with magic, with make-believe. And here it was: the device they called the Thunder Run.

  The cannonballs were backed up behind a little rectangle of wood that fitted into a slot at the top of the run and served as a stopper. Lift the stopper and gravity would do the rest.

  The actors on the stage below were rehearsing a scene from a costume drama built around a marriage in difficulties. An earlier incident had sparked a crisis and the wife had finally run out of patience. After an exchange of muted banalities, Irene had lost her temper.

  ‘The situation is intolerable,’ she shouted. ‘Be honest for once in your life, what is it you want from me?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. You want all of me. Every last morsel.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Then leave me in peace, I implore you.’

  Perfect, Billy thought, imagining Irene and her stage husband locked in a moment of silence, awaiting a sign from the gods. He reached for the stopper and released the cannonballs. They started to roll down the gully, a gathering rumble that could only be the approach of a summer storm. Billy watched them as they began to slow where the gully flattened out. The support trestles were still shaking. This close, he could feel the thunder deep in his bones.

  Below, on stage, the actors had abandoned the script. Billy heard the scrape of a chair as one of them stood up. It must have been Irene.

  ‘Damn and blast,’ she sounded even angrier. ‘I left my bloody washing out.’

  The torch flickered and died. Billy was grinning in the hot darkness. Magic, he thought. Make-believe.

  Part One

  1

  RAF Wickenby was declared operational in September 1942, one of a network of airfields across the east of England that served as a springboard for Bomber Command. The climate was harsh, the landscape was flat and the scouring winds were merciless.

  Aircrew arrived from everywhere. A handful of Australians who’d grown up on the beaches of New South Wales reported thin beer and thinner pickings among the local women. Fed on a rich diet of folklore about the Battle of Britain and the golden generation who’d chased the Luftwaffe across the skies of southern England, the newcomers discovered this was a very different kind of war.

  Flight Sergeant Billy Angell arrived from Bristol on 4 April 1943. In July he’d be celebrating his twenty-seventh birthday but no one he was to meet over the coming months believed for a moment that he was that old.

  His first day on the operational front line was sobering. He was to join an established crew flying an Avro Lancaster, call sign S-Sugar. The Wireless Operator he was replacing had been hosed out of the aircraft on its return from a raid over Essen after he’d been torn apart by a chunk of shrapnel. The explosion had also peppered the thin metal skin of the Lanc but the airframe and control surfaces were intact, along with three of the four engines, and S-Sugar had limped back across the North Sea before being towed to a maintenance hangar for assessment and repair.

  By the time Billy reported to RAF Wickenby, work on S-Sugar had only just begun. A spare half-hour at lunchtime took Flt Sgt Angell to the maintenance hangar. Against the advice of a fitter working on the wrecked engine, Billy climbed the metal ladder propped against the fuselage and ducked inside. The gloom was pricked by daylight through dozens of shrapnel rents. Apprehension smelled of the kerosene the erks used as a disinfectant but something else – a metallic, slightly coppery smell – grew stronger as he struggled over the main spar and made his way forward towards the cockpit.

  The Wireless Op sat at a tiny desk on the left of the aircraft, immediately above the bomb bay, facing forward. An observation window giving him a view out could be curtained to preserve night vision and he could count on the nearby heating vents to keep him warm. All this Billy knew already. He’d been throu
gh the Lancaster Finishing School only last month as his training came to an end. He felt at home at the heart of this enormous aircraft. He understood how to encode wind speed reports and send them back to base, how to log the half-hourly target updates from Group, how to be the Navigator’s eyes and ears when it came to cross-checking a DR fix against faraway radio beacons. What was new was the coppery smell. It was blood, with a thin top-dressing of something more visceral. Even a couple of days after his predecessor’s war had come to an abrupt end, traces of the poor bastard still remained.

  Billy stared down at the desk, at the stains beneath the panel of dials and switches, shuddering to think what a closer inspection might reveal. Nine months of training had taught him a great deal about the importance of his role in taking the battle back to Germany. But never this.

  The father he’d never known had given his life in another war. Despite the questions he’d asked, his mother had always refused to talk about it and so he’d turned to books to find out what little he knew. His dad had served in the trenches. There’d been a huge attack. Everything had gone wrong and thousands of men had been killed. Billy was still looking down at the desk, still trying to imagine what it must have felt like. Would dying on the Somme have been preferable to this? Was it better – cleaner – to die at ground level with a bullet through your chest rather than suffer the agonies of a lonely death at 20,000 feet? He shook his head and turned away. Down on the hangar floor the fitter wanted to know whether he’d seen enough.

  *

  S-Sugar was retired to a training role and never returned to active service. In her place, the crew were presented with a newly minted Lancaster, flown in from the production line near Oldham by a diminutive Auxiliary Pilot called Daphne. S-Sugar’s crew spoiled her with a cream tea in the Sergeants’ Mess before her return to Lancashire and Flt Sgt Angell was sent to sweet-talk the cook into another plate of home-made scones.

  By now, with a handful of successful ops under his belt, Billy was beginning – however dimly – to understand the strange chemistry that had kept these six men together. The pilot, or ‘skipper’, was a taciturn young Welshman called Harry Williams with a savage haircut, bitten nails and an astounding ability to roll cigarettes one-handed. He’d left school to work as a clerk at Swansea Town Hall and already looked a great deal older than his twenty-one years.

  The Navigator was a Somerset man, Simon Meredith. He occupied the bed next to Billy. He’d taught French and Latin at a minor public school in the Mendip Hills and had a passion for the works of Leo Tolstoy. He regretted not being able to read War and Peace in the original Russian but was halfway through the first volume of what he told Billy was a decent translation. This book, with its worn cover and tiny print, accompanied Meredith on every operation but it was weeks before Billy realised that it also served as a good-luck charm. Tolstoy’s 1,200-page masterpiece would see him through. Or so he hoped.

  The rest of the crew were, by their own account, mongrel offerings from every corner of the kingdom. The Flight Engineer was a Glaswegian who’d joined Rolls-Royce. The Bomb Aimer, London-born and bred, was a private detective. The upper mid-gunner was a jobbing painter and decorator with a complicated love life and a pending divorce, while the rear-gunner, little Johnny Phelps, was a professional jockey with a passion for chess. On the final stages of the return leg of the longer expeditions over Europe, with the skipper’s blessing, he and Simon Meredith would continue games over the intercom that they’d started earlier in the Mess. Bishop to A4. Queen to E2. Is that the coast I see down there? Checkmate.

  The new Lancaster was call-signed V-Victor. By now, Harry Williams’ crew had completed a dozen operations. A tour took you to thirty ops, after which you were excused active service for six months and joined a training squadron. This left Billy playing catch-up but over the weeks to come he quickly sensed that these men’s experience, and the very fact that they’d survived, served as a form of protection and for this he was more than grateful. Rookie crews, he knew already, were the ones most liable to be posted FTR. FTR meant Failed To Return.

  The quarters where Billy slept housed a dozen men. Returning from an op, you de-briefed, wolfed a plateful of eggs and bacon in the Mess and then got yourself to bed. All too often, hours later, you woke up to find that the possessions of other men in the dormitory had already been collected for despatch to their families. Barely half the crews on base would survive a full tour.

  The memory of the empty beds and ‘FTR’ chalked against the names in the Briefing Room would never leave Billy, but joining an experienced crew could be doubly unnerving. On his first couple of ops, over the intercom, the pilot would occasionally address him as ‘Dingo’, which had apparently been the nickname of the dead Wireless Op. Billy didn’t think there was any mischief in this but one chilly morning, after returning from a raid on Düsseldorf, he clambered out of the aircraft, had a stretch and then made the mistake of telling Harry Williams that it felt like flying with a ghost. Billy was pleased with the thought but the image sparked fits of laughter on the tarmac and from that day on Billy became ‘Ghost’.

  Not that it mattered. On 7 June 1943, the crew of V-Victor flew their thirtieth op. Harry Williams steadied V-Victor on the bombing run over the target flares, deposited six tons of high explosive and incendiaries on the bonfire that was Wuppertal, added thirty seconds of straight and level for the aiming point photos, and then made a hasty exit through the forest of searchlights to the darkness beyond.

  Job done. On the return leg over the North Sea Billy clambered up to the astrodome, a bubble of Perspex on top of the fuselage, and gazed at the dying stars while Johnny Phelps’s bishop and castle harried the Nav’s queen in the milky dawn over Skegness. V-Victor’s aiming point photos, when developed and pinned to the ops board back at Wickenby, drew a quiet round of applause from fellow aircrew and that night Harry Williams dressed Billy in a white sheet for the end-of-tour celebrations in a pub called the Saracen’s Head in nearby Lincoln.

  By now, Ghost had become truly part of the crew. They recognised how different he was from anyone else they’d ever flown with. Physically he was an imp of a man, always watching, always listening, always on the move. They couldn’t believe his gift for recalling some of the speeches he’d had to memorise in the theatre and on the longer ops they’d sometimes make specific requests. Shakespeare was always a favourite and Billy worked on a selection of party pieces from Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and Richard II, selecting whichever felt most suitable at the time. The crew, to Billy’s surprise, developed a real taste for blank verse and rarely interrupted. Ghost, they agreed, had the gift of keeping reality at arm’s length, and at 20,000 feet on a dark night that could be more than useful.

  One evening in the Mess, with the end of their tour in sight, Billy had told them stories about his pre-war years in the theatre, about the stars he’d met, about the long weeks on tour playing rep to audiences of a dozen in draughty venues in God knows where. These yarns of his made them laugh and they even half believed him when he talked about recording a production of Desire Under the Elms for wireless broadcast, and later taking that same production to New York, but it happened that Simon Meredith had heard the play on a BBC transmission and complimented Ghost on his performance. Eben, he’d said, was a tough role for any young actor but Billy had more than done it justice.

  Praise was as rare in bomber crews as in any other corner of British life but the realisation that Ghost might have been briefly famous, as well as a half-decent Wireless Op, definitely won their approval. And so at dawn beside the cathedral in Lincoln, after a night’s celebration of surviving thirty ops, the crew of V-Victor raised their stolen glasses to the rising sun and assured Billy Angell that completing his own tour would be a piece of cake.

  Wrong.

  His new crew inherited V-Victor. That made Billy the elder statesman. These were airmen fresh off the assembly line and it showed. Adding Billy to their ranks was an odd thing to do because once ag
ain he’d be out of sync. To date, he’d flown sixteen ops, which left fourteen to go. After that, if they all survived, Billy himself would depart to a training squadron, saddling V-Victor with yet another stranger behind the Wireless Op’s desk.

  Billy’s last outing was to take place towards the end of July 1943. By the third week of that month, the new crew of V-Victor had flown on twelve raids, most of them over the industrial heartlands of the Ruhr, a flak-laden hell hole dubbed ‘Happy Valley’. The next trip would put Billy within touching distance of the magic thirty but by now he knew that he had a problem.

  Even with a dozen ops under their belts, the new crew were still in the process of bonding and Billy was uncomfortably aware that the chemistry wasn’t quite right. The skipper, unusually, was an older man and when Billy could hold his attention for just a few seconds in the Mess he sensed that his nerves had gone, that he was running out of steam, that he no longer believed in his ability to survive. Something about his eyes. Something about the way he refused to engage in any real conversation.

  In civilian life Les Hammond had been an insurance clerk. He was long-faced and intensely serious. He walked with a pronounced limp and complained quietly of rheumatism when there was rain in the air. He had a wife and two children, he was twenty-nine years old, and he thought far too hard about all the ways the Germans could kill him. If you were looking for a real ghost, here he was.

  Billy’s twenty-ninth op took him deep into Germany, all the way to Berlin. The flak on the approach that night was unusually heavy. V-Victor had already suffered two near misses. The aircraft had been tossed around by the force of the explosions but everything was still working and there were no reports of injuries from the crew. The Bomb Aimer, who had nerves of steel, was sixty seconds from the release point when a searchlight swept briefly over a neighbouring aircraft, drifted away and then returned. Moments later came a second searchlight, a distinctive blueish-white.