The German Half-Bloods (The Half-Bloods Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  “How can you two be this cynical after the Reich’s recent victories? We’ve already conquered the west, and all but destroyed the British capital,” Freddy Biermann said with a hint of annoyance.

  “I was just pointing out, Herr Biermann.” Paul put his bread down and looked Biermann in the eye, “that Russia’s terrain is vast and unfriendly to marching armies who go too deep into its bog-lands. It’s summer now, but what will happen when winter comes?”

  “Yes, yes. I understand what you’re saying, Paul, but we’ll prevail nonetheless,” Biermann said, signalling the end of that conversation.

  During dinner, Paul cast his eyes around the room and noted that every table was occupied by a sea of grey and black-uniformed men and glamorous women. The five-piece orchestra was playing one of his favourite songs: Johannes Heesters: Jede Frau hat ein süßes Geheimnis. It was from a movie he’d seen two years earlier called, Das Abenteuer geht weiter? He remembered it well because it had been the last time he and Willie had gone to the cinema together.

  His eyes widened. Herr Rudolph was sitting at an intimate table for two in one corner with a woman who was not what one would call, even with the best will in the world, attractive. Paul looked at his father, who had also spotted Rudolph. “Do you see what I see?” he asked leaning towards his father’s ear.

  “The poor man is probably having a terrible time of it and would much rather be with another type of partner,” Dieter winked like a mischievous child before continuing. “After he got Willie out of Dachau, he married. It was quite the shock for us all.”

  “And you didn’t tell me? Who is she?” Paul asked.

  Dieter chuckled again. “Some well-to-do heiress, apparently, but how should I know who that unfortunate woman is? I wasn’t invited to the wedding.”

  “What are you two whispering about?” Laura asked.

  Dieter clasped her hand in his. “We were talking about Herr Rudolph over there. He just got married, isn’t that wonderful?”

  “Ah, yes, the eternal bachelor has finally succumbed to the wonders of wedlock.” Freddie waved to Rudolph who didn’t wave back, then he pinched Olga’s cheek. “He’ll never be as contented as we are, my sweet.”

  After eating, dancing and drinking a bottle of brandy between them, the Vogel and Biermann parties decided to call it a night. Paul couldn’t remember the last time he’d had this much fun. He’d danced with Valentina, who’d proven to be much more agile on her feet than he was, and they’d even managed a lengthy conversation about Dresden, a city they both adored. At the end of it, Paul had invited her to have dinner with him the following week, and to his delight, she’d accepted.

  When they emerged from the Einstein Club up on the street, they were horrified to see flames, clouds of smoke, and blankets of brick dust blocking out the stars to the west of the club.

  “Have we been hit?” said Paul rather stupidly, craning his neck. The aircraft were invisible to the eye, but the sound of their engines seemed to be directly overhead. “I think we should go back downstairs and warn the others. Just to be on the safe side, don’t you?”

  The Vogels and Biermanns, and everyone else who’d been in the underground club had been blissfully unaware of the air raid. No glasses or bottles had vibrated, and the only noises they’d heard had been ones of laughter and music. Paul instinctively took Valentina’s hand, and she allowed him to lead her until they came level with his parents. “By the looks of it, it’s just begun; this could go on for hours,” he said with more urgency.

  After a brief yet calm discussion, Dieter and Freddie decided to go for their cars parked in the street behind the club. Paul and Valentina followed the parents. They were going to try and make it home to their well-equipped shelters in their own gardens, rather than waste time going back down to the Einstein.

  When they reached their cars, another explosion erupted nearby. This one shook the ground and was so very loud that Dieter’s ears were ringing. “It’s going to get worse, Laura. I think we should do as Paul suggested. I’m not happy driving home in this.”

  Olga Biermannn burst into tears. “I won’t get in the car with you, Freddie. What do we do? Where should we go?”

  Laura slipped her arm through Dieter’s waiting for him to say, ‘it’ll all be all right, darling,’ but instead he jumped as more whistling bombs slammed into buildings only a couple of streets away. “Right, that’s it, we’re going back to the Einstein,” he said.

  “We’ll be fine, Dieter. Göring assured us that no enemy planes could ever break through the outer and inner rings of Berlin’s anti-aircraft defences,” Freddie said, his blind trust in the Nazis intact.

  “Well, it seems that the British have other ideas,” Laura said in a clipped tone. “And I’m not waiting around to be blown to bits in case you’re wrong.”

  Dieter was frustrated with the Biermanns’ attitude. The argument that the British were no threat to the capital from the air was wearing very thin. Berliners were a naïve and simple people, and they believed every word that came out of Göring’s and Goebbels’ mouths, and it appeared that Freddie did as well.

  It was true that the air raids had not inflicted much damage to the city thus far, Dieter admitted, but he had recently given MI6 the coordinates of many of the factories in the centre of Berlin, and it was clear to him tonight that the British planes had found a way to reach and target those places.

  Olga Biermann was frozen to the spot, wailing like a mournful cat and refusing to take a step forwards or backwards. The noise soon became deafening: throbbing engines, whistling bombs, explosions, buildings crashing to the ground, and people screaming at each other in a terrified scramble for the nearest shelters.

  “We should follow those people over there,” Laura said pointing to people with children running in the same direction.

  “Freddie, if you and Olga won’t come with us, at least let Laura and I take Paul and Valentina back to the Einstein – what do you say? Just for once, let’s trust our eyes rather than the Nazi Party’s propaganda.” Dieter yelled over the cacophony.

  Dieter’s teeth rattled as another spate of bombs fell one after the other, and the horizon to the west turned orange with flames rearing into the night sky. The concentration of anti-aircraft fire was the greatest he’d ever seen, but although it provided a magnificent, yet terrible sight it seemed to be strangely ineffective. Dieter craned his neck at the blackness above; he didn’t see any planes being brought down and not one aircraft was even being picked up by the searchlights that flashed back and forth across the skies.

  Olga shouted at her husband that they might be buried alive inside the club, and the group wasted yet more time trying to persuade her to go back there until another bomb shattered a shop’s window pane on the opposite side of the street and Dieter was cut on the forehead by flying glass.

  “That’s it, come on everyone,” said Freddie, grasping his wife’s sleeve and almost dragging her behind him. “It would be a shame to be killed after we’ve had such a nice night out!”

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Romek Gabula

  Paris, France, August 1941

  Romek stood with a mug of coffee in his hand quietly studying his mistress, Sabine, who was sitting at her station hitting the typewriter keys with gusto unaware he was watching her. As always, in these unobserved moments, Romek’s face was embittered by hurt and anger, and at times, incomprehension. Sabine was an attractive woman, but she was not his Klara. His Klara had betrayed him with another man, a man who had turned her head and killed their marriage. With whom, he had yet to discover, but discover he would.

  “I will always be your friend, Romek, but as much as I’d like to, I can be nothing more than that,” Klara had said months earlier in an infuriatingly dismissive tone. “My heart doesn’t beat for you the way it should. Please, forgive me.” Then she’d wept with the drama of a bad actress.

  What the hell was that supposed to mean? he’d asked her at the time. They weren’t s
tar-struck young lovers, they were a team living through a war, depending on each other for support.

  His eyes drifted from Sabine’s hands to the back of her head and curve of her neck, but still, all he could think of was his Klara. He hardly saw her now. She was a secret, a stranger to his Resistance group, and to him. They’d been intimate only once in the last year, he reflected, and it had been a bitter-sweet moment with her hiding her naked body from him as though he was no longer worthy of that vision. On their final night of tenderness, she had poured salt in the open wound and he’d been forced to acknowledge that she was no longer his.

  Her rejection still irked him. His wounded pride hadn’t yet healed, but he was not heartbroken. He didn’t hate her or adore her as he had once upon a time, he was bitter. He supposed his state of mind was that of any man who’d been scorned by a deceitful wife, and he was determined to find out who had stolen her heart, who she’d deemed the better lover; better than her once dedicated husband.

  Sabine had risen from her chair and was heading for the sink in the corner of the room. Romek caught up with her and kissed her on the lips. “I missed you,” he said, tucking a strand of black hair behind her ear.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Sabine giggled, giving him a girlish peck on the cheek.

  She filled a cup with water then beamed at him. Sabine, devoted, and more than happy to give him her body, had a knack of making the war and every other bad, ugly thing in the world disappear, including Klara.

  Later that day, Romek stared at a map of France pinned to a wall in the basement. Coloured pins had been stuck in areas and cities on the map where Resistance groups and cells were situated, and even now after a full operational year, he marvelled at how far they’d come since those fledgling days of German occupation.

  Romek had possessed the guile and strength of will to become the leader of the Paris Resistance group known as Les indomptables, the indomitables. The name, thought up by Oscar, Romek’s and Max’s first ever French agent, had described the group well in Romek’s opinion, for the men and women he fought with were unconquerable, heroes who would die undefeated in spirit.

  Although he was cautious in his selections, Romek’s newly formed group had grown swiftly, with Frenchmen, anti-Fascists from Spain, Poles, and the displaced from German-occupied Europe. That they were taking orders from a Pole didn’t seem to matter to the men and women risking their lives to fight the occupiers, for Romek had a good reputation throughout the growing French underground network.

  The group, now numbering thirty, operated out of the old toy factory’s basement where he had attended earlier meetings with Darek, the Pole. Situated on the outskirts of Paris, the place had proven to be an ideal location for the Resistance. It had, for some strange reason, been constructed in the middle of a forest and was surrounded by trees that stretched for miles, and was serviced by only one road in and out. It was also enclosed by a high wall with towers on each of the four corners. Although not confirmed, Romek believed that the building might have been used as a prisoner of war camp during the Great War.

  Some of the Resistance fighters complained when they were given tedious perimeter guard duties that involved hours watching the service road at various points, as well as inside the dense woods within a half kilometre radius of the building. But Romek reminded them that he knew of no secure place in France to hide from the Germans. “This factory is a gift and worth protecting to its last brick, even if it means you freezing your balls off in the woods or getting soaked at the side of the only road in,” he’d barked at the whiners. The building also boasted an underground tunnel that only Darek and he were aware of. It began underneath the floorboards in the radio room and went all the way to the trees on the far side of the factory’s outer wall. Romek believed that a well-rehearsed evacuation plan would give the Resistance fighters just enough time to scatter into the woods, but not to destroy all their files or intelligence-gathering materials.

  Romek had predicted in the previous year that French hatred for the Germans would grow and with it a desire for action from all quarters of the population, and he’d been correct in that assumption. “Our gestures of defiance won’t necessarily change the outcome of the war,” he’d told the Polish fighters at that first meeting a year earlier. “The Germans will probably mend and replace whatever we destroy within days, but even so, we’ll frustrate and delay them, and the people of Europe will know we’re not giving up.”

  He often thought back to the moment he’d spoken those stuttering, timid words. At the time he’d had no concept of what outcomes or retaliations would result from their brave acts. He’d been hopeful, yet hesitatingly so, ambitious, yet afraid to voice his hopes to people who had just been defeated by a seemingly unstoppable army. Now, only now, did he regret not being more optimistic from the outset, for he and his fighters had proven that they could do more than exasperate their enemy, they could hinder and thwart it.

  One of Romek’s ongoing strategies was to send couriers into the unoccupied French territories in the south, and from there, slip into neutral Spain with rolls of film holding comprehensive reports, diagrams and maps for British Intelligence. Another leap forward for his group was its new association with various networks: telephone workers had united in secret to sabotage telephone lines and intercept military messages, which they then gave to Romek. Postal workers were organised to capture important military communications.

  The French railroad workers had also formed a Resistance group called the Fer Réseau, the Iron Network. They diverted freight shipments to the wrong locations, caused derailments by not operating the switches properly, destroyed stretches of railroad tracks and blew up railroad bridges. But for all their advances, the French Resistance groups were still desperate for well-trained men to lead their overworked members, and to find a safer way in which to communicate with all the other cells throughout the European continent. Romek admitted that his group still had a long way to go, but he also acknowledged his immense progress. Max would be delighted.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  After they had completed their latest report for Max, Romek left Sabine’s station and headed to the radio room to send the time and coordinates for the handover of a batch of documents and films to Max’s courier in Marseille. The reports contained important information about the German-held airfield at Juvincourt-et-Damary in the Aisne department of Northern France. Romek and Darek had gone there three days earlier and had been shocked by the massive amount of construction work going on. It had previously been a base of operations for air attacks on Britain, specifically London, but it had now morphed into a major supply and military camp for thousands of Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht soldiers. Romek hoped that the British would blow it to smithereens.

  Radio transmissions were few and far between now because of the risks of signals being picked up by German detector vans. Every time Romek sent one, he posted extra men around the factory’s perimeter. He halted at the radio room’s partly open door, and unseen, watched the newest member of the group study a typed document sitting on the desk next to the transmitter. He was not reading a significant or classified report, Romek acknowledged, for he and Sabine kept top secret intelligence in a room that was bolted and padlocked from the outside, but regardless, the man had no business snooping around in a place that was off limits to his men.

  Romek forced himself to stay put to see what else the man, Albert, would do. He took a backwards step into the shadowy doorway and continued to study the recruit, who’d been recommended by Darek, the Pole, only three days earlier. Darek, until now, had been a good judge of character.

  Spying through the door jam, Romek could see no more than Albert’s arm and one side of his jacket, shoulder and profile, but that was enough to observe his hand go into his pocket and pull out a camera.

  Enraged, Romek pulled his gun from its holster, burst into the room and fired on Albert. “Traitor!” Even as his victim lay at his feet, he continued to shoot until every b
ullet in his clip had been discharged, and a pungent cloud of smoke hovered in the air.

  Romek heard hurried footsteps come to a halt behind him. He listened to the voices, the questions, yet he continued to point his gun at the dead man on the floor.

  “Romek, you’ve killed Albert? What happened here?” Sabine tugged his sleeve.

  Romek continued to stare down at the bullet-riddled body. A dark red puddle was spreading behind the man’s head, his bloodstained hair, face, and clothes. The carnage disturbed Romek more than he cared to admit. He’d never killed a man before, never seen a human being’s brains spurt out of his head like pink and grey, creamy rice. It was not at all how he imagined that organ would look.

  He dropped the gun and turned to the sea of faces, their mouths agape, their eyes questioning. If he had made a monumental mistake, he would have to justify it.

  “What happened?” Sabine asked again.

  Behind her, Oscar, Edzio, and eight other men who’d been preparing for missions that night, shoved each other out of the way as they tried to get a look at the body.

  Romek walked to the door where Darek stood. “Albert, the new man you brought in is … was, a spy … how could you be that stupid? You’ve burnt us.”

  Darek stared down at the body, shaking his head. “He can’t be … he couldn’t … he can’t, I did a background check … I always do one … you know me, Romek.”

  Romek pushed Darek against the wall, his bunched fist touching the man’s chin. “You fool! He was photographing top secret papers. Merde, Darek!”

  Darek pushed Romek’s hand away from his face, and spat, “I didn’t know. I swear to you, Romek, I thought he was clean.” Then, he pointed to Edzio. “Edzio told me Albert was desperate to fight the Germans. He said we could trust him.”