I climbed out of the cramped back seat, took my helmet off and poured water from my canteen over my head. It was hot. My head was hot and it still ached. I didn't want to face a bunch of questions from some tight-assed English officer and end up cooling my heels while Villard took Diana to some other place, some other room. I tried to calm down, feeling the water soak into my shirt, mingling with the sweat that dripped down my neck, spreading a warm dampness across my chest. I took a breath.
"Captain Dickinson and I met in England, Scotland, actually. I used forged orders to hitch a ride on his MTB to Norway. But these orders are legit," I said, pulling the folded papers from inside my shirt. They were limp with my sweat.
"Two men died on that trip," Harry said. His statement hung in the air. Rodney and Duxbury were exchanging looks that seemed to say, There's two of us, too.
"Forging official orders ain't an easy thing, 'ow'd you do it?" asked Duxbury.
"I didn't have to forge the whole thing. I had a set of orders from British headquarters giving me authority to investigate a murder. They ran for several pages, instructing all units to render aid as required. I just pulled one page and substituted another in its place."
"So what you handed me was real, except for one page?" asked Harry.
"Yeah. It was another guy's idea. He said that if the front and back looked real, no one would question the contents."
"And the Captain 'ere checked out your orders for this mission, you said?" Duxbury asked me. I didn't reply. Something was eating at me. Something I had just said reminded me of something I had seen. Orders. False orders hidden within real ones. Front and back. Where was it?
"Lieutenant?" Duxbury said.
"Yeah, yeah. He checked them out. Right, Harry?"
"Yes, but there's something strange going on," Harry said to Duxbury, pointing his finger at me. "How did he know the girl at the bar, the one that French policeman was dragging out the back door?"
"She's English," I said.
"That right? The Vichy copper got 'imself an English girl?" Duxbury's face took on a questioning, threatening look.
"There's more to it than one English girl," said Banville, leaning in from the back seat. "That letter you found in the upstairs room, addressed to Monsieur Baudouin. It was a ransom note."
My mind was struggling to keep up with all the ideas flying around. Ransom letter. Okay, Villard is holding the kids hostage, trying to make some francs on the side by getting their families to pay up. But which one of them had no family to pay up? Diana, since her false identity probably didn't include actual parents in Algeria. There was nowhere to send a ransom letter for her.
"The letters!" I blurted out.
"What bloody letters?" Harry said.
"The letters I saw in Bessette's office. There was a letter to Jules
Bessette, Blackpool, England on his desk. It was addressed and sealed, but not stamped."
"Has the heat gotten to you? Or are you still concussed?" Harry asked.
"No, no, listen, listen! Bessette is a captain at French Army HQ. I broke into his office a few nights ago, don't ask how. He had letters on his desk. One was addressed to a Mademoiselle Bessette in Marseilles, another to Jules Bessette in England."
"So, he keeps in touch with his family," Harry said.
Everything came together in my head and I tried to assemble my thoughts. But they were all jumbled up.
"It was talking about orders that made everything click. About hiding something within something else. I remember that the letter to Jules Bessette wasn't stamped. That's because the Bessette family has another way of getting letters to England. Bypassing the censors. Bessette is corrupt, and so is the entire family. They run the docks and operate a smuggling operation from here to Portugaclass="underline" people, drugs, whatever has value. I couldn't figure out how they geared up so fast to grab the morphine and penicillin, but they were told about the arrival of the drugs by letters smuggled to them on neutral steamers, just like they smuggled in anything else."
"Slow down a bit, Lieutenant," Banville said. "What does this have to do with the ransom letter you found upstairs?"
"Nothing and everything," I said. They all seemed slow and stupid. "When you mentioned the letter it all fell into place. Villard and Bessette are in this together, aided by someone who knew about the penicillin coming to Algiers, someone on our side. Bessette supplied the information, which reached him via his smuggling operation from his contacts in England. His brother Jules lives in Blackpool, which is where the U.S. Army hospital now in Algiers was based. Jules got the lowdown from someone there, then passed it on via their smuggling route. That's why there was no stamp on the envelope. Some sailor just walks off the ship when it docks in England, licks a stamp, and mails it there. No censors to worry about. On the return route, they use the same method." I took a breath and looked at the four of them. Furrowed brows, sideways glances, but I could see they were trying to think it through.
"Then 'ow does this English girl fit in?" Duxbury asked.
I supposed there was no reason why they couldn't know about, Diana. They were Royal Commandos.
"She's SOE, sent down here to help organize the revolt against the Vichy regime. They failed and she was taken prisoner with those French kids. Villard is working all the angles, so he's extorting the families for a payoff to release their sons and daughters. Only she… Diana… doesn't have any family here."
"So he found another use for her," Banville said. No one else had seen the room. "He used morphine on her and raped her."
The words were cold and hard. I wasn't ready to hear them said out loud. I shied away from the jeep and the eyes looking at me. My guts twisted and I felt dizzy, like I was about to faint. I grabbed the trunk of a palm tree and steadied myself.
"Do you mean to tell me that this damn Frog is stealing drugs from our 'ospitals and using them on a brave English girl and then 'avin' 'is bleedin' way with er?" Duxbury's voice rose with each word, as if he could hardly believe what he had heard.
I nodded. I couldn't speak.
"Then what the bloody hell are we waiting for?" Rodney asked, his hands clenched tightly on the machine gun.
"Get in, Billy," Harry said, in a sad voice. "We're still on land, this is your show."
I doused my head with water again, washing away the tears I prayed they hadn't seen. I got in, put on my helmet, and checked the clip in my Thompson as Duxbury gunned the jeep out of the palm grove and into the fading heat of the day.
Chapter Twenty-four
The railroad tracks led directly to the supply depot. Duxbury parked the jeep behind a low building that was crumbling into the ground; it was hard to tell where the back wall ended and the pile of rocks began. Banville and I crept along behind it until we could get a good look at the entrance to the depot. We were on a small rise and could look down into it, over the tops of scrub brush that hung onto rocky soil sloping up from the tracks by the front gate. A barbed wire fence encircled the place, or so it seemed. I couldn't see the back, but the fence I could view in front and along the sides was over six feet high. The main gate was open, and three trucks and a couple of cars were parked inside randomly.
"Looks like the headquarters building to the right of the entrance," said Banville, shielding his eyes from the sun. "And a barracks beyond that. That's a garage on the left."
"Yeah, lots of activity, too." The HQ, barracks, and garage formed a U-shape, facing the gate, leaving a wide-open area in front. In back of the barracks were rows of warehouses. Men were running to and from the buildings, and others were bringing up boxes and crates from the warehouses, loading them into the trucks parked in the main courtyard.