Getting into the thick of it now...

Chapter Ten

Auf Wiedersehen

Aldbourne, England; De Panne, Belgium

1-4 May 1944

Karolina stopped to tie her boots outside of her billet, and for the first time that she had been in Aldbourne, appreciated the quiet outside. The sun had barely risen above the horizon, and the chilly mists hovering over the fields had become a delicious treat instead of a pain as the weather had turned warmer. Bright flowers had bloomed in her host family's garden - purple irises and daffodils had sprouted up overnight as if by magic, and Queen Anne's lace filled the sides of the roads and sprinkled through the pastures. She tried to remember what flowers had grown in German springs but couldn't think of a single one. She remembered making flower crowns and garlands for May Day in the BDM, wrapping the silly little maypole outside of their camp dorm with the boys of the Youth, eating cake and tea and dancing. She had never really liked the traditional music the matrons insisted on playing. She had wanted to dance to swing, but it was forbidden, and every record that had existed after the rise of Hitler had been found and smashed.

She thought about this as she ran down the street and out of the village, passing the old men as they went out to feed their cows and horses, enjoying the crisp air on her skin. She felt more alive in the mornings, more human, but she never could figure out why. She never had the opportunity to run like this in London - once, an off-duty British soldier had tried to throw his beer on her, told her women don't run, and she had broken his hand. In Berlin, she went out every morning with a squad of Abwehr girls and the people on the street had looked at her with pride, entirely impressed with their new breed of strong young women.

Values, Karolina thought with a smirk. How curious. One valued the strong and murdered the weak, the other valued the weak and sent the strong to defend them.

She would have posited this imbalance all day long if it hadn't been for the sound of another pair of boots hitting the ground behind her. Her train of thought was broken, and she looked over her shoulder to see Speirs close behind, catching up with her. The man nodded at her cordially and didn't say a word, just kept pace with her as they both ran into the rural outskirts of the town.

They seemed to have reached an accord with one another, or at least Karolina thought so. She had a hunch of what was going on in Speirs' head, but wasn't entirely sure. It was clear that he had finally accepted her presence in their midst and seemed to have decided that she was valuable to him for information. It had only taken him four months to come to that conclusion, but in a way, Karolina respected him for that. She understood the suspicion - all the men had was Nixon's confidence and her word that she wasn't a sleeper agent. She wouldn't have believed her, not in a hundred years, and Speirs had done well, enough to flush out a bad agent had she been one in the first place.

She hadn't said any of this to Speirs, though. She didn't think it was necessary and had known from the time he had punched her in the face that, curiously, their brains operated on the same wavelength. She was delighted that he had decided to tune in with her's - at the very last minute possible, she observed wryly.

"Good morning," she said, after another mile of silence. Speirs made a noncommittal noise in his throat and she laughed and wiped the sweat from her eyes. "What do you want?"

He ran in silence for a moment, shaking his head, before he finally came clean. "Can you teach me how to use Enigma?"

She looked at him in surprise. "Oh, ja, sure," she said. "Why?"

"If we need to communicate with you, without Longshore, we need to know how," he said. "And we're going to need to update you if anything changes, before the word trickles down to you from some other source. It's practical."

Mark was being left behind, in charge of receiving all the operatives' Enigma messages and translating them for the officers in Upottery, where the men would be moving next week to prepare for the Invasion. He was absolutely livid about it and had let everyone know as they had tuned up their machines to the receptor machine. He had begun to make a disparaging remark about women, but Ella had accidentally dropped her machine on his foot. On accident, of course.

"It is practical," she said. "I cannot wait. 'Dear Karo Lina Toda Ywea Temo Rebe Ansa Ndwe Miss Youx Oxo...'"

She laughed at her own joke and Speirs squinted at her, not comprehending her syntax. She shook her head. "You will understand. I need to get my machine, and maybe we can wake up Nixon and we will go to battalion headquarters after the run, okay?"

Thirty minutes later, she ran up the stairs of her billet and found Ella blinking awake in her bed. "Qu'est-ce que tu fais?" said the girl, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes as Karolina buckled her Enigma machine into its portable box. Karolina grabbed one of the little blue pills on her bedside table and popped it into her mouth, swallowing it with a bit of last night's water on the nightstand.

"Teaching the officers how to send and decipher Enigma," she said, catching a whiff of her underarm and grimacing. "Good French."

"Practicing," groaned Ella, flopping face down on her pillow and falling back asleep. She envied the girl for that - Karolina was such a light sleeper that the slightest change in birdsong woke her up.

She shut the door behind her and met Speirs by the fence. The man had lit a cigarette and offered her one, but she waved it away. "Did you wake up Nixon?"

"I tried," he said. "Threw some water on him. He said he would meet us shortly."

They stood there kicking at the gravel, waiting on Nixon to come down, not speaking, just watching the sun come up over the trees. A breeze hit the back of Karolina's neck and she shivered. "I will miss the silence," she said aloud, and then wondered why she had said it at all. Because it was true?

Speirs stared off into the field across the street. "What does..." he began, but then cut himself off. "Nevermind."

"No, what were you going to say?" she inquired, genuinely curious. He seemed less defensive today, and she was intrigued.

He wiped his hands on his shirt, looking embarrassed. "Hell," he said. "I was going to ask, 'What does war sound like?'. Stupid."

She shrugged. "Loud. Never silent like this. And no birds." As if to make her point, a mockingbird called out from within the woods. "No wild animals. When you find a moment of peace, you enjoy it."

He nodded, and they grew quiet again, and Karolina thought about cleaning her sniper rifle before she disassembled it and threw it into a gunny sack in two days' time.

"Well, what a happy little gathering," said Nixon, closing the door of the house behind him. His eyes were heavy with sleep, and he checked his watch. "Seven in the morning, on a Saturday," he grumbled. "Excellent, fantastic. What are we doing?"

"Learning Enigma," said Karolina, and he perked up immediately, though his eyes were still heavy from sleep. She patted the box slung over her shoulder. "You have to send me little love notes. Keep me on my toes."

Nixon laughed and slung an arm around her shoulder, something he had started doing once she had returned from London and consequentially told him she was leaving. She still didn't like it, but knew that he meant well, so she resisted the urge to shove him off - but as soon as he realized how sweaty she was, he pushed her away with a fake retching noise.

"So," Karolina said, after she had broken into Mark's office at battalion headquarters and locked them inside. "It is actually fairly simple to use, but was hard to translate, until the British cracked it with Ultra."

She opened the box and turned on the receiver machine, listening to the familiar noise of the cranks and whines of both machines. Nixon glanced at the door, and she read his mind. "It is very loud."

"You don't say," said Speirs.

She pointed at her machine, nestled in its box. "You type your message on the keys, then press send." She turned on her machine and listened to the clicks as it connected with the receiver machine. "You must type them all in four-lettered sequences and remember what you are saying as you type - there is no paper to tell you what you have typed." She gestured at the receiver, which was humming quietly. "When the transmission has sent, the machine will have picked up the signal and will translate whatever you send into English."

Speirs' eyes were glittering as he circled around the receiver machine. "Show us," he said.

Karolina cracked her knuckles and began to type, hitting send after each four-lettered sequence. The men stared at her hands flying across the keyboard, and then jumped as the receiver hummed to life. The dials on the face of the machine turned as twenty-four circles wiggled rhythmically, churning out letters on a feed of tape, grinding the gears together in a great chopping wave. Speirs picked up the feed as it came out of the machine.

"Cove Ntga Rden Hasf Lood Ed," he read. "Will the transmissions always be coded?"

"For my safety, yes," Karolina. "I cannot say 'Having good time sabotaging Germans', can I?"

Nixon crouched down by the Enigma machine, tracing the swastika outlined on the top of it. "Took a little something with you when you left, huh?"

Karolina smiled. "I don't know if you have heard," she said. "But I used to be a German spy." She gave Speirs a pointed look, and he hid behind his neutral mask. "It is a huge secret, don't tell."

Nixon snorted. "Well, if you've learned anything from us, it's sarcasm."

She turned to give him a biting response, but a shadow emerged in the hallway behind the frosted glass of the door, and Karolina stood up, unsheathing a knife she had hidden in her PT shorts. Nixon started to his feet beside her, and Speirs crept to the side of the door, picking up the empty wastebasket and raising it over his head to bash the shit out of whoever came through the door.

Mark burst into the room, a pistol in his hand, but he lowered it when he saw Karolina's smug face. "Are you kidding me?" he said, exasperated, shoving the pistol back into his jacket pocket. "It's eight in the morning, on a Saturday!"

"Sorry to disappoint you," said Karolina, putting the knife away. Speirs dropped the wastebasket on the floor with a hollow, metal thud, and Mark jumped and shot him a glare.

That night, she told the men that she was leaving. It did not go over well.

Karolina had walked into the mess hall and had eaten dinner with them as she normally did, listened to their banter and their foolishness, and had told them to wait around until the other men had left the dining hall for an announcement. They were starting to get tired of announcements, but they humored her. They knew that whatever she had to say was usually good.

She stood in front of them, and suddenly everyone's chatter dropped to a hush as they noticed the look on her face. "Well, gentlemen," she said, clasping her hands behind her. "I am afraid to say that our time here, together, is drawing to a close."

Guarnere squinted his eyes. "Whaddya mean?"

"I am being sent elsewhere to aid the Invasion," she said, and they just stared. "To France."

"What?" Johnny Martin hollered, getting to his feet. "How?"

She cocked her head. "What do you mean, 'how'?"

"Well, it's not like you can fly over there, and you sure as hell can't jump out of a plane," said Randleman, looking annoyed.

"I cannot exactly tell you how," she said. "But use your imagination - I cannot walk on water."

Luz scoffed. "So, they're gonna pack you up in a little boat and kick you towards France? That sounds like a great plan."

Karolina wiped a hand over her face, trying to ignore the grumbles of the men. "Look, I am going over there to help aid the landings, and to make sure you all take the coastline," she said. "And then, after you all get there, I will meet you and we will go conquer Europe."

"That sounds fun," said Toye. "And dangerous."

"But you'll be alone in a town you don't know," said Lipton, concerned. "That doesn't sound very safe."

She could have laughed at the absurdity of their situation and worrying about safety, and she wanted to, but she didn't want to insult him. Instead, she patted his shoulder and gave him a sad little smile. "And you will be jumping out of an airplane in oncoming enemy fire, floating to the ground behind enemy lines and regrouping in the night," she said. "That doesn't sound very safe either."

"How are you going to find us?" asked Shifty.

"I'm stationed near the beach," she said. "I'll find you."

Everyone sat back and let that digest for a moment, and she could see the men were not pleased. Winters raised an eyebrow at her from the back, and she shrugged. It was better to be honest, and she owed them more than disappearing into the night without saying goodbye.

"When do you leave?" asked Liebgott, and she stared at him, shocked at the look of sincerity on his face. Guarnere seemed surprised as well, and exchanged a glance with Malarkey, who shook his head.

"On the third, at night," she said.

Welsh looked hurt. "You waited until the last minute to tell us?"

"For her own safety," Nixon said, stepping in. "And ours. I trust none of you will share any of this to people outside of the airborne?"

"We're not idiots," said Guarnere under his breath.

Nixon rolled his eyes. "Yeah," he said, without a single voted of confidence in his tone.

"This is not for forever," Karolina said, feeling the mood in the room shift from disbelief to begrudging sadness. "I will see you on the other side."

Not all of them, though. Not all of them. She closed her eyes. It was time to greet death again, her old friend. But first, she was swept up into a hug by Guarnere, who held her a little too tight for her comfort, but she patted his shoulder and wondered when she had allowed these men to get so close to her.

Ella had cried, of course. She had wept when she packed her trunk, wept when she kissed their hosts goodbye - who had looked appalled at the contact - and wept when they jumped into the jeep that would take them to the train station.

Now, she was weeping on the platform, standing beside Karolina as they waited for the train that would carry them into London and on to Great Yarmouth.

The day had been taxing, even on Karolina, who had packaged her emotions into a neat little bundle and placed them somewhere deep down in her chest, alongside the fear that was bubbling up from the bottom of her stomach like tar. She had spent most of the day with the men and the officers, tying up loose ends with paper work and sharing her future coordinates with Mark. Guarnere had taught her how to play poker, or had tried, and had laughed at her as she lost her money but had given her losses back at the end of the game. Nixon insisted on her filling him in on every detail of Sainte-Mere-Eglise, so that when the time came he'd be able to find her in the melee of war. Shifty had taken apart her sniper's rifle and cleaned it for her, and she fixed his broken scope in return. Roe had even packed a little medical kit for her to take with her, and she found herself touched by all these sweet, strange gestures of friendship.

But Speirs had been the strangest of all.

He had found her as she was organizing her papers in the officers' headquarters, and he had walked in and shut the door behind him. He looked disheveled and out of breath, but he walked up to her and extended his hand. She had looked at it for a moment before realizing that he was offering a handshake, and she took it.

He pumped his arm a few times, and then ran a hand over his messy hair. "Well," he said, and then he stopped. She looked at him curiously. It appeared as if he wanted to say something else, but couldn't get his mouth to work, so she cut in.

"I have to say that I always thought you were the most competent person here," she said. "It has been exciting with all of you. I hope you survive."

She thought she saw him blush, but decided it was a trick of the light. He pursed his lips, then gave her a little grin. "I hope you survive, too," he said, ducking his head and digging around in his pack. "Here. I found this. Take it."

He dropped a silver-handled dagger on the desk between them, and Karolina picked it up, admiring the filigree on the handle. She pulled off the metal sheath and held the blade up to the light, watching the way the steel glinted, and then she threw it past him and into the wall, where it embedded with a solid thunk.

He jumped to the side, but the knife had already implanted itself into the wood, a good three inches deep. She grinned, and then laughed at his pained expression.

"Sorry," she said. "I should have warned you. It was impulse." She walked past him and wrenched it out of the wall, pleased to not see a single scratch on the blade. "It is a good present. Thank you."

He flushed, and she was delighted with his response and with him, for the moment. "It wasn't a present, I happened to see it and thought you might -"

"Here," she said, reaching to her side, pulling off her old knife. "Have this one, it has served me well." She held it out to him, and when he didn't reach to take it, she sighed. "It is not polite to take a gift without giving a gift."

He had taken her knife and given her a look, one that she was still trying to decipher. Karolina knew that most everyone on the base was intimidated by Speirs, except for her, and she had rubbed it in his face for the past four months, nearly non-stop in her biting comments and blatant disregard for his anger. It was because she saw a bit of herself in him, and hated it - she was supposed to be the one people were afraid of, and yet she had this stubborn ass of a man battling her at every turn, and nothing could ever be easy, could it?

But the way he had looked at her in the office, she had no basis of comparison for that. His expression was cold, but his eyes were warm and intense. She had waited for him to say something, and when he didn't she nodded and scooped up all her files, making sure they wouldn't slip as she walked. "Well," she said. "I will see you in France." And he had held the door open for her, and she had walked back to her billet with the most peculiar feeling in her stomach. She had resisted the urge to look back, but now she wished that she had. It could have been the last time she would ever see the man. That made her chest tight, for some reason.

Ella sniffled beside her, and she was brought back to the present. Katya rolled her eyes beside the girl. "Stop doing that," she barked, and Ella gave her a strong side eye.

"Stop doing what?" she said. "Mourning my dead friends?"

"They're not dead yet," said Karolina.

"They will be!" Ella said, in total despair. A whistle sounded in the distance, and Karolina watched the train's headlight turn the corner and burn their way. "I just know that most of them will die."

"Let us focus less on that, okay?" said Katya, giving the girl's back a firm pat that looked as if it were meant to be comforting. "Let us focus on surviving ourselves."

"She is right," Karolina said to Ella. "This next month is going to be hell."

"War is hell," said Katya as the train slowed to a stop in front of them. "Hell is boring in comparison. I know, I have been."

Of course, it all went awry at the start. Nothing ever went to plan.

They had been in the Netherlander's boat, bopping forward on the angry waves of the Channel, when the captain of the vessel had scurried down into the hull and looked at them with frightened eyes.

"We cannot go to Amsterdam," he said, in broken French. "Gestapo at the port. We will go south to De Panne."

"De Panne, in Belgium?" Claude had said, utterly livid. "Near Dunkirk?"

"I am sorry, it is only safe port," the captain had said, and he hastened away from the five angry operatives stowed away in his hull.

They had been on the boat for two hours, all of them cramped and uncomfortable and nervous about torpedoes and drowning. Katya laughed in a cold, high-pitched way. "We are all dead," she said.

"Shall we waltz right into Calais, then?" Liesel said, dumbfounded. "We might as well."

"We might as well sail into Calais," said Katya.

When they disembarked in De Panne, having donned their civilian clothes and carrying their suitcases in hand, they had found a deadly silent city. Absolutely no one was in the street, not even the night guards of the German army. They had met an old man sitting outside of a half-empty pub, smoking a cigarette and eyeing them carefully.

"Excuse me, sir," said Liesel, putting on the charm. "Where is everyone?"

The old men cocked one eyebrow and extinguished his smoke. "Haven't you heard?" he said in French. "They've all gone to Calais."

"Calais?" said Karolina, and the man nodded.

"Yes, indeed," he said. "Not sure where you've just come from, but there's going to be an invasion, my love. People are going to the Germans for protection."

"Are there any lines running to Paris?" asked Ella.

The man looked at her quizzically. "The trains stopped a few months ago," he said. "You'll have to walk there." He stood and ambled over to a truck that was parked alongside the street. "Bonne chance."

"Wait a minute, sir, if you please," said Claude, intercepting the man. "Is that your truck?"

The man squinted his eye at the dark Frenchman. "Yes, why?"

"Would you be willing to part with it?" Claude asked politely. The man looked taken aback. "Or, if you're not, I'm sure we could pay you a reasonable fee to get us to Normandy. We're all looking for family, you see. We think they went south to the coast."

Ten minutes later, a thousand francs poorer, and slightly more cheerful, the five of them piled into the truck and headed towards France.

"It's simple," said Karolina, pulling out a map up front with Claude. "We are going to go past Dunkirk, then go straight down through Longuenesse and through Abbeville, pass a place called Nuefchatel-en-Bray, and then wind our may into Normandy." She traced the line down the coast. "We will drop off people at their stations as we pass them."

"We already skipped Amsterdam," Ella said from the back of the truck. "I'm sure it will be fine that we skip Paris." She considered that for a moment. "Was there anything we needed in Paris?"

"No," said Liesel. "It was simply a cloaking measure. But from the way everything looks, no one cares about us. I think people think it's the end of the world."

The sun was beginning to peek over the treetops, and Karolina shut her eyes as they bumped past deserted cars and broken-down wagons.

Ron couldn't sleep. He kept thinking about that silver knife, that stupid silver knife.

He had wanted to give her something. Why? Because he felt as if he had needed to apologize to her, to do it more, so he had worked himself into a frenzy thinking of what she might need in France. And when he had remembered the silver dagger hanging above the great fireplace inside battalion headquarters, he had sprung into action.

Naturally, it was very difficult to steal something so valuable, but he had done it. He had lurked by the fireplace, putting on the air of an impatient officer waiting for a meeting with a long-suffering colonel, and soon enough no one bothered to look his way when he paced in front of the fireplace. As soon as Vest had risen up from his desk in the entryway to go get a fresh cup of coffee, Ron had pushed a chair near the fire, leapt on top of it and wrenched the dagger out of the decorative shield.

It was real silver, but it hadn't been treated or cleaned in a long time and had a patina of dull dirt over it. It wouldn't do to give someone a dirty knife, so he had hoofed it back to his host's house, where he knew Mrs. Bradbury cleaned her silver service every Sunday afternoon, and he found her stash of silver cleaner and rags and worked up a sweat polishing the handle until it gleamed. Then he had looked at his watch and realized that she had only a few hours left in Aldbourne before the train left to... wherever they were going.

He strode into town, doing his best not to run, passing Nixon on the way. The man looked at him with concern, and he realized that he was scowling at the ground.

"Where's Karo... Shütze?" he said, and he sighed when Nixon smiled. "Where is she?"

"Officers' headquarters, of course," Nixon said, and Ron walked off, leaving the man behind. He heard Nixon laughing, as if it were comical, and he guessed he might look comical to anyone else. But he was on a mission.

When he walked in and saw her standing there, the first thing he noticed was her hair. It had grown slightly longer in the last few months and now brushed her shoulders. He realized that she was staring at him, and all he could think to do was to offer his hand. When she shook it, he was disappointed. What else did you expect her to do?

She had looked baffled, but then she had really looked at him, straight in the eye, and Ron's stomach had seized up on reflex, as if he was looking into the gaze of an apex predator. And then, she gave him the highest compliment that she could give anyone: she thought he would survive.

And he had taken out the knife and given it to her, and she had fussed over it and looked at it hungrily, and then she had nearly taken his ear off when she threw it into the wall, and all the blood in his body began to flow south as a feeling of her, yes her bloomed in his stomach and he realized in one fell swoop that he wanted Karolina Shütze very, very badly.

Oh, God, he had thought as she yanked the knife out of the wall, grinning a very scary grin, why now? When she was going off into France by herself to take down an entire company of Germans, she wouldn't survive that, why would anyone give her that assignment unless they wanted her to get killed, but that was probably what the OSS wanted, they didn't know what else to do with her, she wasn't acclimating to life in England and now she was about to be unleashed in Normandy and oh God, she's gonna die, isn't she?

Lest she see past his mask and into his brain where he was trying to think of ways to calm his body down, he tried to make excuses that it wasn't a gift, that he had found it accidentally and thought she could use it, and she had bought the lie and given him her knife in return. It's handle was well-worn from use, even had grooves from the imprint of her fingers, and he had looked at her with a mixture of please don't go and I hate you so much right now I want to die flitting across his face at the speed of light, and she had stared at him curiously until she gathered her papers up and escaped into the night.

Nixon had been outside, talking to Winters by a jeep, and when Ron walked past him, he held a hand out and gave the man a curious look. It only took him a few seconds to register the emotions on the man's face, and Nixon looked pained. "Oh, no," he said, meaning it. "Oh Christ, Ron."

Ron had returned to his billet, pulled out Karolina's knife, and had stabbed the shit out of his pillow. He pretended it was some Kraut guarding the coastline behind a big gun. He only stopped when there were feathers left, and even then, it wasn't enough. It just wasn't enough.

He shut his eyes tightly and tried not to fixate on the odds.