Free The Doomsday Testament by James Douglas Page B

had ever been a Nazi, in a country where the majority of people who weren’t Nazis ended up in the awful concentration camps we’ve liberated. After Belsen my German tastes like vomit in my mouth. We still lose a few men to ambushes and accidents, but we regard this holiday from the war as just recompense for our earlier efforts, which were considerable. Compared to Malestroit and Arnhem this was a picnic
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    Frowning, Jamie tapped the word ‘Jedburgh’ into the laptop Gail had brought to the hospital. Pages and pages on a quaint historic market town in the Scottish Borders. Puzzled, he added the word ‘operations’ . . . and was invited into a deadly new world.
    Jedburgh was the code name for small teams of highly skilled clandestine soldiers, operated by the Special Operations Executive and the American OSS, who were dropped by parachute into Occupied France prior to the D-Day invasion. This also explained the reference to the meeting in Baker Street – the location of SOE headquarters. Unlike SOE’s undercover agents, the first priority of the Jedburghs, normally a three-man unit composed of experienced special forces soldiers from the United States, Britain and the host country, was not to gather information or carry out sabotage. Instead, their primary purpose was to liaise with local resistance movements and provide guidance, training and access to weapons. Sometimes this would involve a few dozen men, but in one well-recorded case, in Brittany, more than a thousand resisters supported by Jedburgh teams and a squadron of French SAS, had fought an entire German regiment to a standstill.
    Now Jamie knew how Matthew had been employed after he returned from North Africa. He could only imagine the strain of hiding for weeks on end behind enemy lines, under the constant threat of betrayal or discovery. The Jeds dropped in uniform, but that meant little after Hitler’s ‘Commando Order’ in October 1942, which sentenced captured Allied raiders to death without trial. The war had almost run its course, but now they had a new and unwanted mission to complete.
    Fitz at least had the grace to look embarrassed when he handed over our orders. Two three-man teams, codenames Dietrich and Edgar, commanded by Captain Matthew Sinclair, will proceed south-west to a given map reference, where they will be issued with further orders. This mission, Operation Equity, is to be treated with the utmost secrecy – which I took as the greatest insult of all, since I have been operating in the utmost secrecy for the last four years. I should tell him I am the wrong man for this job. That I am burned out and numb, and that I welcome the numbness because it protects me from the man I have become. The war has drained me of all humanity. I feel like a boxer at the end of a fifteen-round contest. I have nothing more to give
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    What is war? War is chaos and stupidity as the norm; hunger as a constant companion; death – non-judgemental, arbitrary, messy death – ever-present and around every corner; a callous disregard for life or the living, ingrained so deep a more religious man would call it evil. And of course hatred. Hatred for the people who made you like this, hatred for the enemy who wants to kill you, hatred for the bovine civilians too stupid to run away, hatred for the mines and the bombs and the bullets and the shells and the flame-throwers, that will castrate, mutilate, eviscerate or incinerate, just state your preference. Oh, yes, you can hate an inanimate object, just as you can hate the dead for making you kill them. You hate the tanks and the planes and the guns, as long as they are the other side’s tanks and planes and guns. You very quickly learn to love your own tanks and planes and guns in the same way you love the soft, red Saxon earth that crumbles beneath your entrenching tool to give you sanctuary, right up to the moment it buries you alive. You hate the trees, for giving shelter to the enemy and for those great,