Free Jackdaws by Ken Follett Page B

Paul
frowned. He had not invited Graves. "Mr. Graves!" he said sharply.
"I didn't know you had been asked to join us."
    "I'll explain in a
second," Graves said, and he sat down on a schoolboy bench, looking
flustered, and opened his briefcase.
    Paul was irritated. Monty hated
surprises. But Paul could not throw Graves out of the room.
    A moment later, Monty walked in. He
was a small man with a pointed nose and receding hair. His face was deeply
lined either side of his close-clipped mustache. He was fifty-six, but looked
older. Paul liked him.
    Monty was so meticulous that some
people became impatient with him and called him an old woman. Paul believed
that Monty's fussiness saved men's lives.
    With Monty was an American Paul did
not know. Monty introduced him as General Pickford. "Where's the chap from
SOE?" Monty snapped, looking at Paul.
    Graves answered, "I'm afraid he
was summoned by the Prime Minister, and sends his profound apologies. I hope
I'll be able to help.."
    "I doubt it," Monty said
crisply.
    Paul groaned inwardly. It was a
snafu, and he would be blamed. But there was something else going on here. The
Brits were playing some game he did not know about. He watched them carefully,
looking for clues.
    Simon Fortescue said smoothly,
"I'm sure I can fill in the gaps."
    Monty looked angry. He had promised
General Pickford a briefing, and the key person was absent. But he did not
waste time on recriminations. "In the coming battle," he said without
further ado, "the most dangerous moments will be the first." It was
unusual for him to speak of dangerous moments, Paul thought. His way was to
talk as if everything would go like clockwork. "We will be hanging by our
fingertips from a cliff edge for a day." Or two days, Paul said to
himself, or a week, or more. "This will be the enemy's best opportunity.
He has only to stamp on our fingers with the heel of his jackboot."
    So easy, Paul thought. Overlord was
the largest military operation in human history: thousands of boats, hundreds
of thousands of men, millions of dollars, tens of millions of bullets. The
future of the world depended on the outcome. Yet this vast force could be
repelled so easily, if things went wrong in the first few hours.
    "Anything we can do to slow the
enemy's response will be of crucial importance," Monty finished, and he
looked at Graves.
    "Well, F Section of SOE has
more than a hundred agents in France—in fact, virtually all our people are over
there," Graves began. "And under them, of course, are thousands of
French Resistance fighters. Over the last few weeks we have dropped them many
hundreds of tons of guns, ammunition, and explosives."
    It was a bureaucrat's answer, Paul
thought; it said everything and nothing. Graves would have gone on, but Monty
interrupted with the key question: "How effective will they be?"
    The civil servant hesitated, and
Fortescue jumped in. "My expectations are modest," he said. "The
performance of SOE is nothing if not uneven."
    There was a subtext here, Paul knew.
The old-time professional spies at MI6 hated the newcomers of SOE with their
swashbuckling style. When the Resistance struck at German installations they
stirred up Gestapo investigations which then sometimes caught MI6's people.
Paul took SOE's side: striking at the enemy was the whole point of war.
    Was that the game here? A
bureaucratic spat between MI6 and SOE?
    "Any particular reason for your
pessimism?" Monty asked Fortescue.
    "Take last night's
fiasco," Fortescue replied promptly. "A Resistance group under an SOE
commander attacked a telephone exchange near Reims."
    General Pickford spoke for the first
time. "I thought it was our policy not to attack telephone exchanges—
we're going to need them ourselves if the invasion is successful."
    "You're quite right,"
Monty said. "But Sainte-Cécile has been made an exception. It's an access
node for the new cable route to Germany. Most of the telephone and telex
traffic between the High Command in