Assignment Gestapo Read Online Free PDF Page B

Russian.
    The girl looked up at him, wonderingly.
    ‘Are you an officer?’
    ‘Of course,’ lied Barcelona, with his usual aplomb. ‘I’m a general.’
    ‘Well . . .’ She hesitated a moment, then seemed abruptly to make up her mind. ‘The others are down in the cellar. There’s a trap door beneath the carpet.’
    She waved a hand towards a corner of the room, and on closer inspection, and rolling back the rug, we discovered that there was indeed a trap door sunk into the floor. It was well camouflaged and I doubt if we should ever have noticed it by ourselves.
    ‘Russian soldiers?’ asked Barcelona.
    ‘Njet, njet!’ The girl shook her head, vehemently. ‘Only family and friends. Not Communists. All Fascists. Good Fascists.’
    Heide laughed and rubbed his hands together.
    ‘That’ll be the day!’
    There were sudden movements in the room next door. We sprang round, gripping our kandras. The girl whimpered and made a sudden dash for the door, but Barcelona grabbed her by the arm and dragged her back.
    ‘You stay where you are. We like you here with us.’
    A pause, and then Lt. Ohlsen appeared, followed by the rest of the section.
    ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded. His gaze swept round the room, taking in the empty jampot, the bottle of apparent cognac, and the girl. He glared at us. ‘Have you taken leave of your senses? There’s a whole Company waiting out there, while you sit on your arses and stuff yourselves with jam and cognac!’
    Porta put a finger to his lips.
    ‘Not so loud, sir.’ He nodded towards the trap door. ‘There’s a whole battalion of Russian Fascists stashed away down there . . . And as for the cognac— He kicked disdainfully at the bottle – ‘that was a filthy trick, if you like. It’s full of tetra-chloride. Could have poisoned ourselves.’
    Lt. Ohlsen frowned, walked across to the trap door and squatted down to examine it. The Legionnaire and the Old Man came into the room after him, both of them preparing Molotov cocktails.
    ‘They’re down there?’ said Ohlsen. ‘In the cellars?’ He turned to Tiny. ‘All right, get it opened up.’
    ‘What, me? Tiny gasped, indignantly, and took a step backwards. ‘No, thank you very much! I may look simple, but I’m not such a fool as all that! Anyone opens that lid gets a bundle of fireworks in his face, seems to me.’
    ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ snapped the Legionnaire. He joined Ohlsen, bent down and seized the ring that opened the trap door. ‘O.K., here goes! Watch out for squalls!’
    Before he had a chance to do anything, the girl had hurled herself towards him, screaming and knocking him off balance.
    ‘Nix, nix! Small child in there!’
    The Legionnaire threw her impatiently away from him. Porta picked her up and pushed her to the far side of the room.
    ‘Come off it,’ he said to the Legionnaire. ‘You ain’t going to kill a kid, are you? I thought the bleeding Froggies was meant to be gentlemen, not child murderers?’
    ‘Have you finished?’ asked the Legionnaire, coldly.
    ‘No, I haven’t,’ said Porta. ‘Not by a long chalk, I haven’t I—’
    Lt. Ohlsen, got to his feet, white with anger.
    ‘Look, we haven’t got all day to wait while you sit down and argue about the ethics of the thing! It’s either them or us, and it’s my job to make damned sure that it’s not us!’
    Tiny, seating himself on the edge of the table and swinging his legs to and fro, began thoughtfully to rub his length of steel wire up and down his leg.
    ‘Sir,’ he said, hopefully, ‘I ought to report that I strangled a Russian cat just before you came . . . I could strangle the rest of ’em easy as pie if they’d only come up here and let me—’
    ‘I’m not interested in cats, Russian or otherwise!’ Ohlsen turned and jerked his head at the rest of the section. ‘Get the trap covered with light machine guns and PMs. The first man to come out with any sort of firearm and he gets what’s coming to him. And