Island of Steel - Introducing the Heroes

But he searched in vain for the  soft trilby hat that made him look really respectable. With a sharp curse he realised he had left it at the club, on the table he had shared with his transvestite contact. Then he stiffened and grew cold.

‘Damn! Blasted bloody damn! I never told Blue about the canal boat shipment!’

He collapsed once more into his chair and stared wide eyed at nothing. He wanted to be sick more than ever. A black depression cloaked him like a winding sheet. His fingers twitched as they rooted in a small waist pocket in his trousers to produce the small hard wax-coated pill he thought he had lost. He stared at it in his shaking palm.

One bite and swallow.

One gulp of water. Better, one gulp of whisky. Two gulps and all would be over.

Oblivion. Or so the Special Operations Executive had said.

The final farewell.

The final damnation, so his vicar of a father would have said.

‘No!’ He jumped to his feet. His eyes regained their determined madness. ‘There’s time to catch him up!’

With a canvas holdall filled with his few possessions, Baker left his dreary hideaway. He had already triple checked that there were no incriminating left-behinds. In his mind's eye, he could see his handler smiling approval. So with an assured gait, he quietly and quickly started to descend the six grimy flights to the street.

Sunday, the church-going day of rest and reflection, was even more quiet, with wartime austerities resulting in less motor traffic than usual. So when he was a third of the way down he was able to distinctly hear the sharp cat squeal of brakes outside the building. Then car doors slammed.

The Gestapo had come for him.

Curtis Olson

America joined in the mayhem of World War II in the winter of 1941, after Pearl Harbour. The following year Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses and Consolidated’s B-24 bombers of the United States Army Air Force were based in Britain and flew on raids over Europe. On one of them was Lieutenant Curtis Harvey Olson of Fairfield, Iowa, a gangly basketball player with a blond crew cut and corn blue eyes, navigator of ‘Juicy Lucy', a B-24D Liberator. 

He was nineteen years old.     

And he was imprisoned in a lumber store. Somewhere in the country on the French side of the Belgium border.

At least one crewman in his squadron of Liberators under attack from Messerschmitts would have seen the cremation of old Juicy Lucy. They may even have seen his parachute. Yet pragmatically he knew that the whole crew of ten would be reported lost in action. He was flooded with remorse at the pain his family and girl friends would suffer at the news.

‘That just ain’t right and I’m going do something about it!’

He shouldered the door, causing the big black and tan Beauceron guard dog to bark louder, but nobody shouted at him to stop and he turned to wildly kicking it. He surmised by the way the door moved that the shotgun-toting farmer who had captured him had wedged something like a heavy log to keep it shut.

The lumber store had thick mud walls with a low corrugated tin roof. With a pole he struck the roof and lifted it up at one corner.  He forced short logs into the gap to keep it open. Pushing the pole further into the gap he levered it wider, adding more logs to stop it springing back, until he felt he could get out. He removed his flying suit and insulated padding, and standing on a log pile began to squeeze through the hole into the grey dawn. He was hot and irritated with running sweat. The dog was hysterical, bouncing up and down and dashing back and forth, barking and snapping its salivating teeth.