Tamar Read Online Free

information regarding the positions of German troops is entirely accurate. It was accurate last week, but . . .”
    Tamar put up a hand, palm out, the way you might shield light from your eyes. “Please,” he said, “tell me something simple. Where are you sending me? What is zone six?”
    Nicholson turned away from the sunlight and the tennis and said, “Your old turf. Where you were last time.”
    Tamar’s heart stumbled like a happy drunk.
    “You got out clean,” Nicholson continued. “You know the geography. And we need someone good near the front line. That’s why we’re resurrecting Mr. Boogart. It’s a largely rural area. Who else but an itinerant farmworker would be roving about?”
    Hardly daring to, Tamar asked, “And where will I be? What are the safe houses?”
    Hendriks tapped the file impatiently. “The information you need is all in here. At the moment, we believe that the Maartens farm is the best option. You do remember the place?”
    Tamar lifted his face to the window, dazzling his eyes with the sun that now burned directly through the smeared glass. Praise God. “Yes,” he managed to say. “I remember it.”
    An unfamiliar feeling grew huge inside him. Then he recognized it: joy.
    Something in the dazzle moved: Nicholson lifting his arm to look at his watch.
    “Now then, Tamar. Here’s the drill. You’ve got this room for the next twenty-four hours. Learn everything in that file, and then lose it in some remote part of your brain. As if you’ve completely forgotten it. Do you understand? Right. You’ll be here again at 1500 hours tomorrow, when Mr. Hendriks will test you on your prep and answer any further questions you might have.”
    “Sir.”
    At the door, Nicholson paused. “This is Dart’s first time,” he said. “Did you know that?”
    “I guessed.”
    “That worry you at all? A bit of a moody bugger, is he?”
    “I don’t think so. He’ll be fine.”
    “Good. But I don’t want you nursemaiding him, hear me? That’s one reason we’re tucking him away in Albert Veening’s nuthouse. We don’t want him near you all the time. We can just about afford to lose him, but we can’t afford to lose you as well. If we do lose him, you might have to be your own WO for a while. For that reason, you’ll have your own set of silks. Now, get your nose into that file.”
    “Sir? May I ask when Dart and I will be going in?”
    “There’s a three-quarter moon in four days’ time. The weather forecast looks reasonable. That’s the timetable we’re looking at. Is that soon enough for you?”

 
    Tamar and Dart sat in a dingy, blacked-out brick shed that contained a table, four chairs, a telephone, and a good deal of cigarette smoke. Tamar wore a scuffed leather jacket over a high-necked sweater and grubby denim dungarees. Dart looked rather more respectable in a dark tweed overcoat and corduroy trousers. Outside, at the edge of the bleak airstrip, a Stirling bomber was warming its engines, and every time they faltered, Tamar’s heart faltered with them. The surface of the table was covered by a map of Holland brightly lit by the big lamp suspended from the ceiling. The young SOE officer was called Lennon, and he had a heavy cold; the edges of his nostrils were raw. He would have preferred the two agents not to smoke but didn’t think it was reasonable to ask them to stop. He wiped his nose with a crusty handkerchief and tapped a pencil on the map.
    “We last used this dropping zone seven weeks ago,” he said. “It is, as far as we know, quite secure. There are small German garrisons here and here.” He drew faint crosses with his pencil. “They might look uncomfortably close, but it seems they are lazy buggers who don’t like going out at night. It’s mostly marshy ground out there. Ponds and so forth. So you might get your feet wet. On the plus side, there aren’t many roads good enough for German armoured cars and whatnot to pootle about on.”
    Pootle,
Tamar