A Special Relationship

She forfeited with a moan that came deep from the middle of her. Hips thrust up at my face, and she shuddered three times. Then she relaxed with a drawn-out exhalation.

I crawled on my hands and knees up until I could kiss her, rub her own juices all over her face, lick and nibble and chew.

"I don't have a safety," I panted.

She just shook her head and wrapped her hands around my ass cheeks. Pulled with desperation.

My prick found her hole. I thought of hot springs, the water gushing, bubbling.

It was fast. It was fantastic.

I groaned and tensed like preparing to hoist a two-hundred pound barbell. Then I spasmed and a hose broke inside me. Inside her. My semen spewed so hard I feared for the safety of her insides.

I froze, thinking about the exterior scars. The interior scars.

I rose up. She dragged me back down and kissed me until I relaxed.

Entwined familiar like a pair of old lovers, we fell asleep.

**********

I woke up feeling that something was very different this morning. It was.

A beautiful, sleepy-eyed woman with wild tousled hair was lying on top of me with my hard cock inside her.

She was still, just looking down into my face. I raised up to kiss her, but she drew back her head.

She did not draw back her twat. That she started to work up and down my shaft. Faster and faster and with sounds low in her throat.

I was just a spectator, idly watching her ride. Until my body surprised me and my back bowed and my bells emptied into her.

But I stayed hard enough. Her body took the compliment of mine as it was intended and she worked her hips furiously, hunched over as if in pain while she shivered, panted... then fell off of me.

We lay together in companionable silence for a while, listening to the street sounds below. There was a breeze this morning, and my sweaty skin was prickling cool.

"Did I pass?" I asked.

She laughed. The first time I had heard her amused.

"Yes. I needed to see... I needed to feel for myself whether you could be trusted."

I did not ask what would have happened if I had failed this exam.

"You have many questions. I cannot answer them all." She took my hand and placed it square on her disfigurement. "I was arrested in Wiskitki. Near Warsaw. You have never heard of it. No one has. Five of them took me. Over and over. When they were done with me, they decided that a Polish whore did not deserve to carry the child of a Wehrmacht soldier. So they used a dagger to make sure whatever they had started inside me would be ended."

My whole body went icy cold at the way she spoke about it. Matter of fact. My hand tried to retract on its own, but she held it in place against her with unexpected strength.

No wonder I needn't have bothered with contraception.

"We will probably never meet again, David Voight. But if you ever need me, ask for Chodakowska."

**********

You ever drive your car down a familiar road in broad daylight and a frigging moose jumps out in front of you and you stomp the brakes and jerk the wheel and you fly off into a stinking ditch full of logs and brambles and the fucking sun goes out and there is no one around to save you?

Me neither. But what did happen was pretty similar.

It looked like the English equivalent of a lobster boat. About 25 feet long, cabin amidship, flat and open in the back. Specially-muffled six cylinder Gardner diesel kicking out 180 horses, she could scoot. She was low to the water and fast quiet and practically invisible on the nights I pointed her towards the French coast. My jobs were pretty simple. Pick up a passenger, ask them a question. If they answered correctly, get them back to England. If they wrong-footed my inquiry, well....

When the sun came up I would be back at the jetty hosing blood out the scuppers.

That went on for a while, then they decided I should take passengers over and drop them off. Or wait for them. Or go with them inland a mile or two and complete a to-do list they gave me.

Whoever 'they' was, or were, they had decided that I was a Canadian through my mother and therefore a member of the Commonwealth and therefore to be loaded with more and more responsibilities.

They decided I should teach my passengers a few tricks before I dropped them off.

Remember the guy who thought he was just going to show up at the corner where the bomb had fallen and dig a shaft down and go home in time for tea and crumpets?

I was the wrong guy in the wrong place, etc.

On the day we heard about Pearl, I was running a camp near Heathfield, in charge of training, placing, and extracting from occupied France over a hundred agents. We had been absorbed some time before by the Special Operations Executive, but nothing changed. Everyone was too busy running around like they were on fire to sit down and calmly wonder who the hell I thought I was and why I was commanding so much of His Majesty's resources.

After the news from Pearl, and the US jumping into the war in both directions, I figured somebody somewhere in the War Department would blow the dust off my file and order me back into the ranks.

**********

January 1942

She slammed the door behind her, scaring the shit out of me. I had been lost drafting a rough schedule for the next training session. My mind tended to leave my body when I pondered the mistakes we had made and how to use them to teach the next class to stay alive.

"Sorry, David," Moira said with an evil smile.

I could not chastise her for it. The damn door stuck. You had to slam it to get it closed. The whole administration building was off a few degrees no matter how you looked at it. It had been knocked together by local lads and old men too physically and mentally off kilter to trust under arms. The whole of what we came to call the Campus -- offices, barracks, training spaces, cook house, canteen -- were leaky, underinsulated, quivering failures that trembled in a slight breeze. The only sturdy structure close by was the old stone house, the great house of this tiny estate. We reserved that for important visitors and special events.

I returned to my list and read down the names of the class which would be assembled here in two days.

"No," I said without looking up. "No way."

Moira came over to my desk and put her hands down on its top, leaning over in a Churchillian pose. All it wanted was a cloud of cigar smoke. Although it was so cold in here that I could see her breath.

The last name of the list had been added on with a different typewriter from the ones above it.

MOIRA HAINING

"No," I said once again.

I made the mistake of looking up at her. Moira had red hair that apparently had never met a comb it could not defeat, green eyes, freckles, a strong nose, and a wide mouth filled with teeth that were crooked in such a cute symmetrical way that it seemed designed.

She was also the best instructor I had. Some weeks ago she had gotten the desire to go into the field.

I shook my head. "And you know why."

"You only have one good reason," she said. "And it isn't even that good."

I had two reasons, actually. The first I had presented to her about three times a day since her brother had gotten himself killed in action.

She knew too much. It sounds like a line out of Sam Spade's fictional mouth, but it was true. She had been my close assistant since about one month after I opened this place. She had met every one of the agents that had come through our school. Her lovely head contained every detail of our organization.

She could not be allowed to fall into enemy hands, and she knew it.

She still wanted to go. She knew what that combination meant, and she told me she was ready to pay the price come to that.

I believed her, but I did not want that price to ever come up.

Too much of my wanting was due to the second reason, which I had not mentioned to her.

I loved her.

I don't know how it happened. She was sometimes my sister, sometimes my daughter, sometimes even my mother. Our relationship was complicated, and working in close proximity under the constant strain of sending men and women we came to hold in high regard to their more than possible deaths? Well, that made it impossible to have what we would have defined before 1939 as normal man-woman, teacher-student, employer-employee interactions. Pick any one of those. It didn't work.

About a month after she arrived, we came back from a training exercise in the rocky hills of East Sussex. Wet, tired, hungry, I arrived to the news that two of our agents had been taken. I showed the communication to Moira, who sat down as tired and defeated as I had seen her since we met.

I made us some tea, and we had a cup and a biscuit in front of our tiny fireplace. As we warmed, we shed layers. She finally got down to a threadbare cotton undershirt. She gave me an intense questioning look, then pulled it off.

My quarters were just off the office. We danced awkwardly to my cot, unbuttoning, unzipping, arms busy everywhere.

It wasn't fucking. It may have looked, sounded, felt, and even smelled like fucking, but it was not.

It was expiation for our sins, our hubris, our failings. It was a purging. It was confession and reparation and a cry to the cosmos for an explanation.

Some hours later, we lay still in each other's grasping hug. The day still black in our hearts, but the pain was blunted.

"This was a bad idea," I whispered.

"Aye. 'Twas."

We made that mistake repeatedly. Then her little brother went down with the HMS Donegal.

Okay, I guess I knew how it happened. But what I could not remember was when it tuned from lust into love. Oh, Christ, I need another word. I didn't love her like I had ever loved any woman before. I loved her as a friend, a colleague, a partner. An equal.

"I only need the one reason," I said. She dropped it and went out to prepare for the new class.

That night I was drifting off when my door creaked open. Moira tiptoed in and slipped under the blankets. Without a word she peeled my pajamas from me and when I was naked she pulled me on top of her.

I pushed against her slit but before I could penetrate, her hand shot down and took my bare prick in a painful grip.

"No, you don't," she said with determined kindness. I cannot do justice to the actual sound of her words. In her burr it came out: "Nae ya dohn."

She reached out to my bedside table, fumbled in the drawer, and plucked out a Shiekh.

As she was rolling it on me, she said, "I never knew before this moment that you truly loved me, David."

My silence was something. Not agreement. Not assent. Maybe it was the acknowledgement of our condition.

"To put a bairn inside me... that would be the end of it," she continued with a nonchalance neither of us felt. "And you would post banns with me, David. I know you well. You would spend your life with a woman to save her."

She finished the application and pulled me into her.

She gasped, then whispered in a slow tortured breath.

"T'is a kind of love few women ever have known."

The next morning she joined the new recruits.

**********

September 1942

Today I met the second cohort to muster since Moira parachuted into France.

Four stood before me in what an optimist might describe as a straight line. I didn't care. If these four had been under my command in the United States Army, their sergeants would have gone hoarse with gentle descriptions of their intellect, their breeding, their mother's status in society, their lack of geometric awareness. Here, their line was close enough.

Truth was, exactly zero of these new recruits would have been allowed to wear Uncle Sam's Army uniform. For one thing, two of them were female. One of the men was colored, and....

Well, the other guy might have slipped in, I had to admit. But at five foot three and nine stone with bricks in his backpack and a baby face, he barely resembled a soldier. If his local recruitment office had not yet made their quota, he would have been given a chance to join his Uncle Sam for fun and adventure. Which made some kind of sense, because Michel actually was a soldier. A Jewish kid from Calais who joined the Fusiliers marins, the French equivalent of the Marines, then escaped capture when his unit was taken by the Germans in 1940, made his way to Palestine, where one of my scouts looked him up and down and told him if he could find his way to London, he should go into the Barking Maid pub in Fulham and ask for a pint of Hamm's. Then drink whatever they poured and wait at a back table for contact.

The other man, Akinele, told us he had been born in Paris to Nigerian Protectorate parents. Akinele NMI NLN. No Middle Initial. No Last Name. Ten seconds after meeting him, I knew he was lying to me. I didn't hold it against him. We had busted him, administratively speaking, out of Dorchester Prison, where lying was a survival skill. He had other skills as well. He was a forger, a confidence man, a cat burglar, and an arsonist. He was the perfect agent.

Doris was a nurse who had been sacked for helping along a few of her less-enthusiastic elderly patients to the final shore. She was a pleasant-looking woman in her mid-thirties, fit, smart, saucy. She had her own stubborn view on how the world should be run. That had ended her career and landed her in jail, or gaol as they liked to spell it hereabouts. We always kept tabs on fresh admissions to such places, as many of the same qualities which make a man or woman a criminal also will make them a successful field operative.

The last was a younger woman, 25, thin, dark, pale-skinned... and beautiful. My scout network was always on the lookout for beauty. A woman agent who was sexually desirable had one more very potent weapon in her toolkit. We had employed a few as bait with good success.

She, however, had not come to us by scout. I received a call from someone in the government, someone to whom I owed several favors. He asked me to take on a young woman he had found sleeping rough on the streets of Bristol. I told him to send her down and I would give her every chance to impress me.

I knew she would have no previous abilities in any of the tradecrafts we were teaching. Parachute jumping, radio maintenance, Morse code, demolition, general sabotage, unarmed combat, close knife work, forgery, tailing, making and shedding a tail. One learned many useful things living on the street, but none of the ones on my list.

On the other hand, if she turned out to be of sound mind and body, her lack of military experience made her a good canvas on which to paint the portrait of her which my organization required. We would not have to break her of bad habits if she had acquired no habits at all.

These were the four. Me and my five instructors had twelve weeks to hammer all the above topics into them before they were assigned code names and dropped or landed or smuggled onto the Continent upon which the Nazis were currently squatting and plotting their next escapade.

Eighty-four days to save them. I should have been allowed several years, but we did not have years.

I shook their hands and introduced myself. I felt in their grips and saw in their faces a range of deceptions. This group had their secrets. Jane, the street urchin, took my paw firmly.

Soft hand, no scars, clear eyes. If this woman had been living on the street, then I was Roy Fucking Rogers.

I asked her in French to explain to me what audacity gave her to believe that a worthless street urchin deserved to join my select unit.

Without any hesitation, she began to tell me her story. Born to a prostitute, given as a child to labor in the cellar of a brothel bringing up coal, sweeping the steps, mopping the floors. The death of her mother, her inability to join her sisters on her back due to deformities in her womanly parts. Turned out onto the streets, there to be taken up by an order of nuns and groomed to become a bride of Christ only to be subjected to the sexual cruelty of a particular priest. Denting his skull with a crucifix and fleeing back to the streets where my friend with no brief noticed her....

She was a fluent and facile flinger of bullshit. Not a word of this tale lived in the same town as the truth. Still, her French placed her as a native of one of the lands around Lyon, and that was good enough for me. I knew she was no Lyonnaise, but her accent would convince anyone else she was. And looking me in the eye while holding out that crock was talent we could exploit.

I held up a hand to stop her, then directed them to their first class. Morse code.

Or, as they would come to call it after several weeks of drilling in it, Morse ..-. ..- -.-. -.- .. -. --. Code.

**********

October 1942

The Barking Maid pub in Fulham on High Street looks like a host of other public houses which exist to serve a post hours pint to the deserving factory worker. No pretenses here in this two-story brick end of a row of apartments. The exterior is soot-stained and in dire need of repointing. The inside is head-damaging low, dark, and thick with the residue that remains of a spill when the scent of hops vaporizes away.

I was sitting at a back table with a pint of brown ale and a folder of coded messages.

Yes, coded messages out in the open in a pub where everyone and God might lay eyes on them.

Because this was the Barking Maid, one of a number of special pubs across the country in which it was safe for various members of the various intelligence organizations to gather and, to a certain point, relax. The mild-looking barman and his oft-sotted helper were on assignment from the commando group L Detachment. The kitchen was run by three sailors on loan from Naval Intelligence. There were more arms stashed under the bar and in cabinets than had crossed the Delaware with Washington. The staff knew all the local patrons. When a strange face showed, he was tracked and evaluated until eliminated as a threat. If not eliminated, he would be politely encouraged to find himself another local. The politeness would not extend to a second appearance.

I finished with the sheet I had been working on. Columns of handwritten numbers and letters in groups of six, and underneath my careful interpretation based on the proper code pad. The code changed daily, and the encoding key for that day was printed onto a page in a small notebook. Pages of the notebooks issued to agents in the field were made from a paper that was both digestible and also would burn like a spatchcocked firecracker at the application of a match flame.

I read the message again, this time in whole. The small network in Caen was firmly in place and returning valuable observations.

The Germans had fucked up their momentum two years ago when the Royal Air Force kicked their asses, denying them the air over Britian. It seemed that the Nazi war mind had only two gears -- arrogance and paranoia.

The Luftwaffe had thought they would steamroll the RAF in two weeks, but they had been a little off. Now the Germans were convinced that the English forces were going to come storming across the Channel. Here they were also just shy of the mark. By a mile. The States were in the war, but the Pacific was getting most of America's attention. The Allied might available to assault the French coast at the moment was as fearsome as a jamboree of drunken Boy Scouts.

But the fucking Krauts were incapable of generating or believing useful intelligence. All their reports, observations, and projections had to be tailored to conform to the National Socialist playbook. And squeezing into ideological tunnels neutered information.

We had three in Caen. We dubbed them Maelstrom: Whippoorwill, Parsley, and Clafoutis. I tried like hell not to keep staring at the name. Moira was Clafoutis, and every time I made the mistake of letting my gaze go to the word I suffered a rush of regret and fear. You can't run a network properly if you have a personal stake in it. That was one of the many rules I had put fucking tire treads on as I ran over them.