A Special Relationship

"I am dreadfully cold," she whispered.

A gentleman would not allow that, I thought as I stripped quickly -- it was damn cold -- and got in to warm her.

There was no moon, and the candle was extinguished. We touched in a black abyss, void of any particle of light, but we still had smell and sound and hearing. And touch. Yes, touch.

We touched from toe to crown, hands slipping up and down, here and there.

I had been right about her ass.

"I expected you to be in his bed," I said softly. Sometimes you had to throw a rock in the bushes to see what moved. She would either slap me or throw off the covers and walk out. Or both.

Instead, she stopped her hands for just an instant, then one of them gripped my erection.

"He's been my friend forever," she said. "And he is engaged to be wed."

She did not address my expectation directly, but I chose not to pursue that line of inquiry, as my attention had been diverted to my right hand currently caressing her hairy patch and tickling the prominent lips hidden therein.

She sighed while I gently kneaded those lips as Simone had taught me so many years ago.

"I don't have a safety," I said as we kissed.

She laughed. "You pack this cannon but you don't carry a rubber?'

I contracted muscles to make my cock flex. Once. Twice. Thrice. "I'm happy that you like my artillery."

She squeezed it hard enough to make me gasp, then laughed again. "You...."

Talking ceased as I kissed her neck, then her breasts, then her tummy. Each stop on the line necessitated getting off the main track and exploring around the station until the conductor's moans signaled boarding.

I would leave it unsaid that there were many other things to do in the dark that did not require a safety.

Like nibbling up each leg from big toe to that deliciously womanly blubber-like flesh just south of the promised land. Like pressing fingers into that hollow above the thighs, almost hard enough to be painful. Back off. Kiss it. Repeat.

Like my lips on cunt lips and my tongue into the depths of her hole and my fingers rubbing gently and persistently around and inside to stimulate every interior surface.

She tasted of lavender. And rosemary and basil. The faint astringent residue of soap applied and rinsed.

"How... David... There... Oh God... Oh... You...." Her muscles worked in series, an athlete of some rare sport. She twitched and contracted. Her hands sought to pull out my hair.

She became pliable. I rotated her through several degrees of freedom until she was atop me with my cock in her mouth and my lips back on her hot wet slit and there we lay for an eternally pleasurable time until I could not hold back any longer and filled her mouth. She sucked liked a babe at a nipple as my night exploded into white flares and red rocket bursts.

All that while, like my own secret weapon, I held just one finger on a certain little button which had become engorged with blood. It throbbed under my touch. I pressed firmly but did not make any motion. Just applied pressure persistently until her body noticed and her hips began to rotate. A bull trying to throw the rider but could not. Her arms and legs moved spasmodically. Her head shook back and forth. The only unmoving part of her was under my determined fingertip. She began to speak in tongues and her thighs tried to crush my head, then she fell silent except for her panting.

I gently released my touch and her whole musculature spasmed once, violently.

"What the bloody hell?" She was astonished. As if she had discovered an uncharted continent.

Thank you, Simone.

**********

March 1943

Halfway through the next training class, I received an invitation to visit a certain office in Whitehall for tea. This was code for a powwow involving the allocation of funds and materials. The room number, that is. Tea would of course be served at any type of Whitehall meeting.

These powwows were often as useless as boar tits, but gave me an excuse to visit London shops for items the tiny village nearest our camp could not provide.

A pretty young WREN showed me into the room. Only one person was seated at the table of 12 chairs. Not a good sign.

The fellow had a hook nose and a thin mouth devoid of lips. He was so clean-shaven I thought it possible he suffered from some condition hampering his ability to cultivate facial hair. Gold wire rims hid watery blue eyes. Rationing had not been kind to him. He should have weighed five stone more than he did, and the slack in his coat told me both that he had recently lost most of that five and that he was out of funds to have his outfit resewn to fit his body's new equilibrium.

He introduced himself as Mayberry. I was dead certain that was not his real name. I introduced myself as myself.

He seemed taken aback by my accent, which meant that he had come to this table unprepared. I had, on the other hand, not.

I put my valise down and sat opposite him.

"Certain strategic operations are in preparation," he said. His voice and tone attempted a class far above the evidence of his clothing. I suspected he practiced in front of a mirror at home.

He didn't even credit me enough to lead with "As you may know...." or "You may have heard...."

No, he assumed I was some low-level mechanic.

"Are these your operations?" I asked.

He smiled. "Something like that. In the event--"

"Is your department in charge of these operations?"

He did not like the interruption. "I really can't--"

"I didn't catch your department." He was seriously going to try the 'you are not privy' ploy.

"That is not important."

Bingo.

I nodded as if acquiescing, and he plunged forward, not taking note of the hazard signs.

He bloviated for a time while I sat with a thin smile. In short, he and his unnamed department had been authorized by some equally unnamed higher up mucky mucks of the SOE to assume command and control of my networks, effective as soon as the lines of communication could be transferred, so on and so forth.

"No thanks." I was very polite about it.

"Wha--." He balked. "I... we do not need your permission."

"Okay. Still, I must reject your offer."

He sat paralyzed for a minute while his mind sputtered.

"I am afraid you don't understand, Cap-- Col--"

He flipped mentally through his little book trying to match me with a rank.

"...Mr. Voight." He said at last in an attempt to salvage his dignity. He had bupkis. "You will hand over your networks. This is an order."

I shook my head. "Nope." I stood as if to go.

He paled and reddened all at once, in different places on his face. The chromatic inequity of it was really remarkable.

"Are you refusing a direct order?'

"Looks like it."

"You can't do that!" He had come into the room in complete control. Fifteen minutes later confusion and panic were breaching his defenses. "I will have you up on a court martial!"

"Mayberry," I said, "if you can figure out my rank... hell, if you can figure out which fucking flag I am supposed to salute, then go right ahead. And let me know what you find, because I sure as hell don't have a clue."

His eyes narrowed but his mouth opened. No sound emerged.

"See," I continued, "you have got to be from one of those half-assed amateur operations the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare absorbed whole when they were desperate for idiots to toss into the breach. Nobody else would suggest such a damn fool idea. We have networks which have taken a long time to dig in. Any disruption to their routine could be fatal. So, no, you cannot have any of them."

He bounced up and down in his seat as if he wanted to jump on me. It would have been a bad idea.

"We will just take them," he said through clenched teeth. Two tiny drops of spit arced from his mouth. This is the kind of coolness under fire that typifies a professional spymaster.

"And I will send them an oxen free. Do you know what that is?"

He did not. He just glared at me.

"It is the signal to activate the escape plan. Bury it, burn it down, and slip away. Come home to mother."

"You bastard! I will have your agents arrested if they try to come back!"

Wow, that was Mayberry's smarts on holiday right there.

I wondered how many days it would shorten the war and how many lives it would save if I were to follow this idiot into the nearest quiet park and put a couple of .45 rounds into his tiny head.

Instead, I picked up my bag and bid him good day as he tried to order me to sit back down and where did I think I was go--

In the hallway outside, I pressed the switch that turned off the battery-powered wire recorder in my valise.

Someone unknown to me but probably well known to Mayberry or whatever his name was would shortly be having a quiet word with him. That word would be that threatening to arrest your own agents was a spectacularly unwise and career-ending play.

**********

May 1943

I really thought I would never see Lady Anne Jennings again, so it aligned with the way my life had been pressed through a strainer in the past few years that I found her one afternoon relaxing on my cot.

She sprang to her feet and embraced me, almost chastely. She did not offer her mouth.

She trembled in my arms.

"Oh, David. It is so good to see you."

"It's good to see you too, Anne. To what do I owe the pleasure?"

She pulled back a bit to look up at me. She smiled that devastating smile.

"You? You owe nothing and no one." Her smile disappeared. "No... wait. You are in my debt."

I tilted my head, a dog not knowing.

She removed her hand from a pocket. In her palm lay a stack of cardboard squares printed with the distinctive Egyptian design of the Ramses prophylactics.

Simone had a saying for moments such as these. It very roughly translated from the French as 'A nail does not want to be caressed into the board' or some such. You get the gist.

The last time, I could not see her in the night. Today there was no such problem. The reverse, in fact. This building may have been assembled in haste and error, but the windows were huge. Somewhere in West Sussex stood a greenhouse with many missing panes which had been relocated here to this wall and that. The oft uncooperative English sun shone bright today, and my room and my bed were illuminated to the limit of my eyes' ability to handle the load.

I stripped her with purpose bordering on rough and pushed her down on my cot. With the dynastic elastic covering my hard cock, I lifted her knees until they were on either side of her face. She looked at me with fear and anticipation. I looked down on her like a prideful Pharoah about to claim a prize won in battle.

Her womanly parts were compressed in this contortion so that her flushed and swollen labia pushed up through the hedgerows of curly ebony hair. Pulsing with her heart as my cock pulsed with mine.

Feelings primeval took control of my brain.

A B-17 is a complex work of engineering, flown hundreds of miles through German fighters and flak by pilots trained and winnowed until they are the best. Still, at the target, control of the whole huge enterprise is turned over to the bombardier and his few buttons.

My body was now turned over to that little part of my brain to direct on to target that big aching payload above my balls and behind my cock. No licking or kissing today. No gentle fingers.

I shoved my hardness into her glistening pinkness. I groaned. She called out my name and then kept calling it over and over and over and over as I hammered that nail until it was sunk and then kept on pounding until the wood was filled with impressions of the head and my arm ached and my cock ached....

My mind returned to me. Her legs were trapped between us, our faces together kissing so hard I feared for my lips.

Tears spilled from her eyes.

"God damn you David," she croaked. "Do you know how many rubbers I brought?"

**********

I commandeered one of the bedrooms in the main house. The place was underused anyway, and I needed the big soft mattress in the upstairs bedroom. Well, we needed it.

Jane was back.

Not as a trainee anymore. I assigned her to teach conversational French and encryption classes. The camp was running overlapping cadres now, with two dozen or so agents in training at any one time and an equal number of instructors and support staff. Mayberry had at least been right about something big in the works. Everyone knew we had to put an army onto a French beach sometime soon. Right in the place where many of our networks were.

We ate in the canteen or in the rough kitchen in the main house. I sat in my little office carved out of a pantry and read and wrote dispatches while Jane either led an evening class or translated technical bulletins.

Every night we unfurled one or two Egyptians.

The countryside was becoming infested by American troops roving about on map-reading exercises or mock skirmishes or just moving from one temporary cluster of tents to another. We frequently had to turn them back from our narrow lane and insist that they could not just push on through to wherever they were bound. The attitude of the typical American officer was that he knew this land and his business there far better than did a few elderly English grunts.

This is why I had my guard shack supplied with a rack of Thompson submachine guns. With the ominous-looking 100-round drum magazine. These weapons made a striking visual when produced and turned upon intruders, who invariably apologized and shifted into reverse.

So it was that I thought the disturbance at the gate was another of those errors, and it wasn't until I came to the main house later that evening that I found it had not been. Jane was obviously flustered -- and for her that was quite a departure. She was one of the coolest persons I had ever trained or worked with.

She was standing at the kitchen window holding a cup. I walked up behind her and put one hand where her neck transitioned to shoulder and felt quivering tension underneath.

I turned her gently around.

"What is it?" I asked mildly.

She shook her head. Nothing? Or something I did not need to... or should not be allowed to know?

The teacup unsteady, concentric waves on its surface.

I said no more, just stared at her expectantly.

She held out for some time but knew I would not desist.

"It was just an old friend come to call. I sent him away."

"Captain Cowie then?"

She actually twitched as if an electric shock at my knowledge of his name. I wondered what the hell she thought I did all day.

"Yes." Her gaze fell into her cup.

"I am alarmed that he was able to find you."

Her bottom lip feinted to be bitten but returned in an instant to its starting point. Almost fast enough to pass, but I would have her pot at the poker table. I didn't press the point I had already won.

"What did he want?" I asked as if I did not already know.

"Me."

"He pressed his case?"

She nodded. "I said no. I told him to go and never come back."

"He won't give up."

She nodded again.

"He has already informed his family that you agreed to wed him."

"How-" She started, then suddenly realized that she did know what I did all day.

"Have you given him any cause that he should make that claim?"

The lip begged to be bitten again. Of course she had. She had not said yes, but she had never said no. Now he would not accept any naysaying. He was a fucking peer. And I would bet that imaginary pot that Colonel Carmichael would also turn up at our gate sooner or later. Maybe I could arrange a duel between them.

"I cannot allow one of my best trainers to be distracted at such a time as this. I need you to deal with this problem."

She looked at me with great and real interest. "How?"

"Marry me."

**********

Our honeymoon was a pint of the local public house's best and some bread and cheese during a long lunch. Then we went back to work.

Men and material were flooding the island, but the fuel that made them go was information. My networks were more valuable to the Allied effort than ever, and we put demands on them that would have been unimaginable to me just the year before.

I put Jane in charge of running three networks, including Maelstrom. I was swamped by logistics, meetings, phone calls, and training. Everyone in our compound seemed always to be rushing to somewhere else.

We knew it would be big, and it would be soon.

My phone rang one morning while I was simultaneously eating a bowl of oatmeal and scanning aerial photographs of a railroad bridge near Rouen.

"Hello, David! It's Mickey. Guess what? I just made captain. I owe it all to you, brother. Can we get together and lift a pint for the old days?"

I didn't know any Mickey from my old days. I played along, congratulating whoever the hell it was.

"Can you get up to the city? Meet me in that joint where you danced with Ska. Tomorrow about nine?"

My skin prickled, but I managed to present as the old and true friend. When I hung up, I just stared at the handset.

Danced with Ska could only be the hotel where I had briefly roomed, the Cumberland, where the woman known to me as Chodakowska had shredded the hymen of my naïve existence and torpedoed my Army career.

I snatched up my Colt and a box of shells and ran for the train station.

**********

July 1943

The man who called himself Mickey did wear the uniform of a U.S. Army captain. The clothes themselves were appropriately creased and worn. The bars looked appropriately new. I knew this game. Our operation had several men and women whose job it was to turn out clothing agents could wear into their areas of operation without drawing attention. We often met with recent refugees from Europe and purchased their old clothes for a tidy sum and new replacement duds. Our team of tailors then reworked the old and very authentic garb as needed for our agents.

I very much doubted this Mickey was a mere captain. He was obviously Army Intelligence, but he did not identify himself as such. We had a couple of pints in the hotel bar, then went for a stroll through Hyde Park. In a sheltered gazebo by the lake, he showed me a letter signed by Eisenhower, whose signature I did not know and therefore did nothing for me, and one signed by Boyce directing me to fully cooperate with the bearer. That signature I did recognize, so I told my old bud Mickey to spill.

It was simple, really. Mickey and Ike and all their other pals wanted me to figure out ways to make the Germans believe that the Allies were going to land near Calais. Maelstrom and the two other networks active in Normandy were to feed the enemy information designed to lead the German High Command into believing that Normandy landings were not in our plans.

Simple, except that this request told me that Normandy was indeed where the landing crafts were to be aimed. This knowledge was the gold nugget of the war, to be protected at any cost. Now I knew, and my people would soon know. That made us all targets. Of Nazi counterintelligence, of Allied suspicion of our loyalties. Hot potato did not begin to describe the hazards of handling that information. No wonder the fictitious Mickey was invented.

Simple, except that my networks were being asked to show slivers of their asses to the enemy to lead them astray. To get their attention when our efforts had been extraordinary to avoid attention. It was a dangerous game.

I had a flash of fear for my dear Clafoutis, but I imagined what she would say to my fears. It would be heavily accented and thickly obscene. Along the lines of 'Put yer fecking shite smack back into yer knickers, ye cunty knob, and act the man'.

Mickey looked at me oddly when I smiled broadly and told him we would get the job done.

**********

March 1944

My team invented several clever ways to divert German attentions from Normandy to Calais. Mickey came to the camp a few times to give us ideas and oversee our progress. His name turned out to be Colonel Robert Devers. I kept calling him Mickey and did not salute him.