A Bitter Wind

Chapter One
Christmas Day, 1944

The body was still warm.

Warm, but no pulse, I realized, as I felt his neck right below the jawline. He could have been here three minutes or three hours, but what really concerned me was how much time I had left on this narrow ledge. I was hundreds of feet atop a dazzling white cliff, the frigid English Channel launching waves against the rocks below.

I grasped his collar with one hand and pulled as I struggled to keep a foothold in the crumbling chalk. I dug in my heel, but all that did was send a cascade of pebbles and dirt sliding down the incline before they tumbled over the edge beyond the dead man’s feet. I reached out with my free hand to grasp a tuft of grass sprouting from the white chalk, but it came away and threw me off-balance. I tried to dig my fingers into the soil, but nothing offered a solid grip. I felt the body move. Was this guy still alive?

No. The body was deadweight, and I was holding on to it as it slipped away. I was fighting gravity, and it was a losing battle. Small stones clattered below each time I pulled him toward me. The only thing between us and a hard fall was a few strands of rusting barbed wire.

“Billy!” Diana shouted from above. I risked a glance over my shoulder and saw her greatcoat flung my way. “Grab it!”

The sleeve hem was a foot from my hand. Diana gripped one sleeve with both hands. She was lying prone, so I didn’t have to worry I’d drag her over the edge. I pressed my body hard against the sloping ground and stretched out my arm. The greatcoat was almost in reach. I pulled the body closer, my arm quivering against the weight.

“Let him go!” Diana shouted. It was good advice, but I knew I wouldn’t take it. Couldn’t take it, not with the sticky feel of blood on my hand where I had him by the collar. This wasn’t just a random fall. Someone had knocked this Yank on the head and shoved him over.

It was murder. And that was something I couldn’t let go.

I tried again. I jammed my toes into the crumbling grit and dragged the body a few inches more up the incline as I strained to reach the coat, my muscles taut from the effort.

I grasped the sleeve, clutching the wool serge in the palm of my hand. It gave a little, not much, as Diana held tight against the weight of two bodies. I knew she couldn’t pull me, but if I could get up onto the coat, our weight might be spread out enough to keep the ground from falling out from under us.

I took a deep breath and let go, trying for a few inches higher. It worked. I got my shoulder onto the wool serge, the coarse, solid fabric reassuring. I was sweating even as the cold winds blew up the cliff face, and my heart pounded from the exertion. I took a moment to rest. As soon as I relaxed, I felt the body slip. I had a good grip on his collar, but the slack corpse was letting gravity have its way, and his arms were about to slip out of the leather flight jacket. I didn’t have long before that was all I’d take to the top.

“Come on,” I said to my dead friend through gritted teeth. I did my best to bunch up his collar and hold everything in place as I lunged forward and landed a good grip on the open greatcoat, right in the armhole.

“You okay up there?” I gasped out to Diana.

“Yes! You’re getting closer.”

I made another move. I wrenched the body onto the coat and grabbed for the greatcoat collar, feeling the brass buttons dig into my palms. This would work. The avalanche of stones subsided as I pressed my cheek against the rough wool and sucked in air. It was less than a yard to the top, and this last bit was firm. That’s what had fooled me going down: the first two steps were solid, then things started giving way.

I risked letting go of the coat and took the body by the arm and pulled him higher. I maneuvered his head above mine before I had to hold on to the coat again and stabilize things.

“I can almost reach him,” Diana said. “But I’d have to let go of my coat.”

“Hang on,” I grunted. I moved the body up again, using both hands for a few seconds. Now the corpse blocked my view of Diana, but we were getting closer. “Let go, just for a second.”

“All right,” Diana said. “Now.”

I felt the slack as she let go, but the coat stayed put. She grabbed the body with one hand while I hoisted it up. I pushed, she pulled, and in seconds the dead man’s head and shoulders were safely on flat ground.

Without that added burden, I was able to get up onto my knees and crawl the last few feet as Diana dragged the corpse onto the path.

“My god, that was hard,” Diana said. She knelt next to me as I drew in deep lungfuls of air. She grasped my hand and rolled back my sleeve. “You’re bleeding. Are you hurt?”

“It’s his,” I said, and nodded toward the body. “From the back of his head.”

“This wasn’t an accident, then,” Diana said as she continued to check my wrist to be certain I wasn’t injured. Satisfied, she pulled my sleeve back into place and worked at cleaning the blood off her fingers with a handkerchief.

“Not unless he whacked himself on the head as he jumped down the cliff,” I said. “We need to get the police here.”

“There’s a constable in Capel-le-Ferne,” Diana said, and jammed the handkerchief in her trench coat pocket. “He can call in an inspector from Folkestone and watch the body until he gets here.”

“One of us has to stay,” I said as my eyes rested on the lifeless form I’d dragged up the cliff.

“That would be you, Billy,” Diana said, and looked around. “You need to catch your breath, and I know where to find the constable. Watch out, the killer could still be about.”

“That’s good advice,” I said. “Be careful yourself.”

I smiled and Diana took off down the path at a trot. The jeep was only a half mile away, but I worried that the killer was just as close. I stood up and brushed the dirt off my trousers and Ike jacket. I put on the Mackinaw coat I’d thrown off before I climbed down, grateful for the warmth.

Even so, I shivered as I looked down at the body. A major in the Army Air Force, evidenced by the insignia on his leather flight jacket. I straightened his limbs and tried to give him what dignity I could. I fetched his service cap and placed it under his arm.

It was the cap that had first caught our attention. Diana and I had been strolling along, arm in arm, while enjoying the view of the White Cliffs of Dover along the curving shoreline. She’d recently been posted to RAF Hawkinge, an air base outside of Folkestone, and was lucky enough to get a half day off at Christmas. I’d come down from London and met her at the gate, since I didn’t have permission to enter the base. Lots of hush-hush stuff going on there, and I didn’t have the need to know. I didn’t care either, as long as we had time to spend together.

It was a rare sunny winter’s day, with cold wind blowing in from the Channel. That wind had sent the service cap floating up and swirling on a gust before it dropped at our feet. That took us a couple of steps off the path to where we peered down the crumbling chalk cliff face. We thought the guy had taken a tumble too close to the edge. He’d landed on a narrow ledge above barbed wire coils that had probably been strung during the invasion scares early in the war. He was close enough to the edge that we thought he was in danger of rolling off if he came to and tried to get up. That’s what sent me down what looked like a stable path. True enough for the first two steps, but then the loose, chalky soil gave way, and I skidded like Max West sliding into second at Braves Field back in Boston.

I was lucky the pilot halted my momentum. Deadweight came in handy sometimes.

I studied the guy. About my age and height, maybe a touch shorter. Slim, with a firm jaw now gone slack and hazel eyes fixed on the sky. Brown hair, recently cut. I pushed his lower jaw shut and closed his eyelids. It was as much for me as for him. The stunned look of death is never a pretty sight, and it wasn’t a look I wanted haunting me while I waited alone on this windswept path.

The gleaming cliffs had less appeal than they’d had when we started this stroll, and I found myself thinking like a cop. Which is what my job in civilian life had been. Still was, sort of. I looked around at what now was a crime scene. No bloody blunt instrument lying around. No blood spatters that I could see, and not a single indication of a struggle. The only marks on the ground were from Diana and me dragging the body.

I looked at his hands. No bruised knuckles or defensive wounds. He’d been hit low on the back of his head, slightly to the right. A complete surprise. I took a few steps back and imagined walking with the major. A half step back and I take out my weapon—a lead pipe, a sap, or even a solid rock. One hard whack and he’s over the edge. Did the killer count on the fall finishing the job? Did he hightail it out of here without even looking?

No. The urge to look over the cliff’s edge would have been impossible to resist. What did the assailant think when he saw his victim only a few yards away? Was he too frightened to descend? Possibly. Or too smart, maybe.

Who’s to say it was a man, anyway? Many women are capable of striking such a blow. Especially those like Diana, trained by the Special Operations Executive. But any woman angry enough could crack a skull from behind. Whatever the weapon was, it was likely tossed over the edge to be washed clean by the crashing waves.

I knelt by the body even as I told myself to back off and leave it to the local constabulary. This wasn’t Boston. And I was here on leave, visiting my girlfriend after a grueling investigation in France that involved way too many German tanks. But idle hands and all that, and in a moment, I found myself checking for identification. Nothing in the outer pockets. I unzipped the flight jacket and reached inside, rewarded with the crinkle of paper. I withdrew two sheets, folded into quarters.

The wind flapped the papers as I opened them. I held them tight, which left smudged traces of the dead man’s blood. But that wasn’t the problem.

The problem was the word RESTRICTED at the top of each page. The words “Jackal” and “Jostle” were tossed around like someone knew what they meant. I sure didn’t, and I had no idea what the maze of wiring diagrams were for.

But what I did know was that this information was worth killing for.