Her Code Name Was Madeleine

By Darrell Egbert

Her code name was Madeleine. She was beautiful, daring and a member of the notorious French Maquis. Before she was 18 she had eliminated more than a dozen German officers. Now as a spy for the allies she’s pared with shadowy unknowns to turn the tide of war on the German submarine wolf packs.

A story lost between the pages of history––a new chapter in the world at war in the 1940s. It was a time when Britain had been brought to its knees––a time when enemy submarines roomed the Gulf of Mexico sinking American Liberty ships bound for Europe. It was a time for heroes.

Master storyteller, Darrell Egbert, spins truth with fable to bring us another page turner––a book that is hard to put down.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publisher's Place
• Release date: Apr 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311062383

Darrell Egbert

Darrell Egbert was born in Layton, Utah, in 1925. He learned to read and write in a three-room schoolhouse, located in a mining town in the Oquirrah Mountains of Utah. He studied more serious writing while at the Universities of Nevada and Utah, and the art of “readable writing” while at the Air University in Montgomery, Alabama. Like most young boys, he built model airplanes and dreamed of becoming a military pilot. His dream became reality, when, at the age of seventeen, he was accepted into the Army Air Corps. Soon after his eighteenth birthday, he was called to active duty where he spent the next two years of the War as an Aviation Cadet. He graduated from twin-engine school as a Flight Officer and first pilot of a medium bomber just as the atom bomb ended the War. Upon graduating from the University of Utah, he applied for active duty, which coincided with America’s entry into the Korean War. He spent most of his career until retirement in 1969 in staff positions involving the maintenance of bombers and missiles, both air to ground and inter-continental. His overseas assignments included such diverse places as French Morocco and Thule, Greenland. At Thule, he took a ground part in special photoreconnaissance missions, which helped bring about the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. He began writing for publication when his first historical novel came to the attention of Barnes and Nobel. Shortly after leaving the 44th Bomb Wing he met and married Miss Savannah of the Miss Georgia Beauty Pageant. Lieutenant Colonel Egbert and Betty, his bride of 56 years, are retired and live with their dog in Washington, Utah. As he is fond of saying, “I never had it so good”....

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Her Code Name Was Madeleine

By Darrell Egbert

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Publisher’s Place

Copyright 2014 Darrell Egbert

Cover Art by Wallace Brazzeal

This digital edition January 2014 © Publisher’s Place

Discover other titles by Darrell Egbert at Smashwords.com:

The Third Gambit

The Secret of Recapture Creek

The Ravensbruck Legacy

They Came From Benghazi

The Escape of Edward St. Ives

They Rode a Crooked Mile

Somewhere West Of Fiji

Smashwords Edition

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Chapter 1

A couple of hours ago I had been lying among the poppies, not in Flanders Fields, but in French Morocco where they blow with the breeze in equal profusion. And no I’m not dead or dying even, but I could have been and not really cared that much.

I could easily have broken my neck, when the chain came off this go devil as my grandfather used to call motor scooters. But whatever name you fancy, be it a camel, horse or bicycle, if you fall off one or get thrown off going as fast as I was you’re going to be lucky if you end up any better off than I am.

I was hurting. I was looking over the tops of the waving poppies where the sun was about to set over my right shoulder, which I think is broken. I saw this Tuareg mounted on a camel coming fast toward me.

I had left the main road leading to our airbase, and I was speeding through the poppies on this hard packed trail that must have been a thousand years old.

I had never seen a Tuareg before so how did I know that’s what I was looking at? I certainly had heard of them and I had seen them in the movies. They wore blue; everything about them is blue even their skin. This isn’t some mistake of genetics. It’s because they dye their clothes indigo blue, and it turns everything else about them the same color.

They don’t look like the other natives, the Arabs and the Berbers. For starters they carry different knives, and they ride camels for transportation. Besides they wear this turban that is wound a few turns tight around the head, and then crosses the face so that only the eyes and the bridge of the nose is showing. A foot or so more falls loosely around the throat, the remaining foot and a half drapes in front like a tie.

I didn’t know what to expect from this one. In the movie, Beau Geste, you might get shot or get your throat cut with this hand tooled, curved dagger called a khanjar and left bleeding among the dunes or the poppies if you ran into one.

He tapped his mount with his leather quirt just below his odd looking saddle and the camel responded with a raucous bellow as it knelt on its knees. This warrior, that’s what he was, and a rich one apparently, because his khanjar was silver and cost some bucks, and so was some of his saddle; a necklace and decorations in swirls on his turban was anything but feminine. This guy was born and raised on the Western Sahara and I could tell he was tough. And I was scared and I was hurting and the last thing I wanted was trouble with him.

Before I knew what was happening, he began making a cheese ball about the size of a golf ball from some kind of concoction he was carrying in a wooden box. It smelled terrible, something like limburger. I watched him hollow out this ball and then pour some kind of powder into the center. He ordered me in some guttural language to eat the stuff. I did, but I never asked for seconds, although if I had known what was in it, I might have.

This powder must have been powerful stuff, maybe home made opium mixed with marijuana, and Bella Donna the Deadly Night Shade that grows wild where he came from. Anyway I quit hurting. And from that day forward, Tuaregs have been some of my favorite people.

I woke-up in our hospital, still hurting but not nearly so much. I suspect he had made his way through the poppy fields to our gate guard and told the French sentry where I was.

The doctor attending me wanted to know if this Tuareg had given me something and I told him yes. The doctor gave me some more of something else, but not until the next morning did anybody give me anything laced with opium or atropine, which was more the pity.

An hour after the sun came up a nurse moved the curtain away and asked me if I wanted to see a visitor by the name of John Martine. I smiled and said yes. He was more welcome than anybody I knew, except maybe the colonel’s secretary, whom I didn’t know very well, but wish I did.

Before I dozed off again, I told John Martine, my French friend the story of my latest friend the Tuareg. I didn’t get much of what John said to me other than he seemed to know him. I remembered the part about him being rich and heading south to Safi, where he intended to camp for a week, taking in the horse and camel auction, before moving on to Agadir in the south. It was a long time later that I found out who he was. He was indeed rich and he did know John Martine. And he was up there to meet with John. I never asked him why but later I had plenty of clues.

I stayed on crutches for two weeks then limped around on a cane for another two before I was declared healed with only minor aches and pains. During that time I spent hours talking about Berbers and Tuaregs with John. John knew several of each and it seemed to me he had more in common with them than he did with his French friends.

Chapter 2

I just might have been the youngest first pilot in the Army Air Corps. At War’s end, I was the youngest in my class, and I was in the last class; and for sure, I had chalked up fewer flying hours than anybody else, and no combat time at all. No chance of getting any either, since they had just dropped two atom bombs on the Japanese.

I figured if I wanted to make the Air Force a career, the smart thing to do would be to get an education, and then come back and try for a regular commission.

As it was, I had nothing going for me. I needed a leg up on the horse and college was the answer.

General Curtis LeMay, the commander of the Strategic Air Command and the de facto commander of the Air Force, had just received instructions from the president to start rebuilding the Strategic Air Command. He was an engineer and he let it be known that one of his goals for the new Air Force was to increase the number of college graduates.

He was also a command pilot who had distinguished himself as an expert navigator. Another of his immediate goals was to increase the proficiency of his active duty navigators and those in the inactive reserve.

Even while the Air Force was releasing aircrews from active duty, the general was in the process of upgrading special global navigation schools with the objective of having every navigator currently on duty, and those in the reserves, expert enough to navigate around the world—and to do it without looking at the ground.

Now, as I stepped from a staff car in front of the barracks, I am reassured that I have not made a mistake. This is where I want to be. And I am certain that I have taken the right road to get here.

The barracks door was open. And as I climbed the steps and walked in, several officers, all above my rank, and all with more than a few combat ribbons fastened below their wings, acknowledged my presence as though they were expecting me.

One with a smile larger than the others rose from his bunk. With his hand extended, he said, Welcome home, lieutenant. This stranger, who called himself Ray Peterson instead of Captain Peterson, became my friend on the spot, and that special feeling of family I had known years ago returned. I was genuinely happy and so was he—and for the same reason.

I noticed immediately that he was wearing a pair of new navigators wings. When asked what they were, he took a minute to explain where he got them, but not one word about whether they had any special meaning; certainly nothing about Operation Reflex if in fact he knew anything.

Ray had seen a lot of aerial combat when the Air Force was still being called the Army Air Force. Among others, he had been on the first Schweinfurt and he had seen a lot of young men his age killed. He had watched many of his friends go down over Germany and France, some on fire, where nobody got out.

But you didn’t have to know him long and he would tell you what he had been doing while he was away these past four years, much like a close relative would have that you hadn’t seen for a while.

And once he started, you might conclude that there had been some other stress-inducing events in his life besides German bullets and shrapnel.

He was married or had been until a few weeks ago. His father-in-law had been his boss for the past four years. He sounded like a selfish and thankless bully to me, and Ray Peterson, couldn’t stop railing against him.

This worthy was the owner of a large, long haul trucking firm. Ray was head of its broken truck division. He said all he ever saw or heard about were trucks or their parts from morning until night, seven days a week, and most of them were out-of-commission, stalled somewhere miles away.

His wife’s father minded those that were up and running. That was the easy part of the business, Ray said. Now that he was losing Ray, he had to go back to work, and he was plenty angry with him for leaving.

He could have quit any time, though, if he had wanted, and as time went by that didn’t seem such a bad idea. He would have lost his wife, but that wouldn’t have broken his heart either. He told me it had been a no time-off kind of life for four years. Maybe not that bad, but from what I could tell, he did have some of the symptoms of a person suffering from long-term sleep deprivation and stress.

Ray talked too fast to be from the west. He sounded something like a New Yorker on steroids. He would rattle along, telling me about the horrors of the trucking business, and then he would switch subjects back to his ungrateful former wife and his domineering father-in-law. When he changed subjects he frequently began again with: and the thing of it is. Not really that annoying, but when heard often, I found it to be contagious.

And then his chattering would cause him to repeat a word, and then maybe two, and then a genuine stutter would develop full-blown and expected.

I was the first friend he had made, he said, since the war ended, and I felt sorry for him. Yes, we made friends that fast, and, what’s more, many of us made them for life—it was one of the unique things about the Army.

And that’s why he offered me a ride. I had no car and we were going to the same new duty station following processing. And I was now a friend; among other things, I was somebody to talk to. So talk was non-stop all the way from San Francisco to San Bernardino. I listened and enjoyed it, kind of, I suppose because I never had anything else to do but watch the endless green fields of the San Joaquin Valley sliding by.

He reminded me of a prisoner who had despaired of ever regaining his freedom. But then good fortune came his way that he didn’t fully understand, and he was granted a pardon. The prison doors clanged shut behind him. But he still didn’t grasp its meaning.

I was happy for him. And by him telling me about these things, he was living the moment over and over again. He said it made him happier to be able to tell them he was quitting than he had been in his life. But it was more than that. He was leaving his home for a better, more familiar one.

After I heard the story twice, and he was partway through it again, I told him to forget about it, because he had no more problems—they were over.

She was gone and he was gone, the trucks were gone, and so was the war. And Ray just kept nodding his head in the affirmative, the same way he did when they told him the war was over, and that he didn’t have to get up and go fly into several squadrons of German fighters and anti-aircraft guns—and watch his buddies burn to death.

Each time I saw Ray, which wasn’t often during the next six months, he seemed to be improving: You take away the problem and oftentimes the body will heal itself, or words to that effect, said one of the medical luminaries, dating from the Golden Age of Pericles.

He came to see me once; my office was in the big hanger where we were overhauling reciprocating fighters for the Korean War. I walked him out when he was ready to leave. He pointed to a small brick building with an iron door across from the hangar. He asked me if I knew what it was for. I didn’t. He told me how interesting it was and that some day he would tell me what was in it.

Our adjutant called me a few mornings after I last saw him. He handed me some orders with a comment that I must know some people in high places. The high place was Ray’s headquarters’. It was an air division that had been newly staffed with many more high-ranking officers than was called for.

It had a purpose in LeMay’s scheme of things; it was just that the purpose was unknown to all but a very few of its members. And Ray was one of them. But I would find out years later that he didn’t know as much as I thought he did about what I thought he was supposed to be doing, but he knew much more about other things of more importance.

Now whether somebody requisitioned me or whether Ray got special permission over the telephone, I don’t know. But a major with his name and title on the papers was good enough for me. It also meant Ray had been promoted.

Somebody in the know had to have approved his new security clearance. He had to have one, we all did. But Ray was fast becoming involved in something they were calling the Cold War. And everything about him was beginning to breathe Top Secret.

This is not to be confused with the Korean War, which was another shooting war that had just started. But unbeknownst to me, the cold one had been going on for some time, and it was far more dangerous than Joe-Blow-Six-Pack and the American Congress ever dreamed it was. And Ray was smack-dab in the middle, and for sure, he didn’t need any more stress in his life.

This assignment with Ray turned out to be a kind of field trip. The orders only lasted two days, and why that long I don’t know. But I got the idea I was doing him a favor and he owed me one. In this case the payback, several years later, would change my life.

We pulled out going west and north heading toward Las Vegas in his used ‘47 dodge coupe. From there we headed north to a spot on a map referred to as Groom Lake. I would also come to know it as that Las Vegas Base or just Area 51. This area in the desolate Las Vegas military reservation was creepy—spooky is what it was. Nobody knew why it was, but everybody had heard a rumor.

It had posting signs, telling all and sundry it was off limits. Why that was, it didn’t say. But it did say if you got too curious and you went any farther into the wilderness looking for the answer, you were liable to get yourself shot. Somehow I didn’t think they were kidding.

Ray knew no more about what we were doing that day than I did or at least he didn’t seem to. He didn’t know where we were or where we were going or what we were going to be doing when we got there. But then, nobody I knew had any better idea than Ray did about what was going on out there, and if Ray knew anything he was not talking.

But at least I discovered why we were driving that rattletrap car of his, instead of a new Air Force staff car. A new shiny standout Plymouth could be seen from miles away, particularly one in the center of a cloud of dust flying down the road. It would be just the thing to draw attention to an official Air Force presence.

What we were supposed to be hiding from, though, was unknown to me and, for the most part it still is. But whatever it was, I needed orders to be that close to Groom Lake.

We ignored the signs as if they were not there, and continued on about another hour down this unimproved road. It was heavy with cactus and sagebrush growing on either side of steep, uneven berms; looking for all the world as though a new county hire had been out there practicing with a junked road grader with a rusty blade.

It came to me that this road had been made by rank amateurs. Then it came to me that they wanted amateurs because they didn’t want guys who did that for a living anywhere near the place. And that might very well be why I was there.

Directly we spotted whatever it was we thought we might be looking for. And when Ray saw it he stared—bug-eyed. Then his face changed color, not to red as burned by the sun, but definitely pale as in scared to death.

He turned his car around, doing his best not to get stuck in the berm. It was clear that we were close enough; we were not going to get any closer to this pile of shiny metal nestled on the side of the mountain. But we did. I mean we got stuck. And we quit talking and he stayed scared of something for the next twenty minutes, until we got un-stuck and going again.

About two hours later saw us at a restaurant in Baker on our way back to San Bernardino. He ordered a draft and I ordered a coke. I waited for him to say something. When he did it was something he should not have been talking about, given our separation in rank and the subject matter.

Have you ever heard of Butch Blanchard or Bob Barrowclough? The use of a senior’s first name or a nickname by a junior officer was considered pretentious. And he surprised me.

For that matter, what do you know about the 509th at Roswell? He talked as though he had served in that unit and knew these men. I couldn’t be sure, but that’s the way it seemed, and he was making me uneasy, because he was uneasy. What do you know or what have you heard about something called a Flying Disc"? This question got the same, almost negative response from me, but somehow he expected it would.

We drank our drinks and left, not saying much when he found out I couldn’t converse on the subject and his mind was not in the mood for anything else. It certainly was not on broken trucks the way it had been the first time we met.

It would be many years later, after I had read in the newspaper about General William Blanchard and Colonel Robert Barrowclough, connecting them with Area 51 and Roswell that I was told to keep my mouth shut about them by one in authority, who would rise much higher in rank than Ray or I ever would.

And to set the record straight, there was nothing wrong with Ray’s head that time didn’t cure. And as for these two senior officers: I came to know both of them well, and there was nothing wrong with the insides of there heads either.

Chapter 3

I don’t think it matters too much what you name your son or your daughter if it’s within reason; the French give boys girls’ names all the time. The Americans do, too, but maybe not so often. Her name was Jean Martine and she was the wife of Jean Martine, my new best friend. But then you don’t pronounce them the same way in French. However, I’m not French, so they did sound a little different to my ear.

Sometimes French names are different in unexpected ways. That is, you can have a young beautiful woman with a beautiful female name like Jean. But you don’t expect her to have a reputation for being one of the most dangerous assassins who ever graced the membership roles of the Second World War’s most notorious insurgent organization: the Maquisard de Paris. But she was unquestionably beautiful and, according to her husband, she had killed seventeen Germans. And she did it before she was eighteen years old.

The Maquis assumed the name of the area in which they operated, while the individual cell members knew each other by code names only. Her name was Madeleine. Her close associates knew her as the Menace but never referred to her