Forbidden Zone

By Ian Slater

The Nazis’ dark secrets are revealed, in a tense and compelling thriller from bestselling author Ian Slater.

June 1944. The moment has come. The Allied pincers are closing in. Hitler has already ordered his jet fighters, V-1 flying bombs, and V-2 rockets into action. Now, in a desperate bid to keep his war machine churning, it is time for the führer to use the most secret weapon of all.

For G.I. David Adam, it's a mission into hell. To stop Hitler’s mad plan will take him and others into the lion’s den, under the shadow of the SS—where exposure means death, but being killed is better than being taken alive…

Only a handful of courageous men and women can stop Hitler’s terrifying superweapon, and helped by French resistance fighters, Jewish slave laborers, and members of the Polish underground, these few will fight the most critical battle of the entire war.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Diversion Books
• Release date: Nov 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781626811706

Book preview

Chapter One

June 1944

Hurrying through the rain-polished streets of Dieppe, Oberleutnant Kurt Breller kept close to the ancient buildings that hugged the Quay de Norveges. All around him the darkness, smelling heavily of fish and sea, was throbbing with the thunder of approaching enemy bombers, but this night Breller was more afraid of the Maquisards, of the French Resistance. Still, he must try to reach her.

Dieppe was still in German hands and it should have been safe, but it wasn’t. No matter that he would have the cover of curfew till dawn, that the port was one of the most heavily fortified of all the coastal Festungen, Hitler’s chain of fortresses in the Zone Interdite, the Forbidden Zone that stretched the thirteen hundred miles of the fortified Atlantic wall, from Spain in the south to Holland in the north. The truth, as Breller and every other German in Dieppe knew, was that members of the Maquis had infiltrated the port’s forced-labor battalions. He knew he could die as easily from a Frenchman’s bullet as a British bomb.

Suddenly the deafening roar was directly above him. A second later he heard the high whistling of falling bombs, saw the purple flashing of artillery along the coast, the crash of explosions about huge, brutish bunkers thrown into stark white relief against the sea, and over it all the long bluish stalks of searchlights. There was a direct hit on a bunker not far away above the Puys Cliffs, the town’s eastern headland. Instinctively Breller ducked as the chalk cloud ballooned high in the air and came hailing down. Miraculously, when he looked up again, the bunker was still standing. For several seconds there was a lull, sticks of bombs toppling ineffectually into the waters of the Bassin du Canada and the inner harbor. Then the earth was heaving again, the fiery train of high explosive growing louder, the earlier staccato now a steady roar racing toward him. He crossed himself and wondered if he would ever see her again. In another second the whistling of bombs became a sustained scream and, dropping to the ground, one hand over his helmet, the other cupping his genitals, he drew himself tightly into the fetal position, waiting…

In the town center, civilians and Germans alike were scrambling for the bomb shelters, all except Marie Xupery. Silhouetted, her long auburn hair catching the lightning of the big coastal guns, she stood trembling, waiting in the high attic of her apartment, which had been part of her family home before the Germans had requisitioned it, forcing her to work as an administrative assistant in the giant Todt construction organization, forcing her parents to move inland, away from the Forbidden Zone, away from everything and everyone they had loved. She turned her head toward the bombers and prayed their terror would never end, that Breller would risk it and come to her as he always had. She shivered in expectation. She did not understand it, she did not want to, she knew only that now she wanted him, her German, that when the danger was greatest, when the bombers came vibrating thickly overhead in the blackness like great, unseen birds of prey, she had to be with him, and he with her, the fear exciting their lovemaking to frenzy, rushing them to the precipice of danger and over, through sweet cascades of indescribable release. Come on, come on! she intoned urgently. Please, please don’t stop. Oh God, she moaned, don’t stop.

Sixty miles inland, around the great bend in the Seine, a camouflaged armored car roared through the high, elaborate, wrought-iron gates of Chateau La Roche-Guyon, throwing up a fine, white dust, and through the dust came the sleek, black Horch-WH 948205, pennant flapping stiffly in the breeze, outriders flanking, another armored car bringing up the rear.

The chateau overlooking the green sweep of river backed by towering cream-chalk cliffs had been a Norman fortress for a thousand years, and in the great hall the portrait of the Marshal de la Roche Foucauld had long looked down imperiously, surrounded by a collection of weapons that once resounded in ancient battle. But now the chateau echoed to the sound of jackboots, taken over by the Reich for the exclusive use of the headquarters of Armee Gruppe B in the person of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, legendary leader of the Afrika Korps, now commander in chief of the Fifteenth and Seventh Armies, including all Luftwaffe support troops along the entire front of the Forbidden Zone.

The crack of boots became muffled as the field marshal and his aides passed from the green and black tile of the foyer onto plush Persian carpets. Arms akimbo, knight’s cross glinting, his silver-topped baton protruding from his left hand like a dagger, Rommel stood dwarfed by the tapestries of the grand ducal study, oblivious to the cluster of antique treasures, his attention riveted instead on a huge stand map of the French coast. His gaze shifted west, down from Dieppe, his black-gloved hand smacking the map flat on, right index finger extended east toward Dieppe, his thumb covering Cherbourg on the Contentin peninsula, the open hand sliding predatorlike toward the sixty-mile curve of cliffs and beaches between Normandy and the great bight of the Seine. Suddenly the gloved hand closed to a fist, rapping the map till it shook. Here! On the beaches! Stop them on the beaches. Move the panzers up. Dig in. Wait for the Allied bombardment to cease, then strike!

Only now did he take off his leather coat and cap, running his fingers anxiously through thinning ginger hair, turning to General Speidel, his fellow Swabian chief of staff. I told Runstedt. I told the führer. But no… He held his hands up in disgust. "They still hold them back. ‘No, no,’ they say. ‘Don’t break the panzers up. Keep them all in one central reserve—ready to deploy them for the main battle.’ This is the main battle. If we lose this, we lose the war."

The phone jangled. Speidel answered it coolly, matter-of-factly, adopting the usual mood of his commander. As he replaced the phone gently, lifting his head, the light from the chandelier momentarily turned his spectacles into mirrored disks. Festung Dieppe is under heavy air attack. Berlin says we should prepare to meet a second invasion farther east, between Dieppe and Calais, by the American, Patton.

Rommel nodded, sneezing violently, the long term after-effects of his earlier nasal diphtheria always worse when he was under pressure. Brilliant. Gripping his handkerchief, he waved irritably at the sector south of Dieppe. And while they are waiting for Patton, the Allied beaches in Normandy groan with supplies, expanding every hour. If we don’t—

The phone rang again.

"Ja, answered Speidel, ja, ja. Nein … Ja!"

Rommel was only half listening, his eyes sweeping over the map, his left hand pressing deep into his lower back, his lumbago aggravated by the long, tiring drive from Germany at six-thirty that morning. The weather had been so bad in the channel on June 6 that no one had expected the invasion and he had snatched a few days leave to return home for his wife Lucie’s birthday. He had even brought her a pair of shoes specially from Paris. In the background Speidel’s voice was even, unhurried, conditioned to the chaos of war.

"Ja, Speidel ended dryly. Danke. I will inform the field marshal. He turned to Rommel. Top Secret message coming in from Berlin."

Rommel did not even bother turning from the map. He could guess: headquarters was no doubt still refusing to release the panzers. In any case it was probably too late now; the Allies’ overwhelming air superiority meant that most of the tanks would never reach the coast.

Germany’s most celebrated soldier shook his head in disbelief. It was one of the worst military situations he had seen, including all his time being chased to and fro across the western desert by Montgomery’s Eighth Army.

As dawn broke on June 8, one of his crack divisions, Panzer Lehr, continued its dash toward the coast in heavy camouflage, avoiding the main roads, skirting the woods of Normandy in an attempt to throw its weight as quickly as possible onto the beaches and smash the tentative hold of the Allies. But Allied air supremacy was telling, and Panzer Lehr lost over a hundred and twenty supply trucks, eighty half-tracks, mobile guns, and tanks. When they were not being chopped up by the Allied fighters and bombers who had launched over ten thousand sorties, compared to the Luftwaffe’s paltry seven hundred on D-Day, those panzers that did manage to reach the coast were finally stopped by the massive Allied naval bombardment of D plus 3. By D plus 4 the Americans on Omaha and Utah, the British and Canadians on Sword, Juneau, and Gold, were still hanging on. The nightmare Rommel feared—an Allied breakout into the bocage—the open hedgerow country of Normandy—was growing by the hour.

What was needed, what he had desperately been pressing Hitler for since first news of the Allied landings, was a surprise counterattack by the Wehrmacht, something so stunning, so ferocious, against which the enemy’s defense would reel and crumble.

What we need, he told Speidel, "is more, more of everything. To do something spectacular. Like North Africa again, eh! But first he knew that Hitler must be made aware of the full extent of the danger, otherwise he would get nothing from OKW headquarters in Berlin—the Russian front having absolute priority. I must speak to him personally. I don’t trust any of those toadies around him. Send a message. Immediate. Top Secret. I beg him to meet Von Runstedt and me."

"Beg, Field Marshal?" asked Speidel, his eyebrows arched in surprise.

Urge!

"Ja, Field Marshal."

As the message left La Roche-Guyon, sixty miles to the east the final waves of the Allied air fleet were still pounding Dieppe.

Marie heard footsteps on the stairs leading up to the attic. Nervously fingering the tiny crucifix about her neck, she jerked her head back in fright as the door was flung open. For a moment she hesitated, used to seeing Breller in his dull-gray Todt uniform. Now he looked like someone else, sporting a smarter bluish-gray oberleutnant’s jacket with scarlet tabs and crossed AA gun insignia of the Luftwaffe’s Flak Regiment 157W. Though covered in dust the new uniform made him appear stronger, taller, more self-possessed.

She ran to him, and in a moment felt him hard against her. Closing her eyes, her breasts pushing into him so that she forced him against the doorjamb, she told herself again how it had been her job to seduce him, her job to let him do it. She had learned to love it.

At the outbreak of war, her secretly joining the Maquisards had been inspired by sheer resentment of the occupation, of authority in general, and it had made her feel older, more mature than her twenty years. But now that the bombs were falling, now that her German was with her again, she again felt her hatred of them turned to a savage passion, her lust excused as duty.

He entered her and it felt wonderful. Faster! she demanded, the noise of the bombers approaching a crescendo. Faster!

Chapter Two

London

David Adam sleepily drew up the coarse woolen blanket and reached over to the other side of the bed. Katie? She wasn’t there. The blackout curtains were still drawn, and for a moment he imagined he was back in his U.S. supply barracks south of London, where he was a lieutenant assigned to light duties. Shielding his eyes, he switched on the overhead bulb, glancing at the alarm clock. It was four-twenty A.M. Kate would be on her way home from the midnight-to-four shift at the parachute factory in Bethnal Green. With D-Day only seven days old, nearly everyone was still on overtime shifts. He had been lucky to get a forty-eight-hour pass. He switched off the light and pulled the covers up again, waiting for her. Soon he would hear her tiptoeing softly up the stairs, over the landlady’s kitchen below, stopping outside their second-floor flat. The door would open as upon a cave, and momentarily she would be framed in the rectangle of light, looking like a stoker in her broiler suit, her hair a severe bun beneath the scarf. Anyone home? she’d ask softly, undoing the scarf, letting her hair fall voluptuously over her shoulders. Cupping his hands about his mouth and discarding his New England accent, he would do his imitation of Boris Karloff. "Do come in!" She would laugh, and unbuttoning the boiler suit, she would come to bed and they’d make love.

Impatiently he looked at his watch. She must have been held up on the tube or one of the buses that miraculously managed to weave their way around the darkened streets, though the Londoners’ observance of the blackout was by now more the result of habit than from any fear of German aircraft overhead. The Luftwaffe had virtually disappeared by ’42, after the Battle of Britain established British air supremacy over the Channel in the summer of ’41. Now the roar of engines was not that of Goering’s air force, but the massive Allied air fleets on their round-the-clock bombing of Fortress Europe.

David sat up, shivering in the early morning chill, pulling on his heavy U.S. Army issue woolen socks and the khaki jacket emblazoned with the maroon chain-lightning insignia of the New England sapper unit he had joined in 1942. He dropped a shilling in the meter and made a cup of tea. It was too weak; Katie was near the end of the tea ration, kept drying the leaves out, using them twice, and there was no sugar. Still, he didn’t mind, for as he sipped the warm, weak char, as the British called it, it took him back to when he and Katie had first met in the autumn of ’43, both seeking shelter from a bitter north wind in a little coffee shop off Soho. The coffee, a chicory substitute, had been weak too, but they hadn’t cared then either. They had taken to one another immediately, and soon minor and major hardships alike were merely something else to be shared.

They were married six months later, early in May of ’44, up north in the long, rolling hill country of the Yorkshire dales where her parents lived. They had driven up over the barren, windswept fells in the rattling bull-nose, baby-green Austin that David had wangled from the motor-pool wreck yard for thirty pounds, its rusty radiator boiling over furiously most of the way, with Katie laughing and threatening to get out and push. And the attachments for the canvas gas bags atop the luggage rack clanging like so many tin cans.

The little ivy-covered stone church was over three hundred years old, as old as it was beautiful, secluded amongst copses of sweet-smelling ash and hazel by the River Ure, where whitethroats sang and darted like sunlight in sylvan glades and skittered over summer-mirrored water, while frightened red grouse barked noisily nearby in the rough, pink heather. David’s only regret was that his parents couldn’t be there. But Katie’s folks had done their best to make up for it. They weren’t the most talkative lot, taciturn farmers, but the warmth of family was there, like a cozy fire on a winter’s eve, and at least David could chat to her father of country concerns. Then, encouraged by Kate and fortified with a pint or two of Yorkshire bitter, David had talked up a storm about his home, of New Hampshire, of fishing on Lake Winnipesaukee for trout, of walking with his father in the maple orchards, of sappin’ time, tapping in the spouts, draining the rich maple syrup, of hiking in White Mountain forest, of his mother’s French-Canadian background, how her grandmother, like so many French-Canadians from just across the border in Quebec, had headed south in the post-Civil War boom to work in the New England textile mills, so that he had grown up equally fluent in French and English. He told them too of the beautiful Androscoggin River, the roaring, breath-catching excitement of spring log drives, of the scent coming from tall balsam fir, and of hiking in the woods below the jutting granite fence of Cannon Mountain. Above all, David talked nostalgically of the astonishing colors of the New England fall when the acidity of the poor soil turned the leaves through endless variations of red and gold.

Katie’s father talked only of sheep. David didn’t know much about them, but said that from what he’d seen of them—in sheep-dog trials and the like—he wondered why it was considered an insult to call people a bunch of sheep. Every sheep he’d seen seemed to have a mind and direction all its own, which was why it was so hard, even for trained dogs, to keep the flock together. Katie’s father said nothing, silently consuming the last of his beer ration. Only later, in David’s absence, did he solemnly pronounce to his daughter, ’E’s a smart young man, that Yank.

David and Katie had decided that war or not, they would have children as soon as possible, and by the time they had been married, Katie was already three months pregnant. Now, alone in the flat, as he topped up the mug of tea, he was going over the names they were considering; it would have to be something, they agreed, that you couldn’t shorten too easily. He and Katie both liked Angela—but everyone would make it Angie. David hoped it would be a girl to start with. There had been five children—three boys and two girls—in his family and he remembered now how often his mother, exhausted after the dinner and bedtime, had commented how glad she was that her first one had been a girl, how it gave you time to learn about child rearing before you were hit with what she called the gredinerie des gamins—the rowdiness of boys. Here in the flat, unlike the supply barracks, where someone was always snoring or talking in his sleep, David found it easy to daydream, even with the usual wails of sirens and the odd explosion from a shot-up bomber in the background. Sipping the tea, all he could hear was the faint, comforting hum of traffic by Regent’s Park, snaking its way through the blackout, occasional voices floating up as people trudged home from a late shift, and in the distance somewhere a putt-putting backfiring, a motorbike, perhaps, eking out the last of its petrol ration. He smiled to himself, remembering how they’d barely made it back to London in the Austin and how he’d had to coast a lot of the way in neutral, in what Katie called Angel gear.

David looked across at Katie’s photograph on the worn, cedar dresser whose varnish looked richer, more expensive, in the forty-watt glow. His eyes lingered on the photo, on the green, intelligent eyes; her long, silken brown hair contrasted against the turquoise fullness of her sweater; and her smile, simple, direct, so open and unworldly that it made him frightened for her. He too had been unworldly before the war, before joining the New Hampshire regiment and training as a sapper, a demolition expert, and being shipped overseas to North Africa. Then one morning—they were somewhere west of the Azores—he’d gone to the upper deck of the troopship and seen a big crowd milling around the foc’sle. A hated sergeant had disappeared during the night. Fell overboard! explained a private with a malevolent grin. Even with the world at war, it wasn’t until that moment that David had faced the reality of life beyond the tranquility of the New Hampshire towns and countryside

Reviews for Forbidden Zone

[henrimoreaux · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Forbidden Zone is the tale of a Special Operations Executive (SOE) operative deployed into France to help avert a catastrophe that would see Germany able to reverse the tide of battle after the successful Allied Normandy landings.It's based on real events, allegedly, regardless however it is a pretty interesting and entertaining story that does have an air of realism. I do think it's a little unfortunate that it's so short at a mere 217 pages though as I felt there could have been areas of more detail and/or more expansion, nonetheless it is a decent book that kept me my attention to the point that I read it cover to cover in an afternoon.