The Fifth Column Read online

  THE FIFTH COLUMN

  James Garcia Woods

  © James Garcia Woods 2002

  James Garcia Woods has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2002 by Noche Flug.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  PROLOGUE

  As the hands of the ancient town hall clock creaked round towards midnight, the villagers of San Antonio de la Jara began to trickle into the main square, and soon almost the entire population was gathered together.

  Most of the small towns on the plain held their fiestas during the warmer, gentler summer days, but San Antonio took a kind of perverse pride in the fact that the obscure saint who was honored in their pueblo had his day amidst the chill winds of February.

  Strictly speaking, the saint in question – a minor martyr of the early church was not being honored at all that year. His church had been burned down, the fat parish priest had fled. And even as the church still burned, the saint’s statue – along with that of the Blessed Virgin – had been paraded through the smoke-filled streets to invite derision, instead of the customary veneration. The war which had torn the country apart had also all-but killed religion – as it had killed so many other traditions.

  Yet the expulsion of God and all his angels did not prevent the people gathered in the Plaza Mayor from throwing themselves into the celebrations with a gusto which was uniquely and gloriously Spanish. If anything, the villagers displayed even more exuberance at these fiestas than ever before, because they were acutely aware that although life had never been anything but hard, it could be about to get much harder. They knew – even if many of them would not admit it – that not all the sons and brothers who were fighting on the front line would eventually return. They understood – without actually putting it into words – that the day might soon come when a hostile army would appear on the horizon, and a fresh wave of killings would begin. And so they ate and they drank, they danced and they sang – and they told themselves that if this were to be the last fiesta they ever attended, they would make sure it was a good one.

  The tall American standing on the edge of the crowd shook his head in wonder. Spain was not just another country, he thought. It was another world – a world he could never even have begun to imagine back home, but one which he had now embraced and was more than willing to die for.

  He let his mind drift back to New York City, where his epic journey had started.

  “Tell no one where you’re going,” the secretary of the selection board had told him, as he’d stood there, bursting with pride that he’d been chosen as one of the vanguard. “No one! Do you understand? Not your friends! Not your family! Your departure must be kept secret at all cost.”

  It had been an impossible instruction to obey, of course. He had confided in his favorite cousin, who had passed the information on to his friends, and when he finally made his way down to the docks, it had been as part of a small procession.

  But he had not been alone in his weakness – in his betrayal of Party discipline! Once he arrived at the pier, he came across at least another hundred young men like himself.

  All of them carrying the identical cardboard suitcases that the Party had issued them with.

  All of them surrounded by a knot of anxious relatives.

  There had been government agents on the dock, too – hard faced officials who asked them where they were going and warned them that it was illegal to travel to Spain. And so all the earnest young men, many of whom had never told a real lie in their lives, made up stories – that they were writing a book, that they were going to search for their roots in France, that they were interested in learning how to produce wine. The government agents had not believed them, but since it was still permitted to go to France, all they actually could do was to issue dark warnings about what might happen to the travelers if they attempted to cross the border into a country split in two by a bloody civil war.

  The American grinned as he remembered the mixture of farce and desperation that border crossing had actually involved. The volunteers had been taken by train to Perpignan, where, to avoid being conspicuous, they had been split into smaller groups of around a dozen men each.

  His group had been summoned to a café in the center of the town.

  “You go tonight,” their contact had told them. “Now listen very carefully, and follow my instructions to the letter. Until you reach the taxis which are waiting for you at the edge of Perpignan, you must show no sign that you know one another. I will leave this café first, and you will follow me, one at a time. You must always maintain a distance of at least thirty meters between yourself and the man in front of you. Is that clear?”

  Had he ever really imagined that a group of twelve young men – obviously foreign and carrying identical cheap cardboard suitcases – could walk through a small French town, in an awkward crocodile, without being noticed, the American wondered, looking back on it.

  If he had thought it, he’d have soon seen the error of his ways. Hundreds of locals, out for their evening strolls, had spotted them and called, “Viva España.” A gendarme on duty at one of the intersections had even gone so far as to stop the traffic for them, and given each one of them the clenched-fist Communist salute as he passed by.

  But there had been nothing even mildly amusing about the next stage of the journey – scaling the Pyrenees. The French smuggler who guided them had taken the crossing in his stride, but after several hours of steady climbing – up from the mild foothills into the icy mountains – many of the young Americans would have been happy to simply lie down and die.

  Despite the hardship, they made it.

  They had made it!

  They were not yet at the front, doing what they had come to do, but at least they were in Spain, preparing for their great adventure.

  The young American frowned. He should not think of as an adventure, he thought, rebuking himself in the absence of anyone else to do the job for him. He was not in Spain for the excitement and the personal glory. He was there as one tiny part of a larger movement which would bring fascism to its knees. And yet it was hard not to feel the thrill of anticipation – to see himself, in a minor way at least – as heroic.

  He let his gaze sweep across the square.

  At the local people, dressed in their Sunday-best clothes.

  At his comrades, wearing a motley collection of uniforms, many of which had been bought at army surplus stores back in the States.

  He examined the houses which ringed and bou
nded the square. They were three or four stories high – though they had surrendered a portion of their bottom floors to create a covered arcade which offered protection from both the sun and the rain. The beams of these houses were seasoned wood, the supporting pillars made of stone. There was not a steel girder in sight.

  The whole place breathed history, he told himself. And when he said ~~history~~, that was exactly what he meant. He was by no means an educated man – not in the formal sense of the word – but it did not require years of study to get a sense of the atmosphere of the place, to feel the impulses, the hopes and fears, of countless generations reverberating through the soles of his thick boots.

  The town had existed when Columbus set off to discover the New World. Saint Teresa of Avila had established a convent here when his own country had not been a country at all, but merely a loose collection of isolated settlements. But, on one level at least, the past was not important – because it was only by ensuring the future that the past would be allowed to survive.

  Earlier in the day, fireworks had arrived from Valencia – the town which had housed the government since it fled from Madrid. Now the rockets were in place, the giant Catherine wheels had been firmly fixed to wooden posts, and the display was about to begin.

  It was a pity to have to miss the fireworks, the American told himself as he made his way round the edge of the square, but to a man who had pledged his whole life to the betterment of generations as yet unborn, it was only the smallest of sacrifices to make.

  He turned onto one of the streets which led out of the plaza. The houses on both sides of him were in complete darkness now that the people had congregated in the main square.

  Or rather, ~~nearly~~ all the people had congregated, he reminded himself.

  Apart from him, there was one other person at least, who, because of the urgent matter which needed attending to, had turned his back on pleasure.

  The blackened shape of the church loomed up in front of him. Located as it was, in the center of the village, setting it ablaze must have posed considerable threat to the houses surrounding it. Yet such was the hatred of the Church in this area that, the American was willing to wager, the inhabitants of these houses had been as enthusiastic as anyone else about setting the fire.

  He reached the burned-out building, and stepped through the gap where had once been a solid, hardwood door. The walls had survived the conflagration, but the roof had collapsed, and looking up, he could see the stars glittering in the black Castilian sky.

  As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he found he could distinguish the far wall of the church, in front of which the altar and its accompanying statutory had stood. But he could detect no movement – no sign there was another living soul inside the shell.

  He shivered, though not because of the cold. He had long decided that Marx was right when he’d said that religion was the opiate of the people, yet he could not completely cast out the feeling of awe he had experienced as a child when, every Sunday, his mother would take him to their local church to praise a god who, it was promised, would one day deliver justice to his people.

  Standing there, in what had once been the aisle, he remembered the feel of his mother’s hand – damp yet reassuring – and the sight of the big man in the pulpit who had talked with absolute certainty about the days of glory to come.

  The memory made him laugh. It was a soft laugh, yet, in the absolute stillness of the ruined church, it seemed almost like a scream.

  From the square came the sound of the first explosion.

  Soon, the night sky would be lit up with crimson and yellow sparks.

  Soon, there would be the roar of battle without any of the horror which followed such conflicts.

  He strained his ears, trying to isolate sounds of movement within the church from the cacophony which had begun outside.

  “Is there anybody there?” he asked.

  But only the silence answered him.

  He was beginning to feel slightly nervous – though he had no idea why he should – and despite the fact that it was a cold night, he felt drops of sweat starting to form on his powerful neck.

  “I ain’t here to play no games,” he said.

  He realized he was speaking louder than was strictly necessary, as if to give himself courage.

  But why should he need to do that?

  Perhaps because, though he had no evidence to back it up, he was sure that he was being watched.

  “You said somethin’ about there bein’ a traitor in the battalion,” he called to the silent, unseen observer. “If you’re right about that, then we gotta talk it through – while there’s still time.”

  He heard the banshee wail of the rockets, and the bang-bang-bang of the ripraps. But they were all some distance away, and belonged to a world in which the joy of living was all that mattered – and in which treachery played no part.

  “I’m gonna count to ten, an’ then I’m headin’ back for the square,” he announced. “One... two... three…”

  The frenzy of noise from the plaza swelled as he counted. The firework display was approaching its climax.

  “... four... five... six...” he continued.

  The flash and explosion from deeper inside the church came so close to one another that it was impossible for his mind to separate them. The pain – burning its way into his chest – arrived a split second later.

  Breathing was suddenly an almost impossible task, and his sturdy legs no longer seemed capable of supporting his weight. So this was what it was like to be shot, he thought, as his knees buckled underneath him and he fell in a crumpled heap on the stone floor.

  It hurt more than he had ever imagined it could. Yet at the same time he felt a sense of inevitability – as if it had always been intended that this pain should be his.

  There was the sound of footsteps now, starting from behind one of the store pillars, beating out a heavy tattoo as they got closer. The American would have liked to raise his head – to look up at the man who was approaching him – but his body was working so hard at registering the pain that it had no strength left for any other activity.

  The sound of the footsteps ceased, and he could see a pair of boots a few inches in front of his eyes.

  From somewhere deep inside himself, he found the power to speak.

  “Why?” he grunted, blowing a bubble of blood as the word emerged from his mouth. “What have I done wro...?”

  The figure beside him bent his knees, and something hard and cold touched the fallen man’s head. A pistol barrel! It could only be a pistol barrel!

  Let me live! the wounded man pleaded silently. I don’t mind dying – but not like this! Spare me, so that I can at least do some good before I go.

  The man with the gun breathed in deeply. Perhaps he could read his victim’s thoughts and had some sympathy with them. Or perhaps he needed the extra air because killing another human being – even when it was necessary – was still a momentous act. Whatever his reasoning, it did not deter him from squeezing the trigger which propelled the bullet into the fallen man’s brain.

  There was one last wild burst of explosions from the square, and the fiestas were over for another year – or maybe forever.

  The killer buried his gun deeply in his jacket pocket, and walked quickly away from the scene of his crime.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Paco Ruiz stood on one of the middle rungs of his ladder, surveying the hundred or so meters of ploughed-up no-man’s-land which ran from the edge of his own trench to the line of sandbags marking the beginning of the fascists’ trenches. Seen from the air, he imagined, the trenches would be gaping wounds, savagely slashed across the innocent landscape, but the men on the ground – like him – had a very different perspective. To them, the trenches were a series of uncovered tunnels which cramped and confined them – and all too often served as a gateway to death.

  Earlier in the day – before the clouds had dispersed and the sun made one last half-hearted a
ppearance before starting to set behind the hills – it had been raining down mercilessly on the Jarama Valley, and Paco found himself wondering if the enemy were feel-ing as wet and miserable as he was. He guessed they were, though he couldn’t know for sure.

  There were so many things he couldn’t know for sure – starting with the composition of the enemy forces. It was possible that the men who fired the odd, half-hearted pot shot at him were regular Spanish troops – soldiers who were already serving in the army when the war started, and had followed their rebel generals because that was what soldiers did if they wished to avoid being shot. Or they could be conscripts – peasant boys pressed into the army once the rebels had overrun their villages. They might be Moors, the hardened troopers who General Franco had used with so much effect to crush their own countrymen in Morocco – and his own countrymen during the Asturian miners’ strike of 1934. They could even be Irishmen – General O’Duffy, with his six hundred Irish volunteers, was rumored to be somewhere in the area.

  Whatever their nationality, they weren’t going anywhere else in the foreseeable future. The battle for the Jarama Valley had been hard fought – 25,000 casualties on his side, 20,000 on the other – but for the moment there was an almost perfect balance of forces, and wherever the breakthrough in the war came, it would not be on this front.

  “Excuse me, captain,” said a voice to his left.

  Paco climbed back down into the trench, and turned to face the man who had addressed him. He was a young private – probably no more than seventeen or eighteen.

  In the early days – Good God, had he really just thought about them as the early days, when the period he was talking about was less than nine months earlier? – well, back then, anyway, the militiamen Paco had fought with had all been around his own age, but the Republic’s new regular army seemed to populated entirely by men who were little more than babies.

  The private was standing there awkwardly, aware that he was being inspected by one of his superiors and seemingly unable to find the courage to speak again until he was spoken to.