“That’s what it’s loaded with,” Philippe says. He’s busy showing Marie how to use the gun, though Rainy has the distinct impression that the demonstration is unnecessary. Unnecessary, but given the flush in Marie’s cheeks, not unwelcome.
“If she jams,” Hooper goes on, “you just pull the magazine, give ’er a tap on the ground, stick her back in, cock, and Bob’s your uncle.”
The plan is straightforward but not easy. The target is a German fuel depot supposedly containing hundreds if not thousands of fifty-five-gallon drums of gasoline. This is part of the fuel supply for the Das Reich, and Rainy can see definite advantages in knocking it out. In fact, she is rehearsing explanations in the back of her mind for her boss, Colonel Herkemeier.
They will arrive at the fuel dump from two directions. Étienne, Marie, and Wickham will walk up the railroad tracks and provide a diversion at exactly 1:05 a.m.
Philippe and Rainy will take a horse-drawn cart with one barrel of the cognac taken from their disabled truck. They will go right up to the gate of the dump and see if they find a willing buyer. But whether they are stopped at the gate or allowed inside, the 1:05 diversion will give them an opportunity to make their play.
A smaller detachment of freedom fighters, older men and some children, has been detailed to set up an ambush to slow any German reinforcements. The Germans won’t take long to get past the ambush, but every minute will help.
Simple. Simple and extremely dangerous. They could be stopped en route. They could be shot on sight at the gate. Étienne could fail to start a diversion. If he did start a diversion, the Germans may not be fooled. If Rainy and Philippe do make their way into the facility, they may still be shot or be burned in the explosion they hope to start.
There are, Rainy thinks as she sways along in the wooden seat of the cart, many ways to fail or die on this mission. And few ways to explain her decisions to Herkemeier.
The horse’s hooves make a pleasant clip-clop as they set off into the chilly night.
If they are stopped by French milice, Philippe will do the talking; if stopped by Germans, it will be up to Rainy to talk their way through. Philippe is dressed like an older man in a voluminous and oft-patched coat and a beret. He sits hunched over as he holds the reins. He will look to a casual observer like an old man out with his sister or wife.
At one in the morning.
“How do we start the fire?” Rainy asks as they roll slowly past a graveyard on one side of the road and a vineyard on the other.
“Shoot up the barrels and toss a Molotov cocktail,” he says. He points to his coat pocket. A damp rag protrudes from the mouth of a wine bottle.
“How far can you throw that?” she asks pointedly.
He hesitates. “Maybe not far enough,” he admits.
“Thousands of gallons—sorry, liters—of gasoline could make a hell of a big explosion.”
“I hope so,” he says. Then, lightly as if he doesn’t really need to ask, “What would your intelligence people say is the best way?”
“Something with a fuse if we had it.”
“We do not.”
Rainy shrugs. “Shoot holes then send a burning truck into it?”
“So . . . We figure it out when we get there?”
Rainy says nothing. She has a personal and professional dislike of half-baked plans. But she sees no alternative to improvising.
“I suppose Marie does not speak of me?” Philippe says, trying with no success at all to sound casual.
Rainy deflects. “How do you know her?”
“Oh, we knew each other before the war as children. Étienne as well. We are all from the same small town, though we moved away.”
“Why move away?”
He hands her the reins and begins to roll himself a cigarette. “Étienne got a job as a schoolteacher in Fouras. Their mother died, their father was taken away to Germany. Forced labor. So Marie went with Étienne.”
“And you?”
“I left when the war started. Oradour is a small town, full of friends and relatives. I knew I would resist, and I feared German reprisals.”
“Oradour.” Rainy’s French is good, but she struggles with the soft, throaty French r sounds.
“Oradour-sur-Glane,” he clarifies. “There’s a completely separate Oradour-sur-Vayres, just thirty-five kilometers away.”
“What, you’re short of names so you used that one twice?”
He smiles.
“She likes you,” Rainy says.
He turns so abruptly that the makings of his cigarette go flying. “Did she say that?”
Rainy shakes her head. “Didn’t need to. It’s obvious. Obvious to Étienne as well.”
“Étienne.”
She waits. It’s an interrogator’s trick the army taught her: most people find long silence intolerable and will say more. Philippe is not most people.
A truck full of French milice drives past, going the other way. They stiffen, but the truck rolls on until its taillights can no longer be seen.
They come to an intersection. The woods press close on one side, with fallow fields on the others. Philippe snaps the reins, and they plod on through. The wagon is the sum total of traffic at this time of night.
“That’s the ambush point,” Philippe says when they are through. “Our people are in the woods. If the Boche come this way . . . The gate is just around that bend.”
Rainy reaches under her coat to snap the safety off on her concealed Sten gun. Three magazines are in her left coat pocket. One will have to be snapped into place before she can use the Sten. She reaches behind and draws out her Walther, sticking it in her right pocket.
Slowly, slowly they come around the bend, and slowly, slowly the gate comes into view, barbed wire over wooden posts with a tall wooden gate. The gate is locked from the inside with a chain. A bored German soldier in an ill-fitting uniform stands with rifle hanging, chafing his hands and blowing into them to warm his fingers. A few feet behind him is an ugly, squat, concrete blockhouse with a wooden door, and beside it a firing slot, presumably housing a machine gun. Smoke curls from a pipe chimney.
“Not SS,” Rainy says.
“No,” Philippe agrees. “SS men don’t guard fuel dumps. He’ll most likely be some poor Pole or Ukrainian pressed into service. A lot of the less-than-front-line units have German officers and NCOs but pressed men from the east.”
The guard spots them and yells something over his shoulder while unlimbering his rifle. He holds the rifle at his waist. Rainy has not seen him touch the safety, but she cannot be sure.
Philippe waves his hand in a big arc and rattles off a quick stream of friendly sounding French, the most prominent words being cognac and officiers, officers.
The guard orders them to halt, and they do at a distance of a hundred yards. Too far. A helmetless sergeant comes out of the cement block hut, pushing his uniform into place and smoothing his hair, looking very much like a man who has been catching forty winks.
The NCO yells, “Was willst du hier?” What do you want here?
Rainy glances at her watch. 12:59 a.m. In six minutes Étienne is to provide a distraction.
Philippe offers an eloquent shrug of incomprehension. In French he explains that he and his sister are here to see whether the German officers are thirsty. Then he adds, “My sister speaks German.”
Rainy translates into German, and this seems to reassure the NCO. He waves them closer. But he also ducks back inside and reemerges with a helmet on his head and a Schmeisser in his hand.
Clop, clop, clop, the wagon advances.
They stop a second time, just before the gate. The German sergeant orders them to get down and come forward, hands in the air.
Step. Step. Step.
Two minutes.
They stop when they reach the gate. The NCO asks again for an explanation. Rainy takes her time about it, launching a long tale of how she and her brother just happened to find a barrel of cognac. This part of the story is clea
rly a lie and is meant to be understood as such by the German. He will of course assume that they have stolen the barrel. The sleepy NCO gets a shrewd look on his face, the kind of look people get when dealing with possibly useful criminals.
After a while the German impatiently silences Rainy with a raised hand. In response, as though trust has been established, Rainy lowers her hands.
The German does not like this. He orders her to open her coat. If she does, he cannot fail to see the Sten gun hanging low on its strap over her belly where the coat is at its blousiest.
She protests that she is not a whore! She has not come here to be insulted! Is she to undress for the amusement of this lowly sergeant?
It’s a convincing display of feminine modesty and French emotionalism—at least that’s how the German sees it. He grins and says something rude along the lines of not needing to rape some old widow woman in . . .
But then something triggers in the German’s mind. He frowns. Old woman? He leans forward to peer closely at her.
From out of the night comes a burst of automatic fire. The German jerks his head left, realizes what is happening, snaps back, raises his Schmeisser, stops, stares, and claws at his chest where the bullet from Rainy’s Walther has entered.
Bang!
She aims again, shoots the young guard as he fumbles with his gun, once, twice, then shoots the staggering sergeant carefully in the head.
“I’ll get the bolt cutters!” Philippe says, but before he can move Rainy has shot the lock on the gate. She draws the gate open.
Philippe, ever the maquis fighter, grabs the Schmeisser and a spare clip from the dead sergeant. German voices shout. From the woods beside the dump comes another burst of Sten gunfire. A hand-cranked alarm starts to whine.
No grenades. A weak and only partly effective distraction, and no guarantee that the small garrison of Germans will run that way rather than toward the sound of a handgun at the gate.
“Do we go?” Rainy demands.
“We go,” Philippe says.
Rainy draws out her Sten gun and snaps in a magazine, while Philippe checks his purloined Schmeisser. They are through the gate, and now Rainy sees the fuel dump proper. There are two massive pyramids of fifty-five-gallon drums, stacked as much as nine barrels high. A loader sits parked. Two trucks are parked to the right. To the left a low, wooden barracks spews German soldiers, uniforms askew, rifles being hurriedly loaded on the run.
The Germans are more than a hundred feet away, too far for accuracy, but Philippe and Rainy both pivot and spray automatic fire that may hit no one, but succeeds in causing the Germans to dive to the ground.
Where the hell are Étienne and Marie and Wickham?
Rainy and Philippe leap to cover behind a parked forklift.
“Go!” Philippe orders. “I’ll hold them off!”
Rainy knows better than to argue. There is no saving Philippe by standing at his side; the only salvation will come from making a very big fire.
Rainy shrugs off her coat and runs. The shoes, chosen to look like typical footwear for a working-class Frenchwoman well into an era of shortages, begin to come apart, one sole loose and flapping absurdly as she runs toward the closest pyramid of fuel.
She spots cover of a sort, a low stack of empty jerry cans, the familiar five-gallon steel containers. She drops to her knees behind them, pushes the selector switch to fully automatic, and sprays the pyramid of barrels with the rest of her first clip, pauses to reload, and empties the second thirty-two rounds into the barrels, bullets punching holes with heavy metallic thunk sounds. A bright light on a wire strung between poles snaps on and blinds her a little so she cannot see the streams of gasoline, but she can smell them.
Behind her Philippe fires in careful three-round bursts, keeping the Germans pinned down. It won’t last long. These may not be frontline troops, but if there’s a single living officer or NCO he’ll have them organized for a flanking counterattack within minutes.
And now . . . only now . . . does it occur to Rainy that she has no lighter. No matches. No way to make a flame.
She looks around her frantically. Empty jerry cans. Leaking barrels. A pump. Nothing!
She feels a wetness in the foot with the disintegrating shoe. Gasoline is pooling around her.
Philippe! He’ll have matches or a lighter. He’d have to, he smokes. She dashes back to him.
“I need a match!”
He reaches inside his shirt and pulls out a small box of matches. Then the Molotov cocktail in his coat.
Rainy grabs and races back, but now a file of German soldiers appears, creeping cautiously between the two barrel pyramids. Surely, Rainy thinks, they smell the gas, they must be splashing through it!
But this is not the time to worry about these Germans who may not all be Germans; these men in gray who may be unwilling cannon fodder for the Third Reich.
She looks down, finds the edge of the advancing wave of gasoline, makes sure she is outside of it, flicks a match which, amazingly, catches on the first try. She lights the rag wick, steps back, and smashes the bottle hard against the nearest barrel.
There is a small whoosh as the Molotov cocktail catches. Flames race along the ground, leap up to the still-draining barrels, and . . . Whoooosh! A small fireball sucks air toward it, feeds itself on this fuel, heats the gasoline around it, forming a vapor mist that explodes with a noise like a million matches struck at once.
Ba-WHOOOOSH!
Then a second explosion, a flat, smacking sound like a big piece of dropped plywood, and a flaming barrel flies through the air like an out-of-control Roman candle, spraying burning fuel. Flame spreads quickly across the spilled gasoline. And it spreads to the half-dozen soldiers who shout in fear, crying out in words that are not German.
Rainy does not want to see what comes next. She pivots, races back to Philippe, fires a few rounds over his shoulder at the Germans beyond, and yells, “We need to get out of here!”
Philippe nods. Their horse-drawn wagon is still where they left it, but that fact is overwhelmed in importance by the sudden sharp crackle of gunfire coming from down the road.
“The ambush!” Philippe says.
Somehow German forces have already been sent, triggering the ambush.
Impossible! Not even the Germans react that quickly!
But that’s beside the point, because what matters is that the road is closed to them. The only option left is the railroad tracks, which are beyond the now-towering wall of furious flames and boiling smoke.
Flames lick at the tires of the forklift, their only cover. The heat is intense and mounting by the second. Rainy’s skin feels stretched as tight as a drum skin. She smells her hair crisping.
“We take this!” Philippe yells, and smacks a hand against the forklift.
“You drive,” Rainy says.
Philippe jumps into the single seat. Rainy climbs on the back. Two Germans rush toward them, one spraying his Schmeisser, the second on fire and screaming as he runs in panic, trying to outrun the flames burning his flesh. Rainy shoots them both, finishing her last clip. She grabs Philippe’s gun as the forklift engine catches and the vehicle jerks forward.
They veer away from what is now a mountain of flame, jetting hundreds of feet in the air, turning night into an orange-lit nightmare of eerie shadows.
“Hang on!” Philippe yells, and Rainy sees that he means to crash right through the chain-link fence separating the dump from the railroad tracks. She grabs a handhold but the sudden crunch of impact stops the loader and knocks Rainy off. She rolls on the ground, quickly pops up, and fires a burst through the smoke toward whoever might still be pursuing them.
Philippe backs up, then rams the loader forward again, aiming for one of the poles, which this time tilts away. The fence is down, but the loader is stalled in place, hung up on the fence, so Philippe and Rainy both race on foot through a narrow band of woods, toward the train tracks, where they turn north, running flat-out along the ties until they s
pot a body ahead. A body with blond hair.
“Marie!” Philippe cries.
She is alive. Hair a mess, clothing dirty, but alive. There is a red mark on the side of her face. A bump swells beneath the flesh of her temple. Her Sten gun lies beside her, and Rainy scoops it up.
“Can you move?” Rainy demands.
Marie nods.
Philippe and Rainy haul Marie to her feet and they run. Rainy pops the clip on Marie’s Sten as Marie gasps out her story.
“Étienne! My own brother,” she says. “A traitor! He was calling to a German patrol. Wickham shot Étienne, but before he died Étienne shot the Englishman. Both are dead!”
At least a dozen rounds are gone from Marie’s clip.
Rainy does not relax her helpful grip on Marie’s arm, but as they run a terrible sadness wells within Rainy.
There is a traitor, but that traitor is not Étienne.
13
RIO RICHLIN—NORMANDY, NAZI-OCCUPIED FRANCE
“Dig in,” Rio says.
They may be the two hardest words she’s ever spoken. Ordering her squad to dig in means she, too, must dig a fighting hole, and she, like every one of them, is exhausted to the point of sleepwalking.
They have gained the heights. They’ve moved a few hundred yards inland. To the amazed relief of everyone on or near Omaha Beach, the dreaded Luftwaffe, Germany’s air force, has been nearly invisible. But word has come down to expect a counterattack at any moment. The Germans will certainly counterattack, the only question is whether it will come in the form of small probing attacks or full panzer divisions.
Night is falling on the longest day in any of their young lives. The platoon is lined up fairly tightly with a massive hedge to their rear and an open field ahead. They sit slumped forward or lying on their backs, legs extended, a row of men and women so destroyed they don’t look any livelier than the dead soldiers on the beach.
The field, perhaps an acre in size, is bordered by the same hedges. Rio’s squad is positioned closest to a wooden-gated gap. In the field are three cows taking turns moaning loudly. Rio knows the sound well—it’s the distress cry of cows who have not been milked, so their udders are painfully distended. For years Rio had the chore of milking her mother’s small herd before leaving for school. Since she was twelve, she’d been waking up an hour earlier and stumbling out into misty darkness to fill buckets with milk. And on the one or two occasions where she petulantly avoided her chores, the cows would be making just this sound when she came home from school. She had faced her mother’s raised eyebrow and irritated expression.