by Manda Scott
Céline’s hair shines in the late evening light. Véronique is back again and they stand together, arm in arm. The men know something has changed. Even those outside the central corps, who have not yet been told what is happening, pat her on the shoulder and raise toasts in her direction. Céline is their mascot: along with Fabien, she is lucky, and so Véronique, too, now brings them luck.
Sophie sits on an oak log, leaning shoulder to shoulder with Paul Rey. Toni Gaspari is on her other side, talking with Thierry, who was the best sniper in the Maquis until Toni came along. They could have been rivals, but the Frenchman is too old to take umbrage, and instead they share kills – I’ll take the left, you take the right. The Boche officers now drive in fully armoured vehicles, if they drive at all.
Watching them, Sophie thinks she might like to become a sniper one day, but knows she has not the patience. Besides, her killing is done up close. Toni Gaspari shoots them; she cuts their throats if they are still breathing. They trust each other and there’s a peace between them that she has rarely found with another man. He leans on her and she leans back and thinks this might be what having a brother is like; a very silent brother, who watches her back and doesn’t care who she sleeps with.
And now here is Laurence Vaughan-Thomas, who is not like a brother at all, more like … she doesn’t know what he’s like. In some ways, perhaps the ways that count, they are too alike, she and he. In others, he is so distant as to be of a different species.
He has spent the past two hours at the radio cave, which is never a good thing; London gives him orders and he doesn’t always agree with them. He catches her eyes now, and she follows him away from the light of the fire, to where they can sit and watch the last light of the sun stitch sky to earth.
‘What?’
He hands her the transcript. His handwriting is solid and blocky, so that it’s like reading a type-print.
Laurence is Hermes, the messenger – also the god of thieves. The Brigadier is Zeus, the Allfather, this much is obvious. Beyond it, their conversations are as cryptic as the messages sent to and from Céline.
She hands him back the slip of paper. ‘Translate for me, please?’
‘My father’s most hated event was a wedding: any wedding. The Cousins are the American Seventh Army, which is approaching from the south and getting closer to us by the day. They are currently the same distance from us as my Uncle Charles – Céline’s father, who lives in Cambridge – is to the family’s stately home, which is colloquially known as The Bog: essentially a six-hour drive away. Thus, from Saint-Cybard to them is six hours’ driving time on good roads. TPTB are The Powers That Be. In my uncle’s frame of reference, that equates to either Churchill or Roosevelt. He doesn’t deal with underlings.’
‘And High Flyer, who is also, I assume, Flyboy?’
‘That’s our friend Icarus, who flew too near the sun and fell to his death. Or not, in this case. He’s been providing us with solid intelligence for years now and we have a duty to help him, besides which, he claims to have a dozen agents embedded deep inside the French Communist party and twice that number highly placed in the Soviet Union, which makes him, frankly, worth any kind of risk.’ JJ was with the communists, once, and has contacts there still. And Fabien, of course, is an active member. Sophie makes a note to tell them that there are moles within their ranks. Aloud, she says, ‘Your people think there will be war with Russia when this is over?’
‘There might be. We have to act as if there will be.’
‘And so we are disposable, while Icarus is not?’
He has to think about this. ‘I imagine that would be hotly denied were we to say it aloud in the hearing of the high-ups, but yes, essentially that’s it. Tomorrow is probably our last chance to get him out before he is either sent east or dies gloriously, but pointlessly, slowing the Americans down for the two whole minutes it takes them to drive their tanks over his body. The wedding is going to give us the ultimate cover to extract him. The question is, will you help?’
‘Those are my orders. Even if I have Hitler himself in my sights, I’m to drop everything to get him out.’
‘I know, but still …’
He understands her too well. ‘I will kill Kramme. Whatever else is going on, I will kill Kramme. You can’t take that from me. But if I can help your agent escape in the process, I will do it.’
‘Thank you.’ He pats her on the shoulder, a trait that has begun recently and is, she thinks, friendlier than it seems. ‘Call Paul and Toni, then, can you? I have to have a workable plan ready to send back to the Brigadier by eight o’clock tonight.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
SAINT-CYBARD AND ARC-SOUS-MONTAGNE
4 September 1944
EVEN IN SEPTEMBER, dawn comes fast to the mountain. Amongst the Maquisards, few words are spoken. They dress, eat, check weapons, swiftly. Céline threads between the fires, checking their checks of their weapons, giving encouragement where it’s needed, or caution.
They take six trucks. Those who know the plan spread themselves out, one in each truck, so that when they reach the bottom of the hill, they can say, turn right, not left. We are not going to Saint-Cybard. Look – Céline is already turning. Follow her truck. And when they pull in at a ruined farmstead and alight, it is Céline who lines them up in ranks, as if they were in the army, and issues the orders. We are going to the churchyard. We wait until the bells ring and the congregation walks out of the church – and then we take Kramme.
For the bulk of them, this is news: only a very few were brought into the planning. There are too many semi-strangers here whose ultimate loyalties are unknown.
‘Kramme’s here?’ The question goes around. ‘Kramme is getting married?’
‘Is he marrying a Frenchwoman?’ Ancil Roche asks. He is a big man with black teeth and halitosis.
He’s brash and vulgar and thoroughly dislikeable. In recent weeks, he has been foremost amongst those calling for the summary execution of all collaborator women. Now, he leers at Céline. ‘One of the Saint-Cybard whores?’
Laurence would dearly like to strike him. Céline studies him for long, thoughtful moments before she answers. ‘Luce Moreau has put herself in the most appalling danger specifically in order to bring about this moment. She is a member of the Maquis as much as any of us, and has been so for far longer than most. If you touch a hair of her head, I will see you shot for murder. I am serious about this.’
Céline is leaner than she was, and grimmer. Ancil Roche does not have what it takes to answer back. He looks down and away and joins the small band of followers these men always attract, the bane of any army.
Céline ignores him. Her orders are crisp. ‘Stay silent on the approach. Do not smoke. Do not cough. Do not speak. As we wait behind the wall, do not give us away or we lose our chance to get Kramme. On Fabien’s signal, go. If you move before he orders it, I’ll shoot you myself.’
Sophie is in the lead truck. Laurence did not – could not – show her the rest of the cipher exchange with the Brigadier:
Laurence doesn’t want it to be necessary. He wants her to keep killing Boche with the alacrity she has shown heretofore. In battle, she kills with a single-minded dedication, and most of it at close quarters.
In many ways, she carries more luck with her than Céline does, but the men do not view her as their mascot. They laugh with her, and make coarse, affable jokes about her affair with Paul Rey, but there’s a grimness to her that causes them to keep well away on the field of battle and nobody was in a hurry to pile into the truck with her.
She follows Fabien out of the truck. Alain Devereaux still looks as much like a teenager as he did when Laurence first met him in Arisaig, but his men adore him, and one day soon he will make a good minister of finance, or perhaps even a president: nothing is impossible. If one hundred and four Maquisards of mixed political affiliation are prepared to follow him through all the vicissitudes of war, hundreds of thousands could easily follow him in the years
of peace.
For now, Fabien leads his band over warm grass, ducking low through an orchard to the wall. It is barely four feet high, dry stone, loose in places, with plates of lichen furring the contours. He kneels and places his eye to a gap. Behind wait his dry-mouthed warriors. Keeping so many silent is hard for this length of time, but the forest is a quiet place; they have all taken time to stand beneath the trees and listen to the rush of their own heartbeat, even Ancil Roche.
It occurs to Laurence that he and his fellow Jedburghs are the only ones who don’t know what Kramme looks like, and that it would be good to see him before he is shot so full of holes that there’s nothing to see. If Sophie wants to be first to kill him, she’ll have to run spectacularly fast.
Finding his own gap in the wall, he peers through at the enemy. Fifty yards in front and to his right is a small, stone-built church, with a lean bell tower. To the rear of which is, apparently, a small door. From this, so they have been told, Icarus intends to exit, at the precise moment when Kramme and his new bride emerge from the front and pose for the ciné camera. The bells are their signal: thirty seconds after they start, the action will begin.
The wall that surrounds the church encloses a cemetery that could grace any small – really small – English village. There is a patch of stubby grass that looks as if someone has swung a scythe over it in a hurry, and on this stands an elongated camera atop a tripod. A Boche corporal stands behind it, bored.
Laurence looks away. He has never come to the point where he can stare a man in the face – even at this distance – see the planes of his features, the memories, the hopes … and then kill him the way the snipers do.
Snipers are at the heart of the Icarus plan, reckless and desperate as it is. If it has gone well so far, Toni Gaspari and Thierry should by now be in place, rifles steady. When the shooting starts, they are to kill the drivers of all four staff cars and steal the one Thierry estimates to have the greatest speed. They are wearing stolen Boche uniforms and have three American uniforms in the back of the car. When they near the Seventh Army, they will swap and so hope not to be shot.
This is the extent of their strategy. Laurence and Paul Rey – and Sophie if she is remotely willing to follow orders – are to prevent any of the Boche from harming Icarus as he runs from church to car. After that, they can join in with shooting whatever is left of Kramme.
He backs away from the wall and lets out the breath he has been holding. Breathing in again, the air is clear and still, and the smell is of grass and last night’s cigarettes, of men’s sweat and gun oil. He counts the minutes by the concussion of his heart. His whole body shakes to each beat. He is fitter now than he has ever been, fitter even than he was in Arisaig when he had been carrying logs up hills for weeks. Unexpectedly, he finds himself happier than he has any right to be. Whatever else his life brings, he is grateful to have been a part of this.
A blackbird lets loose a sharp, scolding chuck. Inside the church a hymn rises, of massed male voices in harmony, beautiful in its way. There was a time when he loved German more than English and he hears it now, and knows a passing nostalgia.
And then the bell tolls. By a miracle it is whole, uncracked, and has not been melted down for war munitions.
Still, Fabien doesn’t move. Laurence is locked between men: Paul Rey, Daniel, René of the ruined hand, JJ, who is a rock of solid muscle. Céline is at his far side, and Fabien, but it is Sophie who presses against him, a hair trigger ready to fire.
Inside the church, the hymn stops. A priest speaks a last blessing. Amen. Fabien is so still. How can he be still when Laurence can feel a scream rise in his own throat? Over this wall, across the meadow, over the cemetery wall and then death, one way or the other. Sixty German officers, maybe more. Every Boche of any rank from a fifty-mile radius is here, and they’re all desperate. The British are close. The Americans are closer. Getting married here, today, is an insane act of defiance. Or it’s a trap. This is possible. They know the risk.
Please, God in whom I have never had faith … Please let the plans work, both of them.
Please—
‘Go!’
Up. Up. Up. A hand on the wall, up and over. And run.
God, she’s fast, Céline. She’s over the wall before Laurence is fully on his feet, but he’s always been quick out of the blocks and he’s a bare half-stride behind her by the time they pass the nearest yew trees, and JJ, René and Daniel are to his left and Sophie to his right and all he can hear is the rattle-bark of the Stens and the shouts of German officers who have trained for years and do not panic, and the screams of the few who do, and a single shot from his far right that might be – please God, let it be – a rifle, or perhaps two, fired so close together that he can’t separate them.
And then again, and it is two. Toni and Thierry, each outdoing the other. Four shots in all.
Kramme! There, on the church steps, a bluster of silver and gold braid on crisp, black wool. And beside Kramme, his bride, ivory to his jet. This must be Luce Moreau, bravest of the brave, standing tall and proud in white satin and lace. She is not screaming. She is shouting, pointing, frantic, directing them out, past the church.
What?
His eyes meet hers, a chance moment, frozen in the bloody chaos. Laurence reads fury on her face and doesn’t understand it, but he has no time, he has to break the contact, duck and roll. Shots hiss and spit from his left. Out of the side of his eye, he sees the German corporal with the big camera on the tripod. He is panning round, slowly, as if the lens were a machine gun. Laurence lifts his Sten, flips it to single shot and kills him, all without thinking, without even rising to his feet. Not so hard after all, then, to kill a man on whose face he has looked. He turns back to see that, at last, Kramme is running away from the church. Fabien is after him, and Céline, JJ and Daniel, René of the ruined hand …
Sophie is not here. Nor Paul Rey.
His orders are redundant. None of the Boche is trying to get to the back of the church. They are all being heroes, sprinting forward to make a wall between the retreating Kramme and the Maquis: grey uniforms and black, sparks of gold, flesh and blood. Why do men do this?
Where is Sophie?
Instinct thrusts Laurence down again. He hears a round smack into the wall of the church above him. He rolls away and comes up with the church to his left, running back towards the Icarus door.
Two hundred yards ahead is a road, at the edge of which is parked a row of German staff cars. Toni and Thierry have done all that was asked of them. Dead drivers lie on the blooded earth and – yes! – a single Mercedes convertible is rolling forward at walking pace with Thierry at the wheel.
A lone Boche is running towards the open passenger door, stripping off his jacket as he does so: Icarus is keeping his side of the bargain.
Toni Gaspari is ahead of him. As Laurence watches, the little Italian leaps into the rear seat facing backwards, and props his rifle on the back of the bench. His head is bare. He, too, has thrown off the German uniform. He never wanted it in the first place. He is shouting at someone.
‘Sophie!’
Laurence hears the word faintly, in echo.
Sophie? So she is here, not back at the church, killing Kramme. He is surprised at that. He looks around and she is ahead and to his right, running at an angle towards the road, to the car and – what? – even as he watches, she lifts her Sten and fires an eight-shot burst at Icarus. The range is too far for accuracy; a line of rounds smacks up dirt from the road a good twenty yards short of the running man.
‘Sophie!’ Toni Gaspari shouts again from the car. ‘Stop!’
She doesn’t stop. She fires another long, raking burst that empties the gun so that she has to change the magazine, but she can do that on the run, Laurence knows this – he taught her. Jesus Christ and all his little fishes, is she working for bloody Kramme after all?
‘Sophie! Stop!’
Laurence is as fast as Céline now, faster. But Sophie is thirty ya
rds ahead and she has her new magazine in, and while she may be doing her very best to destroy the car and all its occupants, the thing about Toni is that, whatever she has done, whoever she is working for, he is never going to shoot back. Not at her.
Laurence is gaining ground. A dozen strides and he’ll reach her, maybe less. Laurence hasn’t fired yet. Be ready to pull the plug. He might want to, but his fingers are not willing. If he can kill a Boche corporal, surely he can kill a traitor? He raises his Sten.
Ten more yards.
Icarus, sprinting like a man possessed, reaches the car and throws himself into the back seat, leaving the door swinging. The tyres scream on the road as Thierry puts his foot to the floor and slews it out into the road. Sophie’s mouth is open in a silent scream and Laurence, slowing, sees her go down on one knee and flip her Sten to single, take aim and fire one final shot.
There’s a foot, maybe less, between the two men in the back seat: the German and the Italian. And the car is moving forwards and sideways with exhaust smoke pluming the air. It cannot be that she was aiming for Toni.
But that is who she hits.
A plash of red and Toni Gaspari, sole survivor of a bloody Boche assault on his village, spins back and round and the swerving car completes a balletic pirouette that jettisons him from the back seat onto the road.
Icarus is gone and Sophie has stopped shooting. Maybe her gun has jammed or is empty or … it doesn’t matter; Laurence is on her, and he doesn’t care. He slings his Sten over his shoulder, draws his Colt and places the muzzle against her skull, at the back, angled down. He is breathing hard as a raced-out horse. His pulse pushes dark flashes across his eyes. ‘I should kill you now.’
‘You should have done it months ago.’ Her voice is free of all inflection. Her gaze rests on Paul Rey, who is here now, his face a chalky grey, his freckles splashed like old blood across his nose. He has seen Toni, but his focus is on Sophie and hers is on him. Laurence is irrelevant. Paul says, slowly, carefully, ‘Sophie, we didn’t know. We. Did. Not. Know.’
