Kranz worked the fuse into the pliant material. With one hand he opened the box of matches. Though his right arm hung limp, he could still grip a little with his hand. He held the matchbox and drew a match along the coarse strip. A flame sputtered and fizzed to life. He touched the match to the end of the fuse. It hissed and immediately started to burn down.
One, counted Kranz.
He dropped the matches and fled. He ran past the prostrate body of Vicq and straight to the front of the truck.
Fourteen.
He grabbed the truck’s hand crank and rolled it clockwise with all his might. Nothing. Barely a sound.
Eighteen.
He rolled back and cranked right. Nothing.
Twenty.
One more go, and then he would just have to sprint for it. He rolled the crank counter-clockwise, put his weight on it till he felt it resist, then thrust down with everything he had.
Cug, cha–chug–a–chug.
The truck was alive.
Twenty-two.
Kranz ran and jumped inside, when something dawned on him. He had only passed one body, that of the smaller man.
Where is the big Australian?
Did I pass his body?
Kranz ran through a mental snapshot of the warehouse, and realized that he had not been there. He looked in the truck’s side mirrors and saw nobody behind.
Where is he?
Twenty-seven.
Too late to matter.
Kranz jammed the truck into gear and flattened his foot on the accelerator. The truck lurched forward as a shot rang out from somewhere unseen. The truck picked up speed and Kranz used his good hand to change into second gear. The steering wheel turned of its own accord and the truck veered left.
Kranz yanked it back. He figured his best chance was to hit the fence at the same spot where he had already cut the wires.
Thirty.
In his side vision he saw men running. Now a volley of shots rang out. Kranz looked to his left and saw four guards. Two had stopped and propped and were firing, two were still running. They had no idea it was already too late, that they were already dead.
Thirty-three.
Come on! Why hasn’t it gone up yet?
He only cared about completing the mission. Then he saw the same vision for the second time that evening: high above the distant mountains, the clouds lit, and for a few seconds glowed a brilliant red.
Thirty-six.
He hit the fence at speed. The wires snapped clean away. The truck bucked down and then lurched up, out of a shallow drain.
Thirty-nine.
He swerved out onto the road and flattened the accelerator.
Forty-one.
Shots rang out in the night.
Forty-three.
He was at least one hundred yards clear. Maybe it would be enough.
Come on! Now! Now!
Forty—
44
Michel and Henry hobbled along the dam wall. Michel was shocked to see Ariane on the opposite side, slumped to the ground and gasping. Her clothes had burned to her skin from the scorching shockwave emitted by the dynamite—but she was alive. The bodies of Damia and Maudette lay lifeless beside her.
The walkway had come through the explosion with remarkably little damage. There was shredded tin and steel and broken concrete where the master’s hut had once stood, but the damage was on the surface and did not run down the face of the concrete arch.
“A miracle, Michel. A miracle. God, He … He made a miracle,” said Henry.
The air stank of burned chemicals and charred carbon and concrete. Michel’s nostrils flared.
“Perhaps, my friend,” said Michel weakly. “Perhaps.”
They were negotiating the rubble to reach Ariane when a flash lit the sky. Michel and Henry flinched and turned, seeking out more hidden Germans. The south-western firmament came alive, a bright white light fulminating into a rich amber glow. Soon the entire horizon burned red, the radiance against the clouds so fierce that it reflected all the way to their own valley, where it lit the dam wall. Before long sound followed—the random percussive slaps of explosion after explosion tearing through atmosphere.
Michel watched and listened, first in amazement, then in horror. From the earth an enormous cloud of red and orange seemed to rise and blossom, but it was no cloud. It was fire, a great and terrible fire that threatened to consume the sky.
As he stared at the inferno, Michel finally understood. He understood it all. Vitrimont, Kranz, the German commandos. He was suddenly weak, dizzy. He dropped to his knees.
“Oh Jesus, no. No …”
A much darker cloud of smoke and dust now slowly rose in the shape of a mushroom, replacing the lake of fire and growing to fill the vastitude of the moonlit horizon.
Michel wanted to look away, but he did not. He would bear witness to this destruction. The shame and the anger he had tasted two days ago came shunting back into his mind, and Michel knew one thing for certain. Oraon was gone.
He forced himself to his feet.
Have to help Ariane. Promised. Have to …
He looked across. He saw she had moved. Saw she had crawled to the precipice, where the concrete arch gave way to empty space before it met the boulder-strewn foot of the dam wall. Beneath the electrified railing, she perched half on the concrete and half beyond the threshold, her head high, facing the burning horizon. At first, Michel did not understand. Then he did.
“No! Ariane! No—”
She used her burned hands to give a final push and she disappeared over the side.
Michel closed his eyes and did not see, but he heard. Even within the soundscape of never-ending explosions, there was no mistaking the petite thud of a tortured widow’s body breaking on giant boulders of rock.
45
Like a Wagner symphony. Every note building, building, building toward a crescendo that never came.
So went the explosions. The heavy and deep, the sharp and urgent, the long and trembling—an unending series of earth-shattering blasts that issued from bombs ranging from the big to the absurd, bigger even than some of the women who had assembled them. As the firestorm inside one warehouse waned there was always another to catch fire, and the greatest percussion orchestra ever assembled played on with no sign of an ending.
For Kranz, the thunderous sound of explosions was welcome and so very sweet, for it meant his mission had been a success and the French war effort would suffer. Single-handedly he had set off an unstoppable chain reaction inside the huge Oraon munitions compound. He knew that every explosion was one less artillery shell to take a German soldier’s life.
With music in his ears, he drove west. One of the truck’s headlights was broken, but it did not matter. Red and yellow lit the underbelly of the clouds above, the same way the sun did in the morning when it crested the east. The glow cast the road in a pinkish hue, and Kranz drove with all the light he needed.
He turned north, toward the stalemated front that stretched from the Lorraine down to the northern Vosges Mountains. It was hours until the last traces of artificial light disappeared in his rearview mirror.
Mile after mile Kranz continued unmolested, passing many a checkpoint. They were either unmanned or manned by soldiers unwilling to stop and check a military vehicle. The French were lax—famously, perhaps by now infamously—and it meant he was able to get within a few miles of the front separating French and German-held territory.
He was nearly upon the town of Luneville when he saw the signs of intensified military activity. He pulled onto a thin dirt lane and drove toward a forest that was maybe a mile away, spread across a low line of hills. He had no map and could not be certain, but he believed that somewhere on the other side were his people.
He steered the truck off the road and parked in a ditch. He set off across a farmer’s field that had been recently plowed and sewn with seed in neat lines. Green sugar beet shoots thrust their heads above the floor of brown in search of life-givi
ng sun. Kranz’s boots indiscriminately snapped their necks and pressed their broken bodies back into the dirt. He made no effort to preserve the farmer’s work, for the most direct route to the forest was across the lanes, and Kranz was animal now in his focus.
He climbed a stone fence and was walking through a field of pasture when he saw five men emerge from a path that led from the forest. They wore uniforms and carried rifles. There was no doubt they were soldiers, and on this side of the forest they had to be Allied soldiers.
His pace did not break or slacken. Only the fearful act fearful, or at least that is what Kranz figured the soldiers would believe. He was on the right side of the front, so why should it not be his field? He was too old to be a fighter anyway.
Kranz lifted his good arm and waved. He called out in French, “Evening. Have you seen my pig? It’s escaped!”
His French was good, but he had already learned that his accent was a giveaway to the trained ear. The uniforms did not look French and Kranz felt immediate relief. English or Canadian, he guessed, though there were dozens of different nationalities populating the Western Front. The soldiers turned and looked at him. Their rifles stayed put, slung around their shoulders.
“Good evening. Speak English?” called one of the men in French. “That’s about all the frog I know,” he said in a quieter voice meant for his comrades.
“What?” said Kranz, closing on the men.
“Gadds, you speak some French, don’t you?” said the lead soldier to one of the others.
“Studied it at school. Bit generous to say I speak it.”
“My pig is black and white. Have any of you seen it?” called Kranz, still using his French.
“I think … he’s looking for a pig, maybe.”
“Poor sod’s lost his porker, has he?”
“Can’t say I’ve seen too many pigs roaming the front lately. Might find a fat Hun if he keeps walking this way, though.”
“Unless you count Alvin here,” said another of the soldiers. “You think he’s looking for Alvin, chaps?”
Four of the men laughed. The fifth said, “Are you lot ever going to give it up? How bloody long can one joke last?”
“When’s the war due to end?” said the joker, and they laughed again.
They waited for Kranz to finish crossing the field.
“Bonsoir,” said Kranz as he stepped onto the trail. He followed with a very poor rendering of “Hello!”, said with inordinate gusto, and then he smiled the broad and unctuous smile of a man pleased to know but a single word of another language. The soldiers replied with a chorus of “hellos” and “bonsoirs”, which was one of a handful of French words every soldier soon learned.
“Well, then, my pig?” said Kranz in French. He wore an exaggeratedly quizzical look, eyes high and forehead creased, as he looked from soldier to soldier. Just a simple farmer seeking a valuable pig escaped into the forest.
“No, mister,” said the French-speaking soldier. “No pig. Sorry.”
Kranz threw a dismissive hand in the air and emitted a grunt of exasperation. He started to thread his way through the men. He would walk into that forest and toward German territory in plain sight, and they would let him.
But then there was a noise, loud and at first inarticulate. Someone yelling.
“Oi! Ay!”
In the moonlight it was not hard to make out the large man in front of the truck parked two fields over. Kranz instantly knew who it was. The Australian. He must have hidden himself in the truck behind crates of explosives.
The soldiers were drawn by the commotion. The distant figure began to scream, over and over.
“German! He’s a German! Allemand! German! Allemand!”
One man turned and looked at the small pig farmer in their midst. Then another, then another, the faces of the soldiers now creased with doubt. Kranz did not let it grow into anything more.
The knife was already in his good hand and now it slid up through the throat of the nearest. It was lightning quick, the blade up and out within the second, chased by a fount of blood that poured from the gash like dirty milk from a broken bucket.
“Hey—” was all the next man said, not quite certain of what he had witnessed. Kranz lunged, his arm fully extended. The extra few inches added by the blade were the extra inches Kranz needed to close the gap between them. For a split second they were one, man and steel and his murderer, frozen as some terrible memorial to the madness of war, and then Kranz was moving.
A soldier had managed to bring his rifle to his shoulder, but Kranz was almost upon him. He fired in wild haste while the rifle was in motion. Kranz kept coming as the soldier behind fell and screamed. Then the rifle was on the ground and the shooter’s throat was slit from front to back, fully half of his neck rent open. The knife hit the bone of vertebrae and caught. It fell with the man.
A soldier behind Kranz fumbled his Lee–Enfield—click, click—a dreaded sound that veterans of the front knew all too well. It was just a matter of time before every rifle that was dragged through mud and dust and treated like a piece of farm equipment refused to take any more punishment and jammed. Soldiers merely hoped it happened when the enemy was one hundred yards away and struggling with their own faulty equipment. Not ten feet away. And not a killer like Kranz.
The deadly cipher leapt forward and landed on one leg. His body moved in one fluid motion that harvested every iota of available force as he spun and kicked. His boot hit the soldier’s chest, causing the man’s torso and head to whiplash into the ground. The useless rifle knocked clear.
The stunned soldier flipped his body over, scrambled to his feet and tried to get away. He tried to flee, to find a different weapon or air to breathe or more wits, help, courage—it shall never be known what, for a little ankle tap from Kranz and the man fell back on the ground then Kranz’s knee pressed hard into the spine of his neck as his good hand applied pressure to the soldier’s forehead and now Kranz thrust, thrust, thrust with all his weight and force until he heard a snap and the man struggled no more.
Kranz turned his attention to the final soldier who lay on his side, screaming and writhing. A dark wet and a little patch of torn uniform at the man’s hip told Kranz where the bullet had entered. He knew what that felt like—the agony of a bullet to the hip—and he knew in the right circumstances it was not fatal, but for this soldier it would be. Kranz walked across and picked up the man’s own rifle. He placed the barrel against his back, exactly where the heart was. He pulled the trigger. The man lurched face first into the grass.
With five corpses surrounding him, only the Australian continued to scream. Kranz turned and found him midway across the first field of plowed earth, tripping as he frantically lurched forward. Kranz awkwardly held the rifle with his bad arm, which was very nearly limp, while he worked the rifle’s bolt and chambered another round. He brought the wooden stock to his shoulder with just the one hand. Though he wavered a little, the target was so big that it made no difference. Kranz’s finger rested on the trigger.
He held as he thought. The Australian was big and slow and too far behind to catch him. He had shown great bravery, first at the armaments warehouse and now here, though whether it was bravery or fury, perhaps some other form of mania, Kranz did not know.
Despite what his detractors believed, Kranz only killed with purpose. He did not loathe or hate his fellow fighters—indeed, he respected them deeply. Under the right circumstances, taking their lives was a truly honorable act. But in the wrong circumstances, it was not just pointless, it was cowardly.
He considered the situation and concluded that there was no need for the Australian to die. Not there. Not then. Had there been more time and less at stake, Kranz would have waited for him, let him fight and die for his honor and country—or whoever’s country he was really fighting for, despite what he thought—in a meaningful way.
Kranz lowered his aim and slung the rifle around his shoulder, then turned and jogged along the path that disappe
ared into the forest. Once again, he headed north. He would not stop till he was in Germany and, once there, he would not stop till the war he had waited all his life for was won.
46
He returned on a horse, a sole rider on a long and winding trail.
Every prancing step was a jolt and every jolt was a shaft of pain through Michel’s ribs, probably fractured but he would keep that from the army doctors so that he could get back to the front as soon as possible. Besides, it was only physical pain. It was dwarfed by the psychic burden he carried of knowing he was the one who let Kranz escape. The one who let Kranz murder hundreds of innocents. Of knowing he had promised to protect Ariane, only to watch her die as he stood witness to his own failure. Stood impotent and useless before whatever wretched higher power let it all happen without care to intervene.
And of knowing that he had led Percy to his death. Now, he had to tell his daughter. Now, he had to find the words to explain to Maddy that her father was gone. Words that were not hideous and not intolerable and yet were true, for nothing had mattered more to Percy than truth, however hard, however brutal.
He would tell Maddy that he died making a difference. That he died while fighting and gloriously furious, in the way only Percy was and ever would be. He died in the mountains that he loved. Died for his country and his friends. Died proud of his son and his daughter.
But that was only part of it, and Percy demanded more. He demanded complete truth.
And what is the complete truth? Michel asked himself.
That he died alone.
On the shore of a lake he detested.
To save a town that was obliterated anyway, along with hundreds of lives.
Because of what I asked him to do …
What true words are the right ones to explain that?
Michel And Henry Go To War (The French Bastard Book 1) Page 20
