He almost didn’t recognize Eclipse of the Hun III in the glare of portable floodlights the mechanics wheeled around to illuminate their work. Her engine was uncowled, her access and service panels opened. At least six mechanics were clambering all over her.
“Pretty bright out here, isn’t it?” Tommy asked Sergeant McNulty, his crew chief.
“Well, Captain, you read that last directive from Ninth Air Force. They ain’t getting their dandruff up any more about lighting up at night so my guys can see what the hell they’re doing. You ever try finding a leak, changing a prop, or re-pinning a connector with nothing but a crappy blackout flashlight? And them Kraut flyboys can’t find shit in the dark any better than you guys can, anyway. With all due respect, of course.”
“All due respect, my ass,” Tommy replied. “The Krauts didn’t have any trouble finding those British cities in the dark, did they?”
“That’s different, Captain, and you know it. All they had to do then was drop their eggs in a couple-hundred square-mile box. You can do that blindfolded, right? But to hit a tiny little maintenance ramp in Middle of Nowhere, France? That’s a different deal altogether.”
Tommy had to give him that. Those scenarios were very different. But one thing he couldn’t resist saying: “By the way, Sarge, the expression is getting your dander up, not your dandruff.”
“Close enough for government work, Captain. Since you’re out here sleepwalking again, you wanna know what we’re doing to your old girl?”
“Sure, give me the two-dollar tour.”
McNulty explained each task being performed as they walked around Eclipse. The tour ended at the cockpit, the one area where no mechanic was working at the moment. McNulty pulled a rag from his pocket and made a big show of dusting off the two stenciled swastikas below the canopy rail, indicating Tommy’s air-to-air kills.
“I was thinking, Captain…should I have Vincent Van Goldbrick make up a star stencil? We got plenty of red paint to go with it.”
“For what, Sarge?”
“For the kill mark when you shoot down one of them Russian bastards…like the ones that gave you shit the other day. That’s their national marking, right? A red star?”
“Wait a minute, Sarge. We got the word to lay off. The Russians are just trying to be pains in the ass, that’s all. We don’t engage unless they do…and nobody at HQ thinks they’re going to. It’s all just a game.”
McNulty’s face screwed up like he’d just sucked a lemon. “Ain’t that typical of the brass?” he said. “If that ain’t the biggest load of horseshit I ever heard in my life. Fucking generals and their fucking politics…”
“Those are our orders, Sarge.”
“But what if them Russkies do it again, Captain?”
“We ignore it. Again.”
McNulty threw up his hands. “I just ain’t apprehending that, Captain.”
“You mean comprehending, don’t you?”
“What I mean is fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, you crapped in my face.”
Chapter Thirteen
For two nights, Sylvie and her two-man team—Vachon and Ledoyen—shadowed the warehouse, lying in wait for the thieves and the chance to follow them to wherever they were going. But it had been wasted effort; nothing in the way of food supplies—or any other goods, for that matter—had left the warehouse without that removal being properly authorized. As the three of them sat in her office on the third night, Sylvie was beginning to doubt herself.
“Am I totally wrong about all this pilferage?” she asked.
The mathematical mind of Philippe Ledoyen refused to believe it. “The numbers don’t lie, madame. There has been theft…and there will probably be theft again.”
Before she could say anything else, a breathless teenaged boy suddenly appeared in the office doorway. “Herr Vogel is very ill!” the boy blurted. “He needs a doctor right away!”
Unconcerned by the boy’s urgency, Ledoyen said, “Well, at least the old Kraut finally decided to show his face again.”
Sylvie was already on her feet. “Luc,” she called to Vachon, “come with me.” Then she turned to Ledoyen. “Philippe, call the Army hospital. Get an ambulance to join Luc and me at Vogel’s house. Then you go and keep an eye on the warehouse. We’ll catch up with you there as soon as we can.”
It took them just a few minutes to bicycle to Vogel’s house. A small crowd of townspeople had already gathered there, murmuring epithets against the French specifically and the Allies in general. Sylvie and Luc struggled to thread their way through the unwelcoming mob, their path to Vogel’s door blocked repeatedly by sullen Germans.
“If you want your bürgermeister to get medical help,” Vachon warned, “you’d best clear a path.”
They didn’t have to knock. The door flew open at their approach to reveal the imposing form of Vogel’s daughter Hanna Elsner, a tall, sturdy woman in her thirties who looked ready to spit nails. “Isn’t this so typical of the French,” she bellowed. “We need a doctor, but they send the grocery clerks. Who will arrive next, the plumber?”
Her voice had the power of a siren. Sylvie had heard rumors that Hanna was a budding opera singer before the demands of the war had severely limited her opportunities to perform. This brief but powerful verbal assault gave credence to those rumors.
“The ambulance is coming,” Sylvie replied, trying to be reassuring in the face of this brewing volcano standing before her. “I just thought there might be something we could do to help in the meantime with…well, we haven’t seen your father in days, and—”
“It’s your fault this has happened to him, you dumb goat,” Hanna said, grabbing Sylvie by the arm and dragging her into the house. When Vachon tried to intervene, Sylvie told him, “No, Luc. Stay at the door. Help the medics get through that mob.”
Vogel was lying face up and motionless on the dining room floor, his face the color of ashes in a furnace. An elderly woman—his wife, no doubt—was on her knees beside him, gently messaging his temples, speaking softly to him in a rambling monologue. Sylvie wasn’t sure if he was dead or alive.
But there was a flicker of life in his eyes as she approached and then a beseeching look imploring the protective angel fluttering over him to let her through.
“It’s his heart,” Frau Vogel said. “The stress has been so much. Too much. I begged him, but he wouldn’t listen…like the fate of Germany rested on his—”
“SHUT UP, MAMA,” Hanna said. “Don’t say another word in front of this French whore.”
“You are the one who needs to be silent, Hanna,” Frau Vogel told her daughter.
Vogel was staring at Sylvie with vacant eyes, whispering something. She leaned closer, trying to hear what could very well be his last words. He was saying the same barely intelligible sentence over and over. With each repetition, his voice got weaker.
But then she thought she understood.
“Engelhardt Farm?” she asked. “It’s at Engelhardt Farm? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
With a gentle, almost imperceptible nod of his head, she had her answer.
The moment Sylvie spoke those words—Engelhardt Farm—Hanna was no longer a brewing volcano. She was now in full eruption.
“TRAITOR,” she screeched. “FOR GOD’S SAKE, PAPA…WHY?”
Like an echo, she repeated the word why over and over.
Frau Vogel continued to hover over her stricken husband, a vessel of calm in a noisy, raging storm, administering her gentle touch. Sylvie had no trouble understanding what she was telling him:
“There, mein schatz, the weight is finally lifted. That will make it all better.”
Then Vachon was lifting Sylvie out of the way, making room for two French medics who, with an efficiency of movement that came from practice under fire, scooped Herr Vogel onto their stretcher and raced him out the door to the waiting ambulance.
With Vogel on his way to Ebingen’s French Army hospital, Sylvie and Vachon bicycled briskly to
the warehouse to check on Ledoyen. He wasn’t there—but it was clear he had been.
His wire-rimmed glasses lay on the floor just inside the big sliding door that trucks and wagons used to enter the building. The frames were mangled, one of the lenses a spider web of cracks. The shattered spectacles in hand, they burst into the warehouse supervisor’s office. There they found Hans Elsner, the night supervisor, fast asleep at his desk. Vachon roused him with a brisk jerk of his collar.
Sylvie dangled the broken eyeglasses in front of Elsner’s face. “Where is Philippe Ledoyen?” she asked. “What’s happened to him?”
Elsner shrugged and replied, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You haven’t seen him tonight?”
“I see many people in the course of a day. I don’t have time to keep track of your underlings, Frau Bergerac.”
“Luc,” she said, “take Herr Elsner to the Gendarmerie. They’d like nothing better than to question a terrorist, I’m sure.”
Elsner recoiled at the mention of the Gendarmerie. But he became panic-stricken at the word terrorist.
“I am not a terrorist,” he cried. “You have no proof!”
Sylvie smiled. “Ah, the Gendarmerie doesn’t need proof to torture you, my friend. They just need to suspect you are a terrorist. But it seems you already know that.”
Back at her office, it didn’t take Sylvie long to figure out where Engelhardt Farm was. Clearly marked on the Ebingen area map, it lay two kilometers west from the center of town, at the foot of a towering ridge.
Besides the map, the only items she’d need to add to her kit for the journey was a woolen scarf to ward off the nighttime mountain chill and the Ruby automatic pistol her uncle had given her when she’d joined Affaires Civiles. He’d made her surrender the Welrod pistol she’d carried throughout her years in La Résistance. “You don’t need the relative silence of a Welrod anymore, Sylvie,” he’d told her. “If you need a weapon now, you’ll want it to be an automatic that can fire its entire magazine quickly. Besides, the Ruby is much more compact than that cannon you’ve been carrying. Small enough to slip into a coat pocket.”
Her musette bag complete, she set off on her bicycle.
Beyond the city limits of Ebingen, there was nothing but dirt roads and trails. Fortunately, it hadn’t rained much the past few days, so those roads were firm enough for the bicycle. She’d elected not to use the generator-powered headlight; she could see well enough ahead in the moonlight and wanted her progress to be unobserved as much as possible. The headlight’s flickering glow would illuminate her approach like a beacon.
It wasn’t long before she reached the intersection of the road with a trail. Alongside that intersection was a small wooden sign, low to the ground. On it were painted numbers—48/9—and an arrow pointing up the trail.
At first, the numbers baffled her. But a glance at the map raised a possibility what they might mean: They could be rough grid coordinates—just the degrees without the minutes. And they correspond to the rough coordinates of Engelhardt Farm.
She began to ride up the trail, but it quickly became too steep for the bicycle. She laid it down in the grass and continued on foot. The trail felt rutted beneath her feet, like trucks and horse-drawn carts had climbed this hill, leaving behind imprints as damning as fingerprints.
They’ve done it often, too…and recently.
It was a tough climb, but Sylvie felt sure she was getting near the top. The slope was easing now, and she could make out the horizon, where the gray of the night sky met the blackness of the hillside. But there was an irregularity in that horizon: a channel some twenty yards wide stretched up the shallow slope beneath a canopy of trees, open to the sky at the far end like a tunnel through a void.
There was something on the ground at the channel’s entrance. It felt like a steel rail that a train might run on. But there was only one, centered on what seemed to be a bed of rough-hewn wood.
In the dim red light of her blackout flashlight, the rail looked exactly like it felt: a steel I-beam. It wasn’t made for trains, though; it was taller, and the head of the I was as flat as the foot. It extended in a perfectly straight line up the slope for what she guessed was fifty meters. She followed the rail to the top.
It seems to be perfectly camouflaged, too. With this canopy of trees over it, no one would ever see it from the air.
Sylvie stepped away from the steel track to shoot its bearing with her compass.
Just what I was afraid of…it’s pointed west-northwest. Straight toward Paris. Or London.
She knew there was only one thing this arrow-straight collection of wood and steel could be: It’s a launching ramp for something that flies…an airplane. Or a rocket.
But she knew there had to be more to this place than just a launch ramp. There’d be workshops, storage facilities, barracks. None of those things were apparent in the dark.
But if they’re here, they have to be close by.
She was halfway down the slope when she heard a vehicle’s motor, straining to climb the hill that led to the launch rail, its headlights throwing crazy shadows across the hillside. Then, traveling easily across level ground now, it drove slowly for nearly a minute before the motor was shut off and the headlights extinguished.
It sounded like a car, not a truck. Whoever’s driving seems to know their way around up here.
Sylvie knew she could go back to town and let the Army handle this in the morning. She was sure she’d be able to find the place again and lead them right to it. But suddenly she felt so alive, so filled with the thrill of the hunt like those days in the Résistance when nothing was more important than the mission you were undertaking.
She remembered something a Résistance commander had once told her: When you have a clandestine mission and you’re given a partner, the first thing you do is get rid of the partner.
So fuck the Army. I’ll handle this myself.
Sylvie heard a door slam. A flashlight’s bright beam appeared as if out of nowhere and lit a path for someone beginning a steady uphill trek. She couldn’t see the person carrying the light.
Wherever he’s going, he seems in a big hurry.
The light’s beam went higher and farther away until it vanished suddenly, as if snuffed out.
Following the light’s path, she left the trail for the cover of the trees that bordered it and continued the ascent.
Suddenly, a wide oval of bright yet flickering light appeared before her, reflecting off her face and hands as if they were mirrors. Dropping to her knees and scrambling behind a tree trunk, she tried to process what she was seeing. But it took another good look before she knew:
It’s a cave! A big one, at that. And there’s something burning inside it.
She could see that the objects engulfed in flames were long and thin cylinders, like big pipes, lying horizontally on platforms or dollies. A dozen, maybe more. Each was about a foot in diameter, coming to a rounded point at the near end…
Like the nose of an artillery shell…or a missile.
And if they were, in fact, some kind of ordnance, they couldn’t be far from exploding amongst all those flames.
I’m much too close.
Sylvie rose and turned to make her escape.
She didn’t see the dark form of someone swinging the wooden post at her head.
Chapter Fourteen
Sylvie didn’t realize how lucky she was to have stumbled and fallen to the ground as she turned to flee. Like a bat in the hands of a ballplayer swinging for the fences, the wooden post whizzed over her head, striking a tree trunk and shattering in the assailant’s hands on contact with that immovable object. Only then was she aware of the gyrating silhouette beside her, doing the hopping dance of someone in great pain.
The voice crying, “Ow, my hands! My hands!” was that of a woman.
Swinging her legs like a jackknife being closed, Sylvie chopped the feet of the woman out from under her. Once the assailant was o
n the ground, flat on her stomach, Sylvie pounced on her back, driving a knee deep between her shoulder blades.
Retrieving the Ruby pistol from her musette bag, she burrowed its muzzle into the coiffed blond hair on the back of the woman’s head.
“We’re going to behave now, are we not?” Sylvie asked, surprised at how easily the words flowed under stress; she was thinking in French yet speaking in German.
The woman just kept wailing about her hands. The voice sounded familiar.
Without moving the gun, Sylvie pulled the flashlight from her bag and aimed its red glow in the woman’s face.
Just who I thought. Hanna Elsner.
“On your feet,” Sylvie ordered. “We’ve got to get away from here.”
“My hands,” Hanna sobbed. “They’re broken, I’m sure.”
The first reply that popped into Sylvie’s head was something she’d heard said by countless GIs: Too fucking bad, pal. But she really wasn’t sure how to put that properly into German.
Instead, she replied, “I seriously doubt it. They’re just stinging from the impact with the tree, that’s all. And if you’re looking for sympathy from me…”
They hurried to the bottom of the slope. Off to the right, across the level ground, Sylvie could see the faint outlines of buildings. The nearest one looked tall enough to be a barn.
Up at the cave, nothing had exploded. In fact, the fire was beginning to die out.
“That car I heard…did you drive it here, Hanna?”
“What if I did?” She sounded surprisingly defiant for one claiming to be in such pain. And one not holding the gun.
“If you did, I’d be grateful, because we’re going to use it to drive back to town.”
Sylvie had wanted to look around, but the only light available appeared to be her flashlight.
“There’s no electricity here?” she asked.
Our Ally, Our Enemy (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 3) Page 11
