Night Soldiers ns-1

by Alan Furst

  A mad lady on a bicycle! Most certainly English! All in tweeds!

  He had gone down the mountain with Gilbert. Found, hidden in an alder grove, the old truck that was sometimes made to work. Then the two of them had sputtered off to Epinal to buy provisions. When they got back to Cambras, the village was buzzing with the unusual visit. Had she been looking for him? Well, no, she hadn’t said that exactly, but she had been in the house of Gilbert and had drunk many cups of tea with the old woman. Tea? There was tea in Cambras? No, the mad lady in tweeds had brought her own tea. In a box made of stiff paper. Really? Might he have a look at it? Alas, no one would expect an Americain to be interested in a miracle that petit. Where had the box got to? In the rubbish heap, perhaps? No such dishonor. Fed to Gilbert’s pigs, along with other delectables stored up in a wooden barrel in the farmyard. Oh Christ. A missed communication-in his trade one of the worst disasters imaginable. That meant an emergency trip to Belfort. He was furious with himself for missing the courier, though Ulysse had told him it would happen while he was away.

  When, an hour later, he put on his gloves, he found a slip of paper stuffed down the little finger.

  On November 14, a memorable night in the history of the village, the Cambras maquis drove to the drop zone, then carried dry wood on their backs for half a mile after hiding the truck well off the road. They triangulated the field with woodpiles and covered them with canvas tarps when it started to rain, a cold, icy misery that fell straight down in drops heavy as pebbles. They tried sheltering under the trees but this particular mountain meadow was surrounded by deciduous forest so that one was merely splattered by raindrops hitting the bare branches rather than nailed directly atop the head. Eidenbaugh was soaked through in minutes. At 3:30 A.M. sharp they lit off the woodpiles, then stood back with ceremony and watched them blaze and smoke in the rain. But there was no sign of an airplane and by a quarter to four their bonfires were no more than smoldering piles of wet, charred wood. They couldn’t return to Cambras, so they groped their way into the forest in search of dead branches, falling and bruising themselves in the sodden darkness. The wet branches were piled up on what remained of the bonfires and they tried to light them, using up most of their matches and swearing the blackest curses they could summon.

  To no avail. At last, La Brebis came to the rescue. Producing an old piece of rubber tubing from a coat pocket, she siphoned off the gas from the truck, using a wine bottle meant for celebration but drained dry as they sought any available warmth on the mountainside. A bottle at a time, they soaked down the woodpiles while La Brebis, who had ingested a certain amount of gasoline in getting the siphon action under way, went off into the woods to be sick. At this point they heard the sound of airplane motors above them in the darkness-coming from the east! The equation for nighttime air supply operations was complex, involving fuel weight, load weight, air speed, distance, weather, hours of darkness, the phase of the moon, evasive flight paths, and fuel allowance for escape tactics in case of pursuit. Thus the bravery of the British pilot, circling above the socked-in meadow, was extraordinary. He must have used his last margin of safety looking for them and, should he encounter Luftwaffe night fighters on the return trip, was well on his way to ditching in the Channel. They never saw the plane, but they could hear the engines quite distinctly-he’d come down low to look for their signal. The gas-soaked wood woofed to life and roared against the downpour for only a few moments before the flame turned blue and danced pointlessly along the boughs, burning up the last of the fuel.

  But that was enough. The Lancaster pilot must have seen the orange smudges beneath the clouds and signaled his dropmaster, thus the crates with parachutes attached were manhandled out the cargo doors and floated down through the darkness, one of them hanging up in the branches of a tree until Vigie scampered up and cut the shrouds. They loaded the crates into the truck, their excitement obscuring-until Gilbert attempted to start the engine-the fact that the precious gasoline had been burned up. The Vau brothers hiked back to Cambras. At midmorning there were schleuh patrols down on the road-someone else had heard the bomber-but it was raining too hard for the Germans to come up into the forest. Nonetheless, the maquisards waited most of the morning in ambush by the trail, having voted to defend the arms no matter the cost.

  Just before noon, as the rain turned to snow, four of the Cambras women appeared at the edge of the field, pushing bicycles. They had traveled all morning, trading the heavy metal petrol cans back and forth, exposing two extra people to risk in order to make better time.

  The entry into Cambras was triumphal. The entire population stood out in the wet snow and applauded l’Americain, les Anglaises, and themselves.

  Four days later, his Limelight message was broadcast, setting the first attack on the night of November 25. Seven days! That was no time at all, but he did what he could. Which meant preparing for the operation-doing the necessary intelligence background-and training his maquis in the new equipment simultaneously. To that point, he had followed the Triangle camp teachings meticulously. His instructors and briefers had shown him that the path through danger lay in knowledge of the situation, caution, objectivity, secrecy, planning, and, above all, scrupulous attention to detail. But suddenly he was at war, so he found himself improvising, doing six things at once, making decisions quickly, in the heat of the moment. All the wrong things. But something was up, he could feel it in the air-they all could-and he was carried along in the rhythm of it. There were Lancasters overhead every night, the Epinal searchlights crisscrossed the sky, and the schleuh patrols were everywhere on the roads. Rumors reached them of stepped-up questioning in the basement of the Epinal Mairie-the town hall, now a Gestapo interrogation center.

  The new guns were a matter of great excitement to the Cambras maquis. The Mark II Sten, properly a machine carbine, was the special operations weapon of the clandestine war. It was simple: a few tubular components that screwed together quickly once you filed the burrs off the threads. It was light, six pounds, essentially a skeletal steel frame carrying the most elemental bolt-and-spring firing mechanism. And it was fast, putting out rounds in a staccato spray. “Beau Dieu!” Gilbert gasped after he had riddled a tree stump with one magazine-consuming burst.

  The Stens were less exciting to Eidenbaugh. It came to him, in an idle moment, that the weapon was manufactured by the same armaments industry that produced the Purdey shotgun-a masterpiece. But the reality of the war called for hundreds of thousands of simple death machines to be placed in willing hands. The OSS, in a perfection of that logic, manufactured the Liberator, a single-shot pistol with one bullet and cartoon instructions overcoming literacy and language barriers, then spread thousands of them throughout occupied Europe. It was the perfect assassination weapon, meant for the man or woman whose anger had outdistanced caution to the point where he or she would kill up close.

  For Eidenbaugh, the Sten was the least prepossessing of his available tools. It was, for instance, cheaply made-costing around $12.50 to produce. The primitive firing mechanism tended to jam, thus the thirty-two-round magazine was better loaded with thirty rounds of 9 mm parabellum (ball) ammunition to reduce pressure on the magazine spring. In this instance, a special filling device was to be used, but these had not been included in their arms shipment and they had to improvise.

  And it was “short.” That is, the fixed sight was set for a hundred yards. Infantry war tended toward engagement at the extremity of the rifle’s efficiency-about a thousand yards, three fifths of a mile. With the Sten, however, you operated at the length of a football field and could see the enemy quite clearly. In essence, a streetfighting weapon. The implicit message was clear to Eidenbaugh: if, as guerrillas, you had the misfortune to engage the enemy on his own terms, the best you could do was to get close enough to burn him badly before he killed you-which he would, simply drawing back out of your range to give himself total advantage.

  He had no intention to engage. Their target-identified in code
by the courier-was the railroad yards at Bruyeres, about fifteen miles from Epinal. Sable had a cousin who worked in the roundhouse and, on the Tuesday before the attack, it was La Brebis and not the cousin’s wife who, at noontime, brought him his lunch of soup and bread. Eidenbaugh found a vantage point on a hill overlooking the yards and watched her ride in on her bicycle, napkin-covered bowl in the crook of her right arm, half a baguette balanced across the top of the bowl. The German sentry waved her through. Later, Eidenbaugh was ecstatic to learn there were fourteen locomotives in the roundhouse. He would, he knew, get them all.

  It didn’t, on the night of November 25, sound like very much. A single, muffled whumpf in the roundhouse and some dirty smoke that dribbled from a broken window. That was all. But it would be three months at least before these particular locomotives went anywhere. Eidenbaugh and Vigie watched it happen from the vantage point, then retreated casually, by bicycle, back to the village.

  Eidenbaugh went in alone, with the graveyard shift. They were the brave ones, for they were the ones who would suffer German suspicion after the sabotage. These interrogations would not, Eidenbaugh knew, be of the most severe category, for no occupying power can easily afford to sacrifice skilled railroad workers. The men gathered around him as they trudged into the railyard. To them he was a weapon, a weapon against those they loathed beyond words, and they protected him accordingly. He wasted no time in the roundhouse, simply formed the malleable plastique explosive into a collar around the heavy steel and wedged a time pencil into the claylike mass. Then he tied up the two roundhouse workers with heavy cord and moved them behind a wall. He snuck out the back way, through a well-used dog tunnel in the wire fence. The whole business took less than twenty minutes.

  For a mere thud of an explosion and a little smoke. The yard sirens went off almost as an afterthought, the firemen appeared, the French police followed, a few German officers ran about-but there was little to be done. One fireman, reducing the water pressure to the volume of a garden hose, soaked down the area for ten minutes while a yard supervisor nailed a board across the single broken window. A pursuit unit showed up, and the German shepherds went right for the dog tunnel in the fence, picked up a scent that led to the edge of an empty hill above the yards, accepted their biscuits and pats, peed, and went home. A Gestapo Sturmbannfuhrer took the rope that had bound the workers as evidence and put it in a leather pouch with a tag stating time, place, and date. Then they all stood around for an hour smoking and talking-bored, more than anything else. It was so insignificant.

  Apoplectic rage was reserved for the German transport officer, who had chosen that night to occupy a French feather bed rather than a German army cot and thus arrived late. He was the only one there who understood what had happened, for it was, after all, rather technical. It had to do with the way locomotives are turned around in a railroad yard.

  In the center of the roundhouse was what the French called a plaque tournant, simply a large iron turntable with a piece of track on it that allowed the crew to turn a locomotive around and send it back out into the yard once it had been serviced. In the interim, locomotives rested in a semicircle around the turntable, which could meet underlying track by being rotated. What the saboteur had done was to blow up the midpoint of the plaque tournant. The damage to the electrical system was meaningless-any electrician could wire around that in an hour. However, the explosion had also damaged the central mechanism of the plaque, a large iron casting, and that would have to be reforged. With French and German foundries pressed beyond extremity by demands of the war, replacement would take at least three months. Thus, for that period, fourteen locomotives weren’t going anywhere-the plaque had been blown in a position directly perpendicular to the outgoing service track.

  The transport officer stared at the mess and said scheiss through clenched teeth. The gap was less than fifteen feet. It might as well have been fifteen miles. His transportation mathematics were, by necessity, quite efficient. Each locomotive pulled sixty freight cars and, in a three-month period, could be expected to make nine round trips to the coastal defense lines in the west and north. He multiplied by fourteen out-of-service locomotives and came up with something more than seven thousand lost carloads. And this sort of thing, he assumed, would happen throughout the French rail system.

  The transport officer wasn’t such a bad fellow. In all likelihood he would have appreciated, once restored to his more reflective self, the words of the saboteur’s British briefing officer as he reviewed the plaque tournant procedure: “For want of a nail, dear boy, and all that sort of thing.”

  In the winter of 1944, on a night when the mountain was still and silent, when snow hung thick on the pine boughs and white fields shone blue in the moonlight, Khristo Stoianev went to war. As they’d meant him to do.

  The priest who had released him from a cell in the Sante prison had barely spoken, but the intent of the action was self-evident. He was free. Free to fight the common enemy. The time and place he must choose for himself. Khristo sometimes thought about the priest: a small, stooped man, unremarkable, invisible. A perfect emissary for Voluta, his church, and NOV, the Polish Nationalist organization. Khristo knew that someone had kept track of him, had known he was in the Sante, but that was no surprise. His training and experience gave him, when the time was right, a certain value, and the NOV priests would be aware of that value. Priests made excellent intelligence officers, he knew; the Vatican was said to have the world’s finest intelligence service, calling on the accumulated experience of seven centuries. Father Voluta-it seemed a strange idea. But Ilya had claimed it to be so, and Ilya knew things.

  Others, certainly, had been set free from French prisons as the German tank columns neared Paris and the fall of France was imminent. Like Khristo, they had been jailed because they were dangerous. Now, for the same reason, they were released. It was one of the first ways a defeated country could fight back. That the French had let him go at the behest of the Poles surprised him not at all. The two conquered nations were old friends, sharing a taste for romanticism and idealism that had got them every sort of misery for a hundred years. But they shared also a near pathological conviction-that romanticism and idealism would in time be triumphant-which made for a battered old friendship but a durable one.

  Khristo walked quietly from the bedroom of the old house that had been his refuge, the polished wood floor cold on his bare feet, and dressed from a large closet in the adjoining alcove. Thick wool socks, corduroy trousers suitable for working dogs in the field-a gentleman’s roughwear-wool sweater, and an old coat, shapeless but warm. Good high boots that laced up tight. From a peg on the inside of the closet door he took a Hungarian machine pistol-Gepisztoly M43-on a leather strap. It had cost four chickens, three dozen eggs, and a bottle of brandy, but it made them comfortable to have a weapon in the house. He smiled as he handled it; Sophie had oiled the cheap wooden stock as though it belonged to a fine gun kept on an estate. But then, Sophie had altered the corduroy trousers so that he could wear them, had knitted the sweater and the socks-unraveling fashionable items from better days in order to do so-and, come to that, had polished the floor as well. All her life she had done these things and saw no reason to stop just because of the war. Perhaps the war was all the more reason to do them.

  He took four loaded magazines from the closet shelf and put two in each pocket of the coat, then tiptoed down the hall to Sophie’s bedroom to say good-bye. Her bed was empty, a heavy comforter folded neatly at the foot. Next door, where Marguerite slept, it was the same. He listened and, very faintly, heard the sound of plates and silverware in the kitchen on the first floor. Years of service, he realized, had schooled the sisters in the preparation of breakfast without waking the house.

  Prison had changed him.

  He came to understand that on his first day of freedom. The Nikko Petrov papers were no longer of use, so he walked restlessly about the streets of the city-frantic knots of people on one block, deserted silence on
the next-as it waited to see what Occupation might bring. Eventually, he found a young man approximately his height and size and strong-armed him in a doorway, taking his passport. He bought glue in a papeterie, then found a cafe, pried his photograph from the Nansen document and made himself a French passport. The franking marks across the corner of the picture did not quite match, but one had to look carefully to see that. He ordered a steak, ate it so fast he barely noticed the taste, then left the cafe with the steak knife in his pocket. A few blocks away he found a mont de piete-“mountain of piety,” as the French ironically termed their pawnshops-held a knife to the pawnbroker’s throat, and stole a small French pistol. He could have bought it, he had money from the priest, but he knew that money meant survival and he intended to survive. Nearby, he saw a finely dressed gentleman getting into a car, held him at bay with the pistol, and drove away in the car, a five-year-old Simca Huit, dark blue, with nearly a full tank of gas. For as long as he was able, he drove south and west. Away from the advancing Germans, headed for the coast or, perhaps, Spain. He would accept whatever the fates offered.

  But the farther south he drove, the worse the nightmare. The roads were clogged with people and their possessions, cars had been pushed into the fields when they would no longer run, abandoned cats and dogs were everywhere. He saw a woman pushing a baby carriage with a grandfather clock in it, he saw unburied dead by the side of the road, bloated and flyblown in the early summer heat. The anarchy of flight was exacerbated by Stuka bombing runs on the refugee columns so that people had to run for the ditches and, here and there, a tower of smoke rose into the sky from a burning car.