The Maids of Chateau Vernet

by Steven Landry

  25

  2052 hours, Thursday, August 6, 1942, Spicheren, Occupied France

  The ground shook and the thunderous sound of the explosion grew. As the blast wave rolled over the farmhouse, everyone screamed. The house above them creaked and grumbled, furniture slid across the wood floor over their heads. Within seconds, the structure above collapsed and the blast wave carried the pieces away. Debris rained down into the dark cellar, falling through the gaps in the floor above them.

  Danette curled into a tighter ball, hands over her ears. Her mask-covered mouth remained wide open as Hiram had instructed. Something heavy crashed down through floorboards, landing between Danette and Deborah. Whatever it was, it was hot. Danette rolled away from it.

  “Deborah,” Danette yelled. “Are you hurt?”

  After an uncomfortable delay, Deborah coughed. “I’m fine. You?”

  “Still here.” After a few seconds, the initial wave had passed and debris stopped falling. A cloud of unsettled dust filled the room.

  The farmer coughed, one of the little ones followed. Through the haze, the farmer and his wife started to get up. “Stay down! It’s not over yet.”

  Outside the world grew silent. And then, as Hiram had warned, air rushed back toward ground zero. The negative pressure wave rocked the timbers above them once more and showered them with dirt and broken pieces of the homestead. Several of the floorboards above them wriggled loose and disappeared.

  Danette ducked her head between her knees and covered her head with her arms. My God, the blast was four kilometers away. What must have happened closer in?

  “Merde!” Deborah gasped.

  “What’s the matter?” Danette turned to face her dusty companion.

  Deborah kneeled beside the upended cast-iron stove between them. She held on to one of the backpack straps. The pack sat beneath the stove, the fabric smoldering. Danette looked around her, pushing away debris, searching for the other pack.

  Deborah reached out and touched Danette on the shoulder. “The packs were next to each other. We lost them both.”

  PART II

  26

  0545 hours, Friday, August 7, 1942, Spicheren, Occupied France

  Danette spent the rest of the night in the root cellar with Deborah and the farmer’s family. They extracted the two backpacks from beneath the fallen stove once it cooled. Both were heavily damaged. The flexible ring that constituted the portal perimeter in each pack had been broken and burned, as had much of the equipment in the proper portion of the backpacks. The C2ID2s had been inside where the pack’s shielding would protect them from an electro-magnetic pulse when the weapon detonated. Several ammo magazines for the M22s remained in working order, but little else. God only knew what was happening in Saarbrücken.

  With both communication devices destroyed, Deborah and Danette had no way to contact Hiram. They would meet him at the rendezvous point. Danette refused to think about the alternatives.

  The farmer and his family grew restless. One of the children, a young boy of about five, pulled at the surgical mask Danette had given him. She sympathized with him. The mask she’d been wearing since the previous night irritated her more every minute. She scratched the side of her head where the tie rested.

  Deborah touched the boy’s hand and shook her head. “You need to keep it on a while longer. The dust might make you sick.” Her gentle words earned a nod in response and he settled the mask back in place.

  “Can you make sure your brother and sister keep them on as well?”

  He nodded and turned to his siblings. His sister rolled her eyes at the idea of taking direction from her little brother.

  Danette explained that they needed to keep them on for a few days. She offered the farmer a package containing enough masks for the family for that amount of time. “Replace everyone’s mask a couple times throughout the day.” The farmer agreed and waved the kids toward him. They all settled in close. He hugged his family tight, thankful they had all survived.

  Hiram had explained that the fallout from a hyperbaric nuclear device was minimal compared to the atomic bomb under development by the Americans. He expected the danger here to dissipate after a few days. Danette prayed for the accuracy of Hiram’s assessment.

  “I think it’s time we get out of here,” Deborah said. They climbed out of the root cellar into a wasteland. With the exception of a few timbers and bottommost structure of the fireplace, the blast demolished the farmhouse. The wooden structure of the barn had been replaced with foreign debris, including an upended car carried in from one of the main roadways. A pall of dust hovered like fog above the farmer’s decimated wheat field.

  They found the railbike entangled in the branches of a fallen tree. Deborah struggled to part the bike from the thick limbs, careful not to inflict additional damage. Fifteen minutes later, Danette made her stop. With a broken axle, crushed controls, and an oozing power core, they deemed the bike a total loss.

  “What do we do now?” Deborah said. “We can’t leave it here like this.”

  “You’re right.” The bike’s improvised drivetrain might not have been as advanced as Hiram’s portals and nuclear weapons, but they couldn’t take the chance of the technology falling into the wrong hands. Danette unclipped a hand grenade from her combat vest, pulled the pin, checked to make sure the farmer and his family remained in the cellar, and dropped the grenade into the center of the broken power supply. Both women turned and ran, diving into a drainage ditch three seconds later, a full second before the grenade detonated.

  Danette and Deborah headed south with their M22 rifles and four and a half magazines worth of ammo. They walked in silence. Danette searched for danger. Deborah searched for Hiram.

  The earth around them had been abused by the blast. Crops that had yet to be reaped had been ripped out of the ground. Most of the nearby structures – mainly houses and barns – had been battered. Roof shingles and broken glass littered the ground in every direction. A few automobiles settled upside down in a field near a main roadway. A once beautiful writing desk had fallen in the middle of a dirt road, two legs reaching for the sky, nubs where the two others had been. A layer of dust coated everything from the leaves of the trees to the walls of the broken buildings they passed. She dared not imagine the severity of damage closer to ground zero.

  They walked south in the direction of the Vosges Mountains, toward the rendezvous point Hiram had designated on their trip north. On foot, the fifty-kilometer journey would take days. The forest provided cover where possible. For a stretch of the journey, they passed through the town of Rouhling. As they hid behind a small feed store, a convoy of military vehicles raced through the town. French policemen, a handful of German soldiers, and civilian drivers filled every truck. The driver of one of the smaller vehicles at the front of the line came close to running over a little girl. Her father pulled her out of the way just in time. The driver did not slow. From their vantage point, Danette saw the man laughing as he passed. The convoy had been in a hurry, headed back toward Saarbrücken, she guessed.

  27

  1215 hours, Friday, Midday August 7, 1942, Gibraltar, United Kingdom

  “Holy Mother of God,” whispered Beetle Smith. He stood next to Sarah at the map table in his subterranean office on Gibraltar. She’d been summoned from her isolation cell in the middle of lunch.

  Sarah peered down at the aerial photos lined up on the table. At first, the images appeared to contain debris, piles and piles of it. A line of water cut through the mess. The Saar? She looked at photo after photo, the extent of the damage growing clearer. A crater had been punched into the city. A single building stood near the center, a mere shell. Spreading out from the impact zone, the destruction continued. Some buildings had fallen, some disintegrated, leaving behind rectangular stone and brick foundations etched into the earth. The damage reached out away from the crater for kilometers. Outside the city, the impact wave knocked down trees and blew away small homes, leaving discolored patch
es where they once rested. One shot captured a bull impaled by a wooden post near a farmhouse. Sarah’s hands shook and the images began to spin.

  Smith took a pair of calipers from a drawer beneath the table and measured the width of the dark gray area in the center of one of the photos. He then measured the distance between the two points on the calipers with a ruler and whistled.

  “The crater’s over a mile wide,” he said, looking at Sarah. “The radius of destruction extends almost three miles from ground zero. I guess you weren’t full of shit after all. My apologies, madam.”

  Sarah wasn’t sure whether he was apologizing for his language or his earlier skepticism. But she thanked him anyway.

  “And you say your comrades have six more?” Smith said, leaning over the table.

  “Yes.” Her voice wavered and bile bubbled up into her throat. “I have to reestablish communications with my team.”

  “Do you have any idea how to communicate with them?”

  “I’ll need my C2ID2.” The device had been confiscated when she’d first come ashore.

  Smith didn’t seem to understand.

  “The communications device I had strapped to my forearm when I disembarked from the HMS Talisman.”

  Smith still looked confused.

  “I guess the British didn’t think you needed to know.”

  “Wait here,” Smith said, and stormed out of the office.

  Sarah looked at the pictures once more. Nothing prepared her for the level of destruction Hiram’s bomb inflicted. Horror crept up inside her, mingling with the bile in her throat. The whole city lay in ruins. How many people had they killed? Tens of thousands? More? The device was supposed to go off closer to the railroad bridges and junction, with a much smaller blast area. From the photos, the zone of destruction extended well past Saarbrücken, across the French border near Spicheren. Something must have forced Hiram’s hand, but what?

  She looked at the wider-angle photos more carefully. One showed a train stopped on the tracks near Forbach, west of Spicheren. A few seconds later she found a magnifying glass in one of Smith’s drawers and took a closer look at the train. A line of boxcars. A Holocaust train, maybe. Is that what forced the change in plans?

  Smith strode back into the office. “Your device… What did you call it?”

  “Combat communication and information digital device. C2ID2 for short.”

  “Your C2ID2 is at a lab in London. Hopefully the scientists haven’t started their dissection. Ike promises it’ll be waiting for us when we arrive at Camp Griffiss. We’re leaving as soon as adequate transportation and a fighter escort can be arranged. Have you eaten?”

  “I don’t think I could keep anything down,” she said. “Perhaps some water or tea?”

  * * *

  1910 hours, Friday, August 7, 1942, London, England, United Kingdom

  Sarah climbed down the ladder leading from the cargo plane’s rear door to the tarmac. The cool, overcast day brought about a shiver. A young uniformed man offered her a jacket, then directed her to a waiting car.

  “APO 887,” Smith told the driver as he settled into the rear seat beside her. As the car pulled away, Smith clarified their destination for Sarah’s benefit. “Headquarters, European Theater of Operations, United States Army. It’s Ike’s headquarters at Camp Griffiss in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames.”

  Sarah, escorted by Smith, passed through several security checkpoints before being admitted to a nondescript conference room on the first floor of a nondescript building. In addition to General Eisenhower, four men waited in the room, only one of whom she recognized.

  “Pleased to meet you, indeed.” Sir Winston Churchill smiled after Smith’s introduction. Beside him, stood Vice Admiral Lord Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten – a name Sarah would never remember – British Chief of Combined Operations.

  Lord Mountbatten introduced her to the next man in line. “And this fellow is Colonel Donovan, head of the American Office of Strategic Services.” Donovan wore civilian clothes despite his rank.

  With introductions complete, everyone found a seat at a rectangular conference table. Sarah sat between Donovan and Eisenhower. Churchill and Mountbatten sat opposite them. A movie projector on the table between them blocked her view of the men on the other side. Smith switched off the lights and started the machine.

  “This footage was captured four hours ago by a Westland Lysander of the Royal Air Force’s 138th Squadron,” Smith began. “The devastation extends over an area of about twenty square miles, 32 square kilometers. The city of Saarbrücken and its railroad complex have been decimated. Water continues to fill the impact crater as we speak. The devastation spread across the border into France. Damage from the blast has been documented as far away as ten miles, 16 kilometers, from the epicenter. You’ll note however, no evidence of the massive fires our own scientists predicted in an atomic explosion.”

  Sarah searched for the Holocaust Train in the footage. She caught sight of a line of boxcars moving away from the blast area, possibly headed south, but there had been so many trains. She couldn’t be sure if it was the train.

  Churchill said, “Casualty estimate?”

  “Over a hundred thousand dead or injured, maybe more,” Smith said. “Mostly civilians.” Sarah’s heart rose up into her throat, followed by the contents of her stomach. She bolted from the room, searching for a bathroom. A guard stationed outside the door took one look at her and pointed across the hall. She shouldered through the door, hand over her mouth, and headed for the nearest toilet. She thought she’d never stop retching, but eventually her stomach calmed. She went to the sink and splashed her face with water. As she straightened up and caught the reflection of the room in the mirror, she noticed Lord Mountbatten standing in the open door.

  Sarah dried her face on the towel. “We estimated a high number of civilian casualties, but not so many from a single attack. What have we done?”

  “It needed to be done, my dear. Retaking Europe from the Nazis will be costly work. I fear many more lives will be lost. The Russian armed forces have suffered almost eight million casualties, plus a like number of civilian deaths. If what you told Ike about Hitler’s Final Solution is true, another twelve million are scheduled to die in the camps. And that doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of British and French laid to rest so far. Every month we shorten this war will save a million lives. If your nuclear weapons accelerate the conclusion, we’ll endure the cost, whatever it might be.”

  Sarah nodded. She had made similar arguments herself – all of them theoretical. Now, the visual evidence of the bomb’s power confronted her. It was real. “I understand. Just give me a few minutes.”

  Mountbatten nodded, backed out of the doorway, and closed the door.

  Sarah sat on the cot in the room. She bent her head, closed her eyes, and prayed. She prayed for the families that had been destroyed by Hiram’s nuclear weapon, for the friends she feared she might never see again. When she opened her eyes, they fell on a poster tacked to the back of the bathroom door. It depicted a young mother sitting at the base of a tree with two children. In the distance, plumes of smoke rose up from the city toward the barrage blimps floating above. A ghostly Adolf Hitler whispers in the woman’s ear “Take them back!” urging her to return her children to the city. Printed below the picture were the words “DON’T DO IT MOTHER – LEAVE THE CHILDREN WHERE THEY ARE – A Message from the Ministry of Health.”

  Sarah made up her mind. She stood, straightened her clothes, attempted to fix her hair, and returned to the conference room. They had an invasion to plan.

  28

  1300 hours, Friday, August 7, 1942, near Lutzelbourg, Moselle department, Occupied France

  The heat rising from the decimated landscape around Saarbrücken had provided additional lift, which enabled him to drift all the way to the rendezvous point in Lutzelbourg in four jumps. Each landing sent screaming hot pain from his ankle up through his leg. On
ce the meadow north of town revealed itself in his night vision goggles during his final jump, he had taken a small chance and deployed his parachute rather than put himself through another hard landing. He settled down to rest the ankle and wait for Danette and Deborah.

  Hiram grew frustrated as the day wore on with no sign or signal from the two women. He had taken a few more of the pain killers, but the pain in his left ankle only grew. Repairing the damage took a back seat as his body combatted Hagar’s Curse, a result of the hours spent inside the pod waiting for the initial contamination generated by the Mark XII explosion to dissipate.

  He’d launched two drones earlier in the day, a surveillance drone to search for Deborah and Danette, and an Icarus drone to establish communication with the rest of the team. Neither had accomplished the assigned task. That the latter wasn’t working did not come as a surprise. The Icarus drone’s manual stated that upper atmosphere ionization – a side effect of the bomb – temporarily disrupted communications. Hiram expected it to clear up soon.

  His inability to locate the two women closest to him troubled him more. The farmhouse where they had planned to take refuge had been blown away, but they should have been able to survive in the cellar. Now, he couldn’t even tell if the place he sent them even had a cellar. Had they made it to the farmhouse? He found no sign of the railbike anywhere between Lutzelbourg and Spicheren. I can’t have lost them now, after all it took to get them out of the camp. Ozreini Adonai elohai. Help me Lord, my God.

  29

  1630 hours, Friday, August 7, 1942, Lutzelbourg, Vichy France

  Hiram climbed down into the pod to grab an HF radio. His ankle screamed in its cast as he climbed back out of the pod.