The Maids of Chateau Vernet
Page 23
“Falcon will be waiting for them,” Barbara said, “with Monsieur Donath’s men and a few anti-tank rocket launchers.”
“We should let them know," Charlotte said.
“You’re right.” Barbara laid the rifle aside and grabbed the HF radio handset. “Falcon, this is Echo, over,” she called in French.
“Echo, this is Falcon, over,” Trembley replied.
On the display, the Panzers ignored the right angles of the roads as they rolled back through the village, pushing smaller vehicles out of their way.
“Falcon, three Big Boys heading south on the west side of the river. ETA twenty minutes at present speed, over.”
Charlotte understood most of what Barbara said, though she struggled with Hiram’s military terminology. Barbara, on the other hand, rattled off Hiram’s slang with ease.
“Roger Echo. No infantry support, over?” Trembley said.
“Negative Falcon. The Big Boys split off from the infantry before they crossed the river, over.”
“Roger Echo. We’ll be sure to make them feel welcome. Falcon out.”
Barbara put down the headset and took up the M22 again. By Charlotte’s calculations, the tower was only about four-hundred-and-fifty meters out, an easy shot for Barbara.
“Ready when you are,” Barbara said.
The last halftrack crossed the bridge. Charlotte tapped two icons on her C2ID2. To the North, a bright light flashed. Six seconds later, the faint boom announced the explosion. The ten kilo charges would rupture the two pilings, which would put more pressure on the adjacent pilings. The fast-flowing river would do the rest of the work. The roadway above would collapse as its supports washed away in the torrent.
Charlotte tapped another icon on her C2ID2. “The jammer is on.”
Beside her, Barbara pulled the trigger. Charlotte watched as the shorter guard’s body tipped toward the center of the control tower and collapsed. Barbara re-sighted her weapon on her next target. The second guard took a shot square in his back. He took two awkward steps forward and tumbled over the railing.
Barbara laid down the rifle and picked up the HF radio handset. “Falcon, this is Echo. Execute. Out.” Hiram had changed the plan when the mechanized infantry column appeared. The Partisans, assisted by Team Charlie would execute their attack on the railyard as soon as the German column was trapped on the other side of the river.
Charlotte toggled her view in the C2ID2 to the drone over the railyard. Heat signatures from Donath’s men emerged from the woods headed toward the guards patrolling the western perimeter of the railyard. Within minutes, all six guards were down. Not one of them managed to raise an alarm. Donath’s partisans, followed by Team Charlie, flowed into the railyard.
Hiram appeared on the other side of Barbara, quiet despite his awkward gait. He settled in beside her, an M22 and his well-worn sniper rifle ready to get to work. Simone crawled up on Charlotte’s other side a minute later.
“Is everything on schedule?” Hiram said, voice low, his Babel Fish translating at the same volume.
“Three Panzers headed toward Falcon’s team,” Barbara said. “He’s expecting them.”
Hiram nodded, took out a high-powered night vision spotting scope, and surveyed the scene below them.
Charlotte ran through the scenario for Simone. Simone took out her C2ID2 display unit and called up the view of the Panzers on her screen.
“I’ll watch the Big Boys. You keep an eye on the railyard. You’re much better at flying the drones than I am.”
Charlotte smiled at the compliment and nodded. She switched the display back to the video feed from the overhead drone. Teams Charlie and Delta moved into position to assist with the transfer of prisoners from the cattle cars to the trucks.
“Sorry boys, can’t have you falling into enemy hands,” Hiram said. He tapped an icon on his C2ID2. A second later Charlotte heard four quick booms in succession and assumed Hiram had sacrificed the combat robots.
Hiram tapped Barbara on the shoulder and said something in English about the radio. They got up, Hiram signaling Charlotte and Simone to watch the events playing out below.
“You are our eyes,” Barbara said as she put an arm around Hiram. The two hobbled away into the darkness.
On the display, Donath’s men eliminated the remaining guard force one by one, with almost mechanical precision. She admired their efficiency.
A sudden ray of light exploded from an open door in the control tower. The silhouette of a man stepped onto the platform surrounding the tower. He looked at the dead guard and surveyed the landscape around the railyard. Then, he turned and scampered back the way he’d come.
Here we go.
A siren wailed, projected from the speakers mounted above the control tower.
A bright white light pierced the darkness once again. Three bright beams bounced across the landscape from the targeting searchlights on the Panzers charging through Pont Saint Vincent.
49
0520 hours, Monday, August 17, 1942, Pont-Saint-Vincent, Meurthe-et-Moselle Department, Vichy France
Hiram waited in silence atop a boxcar in the railyard watching the approaching tanks. A few feet beneath him, Irene tried to convince a group of men, women, and children to board the trucks that would take them to safety, a task complicated by the unaccompanied children who spoke only Spanish or Portuguese. Teams Charlie and Delta worked through the cattle cars down the line, cutting the thick wire that secured the bolts meant to keep the sliding doors in place.
Hiram pointed the barrel of his sniper rifle toward the chest of the silhouetted man protruding from the lead tank’s turret. A targeting searchlight mounted on the tank’s hull screwed with Hiram’s night scope. Hiram shot out the light, then focused on the tank’s commander again. The man wore a German uniform and rode atop a German tank. But the patch on his right arm – three vertical stripes of blue, white and red from left to right – and twin lightning bolts on his collar said he wasn’t German. LVF? His father had told him about the Légion des Volontaires Français Contre le Bolchévisme, or the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism, a unit of French Fascists fighting alongside the Nazis.
A burst of machinegun fire drew Hiram’s attention to the right. Through the scope, he saw one of Donath’s machine gun nests by the railway bridge engaging infantrymen attempting to cross from the island on foot. They must have crossed over the upstream lock on foot, then climbed onto the railway bridge. The LVF men fell one after another. Many dove into the water to avoid joining the slaughtered pile on the bridge. The men in the water struggled against the current. Drown, you bastards.
He swung the rifle back to the north. The two lead tanks slew their turrets in the direction of the machine gun nest. The scope flared as an artificial sun passed over him, revealing the lead tank commander in high relief.
Hiram pulled the trigger. The lead tank’s gun blossomed flame as its 88mm main gun fired. And, three AT-7 anti-tank rockets leapt out of the night headed for the Panzers. Hiram assumed he hit the LVF officer. Even if the shot missed, an AT-7 struck the tank at the bezel ring, popping the turret off like a champagne cork. The 88mm round from the Panzer landed in the nearest of the two machine gun nests. Dirt, broken weapons, and body parts erupted from the crater.
Hiram turned back to the tanks. Three unmoving, mechanical corpses sat along the road. A legless man pulled himself away from the wreckage. The AT-7s never disappointed. On the railway bridge, the LVF infantrymen made another push to cross the bridge. With one of the machine guns silenced, they had a chance, he supposed. Hiram, armed with his grandfather’s trusty M2010, began picking off the LVF men almost seventeen hundred meters away.
“Hawk, this is Echo, over,” Charlotte said through his headset.
Hiram took out two more soldiers on the bridge.
“Echo, this is Hawk, over.”
“Hawk, the enemy commander on the far shore is gathering up his men and loading them into the halftracks, over.”
“Wilco Hawk. Echo out.”
The LVF commander would have to find another way across the river somewhere downstream. Their new route awarded Hiram and his teams two more hours to clear out.
Hiram spotted a straggler trying to make his way across the bridge. The man looked down at the water, and then in Hiram’s direction. Hiram fired and the man fell across the wooden slats at the center of the bridge. After two minutes, and no further movement on the bridge, he checked on Deborah in the boxcar below.
“Deborah, how is it going down there?”
“We’re loading as fast as we can!”
“We need to be gone in an hour, maximum,” he said. “Speed it up.”
“Almost done the first five cars. The rest should be quicker.”
Hiram watched the railway bridge for another five minutes, but no new LVF soldiers appeared.
Simone’s voice broke his concentration. “Hawk, enemy column is heading north, over.”
The news erased some of his unease. He surveyed the bridge and the area around the train before climbing down to the ground, his left ankle objecting all the way. Nora waited for him at the bottom. She helped him down from the last rung of the ladder.
“Thanks,” he said.
She nodded and said, “I’ve got good news, bad news, and worse news.” The translator almost kept up with her.
“Tell me,” Hiram said.
“Emma has freed Ellen, Myriam, and Isabelle, with the help of the French Partisans. They’re back in uniform and ready to fight. That’s the good news.” Nora paused. “The bad news - Barbara’s family is not here. Her husband and two sons are missing. According to some of the other prisoners, they didn’t board the train in Drancy. No one seems to know why.”
“Diane?”
“She’s going to live, but they roughed her up a bit. Isabelle said they raped her, but Diane wouldn’t admit it. She’s in bad shape. She’s with her family in the first truck.”
“And the others?”
She nodded toward the first cattle car in line. “In the next car.” She looked down at the ground. “As we thought, all dead. Ester, Anna, Justine, Stephanie, little Solange. The pigs threw them in there like garbage.” She wiped her eyes and took a breath. “Fourteen more in there too. Two male prisoners I don’t know, two men I think were part of the train’s crew, and ten French policemen. Two of them dressed like prisoners. Why do you think they are out of uniform?”
Hiram shrugged. “Don’t know for sure. Inspector Locard told me Captain Petain tried to keep the whole matter of your escape quiet.”
“Don’t suppose he’ll be able to keep this quiet.”
“Hawk, this is Echo, over.” Simone’s voice, not Charlotte’s. The Babel Fish translated. Now what?
“Echo, this is Hawk, over.”
“Hawk, pull up the feed from drone one, over?”
“Roger Echo. Checking now, out.” Hiram pulled the C2ID2 auxiliary display out of its pouch on his combat vest and powered it on. He tapped a few icons and a thermal image came into focus.
“Echo, this is Hawk. What am I looking at, over?’
“Hawk, I think it’s another German column, over.”
Hiram tapped an icon to overlay a map on the display. The line of vehicles moved north through the town of Diarville, about twenty-five kilometers south of Pont-Saint-Vincent. The convoy looked similar to the mechanized infantry company they defeated. The vehicles traveled at about twenty-five kilometers per hour, their headlights switched on, heedless of potential Allied air attacks.
“Not German,” Hiram said. “LVF. French Nazis working for the SS.”
“Bastards,” Simone said.
“Can you overlay the route we’re taking to Besançon on this map?” Nora said. “If we can reach the town of Pierreville and cross this bridge, we can put the La Madon River between us and them.”
“But they could cross further south, here in Ceintrey and cut us off.” Hiram pointed to the bridge on the map.
“Not if we blow it up first,” Nora said.
Hiram did some time and distance calculations in his head. The LVF column could cross the ten kilometers to Ceintrey in about a half-hour. Port Saint Vincent was about fifteen kilometers from Ceintrey and the railbikes could travel faster than the LVF column, but it would still be a race to the bridge.
It was all academic, if their own convoy of trucks couldn’t get across the bridge in Pierreville first.
“Deborah, we leave in fifteen minutes,” he said. “Anyone not on the trucks gets left behind.”
“Got it,” she said, and began shouting orders to Team Charlie.
Hiram turned back to Nora. “I need to get a few more charges out of my pod. Can you keep an eye out for me? We don’t need any of Donath’s men knowing about it.”
“Of course.”
Hiram inched closer to the mutilated locomotive, hoping to use the structure for added cover. Nora stood a few feet away looking up and down the train.
Hiram activated the portal in his pack, setting it to the moment he had pulled out the drift mines he’d used on the locks. He reached inside and hauled out the floating mines one-by-one, thanking himself for situating them by the pod entry so he wouldn’t have to attempt a climb down another damn ladder. A total of four drift mines sat on the ground beside his pack a minute later. Forty kilos of high explosive, enough to weaken, if not destroy both bridges over the La Madon River.
“Okay, I’ll take Barbara with me,” Hiram said.
Nora held up her hand. “You need to stay with Petain. I’ll take Catherine on the railbike.”
He nodded and struggled to get to his feet again. “You’re right.” He handed her two of the mines. “Take these and go.”
Less than two minutes later, Nora and Catherine roared through the railyard’s south gate. Catherine waved to the partisans standing guard on the way out.
“May God go with you,” Hiram whispered.
50
0615 hours, Monday, August 17, 1942, Ceintrey, Meurthe-et-Moselle Department, Vichy France
“Hurry!” Catherine tucked two pair of night vision goggles back into the pack resting on the floor between her feet. “The bastards have almost reached the bridge.” She grasped the sidewall of the speeding railbike’s sidecar as Nora guided it down the deserted road toward the crucial bridge in Ceintrey. A dust trail rose behind the LVF vehicles on the other side of the river.
“Arm the mines,” Nora said. “It’s going to be close.”
Catherine picked up each mine and set the timers for thirty seconds but didn’t activate them yet.
The railbike careened onto the bridge just as the lead LVF halftrack turned onto the opposite end, a hundred meters away. Catherine struggled to keep her balance as the side car whipped around the turn. She hugged the heavy mines to prevent them from bumping around.
Nora slammed on the brakes and the bike skidded to a halt. The hump at the center of the bridge would protect them from enemy fire for no more than a few seconds. Catherine, arms shaking, dropped the mines out onto the concrete roadbed as Nora turned the bike in a tight circle.
“Go,” Catherine yelled as she tapped the activate icon on her C2ID2.
Nora hit the accelerator as the LVF machine gunner in the halftrack let loose an eight-round burst.
A round cut through Nora and she slumped over. The railbike whipped toward the side of the bridge. Searing pain sliced through Catherine’s arm as the bike began to tip. The momentum tossed her into the air and back toward the active mines sitting on the bridge. Her shoulder slammed into the hard surface, then her helmet hit.
Catherine tried to pull herself along the road, but her broken body refused to comply. She stopped struggling and decided to watch the show. As the halftrack crested the bridge, she smiled. The mines detonated.
51
1635 hours, Monday, August 17, 1942, North of Besançon, Vosges Department, Occupied
France
The late Lieutenant Lebeau’s Citroën led the way to Besançon with Hiram at the wheel. Petain sat beside him in the front seat. Trembley and Deborah sat in the rear. Petain had talked his way through a roadblock and two checkpoints with such ease, Hiram wondered how many times the good Captain had wagged his lying tongue in the past.
The 17th century Citadel of Besançon sat high above the city, wrapped by a horseshoe bend of the Doubs River. The German occupiers, recognizing its strategic position on Mount Saint-Etienne, had turned the Citadel into their fortress.
Hiram made a sharp left and stopped the Citroën at a checkpoint manned by French policemen. As a uniformed guard approached his window, Hiram waved him over to Petain’s side of the car. Petain greeted the man and showed his credentials.
Hiram scanned the length of the convoy stretched out along the rising road to his left through his side-view mirror.
“Non. Quatre moto avec side-car,” Petain said, his tone different than previous stops.
“Un, duex, trois,” The guard pointed back up the hill. “Il n'y a pas quatre.”
Hiram spoke enough French to understand the man’s words. One of the four railbikes had drifted away from the convoy. He looked in the mirror again. Barbara. Hiram clenched the steering wheel tighter.
52
2040 hours, Monday, August 17, 1942, Bost, Allier Department, Vichy France
The men Captain Petain had ordered to join him in Vichy made slow progress across France. They inched around every turn and crept through every town. To Corporal Lafayette, it seemed the team could not make it twenty kilometers without running into a military convoy or police roadblock. The entire countryside had morphed into a nightmare over the past few days.
As the car rounded a bend in the road, Lafayette spotted a familiar truck parked off to the side, the front end breaking through a patch of overgrown brush. “Does that look like the Captain’s truck to you?”