As Ellenor returned the hug, Sarah whispered in her ear: “My brother is smitten.”
Before Ellenor could process this, Sarah withdrew to her seat and said with authority, “So let’s find some way of sticking it to these Boche bastards, shall we?”
****
With fifteen hours remaining, Alec studied the map they’d drawn on a long length of butcher’s paper. The nests of the big ninety-millimeter weapons were marked with circles drawn by Jules with an architect’s precision. The guns were positioned far enough from the city that streetlamps would not illuminate them at night, so they could remain mostly invisible in the dark. This also meant, however, no risk of civilian casualties when Alec and Ellenor dropped their bombs. The command center—a half-buried block of reinforced cement—hunched in the shadow of the Cathedral of Saint Stephen as if embarrassed to be there.
“I hear the Frenchies are on the verge of mutiny,” Roby said.
“The infantry’s in bad shape,” Alec confirmed, studying the schematic. “They’re sick of being ordered to go over the top and be shredded by happy Huns with machine guns. Can’t say I blame them.”
“And the air service?”
“A different story. Morale’s a bit stronger at the aerodromes.”
“Why is that?” Sarah asked.
“I suppose we have a dissimilar view of the conflict.”
“You’re fighting against the same enemy as the infantry, aren’t you?”
Alec’s smile contained no mirth. It felt like a cold, almost bitter thing on his face. “We flyers don’t know the real war, because we don’t know the smell.”
“What does that mean?” Sarah asked. “What smell?”
Alec wondered how much he should say. “It’s like this. Boys and horses have been dying in the same trenches for three years. There are layers of them stuffed into the muck by now, their skulls and skin the same color as the mud. They died to take fifty yards of territory that some other platoon had lost the week before. They can’t be buried properly. It’s all slime and shit out there. So they sink into the mire. A month later, when an entrenching team is sent to dig a new communications tunnel in knee-high water, they find the bodies, chaps that look just like them, their chests full of happy little medals and their entrails swimming with worms. The constant smell can drive a man mad.” He ran a hand through his blond hair. “Flyers know about dying. But we don’t know about war.”
Ellenor shuddered visibly at this description. Roby nodded and said simply, “Aye.”
“Back to the matter at hand,” Sarah said, attempting to keep them on task. She touched the map. “The French squadron arrives over the city early tomorrow morning, before sunup. To clear the way for them, we’re facing two different threats that require two different solutions.”
“The ack-ack and the bunker,” Alec said.
“Correct. For the sake of argument, let’s say the two of you are a smashing success and manage to take out most of the guns. The command center is sunk halfway in the ground. It’s made of concrete and steel. You can’t count on destroying it from the air, and there’s no way that Roby and Jules and I can force our way inside. And that means the wireless radio will alert every German soldier within a hundred-kilometer radius as soon as your first bomb hits the ground. They’ll get planes in the air from all directions. If the radio operators remain in that bunker, it will take a miracle to keep you in one piece.”
“You don’t think a bomb can penetrate that place?”
“For one thing, you don’t have a bomb to spare. It will take all four if you hope to eliminate enough of the anti-aircraft weapons to make a difference, simply because they’re positioned too far apart from one another. But aside from that, no, I don’t think you can blast your way through even if you had spare munitions.”
“Then what’s the point of all this, sis?”
“The point is to save the French planes so they can destroy the factory, which you can still accomplish.”
“Sure, at the expense of our own lives. There are probably half a dozen Jastas within a short flight of this city, and if the radio men are allowed to transmit, half the Luftstreitkräfte will be on top of Ellenor and me before we get five miles away. Don’t you have some local rabble you can rouse to assault the bunker?”
“Look around. This is what we have.”
“Well, I’m not quite sure how I feel about a suicide mission.”
“We’ll call it off, find another way.”
“There is no other way.”
Sarah threw up her hands. “What would you have us do, Alec? Do you want those French pilots to fly into a deathtrap? And if E.I. keeps mass-producing shells, how many other deaths will be on our hands?” She sighed, the frustration causing her shoulders to sag. “At the same time, I don’t want you hurt, either of you, so as long as that bunker is occupied, I won’t support this mission.”
No one seemed to know what to say after that. Roby had carved a scale model of one of the German guns, and he turned it over in his hands. Jules swished coffee in his mug. Alec stared at his sister, wishing she’d never met Stefan Weller and moved to this wretched place.
“Can I tell you about the bees?” Ellenor said into the silence.
They all looked at her.
“I don’t belong here,” she began. “In fact, the very idea that I’m sitting here in this basement, discussing ways to blow things up and save lives, is so far removed from who I am that it’s like I’m back in the children’s room again at Father’s farm, reading them a story of a woman from another world. So all I can do is talk about what I know best.” She gathered her thoughts and continued. “When you’re a beekeeper, you regularly find yourself facing fifty thousand armed warriors who are willing to die for their queen. The only way to stay safe when you’re working the hive is to confuse them all with smoke. So the men in that bunker…we smoke them out.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Gustov lost his temper at quarter after twelve that afternoon.
The morning had been a waste. He’d stopped by one shop after the next, asked his question, and then moved on. He’d parleyed with pedestrians and chatted war gossip with small-scale merchants selling everything from castor oil to postage stamps. He’d purchased trinkets in hopes of bribing shopkeepers, only to give those ornaments away to passing children. He ate a nondescript midday meal at a café in which he was the only customer. He asked the woman in the apron if she had served anyone with a British accent or any woman fitting Ellenor’s description.
Back outside in the street, he heard someone say, “Piss off, flyboy.”
This comment was so out of context that Gustov almost walked away without noticing. He was experiencing a pleasant if unproductive day among pleasant if uninspired people, and to be called a name was startling.
He stopped, turned. “I beg your pardon?”
“I told you to leave us alone.” The man wore a faded, shapeless work shirt and hobnail boots without laces. He spoke his German with a French lilt, revealing his loyalties. Not everyone in Metz appreciated the multicultural richness their city enjoyed. Most men and women were content, but cretins abounded.
Gustov relaxed. There was no threat here, only poverty and blame. “Good afternoon.”
“You can take your ‘good afternoon’ and shove it sideways up your ass crack.”
A military man, Gustov had heard far more original curses. “We haven’t met, yet clearly I’ve offended you.”
“Every kraut in an airplane offends me.”
“A French partisan, I see.”
“France has got nothing to do with it.” He came closer, his eyes red and haunted, his cheeks chapped. Only now did Gustov realize that the man wore the remains of an enlisted soldier’s uniform shirt. “You pompous shit-eaters in your fancy planes strafed my platoon at Verdun because you didn’t have the balls to take up a rifle and face us like men. That’s no decent way to fight, plugging away at helpless sods on the ground who can’t even lift
a finger to stop you.”
“I wasn’t at Verdun. You have my condolences for your loss.”
“This war is going to be won or lost on the ground, by real warriors, and not by a group of fairies in planes painted like whores paint their faces.”
Gustov neared his breaking point. He felt the change inside himself and welcomed it.
“I’d rather share a cigarette with an infantry man from either side than a flyboy,” the Frenchman said, spittle on his lips. “What makes you any better than us? What gives you the right to miss out on frostbite and Weil’s disease and all the goddamn fleas?”
A few hours ago, Gustov would have patted this disgruntled fellow on the shoulder and continued about his business. But his sense that his quarry was escaping had affected him in a primitive way. “Are you quite finished, sir?”
“I’m just getting started. Look at you. There you stand, dressed like a demigod—but me?” He shrugged “I’m not even worthy of brushing the lint from your uniform.” He reached up and flicked the tips of his fingers across an imaginary crumb on Gustov’s chest.
Gustov punched him in the throat.
The man gagged instantly, letting out a series of dog-like sounds as he crumpled to his knees. He clutched at his neck, choking.
Gustov grabbed him by the hair. He tightened his fist, getting a good grip of the unwashed strands and shaking the man’s skull. While the poor wretch coughed, Gustov glanced around, seeing the faces staring at him. People stopped what they were doing to witness the commotion on the corner. Violence was rare in the city, as the residents were the very young and the very old, with all the hot-blooded types shipped off to the Front. This, then, was something wicked and new.
No longer giving a shit about appearances, Gustov drew his Luger with his free hand and jabbed the barrel into the man’s eye. The man yelped, terror flashing through the pain.
“I respect everyone I meet,” Gustov explained to him. “It is unfortunate, sir, that you do not hold to similar standards.”
The man continued to choke, crying now.
Gustov pressed the gun harder into his eye socket. “If I were to let you go, who is to say that you would learn anything from our colorful encounter?”
The man tried to nod. He begged in between his coughs, whispering, “S’il vous plaît,” over and over again.
Gustov tightened his fist, causing the man’s head to shudder. Hundreds of eyes could not look away from him as the people of Metz stood flatfooted in the street and doorways. Fingers parted curtains in dark windows. Gustov felt their frightened gazes on his face. They did not judge. They feared him. He wanted to give them back their tranquility. He didn’t want their impression of him to be how he dealt with insolence from one of their sons.
“Please, sir…”
To hell with it. Gustov shot him.
The bullet blew a soup of bone and red meat from the back of the man’s head, splattering the storefront with blood and gray chunks of brain. The sudden report made the onlookers jump; they recoiled in horror, a few of them rushing away, most of them welded in place.
Gustov looked down at the Frenchman, a red puddle spreading across the ground. The man had died instantly, unlike many of the pilots Gustov defeated in the air. Those were honorable men who had not deserved a protracted death as they burned or fell. This rodent had gotten lucky.
Gun in hand, Gustov raised his voice so that his words carried along the street: “I am looking for a man from Britain and a German-speaking American woman with dark hair. Someone here has seen them. I have money for anyone who aids me. You tell me what you know, and I will pay you, no questions asked. But if you have seen that man and woman and do not tell me, when I find out, I will come to your home and execute you in front of your family.” That last part wasn’t true, but he saw its effect on their faces. “I shall be at Café Lindsey awaiting your assistance.”
With that, he walked away, quivering with energy. He knew there would be consequences, a visit from the police, a debriefing by High Command, but he’d been assaulted in the line of duty and defended himself. They would not discipline him. In point of fact, most of them feared him, regardless of their rank. The Voss family name traced its influence to the time of the Reformation, and even in this bitter world, where one sowed salt in his enemy’s fields and plotted upheavals, names still mattered.
Gustov holstered his sidearm, then retraced his steps as the sun burned across the afternoon sky, every eye on Avenue Foch watching him go.
****
At shortly after two o’clock, fourteen hours before the French planes faced the Flak batteries above Metz, Ellenor sat in a stone room below an abandoned stable and thought again of Sarah’s furtive message: My brother is smitten.
Leaning forward in her chair with her elbows on her knees and her fingers laced, Ellenor revealed nothing in her demeanor. On the outside, she was an attentive member of the meeting being conducted on a table that had been a door in a past life, its surface cluttered with cups and sketches and smoldering cigarettes. On the inside, she walked a wire like an acrobat anticipating a breeze. Did Alec really feel that way about her? Or was Sarah—who hadn’t seen her brother since before the war—misinterpreting his intentions?
“…but our timing will need to be crackerjack,” Alec was saying. “Ellenor and I need to be in the sky at the same time you three gas the bastards from their box.”
“And we’re woefully short on supplies,” Roby said. “We aren’t prepared for an operation like this. We usually take weeks in the planning stage.”
Sarah took up a pen and opened her notebook. “We’ll list everything we need to make it happen. You talk, I’ll write.”
Roby started them off: “If we follow Ellenor’s plan, we’ll need materials to create the smoke—rags, oil, coal.”
“Steel fireboxes and shovels,” Jules added.
“An automobile to carry it all,” Roby continued, “plus dark clothing.”
“And weapons.”
“Yes, and that.”
Without looking up from her work, Sarah said, “Alec? How about you?”
“Our petrol tank is almost empty. Hildegard is down to a few drops.”
Roby pointed to a spot on the map he’d rendered. “We can purchase fuel from the depot here. How much do you need?”
“If I remember correctly from our endless briefings on enemy aircraft, our bird holds around one hundred and seventy liters in her main tank and about fifty in the auxiliary. Can we get that much?”
“This may be wartime, my friend, but money still moves mountains.”
“You free-shooters have a financial backer?”
Sarah explained: “My late husband and I put some money away for emergencies. We have enough for what we need tonight.”
“Excellent. Assuming you also have access to transportation, Roby and I can take some barrels and make the deal while the rest of you acquire the ingredients for the smoke. That sound all right with you, El?”
Ellenor didn’t immediately reply. First of all, he’d called her El, which was a new but not unwanted development, and secondly, she realized that after this evening and the early hours of tomorrow morning, however it played out, she would be gone from here forever.
Where would she go?
“I’ll help in any way I can,” she said, and thought it sounded like a lame reply.
They divided their duties. Alec and Roby would purchase fuel and transport it to where the Rumpler was hidden in the trees; the containers were heavy, and both men would be needed to hoist them. At the same time, Ellenor and Jules would acquire the necessary items to fashion the black smoke that would hopefully drive the radio operators from their post. When both tasks were complete, they’d meet back here at dusk to face the conversation that Ellenor knew Alec was dreading. What would happen after it was all over? Would Sarah stay and fight? Or could Alec convince her to restart her life on safer shores? And if so, how would he get her there?
She had littl
e time to wonder about it. Jules donned a narrow-brimmed hat and escorted her from the cellar, with Sarah remaining behind so as not to be recognized as a woman who was supposed to be dead. Ellenor didn’t even have a chance to wish Alec good luck. He and Roby were already gone.
Outside, the afternoon revealed nothing of war. Yes, much of the window glass had been replaced with wooden sheets, and certainly many of the shops closed their doors at odd hours. Yet the sun seemed unaware of all that, determined to warm the skin and push back the gloom.
“We’ll cut through here,” Jules said, guiding her into an alley under strings of laundry hung between upper-level windows. Jules was sixty years old, with a mane of white hair he wore flattened back from his forehead. His eyes were distorted behind his lenses. He seemed French to his very marrow, his mannerisms and attire distinctly Parisian, but he spoke rarely, performing his role of clandestine scrounger without question. Ellenor wondered what story had brought him into Sarah’s circle but didn’t have the time to ask. After tonight, he would become one more memory.
For now, though, he was very real. He led her through the city’s cobbled streets with little nods of his head, occasionally asking if she wanted to stop for food or rest or a toilet. He eventually led them to a junk dealer whose lean-to marketplace was positioned across the street from a clockmaker’s studio that had been turned into a dispensary for ration coupons. Jules introduced the proprietor as Selig.
Ellenor said hello but didn’t give her name.
“How have we not met, you and I?” Selig asked her.
“I’m new here.”
“And pretty,” Selig said, playing his eyes over her.
Jules scowled. “Selig, please, none of that. We’ve come for rags. As many as we can stuff into these sacks.”
“An odd request.”
“It’s an odd war.”
“I’ll agree with you on that one.” Over the next twenty minutes they filled the bags with scrap shirts, old cotton strips, worn pillowcases, and wads of burlap. As Selig tied a leather cord around the neck of one of the sacks, he said, “There’s been a shooting.”
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