“I heard all the explosions,” he said. “Well done.”
“Any trouble with the Milice?” Manners asked.
“Piece of cake. I think they were asleep, but then the firing started and as one of them opened the door, I tossed a grenade in. One of them survived long enough to start firing a rifle through the window, but the old guy got him with a Sten burst. We went in, got two Lebel rifles and their ammo, and an old revolver, and ran for it as your charges went off.”
Manners congratulated the old sergeant, and moved to the back of the barn. On an earlier visit, they had found some rusty lengths of corrugated iron, put them together as a low lean-to, to make a place shadowed enough to light a tiny folding Tommy cooker without the light showing. He put some water on to boil and poured in the jar of concentrated soup he carried. It was bitterly cold, and now that the boys had stopped moving and their adrenaline surge had passed, they would need hot food. Without being asked, Frise took a loaf of the yellowish chestnut bread from his pack and began sawing thick slices. The colonial sergeant took the guard duty outside.
“You heard the machine gun?” Manners asked McPhee as they crouched over the little pebble of solid fuel, its chemical fumes stronger than the smell of the soup.
“I don’t think our French buddy’s going to make it,” McPhee grunted.
“Don’t write him off that easily. He has a way of getting out of tight spots.”
“The truck was going away. So they wouldn’t have ambushed it, there’d have been no point. The Krauts must have spotted them first. Francois was the only one among them who’d ever been in action. If the Krauts were any good, it would have been like potting rabbits.”
“He had a couple of men who knew what they were doing, the chap who was in the French Marines and the Great War veteran. And they had a lot of cover.”
“Yeah, but they didn’t have a Spandau. That thing rips out bullets like I never heard.”
They dipped their enamel mugs into the soup, and Manners took one out to the sergeant. Nothing, he said. No explosions, no firing, no sound of trucks yet. The Germans would probably wait for daylight before sending out a damage assessment squad with a strong patrol. Manners sent him back inside to drink his soup and took the watch. Inside the barn, the sounds of excited conversation died away as the boys settled down to sleep in the straw. The stars were brighter than ever, almost as bright as they had been in the desert. He traced the handful of constellations he knew, Orion’s belt and the plow, which led him up to the Pole Star. It was a good night for parachute drops, and he wondered how many more tiny knots of frightened, excited men were out in this cold French countryside, how many stripped-down bombers were lumbering back to England after dropping the arms and supplies they used as pinpricks against the million-man army the Germans kept in France. Seventy divisions, Von Runstedt was supposed to have. Seventy divisions, and two thousand tanks. And Rommel had kept a British army on the run in North Africa with just two divisions and less than four hundred tanks. The invasion was going to be a nightmare. But if he and the Maquis could keep Army Group G tied down here in the south, that was almost a third of the German forces who would not be driving the Allies off the beaches.
It was nearly dawn before the survivors came. Manners heard them coming through the woods long before he heard the whispered password “Laval.” No Vichy or German troops would ever dream that the Maquis would use the name of the Vichy political boss as a password. Nor the reply, “Petain,” although the Frenchmen liked to make it sound like “putain”-whore.
They were shivering with cold in shirtsleeves and pullovers. They had taken off their jackets to make an improvised stretcher for the Great War veteran who had taken two bullets in his thigh. There was a whiff of French tobacco in their air, and Francois arrived, nonchalantly bringing up the rear with a Spandau over one shoulder. The men putting down the stretcher clinked from the belt bandoliers around their shoulders.
“You got the gun,” Manners marveled.
“Got the gun, the ammo, the truck, and eight Boches. And two Schmeissers. A successful night. We heard your explosions.”
“So how did it start? Did they spot you”?
“It started by accident. We had a tree all ready to roll onto the road in case the patrol came back, but we lost control of the thing in the dark and it rolled out on its own, just as we heard the truck coming from le Buisson.” He lit another cigarette from the stump of the one he had been smoking, his hand trembling. “Get my boys some food, can you? And take a look at that leg. He could walk a bit, but the tourniquet needs loosening. He’ll need a friendly doctor.”
Back in the barn, as McPhee made more soup and the colonial sergeant began loosening the tourniquet in the light of Manners’s red torch, Francois continued with his tale.
“There was no time to move it, so we had to ambush the truck right there, as soon as it stopped for the log. It didn’t look suspicious, still half on the bank, and only blocking about half the road. So the truck stopped, and we opened up. One of them got off a burst with the machine gun from the roof of the cab, but luckily he was firing the wrong way and the Marine threw a Gammon bomb, and that was it. We shot two of them trying to scuttle down the road. We lost one dead, and the old man was hit.”
“Was the truck a write-off?”
“We pushed it off the road and burned it, took the guns and came back this way. It was easier than I thought, except for burying poor little Jeannot. I don’t think he even fired a shot.” He lit another cigarette. “The boys behaved well. They trust their guns now, and the Gammon bombs. And us. They’ll be even better next time.”
“Next time won’t be so easy. The Germans aren’t idiots. There’ll be no more single-truck patrols, and they’ll start trying to ambush us.”
“I know. But I have an idea.” The Frenchman went across to fill his tin cup, puffing on his cigarette between swigs of soup. “What is the most vulnerable but essential part of our operation?”
“The radio, no question.”
“Correct, and the big danger is their direction-finding trucks, right?”
“Right.”
“How many do they have, for this part of France?”
“I don’t know, but they’ll be a special unit, corps troops, probably assigned to the Gestapo. No more than a company for this region. Say eight or ten trucks at the most.”
“And they always hunt in threes?”
“They have to, to triangulate the bearings on the transmitter.”
“So with three successful ambushes, we close them down.”
“You mean we use the radio as bait? Can we afford to take that risk?”
“We take that risk every time we transmit. Might as well take advantage of it. The thing about the trucks, they are stuck to moving on roads and decent tracks. So we pick our spot, somewhere near a road the trucks must use. And we hit them. It’s not just the specialized trucks; it’s the personnel. Those guys take a lot of training.”
“Let’s be smart about this. We have to set the trap somewhere outside the area we normally use, because after an attack like that the Gestapo will scream blue murder until the army sends in reinforcements to hunt us down.”
“Fine, we’ll go east, into the Massif, somewhere the far side of Brive. It’s nearly empty country, not like round here. But we’ll need some more parachute drops, both here and over in the Massif. That will mean one of us going across there to scout out drop zones, probably me, because we’ll have to liaise with the local Maquis. My brother knows the FFI types in Brive, but most of the guys over there are Communists.”