“Incline Thine ear, O HaShem, and answer me; for I am poor and needy.” Hiram had not heard Deborah pray before. It took him a verse to remember the psalm, but he soon joined in.
“Be gracious unto me, O Lord; for unto Thee do I cry all the day.” Deborah opened her eyes and tried to smile, the effort thwarted by her fear. She squeezed them shut again and resumed praying as a plane roared overhead spitting cannon fire at the train. After another verse, a second plane crossed the sky, firing again at the train. Hiram guessed the planes were British or American fighter-bombers, armed with bombs and 20 mm canons.
One of the shots hit something volatile. The train erupted in a cascade of explosions. I guess they bombed a train full of bombs, Hiram thought as the shock waves rolled over them. Isolated explosions continued for the next few minutes, then silence.
He checked himself◦– no damage. Beside him, Deborah smiled with relief. He reached out and touched her. She shook her head and pointed back toward the tracks, mouthing Danette’s name. Hiram raised his head to shout across to the other side of the embankment. “Danette, are you okay,” but he couldn’t hear his own voice. “Vera!” That’s when he noticed the ringing in his ears. He turned his head to look down at Deborah and saw her mouth moving again. He heard nothing.
“Can you hear me?” he said. Deborah looked at him for a moment, then shook her head. Hiram got up on his knees and took a quick look around. The NVGs rested on the ground an arm’s length away. Once he had them settled in place, he took another look around before scrambling over the tracks to find Danette and Vera.
He found Vera lying on her stomach at the bottom of the embankment, eyes fixed and unmoving, her head contorted at an impossible angle, her neck torn open. A twisted shard of metal stuck out of the wound. He looked around wildly for Danette.
To his surprise she lay a few feet away on the ground in a perfect prone firing position, sighting her M22 up the tracks. He glanced in that direction but saw no threats. He tapped her on the shoulder to get her attention. He pointed to his ear and shook his head. She nodded in agreement. They were all deaf.
Danette resumed her firing position. Deborah who had observed Danette’s calm professionalism, took up a similar position, looking in the opposite direction. Hiram went to examine the railbike, which had slipped off the tracks. The bottom of the front wheel bent inward. Otherwise the bike seemed fully functional. He retracted the guide wheels that had kept the railbike on the track, then swapped the damaged wheel with the spare his mechanics had insisted each group take with them.
Twenty minutes later he signaled Danette and Deborah to climb aboard. He loaded Vera’s body into the sidecar with Danette. Danette held the dead woman like a child, supporting her head as her neck no longer would. Tears streamed down Danette’s cheeks as she turned to face him.
“We need to take her where she won’t be found,” he said. He spoke loud, unable to hear his own words above the ringing in his ears.
Deborah and Danette seemed to understand him, although it was likely their hearing hadn’t returned either. Hiram climbed on to the bike.
Farther down the tracks, local firemen approached the burning train, black silhouettes against the flames. They’d have to find a way around the wrecked train and the response forces streaming towards it. More delays. More time wasted. Time the families in Drancy could not afford.
18
1300 hours, Tuesday, August 4, 1942, Marbella, Costa del Sol, Francoist Spain
Sarah was quite sure she would never eat another orange as long as she lived. For three days she’d hidden along with Maria in the back of an ancient flatbed truck, occupying a small space between dozens of crates packed with fragrant oranges.
Since Sunday night, they’d shared the cramped space with Flight Lieutenant Anthony “Tony” Farley of the Royal Air Force’s 138th Squadron. Tony had bailed out of his Westland Lysander over southeastern France a week earlier, his aircraft falling victim to a German fighter plane. He’d been lucky to survive the night jump into a forest, but his lone passenger, a British SAS officer, had perished when he snapped his neck on an unseen branch.
Hiram had instructed Sarah and Maria not to reveal their true mission to anyone until they spoke to an American officer, either on the Rock or in Britain. Tony’s questions went unanswered, so he had resorted to flirting. Sarah wasn’t in the mood, but she knew Tony could help them get ashore at Gibraltar. She tried to be polite. Tony judged her lack of interest, and focused his attention on Maria, the two of them verbally fencing as the truck rolled down the road.
The truck came to a halt and the stacks of orange crates began to disappear, allowing them to crawl out into the light, shading their eyes at the sudden brilliance of the Costa del Sol. The truck had stopped at a small vineyard located below a high ridge. Sarah saw the Mediterranean Sea a few kilometers to the south, beyond a fishing village on the coast below them.
Maria asked the driver, Ricardo, the name of the town. He was a short, swarthy man with considerable body odor and worse breath. Still, it was preferable to oranges.
“Marbella, mi señora.” Ricardo pointed down toward the town and said a few more words to Maria.
“He says we’ll be boarding one of the boats down there for the trip to the Rock. About 70 kilometers by sea. But first,” Maria smiled “we eat!”
Sarah hoisted her backpack onto her shoulder and thanked him, Maria translating, then asked for directions to the toilet. Sarah left Maria and Ricardo and headed for the privy. As she made her way around the ramshackle house, she wondered why Ricardo had once referred to Tony as a spy during their trip south.
She nearly collided with Tony as she turned a corner. “Pardon me, madam,” he said in his clipped English accent. He stepped aside, allowing her to pass.
“Entirely my fault.” She smiled and continued on her way. Tony was one of those Brits you could pick out of a crowd instantly. Fair-skinned, square-shouldered, and possessing a ramrod-straight posture, he radiated English aristocracy, even dressed as he was in peasant rags and leather sandals. That man would make an awful spy. He spoke terrible Spanish and poor French. Maria had been translating for him since they met.
Sarah breathed in the open air, glad to be free of the stuffy truck and the acidity of the orange-tainted air she’d endured along the way. The scent of oranges lingered and she wondered how long it intended to stick with her.
The familiar pop of a gunshot sent her ducking behind the outhouse that had been her destination. After a second shot, she took off running in the other direction. She plunged into a thick copse of juniper bushes at the edge of the woods. Moments later, two Spanish policemen rounded the corner of the building, guns drawn. They advanced on the outhouse, then yelled for her to come out. When she didn’t respond, they yanked the door open.
Moving slow and quiet, Sarah reached into her pack and withdrew the handgun Hiram had provided her for self-defense. She kept an eye on the policemen, who searched a jumble of discarded farm equipment near the privy. With the silencer screwed on tight and a full ten round magazine she waited.
The policemen moved their search into the house while Sarah crawled deeper into the woods. She rose to a crouch, circled around to the front of the dwelling, and took up a position under a broken-down wagon at the edge of the woods. Tony, Ricardo and another man, along with a middle-aged woman, sat on the ground in front of the house with their hands on their heads. Three policemen stood guard over them, one with sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve. Maria lay sprawled on the ground nearby. She wasn’t moving.