The women would return to J block which held all the other Jewish women and children well after the evening meal had been served. At the chateau, the meals provided to the women had been fresh, the bread still soft. And, unlike the near starvation rations at the camp, food had been plentiful. Sleep, on the other hand, had not. The women worked day and night.
Hiram had observed the routine for more than three weeks with his drones. The number of prisoners, the strategic positioning of guards on each truck, and the route the convoy followed remained consistent. Despite his recon effort, he prepared contingency plans to support changes in the number and arrangement of vehicles, presence of additional guards, varying arrival and departure times, and weather conditions. He continued to track the convoy’s approach toward his ambush site.
The command car rounded the bend below Hiram’s position and came to a skidding halt on the hard-packed dirt road to avoid hitting the large tree that Hiram had dropped across it. The two trucks that followed came to a more controlled stop behind the command car but were unable to preserve the desired distance between the vehicles, as Hiram anticipated.
With one push of a button on his C2ID2, Hiram initiated four blasting caps. The first detonated a satchel charge buried under the stopped command car. The explosion blew the vehicle and its occupants apart, the remains of the vehicle chassis settling upside down in the stream. The next explosion dropped a large tree across the road behind the second truck, cutting off any attempted escape by the remaining vehicles. The final two explosions created large craters at natural choke points in the road, approximately two kilometers in each direction from the ambush site. The narrow road remained the only route to or from the chateau. Any response the Vichy forces might mount would only get by those choke points on foot.
In less than a minute Hiram killed three of the remaining guards and one of the truck drivers with his sniper rifle. The remaining guard from the rear of the front truck and the driver of the second truck had taken refuge behind the lead truck, out of Hiram’s sight line. The guard rose up and fired a wild burst in Hiram’s general direction, causing him to duck. An anguished scream burst from one of the female prisoners in the lead truck. The prisoners in the second truck huddled with their heads down, some crying, some screaming.
Hiram put down his sniper rifle and turned his attention to the C2ID2 screen controlling the combat robot on the other side of the road. He adjusted the robot’s position, then swiveled the gun platform a few inches, sighting on the two remaining men. At his command, the robot’s nine-millimeter machine gun barked a six-round burst and both men crumpled to the ground.
“Stay in the trucks and keep your heads down,” Hiram shouted twice, first in Hebrew, then in French, as he scrambled down the slope with his assault rifle in one hand and a nine-millimeter pistol in the other. Despite his French heritage, Hiram spoke only Hebrew and English. His great-grandfather Silas had abandoned all things French when he immigrated to Israel after the war because of France’s complicity in the Holocaust. During the trip from India, he’d learned and then practiced a few French phrases using the real-time translator everyone called the Babel Fish in honor of the great English writer Douglas Adams. Hiram thought Adams would’ve had a number of witty things to say about the present incarnation of his idea for a universal translator. Although accurate, the slow translations provided made the tool awkward in conversation and unacceptable in fast-paced situations like in the one Hiram now found himself. Whether or not the women understood his words, the maids complied with his direction.
Hiram approached each downed policeman and shot him in the head. The women in the trucks screamed some more. Unable to find one man, Hiram presumed the body was entangled in the remains of the command car.
Turning his attention to the women, he shouted “Danette Halphen, identify yourself!” in Hebrew, then French. That phrase almost exhausted his French and revealing the Babel Fish to these women promised to raise questions he didn’t want to answer.
“You must help us,” one of the women in the first truck said. “Elsie’s been shot.”
Hiram sprinted over to the first truck. He climbed into the cargo bed. One of the prisoners clutched her upper abdomen, blood oozed between her fingers. He didn’t expect her to survive long, even with his 21st Century medical supplies.
After a quick examination, he turned to the women and said in Hebrew, “I can ease her suffering with a pain killer. She’s going to bleed out quickly. I’m sorry.” One of the maids passed along the message to the others. He pulled an auto-injector full of morphine from the medical kit on his belt and jabbed it into her thigh, then applied combat gauze to the wound, which did little to staunch the flowing blood. He said, “I’m sorry” once more. Someone touched his arm, and he turned.
She pointed to herself and said, “Danette Halphen.”
Hiram closed his eyes and opened them again. He had traveled here for the woman in the picture. Nothing prepared him for the shock of seeing his great-great-grandmother standing before him. Her young, rounded cheeks were accentuated by a beautiful, comforting smile so much like Rachel’s. He forced himself to focus on her, the adrenalin made it difficult.
“Your cousin David in America sent me to rescue you.” Hiram had practiced the story a hundred times along the way, often employing the Babel Fish to test his rusty Hebrew. With Danette’s son Silas living with David and his wife Eliza in America◦– a wise decision made after the “Night of Broken Glass” that took place in late 1938◦– Hiram thought the rescue scenario viable. Explaining time travel to a woman who had not yet heard of an atomic bomb, or the liftoff of a shuttle headed for the stars, seemed less believable.
A woman repeated his story in French. A few others exchanged quiet words.
“I’ll take you and anyone else who cares to come, but we need to leave now.”
“You are here to save us?” one of the women said in well-practiced Hebrew.
He hadn’t taken his eyes off the woman claiming to be Danette. “Yes, we need to go now.”
The corner of Danette’s lips lifted and he saw his sister standing before him for an instant. He returned his attention to the group, reassured his great-great-grandmother was among them.
“Please come with me if you want to live. I suggest we all get moving.”
The women in the trucks hesitated, looking at each other for reassurance. After a moment, most climbed down and gathered a few meters away. A few of the women remained by the fallen woman’s side.
“They won’t leave Elsie behind.” A woman approached him, her Hebrew distorted and uncomfortable, not native. “You save the families?”
“If we stay here much longer, we won’t have a chance to save them,” Hiram said.
The woman looked at him for a moment, as if his words made no sense. “You save the families?” A wisp of curly brown hair had escaped her green scarf and swept across her face as a welcome breeze slipped past.
“I’ll do everything in my power to save them,” he said. As long as Danette stays safe.
She nodded and headed toward the women by the truck. She spoke quietly to them and still they refused to come along. Hiram worried they might tell the French police what happened. About a stranger coming to the rescue. About a stranger with a tie to Danette Halphen. After a few minutes of argument, the woman with the green scarf returned to Hiram defeated. “They stay. We go now.”