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?”
The driver pulled up beside the abandoned vehicle. “If it belongs to the Captain, he must have found some trouble.” He pointed to hole in the door, a wide wet smear of what Lafayette guessed was blood ran down to the sideboard.
“Stay here.” Lafayette climbed out and inspected the vehicle. He confirmed that the truck was indeed the one Captain Petain had taken on the trip to Vichy and the smear on the door was someone’s blood. The Captain had taken Lebeau and two other men with him. He found no sign of any of them.
“Search the area,” Lafayette ordered. No one jumped at the command. They seemed hesitant to climb out of the vehicles. “Now.”
One of his men soon turned up a poorly concealed blood pool, but no other signs of the missing men. The armored trunk with the mysterious weapons remained in the back of the abandoned truck. Instead of moving the trunk, he split his men between the two vehicles, and they set off again for Vichy, hoping to find Captain Petain, or at least Lieutenant Lebeau there.
Ten kilometers down the road, the lead car pulled up to a roadblock in the little town of Bost as the sun dipped behind the treetops west of the village. Men in German Army uniforms manned the post.
“I’ll do the talking,” Lafayette said, fishing his identity papers and police badge from a jacket pocket.
“Guten morgen, mein herr,” Lafayette said, his German polluted by the accent of his native tongue. He held out his documents as the German sentry walked up to the truck’s window.
“Bonjour, monsieur,” the man said in provincial French. “What is your business in Vichy?”
Surprised by the man’s response, Lafayette looked over the man’s uniform once more, realized he was with the LVF, a unit of French Fascists fighting alongside the Nazis. Now, they helped the Germans take over what remained of the French State. Traitors, maybe. But who hadn’t betrayed the country in this damned war?
“Your business?” the sentry repeated. He eyed Lafayette over the documents.
“Sergeant Dabney Lafayette of the French National Police,” Lafayette said. “I have orders to report to the office of General Secretary Bousquet.” René Bousquet had been appointed General Secretary to Police by Marshall Philippe Petain’s Prime Minister, Pierre Laval. Lafayette had no idea whether Bousquet, Laval, or his boss were alive, much less still in power. But Captain Petain had ordered them to Vichy, and that’s where they were going. “The next truck is with us also.”
“Who is your captain?” the sentry asked.
“Captain Louis Petain, Chief of Police for the Pyrénées-Orientales Department.”
“Any relation to Marshall Petain?”
“Petain is a common name in Southern France,” Lafayette said.
The sentry’s eyes lingered on Lafayette for a few uncomfortable seconds. “Stay in your vehicle,” he said before taking Lafayette’s papers into a grey tent set up on the side of the road. A black swastika, on a white circular field trimmed in red, adorned the near side of the tent’s roof.
“Should we be worried?” Corporal Martin said from the driver’s seat.