The plane touched down at the other end of the field, then taxied toward them, bouncing over the uneven ground. No savoir-faire now, they ran to meet it, Tonton Jules wheezing as he tried to keep up. It wasn’t much to look at, a single propeller, fixed landing wheels in oversized hubs, biplane wings above and below the pilot’s compartment. On the fuselage, next to a freshly painted RAF roundel, was a black flash mark and a peppering of tiny holes. With difficulty the pilot forced back the Perspex window panel, then tore the leather flying cap from his head. He allowed himself a single deep breath, then called out over the noise of the engine. “Can somebody help? Ahh, peut-être, can you—aidez-mah?”
“You are hurted?” Lebec said.
“No. Not me.”
He was very young, Casson thought, not much more than nineteen. And he certainly didn’t look the hero—tall and gangly, unruly hair, big ears, freckles. The man sitting behind him grabbed the edge of the cockpit with his left hand and clumsily struggled to his feet. Clearly his right arm had been damaged. He appeared to be cursing under his breath. Angier used the tail fin to scramble up on the back of the plane, then slid himself forward to a point where he could help the man get down to the ground.
The pilot looked at his watch. “We should move along,” he said to Casson. “I’m to leave here in three minutes.”
“All right.”
“You’ll have to help me get the tail swung round. And, don’t forget, n’oublah thing, the two, uh—deux caisses, deux valises.” The last burst forth with the fluency of the determinedly memorized.
Lebec climbed onto the wing, then helped the pilot work two suitcases and two small wooden crates free of the cockpit. “Damned amazing, what you can get in here,” the pilot said. Lebec smiled—no idea what the pilot was saying but an ally was an ally.
They handed down the cargo—carried off to Tonton Jules’s wagon—then Lebec jumped to the ground and saluted the pilot, who returned the salute with a smile, then tossed his flying cap back on and tried a parting wave, devil-may-care, as he revved the engine. “Best of luck, then,” he shouted. “Bonne shan!”
He reached up, pulled the housing shut. Eddie Juin took hold of the tail assembly and started to turn the plane into the wind, everybody else ran to help him. The plane accelerated suddenly, there was a blast of hot exhaust as it pulled away, then a roar of fuel fed to the engine as it struggled into the air. It flopped back down, bounced off the field, touched one wheel a second time, then caught the wind and climbed into the darkness. The people on the ground listened for a time, peering into the dark sky, then lost the whine of the receding engine among the night sounds of the countryside.
Verneuil, Brézolles, Laons—Casson drove east toward Paris in the spring dawn.
The end of the operation had been complicated. Système D, Casson thought, always Système D, make do, use your ingenuity, improvise— it was simply the way life was lived. They’d left the field headed for a small village nearby, where a man who drove a milk truck to Paris twice a week was supposed to pick up the supplies delivered from England, leaving Casson and the operative free to take the train into the city. But the truck never appeared, so Eddie Juin had to come up with an alternative. Off they went to another village, where a barn on the outskirts hid a Renault—a four-year-old Juvequatre model, slow, steady, inexpensive, a family car.
Casson drove through first light, staying on the 839. The two crates and two valises were in the trunk. Next to him, the man he had come to think of as the sergeant—though he used the name Jerome—bled slowly into the pale-gray upholstery.
“It’s not so bad,” he said. “You could hardly call it shrapnel. More like, specks. But, iron specks, so I’ll have to see a doctor, sooner or later. Still, not bad enough for me to go back to England—no point at all to that.”
“What happened?”
“Well, at first everything went perfectly. We came in at eight thousand feet over the coast at St.-Malo—no problem. Picked up the rail line to Alençon a minute later—we spotted the firebox on a locomotive going east and we just flew along with him. Next we had yellow signal lights, for ten miles or so, coming out of the big freight junction in Fougères. After that, the track was between us and the moon and we just followed the glow on the rails. But somebody heard us, because ten minutes later a searchlight came on and they started shooting. Nothing very serious, a few ack-ack rounds, and Charley thought maybe a machine gun. Then it was over, but my arm had gone numb and I realized we’d been hit.”
Casson slowed down for a hairpin turn at the center of a sleeping village, then they were back among the fields.
He saw now how they worked it. First came Mathieu, the university man, getting the system organized. Next came the sergeant—almost certainly a technician. Why else bring him in? Short and muscular, working-class face, speaking French in a way that would fool nobody. Not his fault, Casson thought. Likely something he’d taken up years ago in hopes it would advance him in the military. So he’d put in his time in classrooms, dutifully rolled his r’s and nasalized his n’s, but finally to very little purpose—he might as well have worn a derby with a Union Jack stuck in the band and whistled “God Save the King” for all the good it was going to do him.
Casson slowed for a one-lane bridge, the stream below running full in spring flood, water dark blue in the early light. The sergeant had winced when he tapped the brake. “Sorry,” Casson said.
“Oh, it’s nothing. Twenty minutes with a doctor and I’ll be fine.”
“It won’t be a problem,” Casson said.
Well, he didn’t think it would be. What doctor? He only knew one doctor, his doctor. Old Dr. Genoux. What were his politics? Casson had no idea. He was brusque, forever vaguely irritated by something or other, and smelled eternally of eucalyptus. He’d been Casson’s doctor for twenty years, since university. One day Casson had noticed his hair was white. Good heavens! He couldn’t be a Vichyite or a Fascist, could he? Well, if not him, who else? The dentist? The professor at the Sorbonne faculty of medicine who lived across the street? Arnaud had once had a girlfriend who was a nurse. No, that wasn’t going to work, old Genoux would just have to do the job.
He worked his way through the medieval town of Dreux, intending to pick up the 932 that wound aimlessly into the Chevreuse valley. But then he somehow made a mistake and, a little way beyond the town, found himself instead on the N 12, with a sprinkling of early traffic headed for Paris. Well, all the roads went to the capital, the N 12 was as good as any other.
Going over a rail crossing, the springs plunged and the cargo gave a loud thump as it shifted in the trunk. The sergeant opened his eyes and laughed. “Don’t worry about that,” he said confidently.
An explosion, is what he meant. The shipment from England included radio crystals, which would allow clandestine wireless-telegraph sets to change frequencies, 200,000 francs, 20,000 dollars, four Sten carbines with 4,000 rounds of ammunition, time pencil detonators, and eighty pounds of the explosive cyclonite, chemically enhanced to make it malleable—plastique.
“The trick,” he added, “is actually getting it to go off.”
The town of Houdan. A place Casson had always liked, he’d come here with Marie-Claire for picnics in the forest—long ago and far away. They’d owned a set of chairs and a table that could be folded up and carried in the trunk of the car. She always brought a cloth for the table, he would pick up a pair of langoustes with green mayonnaise from Fauchon, and they’d sit by a field for hours and watch the day.