Jean Claude felt his parachute snap open, and an instant later his feet touched the ground—the drop was only six hundred feet, an unusually low altitude, to minimize hang time and reduce the chance of being spotted by a German patrol. He had no sensation of free floating. He managed a safe landing, got out of his harness, and unzipped his jumpsuit as the sound of the Liberator’s engines faded away overhead. He saw no sign of the others. He had landed near trees, which meant that he must be at an edge of the drop zone.
The first order of business was to fold up his parachute. Jean Claude reached for his cardboard box of crystals to set it aside before bending down for that task. Drawing it out of his jumpsuit, he was horrified to feel the crystals cascading out into the thick, damp grass. One end of the box had torn open.
Jean Claude knelt and began feeling around, panicked. There were twelve crystals, each two inches square and half an inch thick, with two prongs at one end. In the space of a few minutes he found more than half of them. He was still on the ground, searching for the rest, when he heard voices. He looked up and saw the moonlit shape of a kepi, the flat-topped cap worn by French policemen, rising behind some bushes not far away. Then he heard the man say, loudly and emphatically, “I’m certain I saw one of them come down over here.”
Jean Claude had not been told anything about policemen on the reception committee. He drew his pistol and cocked it.
At that moment Philippe’s head appeared, right behind the policeman’s shoulder.
Jean Claude stood up and called the men over. He explained his problem to Philippe. Together they found all but one of the remaining crystals, and Jean Claude stuffed them back into the cardboard box while the policeman folded up his parachute. It turned out that the local police, on hearing of the invasion, had joined the Resistance that very night.
Jean Claude and Philippe made their way over to the reception committee, where they were joined by Violette and Bob. The four agents were bundled into a police car and driven the few miles to Sussac, a tiny farming village. A truck followed with their suitcases and Jean Claude’s radio, recovered from the canisters by the reception committee.
They stopped at a general store on a corner of the town square. Ordinarily it carried a combination of groceries and hardware, but at this stage of the war the shelves were rather bare. The agents were ushered through the shop and into a large, well-lit kitchen in the back, where they were warmly received by more résistants, among them a small, mild man introduced as Commandant Charles, who claimed to be in charge of local operations. Both groups had urgent questions: The inhabitants asked about the invasion of their country; the visitors wanted to know what was going on in the woods around the village. Corks popped, wine was poured, and the invasion was toasted, repeatedly.
One of the Sussac women, assuming correctly that the guests must be famished, said they must have something to eat. Before she could propose a menu, the agents requested, almost as one, eggs. The hosts protested that eggs were not nearly grand enough for an occasion such as this, but the visitors explained that they hadn’t had fresh eggs in over a year, as rationing had limited them to the powdered variety. The villagers could scarcely believe that such a thing as powdered eggs existed. They made faces at the thought, and quickly served up plates of beautiful, fresh, sunny-side up eggs with bread and butter.
Sometime after 2:00 A.M. the agents were shown upstairs to rooms that had been prepared for them. Jean Claude, exhausted and relaxed with wine, fell into a deep sleep.
He was awakened about nine the next morning with a small tumbler of calvados. If that wasn’t enough to make him realize he was back in France, he experienced a rush of nostalgia triggered by the coarseness of his linen bedsheets. When, as a boy, he visited his elderly aunt Katrinette on her farm, she always gave him her best sheets from her trousseau. They were family treasures—Katrinette had embroidered them by hand as a young woman, before she married—but they were so seldom used that they remained coarse almost to the point of scratchiness. The sheets he lay in that morning in Sussac, he thought, had to be from his hostess’s trousseau.
Jean Claude joined the others downstairs for breakfast—more eggs. Members of the reception committee had brought in their suitcases and Jean Claude’s radio, and were enjoying some of the real coffee the agents had brought.
Philippe and Jean Claude encoded a brief message to Baker Street announcing the team’s safe arrival, and after breakfast the four Salesman agents, accompanied by Commandant Charles, set off to find a place to make their first transmission. Fortunately, the schedule did not call for the frequency of the lost crystal. They carried the radio to an isolated spot on a hill off a dirt road. Jean Claude tied a rock to the end of his antenna wire and threw it over a telegraph cable suspended from a pole, the only elevated structure around. Philippe, who wanted to make an impression on Commandant Charles, worried that the cable could cause interference. Jean Claude had no idea whether it would, but feigned confidence and crouched down to tune his set, as the prearranged hour for transmission had arrived.
He tapped out the Morse code message as the others watched.
He received no response.
He repeated the transmission.
No reply.
He sent it again.
The home station came in, loud and clear, signaling receipt of the message. Jean Claude breathed a sigh of relief, then adjusted his watch, realizing that in his eagerness to perform, he had begun his transmission a little early.
Operation Salesman II was under way.