When the last of the parachutes had floated to the ground, and the canisters had been rounded up and collected in a central spot, the reception committee counted and found that there were 410 of them. Many were opened up so that their contents could be verified and decisions could be made about their distribution. One package was addressed to Jean Claude. It contained a complete spare radio set, a bag of rice, and—best of all—a large chunk of semisweet chocolate.
The removal of the canisters from the plateau went slowly. The novelty and urgency were not as great as they had been with the first daylight drop, and maquisards preferred ambushing German road traffic to serving as stevedores. By the end of the day most of the canisters were still there (though all the silk parachutes had disappeared). Jean Claude took his things and returned to Sussac to check on any messages André had decoded in his absence. He savored some of his chocolate, “a rather small piece of which,” he wrote later, “I ungenerously managed to part with” and give to André.
The sorting and removal of the containers didn’t go any more quickly over the next two days. A shortage of charcoal meant that few gazogene trucks were available. By the evening of the sixteenth, about half the drop remained on the DZ, waiting to be sorted and distributed.
The next morning, July 17, Jean Claude heard gunfire. It came from the direction of La Croisille, to the southwest, and it sounded different from skirmishes he had heard before—the firing was more intense, and lasted longer. André was absent, and Philippe did not make his usual morning appearance at the rock hut. Worried, Jean Claude carried his new wireless set to a stand of bushes and trees a few hundred feet behind the hut and hid it in a crevice under a rock outcrop. Then he packed his old set into its suitcase. He gathered up his crystals, code sheets, paper, magnifying glass, and pencils, and put them in a small leather satchel. He waited awhile, listening to the gunfire, which ebbed and flowed but never stopped. Still Philippe did not come. Jean Claude picked up the suitcase and the satchel and set out on foot for the DZ, a distance of about four miles over narrow forest paths.
He found Philippe at an edge of the clearing, looking concerned. Reports of enemy activity were coming in from all over the Salesman II territory, none of them good. The attack at La Croisille had been the first German thrust. A little later, two thousand German troops had begun moving toward them from the southeast, near the Plateau de Millevaches. By the afternoon the agents learned of more attacks from the west, around Linards, and from the east, at Beaumont. The Germans, it appeared, were beginning a full-scale ratissage—a sweep of the area, aiming to wipe out the guerrillas once and for all and clear the way for Das Reich’s northward march.
Jean Claude and Philippe speculated that the provocation had been the parachutage tricolore. Such a blatant act of patriotic opposition, they figured, could not go unanswered by the occupiers. They shared some choice words for whatever fool had brought the wrath of the SS upon them.
Jean Claude assembled his old wireless set and threw its antenna up over a tree branch. He sent messages to Baker Street indicating that a general assault was under way. At Philippe’s direction, he also sent a request for shock troops. Then, as evening approached, he packed the wireless set back in its suitcase, left it at the DZ, and walked back to Sussac. That night he retrieved his second radio from its hiding place and set it up in the rock hut. He sent messages to London canceling drops to several DZs that were now unusable, as the enemy was too close.
In the morning, Jean Claude returned to the plateau to help with the remaining containers. He was needed, as many of the men assigned to the reception committee had reported back to their units to defend against German advances. Those who remained loaded containers onto the few trucks and carts available. Late in the afternoon, some trucks that had left the plateau to deliver canisters to a maquis group near Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche, thirty miles to the southwest, returned—still fully loaded. Their crews reported that the route was blocked by German soldiers. Jean Claude walked back to the rock hut and turned in for the night.
It was early the next morning when the feldgrau truck roared up to his door.