Sometimes there were moments when Nancy could forget the war. Just moments, but they existed—strange glimmers of light when she was so tired her brain switched off and she was freewheeling on her bike on a lonely back road with the scent of late spring in the air and the sunlight patterning through the trees hypnotizing her.
The parachute drops were coming every night when there was enough moon, and every day more young men arrived at the campsites dotted across the plateau, in abandoned farms and patches of forest. She trained them, trained them to teach each other, distributed supplies and weapons, established escape routes and fallback rendezvous points, and gave a quiet nod when they approached her with plans for small-scale ambushes, thefts and plans for minor sabotage. She would not risk large actions, but she had seen the benefits of on-the-job training, and thought London would just have to trust her not to fuck up before D-Day. Then there was all the pastoral care. Money to be handed out, news to be exchanged. And every day someone asked her when the Allies were coming, and every day she said “soon” and hoped to God it was true, though she knew that landing would only be the start, the moment their work could begin in earnest. Until then, it was all preparation.
The track curved and she slowed down, coming back to herself reluctantly. Tardivat had said he thought these fields south of the Maleval River would make a decent drop site, and she wanted to see them for herself. She hid her bike behind the hedge near a likely candidate and began to scope it out. Promising. Yes, this one would do, if the farmer who owned it was willing to turn a blind eye. She paced it out. Roughly seven hundred meters square. Spot-on. And no telephone wires or cables anywhere near. Decent cover, but it wouldn’t hide the signal fires from the approaching planes. So far so good. But to the west the ground sloped sharply upward between here and Chaudes-Aigues. Not steep or high enough to be a problem for the planes, but she’d have to hike to the top of the hill. If there were easy tracks up there from the town and the Germans spotted the planes coming over, they could trek up there, then launch an attack on Nancy and her men while they gathered in the parachute containers. If, though, the forest between the town and the top of the slope was densely wooded, it would be worth the risk. She’d just make sure they posted lookouts up here to watch for torches or signs of activity in the town below.
She headed up the slope. She could feel the sweat trickling down the small of her back as she went. Did she need to find more locations to conceal the goodies they already had? Some of their stashes were turning into Aladdin’s caves of arms and ammunition. She needed to send the Spaniards out scouting for fresh places to conceal arms in the woods, perhaps along escape routes they’d worked out. Or, better still, a few totally remote locations known only to a few, so that if the Germans ever managed to deal them a severe blow, whoever survived would be able to find a gun and a bullet.
When the gradient leveled out, she walked south for a thousand paces and, seeing no easy access for the Germans that way, turned, retraced her steps and continued north till she came to a point where the slope fell hard and fast under her toward the town. No easy route from here either, which was perfect, and from this point she could look directly down into the center of the town. A lookout standing where she was now would be able to signal to the reception committee in the field if things started getting lively.
A movement below caught her eye. Not the usual comings and goings of the townspeople. Something different.
She lifted her field glasses and trained them on a group of gray uniforms clustered at the top of the market place. They parted, and she saw they had a man and woman in civilian clothes on the ground between them. Nancy tightened her grip on the binoculars. Some of the soldiers dragged the two civilians to their feet. The woman twisted in their grip and she saw the heavy swell of her belly. The man struggled hard. Nancy could hear nothing but the stir of the leaves in the woodland around her, but she could see the man was screaming, his body bent double. She swallowed. She knew them both.
The man was one of Gaspard’s. He’d been in the barn when they pulled the feed sack off her head. She recognized the woman too. When she was in town a week or so earlier, the pregnant girl had approached her. Said she knew she wasn’t due anything because her husband wasn’t one of Fournier’s men, but if Madame could perhaps help with something for the baby? The baby had swung it. Nancy had given the girl fifty francs and a couple of bars of chocolate, knowing it would piss off Gaspard if he found out she was giving charity to the families of his men. Elisabeth, that was her name. Her husband was Luc.
The soldiers lifted her onto the base of the market cross and were tying her hands behind it. SS men. Luc was on his knees now, begging at the feet of an officer in polished boots and the cap of a major. He lifted his hand. One of his soldiers unslung his rifle and fixed his bayonet. Nancy tasted something bitter and acrid in her throat.
She spoke out loud. “No. No. They can’t…”
The major dropped his hand and the soldier presented his weapon, but rather than a direct stab into the bound woman’s belly, he swung the blade sideways, under the curve of her pregnancy. Nancy dropped the glasses and turned sideways throwing up her guts into the grass.
She didn’t want to see any more. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She had to. Someone had to see this. She lifted her glasses again. The woman’s front was soaked with blood, and there was a purplish slop at her feet. Her dress had been pulled from her shoulder and Nancy could see the whiteness of her neck. She was still alive, twisting her head from side to side in rolling arcs.
“Just die,” Nancy whispered. “Please, sweet girl, just die.”
Luc was at the major’s feet, his hands together, pleading. The major had a pistol in his hand and was pointing it upward at Elisabeth’s head. He was saying something.
Luc dropped his arms to his side. The officer appeared to be listening.
The major’s hand twitched. Nancy heard the echo of the shot a second later, quiet as a twig snapping underfoot. Elisabeth slumped forward. Luc was still on his knees staring at her. He didn’t react, didn’t move at all as the officer walked over to him and shot him through the back of the head.
Then the major turned and looked out into the hills, and Nancy saw his face for the first time.
Major Böhm.
He was looking directly at her, smiling that same pleasant, slightly patronizing smile he had worn when he showed her out of the Gestapo headquarters in Marseille the day he arrested Henri.
She lowered her glasses and started to walk down the slope toward her bike, then her legs went out from under her and she was sitting at the base of a mountain ash, her breath coming in short tight pants, her chest tight, her head spinning.
Stop it. Stop it. Slow down. Don’t think about it, think about what it means. What did Luc say to Böhm? What did he trade to end the torture of his wife?
She shot to her feet. Rage, pure rage took her down the slope, across the field and onto her bike. Rage carried her up the flank of the valley and into the hills. Rage carried her over every one of the twenty miles to the first of Gaspard’s sentries as they blocked her path on the track on Mont Mouchet.
“Madame Wake, such a pleasure,” the Maquisard said.
“Drop the pleasantries, you little shit, and take me to Gaspard. Now!”
If she’d had time to think, she might have realized this wasn’t going to go well. Gaspard would have heard that Fournier’s men now had Brens and TNT and plastic explosive and were having fun practicing with them from Clermont-Ferrand to Aurillac. Their victory blowing up the radio tower would have put his nose out of joint too, and none of that would put him in the mood to listen. She didn’t have time to play nicely though.
She told him what she had seen.
“You have to leave here,” she said into the sickened silence that followed.
Gaspard was sitting on a crate by the fire pit. They had a tarp rigged above it so the smoke wouldn’t give them away to the occasional air patrols, though that and the lookouts along the roads seemed to be where their security measures stopped. At least seventy of his men were enjoying the sunshine in the open space around them. There were probably two or three hundred more in the immediate area.
Gaspard looked at her as if she had suggested popping into town and sorting it all out over a drink with Major Böhm.
“No.”
Pig-headed, stupid arsehole. Deep breath. Explain it in terms even he can understand.
“Luc was here,” she said. “He told the Gestapo where you are. What else would they want to know? You have four, five hours at most, Gaspard.” Nancy spoke clearly and firmly. “Böhm will call in an airstrike on your position and follow up with ground troops. They are coming now. You can’t wait. If you had properly prepared escape routes—”
“I said NO!” Gaspard slammed his heavy hands onto his knees with a solid thwack. “I did not lead these men into the mountains to run from the Nazis at every alarm. And I have known Luc for ten years. He would never betray us. Never. We are as safe here today as we were yesterday.”
Nancy balled her fists. “You didn’t see it! You didn’t see what they did to her! He would have said anything to spare her a second more suffering—so would I. They cut her belly open.”
Gaspard stood up. Now they were both on their feet, eyeball to eyeball.
“Then he would have lied!” Gaspard shouted in her face. “The Boche will waste their bombs and men on some ruin miles from here.”
“You don’t know that! Böhm has broken dozens of men.”
He sliced through the air with his hand. “Bullshit. I’m not giving up this place, this camp, because you think Luc might have given away its location, Madame.”
She grabbed his arm and tried to control her voice. “What would it cost you? You could spread your men further out in the hills. Leave here for two, three days and if it turns out Luc managed to give them a false location or none at all, you can come back.”
He gave her a look of complete contempt. “I do not understand why Fournier’s men listen to you, little girl. How am I supposed to lead my fighters if I keep telling them to run and hide every time there is a rumor the Germans might be coming? Are we men or rabbits? We are here to fight.”
The urge to scream in his face was almost overwhelming. “When the time is right! When the Allies land in France we’ll need every man to harry the Germans behind their lines. Now we need to arm, prepare, train and survive until we are needed.”
That was a mistake.
“I am not the pawn of a bunch of British imperialists in London! I say how I will fight for my country, not them!” The men around him were nodding in agreement. “You will not turn me into a good little English soldier with a handful of bullets and a slab of chocolate. Now piss off back to your little band of rabbits in the hills.”
He walked away.
“Luc told them, Gaspard!” she yelled after him. “They are coming! For God’s sake, do something!”
He kept walking.