The second Nancy got back to camp, she dragged Fournier, Tardivat, Mateo and Denden to the bus and told them the whole story.
“Screw him,” Fournier said, lighting another cigarette. “If he won’t listen, then let the Boche have him.”
Denden shook his head. “If it was just Gaspard, I’d say, go for it. Let this Major Böhm chew him up for breakfast. But he has hundreds of men spread around those hills. We can’t let Böhm polish them off for lunch.”
Fournier sniffed, then leaned over the map spread between them. “So you want us to do something? What?”
Nancy pointed out the routes up to Mont Mouchet. Strange to think these places were just lines on a map a few weeks ago. Now she could see every road, the villagers in every house, recite the name of every friendly peasant, every suspected collaborator.
“We can’t risk getting destroyed ourselves. The Germans will have air support so we are going to stay hidden from the bombers and Henschel’s, but the ground troops? We can do something about that. There are no good roads leading to the summit from the east, so I reckon the Germans will send in their men from Pinols, Clavières and Paulhac then try and complete the encirclement of Mont Mouchet from there. Those are the troops we can slow down. Give Gaspard’s men a chance to hold them off till nightfall and then disappear off the mountain into the woods or through Auvers before the Germans can fully close the trap.”
Fournier tapped the map on the road north of Mont Mouchet. “That road I know well. A few booby traps, I think.”
“Good,” Nancy said. Delaying tactics rather than full-pitch battles—Fournier was thinking like a guerrilla at last.
“I’ll need to take the gazogène to make it in time,” Fournier added.
They only had three of the chugging charcoal-burning trucks, but he was right. She hesitated. Made a decision.
“OK. Take it. But hide it well and come back on foot. The roads will be crawling with troops for the next week.”
She held his gaze until he nodded, then she turned to Mateo.
“We’ll take the road from Clavières. Then we’ll need guides in groups of three along these paths toward Le Besset to take Gaspard’s men out of the fight.”
She looked at the men around her. They nodded.
“Spread the word among the farmers. Tardivat, you coordinate the rescue parties and can you arrange for the reception of whoever makes it out? Cover in the woods, get some supplies into the farms above Chavagnac. And you’re in charge of improvising any other small-scale ambushes on the smaller roads. Take the chance to let some of the new boys have a taste of action, but keep them safe. Denden, whatever happens, don’t miss your transmission. Tell London we want extra medical supplies and plastic.”
She rolled up the map.
Denden downed the last of the tea in his mug. “Marvelous. Let Operation Ungrateful Bastards commence.”
Mateo and Nancy took a dozen men, including Juan and Rodrigo, down the valley to the Clavières road. She had hopes of finding what she needed about two miles from Mont Mouchet, where the pasture lining the roadside was dotted with mature trees. She kept glancing at her watch. She was sure Böhm would advise the military to attack Gaspard’s position at once, before news of the horror in the market place and its implications had time to spread. How long did it take to make the final preparations for an attack like this? Brief the officers, assemble the vehicles and weaponry? She spent half the hike to the road trying to work it out, and half swearing she would not think about it again.
They emerged onto the road as the sun reached its zenith, and in twenty minutes found a place for the first stage of the operation. When Nancy saw an oak tree tall enough to block the road she planted a kiss on its wrinkled bark, then told Mateo to take it down with a ring of plastic explosive. Then she sent a couple of scouts toward Clavières to keep an eye on the road and warn away any locals. The scouts she picked were two of the younger lads, and as they set off Nancy noticed Mateo watching them until they disappeared round the bend of the road.
“Worried about them, Mateo?” she asked, handing him the plastic from her pack and watching as he made a neat ring of charges around the thick trunk.
“No. Just, I am twenty-three years old, and they make me feel like a grandfather.”
“Why?”
He plunged a time pencil into the charge and crimped the copper top. “Fire in the hole!”
They scrambled to a safe distance in the roadside ditches, heads down.
“Because,” Mateo said, as if their conversation hadn’t been interrupted, “I picked up a rifle at sixteen and have been fighting ever since.”
“You should have tried picking up a girl instead,” she said. He grunted. “Maybe Jean-Clair will give you lessons. His mother told me he left broken hearts in every village in the Alps. Seemed pleased about it.”
His reply, in Spanish and probably obscene, was lost in the sudden crack of the explosion, then the tear of wood and storm in the leaves as the great tree fell. The impact made the earth shudder. Nancy lifted her head. Perfectly done. The oak had fallen right across the width of the road.
She clambered out of the ditch, unslung her pack and pulled out one of their precious anti-tank grenades. How many men would the Germans send? A vision struck her, as if carried by the breeze, of Gaspard’s men clustered round the old farm buildings caught unaware by a wave of artillery fire, the fountains of earth, the scream of the shells, the blood and confusion.
Nancy felt the spring wind on her face, and remembered this sensation, a fizz in her blood, from their attack on the transmitter. Not fear, but a strange heightening of her senses. There was something dangerously delicious about it.
“Jean-Clair! Stop staring down the road and watch what Captain Wake is doing!” Mateo said sharply. Jean-Clair jumped and Nancy almost dropped the bloody mine. “The scouts will whistle when they see something,” Mateo continued. “You watch and learn.”
Watch and learn indeed. Nancy wanted to find the sweet spot under the fallen trunk. The Germans would have to use their heavy vehicles to shift this monster out of the way, and when it started to shift, the grenade would go off—if they didn’t spot it first. She lay on her front and crawled under the branches, the spring leaves catching in her hair. It was a Hawkins grenade, impossible to throw far, but fierce, adaptable devils with about a pound of explosive in them. They used a chemical igniter, triggered by pressure, so grenade or not, they were perfect to use as mines for booby traps like this. She pushed it in front of her, using her elbows to drag herself under the twisted limbs of the oak along the gravel road, looking for a curve in the main trunk. Just a little farther. She looked right and left, judging the distance to the roadside, the cover above her. This would do, tucked under the main body of the tree, and far enough forward so the trunk wouldn’t take all the force of the blast and leave the vehicle pushing it undamaged.
She removed the retaining pin, then heard the crack of a snapping branch as the trunk jerked toward her. She snatched back the Hawkins with her fingertips, scrabbling to pull it clear as the trunk settled forward into the very place she had just put the damned thing.
A sudden thumping rush of blood made her hand twitch. She waited to see if she were dead.
“All good, Captain?” she heard Mateo ask.
“Peachy,” she replied through gritted teeth. Then she took a long, slow breath and very carefully repositioned the Hawkins. She slithered back through the branches, every nerve taut and singing now.
Mateo pulled her to her feet and she ran her hand through her hair, shaking out the twigs. The countryside seemed unnaturally quiet, or maybe she was just listening too hard. She caught the sound of one of the scouts thudding toward them.
The boy was sprinting up to the roadblock like he had Hitler himself on his heels.
“Tree’s mined!” Nancy shouted at him, and he skidded to a halt in the gravel and skirted round, keeping his eye on the giant oak as if it might rear up and fight him.
“Well?” Mateo said gruffly as the boy reached them.
“Two kilometers out. I think… I think… a thousand men. I think artillery too,” he panted.
Mateo lit a cigarette. “They weren’t going to come to the party with balloons and streamers, kid.”
Nancy shot him a look. “Let’s get into position, shall we?”
They left Juan in the forest near the fallen oak, then headed east for a mile and split the team. Rodrigo took his squad onto the northern slopes while Mateo and Nancy set up basic tripwires with two of the French boys, Jean-Clair and Jules.
“I wish we had more time,” Mateo muttered to Nancy as she dug into her pack again.
Jean-Clair and Jules watched them. She didn’t reply.
Mateo took a pair of hand grenades from her and a roll of industrial tape, then bound the first grenade to the slim trunk of a sapling at the roadside at waist height. He didn’t speak again. Nancy tied off the cord on another sapling on the opposite side of the road, then came back to watch Mateo tie his end to the loop of the firing pin. He made a neat job of it.
“Jean-Clair,” Nancy said, “you and Jules take the other grenade, set it up like this one, twenty meters further on.”
Jean-Clair took the grenade, cord and tape and the two boys trotted up the road.
Nancy watched them tie the tripwire at just the right height for the front of a troop lorry. Even knowing where it was, Nancy could barely see where the thin gray cord stretched across the road in the dappled shadows. As Jean-Clair and Jules came back Nancy noticed their drawn, concentrated expressions, and where their fingers gripped their Bren guns, she saw the telltale slick of sweat on metal.
She spoke quietly. “Boys, you’ve been trained for this. You’ll be fine. Get into position.”
They nodded, their Adam’s apples bobbing up and down as they swallowed down their fear and excitement, then scrambled up the shallow slope to the south. Trained, my arse. Two or three weeks in a class of fifty with Nancy yelling at them was not exactly Sandhurst.
“You’d better be right about this, Captain,” Mateo said as he climbed over the low stone wall that separated the road from the field.
There wasn’t great cover on this side of the road, just a drainage ditch on the upper edge of the field, then the woods beyond that.
“Why?” she asked as she followed him.
“Because if you are wrong about this attack, I’m going to have to defuse Jean-Clair’s first booby trap.”
It was meant as a joke, but she was too strung out to laugh now.
“I’m not wrong,” she said, walking up the slope away from him. Then she stopped, feeling the ripple in the air before she even heard it. An explosion rolled toward them up the road.