Whatever had gone before was forgotten. The returning moon meant more drops responding to Denden’s flow of requests tapped out and transmitted from the high places around the base on the plateau. The bounty of London knew no bounds, but Nancy had to balance the scale of her requests with the time it would take to gather in the packed cylinders and disappear with them into the night before the German patrols caught up with them. Then the guns had to be degreased and Gaspard’s men trained to assemble and strip them. Denden helped teach the men on how to use the explosives and Tardivat tested the new time pencils and pronounced darkly about their reliability. The list of targets to be attacked on D-Day was regularly updated by London, and Nancy sent messages back via Denden’s quick fingers, suggesting changes and additional targets.
The men weren’t content to wait though. Gaspard’s men in particular wanted to avenge their friends killed in the SS raid, and Nancy could see she’d have to give them some release or waste all her energy holding them back.
So she continued to sanction regular raiding parties, small groups of men traveling in one or other of the little charcoal-powered trucks they now had stowed in barns and stables across the region, who lay in wait for isolated patrols. Tardivat trained the men to run tripwires between the trees along the road when they knew a patrol was approaching. The explosion would take out the first vehicle, then the group would fire down on the rest of the patrol with their brand-new Bren guns before melting back into the endless countryside.
They came back from each successful outing wild with victory, and the Germans stayed clear of the back roads.
Nancy slept when she could, feeling the temperature of the air change around her.
On the first of June, Denden shook her awake after she’d had twenty minutes of the deepest, most perfect sleep, dreaming of her bed in Marseille. She threw her satin pillow at him, but he caught it, damn him, and threw it straight back at her.
“Hold your temper, witch! We’ve got the call!”
“I don’t care. Tell the Germans to come back tomorrow, I have to sleep.”
She put the pillow under her head again and closed her eyes. Denden crouched down beside her and whispered to her.
“Les sanglots longs des violons d’automne.”
Nancy’s eyes snapped open again and she sat up. “Seriously?”
He nodded.
“At last, Denden! They are coming. Within two weeks?”
Any thought of sleep left her. The lines of the Verlaine poem, their cue that D-Day was almost upon them, acted on her like eight hours of sleep and a cold shower.
Denden laughed. “I still think they should have used your code poem to tip us that the invasion was coming. Bit more fun than that dreary Verlaine. What was it again?”
Nancy was wriggling out of her nightgown and grabbing her shirt.
“You’re not supposed to know it. That’s the whole bloody point of a code poem.”
“Seriously, dearie, you didn’t think when every other agent was choosing Keats, or schoolroom crap about nobility and sacrifice, no one would let slip one of the female agents had chosen… let me think… ‘She stood right there, in the moonlight fair, And the moon shone through her nightie. It lit right on, the nipple of her tit…’”
“‘Oh Jesus Christ Almighty!’” Nancy finished, tugging a brush through her hair. Then she shrugged into her new leather jacket. A week ago Fournier had led a raid on the factory that made them, and gifted her one of his prizes. Nancy thought it suited her rather well. Denden was laughing hard now.
“Leave it, Denden. It’s just a bloody limerick!”
“I know, but just imagine the announcer on Ici Londres reading it.”
She did, and it was funny. Suddenly so funny that there were tears running down her face. Within two weeks! Two weeks and there’d be British and French and American army boots on the ground in France again. She needed to up her reconnaissance of the key targets, check the stashes were still filled with what they needed, firm up arrangements for medical care, find another half-dozen abandoned barns and equip them as hospitals.
She wiped her eyes and checked her makeup in the mirror. “Come on, Denden, let’s make some noise.”
No one knew where the Allies were going to land, of course, but that was the whole point: catch the Germans with their troops in the wrong place. Then it was up to the Maquis and men like them all over France to make sure they couldn’t move their men—small groups of fighters, multiple targets, coordinated strikes. Nancy was on the road twenty-four hours a day, briefing saboteurs on exactly where and when to cut rails and supplying them with the grenades and plastic explosive with which to do it. Telegraph poles and high-tension wires would go down in a blizzard, the heavy machinery factories would grind to a halt and every transmission station in Cantal would be reduced to a shower of sparks.
They didn’t even have to wait a week. The next lines of the Verlaine poem were transmitted late on June 5, and Nancy, Gaspard, Fournier and Tardivat gathered their men at dawn the next day.
They had about a hundred of their best fighters on the plateau and another fifty youths primed to head out and give the go order to the other scattered camps. Half wore the leather jackets Fournier had stolen, the rest a ragtag outfit of peasant clothing, British army boots and berets. Nancy climbed up on a log on the tree line and looked down on them. Dirty, scruffy-looking buggers, but every one of them had a revolver in their waistband, a Bren slung over their shoulder and plastic in their pack. And they were straining to be off.
“Men of France!” Nancy called to them. “Today is the day we have waited for. The liberation of France has begun. You know what to do, so do it well. Claim back your country and let’s give the Boche the kick in the balls he’s been asking for.”
They cheered like maniacs, then their squad leaders were leading them off in groups before the echo had died away. Denden offered Nancy his hand, and she took it to jump off the log again with a bounce.
“Positively Churchillian, darling!”
“Mon colonel?” It was Mateo, already kitted out and handing her her pack. She took it and strapped it over her back.
“You sure you don’t want to come, Denden?”
“No thank you!” He lifted his hands. “Far too many guns involved. Mother will stay home and arrange a decent welcome for you when you get back.”
He made a fuss of checking her pack. “Got your grenades? Revolver? Plastic? Rope? Murderous fellow fighters?” He let his eyes drift to Tardivat, the three Spanish fighters and the rest of the men Nancy was taking with her. “Yes, I see you have.” Then he smiled. “Play safely, Nancy, and come home.”
She blew him a kiss, then led her men down and into the woods.