The few guidebooks published on the beauties of the Auvergne in the years before the war all recommended the joys of travel by train. The views afforded to a comfortable traveler in the first-class carriages of the deep gorges, pine-covered mountains and sudden mountainscapes were not, they insisted, to be missed. And, in particular, every traveler should experience that triumph of engineering by the acknowledged genius Gustave Eiffel, the Garabit viaduct. The guidebooks listed the numbers with shivering pleasure: a single span of almost 550 feet, a smooth arch rising 400 feet above the Truyère River in an elegant lace of wrought iron. A wonder. A work of art as well as a miracle of engineering skill.
And Nancy was going to blow it up.
No one used the railways for pleasure now. The tracks were the snaking dark arteries carrying German men and arms north and south through the heart of France, slow, hulking iron troop trains, packed with soldiers and cigarette smoke, now heading toward the allied landing sites. The Allies had managed to keep their plans quiet, however—Nancy had heard of reinforcements being prepared for landing sites in the south and north—and the Germans were forced to wait and see which way to pounce.
Nancy found out which while she was packing her backpack from the warm voice of Ici Londres. Normandy. She’d have put her wedding ring on Calais, but no. Far away on the cold Atlantic shores in the fog and surf, thousands of troops were struggling through the sand and now the race was on. If the Nazis could get their men and heavy armaments up to those beaches in the next couple of days, the Allies might be pushed back into the sea. If the Resistance could stop them, gum up the works, block and sever those arteries, then the great German war machine would seize up, bleed out, and the troops on the Normandy beaches might be able to hang on and force their way into France.
Fournier led a crew of men to take out a railhead just south of Clermont-Ferrand; Gaspard would destroy the fuel train heading up from the coast, then the fuel manufactory itself; and Nancy, Tardivat and their team would take out Eiffel’s bridge over the Truyère.
It was the main target she’d been given in the days after Buckmaster had held a gun to her head, and he said himself it was a bugger. Crisscrossed riveted iron, complex woven metal, a beautifully balanced beast which could withstand multiple failures at multiple points and still not fail. But it had to go. If the Germans couldn’t use it, their networks would snarl. If Nancy’s other groups also took out their targets—signal boxes, junction points, bits of the line where the tracks turned in awkward curves—their networks would be choked and the repairs would take months.
The engineers in London, looking at fuzzy reconnaissance photos, old drawings, postcards and the photographs one of them had brought back from a very pleasant motoring tour in the area, said the key point to attack was at the highest part of the arch, where the train line rested on its back, but to be sure, it would be best to blow the charges when a train was crossing the gorge too. The extra weight should make it certain the arch would fall. They were sure. Nancy could imagine them taking their pipes out of their mouths and shrugging round a table in Baker Street. Almost sure.
It had seemed straightforward enough when they told her about it in London, but when Nancy first saw the bridge, a week after she’d dropped, her heart had sunk. It was a monster. The numbers in the guidebooks meant nothing until you stood below it, craning your neck and seeing it towering above you against the pale blue sky.
The banks on either side of the bridge were almost sheer, so to get to the base of the arch you had to scramble down a brush-covered slope and skirt round the massive stone pilings. You could go at it from the north side, but the more gentle gradient on that bank meant it would make life much easier for anyone with a rifle and a steady hand to spot you before you got there, or send you plummeting off the arch before you got halfway up. In the photographs taken before the war, a metal ladder had led up the side of the concrete piles on each shore, but the Germans had taken those off with a blowtorch.
If you could make it onto the top of the piling, though, a long, narrow flight of iron stairs ran all the way up the curve of the arch. The only problem was, given that pretty open lacework of iron, it would be bloody obvious when a handful of Maquisards ran up it with heavy packs of explosives on their backs.
The Germans knew the viaduct was crucial and they guarded it well. Nancy had watched long enough, sitting in the spring rain for hours at a time with a notebook and a hip flask, to recognize some of the men guarding it. Three patrols were on the move at all times, going up and down the narrow walkways on the top of the bridge. A bell rang ten minutes before a train was due to cross to give them time to clear, and they always did it at a jog. Sensible. Four more patrols went up and down the riverbanks and they’d built themselves wooden guard posts, like lookout towers in a prison camp, on each side of the bridge, with heavy machine guns. Nancy and Tardivat had broken their brains late into the night working out how to deal with them.
Then there was the problem of knowing when the trains were going to cross. One thing of which Nancy was pretty sure was that they wouldn’t keep to the regular timetable once news of the invasion hit.
They needed a diversion to cover their approach and ambushes on the northern shore to take out the patrols. Then Nancy, Franc and Jean-Clair would scramble down the slope, climb the piling, sprint up the shallow stairs, lay the charges to go off as the train crossed and scarper back down the way they had come. Simple really.
Setting up the diversion was easy. Easy-ish. A narrow road bridge, a sad flat ugly sister of Eiffel’s beautiful arch, crossed the river about 350 meters upstream. It had to go. Rodrigo led that team. The patrols on the banks would be next, then Tardivat, Juan and Mateo would stay in place to keep the men up top distracted. And it all had to happen fast. Sure, they might get lucky and take out the patrols, plant the charges and piss off again without the Germans being any the wiser, but it was a hell of a risk. If they were spotted too soon, the men in the guard towers would warn the train and stop it before it went over the bridge. Even if the charges still blew, Eiffel’s bridge might be reparable, and instead of a gut punch the whole thing would just be an irritation. Nancy wasn’t in the mood to just be an irritation.