Allies

by Alan Gratz

  “If we let him live and he’s a collaborator, he could report us as we pass,” said another Maquis.

  “Why can’t you just blow up the train tracks farther back?” Samira asked.

  “There’s a tunnel up around the bend,” Jason explained to her. “We want to do it there. Repairing tracks and clearing a train wreck from a tunnel takes much more time than outside a tunnel. They call it ‘Operation Tortoise’ for a reason.”

  Slow down the German counterattack. That was the plan. But would it be enough to save the life of Samira’s mother?

  “Let’s just kill him,” one of the shadows argued. “We’re wasting time.”

  “It looks like someone has decided for us,” Jason said with a smile in his voice.

  Samira looked, and her eyes went wide.

  Cyrano was trotting right up to the station’s front door.

  “Cyrano! No!” Samira cried. She burst from the bushes where she and the Maquis were hiding and tried to catch the little dog, but she was too late. Cyrano barked, and a pudgy gray-haired man with a short gray beard opened the door. Samira froze. The old man wore brown pants and a blue jacket, with a red kerchief tied around his neck. In his left hand he held a cup of something that steamed.

  Samira was perfectly visible to him in the moonlight.

  “Well, well, well,” the old man said with a smile. He looked first at Samira, then at Cyrano, who trotted inside and turned around three times before settling himself by the woodstove. “Ah,” the old man said to Cyrano. “Make yourself at home.”

  When he turned around again, Odysseus and the other Maquis had stepped out of the darkness with their guns.

  “And who do we have here? Maquis?” the old man said. He put the tips of his fingers to an imaginary hat. “Brigadier Rene de Compiegne, French army,” he said smartly, then added, “The last war, of course.”

  “He’s one of the Hairy Ones,” said Jason. “Hairy Ones” was a nickname for the French soldiers who had fought in the trenches of the First World War. They often had beards or mustaches, and the nickname stuck.

  “You’ll be here to blow up the train tracks in the tunnel, then,” de Compiegne said. “It’s just up around the bend. I’ll show you where the telephone lines are too so you can cut those.”

  Samira could tell the Maquis were surprised. They shared suspicious glances.

  “You sound like you were waiting for us,” Odysseus said.

  “Well, not you personally, but someone from the Maquis. This is an important line. I myself have slowed down German trains on a number of occasions,” the old man said proudly. “You’d be surprised how difficult it is to get these old switches to work in a timely manner.” He winked, and Samira understood that the “difficulty” with the switches was entirely engineered by de Compiegne.

  “None of you know a young Maquis by the name of Elise de Compiegne, do you?” the old man asked hopefully. “She’s my daughter. The Boches called her up to the Compulsory Work Service last year, and she ran away to join the Maquis rather than be a German slave.”

  “We use code names,” Odysseus said. “I’m sorry.”

  De Compiegne nodded. “Of course. Of course. That makes sense.”

  “I think we can trust this one,” Jason told Odysseus.

  Odysseus agreed, and Samira sighed with relief. She didn’t want to see the old man killed just because he was in the right place at the wrong time.

  “Atalanta, you stay with the station keeper,” Odysseus said.

  Samira started to argue, but Odysseus cut her off.

  “We’re dynamiting a tunnel. It’s dangerous work, and I won’t have you there. Besides, we need someone to stay here to cut the telephone wires. We’ll leave them open until it’s done, so as not to arouse suspicion should the Germans try to call.”

  “There’s a phone junction box at the other end of the tunnel,” de Compiegne told them. “You can call us from there to tell us it’s done.”

  “Oh, you’ll know,” Jason said. “Enjoy the warm fire, Atalanta. We’ll be back before you can say boom.”

  “Come inside, my dear,” de Compiegne said to Samira, heading in. “Do you drink coffee?”

  Jason held Samira back. “Keep an eye on him,” he whispered, startling her. Hadn’t Jason just said the old man could be trusted? And what was she supposed to do if he was a collaborator after all?

  There was no time to ask any more questions. Jason and the Maquis were already gone, walking down the track toward the tunnel. Samira followed the old man inside.

  Cyrano’s eyes peeked open to watch Samira as she sat at the station’s little table, then he went back to sleep with a contented sigh. The little dog had clearly already decided the old man wasn’t a threat, but now Samira was suspicious.

  De Compiegne put a new pot of water on the woodstove.

  “This war,” he said. “I thought when the first one ended, there would be no more war in my lifetime. Maybe ever again. How could anyone who saw what happened in the First World War ever let it happen again? But here we are.”

  The long night was catching up to Samira. It was warm and cozy in the little station house, and she could feel herself getting drowsy. She rubbed her eyes to try to wake herself up.

  “I hope your daughter is all right,” she said.

  “Thank you,” de Compiegne said. “Is one of those men your father?”

  “No,” Samira told him. “My father is dead. Killed by the Nazis in Paris. They captured my mother earlier tonight.” The pain of seeing her mother dragged away came back to her all over again, and tears welled in her eyes. She put her head down on her arms on the table and looked away so de Compiegne wouldn’t see her cry.

  “I’m sorry,” the old man said. “I do not know if my daughter is alive or dead, so my wife and grandson are all I have left. But perhaps this war will end soon, and we will both be reunited with what is left of our families.”

  THOOM. The room shook, rattling metal cups and tools, and Samira jerked awake. She had fallen asleep. She was supposed to keep an eye on the old man, and she had fallen asleep!

  “I think that was your friends,” de Compiegne said. He sat in a chair in the corner, a cup of coffee on a small table beside him and an open book in his lap. Over by the woodstove, Cyrano was awake and alert.

  The phone rang, and the old man got up to answer it. Samira rubbed the sleep from her eyes and realized the old man had put a blanket over her. It slipped to the floor. How long had she dozed? Had de Compiegne phoned the German authorities while she had been sleeping? Were Odysseus and Jason and the others about to be rounded up and tortured by the Nazis for information about the Allied invasion? How could she have fallen asleep so fast?

  “I see,” de Compiegne said into the phone. His voice became urgent. “Yes, of course. I understand. I’ll do what I can!” He hung up and turned to Samira. “Quickly, my dear! We must hurry.” He snatched up a long metal tool shaped like a T. “Your friends were able to blow the tracks, but not before an unscheduled train got past them—a train loaded down with German tanks!”

  Samira hurried outside with the station keeper.

  “A train with tanks on it got past?”

  The tracks were blown—nothing else could get through the tunnel, not until long after the invasion was over. But a train full of tanks could be used against the English and the Americans right now, and if the invasion failed—

  “But what can we do?” Samira asked.

  “See that big lever? The one that switches the tracks?” said de Compiegne. “Move it to the middle, and we’ll hammer wooden blocks in the gaps. That might derail the train. In case it doesn’t, I’ll loosen some of the bolts on the track down the line. We have to hurry though—the train will be on top of us in no time!”

  “I’ll start loosening the bolts,” a familiar voice said. “You two jam the switch.”

  Samira jumped as Jason emerged from the shadows of the station.

  “You!” Samira said. “I tho
ught you’d gone on ahead with the others!”

  “Odysseus left me to watch de Compiegne, just in case.”

  “I thought you said we could trust him!”

  Jason shrugged. “I guess I was right. But at least I didn’t fall asleep,” he said with a smile.

  Samira scowled and ran to help de Compiegne with the switch.

  “Fetch me a couple of blocks of wood from the woodpile,” de Compiegne told her. She was back in seconds, and Cyrano barked happily at her heels. It was all great fun to him, but in minutes a train weighed down with dozens of tanks was going to come barreling by unless they could stop it.

  Samira and de Compiegne wedged the blocks in place, and he hammered them home with a sledgehammer.

  “Good. Here, quickly,” he said, panting. He grabbed another of the T-shaped tools. They ran to where Jason was already working. Each piece of railroad track was about twelve meters long and attached to the big wooden railroad ties by bolts that screwed down to hold it tight. De Compiegne fitted the T-shaped tool over one of the bolts and grunted, trying to turn it. Getting the bolts loose was hard—it took a lot of strength to get them to budge. Jason had only gotten three loose already.

  Working together, Samira and de Compiegne were as strong as Jason, and now they were pulling twice the number of bolts loose. “How is taking just one piece of track out going to do anything?” Samira asked as they strained against another bolt.

  “All it takes for a thing that big and heavy and fast to come crashing down is to get it to slip its track,” Jason explained. “This works better than dynamite, but in daylight the engineers usually see the missing track and stop the train.”

  Samira felt a shuddering vibration deep down in her stomach. De Compiegne stopped pulling on the T wrench and put his ear to the tracks.

  “It’s almost here! Quickly! We must get away!” he said.

  But they had only taken out half the rail’s bolts!

  “Quick, hand me that sledgehammer!” Jason cried.

  The train was coming around the bend. Samira could hear the steady chug-chug-chug of its steam engine. Its headlight illuminated the curve of track. De Compiegne dragged her away as Jason hefted the sledgehammer and brought it down on the side of the rail—CLANG!—and again—CLANG!—knocking it a few more centimeters askew each time. He kept swinging even as the train bore down on him.

  “Jason!” Samira yelled.

  Beside her, de Compiegne was frantically waving his arms to one side. He was warning the train they had sabotaged the tracks!

  Samira grabbed at his hands and tried to stop him. “What are you doing? Don’t tell them what we’ve done!”

  “They can’t stop that train in time now, even if they wanted to. Not with how fast they’re going,” de Compiegne told her. “But those engineers, they’re French! We have to tell them to jump!”

  Samira understood, and they both jumped up and down, waving their arms to get the attention of the engineers. The train charged closer. Jason still clanged away desperately, fully lit by the train’s light now. The engineers saw him and Samira and de Compiegne, and they jumped out of both sides of the engine, tumbling hard and dragging themselves away as best they could. The train plowed through the wooden blocks she and de Compiegne had hammered in at the switch like they weren’t there, shattering them like toothpicks as it roared on. Suddenly, Samira was lifted up into de Compiegne’s arms, and he ran away from the tracks, Cyrano at his heels.

  “Jason! Jason, get out of there!” Samira cried.

  She saw Jason leap away at the last second, and then the train hit the empty space where the bent track had once been.

  At first Samira thought the train might just fly on past the gap in its rail. Its engine kept chugging, and its wheels kept turning. But then it slumped. Ever so slightly, but it slumped. The engine slipped off its tracks to the right, and then the two-hundred-tonne behemoth went charging down the embankment toward the river, pulling train car after train car of tanks down with it. The engine smashed into the riverbed with a thundering KROOM, and then everything went topsy-turvy. With nowhere to go, the speeding train cars rammed into the ones in front of them and flipped, twisted, and went flying, throwing tanks into the air like catapults. CLANG! KRANG! SPRANG! THOOM! It was like the world was coming to an end.

  Samira and de Compiegne ducked and covered their ears. A loose tank went spinning end over end right toward them, and Samira pulled Cyrano into a hug as the thing bounced and flipped right over their heads. The train cars kept coming and coming for what seemed like forever, screeching and smashing into each other and jackknifing and splashing down into the river below.

  And then it was over. The engine’s boiler still hissed, and metal still popped and shifted and settled, but there was no explosion, no fire. Just a giant graveyard of scrap metal and shattered wood surrounded by ruptured earth. Samira couldn’t imagine anyone ever cleaning it all up.

  Or surviving it.

  “Jason!” she cried. She started to run toward the broken train cars and smashed tanks, but de Compiegne caught her and held her back. “But Jason, he’s out there somewhere!” she protested.

  Rene de Compiegne just shook his head no.

  Samira’s heart broke. She sobbed real tears for Jason—a man she’d met just an hour ago, and whose real name she didn’t even know. But he’d believed in her when no one else would, and he’d given his life to save countless more. Including, Samira hoped, her mother’s. But still it wasn’t fair, that any one man should have to sacrifice so much.

  De Compiegne hugged her tight until she stopped crying, and she wiped her eyes.

  “I suppose that’s it for me too,” de Compiegne said. “The Nazis will figure me for a Maquis collaborator and blame me for this. Which of course is true.”

  “You can go on the run! Join the Maquis!” Samira told him.

  De Compiegne chuckled. “Hiding out in the woods and fighting the Nazis is a young man’s game, my dear. I’m too old for it. No, they’ll find me here or at home, and they’ll be able to read the story of what happened as easily as I read a book.”

  “A story,” Samira said. “Come on. I have an idea.”

  Samira led the old man back to his station house, which was miraculously still standing. An upended train car lay across its front path.

  Inside, Samira tipped over chairs, swept tools off shelves, and tossed de Compiegne’s book on the floor.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “You said the Nazis would read you like a book. So all we have to do is tell them a different story. You were reading a book by the fire. Maquis saboteurs broke in. Smashed the place up. Cut the phone lines.”

  “Over here,” de Compiegne said. He flipped open a metal box on the wall. It was full of black wires. Samira took a pair of cutters from the floor and snipped the phone lines. She tossed them back on the floor when she was finished and pulled a length of rope from the wall. “Then they tied you up!”

  “What could I do?” de Compiegne said, playing along. “I am an old man. I didn’t want them to wreck the train, but they overpowered me.”

  Samira smiled. As de Compiegne lay down on the floor, Cyrano licked his face, and Samira tied the old man’s arms and legs tight. But not too tight.

  “Hey, who else can say they took out a whole panzer division single-handedly, hmm?” de Compiegne said with a smile.

  “Will you be all right?” she asked, suddenly worried about leaving him here all night.

  “Yes,” de Compiegne said. “Someone will want to know where their tanks are, and they will find me soon enough. Thank you, Samira. I hope you are reunited with your mother soon.”

  “And you with your daughter,” Samira said.

  Outside the station keeper’s house, Samira wondered what to do now. Her mother had told her to get somewhere safe.

  But no. Samira would go to Bayeux. That’s where her mother was, and her mother was the only person she had left.

  In the weird
stillness and quiet of the train wreck, Samira heard the drone of airplanes high overhead. She looked up. Mushrooms sprouted in the sky, black against the gray clouds.

  Parachutes, Samira realized. The Americans and English, coming to save them. Coming to save her mother.

  “Let’s go, Cyrano,” Samira told her little friend. “We’ve done our part here. It’s all up to the soldiers now.”

  What the hell am I doing here? Lance Corporal James McKay of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion wondered. He closed his eyes and held on to his seat for dear life.

  Poom-poom-poom-poom.

  German anti-aircraft shells exploded in the sky around him. The twin-engine Albemarle troop transport aircraft that James rode in jumped and rocked. Germany’s welcome committee, James thought. They must be over the Channel Islands. They would be over France soon, and then he and the rest of the soldiers in the plane would parachute down into enemy territory. They would be the first Canadians on the ground in the invasion—some of the first Allied troops from anywhere on the ground at Normandy.

  The top army brass told them it was an honor. James thought it was a death sentence.

  James was nineteen years old, and like many of the other young men in his company, he was going into battle for the first time. James had short brown hair, brown eyes, and one of those unremarkable faces no one could remember. He was average height and average build. Whenever he was told to line up alphabetically, his last name—McKay—put him right in the middle. In high school, before he’d quit to join the army, James had solid Cs across the board in all his classes. Even his hometown, Winnipeg, Manitoba, was at the longitudinal center of Canada. James was absolutely average. He had never done a single thing in his life to stand out, good or bad.

  So what am I doing parachuting into France on D-Day? James thought.

  “You volunteered for this,” Lance Corporal Samuel Tremblay said, as if reading James’s mind. James sat facing Sam across the airplane’s lone aisle. Sam was a Cree Indian from Quebec. He was thickset, with tan skin, straight black hair, and high cheekbones. Nobody forgot meeting Sam. He was definitely not average.