Liberation

by Imogen Kealey

  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.

  41

  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 unt
il 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.

  42

  A middle-aged man in overalls cycled slowly down the back road from Saint-Georges, the front wheel of his bike creaking on each turn, until he heard a low whistle from the steep bank above him. He clambered off his bike, lit his pipe and waited. As he sent a contented cloud of smoke into the air, Nancy and Tardivat emerged from the tree line and greeted him.

  He didn’t bother speaking, just handed them a sheet of paper, turned his bike around in the road and set off again. Nancy would have kissed him if he’d only stayed still long enough. He was a train driver who had spent thirty years loving every engine, every sleeper and rail on his patch, and now he did everything he could to help the Resistance destroy them. Just as long as you didn’t ask him to get chatty. Nancy was pretty sure she could rely on him, but they had set up this meet the day the first lines of the poem had been transmitted, and she couldn’t be certain he’d heard the next lines yesterday evening on Ici Londres until she heard that squeak of his bike.

  “How long have we got?” Tardi asked as she studied the paper.

  “Forty minutes.”

  They picked up the rest of the team from their cover farther off the road and forded the Ruisseau de Mongon, a fierce little tributary of the Truyère, without being spotted, dodging between the beech trees and pines. Nancy was grateful for every moment she had spent on these tracks now and every hour of PT she’d endured. The climb was fierce; they had to drag themselves up, reaching from one slender trunk to the next until they reached a narrow promontory where they could see both the road and the rail bridge.

  Nancy got out her compact and Tardivat raised his eyebrows. “I assure you, mon colonel, you look beautiful.”

  “Grow up, Tardi,” she said, then rather ruined the effect by sticking her tongue out at him. She checked the position of the sun, flicked open the compact and twisted the mirror, angling it to give three quick flashes. Far below them on the river, a single flash answered them. Nancy flashed the mirror again, twice this time.

  “They’ll blow it in twenty minutes?” Tardi said, looking at his watch.

  “That’s right. Now, shall we get a move on? All clear on the plan?”

  Jean-Clair rolled his eyes. “Mon colonel, I can draw this bridge in my sleep and every time I swallow I taste steel.” He patted his backpack. “Can we blow it up now?”

  Nancy felt her lips twitch in a smile, her fingers tingle. This is living, she thought. This is what it is to live.

  “Roger that.”

  Tardi, Mateo and Juan headed out first, then eight minutes later Nancy followed with Franc and Jean-Clair, staying high up the slope where the trees gave them some cover, and looking down on the lower track that the Germans patrolled, winding its way along the line of the river, halfway down between them and the water. Nancy was as close as she could get now without losing the cover of the trees; that left a hundred meters of open ground sloping fiercely downward before they got to the concrete pilings.

  “Ready?”

  The two men nodded without looking at her, focused only on the base of the bridge. Mateo was clenching and unclenching his fists.

  Nancy looked at her watch. “Now!”

  A muffled rumbling explosion from the road bridge, then another sharper detonation and Nancy saw a great plume of stone and smoke fountaining up in the center of the river. Franc and Jean-Clair set off down the slope at once; she couldn’t resist twisting sideways to see the patrol on the western edge of the path spinning toward the sound and straight into a burst of machine-gun fire from the trees. They crumpled to the floor.

  Then she ran.

  Jean-Clair had already clambered to the top of the concrete piling twenty feet above their heads, fastened and tied a rope and thrown it down to them. His mother had been right about his climbing abilities and she was right to be proud, he was like a rat up a drainpipe, the darling. Franc, his sister had told her, used to sneak out of their house to visit his girlfriends in Montluçon by climbing out of their bedroom window and over the roofs in darkness. And ever since she’d joined forces with Gaspard, Franc had been terribly respectful toward her, trying to make up for plotting to kill her on day one. They both were confident with explosives now too, handling the deadly blocks with confident attention. So they were her bridge team.

  She walked up the wall, leaning back on the rope, and Franc followed her. Jean-Clair gathered up the rope and returned it to his pack, and she checked her watch again.

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  The sound of scattered small arms fire came from the direction of the road bridge. Rodrigo and his team had orders to try to keep the Germans as busy as possible.

  Nancy, Franc and Jean-Clair started up the iron steps. Don’t look up, don’t look down. The crisscross ironwork cut the world into impossible shapes. Twisted diamonds of sky and river, bank and woodland. A handrail of some kind would have been nice though. You’d have thought the greatest engineer in France might have considered a banister. No such bloody luck.

  The patrols on top of the bridge and in the guard towers would stop staring at the remains of the road bridge soon. She
thought in the rhythm of her jogging steps. South side top, blind from this angle. South side bottom, dead she hoped. North side top, blind soon, north side bottom, not blind, not dead. Hopefully still distracted. If they could reach the top of the arch before any of them thought to look up into the ironwork, they might not be seen at all. It felt good, the burn in her muscles, the thrill of doing what she had trained for. Even the weight of the plastic in her backpack felt right.

  Nearly there. She checked her watch again, and at the same moment heard the warning bell above her on the tracks. The ten-minute warning. Shit. They pushed on at the final ascent, her legs screaming in protest, and she could hear Jean-Clair panting behind her.

  This is it. She looked above her, searching for the right joints where the charges needed to be placed to make a chain of three blocks across the width of the rail track, four pounds of explosive in each block to tear a line slicing through the top of the arch like a hot knife.

  OK. Just there.

  They spread out, Nancy staying on the walkway, the two men clambering, nimble as monkeys, out across the joists. Smooth, practiced movements, no need to chat. They had both heard the bell too and knew exactly what it meant.

  Nancy threaded the detonation cord through the explosive. Jean-Clair was walking, apparently on air, balancing on one of the central cross bars, his packs of explosive already in place. He caught the coil as she threw it, passed it through his own charge, slung it across to Franc. Franc buried it in his own, turned to them and grinned.

  “Six minutes,” she said.

  Now for the pressure trigger. Franc swung across the lacework, passed Jean-Clair and back to Nancy and took it from her, then hauled himself upward to the point immediately under the rails.

  “Jean-Clair,” she said, “get over here.”

  “Just want to be sure it’s secure, mon colonel.”

  Franc reached up, pushing the pressure switch into position where the weight of the train would set off the fireworks. They could get well away from the blast in six minutes. This was almost too…