Before The Brightest Dawn (The Half-Bloods Trilogy Book 3)

by Jana Petken

  “Their numbers are low. They’ve left military police units in most of the towns with no more than a unit or platoon of soldiers to patrol the area. The Resistance is in a position now to fight back. Our numbers have grown, and we’re no longer afraid to take the Boches on in the open … if we must.”

  Max was already planning his first transmission to Allied Command, via Operation Ultra Command at Bletchley Park. His team’s job was to provide the Allies with firm information on the German army, its order of battle, troop movements, and the location of its V1 – Doodlebug –and V2 – Rocket – flying bombs’ installation and launch pads. This intelligence would allow Allied Headquarters to make informed decisions on the concentrations of troops and materials, including the Panzer divisions and their supply depots, and how and where to bomb German convoys. They might as well begin now with this new information about the castle.

  “How many Germans did you see at the castle? What are they hauling?” Max asked Cesar.

  “About a hundred or so men. Their officers arrived in Kübelwagens, and about five minutes later, supply vehicles, six open trucks with about fifteen to twenty men in each, and a truck towing a 75-210 mm rocket launcher also went in.”

  Max looked at the other Sussex team members. He outranked them and was their leader, but this was a French operation, and he had decided from the outset not to throw his weight around. “We should hang around and see which way they head. We may as well start with this intel,” he suggested.

  Jules, the radio operator, concurred. “This is good news. I say we capitalise on it. I’m sure the Royal Air Force will be happy to bomb the shit out of a nice juicy convoy…”

  “Not while they’re at the castle,” Cesar said, looking horrified. “We would like to keep our historical sites if you don’t mind.”

  Max responded, “You and your people should leave the area.”

  “We plan to head back to Maine-et-Loire. The Germans have a Gestapo sub-station there. We intend to get rid of it.”

  Cesar handed Max the keys to an old Citroen van. “It is parked inside a burnt-out weapons factory about a kilometre southeast of here. It has German registration plates. We found it abandoned and broken, and we fixed it for you. Most of the Boches stationed in the Vendôme area moved north to the coast in the middle of June, and they took every vehicle that still had wheels with them. Sorry; the van was the only vehicle big enough for your needs.” Cesar gestured to the young woman who was leaning against a tree looking as though she were born with the rifle in her hand. “Marie will take you to it.”

  “Thank you,” Max said.

  Cesar handed Max a piece of paper. “I set up two safe houses in the area. Memorise the maps and addresses. The Resistance have taken over them, and they know you are coming.”

  “Good,” said Max, glancing at the directions on the map.

  “God willing, you will be successful, but if you get into trouble, go to our friends. Do not remain in the open. The military police are based in Vendôme, but they are constantly patrolling the Loir-et-Cher area. They found and executed two German deserters last week. They’re even more vicious now than they were before the invasion, and they’ve been given more authority since the local German units moved out.”

  “Got it,” Max responded, shaking the Frenchman’s hand. “Good luck to you all.”

  “And you,” Cesar said.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Loir-et-Cher,

  Centre-Val de Loire region, France.

  9 July 1944

  At 0300, Max drove the van across the Lavardin Bridge at Loir-et-Cher. Supported by arched stone pillars, the gothic bridge was only one of the many ancient landmarks in the Loire region. If it were not for the rumbling aircraft in the black sky, bombs that exploded in the distance, and destroyed buildings that the Germans had deliberately burnt to quell French resistance, one could almost forget the horrors of war that were raging in Northern France.

  One of the things Max hated most about the war, apart from the death and misery it brought, was man’s total disregard for historical landmarks. This was not the first time he had been to this region. His family had once spent a week in the historical province of Anjou, straddling the lower Loire River.

  He and Paul had been enthralled by a castle they had visited. Their imagination had run riot, and every footstep they took had been a homage to the medieval knights who had gone before them. Wilmot, a child at the time, had been bored and crying to go home. Paul had tried to stir some history into the spoilt brat, as Willie was at that time, by saying, ‘Imagine you are walking in the footsteps of kings and knights and horses dressed in armour and fair ladies with hair to their backsides.’ Willie had replied, ‘All I see are old stones and grass and parts of walls that are no longer walls. I want ice cream.’

  Max allowed himself a satisfied sigh. Willie was safe. After much ado, their father had found out that his youngest son was in Kansas, in America. It had taken months to get the name of the camp because the Americans were struggling to cope with the influx of a quarter of a million Axis prisoners from North Africa. However, at the end of April, the American military authorities dealing with POWs had finally given the family the answers they were looking for, and the family’s letter writing to Wilmot began in earnest.

  Milo, sitting in the back of the van, cracked a joke. Good-natured conversations with his French colleagues kept Max’s spirits high. The past four days had been tough. The men had separated into three teams of two during the day and had met up every night to transmit the specifics of what they had seen, including today’s sighting of another German convoy towing heavy weaponry and heading north.

  The men had also reported on their ongoing efforts to find the location of the V1 flying bomb, and the V2 rockets’ bunkers or launch pads. British and American intelligence branches were convinced they were situated in Northern France, and both countries deemed them an ongoing threat. In a meeting with the heads of British Intelligence, two days before his departure to France, Max had suggested that if there were a bunker protecting the flying bombs, it would most likely be deep in a forest. He was convinced now that his team were not going to find it in the Loire area, and trusting his gut, had informed Allied Command via the Ultra team at Bletchley that he was travelling north the following day, hoping to get through to the forested areas in the Calais department. It seemed that their quiet time in the beautiful, albeit partly destroyed Loire valley was over.

  “How far to the safe house, Jules?” Max asked.

  Jules, sitting next to Max in the front passenger seat, shone his shaded torch on the map on his knees to confirm their location. “About two kilometres from here on the road that bypasses Vendôme.”

  “Dieu, I’ll be glad of a bed tonight,” Milo yawned from the back of the van. “The last four days and nights have played havoc on my bony arse.”

  “I’ll be happy for a glass of wine and a floor,” Hugo piped up. “Who wants to go to bed in this heat? No, Milo, what you need is a cold, stone floor.”

  At one time, there had been a glass panel separating the front and back of the van, but the Resistance had removed it so that the team could communicate with each other. Max, half listening to Milo’s complaints about the insects that had crawled over him at his observation spot that day, was also thinking about the safe house; a farmhouse that had been badly damaged during the German invasion four years earlier. According to the woman who had taken them to the van upon their arrival, it was now a substantial Resistance operation’s base, situated only two kilometres from the Feldgendarmerie – the German military police station.

  With only a kilometre to go, Max gasped, then slammed on the brakes. The men and luggage in the back rolled about and thumped against the floor and walls of the van as it screeched to a halt in a diagonal position on the road.

  “Merde, Max,” Jules grumbled as he righted himself.

  Max turned off the engine, “Germans. Get your sidearms ready. We’re either going to
talk our way out of this or kill them.”

  “How many?” Milo asked.

  “Ram them,” Hugo said from the back.

  The van’s dimmed lights picked up the approaching men, but they were shining even brighter torches in Max’s eyes, making it impossible to count how many Germans were coming at them and from seeing the road ahead.

  “I see four,” Jules eventually said.

  Max’s eyes grew accustomed to the glare, and as the black figures holding the torches reached the front of the van, he also counted four Germans; two with rifles slung over their shoulders.

  In those pivotal seconds between the Germans being at the bonnet and getting to the van’s front windows, Max noted their dishevelled state, the absence of army issue rucksacks, helmets or caps, a bandage that was wrapped around one of the men’s arms, and the expression of surprise on their faces. He switched off the van’s lights, deducing they were not patrolling but deserting their army.

  “Steigt aus – get out! We need this transport.” The soldier either didn’t care if the Frenchmen in the van understood German or believed his brash tone would translate for him.

  Max gave the man a blank stare.

  “Get out – now!” the soldier barked, this time waving a pistol.

  “I fixed this van,” Max began in French but then switched to stilted German. “It was abandoned … broken. The Feldgendarmerie say to me … you fix for us. I have Ausweis Pass. I take now to Vendôme. If not take … military police angry.”

  Max hoped the soldiers would think twice about confiscating a vehicle earmarked for the military police. The Resistance had warned the team that the duties of the Wehrmacht Feldgendarmerie ranged from straightforward traffic and population control to the suppression and executions of people they deemed deserving of death. The French had been monitoring the Feldgendarmerie role in this area since the German combat units moved forward and out of the region and had noted an uptake in executions.

  Without warning, the soldier opened the door, pulled Max out of the vehicle by the arm, frogmarched him around the front to the passenger side, and threw him against the van.

  Jules joined Max a moment later, about the same time as the back door was thrown open.

  “Out – out!” a soldier yelled at the back of the van.

  Max raised himself to full height and clasped his hands on his head as the second soldier ordered with a gesture. He didn’t see, but rather heard, the scuffle going on at the back. He and Jules were being held at gunpoint by one soldier training his semi-automatic Gewehr 43 rifle. Another German was holding a pistol and shining his torch into their eyes.

  The other four team members appeared, stumbling as two soldiers pushed them towards Max and Jules. One of the Germans tugged Hugo’s shirt. The latter shrugged it off and got a swipe across the head for his cheek.

  “I no not these men,” Max blurted out to take attention away from Hugo. “I pick them on this road … I no not them.”

  “Shut up,” came the response.

  “I want to see what they’ve got in their baggage,” one of the soldiers who had brought the Frenchmen from the back, said.

  Two soldiers went back to the van doors and began throwing bags onto the road. Max was not surprised that the Germans weren’t inspecting identity documents or asking where the four men who’d been in the back were going. The deserters were not thinking like soldiers. They looked panicked, exhausted, and seemed to only want to take the vehicle.

  Max imagined escape scenarios in his head while hoping the Frenchmen were doing the same. He pictured his hand going inside his jacket and reaching for his pistol, which was tucked into his waistband at his side, but no matter how many times he played with the scene, he was shot as soon as he lowered his hands…

  “I found a radio transmitter,” a soldier called out from the roadside near the back of the van.

  Max’s hopes of escape crumpled when the two Germans who had been inspecting the luggage returned. Furious, they showed their companions the grenades, then followed that critical discovery with the British-registered first aid kit and cyanide pills.

  “They’re spies,” one of the soldiers snapped.

  “I don’t care who they are. I say we kill them all and get out of here.” He turned his pistol on Milo and Gabriel, shooting both Frenchmen in their heads in quick succession.

  “Stop – stop!” Max shouted in German.

  “Are you a spy, eh? Well, are you, French pig?” the same soldier demanded to know of Max.

  Max shut his eyes, waiting for the bullet. Instead, he was pulled out of the line and punched in the stomach. He doubled over, gasping for breath, as a rifle butt thumped the back of his head. He dropped like a stone to his knees, dazed and unable to fend off new kicks and punches to his face and body. When he rolled into the foetal position, he tried to use his hands to shield his face, but now at least two deranged Germans were kicking or thumping him with their rifle butts, and every part of him was vulnerable. In excruciating pain, and not losing consciousness quickly enough for his liking, he wished for a bullet to end him.

  As Max lay facing a field high with sunflowers at the other side of the road, he heard the beginnings of a scuffle going on at the van. His beating halted abruptly. Men were shouting, groaning, and swearing in both French and German behind him. He rolled over, unable to rise even to his knees. The torches were on the ground, and apart from their soft rays highlighting the van’s immediate area, it was pitch black.

  Pistol shots cracked out. The grunts and other sounds of struggle ceased, then a rifle’s incessant firing made hearing anything else, indeed even his own thoughts, impossible. Max’s forehead and crown were bleeding. Blood dripped into his left eye. He was in agony, dizzy, but lucid enough to go for the pistol that was tucked into his trousers’ waistband. I’m going to die with my gun in my hand. That thought gave him a modicum of satisfaction as he raised his torso centimetres off the ground and blindly fired shot after shot at the two silhouetted figures spraying the bodies lying on the ground with bullets.

  The first bullet struck Max in the shoulder from close range. A second hit him in an area near his hip. His head smacked against the hot ground, but he made another supreme effort to rise again when a rifle began firing along the road in the direction the van had been heading. Still unable to move, Max twisted his head to his right side and through nauseating pain caught a glimpse of blue and white flashes from the muzzle of the weapon as it discharged. Lethargically, he raised his arm with his pistol shaking in his weakened hand, aimed at the flashes, and fired his gun until the rifle grew silent and he had spent his ammunition.

  Again, Max sank onto the warm asphalt wet with his blood. An airy sob leaked from his parted lips. The pain was intense, but it paled in comparison to his broken heart. He was losing his dream of a lifetime with Judith, of children, and an England at peace – yes, his dreams were fading; his world was becoming darker … and now thoughts of war and love were draining … draining away.

  Chapter Fifty

  Hugo ran in the darkness with rifle fire pushing him on. Bullets whizzed past his ears, but one caught him in the back of the arm, making him stumble and fall. He got up and stumbled on until he heard the echo of a second weapon competing with the rifle. Then, about two hundred metres from the vehicle, the firing finally stopped.

  Tripping again, Hugo fell off the roadway and tumbled down a grassy embankment while trying to cradle his wounded arm with his free hand. In the field ripe with the scent of sunflowers, he took the time to settle his breathing. Then he got up, and crouching, made his way back towards the van, his gun now in one hand and the other arm limp at his side. He didn’t expect to find any survivors, but someone had silenced the rifle fire, and that someone, assuming it was one of his team members, might still be alive. He had to check.

  He halted before reaching the front of the van to listen for signs of life – he heard his own breathing and the sound of crickets – then advanced in a stooped p
osition into the road, his gun primed and ready to fire at the slightest movement. No German torches shone now, and unable to see much, he opened the front passenger door and palmed around the seat and floor area, searching for Jules’ torch. He found it on the floor, picked it up, and switched it on.

  Hugo had not spotted the German lying a metre in front of the van when he’d approached. Now with the torch lit, he surmised by the body’s position that this was the man who had been trying to pick him off with the rifle. The soldier had three gunshots to his back, and his fingers were still curled around his rifle’s trigger. Assuming he was dead but taking no chances, Hugo kicked the body. Getting no reaction, he got on one knee and felt for a pulse; finding none, he picked up the rifle and moved on to the other side of the van.

  He retched as his torchlight’s beam broke on the pile of bodies. Two Germans were lying face down with their heads and torsos partly covering Jules and Marc underneath them. Milo and Gabriel, who had been executed before the fightback even began, lay a few metres past the van. As well as single gunshot wounds to their heads, their bodies were also stained with blood. Theirs – blood from other men – what did it matter now?

  Hugo stifled a sob and moved his eyes back to Jules and Marc, the two colleagues and friends he had lived and trained with for months. It was clear from the abundant amount of blood on their backs and around their bodies that the German bastards lying half-atop the Frenchmen were dead.

  The torch beam enhanced the gory mess; blood looked brighter, thicker, almost like a blanket covering the men in places. He pulled the first German away from the van using his uninjured hand. He felt sick with pain but refused to give up on his team members until he had checked their pulses and heartbeats. Miracles did occasionally happen.

  Unable to move the other German’s head and shoulders off Marc, he got on his knees and crawled over the man.