“I don’t know. That’s a secret. Only M. Marchal knows. He won’t even tell Jean-Claude. We’re just supposed to check out possible sites. Hey, did you hear there’s another American!”
“What? Where?”
“I don’t know. Jean-Claude said he heard that another one had bailed out. Must be holed up somewhere close by. How’s Andrew?”
“He’s…he’s fine…sleeping,” Anna muttered, shaking her head. A second American?
“Très bien,” Justyn said. “I’m going in to read for a while.” He got to his feet, dropped his muddy boots next to the door and disappeared inside.
Anna winced as the screen door slammed. The rapid-fire conversation reminded her of discussions with her students at the university back in Krakow and how the most incredible information would be dispensed with casual indifference. Drop sites. A second aviator.
She picked up the cup and looked out over the small patch of land adjacent to the chalet that had been cleared from the dense pine forest. In the gathering dusk she saw a doe standing just inside the tree line. She watched as the animal glanced around, then lowered its head and nibbled at the underbrush. Peaceful. Unafraid. It reminded her of her life during these past two years—a quiet, peaceful respite from the madness of the war.
The night was getting cool and Anna wrapped her hands around the cup, feeling the last of its warmth. She glanced at Justyn’s muddy boots and took a deep breath. He’d been off checking out “drop sites.” And an American aviator was sleeping in her house. She felt the respite coming to an end.
Chapter 28
RENE LEFFARD WAS IN A BAD MOOD. He stood on the platform at Antwerp’s Berchem station and ran a hand through his thick, black hair. He looked down the railroad tracks then glanced at his watch. Thirty minutes late. Scowling, he turned and retraced his steps along the platform grumbling in silence at how fouled up the country had become.
He glanced at a man standing at the newsstand buying the evening paper and shook his head. What a fool, he thought. Who would pay money for a newspaper filled with nothing but German propaganda? He knew that some people actually believed the garbage they read in the paper, but there were others who didn’t believe it but didn’t care anymore. It was just something to read. Those were the people he really worried about.
A whistle blew, and a few minutes later he heard the chugging steam engine approach from the south. He glanced at his watch again. Thirty-five minutes late.
Leffard spotted Willy Boeynants stepping off the train and waved to him. The tall, silver-haired man, wearing a navy-blue three-piece suit with the point of a white handkerchief protruding from the breast pocket, waved back and walked briskly across the platform. Leffard embraced his friend, and they headed down the stairs toward the street. “Bonjour, Willy. Heureux de te voir, good to see you. How was the train today?”
Boeynants grimaced. “Insupportable. Late and dirty, as usual. I was lucky to even get on because the air-raid sirens went off just as we were boarding. The train pulled out immediately and left a couple hundred people standing on the platform. As usual, it was nothing. Then we stopped in Mechelen and sat for half an hour. And all the while a crowd of drunken Wehrmacht soldiers hung around in the back of the car singing those disgusting German songs.” He patted the thick briefcase he was carrying. “But, I did manage to bring some wine.”
The Leffards’ home on the Cogels-Osylei was a short walk from the Berchem station, in Antwerp’s exclusive Zurenborg district. The three-story house was of the Art Nouveau style of architecture that had been popular in Antwerp around the turn of the century, and Rene Leffard loved every brick and every pane of stained glass. It was old and comfortable and charming, and coming home every night made him forget, if only for a few brief minutes, the drudgery of life in an occupied country.
Mimi Leffard met them at the door, and Boeynants embraced her. “You look wonderful, my dear,” he said.
She blushed and pushed him away. “Oui, oui, merci. Such a liar you are.”
Leffard gave his wife a kiss and closed the door. Her dark brown hair, showing more streaks of gray every day, was pinned back in a bun. She looked tired, he thought. He knew that she had probably spent several hours standing in ration lines trying to get something decent for tonight’s dinner. “Willy has brought some wine,” he said.
Mimi smiled. “Merveilleux! I’m certain it will be the best part of the dinner.”
The dinner was a meager affair—a vegetable soup made with carrots and leeks, some crusty white bread from the black market and a small portion of tinned mackerel. But the wine, a Chateauneuf du Pape ’38 that Willy uncorked with a flourish, helped immensely, and Mimi surprised the two men by producing a bread pudding for dessert.
“Délicieux!” Boeynants said as he scooped some of the gooey concoction into his mouth. “How did you manage it?”
Mimi dabbed her fork into it and tasted a small bite. “I had a few eggs left, and I managed to get a little sugar on the black market.” She tried another bite and shrugged. “Well, it’s one way to use up that awful ration bread.”
After dinner, Leffard and Boeynants helped Mimi clear the table and do the dishes. It had been almost a year since the Leffards’ housekeeper left to take care of her parents, and they had not replaced her. Mimi was not a strong woman, and Leffard had become accustomed to helping out.
When they were finished Leffard led Boeynants to his study, and Boeynants lowered his long, lanky frame into one of the leather chairs in front of the fireplace. Leffard opened a cabinet and withdrew a bottle of cognac and two snifters, glancing at his refection in the gilded framed mirror hanging on the wall. He was a stocky, solidly built man, but he looked thinner, his neatly trimmed black mustache also flecked with gray. The war was aging all of them, he thought. He held up the bottle and swirled it around, looking at Boeynants. Just a few centimeters remained. “Enfin, this is the last of it, my friend. God knows when I’ll be able to find more.” He poured some into each of the glasses and handed one to Boeynants. “À la vôtre! To friendship—and to the day we kick these bastards out of our country.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Boeynants said as they clinked glasses.
Leffard sat in the other chair, took a sip and looked at his friend. “You’ve heard about what happened in Warempage?” he asked.
Boeynants nodded. “I understand Anna has a ‘visitor’ staying with her now. How is she doing?”
“Van Acker says she’s handling it quite well, but she’s a little nervous. The local Gestapo’s been snooping around. Have you heard anything?” Boeynants was an official with the Department of the Interior, and Leffard knew he was in a position to hear things.
“Not much,” Boeynants said. “The Gestapo knows the plane came down, of course, but they seem to be leaving it up to their local boys in La Roche to track down the survivors. I’ll stay on it.”
Leffard took another sip of cognac. “It’s damned unfortunate that they brought that aviator to the chalet. Anna’s been pretty good about staying out of things since she’s been down there.”
Boeynants smiled. “Oui, je sais. And for Anna that’s an accomplishment.”
Mimi came in carrying a tray with a carafe of coffee, two cups and a plate of small biscuits. “I will apologize in advance for the awful coffee,” she said.
Boeynants smiled at her. “I’ve actually grown quite used to our so-called coffee after all this time. I wonder how I’ll adapt if we’re ever able to get the real thing again.”
“Rene will adapt instantly,” she said. “The only time he thinks it’s palatable is if he can mix in a little cognac.”
Leffard laughed. “But we can’t get that either.”
When Mimi left the room, Boeynants poured a cup of coffee and asked Leffard, “Have you heard anything about another drop?”
Leffard nodded. “Voici, here are the coordinates.” He pulled a folded piece of paper from his shirt pocket and handed it to his friend. “Let me know if you he
ar of any extra Gestapo activity in that area. It will be sometime next week.”
Boeynants took the paper and nodded.
Leffard said, “The code is wild boars are foraging in the valley. French broadcast on the BBC, as usual.”
Boeynants repeated the words and took another look at the slip of paper before tearing it up.
Chapter 29
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AFTER the code was broadcast on the BBC, Leon Marchal and his older son, Jean-Claude, left their two-story farmhouse and headed for the barn to hitch up the horses.
Marchal felt good. He was forty-five years old, a short, lean man, weathered and physically fit from a lifetime of hard work. He was a veteran of the Chasseurs Ardennais, Belgium’s most elite military organization, and tonight, as he did on every mission, Marchal donned the Chasseurs’ customary green beret.
The door banged open behind them, and fourteen-year-old Luk Marchal called out from the porch, “Attends! I want to get Justyn and come along.”
Marchal motioned for Jean-Claude to continue on, then headed back toward the house, meeting Luk at the bottom of the steps. He put his arm around his younger son’s shoulder. “We’ve been through this before, Luk. You can’t come with us. Not until you’re sixteen. And I know that Justyn is not allowed to come along either.”
“But it’s not fair,” the boy protested. “Justyn and I helped find the site and dig the holes.”
“I know you did, and that’s your contribution. But you cannot go along on the night drops. C’est dangereux! No one can until they’re sixteen. You know the rules.”
“But the war will be over by then, and I’ll miss all the action.”
Marchal sighed. “I pray to God every day that’s true.” He gave his son a hug.
• • •
By eleven o’clock everything was ready. Marchal walked around the field for a last-minute check. The field was about two hectares of clear, flat grass surrounded on three sides by dense pine trees. The fourth side, also well populated with pine trees, sloped down to the Ourthe River. At each corner of the field was a hole, approximately a meter across and a meter and a half deep. Jean-Claude, Luk and Justyn had dug them last week then carefully concealed them with tarps and pine branches.
Now the tarps were removed and lanterns placed at the bottom of each hole. As soon as they heard the airplane they would light the lanterns, which would be easily spotted from the air but invisible to anyone at ground level.
Marchal walked to the side of the field nearest the river and joined the rest of the crew standing inside the tree line with the horses and wagons. There were seven of them: four men and three teenage boys. They all knew their tasks. They had done this before.
A little after one o’clock in the morning, Marchal heard an approaching airplane. He looked at his friend Paul Delacroix and nodded. The sound was the low, reverberating rumble of a heavy transport and not a Luftwaffe fighter. Marchal shouted, “Go,” and the three boys ran out to light the lanterns.
The plane passed overhead, circled around and headed back toward the field. Marchal sat in his wagon and watched the plane approach, just above the treetops. One by one, five parachutes emerged from underneath the wide fuselage and descended to the field. Large, wooden crates swinging from the bottom of each parachute dropped with a dull thud onto the field as the plane gained altitude and disappeared.
Jean-Claude and the other two boys ran into the middle of the field as soon as the last crate hit the ground and began pulling in the parachutes. Marchal flicked the reins, and his horse trotted into the field, pulling the wagon. Paul Delacroix did the same in the second wagon.
In less than ten minutes all five crates were loaded onto the wagons, the lanterns extinguished and the four men were gone. The three boys stayed behind to fill in the holes and remove all traces of the operation.
By two-thirty in the morning the crates were unloaded and the materials stored in the cellar below Delacroix’s barn. The husky, gray-haired man wiped his hands on his coveralls and produced a dusty bottle of pequet from a shelf above the tool bench. He handed it to Marchal who took a swig of the potent, locally produced liquor and passed it around. It was vaguely similar to vodka but a long way from the cognac they would normally have had during better times.
Delacroix read aloud from the checklist that had come with the drop. “Fifty kilos of plastique, sixty-five detonators and timing pencils, twenty Colt 45s, ten Sten guns, one Bren gun, two thousand rounds of ammunition, thirty hand grenades and ten thousand francs in small bills.”
“Pas mal,” Marchal said, “not bad. I guess that’ll take care of a few more freight trains and supply dumps.”
He glanced at Jean-Claude as his seventeen-year-old son, tall and blond, big-boned but still youthfully slender, took a swig of the pequet.
The boy grimaced, caught his father’s eye and smiled.
After two weeks of surveillance Jean-Claude knew the schedule. The heavily laden trains hauling coke from the plants in Liege to the German-controlled steel mills in Luxembourg crossed the Ourthe River every night between eleven o’clock and midnight. Once over the bridge, the trains labored to climb the grade and slowed to less than 10 km/hr as they headed south. The terrain was hilly, heavily wooded and very remote. It was perfect.
Standing on the tracks, Jean-Claude looked back toward the lean-to he and Henri Delacroix had constructed. It was well concealed in a hollow about fifty meters downhill and west of the raised rail bed. It had served as their home for most of the last two weeks. He glanced at Henri then looked at his watch. It was a little after three o’clock in the afternoon, and the two teenagers set off along the tracks toward the bridge.
They crossed the bridge and continued along the tracks for another kilometer until they came to a crossing with a narrow dirt road. They left the tracks and found a spot hidden among the trees to wait.
An hour later Jean-Claude heard the creaking sound of wagon wheels. The two boys waited until the wagon was almost on top of them and they were certain who it was, before emerging from the cover of the trees.
Jules van Acker drove the wagon, and Jean-Claude’s father sat next to him. Paul Delacroix sat on a bench in the back of the wagon along with another man from La Roche, a quiet, thin man of about fifty, whom Jean-Claude knew only as “Gaston.” Jean-Claude guessed from the man’s cultured, more refined accent, that Gaston might originally be from Brussels.
When the wagon groaned to a halt, the two boys hurried to the back and began lifting out the heavy canvas packs, which had been concealed under a load of freshly harvested beans. Without exchanging a word, the two boys, their fathers and Gaston each strapped on one of the canvas packs and set off down the railroad tracks. Van Acker turned the wagon around and headed back.
Back at the lean-to, Jean-Claude watched as his father and Gaston removed the materials from the backpacks and spread them neatly on the canvas tarp that served as the floor. There were twenty kilos of putty-like plastique, which Gaston carefully divided into four, 5-kilo packs, wrapping each one in a piece of heavy cloth. His father removed four reels of wire from the packs and handed two each to Jean-Claude and Henri.
Then the five saboteurs climbed up the hill to the railroad tracks and headed south to a point where the rail bed began banking and curving to the east. Gaston held up his hand, and the group stopped. The thin man looked carefully north and south along the tracks.
Jean-Claude knew he was calculating the curvature of the tracks and the angle of the bed.
“A little farther,” he said and the group walked another thirty meters down the tracks.
Gaston stopped and nodded. He knelt on the wooden ties and pointed to a spot alongside each of the rails. Paul and Henri Delacroix set to work attaching the packs of plastique to the rails. Jean-Claude and his father followed Gaston another forty meters down the tracks and did the same.
When all four charges had been secured to the rails, Jean-Claude stood off to the side and watched Gaston meti
culously insert the detonators and make each connection to the reels of wire. He must be an engineer of some type, the boy thought, perhaps an army officer, a demolitions man. Had he been in the Chasseurs Ardennais like his father?
Finally Gaston stood and wiped his hands on his trousers. Marchal and Delacroix began to unwind the reels, backing off the rail bed and down the hill.
It was dark by the time the group returned to the lean-to and settled in to wait for the train.
Jean-Claude looked at his watch when he heard the first unmistakable chugging of a steam locomotive. It was 11:15. His father doused the lantern, and the dark moonless night enveloped the saboteurs.
The sound grew louder.
They were all on their knees. Marchal gripped the handle of the plunger.
The venting steam and scraping wheels of the massive freight train grew louder and louder.
“Should be crossing the bridge now,” Jean-Claude said, his voice cracking. He and Henri had been listening to these trains for fourteen days, and he had become intimately familiar with the sounds and vibrations that ran through the ground. He was excited. Ever since the war broke out he had longed to be a part of the action, to be a fighting man like his father, and now he was getting his chance. He was proud of the surveillance work he and Henri had done. He hoped his father would be as well.
The clamor of the straining locomotive became deafening, then abruptly dropped in pitch as it passed their position, heading south.
Gaston put a hand on Marchal’s shoulder and counted, “Un, deux, trois, quatre—”
He squeezed Marchal’s shoulder.
A flash of brilliant white light…Then a thunderous explosion knocked Jean-Claude to the ground. Three more flashes and eardrum-shattering concussions followed in split-second intervals.
Jean-Claude covered his ears and crawled to the far corner of the lean-to as the shrill sound of screeching metal penetrated every fiber of his body.
Massive trees snapped like matchsticks as the heavily loaded railcars careened off the tracks and plunged into the forest with deep, booming thuds.
Night of Flames: A Novel of World War II Page 16