by Scott, Manda
‘Left! Daniel, go left here!’ Not a machine gun, but a row of men and two of them with dogs; big, leashed Alsatians, white teeth ghostly in the unreal light. ‘Go under the carriage!’ Good that Daniel’s lithe and used to scrambling. They’re under and up again and running on the other side, but there’s someone behind the massed men, calling orders through the ranks upon ranks of grey uniforms.
‘Nicht töten! Ich will sie lebend!’
Merde! But Kramme’s in Lyon! She spins, running, and can see nothing in the dark, but there’s no doubt it’s him. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Kramme is out in the middle of the night, directing the troops. How is he here when he’s supposed to be in Lyon? Dear God. God. God. I didn’t tell him. I did not.
Somewhere too near, the dogs are screaming. The sound breaks open her terror.
‘This way!’ She makes herself move, jinks right, down a siding, and where’s the Patron? She can hear shooting up ahead, but there’s shooting everywhere now; if the Boche don’t start killing each other, it’ll be a miracle. Where is the Patron?
A commotion to her left, and there is René, racing down the side of the Dijon line, waving the Sten he doesn’t really know how to use, shouting abuse in his high, boy’s voice. ‘Bastards! Sons of whores! You don’t scare me!’ He is heading towards the dogs.
She shouts, ‘René! Not that way!’ He ignores her. He is going to be a hero. And dead. She angles down towards him. There’s another bridge ahead that takes the rail over the road. They were supposed to blow that. Too late now.
Talking of charges, they’re well within the time when they—
God, it’s a long time since she was this close to plastique when it erupted. It’s like being hit by a train, the blast hurtling into her spine, slamming into her, surging her forward, stunned, dizzy, staggering. She doesn’t fall, though. She slaps her own face and, turning, slaps Daniel, once, a crack on the left cheek. ‘Come on! This is our chance.’ Because the Boche didn’t have Captain Vaughan-Thomas teaching them and they are still recovering from the shock and any minute now, the next charge will—
‘Hands over your ears!’
Sten on its sling, swinging, banging her ribs, her hands are over her ears when the second blast comes, and she doesn’t so much as trip this time, isn’t dizzy, and René is ahead and the Patron is a dozen strides away, dancing, windmilling his arms. ‘Troubadour! Come on! Come on! Come on!’
He fires a long burst into the light-crazed night, stopping the rifle fire for the moment. She slews to a halt beside him. His ginger hair is a blaze of joy. He is laughing. Laughing! He is a god in his element and she so badly wants to join him. This is what they were trained for. This.
He catches her arm, pushes her past him. ‘Go on. Get Daniel clear. I’ll cover you.’
‘Patron … back there, it’s Kramme. He shouldn’t be here.’
‘I know. Someone sold us.’ His eyes pierce hers, sharp as knives. She wants to weep. I didn’t tell him. I didn’t. He grins at her and there is no rancour in it. ‘Go. Don’t stop. I’ll follow.’
‘René’s there.’ The child – not a youth now – has seen the dogs and is stranded in the middle of the railway line, bracketed left and right by searchlights. ‘We can’t leave him.’
‘I’ll get him. You take Daniel.’ He grabs her elbow, wheels her round, pushes her towards the road, the bridge, the shape in the distance that is JJ. Kramme is back, so JJ is back, that much is good.
‘That’s an order, Sophie. Go!’
The Patron shoves her away. She stumbles and when she turns, he’s flying down the track towards René, firing short bursts at the searchlights, at the men and their dogs.
He trusts her to follow an order. She feels sick. ‘Daniel?’
‘I’m here.’ A small voice, off to her right.
He’s crouching on the line, trying to hide between the rails. She grabs his hand and, together, they run along the road, out of range of the gunshots from the yard.
Halfway along, a single body lies black in the dark. The smell of blood is a wall. Sophie does not stop to see if it is friend or foe, but hurdles it and carries on. A hundred strides and they are under the bridge into the dark, damp stuffiness where neither searchlights nor stars can reach and here is JJ, who has never yet missed a jaunt, standing on his backpack, reaching high up into the mouldering brickwork of the bridge, placing a charge. He’s mad. Insane. ‘JJ, you can’t …’
‘Have you got a timing pencil?’
Of course: she was trained well. She pulls it out, stamps on the glass, hands him the closed end. Without any order from her, Daniel kneels at the tunnel’s mouth, looking out, providing cover.
She says, ‘The Patron …’
‘He knows.’ JJ jumps down, dusts his hands, says, ‘That’s a red. He’ll be under and through long before it blows.’
‘It’s not that.’ She shakes her head. ‘He’s gone back to get René.’
JJ frowns at her. ‘Raymond went back to get René. You must have passed him on the road?’
‘We didn’t pass—’ Her guts, already clenched, tie in a knot. In her memory, the lumpen shape is of a parsnip. And herself, careless, jumping over.
She opens her mouth to speak but JJ reaches out to stop her. His face frozen, he says, ‘So the Patron is the only one going for René.’
‘He should be here by now.’
‘Which means—’
Understanding reaches them together. Sophie sees JJ’s move before it comes and grabs for his arm. ‘JJ, stop!’ He’s a big man, and she only has a hold on the back of his shirt; her dead weight against his urgency. ‘Listen!’ Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God. ‘Listen …’
They do. Amidst the shouting and firing, the dogs are no longer baying. Over all the hysteria is the slavering relish of hounds that have brought down their quarry.
‘Bastards. Bastards. Bastards!’
Sophie hauls the big man round. In the part light, his face is a streaming mess of tears. She is dry-eyed. She neither swears nor weeps. She thinks she will never do either again. I didn’t tell him. I didn’t. This is her truth and she believes it. She believes it because it is true. And she will avenge him. This, she swears to herself and the distant watcher, Laurence Vaughan-Thomas, who is unlikely to forgive her. He will not forgive her, either, if she fails now to follow orders.
JJ is fighting her, but not really. Her nails are claws sunk into his shoulder and she will not let him go. He’d have to kill her to go after René now, and he won’t do that. She has control of him and Daniel – just these three, the survivors. If anybody else were coming, they’d be here by now.
Distinctly, she says, ‘We can’t go back for the Patron, for any of them. We can’t save them. We can’t give them a clean death. We have our orders. In case of emergency, we are to make our way to the mountains. No hesitations. No turning back. It’s what we are trained for. So we fucking go!’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE MOUNTAINS OF MOREZ
4 June 1944
THESE WERE THE instructions: if you have to run, go to the Maquis de Morez. There was never any indication of how, but half the training in Scotland, in Hampshire, in the other small country houses out of the way of the war, taught them how to move fast in enemy territory, to navigate where there are no road signs, to take what you need without remorse or regret.
First they run, through fields and copses, over walls and along ditches; if you’re running fast you can’t think. Conversely, if you start thinking, you can’t run fast. So don’t think. They lose the dogs running through a river and on the other side, turning left and down a part-metalled road, they hear a car; just one, coming into town, not out of it. It’s big and it’s running on gasoline, which means it’s the Boche.
Sophie says, ‘We need a car,’ and JJ and Daniel nod at her and duck down in the ditches on either side and she watches the almost-not-there beams of the headlights until she can see the Mercedes, its driver, the two officers in the back. Neither on
e is Kramme. Neither of them is anyone Sophie knows; just random Boche, in the wrong place at the wrong time. She stands up and empties the remains of her magazine into the rear windscreen.
They have to sweep the broken glass off the seats after they have hauled out the bloodied bodies, but she didn’t hit the engine or the fuel tank and the car runs as well as it did before. JJ drives. He knows where the caches are along the route – of fuel, of plastique, of guns. They stop at the first and load everything into the trunk, and now if they are stopped, they will go out in a blaze of arms and explosives.
They go fast, with no care. They are not stopped.
Sophie does not know the route to the Maquis de Morez, but JJ has been often. He drives east and north, up out of the farmland to the foothills, where the forest shrouds the road.
The car is overladen and struggles as the hills grow into mountains and the road must switch back and forth up the side. Tall trees grow on either side, hiding the coming dawn. JJ flashes the headlamps, dit dah dah dah, dit dah dah dah, over and over – his own initials, JJ, JJ – on and on until it is too light for them to be seen, and he turns them off for another kilometre and then has to turn them back on again as he swings the car off the road and onto a forest track that ends in a clearing with tyre tracks crusted into the mud.
‘We get out here.’
The silence bludgeons her ears. All around, big, black pines thrust up, rank upon disordered rank, old and wild and full of primal terror, so close together that they crowd out the sky.
The scent of resin makes the air viscous. Underfoot, centuries of leaf mould soak up the sound as she walks. Her breath shimmers in the morning light. Nobody steps out from between the many trunks to greet her, only the shadows of her fears. Don’t think. Don’t think. How in God’s name did Kramme know the Patron would be there? She didn’t tell him. She didn’t. JJ is there, unloading the car, picking the best weapons. He has a Bren gun over his shoulder, which it would take two normal men to carry. Already sweat beads his upper lip.
Sophie says, ‘What now?’
Harshly: ‘We walk.’
Birds sing around them, and then don’t. Sophie feels a dozen men take aim at her and decide not to fire. Her guts are water. At any moment, she may disgrace herself. She follows JJ along narrow deer tracks that show little signs of human use, winding uphill much as the road did, with hairpin bends curving round the trees.
They stop near the upper tree line. Here, the great pines are smaller, the trunks further apart, and Sophie can see grass and blue sky, can smell the smoke of a fire, and the scent of sweat and cigarette smoke and charred meat that makes her gag. She needs to piss and heads off behind a tree.
‘Stop!’ JJ’s voice, urgent behind her. She freezes, fearing trip wires or land mines. There are none of these, but three men step out from the darkness of the forest, Stens held level.
The youngest of them, a youth barely out of his teens, steps forward. JJ salutes and a heartbeat later, Sophie does likewise. So this is Fabien, Patron of the Maquis de Morez. Back in the early days, she recalls the Patron – her Patron – saying, He looks young, Fabien, but he leads his men with the skill of a sage. Don’t underestimate him.
Round-faced, smooth-skinned, lean, no taller than Sophie … Fabien doesn’t just look young; he also looks innocent, but his gaze is hard and when it meets hers Sophie is first to glance down.
‘He is dead, or captured?’ His voice, too, is deeper and harder than she expects.
JJ says, ‘Not dead.’ He cannot make himself say more.
Sophie can. She steps forward. ‘He was taken four hours ago in the raid on the trains. We need to get him back. I can go—’
‘Wait.’ The voice is a woman’s, from their left.
JJ spins, sweeping off his hat. ‘Mademoiselle Céline. I am so very sorry.’
The woman who stands on the far side of the clearing has the most startling eyes: like looking into polished platinum that promises riches and hardness both. She is as tall as the Patron, and as slender, as straight-up-and-down. Her bright blonde hair is cut in a twenties bob. It would not be hard to imagine her at the old nightclubs of the Montmartre; Le Cabaret des Truands, or even Le Monocle.
She would be as much at home there in a flapper dress with a cigarette in an impossibly long holder as here, where she is in men’s boots and trousers and shirt, just as Sophie is, but on her, they are elegance embodied. She carries her Sten over her shoulder with the ease of long familiarity, and just now it is pointing at JJ.
Sophie has known of women like this, but never met one. It is like encountering a creature from another world. More importantly, she has never seen JJ at a loss for words. She sees it now.
Whey-faced, he says, ‘We tried to get him. I swear to you, we tried. There was nothing we could do.’
So much information in so few words and most of it in the cracks of his voice. The woman, Céline, stares at him, nodding slowly.
‘Then now that we are all together, we shall find something that will work.’ Céline speaks French with the accent of blood and money, of Chinon and Blois and old, old royalty. Her ice-flat gaze rakes them, and comes to rest on Sophie. She thrusts out a hand. ‘Céline. You are Sophie Destivelle, his deputy?’
‘I am.’ I did not betray him to Kramme. I did not.
Céline favours her with a long look.
‘Do I gather you have a plan to get him back?’
Yes! She has spent the whole drive thinking this, every frozen kilometre. ‘I can go back. I am a nurse. They’ll let me in. Kramme trusts me. At the very least, I could take him an L-pill.’ He would want that. She, Sophie, would want it; therefore he must want it.
‘Really? If he was going to use one of those, I imagine he’ll have done it by now.’
‘No, he won’t. He didn’t carry one in case they searched him and it was found.’
‘Because a capsule of cyanide smaller than the size of your little fingernail is a dead giveaway, while hurling Mills bombs around a railway yard is obviously going to be overlooked. Dear God in heaven, why do they leave their brains behind when they pick up a gun?’
Céline lights a cigarette and then offers the packet round. Whatever the deprivations of wartime, this Maquis is well stocked. ‘You can’t get in. Kramme would have you arrested. They’d shoot you on the spot if you were lucky.’
‘Two nights ago, Kramme asked for my hand in marriage.’
‘Did he? I imagine your handlers were exceptionally proud of that.’ Céline breathes smoke through her nose. ‘Sadly, all that effort for naught. Word is that the Aillardes were taken in for questioning this morning. From what I understand, it couldn’t happen to a better couple. But you’re on Kramme’s wanted list now. You can’t walk back in.’
The Aillardes will be dead by now if they are lucky. Sophie digests this news and wonders how it got here so soon. Someone else must have a faster route from Saint-Cybard to here than JJ. Either that, or there’s a telephone line to somewhere close, and someone in Kramme’s close circle who is able to use it.
There’s something interesting in that, but she hasn’t time to consider it. Thinking aloud, she says, ‘Then I won’t go in as Sophie Destivelle. I’ll use a wig, padding, new clothes. If you did the same training as I did, you know how we can look like other people. If I can get onto the Paris train somewhere west of here, I can come in as a refugee.’ I can kill Kramme, too, and then perhaps Laurence Vaughan-Thomas will not have me hanged.
‘I did exactly the same training as you, but you have to believe me, they won’t let you near the prison. Kramme’s been trying to get your Patron for a year now. He won’t take risks with his prize. The guards will have had all leave rescinded. The Hôtel Cinqfeuilles will be in lockdown. Nobody they don’t know by sight will be allowed within half a kilometre of the walls.’
‘We can’t do nothing.’
‘It’s what we were told to do. It’s the standing order. To go against that is a court martial offence.’
‘What does London say?’ Because her experience is that standing orders are malleable, particularly if certain people in London want them to be.
Céline bites at her thumbnail for so long that Sophie thinks she will never answer. Her nails are ragged. On closer inspection, she looks tired, as if she has not recently slept. Her hair is unwashed, and her battle shirt has seen better days.
At length, she says, ‘I have a sked in an hour that might shed some light. If you’d care to join me, you’d be welcome. It’s a fair distance, though. We have to leave now.’
Thus is Sophie introduced to the Maquisards’ camp, which is, in fact, three camps, spread out. She, JJ and Daniel arrived in the most southerly one and she is led along the chain, along tracks that show more signs of use, with the trees marked, occasionally, at head height. They go north and uphill all the while.
Each camp is laid out to a similar plan: the latrine trench lies downhill and downwind, with cooking fires thirty metres uphill. Here, logs are laid around the fires, and around them are sleeping areas for the men, bedded down with pine needles, sheltered with pine boughs: everything here is pine. Above the trees are shepherd’s huts and a couple of pine-built log cabins in which the commanders sleep, these being more comfortable, but also more likely to be seen – and so bombed – by the Boche.
From the last, most northerly camp, the route to the radio hideout heads almost straight up the mountain, out beyond the last of the pines, into rocks and rough grass and scrubby, stunted birch trees that grow out of the scree. It is not a difficult trek, but it’s steep and there are places where they are climbing up near-vertical mountainside, grabbing young, whippy tree roots and unstable rocks as handholds, hauling up with their faces buried in soft, sweet moss and lichen in their hair.
‘This is like Arisaig,’ Sophie says, pushing herself onto a ledge halfway up the latest ascent.
‘Fewer midges, though, or we’d have gone mad long ago.’ Céline offers her a hand, pulls her to her feet. ‘The mosquitoes can be a bugger at dusk if you haven’t got a great big smoking fire to keep them off, mind you. When you get to the top, veer to the right and follow the deer track. We’re looking for a cave on the left hidden behind some scrubby pines.’