Another fluttering tricolor marked the local command centre, this time with an armée de l’air communications truck parked alongside. Bruno wondered if the water-dropping aircraft operated at night. Presumably the pilots needed to sleep. Inside the command centre he found Commissaire Prunier, one phone to his ear, staring at the screen of another phone in his hand and telling someone the evacuations were complete.
‘No lives have been lost so far. We managed to get the people out on gabarres, but the fire still isn’t under control,’ he was saying into his phone. ‘What we’ll need in future is a gabarre refitted to hold a fire engine that can suck up water and pump it out in fire hoses. Maybe a flat-bottomed barge would do. Perhaps you could put a team together when this emergency is over, Monsieur Le Prèfet, and run a cost and feasibility study. We’ll speak tomorrow.’
Prunier closed that phone, nodded at Bruno and showed him the screen of the other one. It was obviously linked to a drone that was tracking the front line of the fire, heading for the fortress on the hill above them that dominated the village and the river crossing.
‘Hi, Bruno, it looks like we’re going to lose the Eco-museum, the walnut plantations and maybe everything this side of the bridge,’ he said. ‘The pompiers and volunteers are all exhausted and there are no more reinforcements. We’ve had to send a lot of men and equipment to Domme to protect the Frenchelon base. We’re down to two water tenders and our one remaining mobile pumping truck was caught in the fire. It got out, but its tyres were burned so it’s immobilized. I protested against losing the trucks and men to Domme but we had orders from the Elysée.’
As well as the famous walled bastide-fortress on the hilltop of Domme, the ridge also housed the main base of Frenchelon, the French intelligence electronic listening system that monitored the airwaves and the worldwide net, its name copied from the similar Anglo-American Echelon programme. Run by the Direction Technique of the DGSE, the French equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency, the presence of the base was an open secret in the region.
‘The wind is blowing sparks and cinders right across the containment line that was made a couple of hours ago. The volunteers spent half the night making it and then they had to run for it when the sparks blew right among them,’ Prunier added, with a shrug of resignation. ‘We’re promised a dawn flight of aircraft dumping water and flame retardant but that may be just too little too late. The fire is moving too fast. The pompiers can’t get any closer than the fortress car park and we haven’t enough pumps so their hoses haven’t got the range to send water over the top of that hill.’
‘Have you visited the fortress?’ Bruno asked. ‘That war museum has three trebuchets, medieval catapults that were used to batter down castle walls. I saw them in action here, sending fifty kilo rocks soaring for more than two hundred metres. They might be able to pitch water over the top of that hill and at least buy us some time before the aircraft arrive.’
Prunier raised his eyebrows. ‘Could you make one work?’
Bruno shook his head. ‘I saw it done but you’d need local experts, the guys who built these modern copies. The Mayor would know who they are, or Monsieur Rossillon, the owner of the castle. It was his idea to have those trebuchets built and put into operation.’
‘How would we get them to deliver water?’
‘We’d need sacks, maybe those hundred-litre heavy-duty plastic sacks used for rubbish collection. We can use plastic ties to close the tops, put them to the sling on the end of the throwing arm and send in barrages of water that way. The bags would burst when they hit the ground.’
‘Be realistic, Bruno. It may be an emergency but we still have to live with politics. The Prefect would have a fit and the Greens would go crazy if we used plastic bags. Plastic burns, and then there’s the ground pollution problem.’
‘Let’s not tell him. It’s usually better to apologize later than ask permission,’ Bruno said, but then saw Prunier frown. He tried another tack. ‘Maybe we can find some alternatives. Farmers use jute sacks and fishermen use waterproof ones to ship oysters and mussels in bulk. Get onto the main warehouses for the big supermarkets. They’ll have some. You just spoke to the Prefect. Get him to wake up the supermarket managers and get their oyster bags shipped here – by helicopter, if necessary. If that doesn’t work, tell them to ship every bag of ice in their freezers. We can pour the ice cubes into ordinary sacks and fire them.’
‘Okay, let’s try it,’ said Prunier. ‘I’d rather do something than just abandon this village and the castle.’
‘I’ll call the supermarket manager in St Denis. I know him well. Then I’ll head up there to the bastion where the trebuchets are based with as many volunteers as I can round up and you get Rossillon and his team to join me. Tell him this could be the only chance we have to save his chateau.’
‘He’s here somewhere. He was one of the volunteers,’ Prunier said, as Bruno called the home number for Simon, who managed the biggest supermarket in St Denis. A sleepy voice answered.
‘Simon, it’s Bruno. Wake up. We have an emergency. Those sacks at the supermarket in which the oysters are delivered. How many do you have in the warehouse? I remember once seeing a stack of dozens of them.’
‘Bruno, off hand I just don’t know. We send them all back at the end of every week so we’ll have twenty or thirty, I suppose. Why do you ask?’
Bruno explained why he wanted Simon to drive to the supermarket, collect all the sacks and bring them as quickly as he could to Castelnaud. Simon should quote Prunier’s authority and the police on the roads would be notified. As he ended the call he saw Prunier already speaking on his own phone.
‘Monsieur Rossillon?’ A pause. ‘This is Prunier. Can you come to the control centre here at once, if you please.’
He turned to Bruno. ‘You deal with him. I’ll call the Prefect.’
‘Wait,’ said Bruno, explaining that the police on the roads should be notified that Simon from the St Denis supermarket was bringing a carload of sacks and should be allowed to cross the bridge. Prunier told an aide to take care of it and began calling the Prefect.
Usually a friendly, energetic man in his fifties, Rossillon was more than tired, almost swaying as he joined Bruno at the door of the control truck. Bruno introduced himself, explained his idea and saw the man’s eyes brighten and his back straighten. But then his shoulders sagged.
‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘They’re pointing across the river, the wrong way.’
‘There’s a bulldozer here, the one they used to make the containment line,’ Bruno said. ‘Could that turn the trebuchets?’
‘Maybe, yes, I think they could. And I’ve got some of those jute sacks. We use them for the armour.’
Bruno looked blank.
‘When the medieval armour rusts, we put the pieces into the sacks with a lot of sand and roll them about to clean the metal. And they have more at the walnut orchard. We’ll need string to close the bags but this might just work.’
Rosillon turned and shouted some names, and a group of men came up. As he explained the plan to them, Bruno found the bulldozer driver eating a slice of free pizza at the wheel of his enormous machine. Bruno described the task and the driver set off up the steep and curving road to the car park and the stretch of flat land where the trebuchets stood. By now Rossillon had gathered a score of men he seemed to know and sent most of them up the hill after the bulldozer in a couple of trucks. He sent another group to the walnut orchard and then followed his friends in a car, telling Bruno they all worked at the bars and restaurants that nestled around the castle entrance and had commercial freezers with plenty of ice.
Bruno found the Sarlat fire chief, explained this last, desperate bid to save the castle and village, and said they would need a water tender. The fire chief shook his head in disbelief and said it was ridiculous. Then he said it was impossible; he was about to evacuate the remaining truck
s and firemen.
‘We’ve got to be seen to try everything and it’s the only chance we’ve got,’ said Bruno. ‘Our last throw.’
‘Putain, you’re right. We’ll give it a shot.’ The fire chief grinned. ‘They’ll never believe this when they see it on TV. It’s worth a try – if only to keep the TV crews out of my hair.’
Ten minutes later, the two big trebuchets had been turned and were now pointing to the top of the hill, the red fire glow fiercely outlining the skyline. They stood ten metres high and the long throwing arms looked to Bruno even longer. Rossillon’s team were hauling on the ratcheted wheels and pulleys that raised the huge counterweight and lowered the throwing arm.
‘Sixteen hundred kilos of sand in that wood box,’ said Rossillon. ‘That’s the counterweight. Now’s the hard part. The throwing arm itself would only send it sixty, eighty metres. With the sling on the end we get the extra force, like the tail of a whip. But if we don’t place the sling exactly right, it won’t work.’
He helped his team fix the ropes with the big leather sling to the tail of the throwing arm. A small truck raced up to him, braked, and two men got out. They began hauling out sacks filled with ice-cubes, loosely closing the necks of the sacks with string. It took two men to carry each sack to the sling of the trebuchet.
‘Stand back,’ called Rossillon. He took a sledgehammer and approached the big machine.
‘Wait, wait,’ came a cry as a TV truck pulled up nearby and a cameraman jumped out, a colleague flipped a switch and the scene was bathed in arc light. A director shouted, ‘Okay, we’re filming, let her loose.’
Rossillon mouthed a curse at them and then with a powerful swing he knocked away the heavy bolt of wood that held the ratchet in place. The great weight plunged down and the long throwing arm swung over the massive oak pivot. The sling at the end of two metres of rope whipped over and the ice-filled sack soared into the air. Bruno saw it briefly silhouetted against the glow of the fire before it dropped down.
‘Mon Dieu,’ he said aloud in tones of disbelief. ‘It worked.’
A cheer came up from the guys who’d already started hauling again on the ratchet and pulleys of the trebuchet that had just fired, even as Rossillon was supervising the loading of another sack into the second, slightly smaller one.
‘I’m putting less ice in this one because I’m not sure of the range,’ he said. Again, the throwing arm came down, and again the bag of ice was placed into the leather sling and Rossillon and his carpenter carefully straightened the ropes attaching it to the throwing arm. Rossillon handed the sledgehammer to Bruno, saying, ‘This was your idea.’
Bruno knocked away the block of wood that had secured the ratchet and again the almost balletic swing of the throwing arm and the extra whiplash effect of the sling sent another sackload of ice over the brow of the hill and into the fire.
By this time, Prunier and the Sarlat fire chief and half the volunteers had joined them on the level ground that Rossillon called his place d’armes to watch the modern use of the medieval catapults, cheering as each one fired. By now they had the waterproof jute sacks filled with water from the tender. It took three men to wrestle it onto the sling and then Simon arrived in his car with his oyster sacks.
‘I’ve got thirty-six sacks here,’ Simon announced, throwing open the back of his car. ‘And on the way I called my colleague at St Cyprien and he’s bringing another load from his warehouse. And he’s calling the hypermarket at Sarlat. They should have more.’
‘That’s great. We can forget the ice and just shoot water,’ said Rossillon.
By this time the men had fallen into a routine. The sacks were placed empty in the sling of the trebuchet before they held each one upright to be filled by a hose from the tender. Then they loosely sealed the top with string, backed away and fired it off.
Bruno checked his watch. It was a quarter to four. Every three minutes, one sack of fifty litres and another of more like seventy litres of water, which meant seventy kilos of weight, was fired over the hill. If they could keep up the pace, that was thirty-six hundred litres each hour. Bruno told himself that maybe the glow of the fire was slackening just a little. But then he realized it wasn’t the fire that was slackening but the lightening of the sky behind him to the east as the dawn began to break.
‘I don’t know if it’s your mad idea or if we just got lucky,’ said the fire chief. He had suddenly appeared at Bruno’s side with a walkie-talkie. ‘The fire engine in the car park has put down enough water to open a track halfway up the hill so any minute now the hoses will be putting down water onto the crest. We’ll save this castle yet.’
The sacks that Simon had brought from the St Denis supermarket had all gone, along with most of those brought from St Cyprien. The sacks from the Sarlat hypermarché had not yet arrived.
‘The aircraft have taken off and are on their way,’ came a tinny but familiar voice coming from Prunier’s mobile phone. ‘Estimated time of arrival is twenty-seven minutes.’
‘Alain, is that you?’ Bruno said loudly, startling Prunier as he leaned his mouth close to the phone.
‘Bruno, yes, it’s me. Where are you?’
‘Up at the castle with the catapults. I’ll doubtless see you later.’ He backed off, apologizing to Prunier and explaining that the air force communications man down below in the car park was his cousin.
There was time for six more shots from each of the two trebuchets before they ran out of sacks. And then they heard the first, faint growl of the aircraft coming up over the river from the west.
‘They’ll pass us, turn over Domme and come in from the east, with the sun behind them,’ said the fire chief, facing the TV camera and speaking into the director’s microphone. ‘They’ll drop just a little ahead of the leading edge of the fire, so the wind will help spread the water over the unburned wood and deny the fire the fresh fuel it needs to advance. Each of the aircraft will be dumping six thousand litres of water with fire retardant. After the big fires in Provence, we bought four more of these special firefighting planes.
‘The aircraft are purpose-built Bombardier four-one-five models, originally designed in Canada as an amphibious aircraft that can operate from land or from water, and can scoop up water from lakes or reservoirs,’ he added, as the camera swivelled upwards to get a shot of the three aircraft passing overhead.
Every eye followed them as they turned and came back, dropping lower and lower until they roared almost overhead, no more than a hundred metres above the brow of the hill. They banked to follow the line of flames and then one by one dumped a great red trail of water mixed with retardant. Was it the first rays of the rising sun that made them that colour, Bruno wondered, or was it the fire retardant? At that point the car from Sarlat arrived with its trunk full of sacks.
Three aircraft, each with six thousand litres, thought Bruno. And the trebuchets had thrown maybe five thousand litres in all, certainly less than a third of what the aircraft had delivered. But they had done wonders for the morale of the exhausted pompiers and volunteers, and Bruno had little doubt which of the firefighting methods would dominate the TV news reports later in the day. In the past week, the viewers had grown accustomed to film of the firefighting aircraft.
Prunier and the fire chief were looking at the mobile phone that was connected to the small drone that lifted from the car park below and soared up, over the brow of the hill to film the effect of the water dumpers.
‘Very impressive,’ said Prunier, as Bruno came alongside to look down at the sight of the fire tamed. The creeping red edge he’d seen before on the images from the drone had gone, replaced by long dark stretches of doused trees with steam rising rather than smoke.
‘We’ll need another dump, just one more,’ said the fire chief. ‘In the meantime, the men from the Middle Ages may resume their bombardment.’
‘I’m not sure we can do much more with
this smaller one,’ said Rossillon, from where he was scrambling with his carpenter over the structure that may have been smaller but still dwarfed them. ‘The throwing arm seems to have sprung.’
‘In a noble cause,’ said Bruno solemnly. ‘Fallen on the field of honour.’
They loaded the larger of the trebuchets with another sack of water but somehow Bruno could tell that Rossillon’s heart wasn’t in it. The sense of urgency, of their use as the last chance to save the castle, had gripped them and given exhausted men new strength. But now that the aircraft had arrived, that mood had dissipated. Every man could do the maths as well as Bruno. They might as well have pissed on the flames for all the good they had done. All that work, all that enthusiasm, for delivering just a few thousand litres, seemed pointless in retrospect.
‘You men may be feeling that your work was in vain but believe me, it wasn’t,’ came the voice of the fire chief. He was addressing the volunteers and the trebuchet crews rather than the cameras, but Bruno guessed the man knew he was being filmed.
‘I know fire and your medieval catapults made the crucial difference in that hour before dawn when the aircraft finally arrived. I was about to order an evacuation of this side of the river, abandoning this magnificent fortress and museum to the flames. But I saw the flames die a little with each sack you hurled at them. Well done, all of you. Monsieur Rossillon, you and your team have defended your castle in the great tradition of this mighty stronghold of Castelnaud. Pompiers, policiers, militaires, men and women and all the volunteers, my congratulations. This was the last battle of Castelnaud, and you have won.’
He raised his hand to the peak of his helmet and saluted them all as a great cheer roared up from two, perhaps three hundred throats.
‘I always suspected he had political ambitions,’ murmured Prunier in Bruno’s ear. ‘Now I’m sure of it.’
‘Still, it was a pretty good speech, off the cuff and unrehearsed. He certainly knows how to inspire people,’ Bruno said.
The Coldest Case Page 26