Night Soldiers (47 page)

Ulysse heard about the business, through his own sources, and the final result of LeBeq's wall writing was that Lucien was pulled out of Cambras. The KIT FOX mission was about to move into a new phase, and Ulysse smelled lots of trouble in the air around Épinal. It was, he thought, the thaw itself, which had melted self-control as well as snowbanks and let loose passions that had remained too tightly wound throughout the winter. KIT FOX was, after all, not a guerrilla campaign, it was a sabotage mission, and there was a feeling in the General Staffs that all-out
partizan
operations, such as the Russians applied to the invading Germans, would lead to the sort of bloodbath that would eliminate a lot of German non-coms—but at the cost of much of the
maquis
leadership. It was not entirely put aside, but was reserved for the week of the grand invasion itself if it was going to happen at all.

At Ulysse's direction, Lucien became the wandering pedagogue of the Belfort Gap, an ancient and traditional attack route up the valley of the Rhine River between the French Vosges and the German Schwarzwald. Two cities, Belfort and Basel, the Swiss border point for France, sit athwart this opening between mountain ranges like stone lions guarding a palace. In the early spring of 1944, the intelligence planners had one objective that led all others: the German high command was now to be exquisitely sensitized to every soft point in Europe that might serve as an Allied invasion route. There was the Balkan route, the Italian route, the beaches of southern France, which led to the Belfort Gap, and the beaches of northern France. Each area had to show heightened levels of sabotage: strategic assets damaged, repaired, then damaged again. Just the sort of thing that goes on before a fleet looms on the horizon.

The Lucien team included Khristo, Fusari, and Vigie, each chosen by Ulysse for a different reason. Khristo, at first, because Ulysse wanted to keep an eye on him. Later, it became apparent that he had a considerable knowledge of the craft in his own right and shared instructional chores with Lucien. Fusari was appointed security chief and bodyguard, their official thug. Dark and suspicious, he looked the part, and in fact had Union Corse connection in his background. He was forever cutting an
X
into the nose of each 9 mm round, dumdumming it so that what went in the size of a fingernail flattened out, by the time it exited, to the diameter of the circle made by thumb and forefinger. He was, like many professional criminals, violently patriotic, and focused all his attention on giving the Germans a proper screwing. On the other hand, he made it clear that should Ulysse require the abduction of a bank manager or the interdiction of a payroll, he would be only too pleased to lend his wisdom and experience to the cause.

As for Vigie, Ulysse had recognized his special value early on. He looked younger than his sixteen years and had the scrubbed innocence of an altar boy. He could go anywhere, seemed always a natural part of the environment, and a lie in his mouth was like a hymn. In short, a born lookout. He had, also, an uncanny knack with women—what they did with Vigie didn't really count as infidelity, for some reason, and he returned from his nightly tomcatting with various morsels of pillow talk. These never particularly served the Allied intelligence effort, but they might have, and they did function to keep everybody's spirits up, so Vigie retained a permanent dispensation, denied the other three, from Ulysse. They bitched about that, referring to their leader as “Mother Superior,” but the point of it was later to be driven home in an extremely ugly way.

Like itinerant scholars of an earlier time, the unit crisscrossed the back roads of the Belfort countryside. It was hard, boring work, completely without glamour and very dangerous. There were young Frenchmen who served the Germans as
milice
, militia, and they maintained loose networks of spies and informants who might not themselves wish to be seen collaborating with the enemy. People had their own reasons—sometimes, alas, very good ones—for making backchannel arrangements with
la geste
, thus the possibility of betrayal was constant.

But the mission of the Lucien team was of critical importance. The knowledge they provided turned plain men and women into sharp weapons against the Occupation infrastructure. If you knew enough to cut an electrical plug off its cord—perhaps stuff a piece of rag in the end so the flash wouldn't burn your hand—you could use any convenient wall socket to blow all the power in a building. It could take half an hour to replace the fuses—a long time if, for instance, the building housed ground controllers for the German air defense system.

They taught railroad workers how to spike a
plaque tournant
. They taught teenagers that cutting a telephone line makes it easy to find the break—but that pushing a thumbtack into a signals cable makes it very difficult and time-consuming. They taught the disruption of rail signals. They taught that a single cube of sugar in a gas tank would caramelize on the pistons and freeze the engine solid. If you didn't have a sugar cube, a potato wedged in the tailpipe of a vehicle would choke the exhaust system, blow a hole in the muffler, and could cause carbon monoxide to leak into the driver's compartment. They taught the use of cyclonite explosive, round pellets of
plastique
(invented by Julian Huxley, the biologist) that looked like innocent goat droppings and would blow out a truck tire. They taught villagers that if they buried a soup tureen upside down, with the silhouette showing up through the dirt, it looked exactly like an inexpertly laid land mine and could stop a column of tanks while a mine disposal unit was brought up. They taught switchboard operators how to disable a teleprinter by wedging a feather in the armature, they taught roadworkers how to blow up a bridge using simple construction dynamite. Every strategic entity—communications, rails, roads, bridges, power—had its weak points, and the French people were taught how to attack them.
But you must wait for the code words on the radio
, they were told. Grimly, they obeyed. Watched the foreign troops marching up and down the streets where their grandmothers had been born, kept their eyes on the ground when
la geste
came by, held on tight to their new and special secrets, and listened every night to the BBC. And waited.

During this period, Ulysse took on the aspect of an omniscient ghost. He would appear at unlikely times, in unexpected places, so far aboveground as to be virtually hidden by prominence. He moved about the Belfort area in a grand, prewar Bugatti, with Albert, in a gray chauffeur's uniform, behind the wheel. The Germans could only assume him to be a Vichy fascist favored by some very high personage within their own ranks. He had the car, and the gas to make it run, and his hawklike face was the epitome of Gallic aristocracy. If challenged, he radiated the superficial sweetness of the powerful, being so acutely helpful and decent that German officers saluted from the spine. They knew such people, or rather knew of them, and one was well advised to keep out of their path or, if noticed, to make a good impression. They had spent their lives in submission to the gods of Authority, and Ulysse was very godlike indeed.

They approached the village of Cabejac just before midnight and paused at the edge of town. Vigie rode in on his bicycle to check things out, the other three sat by the side of the road and smoked and talked in low voices. They had bicycled up from the town of Abonne, some eighteen miles away, and they were tired and sweaty from the ride. It was late April, one of those warmish, unsettling nights when sleep, if it comes, is beset by restless dreams.

Staring up at the town, Khristo found himself jittery. Something in the air, the sort of intuition that will cause animals, drinking at water holes, to look up suddenly. Lucien—in his
bleu de travail
worker's jacket and trousers, old sweater and beret, the very image of a small-town garage owner—was slowly assembling his Sten gun, patiently screwing the pipelike parts together. The weapon's use in clandestine operations was in part attributable to the fact that it could be carried in a knapsack and assembled quickly.

From the north, the drone of a bomber flight reached them. All three looked up, but there was only a night sky lit by a quarter moon. “Good hunting,” Fusari said.

“Amen to that,” Lucien answered, giving the Sten barrel its final quarter turn.

For the last two weeks, the sky above them had been at war. With improving weather, Allied air sorties intensified—American by day and British by night—B-24 s and Lancasters flying deep into Germany to bomb factories and railyards. At night, the Lancasters' flight path often took them over the Belfort area, and the sky came alive with probing searchlights and the white flash of anti-aircraft burst that illuminated, for one instant, its own halo of smoke. Sometimes German squadrons rose to attack and there were arcs of orange-red tracer, like spark showers from a bonfire, and once there had been an enormous explosion that lit up the clouds—a fully armed bomber had been hit. The following night they had seen the white of a parachute and had watched in silence as it drifted below the horizon.

Vigie appeared from the darkness, coasting downhill on his bicycle, standing with his left foot on the right-hand pedal and coming to an acrobatic skid in front of Lucien.

“Bravo,” Fusari said sourly.

Vigie said something in incomprehensible mountain slang.

“Yes?” Lucien said.

Vigie shrugged. “Cabejac,” he said, and spat on the road.

Khristo looked up at the dark town but there was little to see, only an irregular roofline of square silhouettes. Cabejac was an ancient village, chiseled into the limestone cliffs that rose above the Leul, a swift, narrow mountain river that ultimately emptied into the Doubs. The road curved along a cut in the cliff, then switched back suddenly and rose steeply into the town. Fusari had told him on the ride up that the place had a bad reputation. Blood feuds. Marriage in the old tradition: abduction, rape, and then the priest to put things right. People carried shotguns and there were too many dogs about. From time to time, a clan of Gypsies had made the village a temporary encampment, but the reputation of the place had nothing to do with them. No matter, Khristo thought, they have a desire to fight, and they have been approved by Ulysse. And all the sayings about strange friends in time of war were true.
Still
, he thought.

“Lucien,” Fusari said, “we can go back to Abonne.”

Lucien did not answer, stood pensively while the others finished assembling their Stens. Khristo had hidden the Gepisztoly at Cambras—it was a weapon for
partizans
in the forest, not suited to this work at all. He watched Lucien as the American tried to come to a decision. He could abort an operation any time he felt the wind was blowing wrong, but he was also, clearly, under pressure not to do so.

“Vigie,” Lucien said quietly, “was there anything at all up there? Anything out of place?”

“No,” Vigie answered. “Nothing.” He slung the Sten on his shoulder and stood on the pedals of his bike, trying to make it stand in place by wiggling the front wheel back and forth. He kept falling over onto one foot, then trying the trick again.

“I am not in love with this place,” Khristo said.

Lucien walked his bicycle forward. “Nice and slow,” he said.

Vigie sighed, hopped off his bike, and began pushing. “The women of Cabejac are said to be hairy, like beasts,” he confided to Khristo.

Lucien had overheard him. “You stay close while we are here,
copain
. ”

“Pfut,”
Vigie said, contemptuous of any suggestion that he could not take care of himself.

They headed into the town, looking for the Gendarmerie, the post of the military police who traditionally patrolled the countryside and the smaller roads. They had met the
résistance
in cafés, schoolrooms, church sacristies, dining rooms, soccer stadiums. Tonight it was to be a police station, not all that unusual.

But they could not find it in the lower town. Unseen dogs barked at them, passing them along from one to the next, and all the houses were dark and shuttered. The April night was warm, yet it seemed that spring had not yet been acknowledged there.
Normal
, Khristo thought.
All is normal
. He pushed his bicycle with one hand and steadied the weapon with his other—just making sure it was there. Looking to his right, he noticed a narrow, stone-paved alley set between high walls. There was some sort of truck parked down there, only the snubbed-off front end visible.

The street dead-ended at a high wall. They turned left up a long flight of white stairs, the center of each step worn to a sloping valley by centuries of use. Fusari, bumping his bicycle upward, swore under his breath. When they reached the upper town they were high above the road and the river appeared as a winding ribbon, a long way down, its banks suggested by white curls of moving foam. Fusari touched Khristo above the elbow and nodded up the street to a dim spill of light from a partly open shutter. A metal sign,
GENDARMERIE
, hung from a stanchion above the door and the windows were barred.

“There must be another road down,” Khristo said.

“Why?”

“Who puts a Gendarmerie at the top of a flight of steps? Don't they drive cars?”

Fusari responded with a dismissive grunt. He made a point of being Corsican, claiming often to be puzzled by the French and their logically illogical way of doing things.

The door of the station opened, and a man stood in the smoky light from within. “Come along then,” he said, “we've been waiting.” He wore military uniform, red flashes on khaki, and the circular crowned hat often associated with the French Foreign Legion. Broad-shouldered and big-bellied, he had deep anger lines around his mouth and stood with hands on hips, impatient, out of temper.

Down below, the dogs started up again. The French officer had his right hand close by a holstered sidearm. Khristo could hear another sound that lay beneath the excited barking, a muted rumble of some sort. He pushed his bicycle forward until he could see inside the partly open door. There were several men in the room, faces indistinct in the dim light, behind a high wooden counter. Standing, apparently. Waiting to greet them.
The rumbling
, he thought. What was that? The narrow alley. The snubbed-off front end of the truck. The truck? No. Not a truck.