enemy inside the chateau. Flick had a chance of rescuing Michel. lt was against her orders, but no orders could make her leave her husband bleeding on the ground. Besides, if she left him there, he would be captured and interrogated. As leader of the Bollinger circuit, Michel knew every name, every address, every code word. His capture would be a catastrophe.
There was no choice.
She shot at the major again. Again she missed, but she pulled the trigger repeatedly, and the steady fire forced the man to retreat along the wall, looking for cover.
She ran out of the bar into the square. From the corner of her eye she saw the owner of the sports car, still protecting his mistress from gunfire by lying on top of her. Flick had forgotten him, she realized with sudden fear. Was he armed? If so, he could shoot her easily. But no bullets came.
She reached the supine Michel and went down on one knee. She turned toward the town hall and fired two wild shots to keep the major busy. Then she looked at her husband.
To her relief she saw that his eyes were open and he was breathing. He seemed to be bleeding from his left buttock. Her fear receded a little. “You got a bullet in your bum,” she said in English.
He replied in French, “It hurts like hell.”
She turned again to the town hail. The major had retreated twenty meters and crossed the narrow street to a shop doorway. This time Flick took a few seconds to aim carefully. She squeezed off four shots. The shop window exploded in a storm of glass, and the major staggered back and fell to the ground.
Flick spoke to Michelin French. “Try to get up,” she said. He rolled over, groaning in pain, and got to one knee, but he could not move his injured leg. “Come on,” she said harshly. “If you stay here, you’ll be killed.” She grabbed him by the front of his shirt and heaved him upright with a mighty effort. He stood on his good leg, but he could not bear his own weight, and leaned heavily against her. She realized that he was not going to be able to walk, and she groaned in despair.
She glanced over to the side of the town hall. The major was getting up. He had blood on his face, but he did not seem badly injured. She guessed that he had been cut superficially by flying glass but might still be capable of shooting.
There was only one thing for it: she would have to pick Michel up and carry him to safety.
She bent in front of him, grasped him around the thighs, and eased him on to her shoulder in the classic fireman’s lift. He was tall but thin-most French people were thin, these days. All the same, she thought she would collapse under his weight. She staggered, and felt dizzy for a second, but she stayed upright.
After a moment, she took a step forward.
She lumbered across the cobblestones. She thought the major was shooting at her, but she could not be sure as there was so much gunfire from the chateau, from Genevieve, and from the Resistance fighters still alive in the parking lot. The fear that a bullet might hit her at any second gave her strength, and she broke into a lurching run. She made for the road leading out of the square to the south, the nearest exit. She passed the German lying on top of the redhead, and for a startled moment she met his eye and saw an expression of surprise and wry admiration. Then she crashed into a cafe table, sending it flying, and she almost fell, but managed to right herself and run on. A bullet hit the window of the bar, and she saw a cobweb of fracture lines craze the glass. A moment later, she was around the corner and out of the major’s line of sight. Alive, she thought gratefully; both of us-for a few more minutes, at least.
Until now she had not thought where to go once she was clear of the battlefield. Two getaway vehicles were waiting a couple of streets away, but she could not carry Michel that far. However, Antoinette Dupert lived on this street, just a few steps farther. Antoinette was not in the Resistance, but she was sympathetic enough to have provided Michel with a plan of the chateau. And Michel was her nephew, so she surely would not turn him away.
Anyway, Flick had no alternative.
Antoinette had a ground-floor apartment in a building with a courtyard. Flick came to the open gateway, a few yards along the street from the square, and staggered under the archway. She pushed open a door and lowered Michel to the tiles.
She hammered on Antoinette’s door, panting with effort. She heard a frightened voice say, “What is it?” Antoinette had been scared by the gunfire and did not want to open the door.
Breathlessly, Flick said, “Quickly, quickly!” She tried to keep her voice low. Some of the neighbors might be Nazi sympathizers.
The door did not open, but Antoinette’s voice came nearer. “Who’s there?”
Flick instinctively avoided speaking a name aloud. She replied, “Your nephew is wounded.”
The door opened. Antoinette was a straight-backed woman of fifty wearing a cotton dress that had once been chic and was now faded but crisply pressed. She was pale with fear. “Michel!” she said. She knelt beside him. “Is it serious?”
“It hurts, but I’m not dying,” Michel said through clenched teeth.
“You poor thing.” She brushed his hair off his sweaty forehead with a gesture like a caress.
Flick said impatiently, “Let’s get him inside.”
She took Michel’s arms and Antoinette lifted him by the knees. He grunted with pain. Together they carried him into the living room and put him down on a faded velvet sofa.
“Take care of him while I fetch the car,” Flick said. She ran back into the street.
The gunfire was dying down. She did not have long. She raced along the street and turned two corners.
Outside a closed bakery, two vehicles were parked with their engines running: one a rusty Renault, the other a van with a faded sign on the side that had once read Blanchisserie Bisset-Bisset’s Laundry. The van was borrowed from the father of Bertrand, who was able to get fuel because he washed sheets for hotels used by the Germans. The Renault had been stolen this morning in Ch
She spoke briefly to the driver of the van. “Wait here for five minutes, then leave.” She ran to the car, jumped into the passenger seat, and said, “Let’s go, quickly!”
At the wheel of the Renault was Gilberte, a nineteen-year-old girl with long dark hair, pretty but stupid. Flick did not know why she was in the Resistance-she was not the usual type. Instead of pulling away, Gilberte said, “Where to?”
“I’ll direct you-for the love of Christ, move!”
Gilberte put the car in gear and drove off.
“Left, then right,” Flick said.
In the two minutes of inaction that followed, the full realization of her failure hit her. Most of the Bollinger circuit was wiped out. Albert and others had died. Genevieve, Bertrand, and any others who survived would probably be tortured.
And it was all for nothing. The telephone exchange was undamaged, and German communications were intact. Flick felt worthless. She tried to think what she had done wrong. Had it been a mistake to try a frontal attack on a guarded military installation? Not necessarily-the plan might have worked but for the inaccurate intelligence supplied by MI6. However, it would have been safer, she now thought, to get inside the building by some clandestine means. That would have given the Resistance a better chance of getting to the crucial equipment.
Gilberte pulled up at the courtyard entrance. “Turn the car around,” Flick said, and jumped out.
Michel was lying facedown on Antoinette’s sofa, trousers pulled down, looking undignified. Antoinette knelt beside him, holding a bloodstained towel, a pair of glasses perched on her nose, peering at his backside. “The bleeding has slowed, but the bullet is still in there,” she said.
On the floor beside the sofa was her handbag. She had emptied the contents onto a small table, presumably while hurriedly searching for her spectacles. Flick’s eye was caught by a sheet of paper, typed on and stamped, with a small photograph of Antoinette pasted to it, the whole thing in a little cardboard folder. It was the pass that permitted her to enter the chateau. In that moment, Flick had the glimmer of an idea.
“I’ve got a car outside,” Flick said.
Antoinette continued to study the wound. “He shouldn’t be moved.”
“If he stays here, the Boche will kill him.” Flick casually picked up Antoinette’s pass. As she did so she asked Michel, “How do you feel?”
