Night Soldiers

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 resistance in cafes, 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.

Kummelwagen. The open command car used by the Wehrmacht. No French truck ever idled like that; that was a military engine, tuned, powerful, and this was a trap.

He turned his back to the waiting officer and clapped Lucien on the shoulder and spoke through a laugh, in English, with the intonation of a casual joke between friends. “We are in trouble,” he said.

All the little wrong things. The counter was what you found in a police station, not a Gendarmerie. Police rode bicycles. Gendarmes drove cars. Someone had converted a homey Poste de Police-a place where you filled out forms-to a trap. Perhaps there had been a resistance cell among the gendarmes of Cabejac, at one time made known to Ulysse, but no more.

Lucien was very quick. The “gendarme” kept his eyes on the Sten. He was surprised when Lucien’s left hand came up from his pocket with a small automatic and shot him twice in the heart. He held his breast with both hands and made the face of a man with indigestion as he knelt down. Vigie leapt for the door and slammed it shut, moving his body to one side of the portal and hanging on to the door handle. Something very fast went off inside the station and chewed a line of holes in the wood of the door. Fusari ran toward the building, got one foot against the rough stone surface and sprang upward, snatching the rain gutter that ran below the eaves, then throwing one leg over the edge of the sloping roof and hauling himself the rest of the way. A second burst came through the barred window-one round struck an iron bar and went singing away into the night. Khristo and Lucien backed up. Khristo put a short burst in the door, aiming well away from the clinging Vigie. Lucien fired at an angle through the window shutter. The sound of an engine changing gears cut through the noise of the dogs, which had changed from barking to howling when the gunfire started. Fusari’s dark outline appeared on the rooftop. He pulled the pin from a grenade and short-armed it down the chimney. There was an explosion in the shaft, most of its force directed upward. A muffled bang, then the chimney turned into a cloud of smoke and bricks and, a long second later, Fusari’s body rolled off the roof and hit the street like a bag.

As brick shards rained down on the street, somebody inside kicked the door open, sending Vigie flying backward. Khristo fired into the press of bodies that appeared within a rolling cloud of black smoke and soot-mouths wide open, hands pressed to ears, faces squeezed with agony, eardrums apparently punctured by compression from the explosion in the chimney. The door was pulled shut just as the Sten jammed on a dud round-no blowback, no next shot. Khristo swore. Lucien ran past, squatted briefly by Fusari, then stood up and grabbed his bicycle. Khristo got his own bike up and moving. He could hear a man screaming inside the building.

All three of them took off like Furies, pedaling wildly as they reached the stairway. Khristo hung on for the first two bounces, then the handlebars tore away from his hands and he was in the air. He landed on shoulder and