by back-streets and fence-jumping, were already there.
“What the hell?”
“Well, I reached Roddy. Somehow. He’s to make certain arrangements.”
“What took you so long?”
“Ah, it seems the previous owner of this uniform had an illustrious career. This little trinket”—he touched the metallic emblem of a tank with its three tiny plates affixed serially beneath—”signifies a champion tank destroyer on the Eastern Front. The Luftwaffers wanted to hear war stories. So I ended up giving a little performance on the best ways to destroy a T-36. Good God, I hope none of the fellows — they seemed like good lads — try that sort of thing on their own against a Centurion. I just made it up. Something about the third wheel of the left tread being the drive wheel, and if you could hit that with a Panzerfaust, the machine would stop in its tracks. Could there be a third wheel? And I don’t believe I specified left from which perspective. All in all, it was a rather feeble performance, but the London
“You made the call? You got through?”
“Why, it worked better than our trunk lines. No operator, no interference. It was as if Roddy was in the same room. Amazing, these technical things. Now, what’s for dinner?”
It seldom worked as well as it did that night, perhaps using up the last of Team Casey’s good luck. At any rate, Roddy moseyed out of the radio shack. It was rainy in Islington and everybody was keen about invasion news. Would our boys be pushed back? Or would they stay, and was this the beginning of the end?
So nobody paid much attention to a short, fat man with an academic’s somewhat diffident habit of moving and being. Roddy drew his mackintosh tight about him, pulled his deerstalker down about his ears to keep the surprising June chill out, and nodded at the duty officer. His specialty was coding, and he was actually damned good at it, if thought by all a trifle odd. He wandered about as if there wasn’t a war on, and by now everyone accepted that his weirdness and inability to deal with military security matters were a part of his genius and must be accepted. Actually, it was good cover for his real job, which was straight penetration for GRU Section 7, foreign intelligence.
He crossed the busy street to a druggist’s and looked for the phone. He found it occupied and waited smilingly as a woman finished her call, then departed. He entered, dropped a tuppence, and waited. It rang three times. He hung up. The phone rang twice, then ceased. Roddy redialed the number.
“Hullo, is that you?”
“Of course, Roddy. Who else could it be?”
Roddy’s conversational partner was Major Boris Zyborny, code name RAFTER, in charge of penetration of the British main target and Roddy’s controller. He worked in deep cover in the Polish Free Republic Democratic Army liaison office, doing something or other unclear, while keeping tabs on all his boys and girls for Red Army intelligence.
Roddy said, “I need a favor. An old school chum.”
“One of ours?”
“No.”
“He’s to be ignored. He’s meaningless. Enjoy his company, mourn his death if it happens, but keep him out of the equation.”
“A
Roddy explained, and seven minutes later, Major Zyborny was on the long-range radio to Moscow GRU, where someone eventually tracked down a partisan director named Klemansk, a former Comintern agent who’d magically escaped the purges (he was in a Spanish prison awaiting execution at the time) and now commanded Activity Sphere 3, Western Europe, for GRU. Klemansk took some convincing, and in the end agreed because Zyborny assured him that Roddy was important and could only become more important and doing little things like this for him would keep him happy for the long, hard years ahead.
So Klemansk got on Activity Sphere 3’s radio hookup, and via Paris, reached Group Roger on the matter of the Bren guns.
The Germans of course monitored all this information, as their radio intelligence and intercept systems were superb. However, it was buried in endless tons of other intercepted information, as the invasion had upped radio traffic to nearly torrential levels. It was beyond human capacity to analyze and interpret all of it, and by priority, it was decanted into categories depending on urgency. Since a bridge outside Nantilles was way down the list, the intercepts didn’t get the attention they clearly deserved until June 14,1944, by which time the obscure drama of Team Casey, the 113th Luftwaffe Flakbattalion, 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, and Groups Roger and Phillippe had long since played out.
Leets applied the last of the burnt cork to his face. Burning corks had turned out to be no picnic. Back at Area 5 in the Catoctins, everybody had assured the trainees that burning cork was a piece of cake, but no one ever managed to explain how to do it. Major Applegate told stories about hunting Mexicans on the Arizona border with the border patrol, and how they’d always corked their faces when serious business was set for the evening, but he never ever explained exactly how to burn the goddamned cork. Leets had singed the hair off his fingers before he struck on the idea of wedging the cork into a doorway, holding it there by pressuring the door against it with his foot, and burning it with candle flame. It oxidized slowly, stupidly, and resentfully, but finally he had enough and managed to do a reasonable job of masquerading his fat, broad, uninteresting, and very white American face against the darkness.
He was now ready, though he felt more like the football player he’d been than the soldier he was, so packed with gear very like the shoulder and thigh pads that had protected him in Big Ten wars. He had a Thompson gun and seven mags with twenty-eight.45s in each, the mags in a pouch strapped to his web belt, as were six Gammon grenades, Allways fuzes packed with half a stick of the green plasticky Explosive 808, all ready to have their caps unscrewed, their linen lines secured, and then be tossed to explode on impact. They smelled of almonds, reminding him of a candy bar he had once loved in a far-off paradise called Minnesota. He had a wicked, phosphate-bladed M3 fighting knife strapped to his right outside lace-up Corcoran jump boot, which was bloused neatly into his reinforced jump pants, an OD cotton slash-pocketed jump jacket, almost like Hemingway’s safari coat, over his wool OD shirt with his silver first lieutenant’s bars and the crossed rifles of Infantry, as he’d been a member of the 501st of the 101st before his French got him recruitment by OSS, a Colt.45 on the web belt, seven in the mag, two more mags on a pouch on the web, and a black watch cap pulled low over his ears so that he looked like one of the lesser Our Gang members. He also carried a satchel full of Explosive 808, also smelling pun-gently of almonds and, let’s see, was that it, oh yes, time pencils, that is, Delay Switch No. 10, a tin of five of them in the satchel with the 808 for quick deployment.
The plan: The Luftwaffers had wisely used French labor to cut down the forest around the bridge, so it was basically coverless, nude land on the approach, studded with evergreen stumps that were stout enough to stop all vehicles that ran on tires. Stealth was impossible, too, in the arc lights the Germans had mounted that blazed away all night long. There was no danger from the six 88-millimeter flak guns sandbagged around the bridge, since they were dedicated, meaning permanently mounted in antiaircraft trajectories to defend the bridge from Allied air attack, and so out of the picture tactically, and were unmanned at night, as no Typhoons or Jugs would risk a run in the dark. But there were at least six sentries, a sergeant of the guard and four or five riflemen, at each end of the bridge.
So stealth was out. Rather, in a rattly old Citroen, Leets and his three FFI maquis would approach the bridge and when called to halt at close range open fire. They would shoot the sentries, Gammon bomb the guardhouse, and lay down fire on the men at the other end of the bridge, and Leets would hop out to the center, monkey-climb over, plant the 808, and wedge in the already primed time pencils, and then they’d run like hell to the woods two hundred yards away. If reinforcements from Nantilles got there before they made it to the woods, they’d be dead friggin’ ducks, as the Germans, even incompetent Luftwaffers, could hose them down with MG-42 fire from the guns mounted on the trucks, while the men gave chase with Mausers and Schmeissers.
That’s where the Brens came in. The Brens could drive the trucks back, even destroy them, and scatter the
