support the weight of a thirty-ton Tiger II tank, a column of which under the auspices of SS Das Reich now headed toward it on the road to Normandy. Leets had seen the structure at daylight: two buttresses, heavy logs, no apparent stone construction except at the base. He simply had to detonate enough 808 where the truss met the span to disconnect the support; the span would collapse of its own, or at least cave in enough to prevent passage of the heavy German vehicles; it needn’t be pretty or dramatically satisfying. A little tiny bang would be fine, just enough to get a little bit of a job done.
He knelt, slipped the Thompson off its sling and the satchel of 808 to the ground. He reached into it, pulled out a tin of the SOE-issue Time Pencils (“Switch, Delay, No. 10,” as the tin ever so helpfully read) and beheld the five six-inch-long brass tubes, each with a tin-wrapped nodule at the end. The problem with them, goddammit, was that as clever as they were, they were somewhat retarded in their firing rate. Supposedly they were set to fire a primer in ten minutes, but just as often they went in eight or nine or eleven or twelve. It was a matter of how quickly the acid in a crushed ampoule ate through a restraining wire, which, when it yielded, allowed the spring- driven needle to plunge into the primer, which went bang, causing the larger, encasing 808 to go bang.
So Leets took them out now, all five of them, discarded the tin, and stomped hard on the proper end of the pencils. Immediately a new odor arrived at his nose, that of the just-released cupric acid as it sloshed forward from the shattered vials in five pencils and began to chew at the metal. He wanted them cooking now, eating up the time so that when he and the boys fled, the Germans didn’t have a chance to pull the pencils free. He put them in the bellows pocket of his jump pants, buttoning it tightly.
He squirmed over the railing, eased himself down, flailed with a foot for mooring on the truss, found it, and carefully squinched down until he was beneath the bridge span.
Suddenly he heard a racket far-off. Oh Christ, he almost let go and plummeted twenty-five feet to the sluggish streambed below. Were they shooting at him? But then he recognized the glorious workman’s hammerlike bashing of the Bren gun, knowable because of its wonderfully slow rate of fire that enabled gunners to stay longer on target than our poor Joes with their faster-shooting BARs.
Goddamn, good old Basil! Basil, you snotty, arrogant, unimpressible, cold-blooded aristo, goddamn you, you got me my Brens, and maybe I will get out of this one alive.
Vive le Basil!
Brimming now with excitement and enthusiasm, he called up to Franc, “808, comrade!”
Franc leaned over, holding the satchel; it was a stretch, Franc dangling the satchel by its strap off the edge of the bridge, Leets clinging to the truss, grasping at the thing, which seemed somehow just out of reach, but in what seemed a mere seven hours, he finally snared it securely and pulled it in.
He was monkey-clinging to the truss now, his feet secure on a horizontal spar, crouched under the span, where it was damp and pungent, where no man had been in fifty years or so. He tried to find a way to attach the satchel itself, but in wedging it against junctures, he could never feel it secure enough to consider planted. Ach. It was so awkward. Christ, his muscles ached everywhere, and he could feel gravity sucking at his limbs, urging him downward into the muck below.
Finally, he managed to moor the satchel between his knees. Then, holding on with one hand, he unsheathed his M3 knife from his boot sheath and cut the canvas strap on the satchel. Now what to do with the knife? He couldn’t quite find the angle to get it back into the sheath, so he tried to slide it into his belt, and of course at a certain point it disappeared and hit the water below
Goddamn! He hated to lose a good knife that way. It was odd how annoyed he was at the loss of the knife.
Anyway, he liberated the satchel from between his knees, wedged it into the truss, and used the long strap to bind it securely. He pawed at the gathered, crunched material to find a passage to the explosive, and at last his fingers touched the sticky, gummy green stuff. He smelled almonds. He felt as if he were at a mixer at the Alpha Chi Omega house and the housemother had put little dishes of almonds out, to go with the punch, when all anybody wanted to do was get out of there and head down to Howard Street for some hooch. Now he reached into his bellows pocket, careful since it was at a radical angle and the pencils could easily slip out. But one by one, he removed a pencil and jammed it into the wad of 808 nested in the satchel nested in the bridge.
They always said: Use two to make sure. He used all five and made certain in his orthodox Midwestern way that each one was secure and driven in deep enough so that gravity wouldn’t pull it out.
God, I did it, he thought.
It seemed to take an hour to clamber back up to the bridge span itself, and Franc and Leon pulled him, while the third maquis hammered away with the Sten periodically.
On the span he was elated, yet also exhausted.
“Whoa,” he said in English, “wouldn’t want to do that job over.” Then, reverting to French he said, “Friends, let’s get the hell out of here!”
He grabbed his Thompson and ran back down the bridge, past the blown-out guardhouse, deserted, sandbagged gun pits with their silent 88s pressing skyward, the wreckage and small fires from the Gammons; now it was only a question of the long run up the hill to the treeline in the darkness, waiting for the boom from the. .
That’s when he noticed the Brens were no longer firing.
That’s when he saw a German truck scuttling over the crest of the road, and it began to disgorge troops, many of them, while up top, a soldier unlimbered an MG-42.
It was spread out before her on Frank Tyne’s desk: Operation Jedburgh.
She could see all the locations for the teams and all their targets, laid out across all of France, all the boys who’d gone in with darkened faces and knives between their teeth. Teams Albert and Bristol, Charles and David, Teams Edward and Francis, and on and on to Teams Xylophone and Zed, with the mission to set Europe ablaze.
“Oh, Frank,” she said. “And to think, you thought it up. That’s your plan. Those magnificent men, fighting and killing, and all under your direction.”
Frank swelled a bit, then turned modest.
“Sweetie, you have to understand, I didn’t think it up on my own. I mean, it was a true team effort, and it involved logistics and liaison between three entities; I was just part of the team that put the players on the field, that’s all. It’s my bit. Nothing dramatic. I don’t want you thinking I’m a hero. The kids are the heroes.”
Her eyes scanned the map with incredible intensity, and if dumbbell Frank had had a whisper of sense in his brain he would have noted how inappropriate her concentration was, but of course he was way gone. He was over the edge. His dick was as big as a wine bottle.
“Ooooo!” she squealed girlishly. “What’s this one? Casey. At Nantilles.”
“You must have heard the name in the air. Casey’s on for tonight. There’s a bridge, Casey’s going to hit it, take it down, ka-boom!”
“Such heroes.”
“If there’s room for heroics. First you have to get through the bullshit — oh, excuse me — the bull crap about politics. France is not only fighting the Germans, but the French themselves are always trying to skew this way or that for political advantage after the war.” He wanted to show her what an insider he was. “Casey was hung up for some reason, because a commie guerrilla outfit wouldn’t give them support. Somehow the Brits managed to get it all the way to Moscow and back, and the commies were ordered to pitch in.” He smiled smugly, loosened his tie, took another swig of rye.
“And it’s happening tonight?”
He looked at his watch, worn commando-style upside down on his wrist.
“Real soon now. We should know by dawn.”
“It’s so exciting.”
“Millie, whyn’t you come over here on the couch and we’ll relax for a bit, have a few more drinks? Then I’ll wander down to Radio and see if anything’s come in on Casey.”
“Oh, Frank,” she said. She sunk down on the old sofa that comprised his office furniture, beside the desk and the battered filing cabinets and the safe, and snuggled close to him and felt him groping to get his beefy arms around her.
“Oh, Millie, Millie, God Millie, if you only knew, Jesus Millie, I’ve had the same feeling for you you have for me.
