night.
“It’s what I came here tonight to tell you. Brehmer’s infantry battalions are due to arrive at Limoges tomorrow night. Three battalions of Russian renegades, Vlasov’s men. And one battalion of Georgians, who have been transferred from fighting Tito in Yugoslavia. They are hard and terrible men who know they are lost if Hitler is defeated.”
“What do you mean, Vlasov’s men?”
“He used to be a general in the Red Army, a good one. But when he was captured in one of the big encirclements, he turned his coat and joined the Nazis, and went round the POW camps recruiting more. Most of them probably joined up for the promise of a square meal. They claim to be fighting for a non-Communist Russia, but they’re renegades now. Doomed men. Traitors.”
“Limoges tomorrow night,” mused Manners. “Then they have to move them to Perigueux and Bergerac, get them into barracks, food and sleep. That’s another day. Refit them, issue ammo, re-caliber their guns at the range, and a couple of lectures on tactics, communications, rules of engagement. Russian troops will need German liaison officers, and then some French speakers. The staff work for that will take some sorting out. Another day, and then at least one day familiarization with the country. Right, thanks, Marat. We have four days, minimum. Maybe five. Are they using road transport or local trains to move them to Perigueux?”
“Three local trains have been assigned. They are to be available from dawn, two days from now. But the armored train that escorted them here will stay for that. It’s too risky to ambush an armored train.”
“If we are to try anything at all, we have to hit them before they’re ready. Malrand has more ammo for the Spandau. We’re well off for supplies.” He was thinking aloud. Take the plastic out of the Gammon bombs, and he could probably take out one pillar of a viaduct. No-the armored cars would watch the viaducts and the obvious bridges and cuttings. These men have fought partisans. Maybe this was too big a target. The priority was to have the Maquis trained and ready for the invasion, not to lose their strength and morale fighting superior firepower too soon.
“Perhaps we should duck this one and disperse, start up again elsewhere,” Manners said.
“They’ll torture peasants till they find the arms dumps, round up the parents of the boys who have run to the Maquis. If we leave now without a fight, the people will never trust us again,” said Marat. “I thought you might radio for an air raid on the rail station.”
“Bomber Command doesn’t do that kind of favor. And anyway a night raid would flatten half of Limoges, kill too many civilians. Remember the way the American bombers hit Bergerac when they were trying to get the airfield. No, we’d do better to hit them early, and then disperse. Can your railway men get me to Perigueux and up that track to Limoges tomorrow? And can you get a message to McPhee and his boys to stand by?”
“We can use one of the trolleys if we have to, claim a signal repair. I can reach McPhee.”
“Right, wake me in good time. And send Malrand to me in the barn. We have to talk about this.”
“Malrand will be busy,” he said with a wry grin. “Mercedes came here with me.”
“I thought he hated Communists.”
“She’s a woman, that’s different. And she’s a Spaniard. They love him, Englishman.”
“I thought you said she was with McPhee?”
“She is, when he’s around. But tonight he isn’t, and Mercedes has been at war since Franco launched his coup eight years ago. She lives for the day, and she likes men.”
“I suppose it’s that free love idea that you Communists believe in,” said Manners, suddenly worried by the implications for the mission of a woman coming between McPhee and Francois.
“Mercedes hates fascists because she spent three days being raped by Franco’s Moorish troops when she was barely out of puberty,” said Marat. “She has not had much time for your bourgeois conventions of fidelity ever since. And loving her like my own daughter, I can’t say I blame her. We’ve been fighting a different kind of war for a long time, while your friend McPhee was playing at being a novelist in Paris, and while
CHAPTER 16
Horst pulled a manila file from a fat briefcase that stood by his knee, and tossed it with casual pride onto the table beside the champagne and the roses.
“I am honored to meet you, Major Manners. Your father is the unsung hero of this fruit of my researches. This is the war diary of the
He bent forward to offer his hand to Manners, while Clothilde tried to embrace him on both cheeks, and Lydia hovered, her hand half-outstretched. Manners opened the file.
“You read German, and German script, my dear Major?”
“I can make a stab at it. NATO courses, you know,” said Manners vaguely, skimming through the sheaf of photocopied pages and stopping at a passage where the margin had been lined in red ink.
“There are several references to Resistance actions,” said Horst. “The first one came even as they were first deploying by train, just outside the village of la Farde, about fifteen kilometers north of Perigueux, just after the track crossed the small river Beauronne. The usual reprisals were inflicted, and the unit intelligence report claimed that they were a Communist band led by an American Red Indian and a mysterious Englishman-that would seem to point to your father, Captain Manners. There is a cross-reference to Gestapo records, which have not survived for this region in the archives. But I think that means the information was obtained by torture.”
“Two dead, four wounded, one truck destroyed and one armored car damaged. Not much of an ambush,” said Manners, skimming the casualty report.
“That was because the Brehmer Division had not yet taken formally under command some battalions of auxiliary troops, Russian refugees. They report only their own casualties from the armored car unit. There’s an appendix on the auxiliary casualties-forty-two dead and over a hundred wounded. It was quite an ambush, and the Red Indians, as the Brehmer Division called them, then became the unit’s top priority. The unit intelligence officer was a Hauptmann Karl-Heinz Geissler, a former panzer officer who had been badly wounded in the Kursk salient in the summer of 1943, and after convalescence, was transferred to antipartisan duties. That’s where he joined Brehmer. He was obviously a clever man and kept good records. He was killed in the Battle of the Bulge.
“The really interesting reference comes on the sweep operation the Brehmer unit staged after Geissler brought some brains to bear on the problem. He backtracked over all the most recent guerrilla actions and arrested and interrogated a large number of villagers from le Buisson, where there had been a demolition of the railroads and a couple of associated ambushes. They found three villagers with relatives who had joined the local Maquis. Geissler, using the routine developed on the Eastern Front, systematically arrested all the other family members, starting with those who lived on farms, on the assumption that they would be providing food to the Resistance. One from each family was shot in front of the others, and the survivors were then questioned in the usual vicious way. As a result, one arms dump and a Maquis camp were found on the plateau of Audrix, near a well-known cave called the Gouffre de Proumeyssac.”
“I know it well,” said Clothilde. “But it’s a tourist cave with stalagmites and stalactites-no art at all.”
“But this arms dump was found in another cave, which the intelligence report says was marked on no known maps. It goes on: ‘The arms cache was booby-trapped, but surveillance reported no subsequent guerrilla action in this district.’” Horst looked up. “That’s one place to start looking. There are a couple more. First, apparently there are catacombs under Belves that link it to some older caves.”
“No, I know them quite well,” said Clothilde. “They grew mushrooms there. Well searched, and no cave
