track, to cover them with a machine pistol.
'That I can see—fortunately for you.' The speaker was a slightly built man wearing a pale grey double-breasted suit which looked too big for him. He carried no weapon, but in the circumstances he didn't need to: the men standing on either side of him were armed to the teeth, cross-bandoleered complete with German stick grenades in their belts. And somehow the cloth caps which they wore made them even more dangerous-looking: Butler had the strange feeling that they were his enemies no less than the Germans—that they were primed and ready to shoot down anything in uniform, grey or khaki or olive drab. All it needed was one word from the little man in the double- breasted suit.
The Frenchman's eyes flicked over them, lingering momentarily on Audley's black beret and on Sergeant Winston. Finally he came back to Audley.
Price, Anthony - [David Audley 08] - The '44 Vintage
'You are SAS—you have a mission here?' he snapped.
Audley's chin lifted. 'Not locally. We were reinforcing an operation to the southwest. But we ran into some Germans—'
'What operation?'
Audley shrugged. 'Does it matter? What matters is—we need some transport to catch up with our main party.' He slapped the car's mudguard. 'If it's all the same to you, m'sieur, we'll be on our way.'
The Frenchman compressed his lips. 'For the moment that is not possible.'
'Indeed?' Audley managed to sound arrogant. 'And may one ask why it isn't possible?'
'One may, yes.' The Frenchman gave as good as he'd received. 'One may also come and see for oneself.'
'See what?'
'Why you must delay your departure.' The Frenchman looked at his wristwatch. 'Perhaps it would even be to your advantage.'
'Oh yes?'
'Oh yes.' The compressed lips twisted. 'You wish for transport. . . . Well, we may perhaps be able to get you something better'— he pointed to the car—'than that.'
'Like what?' asked Winston. 'Like a Sherman, maybe?'
'Not a tank, no.' The Frenchman raised an eyebrow at the sergeant. 'But a German staff car—would that suit you?'
13.
Butler snuggled himself comfortably on the thick bed of leaves behind the beech tree, munched the last two squares of his bar of ration chocolate, and decided that things had taken another distinct turn for the better.
For one thing, and a most comforting thing too, he'd got the Sten back—
accomplished without recrimination simply by picking it up from where Sergeant Winston had laid it down, and not returning it to him. Winston had given him an old-fashioned look, true; but then he'd shrugged his acceptance of the repossession—and now one of the French Resistance men had obligingly furnished him with a Luger pistol, so that he couldn't argue that he was unarmed even though the Luger looked well worn and would probably jam after the first shot.
And for another thing, and an equally comforting one for all that the condition was a temporary one, they were no longer alone in a sea of Germans. There were at least ten Frenchmen on this side of the road, and as many more on the other side; and if they were irregulars who could hardly be expected to stand up to real fighting like trained soldiers at least they were well armed—he'd seen two LMGs as well as a variety of submachine guns—and if they did run away it was their country, so they would know where to run.
And, possibly best of all, this was an ideal spot for an ambush.
He peered round the trunk of the beech tree down to the narrow roadway below, running his eye back along it from the culvert on his left to where it disappeared round the curve of the hillside fifty or sixty yards to his right.
It was a perfect killing ground. By the time anyone driving round that curve saw the ten-foot gap which had been blown in the culvert they would be smack in the middle of two converging fields of fire. They couldn't go on, and with the narrowness of the road—the hill slope on one side and an eight-foot drop on the other—they couldn't turn round. Their only chance was to back up, and to do that they'd have to stop dead first. And when they stopped dead they'd
It would be as easy as cowboys and Indians—He frowned suddenly at the image as it occurred to him that somehow he'd become one of the Indians. And although he tried to reverse the thought—for God's sake, the men in the staff car would be
Somewhere along the line of the past twenty-four hours everything had become mixed up, where before it had been so clear. On this, his first day of war, nothing had been as he had imagined it would be.
Everything he had trained for, everything he knew, everyone he knew— the real world and the real war
—it was all far away, back in Normandy.
Even the enemy was different.
In the last couple of hours—or however many hours it was—he had killed two men, two human beings, and both of them had been British soldiers like himself.
And yet both of those British soldiers had been his enemies. In fact, they had been his enemies more certainly than any of the Germans he had seen in the village square at Sermigny—more certainly even than the German
