“What about the girls themselves? They want to be involved.”
“And they could be effective, both of them, but not on this mission. They told me their stories. Such a tragedy, but they’re strong, intelligent, and resilient.”
She took a puff on her cigarette. “Take Chantal with you on your rounds,” she mused aloud. “Let her collect and drop off a few messages, give her a sense of doing something important, but don’t expose her to real danger. The threat here is limited for the moment anyway, but if Pétain keeps acting like a Hitler copycat, the French police will be a force we’ll have to contend with. We have time to let her grow up a bit. Maybe her father will agree to move down here.”
“I’m relieved to hear you say that,” Maurice responded. “She’s still a girl. She should not be fighting in a war. What about Amélie?”
“Until we’re finished with the Boulier mission, we need to limit her involvement. She could be an excellent radio operator, but that will become such a dangerous position. The Germans will bring in signal detection technology and spread it south. Count on it. Operators will live in isolation, and their only direct contact with us will be through the couriers. Psychologically, it could be devastating, and I have to wonder about what their life expectancy will be. Probably not long. The radios are their lifelines, but they will also bring death to many of their operators.”
She took a last puff on her cigarette and stuffed it out in an ashtray. “There’s one other person we need to talk about,” she said. “Jacques.”
Maurice arched his eyebrows in surprise. “Is there a problem with him?”
Fourcade shook her head. “Only potentially. He’s completely trustworthy, but he’s Jewish. If he’s found out, what the Nazis will do to him is unspeakable. We need to make sure that we always have his back.”
“Of course,” Maurice replied. “He’s a good man.”
Fourcade sighed and leaned back. “What a world we live in.” She closed her eyes as if to blot out despairing thoughts. “All right, to finish up today’s business, the team coming in tonight is only the first of many. We’ll need to train more people on how to prepare for arrivals, how to signal from the ground so that the pilots see them at night, and how to wave them off if we need to abort. That’s a good place for Amélie to start. If you like, she can be part of the reception committee for our friends coming in from England tonight.”
49
A field north of Marseille
The big Lockheed Hudson bomber lumbered south. Its flight path remained high and well west until it was just north of the Pyrenees, avoiding German anti-aircraft guns already taking up positions along the coast of France. Then it turned east, flying along the valleys that skirted the great mountain range. When it reached the Mediterranean, it continued out over the sea until the lights of Marseille twinkled beyond its left wing. Then it banked north and began its descent.
In the back of the plane, Jeremy’s three-person team prepared to jump. They were incongruously outfitted with their parachute and equipment over jumpsuits, and beneath that they wore the street clothes intended to allow them to blend with the French public immediately.
The crew performed last-minute checks under a red light.
The bomb bay door opened.
Jeremy approached it gingerly, his breath coming in short gasps as the reality sank in of jumping from an aircraft flying swiftly through the night at hundreds of feet in the air. A crew member guided him to sit on the rim of the bay, his legs dangling below. He clung to its sides, sweat stinging his eyes inside his goggles. Wind blew through the aircraft, but it was surprisingly quieter and less violent than he had expected.
The red light turned to green.
Jeremy pushed himself off and dropped, his nerves strung tight. The wind tossed him around a bit, and at first, all he saw was darkness. Then he was past the turbulence of the aircraft’s propwash. He looked up, saw his parachute inflate, and felt the tranquility and thrill that comes from feeling safe under an open canopy before factoring in that someone below might shoot, or that trees or jutting rocks might cause a tragic end. The illumination of a half-moon added to the ambient light over Marseille, allowing him to see his surroundings better than he had expected.
Far below, he recognized the shape of the field, seeing in the same instant a flash of signal lights. He searched around in the sky, spotted his teammates and the three equipment cylinders under open parachutes, and prepared to land.
On the ground, Maurice was the first to hear the aircraft’s low rumble. Some of his team had spread out on one end of the field where the chutes were expected to land. Others positioned themselves at the opposite end to signal the pilots.
The bomber appeared as a dark shadow with a deep, throaty roar as it reached its nearest end of the field. Six dark objects fell in sequence from its underbelly, and then the canopies opened, and the three team members and their equipment containers floated to the ground.
“The first jumper will be the leader,” Maurice had told Amélie. “I’ll take care of him and find out what orders he carries. The radio operator is a woman. Help her. She’ll probably be glad to see a female welcoming her.”
Amélie had watched in awe as the parachutes drifted down, barely visible blots against the night sky. The remark Maurice had made earlier rang true about these people endangering their lives just by making the jumps, and that did not even consider the risk of being shot down on the way to France.
“Be careful as you approach them,” Maurice instructed. “They’ll be armed and ready to shoot, so be sure to
