Jackdaws (3 page)

Then there was a bang.

CHAPTER

THREE

FLICK WAS IN the doorway of the
Café des Sports, behind Michel, standing on tiptoe to look over his shoulder.
She was alert, her heart pounding, her muscles tensed for action, but in her
brain the blood flowed like ice water, and she watched and calculated with cool
detachment.

There were eight guards in sight:
two at the gate checking passes, two just inside the gate, two patrolling the
grounds behind the iron railings, and two at the top of the short flight of
steps leading to the château's grand doorway. But Michel's main force would
bypass the gate.

The long north side of the church
building formed part of the wall surrounding the château's grounds. The north
transept jutted a few feet into the parking lot that had once been part of the
ornamental garden. In the days of the ancien regime, the comte had had his own
personal entrance to the church, a little door in the transept wall. The
doorway had been boarded up and plastered over more than a hundred years ago,
and had remained that way until today.

An hour ago, a retired quarryman
called Gaston had entered the empty church and carefully placed four half-pound
sticks of yellow plastic explosive at the foot of the blocked doorway. He had
inserted detonators, connected them together so that they would all go off at
the same instant, and added a five-second fuse ignited by a thumb plunger. Then
he had smeared everything with ash from his kitchen fire to make it
inconspicuous and moved an old wooden bench in front of the doorway for
additional concealment. Satisfied with his handiwork, he had knelt down to
pray.

When the church bell had stopped
ringing a few seconds ago, Gaston had got up from his pew, walked a few paces
from the nave into the transept, depressed the plunger, and ducked quickly back
around the corner. The blast must have shaken centuries of dust from the Gothic
arches. But the transept was not occupied during services, so no one would have
been injured.

After the boom of the explosion,
there was a long moment of silence in the square. Everyone froze: the guards at
the château gate, the sentries patrolling the fence, the Gestapo major, and the
well-dressed German with the glamorous mistress. Flick, taut with apprehension,
looked across the square and through the iron railings into the grounds. In the
parking lot was a relic of the seventeenth-century garden, a stone fountain
with three mossy cherubs sporting where jets of water had once flowed. Around
the dry marble bowl were parked a truck, an armored car, a Mercedes sedan painted
the gray-green of the German army, and two black Citroëns of the Traction Avant
type favored by the Gestapo in France. A soldier was filling the tank of one of
the Citroëns, using a gas pump that stood incongruously in front of a tall
château window. For a few seconds, nothing moved. Flick waited, holding her
breath.

Among the congregation in the church
were ten armed men. The priest, who was not a sympathizer and therefore had no
warning, must have been pleased that so many people had shown up for the
evening service, which was not normally very popular. He might have wondered
why some of them wore topcoats, despite the warm weather, but after four years
of austerity lots of people wore odd clothes, and a man might wear a raincoat
to church because he had no jacket. By now, Flick hoped, the priest understood
it all. At this moment, the ten would be leaping from their seats, pulling out
their guns, and rushing through the brand-new hole in the wall.

At last they came into view around
the end of the church. Flick's heart leaped with pride and fear when she saw
them, a motley army in old caps and worn-out shoes, running across the parking
lot toward the grand entrance of the château, feet pounding the dusty soil,
clutching their assorted weapons—pistols, revolvers, rifles, and one submachine
gun. They had not yet begun firing them, for they were trying to get as close
as possible to the building before the shooting started.

Michel saw them at the same time. He
made a noise between a grunt and a sigh, and Flick knew he felt the same
mixture of pride at their bravery and fear for their lives. Now was the moment
to distract the guards. Michel raised his rifle, a Lee-Enfield No.4 Mark I, the
kind the Resistance called a Canadian Rifle, because many of them were made in
Canada. He drew a bead, took up the slack of the two-stage trigger, then fired.
He worked the bolt action with a practiced movement so that the weapon was
immediately ready to be fired again.

The crash of the rifle ended the
moment of shocked silence in the square. At the gate, one of the guards cried
out and fell, and Flick felt a savage moment of satisfaction: there was one
less man to shoot at her comrades. Michel's shot was the signal for everyone
else to open fire. On the church porch, young Bertrand squeezed off two shots
that sounded like firecrackers. He was too far from the guards for accuracy
with a pistol, and he did not hit anyone. Beside him, Albert pulled the ring of
a grenade and hurled it high over the railing, to land inside the grounds,
where it exploded in the vineyard, uselessly scattering vegetation in the air.
Flick wanted to yell angrily at them, "Don't fire for the sake of the
noise, you'll just reveal your position!" But only the best and most
highly trained troops could exercise restraint once the shooting started. From
behind the parked sports car, Geneviève opened up, and the deafening rattle of
her Sten gun filled Flick's ears. Her shooting was more effective, and another
guard fell.

At last the Germans began to act.
The guards took cover behind the stone pillars, or lay flat, and brought their
rifles to bear. The Gestapo major fumbled his pistol out of its holster. The
redhead turned and ran, but her sexy shoes slipped on the cobblestones, and she
fell. Her man lay on top of her, protecting her with his body, and Flick
decided she had been right to suppose he was a soldier, for a civilian would
not know that it was safer to lie down than to run.

The sentries opened fire. Almost
immediately, Albert was hit. Flick saw him stagger and clutch his throat. A
hand grenade he had been about to throw dropped from his grasp. Then a second
round hit him, this time in the forehead. He fell like a stone, and Flick
thought with sudden grief of the baby girl born this morning who now had no
father. Beside Albert, Bertrand saw the turtle shell grenade roll across the
age-worn stone step of the church porch. He hurled himself through the doorway
as the grenade exploded. Flick waited for him to reappear, but he did not, and
she thought with anguished uncertainty that he could be dead, wounded, or just
stunned.

In the parking lot, the team from
the church stopped running, turned on the remaining six sentries, and opened
up. The four guards near the gate were caught in a crossfire, between those
inside the grounds and those outside in the square, and they were wiped out in
seconds, leaving only the two on the château steps. Michel's plan was working,
Flick thought with a surge of hope.

But the enemy troops inside the building
had now had time to seize their weapons and rush to the doors and windows, and
they began to shoot, changing the odds again. Everything depended on how many
of them there were.

For a few moments the bullets poured
like rain, and Flick stopped counting. Then she realized with dismay that there
were many more guns in the château than she had expected. Fire seemed to be
coming from at least twelve doors and windows. The men from the church, who
should by now be inside the building, retreated to take cover behind the
vehicles in the parking lot. Antoinette had been right, and MI6 wrong, about
the number of troops stationed here. Twelve was the MI6 estimate, yet the
Resistance had downed six for certain and there were at least fourteen still
firing.

Flick cursed passionately. In a
fight like this, the Resistance could win only by sudden, overwhelming
violence. If they did not crush the enemy right away, they were in trouble. As
the seconds ticked by, army training and discipline began to tell. In the end,
regular troops would always prevail in a drawn-out conflict.

On the upper floor of the château, a
tall seventeenth-century window was smashed open, and a machine gun began to
fire. Because of its high position, it caused horrible carnage among the
Resistance in the parking lot. Flick was sickened as, one after another, the
men there fell and lay bleeding beside the dry fountain, until there were only
two or three still shooting.

It was all over, Flick realized in
despair. They were outnumbered and they had failed. The sour taste of defeat
rose in her throat.

Michel had been shooting at the
machine-gun position. "We can't take out that machine gunner from the
ground!" he said. He looked around the square, his gaze flying to the tops
of the buildings, the bell tower of the church, and the upper floor of the town
hall. "If I could get into the mayor's office, I'd have a clear
shot."

"Wait." Flick's mouth was
dry. She could not stop him risking his life, much as she wanted to. But she could
improve the odds. She yelled at the top of her voice, "Geneviève!"

Geneviève turned to look at her.

"Cover Michel!"

Geneviève nodded vigorously, then
dashed out from behind the sports car, spraying bullets at the château windows.

"Thanks," Michel said to
Flick. Then he broke cover and sprinted across the square, heading for the town
hall.

Geneviève ran on, heading for the
church porch. Her fire distracted the men in the château, giving Michel a
chance of crossing the square unscathed. But then there was a flash on Flick's
left. She glanced that way and saw the Gestapo major, flattened against the
wall of the town hall, aiming his pistol at Michel.

It was hard to hit a moving target
with a handgun at anything but close range—but the major might be lucky, Flick
thought fearfully. She was under orders to observe and report back, and not to
join the fighting under any circumstances, but now she thought: To hell with
that. In her shoulder bag she carried her personal weapon, a Browning nine-millimeter
automatic, which she preferred to the SOE standard Colt because it had thirteen
rounds in the clip instead of seven, and because she could load it with the
same nine-millimeter Parabellum rounds used in the Sten submachine gun. She
snatched it out of the bag. She released the safety catch, cocked the hammer,
extended her arm, and fired two hasty shots at the major.

She missed him, but her bullets
chipped fragments of stone from the wall near his face, and he ducked.

Michel ran on.

The major recovered quickly and
raised his weapon again.

As Michel approached his
destination, he also came closer to the major, shortening the range. Michel
fired his rifle in the major's direction, but the shot went wild, and the major
kept his head and fired back. This time, Michel went down, and Flick let out a
yell of fear.

Michel hit the ground, tried to get
up, and collapsed. Flick calmed herself and thought fast. Michel was still
alive. Geneviève had reached the church porch, and her submachine gun fire
continued to draw the attention of the enemy inside the château. Flick had a
chance of rescuing Michel. It was against her orders, but no orders could make
her leave her husband bleeding on the ground. Besides, if she left him there,
he would be captured and interrogated. As leader of the Bollinger circuit,
Michel knew every name, every address, every code word. His capture would be a
catastrophe.

There was no choice.

She shot at the major again. Again
she missed, but she pulled the trigger repeatedly, and the steady fire forced
the man to retreat along the wall, looking for cover.

She ran out of the bar into the
square. From the corner of her eye she saw the owner of the sports car, still
protecting his mistress from gunfire by lying on top of her. Flick had
forgotten him, she realized with sudden fear. Was he armed? If so, he could
shoot her easily. But no bullets came.

She reached the supine Michel and
went down on one knee. She turned toward the town hall and fired two wild shots
to keep the major busy. Then she looked at her husband.

To her relief she saw that his eyes
were open and he was breathing. He seemed to be bleeding from his left buttock.
Her fear receded a little. "You got a bullet in your bum," she said
in English.

He replied in French, "It hurts
like hell."

She turned again to the town hall.
The major had retreated twenty meters and crossed the narrow street to a shop
doorway. This time Flick took a few seconds to aim carefully. She squeezed off
four shots. The shop window exploded in a storm of glass, and the major
staggered back and fell to the ground.

Flick spoke to Michel in French.
"Try to get up," she said. He rolled over, groaning in pain, and got
to one knee, but he could not move his injured leg. "Come on," she
said harshly. "If you stay here, you'll be killed." She grabbed him
by the front of his shirt and heaved him upright with a mighty effort. He stood
on his good leg, but he could not bear his own weight, and leaned heavily
against her. She realized that he was not going to be able to walk, and she
groaned in despair.

She glanced over to the side of the
town hall. The major was getting up. He had blood on his face, but he did not
seem badly injured. She guessed that he had been cut superficially by flying
glass but might still be capable of shooting.

There was only one thing for it: she
would have to pick Michel up and carry him to safety.

She bent in front of him, grasped
him around the thighs, and eased him on to her shoulder in the classic
fireman's lift. He was tall but thin—most French people were thin, these days.
All the same, she thought she would collapse under his weight. She staggered,
and felt dizzy for a second, but she stayed upright.