Agents of Treachery – Spy Stories

CASEY AT THE BAT by Stephen Hunter

“No, no,” said Basil St. Florian. “Bren guns. We need the Bren guns. It is simply undoable without Bren guns. Surely you understand.”

Roger understood but he was nevertheless unwilling.

“Our wealth is in our Bren guns. Without Bren guns, we are nothing. Pah, we are dust, we are cat shit, do you see? Nothing. NOTHING!”

Of course he said “Rien,” for the language was French as was the setting, the cellar of a farmhouse outside the rural burg of Nantilles, département Limousin, two hundred miles south and east of Paris. The year was 1944, and the date was June 7. Basil had just dropped in the night before, with his American chum.

“Do you not see,” Basil explained, “that the point in giving you Brens was to wage war upon the Germans, not to make you powerful politically in the postwar, after we have pushed Jerry out? Communists, Gaullists, we do not care, it does not matter, or matter now. What matters now is that you have to help us push Jerry out. That was the point of the Bren guns. We gave them to you for that reason, explicitly, and no other. You have had them eighteen months, and you have never used them once. The war will be over, we will push Jerry out, the Gaullists will take over, and we will demand our Brens back, and if we don’t get them, we will send Irishmen to get them. You do not want Irishmen interested in you. No good can come of it. It’s my advice to use the Brens, help us push Jerry, become glorious heroes, happily give up the Brens, then defeat the Gaullists in fair, free elections.”

“I will not give you Bren guns,” said Roger, “and that is final. Long live Comintern. Long live the Internationale. Long live the great Stalin, the bear, the man of steel. If you were in Spain, you would understand this principle. If you-”

Basil turned to Leets.

“Make him see about the Brens. Dear Roger, listen to the American lieutenant here. Do you think the Americans would have sent a fellow so far as they’ve sent this one just to tell you lies? I understand that you might not trust a pompous British foof like me, but this fellow is an actual son of the earth. His pater was a farmer. He raises wheat and cows and fights red Indians, as in the movies. He is tall, silent, magnificent. He is a walking myth. Listen to him.”

He turned to his chum Leets and then realized he had, once again, forgotten Leets’s name. It was nothing personal, he just was so busy being magnificent and British and all that, so he couldn’t be troubled by small details, such as Yank names.

“I say, Lieutenant, I seem to have forgotten the name. What was the name again?” He thought it was remarkable that the name kept slipping away on him. They had trained together at Milton Hall on the river Jedburgh in Scotland for this little picnic for six or so weeks, but the name kept slipping away, and whenever it did, it took Basil wholly out of where he was and turned his attention to the mystery of the disappearing name.

“My name is Leets,” said Leets in English, accented in the tones of the middle plains of his vast homeland, the Minnesota part.

“It’s so strange,” said Basil. “It just goes away. Poof, it’s gone, so bizarre. Anyhow, tell him.”

Leets also spoke French with a Parisian accent, which was why Roger, of Group Roger, didn’t care for him, or for Basil. Roger thought all Parisians were traitors or bourgeoisie, equally culpable in any case, and that seemed to go twice for British or American Parisians. He didn’t know that Leets spoke with a Parisian accent because he’d lived there between the ages of two and nine while his father managed 3M’s European accounts. No, Leets’s father was not a farmer, not hardly, and had certainly never fought red Indians; he was a rather wealthy business executive now retired, living in Sarasota, Florida, with one son, Leets, in occupied France playing cowboys with the insane, another a naval aviator on a jeep carrier that had yet to reach the Pacific, and still a third 4-F and in medical school in Chicago.

Roger, namesake and kingpin of Group Roger, turned his fetid little eyes upon Leets.

“I can blow the bridge,” said Leets. “It’s not a problem. The bridge will go down; it’s only a matter of rigging the 808 in the right place and leaving a couple of time pencils stuck in the stuff.”

But Basil interrupted, on the wings of an epiphany.

“It’s because you’re all so similar,” he said, as if he’d given the matter a great deal of Oxford-educated thought. “It has to do with gene pools. In our country, or in Europe on the whole, the gene pool is much more diverse. You see that in the fantastic European faces. Really, go to any city in Europe, and the variety in such features as eye spacing, jawline, height of forehead, width of cheekbones is extraordinary. I could watch it for days. But you Yanks seem to have about three faces between you, and you pass them back and forth. Yours is the farm boy face. Rather broad, no visible bone structure, pleasant, but not sharp enough to be particularly attractive. I fear you’ll lose your hair prematurely. Your people do have good, healthy dentition, I must give you that. But all the plumpness on the face. You must eat nothing but cake and candy. It goes to your face and turns you rather clownish, and it’s wizard-hard keeping you apart. You remind me of at least six other Americans I know, and I can t remember their names either. Wait, one of them is a chap called Carruthers. Do you know him?”

Leets thought this question rhetorical, and in any event it seemed to tucker Basil out for a bit. Leets turned back to the fat French communist guerrilla.

“We can kill the sentries, I can rig the 808 and plant the package, and it doesn’t even have to be fancy. It’s simple engineering; anyone could look at it and see the stress points. So: Pop the tab on the time pencil and run like hell. The problem is that the garrison at Nantilles is only a mile away, and the minimum time I can get the bridge rigged is about three minutes because we have to go in hard. When we shoot the sentries, it’ll make a noise, because we don’t have suppressors. The noise will travel and the garrison will be alerted. Meanwhile, I have to get down and lash the package just so on the trusses. They’ll get there before I’m done. So my team will get fried like eggs if we’re still rigging when they show. That’s why we need the Brens. We’ve only got rifles and Stens and my Thompson, and we can’t build enough volume of fire to hold them off. I need two Brens on the road from Nantilles with a lot of ammo to shoot up the trucks as they come along. You can’t disable a truck with a Sten. Simple physics: The Sten shoots a nine-millimeter pistol bullet and it doesn’t penetrate metal. Sometimes it even bounces off of glass. The Bren.303 is a powerful rifle- and machine-gun round which will penetrate the sheet metal of truck construction, damage the motor, rip up the wiring and tubing, as well as rupture the tires. It will pierce the wood construction of the truck bed and hit the men it carries. It can also lay down heavy, powerful fields of fire that will drive infantry back. That’s what it’s for; that’s why the British gave you the Brens.”

“The lieutenant knows a lot about guns, doesn’t he?” said Basil. “I’m rather alarmed, to be honest. It seems somewhat unwholesome to know that much about such a macabre topic.”

“Non!” said Roger, spraying them with garlic. He was a butcher, immense and sagacious. He’d fought on the Loyalist side in Spain, where he was wounded twice. He was almost grotesquely valiant and fearless, but he understood the primitive calculus of the politics: The Brens were power, and without power Group Roger would be at the mercy of all other groups, and that was more important than the prospect of 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich using the bridge to rush tanks to the Normandy beachhead, as intelligence predicted they would surely do.

“My dear brother-in-arms Roger,” said Basil, “the bridge will be blown, that I assure you. The only thing in doubt is whether Lieutenant Beets-”

“Leets.”

“Leets, yes, of course, whether Lieutenant Leets and his team of maquis from Group Phillippe will make it out alive. Without the Brens, they haven’t a chance, do you see?”

“Phillippe is a pig, as are all his men,” said Roger. “It is better for them to die at the bridge and spare us the effort of hunting them down to hang after the war. That is my only concern.”

“Can you say to this brave young American, ‘Leftenant Beets, you must die, that is all there is to it’?”

“Yes, it’s nothing,” said Roger. He turned to Leets with uninterested eyes. “‘Leftenant Beets, you must die, that is all there is to it.’ All right, I said it. Fine. Good-bye, sorry and all that, but policy is policy.”

He signaled his two bodyguards, who after rattling their Schmeissers dramatically film-noir style, rose and began to escort him up the cellar steps.

“Well, there you have it,” said Basil to Leets. “Sorry, but it looks like your number is up, leftenant. You get pranged. Sad, unjust, but inescapable. Fate, I gather. Yours not to reason why, et cetera et cetera. Do you know your Tennyson?”

“I know that one,” said Leets glumly.

“I suppose one could simply not go. I think that’s what I’d do in your shoes, but then I’m not the demo man, you are. I’m the head potato, so I’ll supervise quite nicely from the treeline. As for you, if you decide not to go, it would be embarrassing, of course, but in the long run, it probably doesn’t make much difference whether the bridge goes or not, and it seems silly to waste a future doctor of all the fabled Minnesotans on such a local Frenchy balls-up between de Gaulle’s smarmy peons and that giant, stinking, garlic-sucking red butcher.”

“If I catch it,” said Leets, “I catch it. That’s the game I signed up for. I just hate to catch it because of some little snit between Group Roger and Group Phillippe. Stopping Das Reich is worth it; helping Roger prevail over Phillippe is not, and I don’t give a shit about FFI or FTP.”

“Yet they can’t really be separated, can they? It’s always so complicated, haven’t you noticed? Politics, politics, politics, it’s like chewing gum in the works-it gets in everywhere and mucks up everything. Anyhow, if you like, I’ll write your people a very nice letter about what a hero you were. Would you like that?”

As with much of what Basil said, the words were pitched in a key of meaning so exquisite Leets couldn’t exactly tell if they were serious or not. You could never be sure with Basil; he frequently said the exact opposite of what he meant. He seemed to live in a zone of near-comedy in which nearly every damned thing was “amusing” and he took great pleasure in saying the “shocking” thing. The first thing he said to Leets all those weeks ago at Milton were, “It’s all a racket, you know. Our richies are trying to wipe out their richies so they can get all the nig-nog gold; that’s what it’s really all about. Our job is to make the world safe for nig-nog gold.”

“Jim Leets,” Leets had said, “Sigma Chi, N.U. ‘41.”

Now Basil said, “I can, however, in my tiny British pea brain, concoct one other possibility.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, it has to do with a radio.”

“We don’t have a radio.”

The radio was lashed to Andre Breton’s body which, unfortunately, had hit the earth at about eight hundred miles an hour when Andre’s parachute ripped in half on the tail spar of the Liberator that had dropped them the night of the invasion. Neither the radio nor Andre had been salvageable, which is why Team Casey was down 33 percent strength before its other two-thirds landed under their chutes a minute or so after Andre had his accident.

“The Germans have radios.”

“We’re not Germans. We’re good guys, remember? Captain, sometimes I think you don’t take this all that seriously”

“I speak German. What else is necessary?”

“This is crazy. You’ll never-”

“Anyway, here’s my idea. I cop a German uniform tomorrow, and walk into the garrison headquarters at eleven a.m. With my command presence, I will send Jerry away. Then I will commandeer his radio and put in a call. A fellow owes me a favor. If his groundwork is solid, it just might work out.”

“Jerry will put you up against a wall at 11:03 and shoot you.”

“Hmm, good point. Possibly if Jerry is distracted.”

“Go ahead, I’m all ears.”

“You blow something up. I don’t know, anything. Improvise, that’s what you chaps are so good at. Jerry runs to see. While Jerry’s got his knickers in a wad, I enter the garrison headquarters, all snazzed up, Jerry-style. It’s easy for me to commandeer the radio, make my call. Five minutes and I’m out.”

“Who are you trying to reach on radio?”

“A certain fellow.”

“A fellow where?”

“In England.”

“You’re going to radio England? From a German command post in occupied France?”

“I am. I’m going to dial up Roddy Walthingham, of the Signals Intelligence Branch, in Islington. He’s some kind of mucky-muck there and there are sure to be lots of radios about.”

“What can he do?”

“You didn’t hear this from me, chum, but it’s said he’s one of the pinks. Pink as in red. Same team, just different players, for now. Joe for king, that sort of thing. Anyhow, he’s sure to know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody in the big town.”

“London?” asked Leets, but Basil just smiled, and Leets realized he meant Moscow.

So Basil turned himself into a passable German officer with little enough trouble. The uniform came from an actual officer who had been killed in an ambush in 1943, and his uniform kept in storage by the maquis against the possibility of just such a gambit. It smelled of sweat, farts, and blood. It was also a year out of date in terms of accoutrements, badges, and suchlike, but Basil knew or at least believed that with enough charisma he could get through anything.

And thus at eleven a.m., as Leets and three maquis from Group Phillippe prepared to blow up a deserted farmhouse half a mile out of town the other way from the bridge, Basil strode masterfully to the gate of the garrison HQ of the 113th Flakbattalion, the lucky Luftwaffers who controlled security there in Nantilles. The explosion had the predictable effect on the Luftwaffers, who panicked, grabbed weapons and other equipment, and began running toward the rising column of smoke. They were terrified of a screwup because it meant they might be transferred somewhere actual fighting was possible.

Basil watched them go, and when the last of several ragtag groups had disappeared, he strode toward the big communications van next to the chateau, with its thirty-foot radio mast adorned with all kinds of Jerry stylistics; this one had a triangle up top. These people!

It helped that the officer whose uniform he wore had been a hero, and a lot of ribbons and badges decorated his breast. One, in particular, was an emblem of a tank, and underneath it hung three little plates of some sort. The other stuff was the usual mishmash of bold colored ribbons and such, and it all signified martial valor, very impressive to the distinctly nonmilitaristic Luftwaffers who hadn’t run to the blasts and didn’t know skittles about such stuff but recognized what they took to be the real McCoy when it appeared.

Basil got to the radio van easily enough and chased the duty sergeant away by proclaiming himself Major Strasser-he’d seen Casablanca, of course-of Abwehr 31, top secret.

He faced a bank of gear, all of it rather H. G. Wellesian in its futuresque array of dials, switches, knobs, gauges, and such forth set in shiny Bakelite.

The transceiver turned out to be a 15W S.E., a small, complete station with an output power of 15 watts, just jolly super and what the doctor ordered. The frequency range embraced those used by the British and the mechanics for synchronization between transmitter and receiver was very advanced.

He faced the thing, a big green box opened to show an instrumentality. Two dials up top, a midpoint dial displaying frequency, the tuner below, and below that buttons and switches and all the foofah of radioland. Had he a course on it somewhere in time? Seems he had, but there was so much, it was best to let the old subconscious take over and run the show.

It was very Teutonic. It had labels and sublabels everywhere, switches, dials, wires, the whole German gestalt in one instrument, insanely well ordered yet somewhat overengineered in a vulgar way. Instead of “On/ Off” the switch read literally, “Makingtobroadcast/Stoppingtobroadcast Facilitation.” A British radio would have been less imposing, less a manifesto of purpose, but also less reliable. You could bomb this thing and it would keep working.

The machine crackled and spat and began to radiate heat. Evidently it was quite powerful.

He put on some radio earphones, hearing the noise of static to be quite annoying, found what had to be a channel or frequency knob, and spun it to the British range.

He knew both sides worked with jamming equipment, but it wasn’t useful to jam large numbers of frequencies, so more usually they played little games, trying to infiltrate each other’s communications and cause mischief. He also knew he should flip a switch and go to Morse, but he had never been a good operator. He reasoned that the airwaves today were totally filled with chatter of various sorts and whomever was listening would have to weigh the English heavily, get interpretation from analysts, and alert command, and the whole process had to take days. He decided just to talk, as if on telly from a club in Bloomsbury.

“Hullo, hullo,” he said each time the crackly static stopped.

A couple of times he got Germans screaming, “You must use radio procedure, you are directed to halt, this is against regulations,” and turned quickly away, but later rather than sooner, someone said, “Hullo, who’s this?”

“Basil St. Florian,” Basil said.

“Chum, use radio protocol, please. Identify by call sign, wait for verification.”

“Sorry, don’t know the protocol. It’s a borrowed radio, do you see?”

“Chum, I can’t-Basil St. Florian? Were you at Harrow, ‘28 through ‘32? Big fellow, batsman, six runs against St. Albans?”

“Seven, actually. The gods smiled on me that day.”

“I went down at St. Albans. I was fine leg. I dismissed you, finally. You smiled at me. Lord, I never saw such a striker.”

“I remember. Such, such were the joys, old man. Who knew we’d meet again like this? Now, look here, I’m trying to reach Islington Signals Intelligence. Can you help?”

“I shouldn’t give out information.”

“Old man, it’s not like I’m just anybody. I remember you. Reddish hair, freckly, looked like you wanted to squid me on the noggin. Remember how fierce you were, that’s why I winked. I have it right, don’t I?”

“In fact, you do. All these years, now this. Islington, you say?”

“Absolutely. Can you help?”

“I’m actually wizard-keen on these things. It took a war to find out. Hmm, let me just do some diddling, they’d be John-Able-6, do you see? I’m going to do a patch.”

“Thanks ever so much.”

Basil waited, examining his fingernails, looking about for something to drink. A nice port, say, or possibly some aged French cognac? He yawned. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. When would the fellow-

“Identify, please.”

“Is this John-Able-6?”

“Identify, please.”

“Basil St. Florian. Looking to speak with your man Roddy Walthingham. Put him on, there’s a good lad.”

“Do you think this is a telephone exchange?”

“No, no, but nevertheless I need to talk to him. Old school chum. Need a favor.”

“Identify, please.”

“Listen carefully: I am in a bother and I need to talk to Roddy. It’s war business, not gossip.”

“Where are you?”

“In Nantilles.”

“Didn’t realize the boys had got that far inland.”

“They haven’t. That’s why it’s rather urgent, old man.”

“This is very against regulations.”

“Dear man, I’m actually at a Jerry radio and at any moment, Jerry will return. Now I have to talk to Roddy. Please, play up play up and play the game.”

“Public school then. I hate you all. You deserve to burn.”

“We do, I know. Such officious little pricks, the lot of us. I’ll help you light the timbers after the war and then climb into them, smiling. But first, let’s win it. I implore you.”

“Bah,” said the fellow, “you’d best not put me on report.”

“I shan’t.”

“All right. He’s right next door. Hate him too.”

In a minute or so, another voice came over the earphones.

“Yes, hullo.”

“Roddy, it’s Basil. Basil St. Florian.”

“Basil, good God.”

“How’re Diane and the girls?”

“Rather enjoying the country. They could come back to town, since Jerry hardly flies anymore, but I think they like it out there.”

“Good for them. Say, Roddy, need a favor, do you mind?”

“Certainly, Basil, if I can.”

“I’m to go with some boys tonight to set off a firecracker under a bridge. Nasty work, they say it has to be done. ‘Ours not to reason why,’ all that.”

“Sounds fascinating.”

“Not really. Hardly any wit to it at all. You know, just destroying things, it seems so infantile in the long run. Anyhow, our cause would be helped if a gang in the area called Group Roger, have you got that, would pitch in with its Brens. But it’s some red-white thing and they won’t help. I thought you had Uncle Joe’s ear-”

“Basil! Now really! People may be listening.”

“No inference or judgment meant. I tell no tales, and let each man enjoy his own politics and loyalties, as I do mine. That’s what the war’s all about, isn’t it? Let’s put it this way: If one had Uncle Joe’s ear, one might ask that Group Roger in Nantilles vicinity pitch in with Brens to help Group Phillippe. That’s all. Have you got that?”

“Roger, Brens, Phillippe, Nantilles. I’ll make a call.”

“Thanks, old man. Good-bye.”

“No, no, you say over and out.”

“Over and out, then.”

“Ciao, friend.”

Basil put the microphone down, unhooked the earphones from around his head, and looked up into the eyes of two sergeants with Schmeissers and a lieutenant colonel.

Leets looked at his Bulova. It had been an hour, no, an hour and a half.

“I think they got him,” said his No. 1, a young fellow called Leon.

“Shit,” said Leets, in English. He was at a window in the upper floor of a residence fifty yards across from the gated chateau that served as the 113th Flakbattalion’s headquarters and garrison. He held an M1 Thompson submachine gun low, out of sight, and wore a French rain slicker, rubbers, and a plowman’s rough hat.

“We can’t hit it,” said Leon. “Not four of us. And if we got him out, on the surprise aspect of it, where’d we go? We have no automobile to escape.”

Leon was right, but still Leets hated the idea of Captain Basil St. Florian perishing on something so utterly trivial as a bridge in the interests of one Team Casey that existed out of a misbegotten SOE/ OSS cooperative plan, silly, cracked, and doomed as all get out. Strictly a show, thought up by big headquarters brainiacs with too much spare time, of no true import. He knew it; they all knew it and had known it in all the hours in Areas A and F and whatever, disguised golf clubs mostly, where they’d trained before deployment to the god-awful food at Milton Hall. As the Brit had said, it probably didn’t make any difference anyhow. He cursed himself; he should have just planted the charges without the Brens and taken his chances on the run to the woods. Maybe the Krauts wouldn’t have been quick enough out of the gates to get there and lay down fire before he rigged his surprises. Maybe it would have been a piece of cake. But you couldn’t tell Basil St. Florian a thing, and when the man got an idea in his head, it crowded out all other concerns.

“Look!” said Leon.

It was Basil. He was not alone. He was surrounded by adoring young men of the 113th Flakbattalion and their commanding officer who were escorting Basil to the gate. Basil made a brief, theatrical bow, shook the commander’s hand, and turned and smartly strode off.

It took a while for him to reach the outskirts of town, but when he hit the rendezvous, Leets and the maquis, by back-streets and fence-jumping, were already there.

“What the hell?”

“Well, I reached Roddy. Somehow. He’s to make certain arrangements.”

“What took you so long?”

“Ah, it seems the previous owner of this uniform had an illustrious career. This little trinket”-he touched the metallic emblem of a tank with its three tiny plates affixed serially beneath-”signifies a champion tank destroyer on the Eastern Front. The Luftwaffers wanted to hear war stories. So I ended up giving a little performance on the best ways to destroy a T-36. Good God, I hope none of the fellows-they seemed like good lads-try that sort of thing on their own against a Centurion. I just made it up. Something about the third wheel of the left tread being the drive wheel, and if you could hit that with a Panzerfaust, the machine would stop in its tracks. Could there be a third wheel? And I don’t believe I specified left from which perspective. All in all, it was a rather feeble performance, but the London Times critics weren’t around, just some dim Hanoverian farm boys drafted into the German air force.”

“You made the call? You got through?”

“Why, it worked better than our trunk lines. No operator, no interference. It was as if Roddy was in the same room. Amazing, these technical things. Now, what’s for dinner?”

It seldom worked as well as it did that night, perhaps using up the last of Team Casey’s good luck. At any rate, Roddy moseyed out of the radio shack. It was rainy in Islington and everybody was keen about invasion news. Would our boys be pushed back? Or would they stay, and was this the beginning of the end?

So nobody paid much attention to a short, fat man with an academic’s somewhat diffident habit of moving and being. Roddy drew his mackintosh tight about him, pulled his deerstalker down about his ears to keep the surprising June chill out, and nodded at the duty officer. His specialty was coding, and he was actually damned good at it, if thought by all a trifle odd. He wandered about as if there wasn’t a war on, and by now everyone accepted that his weirdness and inability to deal with military security matters were a part of his genius and must be accepted. Actually, it was good cover for his real job, which was straight penetration for GRU Section 7, foreign intelligence.

He crossed the busy street to a druggist’s and looked for the phone. He found it occupied and waited smilingly as a woman finished her call, then departed. He entered, dropped a tuppence, and waited. It rang three times. He hung up. The phone rang twice, then ceased. Roddy redialed the number.

“Hullo, is that you?”

“Of course, Roddy. Who else could it be?”

Roddy’s conversational partner was Major Boris Zyborny, code name RAFTER, in charge of penetration of the British main target and Roddy’s controller. He worked in deep cover in the Polish Free Republic Democratic Army liaison office, doing something or other unclear, while keeping tabs on all his boys and girls for Red Army intelligence.

Roddy said, “I need a favor. An old school chum.”

“One of ours?”

“No.”

“He’s to be ignored. He’s meaningless. Enjoy his company, mourn his death if it happens, but keep him out of the equation.”

“A good friend. I want to help him.”

Roddy explained, and seven minutes later, Major Zyborny was on the long-range radio to Moscow GRU, where someone eventually tracked down a partisan director named Klemansk, a former Comintern agent who’d magically escaped the purges (he was in a Spanish prison awaiting execution at the time) and now commanded Activity Sphere 3, Western Europe, for GRU. Klemansk took some convincing, and in the end agreed because Zyborny assured him that Roddy was important and could only become more important and doing little things like this for him would keep him happy for the long, hard years ahead.

So Klemansk got on Activity Sphere 3’s radio hookup, and via Paris, reached Group Roger on the matter of the Bren guns.

The Germans of course monitored all this information, as their radio intelligence and intercept systems were superb. However, it was buried in endless tons of other intercepted information, as the invasion had upped radio traffic to nearly torrential levels. It was beyond human capacity to analyze and interpret all of it, and by priority, it was decanted into categories depending on urgency. Since a bridge outside Nantilles was way down the list, the intercepts didn’t get the attention they clearly deserved until June 14,1944, by which time the obscure drama of Team Casey, the 113th Luftwaffe Flakbattalion, 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, and Groups Roger and Phillippe had long since played out.

Leets applied the last of the burnt cork to his face. Burning corks had turned out to be no picnic. Back at Area 5 in the Catoctins, everybody had assured the trainees that burning cork was a piece of cake, but no one ever managed to explain how to do it. Major Applegate told stories about hunting Mexicans on the Arizona border with the border patrol, and how they’d always corked their faces when serious business was set for the evening, but he never ever explained exactly how to burn the goddamned cork. Leets had singed the hair off his fingers before he struck on the idea of wedging the cork into a doorway, holding it there by pressuring the door against it with his foot, and burning it with candle flame. It oxidized slowly, stupidly, and resentfully, but finally he had enough and managed to do a reasonable job of masquerading his fat, broad, uninteresting, and very white American face against the darkness.

He was now ready, though he felt more like the football player he’d been than the soldier he was, so packed with gear very like the shoulder and thigh pads that had protected him in Big Ten wars. He had a Thompson gun and seven mags with twenty-eight.45s in each, the mags in a pouch strapped to his web belt, as were six Gammon grenades, Allways fuzes packed with half a stick of the green plasticky Explosive 808, all ready to have their caps unscrewed, their linen lines secured, and then be tossed to explode on impact. They smelled of almonds, reminding him of a candy bar he had once loved in a far-off paradise called Minnesota. He had a wicked, phosphate-bladed M3 fighting knife strapped to his right outside lace-up Corcoran jump boot, which was bloused neatly into his reinforced jump pants, an OD cotton slash-pocketed jump jacket, almost like Hemingway’s safari coat, over his wool OD shirt with his silver first lieutenant’s bars and the crossed rifles of Infantry, as he’d been a member of the 501st of the 101st before his French got him recruitment by OSS, a Colt.45 on the web belt, seven in the mag, two more mags on a pouch on the web, and a black watch cap pulled low over his ears so that he looked like one of the lesser Our Gang members. He also carried a satchel full of Explosive 808, also smelling pun-gently of almonds and, let’s see, was that it, oh yes, time pencils, that is, Delay Switch No. 10, a tin of five of them in the satchel with the 808 for quick deployment.

The plan: The Luftwaffers had wisely used French labor to cut down the forest around the bridge, so it was basically coverless, nude land on the approach, studded with evergreen stumps that were stout enough to stop all vehicles that ran on tires. Stealth was impossible, too, in the arc lights the Germans had mounted that blazed away all night long. There was no danger from the six 88-millimeter flak guns sandbagged around the bridge, since they were dedicated, meaning permanently mounted in antiaircraft trajectories to defend the bridge from Allied air attack, and so out of the picture tactically, and were unmanned at night, as no Typhoons or Jugs would risk a run in the dark. But there were at least six sentries, a sergeant of the guard and four or five riflemen, at each end of the bridge.

So stealth was out. Rather, in a rattly old Citroen, Leets and his three FFI maquis would approach the bridge and when called to halt at close range open fire. They would shoot the sentries, Gammon bomb the guardhouse, and lay down fire on the men at the other end of the bridge, and Leets would hop out to the center, monkey-climb over, plant the 808, and wedge in the already primed time pencils, and then they’d run like hell to the woods two hundred yards away. If reinforcements from Nantilles got there before they made it to the woods, they’d be dead friggin’ ducks, as the Germans, even incompetent Luftwaffers, could hose them down with MG-42 fire from the guns mounted on the trucks, while the men gave chase with Mausers and Schmeissers.

That’s where the Brens came in. The Brens could drive the trucks back, even destroy them, and scatter the easily frightened Luftwaffers. The whole thing turned on the Brens. The two Brens were the wanted nail that doomed the horse that lost the squad that let down the battalion that defeated the army that ruined the war.

“Great news, chum,” said Basil. “You have Brens!”

“What?”

“Hmm, it seems that Roger had a change of mind, or perhaps an order from higher HQ. In any event, even as we speak, Roger and his two Bren gun teams are setting up on the slope overlooking the road from Nantilles, three hundred yards beyond the bridge.”

“Do we know that for a fact?”

“Chum, if Roger says they’re there, then they’re there.”

“I wish I could actually see the guys.” But he looked at the Bulova he wore upside down on his wrist and saw that it was 0238 British War Time, so it was time to go.

“Okay,” he said, “then let’s blow this son of a bitch.”

“Good attitude. I’ll be with the other boys in the woodline. We’ll lay down fire from our end.”

“You can’t see well enough to do any good, and that goddamn little peashooter”-Leets indicated the Sten Machine Carbine hung around Basil by a sling, a tubular construction that looked as if it had been designed by a committee of very dull plumbers, a 9-millimeter burp gun that fired too fast when it fired at all, and then its bullets did little good when they got there if they got there at all-”won’t frighten anyone.”

“Beets, I can’t help it that their guns are so much better than ours. We make do with what is. We do our bit, that’s all.”

“Yeah, yeah. Well, let’s go then. Batter up!” Leets said bitterly. He stormed to the Citroen for his drive to battle. But then he remembered his manners.

“Sorry, captain. I’m a blowhard, I know. Just venting because I’m scared shitless. Anyhow, thanks, what you did was swell, it was, I don’t know-”

“Stop it, Beets. Just go blow up your silly bridge.”

“Captain, one last thing. Who the hell are you? Where are you from? How do you know so much? What are you doing here? Surely you’re too old, too advanced, too brilliant for all this running around. You should be a general or something. You look forty. Who are you?”

“Long, long story, chum. Blow the damned bridge and we’ll have a chat.”

Enter Millie Beeman. Millie, from Millicent, from the Beemans, you know, the Beemans of the North Shore. Millie was a lovely girl, clever as the devil. She graduated with high marks from Smith but never bragged or acted smart, got her first job working as a secretary at Time in Manhattan for the awful Luce and his hideous wife, spent some time on a Senate staff (her father arranged it), and then when war came, she gravitated toward the Office of Strategic Services just as surely as it gravitated toward her. People knew where they belonged, and organizations knew what kind of people belonged in them, so General Donovan’s assistants fell in instant love with the willowy blonde who looked smashing at any party, smoked brilliantly, and had languid, see-through-anything luminosity in her eyes. Everyone loved the way her hair fell down to her shoulders; everyone loved the diaphanous cling of a gown or blouse to her long-limbed, definitely femalesque torso; everyone loved her yards and yards of legs, her perfect ankles well displayed by the platform of the heels all the girls wore.

By ‘43 she’d transferred to London station at 72 Grosvenor in Mayfair, under Colonel Bruce, one of whose assistants she’d become, and wore the uniform of a second lieutenant in the WACs. She was in charge of the colonel’s social calendar, important since one of the common jests of the time was that OSS actually stood for Oh So Social. She answered his phones or placed his calls, but it was more than that. She also knew the town, in the sense of “knew the town,” and so was able to prioritize. The colonel was hopeless and said yes to every invitation in the days before she arrived on station. She knew who was in, who out, which receptions it was important to be seen at, which could be safely ignored, which generals were in the ascension, which in the decline, which FFI liaison officers could be trusted, which should be avoided, which journalists were helpful, which were not, who could be blackmailed, ignored, betrayed, dumped, manipulated, or insulted and, by contrast, who could be trusted, used, counted on, confided in, who had access, represented the kind of people we like and need, and so forth and so on. She was indispensable, she was ruthless, she was efficient, she was beautiful and brilliant at once, and she was the third-ranking NKVD agent in OSS, the star of INO (Foreign Intelligence Section) who had been trained at SHON, Shkola Osobogo Naznacheniya, the Special Purposes School, in Balashikha, fifteen miles east of the Moscow Ring Road, when everybody thought she was rusticating in the Hamptons.

Millie sniffed something was up at six p.m. that evening, when Colonel Brace’s mood immediately brightened. The issue of the day had been Operation Jedburgh, by which three-man teams of OSS/SOE/FFI agents had parachuted behind the lines to wreak havoc on German communications and transportation lines in the immediate wake of the Normandy show. So far, no good. No teams had hit a target, many had drifted apart in the descent and failed to link up with maquis units whom they were supposed to lead, and several had never acknowledged arrival by radio and were considered combat-lost. It was looking like a washout, and Colonel Bruce knew he was meeting with Sir Colin Gubbins, head of SOE, and that Gubbins would blame the muck-up on the American third of the units. It was so important that the teams do well!

But around six, an SOE liaison informed the colonel that radio intercepts strongly suggested one team was in position and would strike tonight at midnight against a bridge on Das Reich’s route to the beachhead.

“Millie, do you see? This is what we need.”

It was a great issue with OSS that it was considered immature, inferior, and amateur in comparison to the far savvier British intel outfits, and it drove General Donovan mad.

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, the boys,” said Colonel Bruce. “Those wonderful, wonderful boys, they make me so proud. Here’s to Casey’s turn at bat!”

Millie, of course, was not privy to code names and didn’t know which groups were operating where; she just scooped up all available information and turned it over to her KGB INO control, a fellow named Hedgepath who’d been big in WPA before the war and was now big in the Office of War Information, the propaganda unit, where he was some sort of chief of psychological operations or something like that, reporting directly to Mr. Sherwood. She adored Hedgepath, because of course he was one of the few men on earth who didn’t yield to and couldn’t be budged by her blandishments, charms, and beauty; she had no way of knowing he was a sexual deviate and therefore immune to such.

She called him from a phone in Accounting Section, feeling utterly secure, because no one monitored internal calls between American entities such as 72 Grosvenor and the London OWI headquarters nearby. It was Kate Jesse’s phone, and Kate thought she used it to speak to a secret lover, an RAF bomber pilot. Kate’s problem: She read Redbook magazine too earnestly.

“Hullo,” said Hedgepath.

“Millie here.”

“Of course, my dear. Report, please.”

She reiterated what she had learned that day: the colonel’s schedule, his incoming calls, reports, office tidbits, expenditure, the nuts and bolts of it. Finally she mentioned some kind of show that was set for the evening and the colonel’s curious explosion of glee, “Casey’s turn at bat.”

“Oh, baseball,” said Mr. Hedgepath. “I loathe baseball. It’s mostly standing around, isn’t it? Awfully boring. Who’s this Casey?”

“It’s from a famous poem. ‘Mighty Casey’ they call him, a sort of Babe Ruth figure. All hopes are on him. It’s very dramatic.”

“Who knew there was drama in baseball?”

“At any rate, ‘Casey at the Bat’ is about a hero’s chance to win the big game. As I recall, he fails. In America, it’s regarded a tragedy. I think Casey has to do with something they’re calling Operation Jedburgh.”

Jedburgh?

“Hmm,” said Hedgepath. He knew from NKVD Moscow Center that the terrible Zyborny had sent a flash to GRU earlier, but Center wasn’t completely able to penetrate the GRU code and knew only that the subject of the message was a Brit-Yank-Frenchy thing called Operation Jedburgh, some silly blowing-up of structures that would have to be expensively rebuilt after the war. But Control did not want GRU operating with impunity anywhere, and the two agencies cordially hated each other. NKVD Moscow Center was suddenly interested in Operation Jed, not as part of the war against the Germans, which it knew was won, but in the war against GRU for postwar operational control of the intelligence mechanism.

“Urgent you penetrate Jed,” Moscow had ordered.

“My dear Miss Beeman,” said Mr. Hedgepath. “Can you focus tonight on this ‘Casey’ thing? There’s a lot of interest in it. Possibly flirt it up with one of the cowboys and get me some information soonest? I’d like to pop a line to Our Friends before bedtime if possible.”

Millie sighed. She knew exactly what she had to do. Drinks with Frank Tyne, a horrible man who was all swagger and bluster. He’d been in and out of France for two years now and it was rumored had actually killed several Germans. More to the point, he adored her and had been asking her out for weeks.

Tonight, his dreams came true.

Leets was having some trouble breathing. His stomach was edgy, his fingers felt like greasy sausages from someone else’s body, and he wanted only to sleep. He’d felt this way before games sometimes. He’d been a tight end usually, because of his size, a blocker, but there were a few plays in the book that designated him as receiver, and he both loved and hated that opportunity. You could become a hero. You could become a goat. It all happened in a split second in front of fifty thousand yelling maniacs cram-packed into Dyche Stadium or some other Big Ten coliseum. Once, memorably (to him at any rate) he caught a touchdown ball on a freakish, lucky, thing-of-beauty pass that he’d ticked with a finger, popped into the air, and snatched while himself falling. He was a hero who knew he’d been lucky and secretly felt he didn’t deserve the Monday of acclaim he’d gotten. It was his favorite memory; it was his worst memory. It came to him now in both formats.

The car rolled onward. No wonder they called them coffee-grinders, a little turtle of a thing powered seemingly by batteries. Chut-chut-chut it went. Leon drove. Leets was in the passenger’s side with the Thompson. In the backseat, in fetal positions, were Jerome and Franc, good guys, kids really, all with Stens. They’d have trouble getting out, so it was up to Leets, really. He’d deliver the first blows for freedom in this part of France. He felt sick about it, but it was increasingly obvious that it didn’t matter how he felt, as what would happen would happen, and if the Brens were there, thank God and Basil St. Florian, and if they weren’t, Dad would be so upset.

A bottle was produced. It came to Leets with a small glass. He poured some bitter fluid, man, it kicked like a mule, JESUS CHRIST! he gasped for breath, poured another tot, and held it over for Leon to gulp down.

“Vive la France!” said Leon, completing the transaction.

“Vive la France!” came the salute from the rear.

Vive my ass! thought Leets.

They entered the cone of Luftwaffe arc light, and immediately the two sentries at the gate raised hands and began to scream, “HALT! HALT! HALT!” They were kids also, a little panicked because no cars ever emerged from the darkness out of nowhere, and they themselves didn’t know what to do, open fire or run and get a sergeant. Their helmets and weapons looked too big.

It was murder. It was war but it was still murder.

Leets rolled from the Citroen and put three into each boy from the hip at a range of about ten yards. The Thompson seemed to point itself, so hungry to kill, and under his feathery trigger control convulsed spastically three times in a tenth of a second, then three times more in another tenth of a second, leaking incandescence and noise, and the boys were gone. He brought the gun to his shoulder, zeroed in on the guardhouse through the aperture sight to the blade at muzzle and feathered off the rest of the magazine, holding the butt tight into his shoulder, watching the wood and dust splinter and leap as the rounds struck and ripped, glass shattered, and a door broke, punctured, and fell. Sensations: the harsh percussion of the detonating cartridges, the weirdness of the empty brass poppity-popping out of the breach in a glinting arc, the substantiality of the bolt sliding through the receiver at thunderbolt speed, the dazzle of the muzzle flash, the acrid stench of burning powder, the spurt and drift of the gun smoke.

The gun empty, he reached into his pouch pocket and pulled out an already primed Gammon. With a thumb he pinned the little floppy lead weight at the end of the Gammon linen against the side of the bag, feeling the slight squishiness of the clump of 808 inside, cranked slightly to the right to the classic QB pose so he could come off his right foot, and launched a tight spiral toward the guardhouse fifty feet away, following through Otto Graham-style. As the bomb sailed through the air, its weighted linen wrap unfurled, and when it separated it popped a restraining pin free inside the Allways fuze, arming that gizmo to detonate on impact. That was the genius of the Gammon; when armed it was volatile as hell, but it always went off.

Great throw, the guardhouse went in a blaze of light and percussion, making Leets blink, stagger, have a momentary loss of reality. His men were next to him, emptying Stens into the wreckage and at fleeing German figures.

“Un autre,” said Leon, another.

Leets got another grenade out, pinned the weight, and this time put more arm into it. It sailed into the darkness, where presumably Germans still cowered, perhaps unlimbering weapons, but the explosion was larger than the last-the Gammon power depended wholly upon how much 808 was packed about the Allways, and evidently Leets had been a little overexcited on this one.

Dust rose, half the lights went out, burning pieces of stuff flew through the air, it was all the chaos and irrationality of an explosion. Hearing was gone for the night. Leets paused for a second to get another magazine into his Thompson, made sure the bolt was back, and raced forward into the madness.

“They must be so brave,” said Millie Beeman to poor, hopelessly in love Frank Tyne. Frank was some kind of Maine ex-cop of French-Canadian extraction (hence his French), a husky guy, not liked by any of the crowd. He was crude, direct, horny, stupid, supposedly a hero but so full of himself.

“Good guys. See, the deal is, it was time to show Jerry some action. The general knew that. So these teams, they were put together as an opportunity for the outfit to show its stuff.”

“And tonight’s the night?”

“Tonight’s the night,” Frank said, with a wicked gleam in his eyes that suggested that maybe he was assuming tonight was the night in more ways than one.

They sat in the bar of the Savoy, amid smoke, other drinkers, and trysters.

“Frank, you should be so proud. It’s your plan, after all. You’re really doing something. I mean, so much of it is politics, society, canoodling, and it has nothing to do with the war. I just get depressed sometimes. Even Colonel Bruce, oh, he tries hard, he’s such a darling, but he’s so ineffectual. You, Frank. You are stopping the Nazis. That is so important. Somebody has to do the fighting!”

She touched Frank’s wrist, and smiled radiantly, and watched the poor schlub melt. Then, fighting the sudden rush of phlegm to his throat, he said, “Look, let’s get out of here.”

“Frank, we shouldn’t. I mean-”

“Miss Beeman-Millie, may I call you Millie?”

“Of course.”

“Millie, it’s the night of the warrior. We should commemorate it. Look, let’s go back to my office; I have a little stash of very fine Pikesville rye. We can have some privacy. It’ll be a great night, and we can wait for news of Team Casey’s strike to come in and celebrate.”

Millie played up the I’m-considering look, going through several yes-why-nots and several no-no-it’s wrongs, before seeming to settle on the yes-why-not.

“Yes, why not?” she said, but he was already pulling on his raincoat over his uniform.

Leets reached the center of the span, when a volley of rifle shots kicked dust and splinters up. He flinched, realized he wasn’t hit, recovered. The fire surely came from the other end of the bridge, where a small security force had been cowering, uncertain what to do. Fortunately the Luftwaffers were as poor at marksmanship as they were at aggression, and so all the shots missed flesh. Leets answered with another long burst from the Thompson, while his comrades chipped in with Stens.

“Throw some bombs,” he ordered, while he himself went to the railing of the span, looked over it.

It was not an impressive bridge. It was, in fact, a rather pathetic bridge. But it would do well enough to 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. I’m so glad the war has brought us together, oh Millie.”

She smiled, and when he closed his eyes to kiss her, she brought a handkerchief full of knockout drops to his nostrils and felt him struggle, then go limp.

She got up quickly, went to the map, marked the coordinates for Nantilles and Casey’s operational area and then realized of course they would know all this. The big info was that a red group had agreed to assist the Jeds, which meant assist the FFI. She knew NKVD would go through the roof on that one! It felt so wrong to her, so unjust. If you helped FFI, then the war would have been for nothing; when it was over, it would just go back to what it had been before, with big money ruling everything and the little guy squashed to nothingness and all the bullies and all the rich scum and all the boys who’d pawed her at Smith-brutal, smelly, drunken Frank Tynes-all those men would be triumphant, and what, really, what would have been the point? The only hope was the Soviet Union, the greatness of Uncle Joe, the justice of a system that didn’t depend on exploitation but that enabled man to be all that he could be, noble and giving, generous and loving. That was a world worth fighting for, and if she didn’t have a gun, she had a telephone.

She picked it up and dialed, knowing that nowhere on earth would anyone see anything suspicious about Frank Tyne of OSS calling David Hedgepath of the Office of War Information at 10:14 p.m. on the night of June 8,1944.

Leets did a quick tumble through the facts as he thought them to be and concluded that yes, Team Casey had a chance.

Luftwaffe troops were basically antiaircraft gunners, their rifle marksmanship and combat aggression had to be somewhat deficient. They wouldn’t understand elevation or deflection fire at moving targets. It was dark; untrained, unblooded troops didn’t care for the dark. They weren’t sure where they were going, and at best they’d put in a half-effort, each fellow thinking, “I don’t want to be the one guy who dies tonight.”

“Okay,” he said to the maquis, “we’ll go ahead by leapfrogging. As each guy runs, the other three pour fire on Les Boches. When you hold on them, aim a man high, or your rounds won’t reach the target. Shoot, move, don’t stop no matter what. We spread out, try and go about fifty yards per spurt. Up top they’ll be covering us. We don’t need the damn Brens; we’re fine.”

“Fuck that fat Roger,” said Leon. “He is pig filth, swine, a screwer of mothers and babies.”

“That communist shit, the reds should be rounded up after the war and-”

“We will visit Roger, I promise you,” said Leets. “Now come on, guys, let’s get a move on.”

Franc went first, then was passed by Leon, and finally Jerome. Leets crouched behind a sandbag revetment and had a wild, insane heroic impulse. Maybe I should stay here, cover them, and keep the Krauts off until the bridge blows.

Then he thought, Fuck that.

He was moving, was past Franc, past Leon, almost to Jerome, moving through fire that was sporadic at best, now and then licking up a spit of dust in the general area, and he’d heard nothing blazing by his ears, indicative of the fact that Jerry had zeroed on them.

The flare popped, freezing him.

Flares? These clowns have flares?

He looked back to the bridge and beheld with horror the reality that two more trucks had arrived, in the dappled camouflage coloring of 2nd SS Das Reich, and watched as from each truck spilled lean, toughened Panzergrenadiers in their camouflage tunics, hardened by years on the Eastern Front, a unit noted and feared far and wide as the finest of the SS Divisions. These characters carried the new Stg-44, something the Germans called an “attack rifle,” which fired a shortened 8mm round with accuracy and a high rate of fire. Oh, fuck, they could really lay fire with that sonofabitch.

Another flare popped, and then another, and the whole scene lit up, this puny French river valley, he and his three maquis racing uphill toward a treeline through a landscape of flickering shadow, as the descending parachute flares caught on the stumps of the so recently cut pines and threw blades of darkness this way and that, like scythes, the Germans still two hundred yards away but coming strong, the camouflaged Panzer-grenadiers racing through and past the confused young Luftwaffers, and now, suddenly, from the ridgeline, a long arc of tracer as the MG-42S tried to range the target.

We are screwed, he thought. This is it.

The bridge went.

It wasn’t the blossoming, booming movie explosion so familiar from the Warner Bros, backlog agitprop films, but more of a disappointingly insubstantial percussion, lifting a large volcano of smoke and dust from the structure in the aftermath of a flash too brief for anyone to see. Leets stole a moment in the fading parachute flare to examine his legacy: The bridge, as the dust cleared, was not downed, leaving a gap as if a mouth had been punched front-teethless, but the roadway span hung at a grotesque 45-degree angle, torquing downward, meaning the truss Leets had 808’ed had gone, but the other one held. It would take days to repair, or to detour around, and those would be days with no 2nd SS Das Reich at Normandy.

He stood, dumped a mag a man high at the nearest parade of SS Panzergrenadiers, and shouted to his guys, “Go, go, go, go!”

Franc took the first hit. He just slumped, tried to get up, then sat, then lay down, then curled up.

“Go, go, go!” screamed Leets, dumping another mag. He had three left.

Of the two maquis, Leon, the youngster, made it closest to the treeline, but then a new flare popped and the German fire found him and put him in a beaten zone, and no man survives the beaten zone.

Jerome didn’t make it nearly as far, and Leets was unclear, for he ran himself through a sleet of light and splinter as the Germans tried to bring him down, but in the second before he was hit he saw Jerome jack vertically from his runner’s crouch and go down hard as gravity took hold of his remains.

The bullet struck Leets in the left buttock, blowing through his hip. Man, did he go down, full of spangles and fire flashes and lightning bugs and flies’ wings. His mind emptied; all visible movement ceased in the universe, and it went silent-I am dead, he thought-but he blinked himself alive again and saw SS coming up hard in the light of a new flare, holding their fire, for they wanted someone alive for the info before the execution, and he cursed himself for throwing out the strychnine tablet he’d been issued.

The pain was immense, and he tried to make it go away by rushing a mag change, lifting the ever-loyal, faultless best friend of the Thompson gun, and running another mag, seeming to drive them back or down or whatever.

He was twenty-four.

He didn’t want to die.

He tried to get through another mag change but dropped the heavy weapon. He got a Gammon bomb out but couldn’t get the cap unscrewed. He pulled out his.45, jacked the slide, held it up stupidly without aiming, blinked in the bright light of another flare just overhead and squeezed off a few pointless rounds.

The gun locked back. He saw two Panzergrenadiers quite close with their fancy new rifles and was amazed that at this ultimate moment his lifelong interest in firearms reasserted itself, and he thought for just a second how interesting it would be to ring one of those cool babies out at a range, then take it apart lovingly, taking notes, figuring out what made it go, running tests on the ammo. It would be so damned interesting.

Then the two Germans sat down, as if embarrassed.

A wave of explosions wiped out the reality that was but a few yards ahead of him.

“There, there, Beets, chum,” said Basil. “The fellows are here with a stretcher. I see a bit of bone, but any horse doctor can set that.”

“Basil, I, what, get out of here, oh, for-”

But Basil had turned and was busy running mags through his Sten, as around him, the other maquisards fired whatever weapons they had.

Somehow Leets was on a stretcher and being humped at speed the remaining few yards to the treeline.

“Basil, I-”

“There’s the good chap. Beets, these fellows will take good care of you. Get Leftenant Beets somewhere to medical aid. Get him out of here.”

“Basil, you come, too, come on, Basil, we got the bridge, we can-”

“Oh, someone has to stay to discourage these fellows. They seem so stubborn. But I’ll be along in a bit. We’ll have that chat. Good luck, Beets, and Godspeed.”

Basil turned and disappeared back into the forest. For Leets, it became an ordeal of not passing out as the maquis heaved his sorry ass along a dark path until he seemed to be being slid into some kind of vehicle, and then he did in fact pass out. Neither he nor any other of the man’s army of friends, lovers, and acquaintances ever saw Basil St. Florian again.

On June 9^th, 1944, Major Frank Tyne, U.S.A. attached to OSS, found a florist who would deliver, and he had a bouquet of mums and roses sent to Millie at 72 Grosvenor, Mayfair, office of Colonel David K. E. Bruce.

He got no response.

Finally, on the 11th, he got his nerve up, parked himself on her floor, and finally caught a glimpse of her rushing from one office to another.

“Millie!”

“Oh, Frank.”

“Millie, did you get my flowers?”

Millie seemed both nonplussed and busy. She was clearly anxious to flee but stayed and faced him with a somewhat tense, unpleasant face.

“Yes, Frank, I got them. They were very nice. Who knew there were florists in London in wartime?”

“Wasn’t easy to find one. Listen, Millie, I wanted to apologize about the other night. Really, I don’t know what came over me. I’m so glad I passed out before I did anything inappropriate. I’m just hoping you’ll see a way to forgive me. It would mean so much.”

“Frank,” she touched his hand. “It’s fine. Everyone had too much to drink. Please, don’t worry about it.”

“Thanks. Say, I was wondering if-”

“Frank, there’s so much going on now that we’re ashore. The colonel’s going to the front soon on instructions from General Donovan.”

“Yes, I know, I’ve heard-”

“So his scheduling is a nightmare.”

“Sure, Millie, maybe sometime.”

“Maybe. Say, what happened to Casey, if I may ask?”

“You didn’t hear?”

“Just rumors. Not happy ones.”

“No. They hit the bridge, did some damage, maybe cost elements of Das Reich a day or two, but they were wiped out, along with the French maquis group. Then Das Reich shot fifty hostages. So it was no good, really, a waste. OWI’s going to try to do something with Casey. Maybe a short little movie for the home folks, ‘The Heroes of the Bridge at Nantilles,’ something like that.”

“It’s so sad,” she said. “Sometimes there’s no justice in this world.”

Stephen Hunter would like to thank Helge Fykse, LA6NCA, of Norway, for information on German radio technology.