Mission of Honor

Chapter Eleven

He had always worked late. Ever since he was a young man in occupied France.

Albert Beaudin sat on the terrace of his apartment overlooking Champ de Mars. The night was cool but pleasant. Low, thin clouds were colored a murky orange black by the nighttime lights of Paris. To his left, the aircraft warning lights of the Eiffel Tower winked on and off. The top of the tower flirted with the passing clouds.

Beaudin's earliest memory of the monument was also at night. It was after the Allies had come through Paris. That was when it was finally safe for his father and him to come to the city. What a night that had been. They had ridden for nearly twenty hours straight with little Albeit sprawled in the sidecar of a stolen German staff motorcycle. Albert was used to being up at night. Much of the work he had done was in the dark. But that night was special. He could still smell the diesel fuel. He could still hear his father and himself singing French folk songs as they sped through the countryside. By the time they reached Paris, they had no voices left. Albert had no derriere left either, after bumping around in the sidecar.

But it did not matter. What a journey it had been. What a childhood he had lived.

What a victory they had won.

Maurice Beaudin had worked with Jean LeBeques, the legendary Le Conducteur de Train de la Resistance, the "Train Conductor of the Resistance." LeBeques ran a locomotive between Paris and Lyons. Lyons was where spare parts for the railroad were manufactured. Because of the city's central location and relative proximity to Switzerland, the French Resistance was also based in Lyons. Personnel could be dispatched quickly to other parts of the nation or smuggled to safety in a neutral country.

The Germans always sent a substantial military force with LeBeques. They wanted to make certain he was not bringing supplies to the Die Schlammgleisketten, as the Germans derisively referred to them. "The Mud Crawlers." The Germans were derisive, but they were not dismissive. From the time France surrendered in June of 1940 until the end of the war, the French Resistance was relentless. They sabotaged the German war effort and forced the enemy to keep much-needed resources in France.

Albert and his father were among the earliest members of the resistance. Maurice Beaudin was a widower. He had a small plant that manufactured the fishplates used to join sections of rail. Maurice had known LeBeques for nearly thirty years. Both men happened to share a birthday, March 8, 1883. One evening, shortly after arriving, LeBeques presented Maurice with a cake. Written on the paper doily underneath was a message asking le receptif, the recipient, if he would be willing to fight for a free France. If so, he was to cut an X-shaped notch on the top left corner of the first crate he put on the train. Maurice did so. From that point forward, the men found ways to smuggle ammunition, spare parts for radios, and personnel on LeBeques's trains. By some miracle, both men managed to survive the war. Tragically, if ironically, LeBeques died in a train wreck late in 1945. He was busy transporting former resistance fighters home after the war.

Albert was just six years old at the time. He attended school until two in the afternoon then went to the small factory to sweep. It was important to collect metal filings every day. Iron was scarce, and the scraps were melted down and reused. To this day, in his own munitions factories, the pungent smell of oiled metal, fresh from the lathe, brought Albert back to his youth.

So did the idea of working with other dedicated individuals on a paramilitary undertaking.

Maurice had never hesitated to involve his young son in resistance operations.

If France remained enslaved, Maurice reasoned, what was the point of growing older?

Sometimes Albert had to distract soldiers by fighting with another boy or picking on a young girl. At other times he had to slip things onto the train while the adults created distractions. Throughout the rest of his life, Albert was never able to communicate to others the excitement of risking death. He had seen others, including his fourteen-year-old cousin Samuel, murdered for suspected acts of sabotage. He had watched men and women dragged in front of stone walls and shot, hanged from trees and streetlights, and even lashed to tractors or bales of hay and used for bayonet practice. Any of those things could have happened to Albert. He learned to accept danger as a part of life, risk as a part of reward. Those sensibilities remained with Albeit after the war. Fearlessness enabled him to expand his father's business into aircraft in the 1950s and munitions in the early 1960s.

By the time he was in his midthirties, Albert Beaudin was a very wealthy man. But he had two regrets. The first was that his father died before he saw how vast the Beaudin empire had become. And the second was that France had failed to become a military and political force in the postwar world. The strongest free nation on the European continent, France was weakened militarily and politically by the defeat of its troops in Indochina in 1954 and then in Algeria in 1962. Hoping to restore French prestige in world affairs, France elected resistance leader Charles de Gaulle as president. De Gaulle made military independence from the United States and NATO one of his priorities. Unfortunately, that left France a virtual nonplayer in the Cold War. Instead of being embraced by the Soviet Union and the United States, France wanted to be independent. That left the nation mistrusted by both. The emergence of Germany and Japan as financial powers in the 1960s and 1970s was also something the French had not anticipated. That left France with wine, films, and posters of^the Eiffel Tower as their legacy for the latter twentieth century.

But while the century was finished, Albert Beaudin was not. Growing up as a resistance fighter had taught Albert never to be afraid of anything. It taught him never to accept defeat. And it taught him how to organize a small but devoted band into a powerful force.

Albert heard a jet. He looked up. He watched as a lowflying aircraft threw cones of white light above the clouds. There must be severe storms to the south. Aircraft usually did not fly directly over the city this late.

Albert listened until the roar of the jet engines had faded. Then he let his green eyes move across the rest of the dark Parisian skyline.

There were indeed storms to the south. Storms that were going to sweep the world. Albert found himself staying up at night, recapturing the drama, risk, and excitement of the last great war he fought for his homeland.

However, the results of this war would be different. It would be fought without the loss of French lives. It would be fought in a foreign land. And it would show the world what ingenuity and stealth could accomplish.

It would also do one thing more. It would shift the center of world power from a handful of bellicose nations to a handful of men. Men who were impervious to bombs and sanctions.

Men who would restore their homeland to a prominence it had not known for over two centuries.