The Bullet Garden

Roger

“No, no,” said Basil St. Florian. “Bren guns. We need the Bren guns. It is simply not feasible without Bren guns. Surely you understand?”

Yes, 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 Tulle, Department of Corrèze, in the region of Limousin, 250 miles south and east of Paris. Basil had just dropped in the night before, with an 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. FTP Communists, FFL 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.”

“I will not give you Bren guns,” said Roger, “and that is final. Long live the 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—”

“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? 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, noble. He is a walking myth. Listen to him.”

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

“I say, Lieutenant, what was the moniker again?” He thought it was remarkable that the name kept slipping away on him. They had trained together at Milton Hall outside London for this little picnic for six or so weeks, but it kept slipping away, and whenever it did, it took Basil wholly out of where he was and turned his attention to the mystery of its disappearance.

“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 seven and fourteen 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, this one, 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 thrust of an epiphany.

“It’s because you’re all so similar,” he said, as if he’d given the matter a great deal of right proper Oxonian 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. It goes to your face and turns you rather ballonishish, and it’s bloody 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.

“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 Tulle 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 silencers. 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. I need two Brens on the road from Tulle 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.”

He went on to explain the ballistic arcana of the circumstance, citing bullet weight, composition, inherent accuracy, muzzle energy and velocity, down to numbers as per cartridge. It was very impressive — if you were twelve. Here it was met with eyes pickled in distraction by all involved.

“Right,” said Basil. “Well presented, Lieutenant Bates. Quite fascinating. Now see here, Monsieur Roger—”

“Non!” said Roger, spraying them with garlic. He was a butcher, immense and powerful but also garrulous and intractable. He’d fought 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 Das Reich using the bridge to rush Tiger 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 Bates—”

“Leets.”

“Leets, yes, of course… whether Lieutenant Leets and his team of maquisards 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, ‘Lieutenant Bates, you must die, that is all there is to it’?”

“Yes, it’s nothing,” said Roger, looking like he had a train to catch as he turned to Leets. “ ‘Lieutenant Bates, 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 cinema-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, Lieutenant. You get pranged. Sad, unjust, but inescapable. Fate, I gather. Ours 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 tree line. 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 Minnesotas 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 red or white guerillas.”

“Yet they can’t really be separated, can they? It’s always so complicated, haven’t you noticed? Politics, politics, politics, it 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 St. Florian was 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 where 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 Hall was “It’s all a racket, you know. Our nobs are trying to wipe out their nobs so they can get all the wog gold; that’s what it’s really all about. Our job is to make the world safe for Anglo-American nobs.”

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

“The Germans have radios.”

“We’re not Germans. We’re the Allies, 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 Tulle 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 eleven oh three 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 up his bum, I enter the garrison headquarters, all Savoyed 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 Jack Cairncross of the Code and Cypher School at some grotesque country monstrosity. He’s some kind of higher pooh-bah 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 reds. 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 Bates — er, Leets — but Basil just smiled, and Leets realized he meant Moscow.

Basil

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 accouterments, badges, and dinky geegaws, but Basil knew or at least believed that with enough charisma he could get through anything.

And thus, at 11 a.m., as Leets and three maquisards from Group Phillippe prepared to blow up a deserted farmhouse a half mile out of town the other way from the bridge, Basil walked masterfully to the gate of the garrison HQ of the 113th Field Flak Battalion, the lucky air boys who controlled security here in Tulle. The explosion had the predictable effect on the air boys, who panicked, grabbed weapons and other dangerous, frightening (to them) 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 château, 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, as the vivid clutter on his chest indicated. One medal in particular was an emblem of a tank, and underneath it hung three little plates of some sort. The other stuff was the usual porridge, and it all signified martial valor, very impressive to the distinctly non-militaristic Luftwaffers who didn’t know tuppence about such stuff but recognized what they took to be the genuine item when it appeared.

Basil got to the radio van easily enough, chased the duty sergeant away by proclaiming himself Major Strasser — he’d seen Casablanca, of course, and knew no German had — of Section III-B Abwehr Paris, working for the legendary Herr Major Dieter Macht, whom Basil actually knew.

He faced a bank of gear, all of it rather scienced-up in an array of dials, switches, knobs, and gauges set in shiny Bakelite.

The transceiver turned out to be a 15 W.S. E.b., 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 were very advanced. 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.

Die Maschine was very Teutonic. It had labels and sub-labels everywhere, switches, dials, wires, the German gestalt in one instrument, insanely well-ordered yet somewhat over-engineered 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 — the noise of static was 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 whoever was listening would have to weigh the English heavily, get interpretation from analysts, and alert command; the whole process had to take days. He decided just to talk, as if from a club in Soho.

“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 Eton, ’28 through ’32? Big fellow, batsman, ginger. I was on the Harrow eleven. June 23, ’33. You got a century that day, out for 126 wasn’t it?”

“Actually, it was 127, edged it to third slip.”

“Ah, right. The wicket was deteriorating a bit, funny bounce. Good showing, though. You had a smashing classic cover drive. Beautiful to watch.”

“The god of batsmen smiled upon me that day.”

“I was at fine leg, damned good if I say so myself. I dismissed you, finally. You smiled at me. Lord, I never saw such a striker.”

“I remember. Who knew we’d meet again like this? Now, look here, I’m trying to reach the code mucky-mucks at that ghastly Toad Hall. Chap named Jack Cairncross. Can you help?”

“I shouldn’t give out information.”

“Old man, it’s not like I’m just anybody. I remember you. Reddish hair, freckled, looked like you wanted to cosh me. 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. Know which hut he’s in?”

“No idea. Can you help?”

“I can get you Bletchley Central. Let me see, yes, via the day code they’d be King-Six-Orange, then. Let’s make you Freddie-Seven-Pip. I’m going to have Evers do a patch.”

“Thanks ever so much.”

Basil waited, examining his fingernails, looking about for something to drink. A nice bottle, say, of something red from ’34, anything would do, ’34 was such a fine year. He yawned. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. When would this Evers fellow—

“Identify, please.”

“Is this King-Six-Orange?”

“Identify, please.”

“Freddie-Seven-Pip. Looking to speak with your man Jack Cairncross. Put him on, do you mind?”

“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.”

“I can’t remember. Something like Freddie-Pip. Listen carefully: I am in a bother and I need to talk to Jack. It’s war business, not gossip.”

“Where are you?”

“In Tulle. Tulle, France.”

“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 SOE. You know, the dagger boys. I’m actually at a Jerry radio and at any moment Jerry will return. Now, I have to talk to Jack. Please, play up for the game.”

“SOE, public school, weekends in the country, all that 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.”

“He is, in fact, no longer here. The Scot beggar has left us for the nobs at Six.”

“Can you patch me through, then? It’s rather urgent.” Basil could hear hubbub in the yard. Had the air boys returned?

“I suppose I must, Seven-Pip,” said his inquisitor with a tragic sigh.

More clicking and buzzing and whatever magic lurked in the wires and antennae of His Majesty’s secret apparatus was again put to the test, until somehow Basil’s voice had been repurposed to the rotting old buildings on Broadway.

“Station K. Identify.”

“Ah, I think it’s something Seven-Pip. Does that help?”

“Observe security protocols, if you please.”

“Look here, it’s one of your old boys, Basil St. Florian. Everyone at Broadway knows Basil St. Florian.”

“I need the code word before—”

“FREDDIE! That’s it. Freddie-Seven-Pip!”

Authenticated, Basil waited again until he was shunted at last to some office or other, one hoped close enough to the target.

“Philby.”

“Yes, see here, I need to speak with — Kim? Kim Philby, can that be you?”

“It is indeed, Basil. Why, I’d know that voice anywhere! Lord, how I’ve missed those nights we tried to empty all the gin bottles in Soho.”

“What gay lads we were!”

“You’re off blowing up Jerry’s kitchens, are you?”

“Actually, Kim, I am. And that’s why I need a chat with your chap Cairncross.”

“That one? The Scot? Dour as haggis in vinegar.”

“Can you get him on the blower for me?”

“Of course. But Basil, do call back, anytime. I’d love to hear your adventures. You’ve much to tell, I’m sure.”

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

“Yes, hullo.”

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

“Who?”

“We met at the Citadel briefing with all the other senior code breakers. I’m with one of the hugger-mugger outfits. Was all banged up. Last year in the war rooms.”

“Oh, that. Rather fuzzy, but if you say so.”

“Right, Jack. Now, see, here’s the thing. I need a favor, do you mind?”

“Well, depending, of course.”

“I’m to go with some rough chaps tonight to set off a firecracker under a bridge. Nasty work, but they say it has to be done.”

“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—”

“Who did you say you were? Good heavens, man. 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, eh? Let’s put it this way: if one had Uncle Joe’s ear, one might ask that Group Roger in Tulle vicinity pitch in with Brens to help Group Phillippe. That’s all. Have you got that?”

“Roger, Brens, Phillippe, Tulle.”

“Thanks, old man.”

“It’s not like you can just ring them up, you know. But I’ll give it a whirl.”

“There’s the lad.”

Basil put the microphone down, unhooked the earphones from around his head, and looked up into the eyes of an Oberleutnant and two sergeants with machine pistols.

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 château that served as the 113th Luftwaffe Field Flak Battalion’s headquarters and garrison. He held an M1 Thompson submachine gun low, out of sight, and wore a French rain slicker, rubbery, and a plowman’s shabby 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 of the Horse Guard 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 hell. 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 Luftwaffe Field Flak Battalion 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 maquisards, by back streets and fence jumping, were already there.

“What the hell?”

“Well, I reached Jack. 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-34. Good god, I hope none of the fellows — they seemed like good lads — try that sort of thing on their own against a Cromwell. 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 stopped 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 Jack had been in the same room. Amazing, these technical things these days. Now, what’s for dinner?”

Leets

Leets applied the last of the burnt cork to his face. Burning corks had turned out to be no picnic, but finally he managed to do a reasonable job of masquerading his broad, uninteresting, and very white American balloon face against the darkness. He looked like a potato that had fallen off a truck.

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, 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. They were all ready to have their caps unscrewed, their linen lines secured and 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, model of 1942, 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. Then, too, a Colt .45 automatic on the web belt, seven fat cartridges in the mag, two more mags on a pouch on the web, 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, and time pencils — that is, Delay Switch No. 10—a tin of five of them in the satchel with the 808 for quick deployment. He weighed about a thousand pounds.

It wouldn’t be a sneak-and-plant-and-run job. It would be more like a 1934 bank job: go in shooting, take (in this case, plant) the loot, and run. It should work but if reinforcements from Tulle got there before they made it to the woods, they’d be dead ducks, as the Germans — even incompetent Luftwaffers — could hose them down with MG-42 fire from the guns mounted on the trucks.

That’s where the Brens came in. The Brens could drive the trucks back, even destroy them, scatter the easily frightened Luftwaffers. The whole thing turned on the Brens.

“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 Tulle, 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 guns.” 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 get it done.”

“Well said, Bates. I’ll be with the other boys in the wood line. We’ll lay down fire from our end.”

“You can’t see well enough to do any good, and that goddamn little peashooter won’t frighten anyone.” Leets indicated the Sten machine carbine that hung around Basil by sling and looked as though it had been assembled from random tubes out of the discard bin by a committee of dull plumbers — a 9mm sub 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.

“Bates, it can’t be helped that their stuff is so much better than our stuff. We make do with what is. We do our bit, that’s all. You know the tune: Guns and drums and drums and guns, hurroo, hurroo.”

“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, Bates. Just go blow up your damned bridge and it’s back to tea and jam.”

The Bridge

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 from Otto Graham 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 tin pot of a thing powered seemingly by rubber bands. Chut-chut-chut, it went. Leon drove. Leets was in the front 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, since 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 grasped 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, 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 Citroën 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 delicate 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 pivoted, brought the gun to his shoulder, zeroed in on the guardhouse through the aperture sight to the wedge at the 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, glass shattered, a door broke, punctured, and fell.

The gun empty, he reached into his pouch pocket and pulled 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 Graham — style. As the bomb sailed through the air, its weighted linen wrap unfurled, and when it separated it popped a restraining pin 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 blade of light and percussion, making Leets blink, stagger, have a momentary loss of reality. So fucking loud! His men were next to him, emptying Stens into the wreckage and at fleeing 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.

He 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 reloaded 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 fifty-six-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 the tin of the time pencils, and beheld the five six-inch-long brass tubes, each with a tin-wrapped nodule at the end. The problem with them, god dammit, 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 ampule ate through a restraining wire that, when it yielded, allowed the spring-driven needle to plunge into the primer, which went bang, causing the larger, encasing 808 to go bang as well.

So Leets took them out now, all five of them, discarded the tin, and stomped hard on the proper ends of the pencils. Immediately a new odor arrived at his nose, that of the just-released cupric chloride as it sloshed forward from the shattered vials in five pencils and began to eat at the metal. He wanted them cooking now, eating up the minutes so that when he and the boys fled, the Germans didn’t have time 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 lowered himself 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 stream bed below. Were they shooting at him? But then he recognized the glorious workman’s hammer-like bashing of the Bren guns, knowable because of their wonderfully slow rate of fire, which enabled gunners to stay longer on target than our poor Joes with their faster-shooting BARs.

Goddamn, good old Basil! Basil, you snotty, arrogant, 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.

“Eight oh eight, 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 was secure enough to consider it 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.

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 again.

He reached into his bellows pocket carefully, since it was at a radical angle and the pencils could easily slip out. Then, one by one, he removed the pencils and jammed them into the wad of 808 stuffed 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 maquisard 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, 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 tree line 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 scuttle over the crest of the road, stop, and begin to disgorge troops — many of them — while on top a soldier unlimbered an MG-42.

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, basically antiaircraft gunners; their rifle marksmanship and combat aggression had to be somewhat deficient. It was dark; untrained, unbloodied 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 his three musketeers, “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. Three rounds, no more. 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, which would show that Jerry had zeroed in 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 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,” with a high rate of fire. Oh, fuck, they could really lay fire with that sonofabitch.

How did they get here so fast?

Another flare popped, and then another, and the whole scene lit up, this puny French river valley, he and his three maquisards racing uphill 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 Panzergrenadiers 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. backlot 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 remember. 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 808ed 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 maquisards, Leon, the youngster, made it closest to the tree line, and 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 had not gotten clear either, 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 and decreed it unto the earth.

The bullet struck Leets in the left 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 cyanide 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.

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, Bates, chum,” said Basil. “The fellows are here with a stretcher. I don’t see any splintered bone, just huge purple smear from bum to cod. You might even live.”

“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 tree line.

“Basil, I—”

“There’s the good chap, Bates, these fellows will take good care of you. Get Lieutenant Bates 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, Bates, and Godspeed.”

Basil turned and disappeared back into the forest. For Leets, it became an ordeal of not passing out as the maquisards 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. But Basil was gone. He had disappeared into the great maw of the war, swallowed whole, for what? Well, not much of anything — a twisted bridge span.

And then he put it together. Someone ordered the Brens to withdraw, leaving us uncovered. Whoever, however, whenever, it was inescapable: We were betrayed.