Purple Hearts. Майкл Грант
along a road that is the dividing line between the Limousin forest and farm fields, and again, despite seeing unmistakable evidence of tank tracks on the side of the road, they are not stopped.
“Any other time the Boche would have roadblocks every kilometer,” Étienne grumbles.
“It’s an unusual situation,” Rainy allows. “Driving around and hoping to be—”
They hit a pothole in the road and the truck swerves. When Étienne wrestles the rickety vehicle back on the road they hear the unmistakable flapping sound of a popped tire. They pull off and sure enough the right front tire is blown, worn rubber mangled around the rim.
“Do you have a spare?” Rainy asks.
Étienne laughs bitterly. “Spare tire? Why not ask for a golden chariot?”
Rainy suppresses her irritation. Again. “Can you find a spare tire?”
Étienne shrugs. He rolls then lights a cigarette and stands thinking ostentatiously, as Marie and Rainy hike into the woods for a quick bathroom break. When they return Étienne has a map unfolded on the hood of the truck. “Tulle is not far. We have a contact there.”
“Maquis?” Rainy asks.
“Communists.” He spits on the ground. “But they may help us. In any case, we have no choice.”
They drive the truck into the forest, shredding the last of the tire in the process, and cut branches to pile against the sides as camouflage.
“It’s five kilometers,” Étienne says. “You two wait here.”
“I think I’d rather come with you,” Rainy says.
Étienne is quick to understand her motive. “Do you, mademoiselle, propose to distrust me? This is not England, still less America. This is France!”
Marie, Rainy notes, remains silent, watching.
“It’s not a question of trust,” Rainy lies blandly. “I just don’t like waiting in the forest and not knowing.”
In the end the three of them are able to hitch a ride on a trailer being pulled by a tractor. It means sharing a ride with a load of farm implements and sacks of manure, which does nothing to improve Rainy’s mood. They arrive at the outskirts of Tulle, wait until they are well past their destination, then jump off and double back to a small farm.
The farmer is a gnarled, whiskered old man with a total of three teeth. He sees them, says nothing, and jerks his head toward the barn before disappearing into the stone house.
In the barn they find two workmen: a thick-set middle-aged man, and a second man, this one in his early twenties, stripped to the waist and shoveling cow dung into a wheelbarrow held by the older man.
The older man sees them, glances at his companion, and without a word leaves the barn. The young man’s dark eyes narrow at the sight of Étienne, but widen in happy recognition of Marie.
He starts toward her, grinning, then stops, abashed, and snatches up his shirt. He is ready to call her by name, but stops himself. “Mademoiselle, it is good to see you.”
“Marie,” she says, making a deprecating face.
“Marie, is it?” His laugh says he knows it’s an alias. “Good choice, you could certainly be a Marie. And I suppose you must call me Philippe.”
Hands are shaken, introductions made.
Rainy is wary of judging a book by its cover, but her instinctive reaction is that she likes Philippe. He’s bright, alert, quick and not at all bad-looking, though he has eyes only for Marie. Still, she remembers Étienne’s remark about Communists. The Communists, whose primary loyalty is to the party and its Moscow overlords, is not technically an enemy of the United States. Quite the contrary, President Roosevelt bends over backward to excuse Stalin’s brutality in the interests of maintaining a shaky alliance with the communist dictator. But that, Rainy knows, is not the opinion of the military who see the Communists as the likely next enemy, once Hitler is destroyed.
“What brings you to Tulle?” Philippe asks, buttoning his shirt while Marie blushes.
“Our truck blew a tire,” Étienne says. “We hoped you might be able to help.”
“Indeed?” Philippe says. “Well, that is not so easily done. Come with me, please.”
He leads them out the back door of the barn to a crude lean-to with a piece of canvas for a door. The roof is low and slanted, there are no windows, and the candle that Philippe lights illuminates a collapsing cot, an empty crate used as a table, and one chair.
Philippe does not offer the chair. Instead he uses the side of his foot to scuff at the dirt floor and uncover a wooden trapdoor. He pries it up revealing rough-hewn wooden steps. They follow him down into a cool, damp-smelling, dirt-walled cellar. By the light of a single candle, Rainy sees two men.
And to her amazement, they are wearing uniforms. It takes her only a few seconds to realize that these are Royal Air Force uniforms, dirty, sweat-stained, and in one case blood-stained, but unmistakably RAF.
“Gentlemen,” Philippe says, “I have the honor to introduce Mademoiselle Marie, her brother . . .” He hesitates, and Étienne says his name. “Étienne, of course. And this is Lieutenant Alice Jones, of the American army.”
One of the Brits stands up and offers his hand. “Flight Lieutenant David Wickham, and this is my wireless operator, Sergeant Hooper. You’ll have to forgive Hooper, his knee is a bit wobbly.”
Rainy smiles at the inevitable British understatement: the ‘wobbly’ knee is clearly broken, and given the blood it’s a serious fracture. Hooper is not wobbly, he’s crippled.
Hands are shaken. Hooper remains lying on a duplicate of the cots above. Neither Wickham nor Hooper can be over twenty-one, maybe twenty-two years of age. The sergeant is a slight man, with a bent nose and nervous hands.
Flight Lieutenant Wickham looks like a recruiting poster model of an RAF flyer: tall for a pilot, with a wave of blond hair, blue eyes, a clear pale complexion, casual attitude, and an accent that speaks of good schools.
He reminds Rainy uncomfortably of her brother, Aryeh, a marine fighting in the South Pacific. Uncomfortable because any thought of Aryeh comes with anxiety. And uncomfortable too, because she finds herself attracted to Wickham, and that is not a thought that should occupy the same mental space as “reminds me of my brother.”
“They were shot down near Strasbourg,” Philippe says. “They have been brought this far, and now we await an opportunity to move them south into Spain, where they can be repatriated.”
Wickham grins sheepishly and says, “I’m very much afraid that I strayed right into the path of German ack-ack.” Then he frowns. “Everyone jumped, but we became separated after coming down. Our French friends have been sheltering us ever since. Three weeks now. May I ask, Lieutenant: what news of the war?”
The cellar is little more than a hole in the ground, with a plank ceiling low enough to force the six-foot-tall Wickham to crouch slightly. There is a wine rack holding a dozen bottles. A quarter of the room is filled with a pile of charcoal.
Rainy sits on the end of Wickham’s cot. Philippe gallantly brings a chair down from above for Marie. Étienne leans against a battered china cabinet that holds a radio on its top.
“I don’t know anything about the war that you don’t know,” Rainy says. “The Russians are on the move. General Clark took Rome.”
“And the invasion?” Wickham asks.
“We wait constantly on news of the war,” Philippe says. “We expect the signal any day now. Any hour.” He looks questioningly at Rainy.
Rainy shrugs. She has no specific information on the date or time of the invasion. But the fact that she has been sent to spy on the Das Reich, and that her operational plan involves exfiltrating