The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

loom of a rock promised some relief from the weather. He nudged the Frenchman beside him, edging him across to the rock. Then Jack took out his compass, and checked the bearing again.
    “Remember what they told us,” he said, speaking in French. “Five minutes rest every hour.” He knelt down, shuffled off his pack, and began kneading the calves and thighs of his partner, who had ducked his head inside his parka to light a cigarette. Jack had long ago given up trying to stop François from smoking on duty. Last thing at night, he stubbed one out, half-smoked, and woke in the morning to relight it. The Frenchman’s legs were trembling with the strain of the climb.
    “I have never understood your English masochism. In all the war I have seen, in all the battles I have endured, I never once had to march. I took aircraft and stole cars, borrowed motorbikes and even a bicycle. But never marched,” said François. “You only make us do this to keep us busy, like you make your conscripts paint the coal white in the barracks and pick up all the matches from the parade ground.”
    “Remember what we learned from Rommel—train hard, and fight easy,” said the Englishman, slapping François’s calf to signal the brief massage was over. “Your turn.”
    François knelt and began rubbing warmth into the Englishman’s legs. It felt blissful, feeling his blood flow again. He wanted to close his eyes and savor it, but this was an exercise. He had to keep his eyes open. Christ knows when an instructor would jump out from behind a rock, stage a mock ambush, haul them in for another of the mock interrogations.
    “Don’t talk to me about your bloody Rommel,” said François. “That’s the trouble with you English. You admire your enemies. The more they beat you, the more you worship them as honorary English gentlemen.”
    “We beat Rommel,” Jack said calmly. “We beat the living daylights out of Rommel and his panzers. You know that, François, you were there. But first we had to learn his lesson.”
    “I know. Train hard, fight easy. Train together, never fight apart. I learned it, too, even before you. We had Rommel and his 7th Division coming at us and through us in 1940.” The last words were torn out of his mouth by the wind’s rising howl. François stood up, slapping his hands together, spitting out his cigarette, shouldering the pack, and preparing to move off. “And we held him off for a week at Bir Hakeim, even with those silly little antitank guns you gave us.”
    “You’re forgetting something,” said the Englishman. François shrugged and knelt to pick up the glowing ember of the cigarette, squeezing out the glow with his hardened fingers, then shredding the tobacco into the wind, screwing up the tiny shred of paper and stuffing it into a pocket. No traces. They marched on down the hill toward the loch, the ground getting steadily wetter, both men scanning the shore and the dead ground for signs of ambush. There would be one, somewhere before the end of the exercise.
    Jack Manners needed no reminding. That was when they had met, in that dreadful summer of 1942 when Rommel’s Afrika Korps had broken through the British lines south of Tobruk, and destroyed the Free French at Bir Hakeim with day after day of tank and Stuka bombardment. Jerry had picked off the undergunned and underarmored British tanks in his usual style and rolled them all the way back to El Alamein. Jack, on leave in Cairo, had suddenly been called in as a French-speaker to help organize a reception for the pitiful remnants of General Koenig’s Free French garrison. François had got out on a German motorbike, a BMW he had taken from a dispatch rider in an ambush, and ridden north to join the British and keep on fighting. That was the meeting, Jack supposed, that made this partnership and this posting and this blisteringly bloody training course in Argylle inevitable. But if he were honest with himself, he’d have volunteered for SOE anyway.
    Special Operations Executive, fulfilling Churchill’s orders to “set Europe ablaze,” was how the lecturers told it. They hadn’t done much in the past three years. A few escape lines to get downed RAF pilots out of Occupied France and into Spain, a few sabotage operations, some intelligence tapped out on wireless by frightened operators waiting for the German direction-finding trucks to track them down. He would never have volunteered for that. But this new operation of the