The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

Jedburgh teams was going to be different. Training the French Resistance, bringing in the arms that could let them fight, and then leading them into battle behind the German lines to destroy the bridges and the communications that would otherwise bring the panzer divisions that would throw the Allied invasion force into the sea. No spying, no skulking about the French countryside in some shabby civilian clothes. He would wear his uniform and fight as a soldier. That was a mission worth training for. Suddenly he felt François’s hand close tightly on his arm.
    “Over there, opposite the island,” the Frenchman breathed. Jack peered into the darkness. The man had eyes like a cat. Maybe there was something, a bulky shape, perhaps some movement. It looked like a lorry. It was hard to tell. “We go round behind them,” François said. “We ambush them.”
    “Careful,” said Jack, his tiredness and his fever quite gone. “It is a favorite trick they use. The tethered goat. They show us a target that looks easy, tempting us to ambush them, when they have the real ambush set up to catch the ambushers. You go right. I go left. We meet on the loch shore. If we see no signs of ambush, then we hit the lorry from the back. If one of us sees an ambush, take it out with a burst from the Sten, and the other rushes the truck. If one of us gets caught, he sets off a Thunderflash to warn the other. See a Thunderflash, then get out of here and back to camp. Hear a Sten, rush the truck.”
    They separated, moving swiftly down the hill, almost instinctively avoiding the loose shale that would betray the sound of their footsteps, skirting rocks that were light enough for a silhouette to stand out. The three-week course had taught them a lot. Jack felt the ground start to flatten beneath his feet, and knelt to stretch out his hand, feeling for a trip wire before the inevitable track that follows the loch shore. Nothing, but he felt the sudden absence of heather, and ridged mud and flint beneath his fingers. This was the track.
    He paused, listened, and then crawled across. No trip wire on the far side. He could see the lorry more clearly now against the water, about fifty yards to his left. No sign of movement. If he were setting up the ambush, it would be straight ahead, one man facing the truck to see any sign of movement against the water, another facing this way to watch the track. The wind was still strong enough down here to cover the sounds of his movement. He leopard-crawled along the slight ditch by the track, aiming to get thirty yards to the flank. Grenade-throwing distance. Cautiously, he parted the thin grass to peer through. A minute passed before he saw the movement, a fleeting blur that could have been a man’s head.
    He slipped the Sten from his shoulder, pulling the bolt back as he rose, and then sprayed the ambush point with a short burst of blanks as he charged it. He changed direction to his left and fired another burst, dropped and rolled to the right, and fired again. Rose and half-darted, half-staggered the last few yards to the ambush and jumped into the depression, to see an outraged sheep scamper complainingly away. A blaze of lights from the truck caught François, charging upon it from the loch side, as two Commando sergeants brought their hands together in slow, ironic applause.
    “Not bad at all, laddie,” came a cheerful Scots voice from his rear. “If Jerry starts putting sheep on duty, you’ll have them cold. But he’s not that short of men, yet.”

    The instructors slept in comfortable rooms in the grim, granite country house. At least, Jack assumed they were comfortable from his own billet in the Nissen hut, a semicircle of corrugated iron that ran with water on warm days and grew a sheen of ice on cold ones. The tiny iron stove in the center of the hut could toast one side of anyone standing over it, while his back froze. His clothes were always damp. There was room to hang only socks above the stove. He and François had been the first of the Jedburgh teams to arrive, and had grabbed the lower bunks closest the stove, and put their kit on a third, to reserve it for the American officer who was supposed to join them.
    “The Americans are always late,” said François. He was lying on his bunk, smoking, as Jack tried to secure his socks so that they would not drop onto the stove and burn. “Three years late in 1914, two years late this time. So they are improving. Maybe our American