The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

roll onto the road in case the patrol came back, but we lost control of the thing in the dark and it rolled out on its own, just as we heard the truck coming from le Buisson.” He lit another cigarette from the stump of the one he had been smoking, his hand trembling. “Get my boys some food, can you? And take a look at that leg. He could walk a bit, but the tourniquet needs loosening. He’ll need a friendly doctor.”
    Back in the barn, as McPhee made more soup and the colonial sergeant began loosening the tourniquet in the light of Manners’s red torch, François continued with his tale.
    “There was no time to move it, so we had to ambush the truck right there, as soon as it stopped for the log. It didn’t look suspicious, still half on the bank, and only blocking about half the road. So the truck stopped, and we opened up. One of them got off a burst with the machine gun from the roof of the cab, but luckily he was firing the wrong way and the Marine threw a Gammon bomb, and that was it. We shot two of them trying to scuttle down the road. We lost one dead, and the old man was hit.”
    “Was the truck a write-off?”
    “We pushed it off the road and burned it, took the guns and came back this way. It was easier than I thought, except for burying poor little Jeannot. I don’t think he even fired a shot.” He lit another cigarette. “The boys behaved well. They trust their guns now, and the Gammon bombs. And us. They’ll be even better next time.”
    “Next time won’t be so easy. The Germans aren’t idiots. There’ll be no more single-truck patrols, and they’ll start trying to ambush us.”
    “I know. But I have an idea.” The Frenchman went across to fill his tin cup, puffing on his cigarette between swigs of soup. “What is the most vulnerable but essential part of our operation?”
    “The radio, no question.”
    “Correct, and the big danger is their direction-finding trucks, right?”
    “Right.”
    “How many do they have, for this part of France?”
    “I don’t know, but they’ll be a special unit, corps troops, probably assigned to the Gestapo. No more than a company for this region. Say eight or ten trucks at the most.”
    “And they always hunt in threes?”
    “They have to, to triangulate the bearings on the transmitter.”
    “So with three successful ambushes, we close them down.”
    “You mean we use the radio as bait? Can we afford to take that risk?”
    “We take that risk every time we transmit. Might as well take advantage of it. The thing about the trucks, they are stuck to moving on roads and decent tracks. So we pick our spot, somewhere near a road the trucks must use. And we hit them. It’s not just the specialized trucks; it’s the personnel. Those guys take a lot of training.”
    “Let’s be smart about this. We have to set the trap somewhere outside the area we normally use, because after an attack like that the Gestapo will scream blue murder until the army sends in reinforcements to hunt us down.”
    “Fine, we’ll go east, into the Massif, somewhere the far side of Brive. It’s nearly empty country, not like round here. But we’ll need some more parachute drops, both here and over in the Massif. That will mean one of us going across there to scout out drop zones, probably me, because we’ll have to liaise with the local Maquis. My brother knows the FFI types in Brive, but most of the guys over there are Communists.”
    “So perhaps you aren’t the best chap for the job.”
    “They don’t like British imperialists either. Maybe McPhee is the one to send. We must discuss this with my brother. But there’ll be plenty of work here. Tonight’s work will bring new recruits to train. And a lot of angry Germans to make us keep moving.”
    “I want to keep hitting their railways, taking out the points network. That’s their Achilles’ heel,” Manners insisted. “Take out the points on the east-west line and they can only run one train a day. Take them out on the north-south lines and we close down half of southwestern France. Now the boys know what to do, I think we can use them to set off the charges as a train is coming, so we get the derailment as well as the track.”
    “They are local boys. They won’t do that to passenger trains.”
    “I’d rather derail freight trains. They are tougher to move. They have to bring a mobile crane in to clear it, and there can’t be too many of those on the French rail system.”

    Late in the morning, a