Authors: Robert Rigby
Codename Eagle
To Reynard
South-west France, autumn 1940
G
aston Rouzard was in a foul temper. He had drunk far too much cheap red wine the previous evening and fallen into a troubled sleep in a lumpy armchair.
Soon after dawn he was roughly shaken awake by his grinning, unsympathetic friend, Raymond Martel, and without breakfast or even his usual cup of strong black coffee, he hurried to Chalabre station to catch the first train to Lavelanet, where he lived and worked as a gendarme, and where he was due to go on duty.
When Gaston bustled, panting and sweating, into the gendarmerie, the phone was ringing. He flinched as the sound clanged in his thudding head, then picked up the receiver and barked into the mouthpiece: “Yes, what is it?”
In a few urgent words the caller explained the situation. An explosive device had been detonated beneath a railway bridge on an isolated stretch of track between Lavelanet and Foix. Part of the bridge was down and the track was blocked; trains could not pass. It was chaos, and it needed sorting.
“Who is this?” Gaston growled.
“Look, it’s dangerous there; I have to get back. And you’d better come quick,” the caller replied before hanging up.
The call did not improve Gaston’s temper. “More trouble,” he moaned, walking out of the gendarmerie. “So many troublemakers, and always me who has to sort them out.”
Gaston had never learned to drive, so he ignored the Citroën in the police yard and went to the motorized bicycle resting against one wall.
He hated riding the thing: he was too big for it and he felt stupid when the people of Lavelanet saw him chugging slowly through the streets. But he had no option; he was alone on duty so there was no one else to go to the incident.
He mounted the bicycle, pushed the small motor into position against the front wheel and pedalled away. The two-stroke engine coughed into life.
Gaston felt as grubby as he looked – and, he realized, smelled. He was unwashed and unshaven, alcohol seemed to be oozing from every pore in his body, there was a sour, bitter taste in his mouth and he still hadn’t had the cup of strong coffee he craved.
Fortunately, the scene of the incident wasn’t too far out of town, and soon he was turning off the main road onto what was little more than a farm track with wide fields on either side.
The bicycle bounced over dried mud and deep ruts, and Gaston’s mood darkened with each bump and shudder. He couldn’t afford to be away from Lavelanet this morning. He needed to know about last night’s mission. Had it been as successful as he anticipated? If all had gone to plan, it meant success for him and not for his enemies.
“I hope they got everything they deserve,” he grunted, smiling for the first time that day.
There were no houses or farm buildings on the narrow track, just the occasional stand of wind-bent trees and clump of scrubby bush. After five minutes of bumping along in a slow curve, there was a sudden, hard right turn where the road met the railway line and ran alongside it as the ground sloped sharply downwards.
The damaged bridge was less than a mile ahead. Gaston knew the spot; he’d passed beneath the bridge many times on train journeys. It went under another small road used mainly by farm vehicles and carts.
“Why do they do it?” Gaston said aloud, his temper rising again. “Kids. I’ll bet it was kids – some pathetic gesture over the war. But the war has nothing to do with us any more. We’re out of it.”
He pulled the bicycle to a standstill at a place where a rusted metal water trough blocked the way, marking the end of the road. Gaston would have to walk the last hundred metres or so.
Easing himself off the saddle, he wearily rested the machine against the trough and was suddenly chilled by the stiff breeze sweeping down from the Pyrenees. He glanced up towards the towering peaks and wondered again about the mission that had taken place last night. He would hear the news soon enough.
Gaston shivered and then blinked in the bright daylight, still groggy from the session of heavy drinking. Reaching down, he dipped the fingers of one hand into the murky water in the trough. It was icy. Winter was coming.
He ran two wet fingers across his aching brow, flinched, then trudged forward, pushing aside thin, straggling branches as the track narrowed to a footpath.
“Hello!” he called, glimpsing the bridge through the bushes and overhanging branches. “I’m here! Gaston Rouzard! Gendarme! Where are you?”
There was no answer. The only sound was the distant cawing of crows.
“Bloody typical,” Gaston said, pushing on. “They call me to sort things out and then leave me to it. How am I supposed to repair a bridge? I’m a policeman, not a bloody railway engineer.”
The bridge sat in a clearing, and as Gaston nudged aside the last branch blocking his view, his eyes widened and he stopped walking. There was no sign of any damage. No fallen bricks or stone, no rubble of any description on the track.
“What the…? What’s going on here?”
Warily, he stepped over the closest rail and on to the track, his boots crunching on the ballast bed and tarred wooden sleepers as he got closer to the bridge. “Must be on the other side,” he muttered.
He walked under the single arch into shadow and gloom. The bricks above his head were damp and mossy, but none had fallen onto the track. It looked perfectly clear in both directions.
Gaston sighed angrily as he moved back into the light. “It’s a bloody joke,” he snarled. “Someone’s got me out here on a wild goose chase!”
“No, Gaston,” a voice behind him said. “It’s not a joke.”
Gaston spun around and then stared. “You! What are you doing here?”
The man facing him didn’t reply.
“Look,” Gaston snapped, “I don’t have time for playing games. You of all people should know that.”
“It’s no game, Gaston.”
“Then what’s going on? Why here? We could have met in town.”
“No. Not this time.”
“What are you talking about?” The anger in Gaston’s eyes changed to a look of concern. “Last night,” he said quickly. “Did something go wrong last night?”
“Oh, yes, something went wrong. Something went
very
wrong. They found out about Yvette Bigou.”
“Yvette? But how – how could they?”
“Because she failed the one task she was given. So I dealt with her before they could get to her.”
“Dealt with her? I don’t…”
Gaston fell silent as he watched the man pull a snub-nosed pistol from the right pocket of his jacket.
“And now, Gaston, I have to deal with you. You’re too much of a liability.”
“No. No, wait,” Gaston gasped. “No, that’s impossible. You can’t shoot me, not you… I’m taking over … me…”
His trembling hands snatched at the holster on his belt, fingers fumbling desperately at the flap covering his police issue handgun.
But it was already too late. The pistol spat out a round. Gaston heard the sound just as the bullet punched into his chest and sent him sprawling to the ground beside the track.
He lay there, terrified and bewildered, his face in the dirt. There was a roaring in his ears, tears in his eyes and a sudden sweet taste in his mouth. He so desperately needed that cup of coffee to wash away the sweet taste in his mouth.
He heard footsteps and the pistol sounded again.
And then Gaston knew no more.
April 1941. Day One.
P
aul Hansen stared moodily at the flickering flames in the wood-burning stove; its double-hinged doors were wide open for maximum heat.
The steady ticking of the slate clock invaded Paul’s thoughts and he glanced across at it; why did clocks always tick more loudly when you were waiting for something to happen? It was almost time for the BBC news bulletin from London. Listening to BBC broadcasts was illegal in France, even in the Free Zone. But those who wanted to know about the progress of the war took the risk and listened anyway. And Paul Hansen had an almost obsessive need to know about the progress of the war.
It had been a long and bone-achingly cold winter. Paul could scarcely believe that the sun-drenched south-west France, which he’d first encountered at the end of the previous summer, could turn so bitingly cold in wintertime. Growing up in England and Belgium, he had never experienced such cold. There had been frosty days, ice and occasionally thick snow, of course, but nothing remotely like the winter that had just ended. On some days, with smoke from the stoves in every home in Lavelanet climbing into low grey cloud, the temperature had plummeted to minus 19 or 20 degrees.
And throughout those hard months, each time Paul gazed towards the snow-topped peaks of the Pyrenees, he was reminded of his failed attempt to cross those mountains into Spain, and of the brutal deaths that marked that failure. The memory was always with him, like so many other memories of the past months.
But at last spring was arriving. Heavy rains were washing away the snow from the lower slopes, swelling the rivers; trees were putting on new leaves and the ground was warming. Most nights were still bitterly cold though, and tonight was no exception.
Paul felt restless and unsettled. He turned to his friend Didier Brunet, who was sitting, equally thoughtful, in a second chair facing the stove.
“Time for the news,” Paul said.
Didier got up and went to the radio set perched on a cupboard. He switched it on and the dull yellow light illuminating the dial grew brighter as the valve warmed. The set was never left tuned to London; it was wise to be careful, even in the Free Zone.
The radio whined and whistled as Didier turned the dial; fragments of French and German came through fleetingly before the familiar chimes of Big Ben sounded. Didier settled back into his chair as the newsreader began to speak.
The news was not good. The Germans’ blitz of London and other major cities was continuing. There had been air raids on Portsmouth, Plymouth and Bristol, and in Scotland, the Luftwaffe had bombed Glasgow and the shipping area along the River Clyde. Fighting between German and British troops in Africa was intensifying and, reading between the lines, it appeared that the enemy was gaining the upper hand. And in the Atlantic, German U-boats had struck again at merchant shipping, inflicting heavy losses.
Paul spoke English as well as he spoke French, but Didier understood only the words and phrases he had picked up from his friend and the BBC, so as the broadcast continued, he frequently asked Paul to translate.
When the bulletin was over and the set switched off, they lapsed into a gloomy silence, with Paul’s mood darkening even more. He had recently turned seventeen, but the events of the previous seven or eight months had forced him to grow up quickly. He picked out a log from the wicker basket and tossed it into the open stove. Sparks hissed and crackled, and burning ashes spat onto the wooden floorboards.