the other three stifle laughter beneath broad, conspiratorial grins.
Rainy is not laughing. Landing on French soil in the summer of 1944 is about as dangerous a thing as you can do short of actual combat. This is her second mission into enemy territory. The first one had been a fiasco—unqualified officers making foolish plans had landed her in the last place on earth she or any other member of Army Intelligence wished to be: a Gestapo jail.
Rainy had been afraid then. She is afraid now. Fear often speaks in her mother’s voice, asking why? Why are you doing this, Rainy? You’ll get hurt, Rainy. You’ll die, Rainy.
But she has learned something about fear: you must always listen to it, but you need not give in to it.
Rainy grits her teeth and wishes the sailors would act a little less like, well, boys. Maybe they aren’t worried about being picked up by the Gestapo or the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) or even the Abwehr, but she is. The Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence arm of the SS, are animals like the Gestapo. From the Abwehr she would have expected firm but proper treatment—if she were wearing a uniform—the Abwehr are soldiers, after all. But Rainy is not wearing a uniform, she is dressed in widow’s weeds, a worn old black dress shaped as stylishly as a potato sack, an obviously hand-knitted black sweater, a droopy, patched overcoat and chunky black oxfords. The Abwehr might hang her on the spot as a spy, while the Gestapo or the SD would torture her and then put her up against a wall.
That thought comes with vivid memories of men and women who she had not known, shoved against a wall she had not been able to see. She had heard their cries, their pleas for mercy, and their brave patriotic songs cut short by the crash of rifle fire. But all she had been able to see from her vantage point was their blood running down over the filthy window of her cell.
The remaining member of the little boat’s crew is an older man. He’s the one seething and, from time to time, shaking his head. Rainy shifts down the bench.
“Don’t let it trouble you,” she says in a barely audible whisper near the older rower’s ear. “I don’t.”
“This new captain’s a . . .” the sailor pauses, searching for the appropriate insult before coming up with, “. . . a landsman.”
It amuses and even touches Rainy that the old petty officer is concerned for her feelings. The trip down from Southampton to this insignificant town on the Bay of Biscay has not been pleasant. An undisciplined and all-male crew had run through every version of leer, wolf whistle and mangled French proposition. The phrase “voulez vous couchez avec moi ce soir, ”—would you sleep with me this evening—had been carefully learned by every serviceman with even a slight chance of reaching France, where the women were reputed to be plentiful and plenty ready. The line had been repeatedly tried out on Rainy.
There had also been a couple of unfunny practical jokes, the sort of pranks no one would have dreamed of playing on a male officer, not even a lowly second lieutenant. Not even a lowly army second lieutenant aboard a naval vessel.
Just before Rainy had gone over the side and climbed down to the waiting rubber boat, half a dozen sailors had said a cheery “farewell” by exposing themselves.
Yes. Definitely not the sort of thing enlisted men would have pulled on a male officer.
But then, Rainy reminds herself, they are boys, mostly. For most of them it is their first time at sea aside from training, the closest they have come to the war. In many cases it is their first time away from home, certainly their first time abroad.
Anyway, she has bigger worries.
They come to shallow water, with the waves piling up a bit, seizing and surging the boat forward. A single light shines in the dark village, perhaps over the church door. Off to the left Rainy sees the old Napoleonic-era Vauban fort, just like she’s seen in the aerial photographs. It is a square with stumpy towers at the corners and a squat stone keep rising in the middle. It even has a moat according to the photos.
They are to pass the fort then turn toward shore. A smaller beach will be there and—she profoundly hopes—a member of the FFI, the French Forces of the Interior, which people mostly called the French Resistance, or the maquis.
If there is no one waiting for her, the orders say she is to abort the mission and return to the destroyer. This makes sense unless the ship you’re returning to is like some disreputable fraternity house.
The contact had better be there.
The rowers are no longer thinking of giggling by the time the bow scrapes sand—it has been a long, hard row. The destroyer captain, in addition to being no disciplinarian and a landsman, is not overly brave and has kept his ship well out of sight of the shore.
To her left now a bluff blocks her view of the Vauban fort. To her right the beach curves in a perfect crescent. There are trees along the shore, but of the sort that shade homes, not of the sort that conceal machine-gun emplacements.
She hopes.
One of the sailors is panting far too loudly.
“Silence!” Rainy snaps in an urgent whisper.
“Who the fug do you think—” the sailor says in a nearly normal speaking voice which anyone—French or German—anyone within a hundred yards could hear.
Rainy puts the barrel of her Walther PPK—a German weapon, a souvenir—against the bridge of his nose. He goes cross-eyed to focus on it.
She puts a finger to her lips and says, “Shhh.”
Silence. It extends. Nothing but the soft shush shush s-i-i-i-g-h of the waves and the flapping of a decorative flag on the short pole that marks the rendezvous.
Then comes the crunch of footsteps on sand. Rainy strains to hear. Yes, just one set of feet. One person.
He appears as formless movement within shadow, then comes at last to where the fluorescence of the hissing surf illuminates his . . . no, her face.
In French Rainy says, “Où est la tortue? ” Which in English means, “Where is the tortoise?”
A girl’s voice, high-pitched despite her attempt to lower it to a husky whisper, says, “Allée à la mer. ” Gone to sea.
“Is it the season for it?”
“Tortoise is always in season.”
With the exchange of code phrases concluded, Rainy exhales. “All right, Navy. Put my gear ashore and you are free to go.” There’s some grumbling, but it’s very, very quiet grumbling.
Rainy slips the automatic pistol into the leather holster sewn into the back lining of her formless black coat.
“I’m Lieutenant Jones. Alice Jones.” She extends her hand.
The girl, a rather lovely young woman of maybe seventeen, shakes her hand firmly. “Marie DuPont.”
This, like Alice Jones, is most likely an alias.
“I have some things to carry, if you don’t mind helping,” Rainy says.
“Of course!”
They divide the weight: a radio encased in a rubberized, waterproof container; a locked tin box containing five thousand dollars’ worth of counterfeit Vichy French francs and German Reichsmarks; a satchel containing thirty-two pounds of TNT in half-pound blocks helpfully labeled, “High Explosive” and “TNT” in red block letters on tan cardboard, and, “Dangerous;” a separate, smaller canvas pouch with thirty-two fuses; and a broken-down-for-easier-shipping Fusil Mitrailleur Modèle 1924 M29, the standard French infantry light machine gun, with two hundred rounds of ammunition.
All told it is something like a hundred and twenty-five pounds of gear and it is a struggle for the two of them to drag and haul most of it across the beach to the road. Waiting there is an aged Renault, still with wooden spoked wheels, which has been somewhat crudely remodeled as a panel truck.
Seeing