“Too late,” Michael said. He watched the scout cars fanning out, surrounding Bazancourt to the west, north, and south. He heard a commander yelling “Dismount!” in German, and dark figures leaped from the cars even before the wheels had stopped turning. The tank came clanking toward the barn, guarding the village’s eastern side. He’d seen enough to know he was trapped. He lowered himself to the loft. “What’s your name?” he asked the French girl.
“Gabrielle,” she said. “Gaby.”
“All right, Gaby. I don’t know how much experience you have at this, but you’re going to need it all. Are any of the people here pro-Nazi?”
“No. They hate the swine.”
Michael heard a grinding noise: the tank’s turret was swiveling as the machine neared the rear of the barn. “I’ll hide as best I can up here. If-when-the fireworks start, stay out of the way.” He unholstered his.45 and popped a clip of bullets into it. “Good luck,” he told her-but the lamplight was gone, and so was she. The barn-door latch scraped shut. Michael peered through a crack in the boards, saw soldiers with flashlights kicking open the doors of houses. One of the soldiers threw down an incandescent flare, which lit up the entire village with dazzling white light. Then the Nazis began to herd the villagers at gunpoint out of their houses, lining them together around the flare. A tall, lean figure in an officer’s cap walked back and forth before them, and at his side was a second figure, this one huge, with thick shoulders and treetrunk legs.
The tank treads halted. Michael looked out a knothole toward the rear of the barn. The tank had stopped less than fifteen feet away, and its crew of three men had emerged and lit up cigarettes. One of the men had a submachine gun strapped around his shoulder.
“Attention!” Michael heard the German officer shout, in French, at the villagers. He returned to the crack, moving silently, so he could see what was happening. The officer was standing before them, the large figure a few steps behind. The flare light illuminated uplifted pistols, rifles, and submachine guns, ringing the villagers. “We knew a kite flier fell down in this arena!” the officer went on, mangling the French language as he spoke. “We shall now wish to grasp that intruder in our gloves! I ask you, humans of Bazancourt, where is the man we wish to cage?”
Like hell you will, Michael thought, and cocked the.45.
He went back to the knothole. The tank crew was lounging around their machine, talking and laughing boisterously: a boys’ night out. Could he take them? Michael wondered. He could shoot the ones with the submachine guns first, then the one nearest the hatch so the bastard wouldn’t jump down it and slam-
He heard the low growl of another engine and more clanking treads. The tank crew shouted and waved, and Michael watched as a second tank stopped on the dusty road. Two men came out of the hatch and started a conversation about the parachutist that had been reported on the radio. “We’ll make a quick sausage out of him,” promised one of the men on the first tank, waving his cigarette like a saber.
The barn-door latch scraped. Michael crouched where he was, against the hayloft’s rear wall, as the door swung open and the beams of two or three flashlights probed around. “You go first!” he heard one of the soldiers say. Another voice: “Quiet, you ass!” The men came into the barn, following their lights. Michael stayed still, a dark form in shadow, his finger resting lightly on the automatic’s trigger.
In another few seconds Michael realized that they didn’t know if he was hiding here or not. Out in the village square the officer was shouting, “There will be severe penetrations for all those cohabitating with the enemy!” The three soldiers were looking around beneath the hayloft, kicking cans and equipment over to prove they were really doing a thorough job. Then one of them stopped and lifted his flashlight toward the loft.
Michael felt his shoulder prickle as the light grazed it and swung to the right. Toward the hole in the roof.
He smelled scared sweat, and didn’t know if it was the Germans’ or his own.
The beam hit the roof, began to move steadily toward the hole.
Closer. Closer.
“My God!” one of the others said. “Look at this, Rudy!”
The flashlight stopped, less than three feet from the hole’s edge.
“What is it?”
“Here.” There was the noise of bottles clinking. “Calvados! Somebody’s stocked the stuff away in here!”
“Probably some damned officer. The pigs!” The flashlight beam moved, this time away from the hole; it grazed Michael’s knees, but Rudy was already walking toward the bottles of apple brandy the other man had uncovered from their hiding place. “Don’t let Harzer see you taking them!” warned the third soldier, a frightened and boyish voice. Couldn’t be more than seventeen, Michael thought. “No telling what that damned Boots would do to you!”
“Right. Let’s get out of here.” The second soldier speaking again. Bottles clinked. “Wait. Got to finish it up before we leave.”
A bolt drew back; not the door this time, but the mechanism of a submachine gun.
Michael squeezed his body against the wall, cold sweat on his face.
The weapon fired, chattering holes through the wall below the hayloft. Then a second gun spoke in a surly rasp, sending slugs up through the hayloft floor. Hay and bits of wood spun into the air. The third soldier fired up into the hayloft, too, zigzagging a spray of bullets that knocked chunks out of the boards two feet to Michael’s right.
“Hey, you idiots!” shouted one of the tank crewmen when the noise of firing had died. “Stop that target practice through the barn! We’ve got gasoline tins out here!”
“Screw those SS bastards,” Rudy said, in a quiet voice, and then he and the other two soldiers left the barn with their booty of Calvados bottles. The barn door remained ajar.
“Who’s the mayor here?” the officer-Harzer?-was shouting, his voice edgy and enraged. “Who’s in charge? Step forward immediately!”
Michael checked the knothole once more, searching for a way out. He caught a whiff of gasoline; one of the men on the second tank, parked in the road, was pouring fuel from a can into the gasoline portal. Two more cans stood ready for use.
“Now we can converse,” someone said, from beneath the hayloft.
Michael silently turned, crouched down, and waited. Lamplight filled the barn.
“My title is Captain Harzer,” the voice said. “This is my companion, Boots. You’ll notice he’s well clothed to the name.”
“Yes, sir,” an old man answered fearfully.
Michael brushed hay away from bullet holes in the floor and peered down.
Five Germans and an elderly, white-haired Frenchman had entered the barn. Three of the Germans were troopers, wearing field-gray uniforms and their coal-scuttle helmets; they stood near the door, and all of them carried deadly black Schmeisser submachine guns. Harzer was a lean man who held himself in that strict rigidity that Michael associated with devout Nazism: as if the man had an iron bar up his ass all the way to his shoulder blades. Near him stood the man called Boots-the hulking, thick-legged figure Michael had seen in the flare light. Boots was perhaps six three, and weighed in the neighborhood of two hundred sixty or seventy pounds. He wore an aide’s uniform, a gray cap on his sandy-stubbled scalp, and on his feet were polished black leather boots with soles at least two inches thick. In the ruddy glow of the lamps two of the troopers held, the broad, square face of Boots was serene and confident: the face of a killer who enjoys his work.