“But they’re more likely to notice us carrying the stuff at night,” Skorzeny argued. “You carry boxes during the day, you’re a workman. You carry boxes at night, if you’re lucky people think you’re a burglar on your way to do a job. You aren’t so lucky, they think you’ve already done it and they try to rob you.”
“No,” Jager said yet again. “The park is just a little ways away-that’s why we took this flat, remember? We can carry all our gear in one trip, set up in the middle of that nice stand of elms we found, and start firing. We can get off eight or ten bombs in a minute or so and then get the hell out of there. What could be better than that?”
“Watching the fur fly,” Skorzeny answered without hesitation. Then he sighed. “I don’t suppose we could do that anyway. Wouldn’t be a good idea to walk past the factory on our way out of town.”
“Why?” Jager said in mock astonishment. “Just because we’ll have lobbed eight or ten bombs full of Tabun into it and around the neighborhood? All we’d have to do is hold our breath as we went by.”
“You’re right-maybe we could get away with it.” Before Jager could explode, Skorzeny laughed at him. “I’m joking, son, I’m joking.”
“Tabun isn’t anything to joke about.” Jager cast a respectful eye on the mortar bombs he and Skorzeny had carried down through the Lizard lines from Germany. Had one of those bombs developed the tiniest leak, the sun would have gone dark in the sky, his lungs would have stopped working, and he wouldn’t have made it to Albi.
“Well, I don’t say you’re wrong about that,” Skorzeny answered. “It’s some very nasty stuff, for a fact. TheFuhrer wasn’t going to use it, even against the Lizards, till the British hauled out their mustard gas. Then I suppose he decided he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.”
“TheFuhrer knows about gas,” Jager said. “He was in the trenches in France himself.” He remembered his own days there, the frantic cries of alarm when the gas shells started landing, the struggle to get your mask on and tight before the tendrils of poison reached you and started eating your lungs, the anguished cries of comrades who hadn’t grabbed their masks fast enough, the stifling feel of every breath, the way you started wanting to tear off the mask after you’d worn it for hours on end, no matter what happened to you once you did… Across a quarter of a century, those memories remained vivid enough to make the fear sweat prickle up under his arms.
Grumpily, Otto Skorzeny said, “All right, Jager, we’ll do it your way, tonight when it’s nice and dark. Should be clear, too, which won’t be bad if we can spy the North Star through the trees. Give us a better gauge of true north than our compasses would if somebody’s tampered with our marks.”
“That’s true,” Jager said. They’d picked the spot from which they would fire a good while before. Thanks to some excellent maps of Albi and their French friends (no, not friends, partners: the Frenchmen had been enemies of Vichy when Petain collaborated with the Germans, and remained enemies now that he was collaborating with the Lizards), they knew the range and bearing from their chosen copse in the Parc Rochegude to the gas-mask factory, to within a few meters and minutes of the arc. It was just a matter of getting the mortar pointing in the right direction, fiddling with the elevation screw, and firing away.
To kill time till darkness fell, they played skat. As he usually did, Skorzeny won money from Jager. They were playing for Vichy francs, though, so the losses hardly felt real. Jager thought of himself as a pretty fair cardplayer, and wondered if Skorzeny cheated. He’d never caught him at it and, if he did, Skorzeny would make jokes about it and turn it into a lark. What could you do?
When twilight came and the sky turned purple-gray, Skorzeny stuck the cards in his pocket and said, “Shall I make us some supper?”
“I thought you wanted us to live till tonight,” Jager said, which earned him a glare from the bigger man. As anyone does who spends time in the field, Skorzeny had learned to cook after a fashion: roasted meats, stews made from whatever was handy thrown into a pot and stuck over the fire for a while. Since Jager cooked the same way, he waved a hand to tell Skorzeny to go ahead.
You couldn’t do a lot to mess up beans and cabbage and onions and carrots and potatoes. The stew was bland and boring, but it filled the belly. At the moment, Jager didn’t care about anything else. The flat had good blackout curtains. That let him turn on the electric lights after supper, and let Skorzeny win more funny money from him with those possibly trained pasteboards.
Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven… the hours crawled slowly past. When midnight struck, Skorzeny loaded the thirty kilos of mortar onto his back, slung into a big cloth bag. Jager carried the bombs in the packs he and the SS man had used to bring them down from German-held territory.
They closed the door behind them and went downstairs and then outside as quietly as they could. Every little clank they made seemed magnified in the dark, silent street. Jager wondered how many people were peering at them as they trudged east down the Avenue du Marechal Foch toward the park.
He also wondered if he would make it to the park. Added together, the mortar bombs and powder charges were at least as heavy as the weapon that fired them, while he was not nearly so big and burly as Otto Skorzeny.
He was staggering but still moving along when they got to the Parc Rochegude. A rustle in the bushes made him snatch for the pistol he wore in the waistband of his trousers. “Just a couple playing games,” Skorzeny said with a coarse laugh. “Might have been a couple of men, but it’s too dark for me to be sure.”
The tree-surrounded open space they’d picked to set up the mortar had no couples using it, for which Jager was heartily glad: he had found a discarded French letter in it one morning. “We won’t need the compass or the North Star,” he said with relief. A few days before, Skorzeny had splashed whitewash on a branch of one of the elms in the grove. Set the base plate of the mortar on the gray stone Jager had placed in the grass, aim the barrel over the white splash, and the Lizards-and the humans who worked for them-would learn collaboration had its price.
Skorzeny assembled the mortar, swearing softly when he barked his knuckles in the darkness. He’d practiced so often in the flat that the lethal little device quickly grew from a collection of innocent-looking hardware to an artillery piece. He lined it up roughly on the marked branch, then turned the traversing screw to bring it to exactly the bearing he wanted. At last he grunted in satisfaction and began adjusting the elevation screw so the mortar would fling its bombs just the right distance.
Jager, meanwhile, had been taking the bombs out of the packs and standing them on their tailfins by the mortar. Even without knowing the particularly lethal freight they carried, anyone would have recognized them as intended for no good purpose: nothing painted flat black and full of sharp curves and angles was apt to be a kiddie toy.
“Flick on your lighter,” Skorzeny said. “I want to make sure I have the elevation right. Wouldn’t do to shoot over or under.”
“No, it wouldn’t.” Jager dug the lighter out of his pocket and flicked the wheel with his thumb. His breath came short and quick, as if he’d spied a Lizard panzer’s turret traversing to bring its main armament to bear on him. A cry ofQu’est-ce que c’est? and feet pounding toward the copse would be just as disastrous now.
After what seemed like an eternity but couldn’t have been more than half a minute, Skorzeny said, “Everything’s fine. Douse it.” Jager flicked the cover over the flame. Even that little noise made his heart pound. Well, the Parc Rochegude would know bigger noises any minute now.
Skorzeny softly slapped him on the back. He took that as his signal to begin. Snatching up a bomb, he dropped it down the barrel of the mortar.