“Is the manifest complete—bargeloads, names, and numbers?”
“It’s all there,” the man said, a little relieved.
Casson was waiting in a hotel room near the docks. Weiss hung his wet coat on the back of a chair. “Fuel barges all over the place,” he said. “Up in Ivry, and Choisy, and eleven down here. They’re being very careful.”
“What are they worried about?”
“Hard to say. It’s a big war, some damn thing goes on in Copenhagen or Odessa and a message shows up on the teleprinter in the rue des Saussaies.”
“Anything we can do?”
Weiss exhaled, rubbed his face. He was tired. “I’m out of ideas. This thing was organized in a hurry—I’m not complaining, you understand, it’s what we asked for. But we usually work slowly, find out what we need to know, plan every step.”
Casson wondered what he could offer. Gueze had given him a briefcase full of hundred-franc notes, but Weiss and the FTP didn’t work that way. “We’ll think of something,” Casson said.
Weiss brooded, took a well-creased road map of France from the pocket of his coat and spread it out on the bed. “It’s hard, with the waterways. You can’t blow up a river.”
Later that day, riding a local train south to Troyes, Casson found a leaflet on the seat from the resistance group
Libération.
The lead story: a heroic attack by three RAF Beaufighters on a barge convoy at Elbeuf, in the curve of the Seine south of Rouen.
. . . their 20 MM cannon firing thunderbolts of destruction, crewmen leaping off the decks and swimming for their lives. A hard blow, and daring, in full daylight, engines screaming as they dove, lower, lower, leveling out just a few feet above the water, machine guns blazing. Then, bombs released, the planes roar away. A huge blast—windows tremble in Rouen, hearts tremble in Berlin. Four bargeloads of coal sent to the bottom of the river. No tank turrets will be forged with that coal!
Coal, Casson thought.
Merde.
He met with Weiss as planned, at a café in Troyes, and told him what he’d read. Weiss shrugged. “Could as well have been turnips,” he said. “Last I heard, Rommel was running panzer tanks, not locomotives.”
“Were they after the gasoline?”
“What else? The problem is, doing this kind of thing with airplanes is very hard. They miss, they hit the wrong building, the wrong
part
of the building, the wrong town, and, yes, it’s happened, I promise you, the wrong country. So, in this case, they hit the wrong barges.” They were silent for a time, the rain slanting down beyond the steamy window. “There is one thing we can try here—a lock, on the canal south of the town. The countryside looks flat but actually it isn’t, the barge traffic has to move uphill.” He looked at his watch. “I have to sleep,” he said, “it’s been forty hours.”
“You have a place to go?”
“Yes, and you better come along. I don’t want you in hotels today—if there’s one thing the British did with their raid, they woke the Germans up. It’s typical of the British—they’ll try an air attack and a sabotage operation on the same target. If one doesn’t work, maybe the other will.” Weiss rubbed his eyes. “Let’s get going,” he said, “before I fall asleep on the table.”
The woman in the small cottage was not pleased to see them. Her husband mumbled something or other as they came through the door but she wasn’t having any. She was big and broad-shouldered, stood over a huge pot with an iron spoon in her hand and glowered at them. Five kids in the house, at least as far as Casson could count, and her husband invites his pals for dinner.
Weiss stretched out on a sofa in the tiny parlor and fell sound asleep. Casson slept in a chair.
“You could have stayed in Paris, you know,” Weiss said to him later. “This is only going to get harder.”
“I know,” Casson said. “But I tried that once. It was a disaster. We were making
The Devil’s Bridge,
shooting on location—a bridge over the Sambre, way up north, almost on the Belgian border. I think the Germans blew it up in ’40. ‘Why not stay in Paris?’ the director said. ‘When the problems come, you’re right there in the office to solve them.’ Well, the problems came, all right, oh how they came. First, the usual problems, then the problems that came from not having a producer on location. I went up there on the next train but it was too late—started out badly and it was going to stay that way.”
“But you made the movie.”
“We made something.”
Just before dark, a woman knocked on the door. Weiss introduced her as Jeanne. She acknowledged Casson with a glance, her hands thrust deep in the pockets of an oilskin field coat. Casson offered her a cigarette and lit it for her. She nodded her thanks as she inhaled, her face drawn with fatigue. “This wasn’t easy,” she said to Weiss, “but we found somebody, the uncle of a teacher at the
lycée.
He has a barge called
Le Zéphyr,
docked about thirty miles upstream. He promises to be in Troyes by eleven tomorrow.”
“That’s the first good news today,” Weiss said. “Will he do what we want?”
“Perhaps he will—he
says
he will. If he doesn’t show, we’ll have to find somebody else.”
“No time.”
“All right,” she said, “I’ll steal a barge and do it myself.”
The
Zéphyr
was north of Troyes a little after noon. The teacher’s uncle, its captain, had already stoked up his courage: the sour smell of wine hung around him like a mist. “What must be done must be done,” he mumbled, as much to himself as anybody else. As arranged, they’d met him on the riverbank, about five kilometers from Troyes, where he’d tied the barge to a willow tree. “I am ready, monsieur,” he said to Weiss.
The lock system was on the other side of the town. Weiss and Casson bicycled there and found a patch of woods where a street turned into a dirt path. Weiss swore when he saw what was going on. A German officer was standing with the lockkeeper in his small hut to one side of the gates. A string of barges had just gone through the lock, white water was foaming out of the downriver spillway, and a line of barges waiting to enter had tied up to posts on the far bank.
It seemed a long time, a half hour or more, before they saw the
Zéphyr.
Moving quickly for a barge, its stern engine hammering away in a haze of blue smoke.
Casson watched the German officer. Tall, hands clasped behind his back, a sharp profile below the visor of his cap. He rocked back and forth as he watched the
Zéphyr
approach.
“I don’t care for this German,” Casson said.
Weiss agreed. “No, he’s taking it very seriously, whoever he is.”
“What’s our captain going to think, when he sees him?”
“We’ll find out,” Weiss said. “If I’d known he would be here, I would have called the thing off. I thought this would be a French affair—catastrophe as daily bread and all that. But now . . .” He didn’t bother to finish.
The last of the water spilled from the downriver gate and the lockkeeper thrust his weight against a huge iron wheel. As it turned, the two gates began to move toward each other, an inch at a time, until they met. When the lockkeeper looked up, there was the
Zéphyr,
headed full speed for the closed gates of the lock. On the tied-up barges, people were shouting, waving their arms. The lockkeeper did his best, ran to the other end of the hut and turned the wheel frantically, trying to get the gates open, but they parted only a foot or so. He saw he couldn’t do it in time, ran out of the hut and along the stone wall that held the gates, and signaled violently with both hands:
run it into shore!
But the
Zéphyr
never wavered, headed directly for the lock.
The sound of the collision was not dramatic, a muffled thud as the wooden prow hit the gates, then the sound of metal on metal as they bent backward. A chain snapped, an ancient iron pulley fell into the canal with a splash. That was all.
The
Zéphyr
’s stern swung around in the current and the side of the barge bumped against the crushed gates as the captain shut off his engine.
For a moment, silence. On the barges, people stared in disbelief. Casson wanted to laugh. There was something comic about it, slap-stick, you saw it coming but there was nothing anybody could do.
Weiss’s voice was so quiet Casson barely heard it. “Oh no,” he said.
The German officer came tearing out of the hut and ran onto the stone wall, brushing past the lockkeeper. Lean and graceful, he ran hard, and Casson now saw what Weiss had seen a moment earlier: something about the way he was running made it clear what he was going to do.
The captain of the
Zéphyr
stumbled out of the wheelhouse and threw his arms wide, palms up to heaven.
Oh Lord, now look
what’s happened.
The officer never missed a step. He leaped onto the barge, grabbed the captain by the shirt, and threw him to the deck, the man’s feet flew up in the air as he landed. He started talking, some of the words drifted over to Weiss and Casson, shrill, whining. The officer waited, the barge captain never stopped. The officer’s arm swept up from his side, pointed out straight, and a flame came out of his hand, the sound flat and hollow on the open water. The man on the deck thrashed for a time, Casson thought he heard him saying something. The officer put his pistol away, vaulted back up to the stone wall and returned to the hut.
8 APRIL.
The town of Coligny, on the Briare Canal. Weiss had a room over a café on the main square. It was quiet in the evening, farm country in Burgundy, people played cards and drank wine in the café. The telephone in the room rang from time to time. Weiss listened, said a few words, hung up. He made one brief call, then another. “The news is not so good,” he told Casson. “They’re saying in Troyes that the canal will be back in operation in a day or two. If we get a sixty-hour delay out of this I’ll be surprised.”
“Maybe it’s just a rumor.”
“I don’t think so. We got word in Paris, about an hour ago, that one of the foundries in Metz has a complete stop-work order—to set up for an emergency job. Somebody will try to get a look at the drawings, but I would bet they’re going to make a new set of lock gates. What that means to me is intervention at a very high level, so we have to assume the Germans pretty much know what we’re doing. By tomorrow, they’ll probably have a couple of infantry companies at every lock on the inland waterways, and we’ll be out of business.”
He paced the room for a time then sat in a swivel chair by the desk. “What we’re doing tonight,” he said, “is maybe our best chance. It’s improvised, but at least we’re depending on our own people.”
The waiting was hard. Casson walked around the room. The town outside was dark and silent, farm dogs barking somewhere in the distance. The phone rang again, Weiss let it ring a second time, then answered. He looked at his watch and said, “Just after eight-thirty,” and hung up.
A knock at the door and two men entered: the pale Slav who’d been with Weiss the day the guns were delivered, and a man who Casson thought, from his accent, might be a Spaniard. They both nodded to Casson.
“Ready to go?” Weiss said.
The two men exchanged a look. After a moment the Spaniard said, “I don’t know this explosive. They use it in the mines, but not where I come from. It’s been in the rain, I think.”
“That won’t matter.”
“No, the man who brought it said it wouldn’t.”
“What kind of fuse?”
“Detonation cord. Also damp, but I cut off a small piece and it worked.”
“You have enough people?”
“Escobar. And three others.”
“It’s scheduled for eight-thirty,” Weiss said. He turned to the other man. “What about the power station?”
“I have somebody from the local office. It won’t be a problem.”
“Good.”
The two men said good night and left.
“We can’t get the right explosive,” Weiss said. “What we’re using now is Ammonal, powdered aluminum and TNT, mining explosive. We get it from the Poles who work the iron pits up in Nancy.”
“What do you need?”
“C4. Likely the English have something even better.”
“Do this tonight,” Casson said. “And they’ll give you whatever you want.”
8 : 3 0 .
Serra and Escobar were waiting in the shadows at the Coligny lock, on the edge of town where the Briare Canal met the river Loing. The Germans had lit the area with two powerful searchlights—which created a fine hiding place just beyond the beams. The lock had been built in 1810; heavy gates on either end of a long
barrage,
a dam of dry-masoned set stone that measured several hundred feet from end to end, large enough to hold thirty barges.
Serra had packed the Ammonal into a metal drum he’d found outside a workshop in Coligny. He’d punched a hole in the side and set the end of the fuse between two packets of explosive.
“A lot of people on the barges,” Escobar said.
“Yes. They’re waiting to go through in the morning.”
They could smell smoke from cooking fires. Somebody laughed, a woman called out to a friend.
“Who is at the power station?”
“Ivanic.”
“Then we don’t have to worry.”
“No,” Serra said.
“And the guards?”
“Four of them. Gendarmes, in the lockkeeper’s hut. They stay in there most of the time, people here say they go to sleep after midnight. I don’t think you should be worrying about them, somebody’s covering that side of the dam. They have a machine gun, the gendarmes will not argue with it.”
8 : 4 4 .
The searchlights flared brilliant white, then died away.
Serra closed his eyes and waited for the afterimage to fade. It was very dark now, a power failure in Coligny. A half-moon and a few stars showed through the scudding cloud, just enough light to catch the dull silver of the gasoline tanks on the barges.
“In a minute,” Serra said.
Some commotion, a single shout from the lockkeeper’s hut. Moments later a whistle, and a man came running low around the stone wall of the dam. “Serra, are you there?” he called in Spanish.