Page 76 of Summer of Fire
Lizzie was unbelievably intuitive when faced with danger and even though he hated her going, he knew she had made a good plan to make sure the general was out of the way whilst they blew up the airfield. That had to be the priority.
London was being bombed every day. He couldn’t let himself stop her from doing what was best for the operation. He muttered a few words of prayer that he wouldn’t live to regret letting her go and she would escape the Nazi’s clutches and get out of France tonight.
The thoughts whirled through his head as he crept through the trees with the stealth of a tiger, out of sight of the road, until he was almost parallel with the entrance to the airfield.
Jack, Pierre, and the rest of the team formed a huddle, and he whispered last reminders. They squeezed each other’s shoulders for good luck before drawing away.
Jack looked at his watch and nodded. It was time.
If all followed the pattern of previous days, since they’d been monitoring the airfield, the night patrol guards, and the Luftwaffe pilots wouldn’t arrive until around curfew.
Lizzie had confirmed his suspicions that during daylight hours, they only kept one guard at the entrance and one nearby.
The office should be empty by now—they’d watched the few staff members leave before Lizzie appeared. The memory of the Nazi General in the black Mercedes reared into his mind. He should have killed him right there and then, he thought, vicious images dominating his consciousness.
He shook his head. If he’d done that, he would endanger the whole operation. But his sweet Lizzie wouldn’t have to risk her life to appease the rotten bastard.
Jack pulled himself together.
The abandoned land had been commandeered some time earlier, but it was only a few weeks since they’d turned it into an airfield. Since then, the German pilots had used it to fly their raids to London. With France under Nazi control, it allowed them to fly from Northern France rather than all the way from Germany.
Jack crossed the road towards the guard who sat in the hut eating and looking downwards. No doubt he thought he was in for a quiet few hours before the evening’s action started, and the pilots arrived.
Jack tapped on the window of the hut. The soldier looked up, startled, swallowing hastily as he grabbed his rifle and scrambled to his feet.
‘Ja?’ he said, emerging. It was clear to Jack by the soldier’sbody language that he considered a French labourer to be an inconvenient nuisance, not a genuine threat.
That miscalculation cost him his life.
Jack wasted no time in conversation but signalled to Pierre with a jerk of his head as he stepped to the right, out of the line of fire. The soldier’s eyes bulged in shock as the bullet hit him right in the heart. His knees crumpled, and he fell to the floor, gasping. Pierre’s gun had a silencer, and the sound of the shot barely registered.
Jack edged around the barricade, which was a basic affair that had been erected in haste when Reims received orders to set up an airfield to facilitate the Blitzkrieg of London.
All life had drained from the young soldier’s face. His body was a deadweight as Jack dragged him behind the hut, out of sight of the entrance.
Jack removed the soldier’s clothes and Louis, one of the Resistance lads, ran over and hastily dressed in the uniform. Jack had instructed Louis to have a close shave so he would look the part.
Louis took the place of the soldier and sat in the hut. They could do with his help in blowing up the bombers, but they couldn’t take the chance that someone would arrive early and be alerted to an unmanned post.
Jack looked around for the other guard, but there was still no sign of him. The watch tower was usually empty until the busy night shift. This was the Nazis’ Achilles’ heel. They were so arrogant; the soldiers hadn’t even imagined in their worst nightmares that the Resistance would dare strike here in daylight.
Most of their manpower was focused on protecting railways, which Jack and the team had doubled down on disrupting. The Germans didn’t see this coming, and that was the beauty of it, thought Jack as he attached the first timed explosive to one of the bomber aircraft.
Dusk had fallen and protected them like a cloak as the team darted from bomber to bomber, attaching the explosives like he had taught them when they practiced on the railways and bridges. No wonder the Nazis were furious. Jack, Pierre, and the network had created havoc for them during the past few weeks.
Jack counted twenty bombers. He estimated they had four more to do, so that was one each. He looked at his watch. The timers were ticking. They must get out in the next ten minutes, or they risked blowing themselves up with the entire squadron of planes.
A few minutes later, two of the team signalled to him they were done. They began moving away from the bombers.
They had almost pulled it off. In five minutes, the airfield would be an inferno. No one would bomb London from here tonight.
But they must leave now.
Where was Julien?
Jack searched the field, looking at the area he had been assigned.
No Julien.
