But then something triggers in the German’s mind. He frowns. Old woman? He leans forward to peer closely at her.
From out of the night comes a burst of automatic fire. The German jerks his head left, realizes what is happening, snaps back, raises his Schmeisser, stops, stares, and claws at his chest where the bullet from Rainy’s Walther has entered.
Bang!
She aims again, shoots the young guard as he fumbles with his gun, once, twice, then shoots the staggering sergeant carefully in the head.
“I’ll get the bolt cutters!” Philippe says, but before he can move Rainy has shot the lock on the gate. She draws the gate open.
Philippe, ever the maquis fighter, grabs the Schmeisser and a spare clip from the dead sergeant. German voices shout. From the woods beside the dump comes another burst of Sten gunfire. A hand-cranked alarm starts to whine.
No grenades. A weak and only partly effective distraction, and no guarantee that the small garrison of Germans will run that way rather than toward the sound of a handgun at the gate.
“Do we go?” Rainy demands.
“We go,” Philippe says.
Rainy draws out her Sten gun and snaps in a magazine, while Philippe checks his purloined Schmeisser. They are through the gate, and now Rainy sees the fuel dump proper. There are two massive pyramids of fifty-five-gallon drums, stacked as much as nine barrels high. A loader sits parked. Two trucks are parked to the right. To the left a low, wooden barracks spews German soldiers, uniforms askew, rifles being hurriedly loaded on the run.
The Germans are more than a hundred feet away, too far for accuracy, but Philippe and Rainy both pivot and spray automatic fire that may hit no one, but succeeds in causing the Germans to dive to the ground.
Where the hell are Étienne and Marie and Wickham?
Rainy and Philippe leap to cover behind a parked forklift.
“Go!” Philippe orders. “I’ll hold them off!”
Rainy knows better than to argue. There is no saving Philippe by standing at his side; the only salvation will come from making a very big fire.
Rainy shrugs off her coat and runs. The shoes, chosen to look like typical footwear for a working-class Frenchwoman well into an era of shortages, begin to come apart, one sole loose and flapping absurdly as she runs toward the closest pyramid of fuel.
She spots cover of a sort, a low stack of empty jerry cans, the familiar five-gallon steel containers. She drops to her knees behind them, pushes the selector switch to fully automatic, and sprays the pyramid of barrels with the rest of her first clip, pauses to reload, and empties the second thirty-two rounds into the barrels, bullets punching holes with heavy metallic thunk sounds. A bright light on a wire strung between poles snaps on and blinds her a little so she cannot see the streams of gasoline, but she can smell them.
Behind her Philippe fires in careful three-round bursts, keeping the Germans pinned down. It won’t last long. These may not be frontline troops, but if there’s a single living officer or NCO he’ll have them organized for a flanking counterattack within minutes.
And now . . . only now . . . does it occur to Rainy that she has no lighter. No matches. No way to make a flame.
She looks around her frantically. Empty jerry cans. Leaking barrels. A pump. Nothing!
She feels a wetness in the foot with the disintegrating shoe. Gasoline is pooling around her.
Philippe! He’ll have matches or a lighter. He’d have to, he smokes. She dashes back to him.
“I need a match!”
He reaches inside his shirt and pulls out a small box of matches. Then the Molotov cocktail in his coat.
Rainy grabs and races back, but now a file of German soldiers appears, creeping cautiously between the two barrel pyramids. Surely, Rainy thinks, they smell the gas, they must be splashing through it!
But this is not the time to worry about these Germans who may not all be Germans; these men in gray who may be unwilling cannon fodder for the Third Reich.
She looks down, finds the edge of the advancing wave of gasoline, makes sure she is outside of it, flicks a match which, amazingly, catches on the first try. She lights the rag wick, steps back, and smashes the bottle hard against the nearest barrel.
There is a small whoosh as the Molotov cocktail catches. Flames race along the ground, leap up to the still-draining barrels, and . . . Whoooosh! A small fireball sucks air toward it, feeds itself on this fuel, heats the gasoline around it, forming a vapor mist that explodes with a noise like a million matches struck at once.
Ba-WHOOOOSH!
Then a second explosion, a flat, smacking sound like a big piece of dropped plywood, and a flaming barrel flies through the air like an out-of-control Roman candle, spraying burning fuel. Flame spreads quickly across the spilled gasoline. And it spreads to the half-dozen soldiers who shout in fear, crying out in words that are not German.