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He breathed easily. He was used to this. He had now crossed the Pyrenees several times. He wore rope-soled espadrilles that gave his feet a better grip on the rocky ground. He had a heavy coat on top of his blue overalls. The sun was hot now but later, when the party reached higher altitudes and the sun went down, the temperature would drop below freezing.
Ahead of him were two sturdy ponies, three local people, and eight weary, bedraggled escapers, all loaded with packs. There were three American airmen, the surviving crew of a B-24 Liberator bomber that had crash-landed in Belgium. Two more were British officers who had escaped from the Oflag 65 prisoner-of-war camp in Strasbourg. The others were a Czech Communist, a Jewish woman with a violin, and a mysterious Englishman called Watermill who was probably some kind of spy.
They had all come a long way and suffered many hardships. This was the last leg of their journey, and the most dangerous. If captured now, they would all be tortured until they betrayed the brave men and women who had helped them en route.
Leading the party was Teresa. The climb was hard work for people who were not used to it, but they had to keep up a brisk pace to minimize their exposure, and Lloyd had found that the refugees were less likely to fall behind when they were led by a small, ravishingly pretty woman.
The path leveled and broadened into a small clearing. Suddenly a loud voice rang out. Speaking French with a German accent, it shouted: "Halt!"
The column came to an abrupt halt.
Two German soldiers emerged from behind a rock. They carried standard Mauser bolt-action rifles, each holding five rounds of ammunition.
Reflexively Lloyd touched the overcoat pocket that contained his loaded 9 mm Luger pistol.
Escaping from mainland Europe had become harder, and Lloyd's job had grown even more dangerous. At the end of last year the Germans had occupied the southern half of France, contemptuously ignoring the Vichy French government like the flimsy sham it had always been. A forbidden zone ten miles deep was declared all along the frontier with Spain. Lloyd and his party were in that zone now.
Teresa addressed the soldiers in French. "Good morning, gentlemen. Is everything all right?" Lloyd knew her well, and he could hear the tremor of fear in her voice, but he hoped it was too faint for the sentries to notice.
Among the French police there were many Fascists and a few Communists, but all of them were lazy, and none wanted to chase refugees across the icy passes of the Pyrenees. However, the Germans did. German troops had moved into border towns and begun to patrol the hill paths and mule trails Lloyd and Teresa used. The occupiers were not crack troops; those were fighting in Russia, where they had recently surrendered Stalingrad after a long and murderous struggle. Many of the Germans in France were old men, boys, and the walking wounded. But that seemed to make them more determined to prove themselves. Unlike the French, they rarely turned a blind eye.
Now the older of the two soldiers, cadaverously thin with a gray mustache, said to Teresa: "Where are you going?"
"To the village of Lamont. We have groceries for
you and your comrades."
This particular German unit had moved into a remote hill village, kicking out the local inhabitants. Then they had realized how difficult it was to supply troops in that location. It had been a stroke of genius on Teresa's part to undertake to carry food to them--at a healthy profit--and thereby get permission to enter the prohibited zone.
The thin soldier looked suspiciously at the men with their backpacks. "All this is for German soldiers?"
"I hope so," Teresa said. "There's no one else up here to sell it to." She took a piece of paper from her pocket. "Here's the order, signed by your Sergeant Eisenstein."
The man read it carefully and handed it back. Then he looked at Lieutenant Colonel Will Donelly, a beefy American pilot. "Is he French?"
Lloyd put his hand on the gun in his pocket.
The appearance of the fugitives was a problem. In this part of the world the local people, French and Spanish, were usually small and dark. And everyone was thin. Both Lloyd and Teresa fitted that description, as did the Czech and the violinist. But the British were pale and fair-haired, and the Americans were huge.
Teresa said: "Guillaume was born in Normandy. All that butter."
The younger of the two soldiers, a pale boy with glasses, smiled at Teresa. She was easy to smile at. "Do you have wine?" he said.
"Of course."
The two sentries brightened visibly.
Teresa said: "Would you like some right now?"
The older man said: "It's thirsty in the sun."
Lloyd opened a pannier on one of the ponies, took out four bottles of Roussillon white wine, and handed them over. The Germans took two each. Suddenly everyone was smiling and shaking hands. The older sentry said: "Carry on, friends."
The fugitives went on. Lloyd had not really expected trouble, but you could never be sure, and he was relieved to have got past the sentry post.
It took them two more hours to reach Lamont. A dirt-poor hamlet with a handful of crude houses and some empty sheep pens, it stood on the edge of a small upland plain where the new spring grass was just beginning to show. Lloyd pitied the people who had lived here. They had had so little, and even that had been taken from them.
The party walked into the center of the village and gratefully unshouldered their burdens. They were surrounded by German soldiers.
