One Shot Kill (6 page)

As Madame Lisle covered her ears and hurried down the hallway towards her kitchen, Rosie scrambled to the upstairs window. The old revolver wasn’t the most accurate weapon and her first shot skimmed over the head of a Gestapo man heading for the back door.

The bullet disturbed the admiral’s new horse, dragging the assistant holding her reins off his feet and bowling another Gestapo man over. As two more Gestapo officers scrambled away from the bucking horse, Rosie took advantage of the distraction.

Her first shot with the elderly revolver had pulled to the left, so she made a slight correction to her aim and popped off two shots. One Gestapo man was shot clean through the heart, the second was knocked unconscious by the bullet hitting his metal helmet square on.

With surprise still on his side, Eugene moved towards the front door. He shot the admiral’s driver, then sprayed a dozen bullets into the admiral’s Mercedes and the truck the Gestapo had arrived in. One Gestapo man was injured, while two more shot wildly towards the cottage as they ran for cover behind the car.

The machine gun needed reloading, but before Eugene backed into the hallway he ripped a grenade off his belt and lobbed it into the open-topped car. As he attached a fresh stick of bullets to his gun, Eugene heard someone shooting behind him.

It was the Gestapo man that Rosie had failed to stop coming in through the back door. Madame Lisle had grabbed a knife and sat cowering under her kitchen table. As the German passed without seeing her, he aimed his rifle at Eugene’s back.

‘Dirty son of a pig!’ Madame Lisle shouted, as she plunged a jagged-edged bread knife deep into the German’s calf.

The German squeezed the trigger as he fell, shooting Eugene in the right buttock. Nobody heard Eugene’s excruciating howl because it coincided with the grenade exploding. The blast sent chunks of shrapnel in all directions, some of the hot lumps puncturing the uniforms of retreating Gestapo men.

Up in the bedroom, Rosie acted clinically, using her last bullet to shoot the admiral’s assistant through the chest as he got up after being bowled over by the horse. Edith was weak, but she’d managed to open Eugene’s backpack, pulling out a leather holster which held three grenades and an automatic pistol.

‘Thanks,’ Rosie said, throwing down the useless revolver before pocketing the grenades and taking the pistol. ‘Get your dress on. Be ready to leave.’

Rosie’s ears rang from the grenade blast, but she was more unsettled by the sudden outbreak of silence.

‘Eugene?’ she shouted, as she rounded the top of the stairs.

He was slumped against the wall of the narrow hallway, with his right leg twisted awkwardly under his body. The bullet had entered his buttock at an upwards angle and exited close to his belly button, taking his bladder and a huge chunk of his lower intestine with it.

The burst stomach left Eugene’s pipe work spattered up the wall, and a smell of his ruptured bowels mingling with the gun smoke in the air. He was still conscious, and while Rosie’s first thought was to help him, Eugene gestured frantically down the hallway.

The German who’d shot Eugene had fallen on his face with a kitchen knife sticking out of his calf. Madame Lisle had shown great agility for an elderly woman, jumping on the German’s back, ripping out the knife and thrusting it back towards his stomach. But the soldier was much stronger. He’d gashed his right hand badly as he grabbed the blade plunging towards him. Now Rosie watched him turn the knife around and go for Madame Lisle’s throat.

She was afraid of shooting the unfamiliar pistol and taking out Madame Lisle by mistake. She also had no idea who was still alive outside, so she feared a bullet in the back as she charged down the hallway.

Madame Lisle screamed as Rosie stepped over the blood pooled around the dead admiral. She took aim at the German. The bullet cavitated the top of his head, and took a huge chunk from the back of his skull as it exited. Rosie couldn’t have aimed any better, but the German’s final spasm had driven the kitchen knife deep into Madame Lisle’s throat.

Lisle was losing blood fast. Rosie wanted to help, but more shots ripped along the hallway. As she took cover by backing into the kitchen, Eugene swung around with his machine gun.

He’d fixed the fresh clip on to the machine gun half a second before he’d been hit and he opened up, hitting a pair of Gestapo men coming across the front lawn towards the house.

Then it all went quiet again. Madame Lisle was past saving, so Rosie dashed back towards Eugene.

‘Don’t hang around,’ he said.

Rosie tried to pull up Eugene’s shirt to get a look at his wound, but he blocked her with a trembling hand.

‘Get out of here. I’m going to die.’

Eugene was fiddling in a blood-soaked area around his belt. She realised he was going for his L-pill, which packed a fatal dose of cyanide.

‘They might be able to keep me alive for a while,’ he said. ‘Taking this makes sure.’

Rosie straightened up, breathed deep and slumped against the wall in a state of complete exhaustion. The scene was carnage: gore splattered up the wall, boots swilling in blood. Part of Rosie felt blind panic. She had to get her mind back in focus.

Edith shouted weakly from upstairs. ‘Hello?’

Just because it had gone quiet didn’t mean that all the bad guys were dead. The vehicles out front were both destroyed. There were horses to escape on, but it would take time to saddle them up and sort Edith out. Time she might not have…

Rosie looked up the stairs and saw Edith in the bedroom doorway, wearing the dress but no shoes. ‘I’ve got to go check the outside,’ Rosie said urgently.

Everyone in front of the house seemed dead, and although Eugene was dying he was still poised with the machine gun in case something came out of the bushes.

Rosie went to the back of the cottage. She rolled the dead German off Madame Lisle’s corpse and snatched his rifle, knowing it would do better than a pistol or a machine gun if she had to shoot at someone in the bushes.

She reloaded as she peeked out of the back door. The paddock looked idyllic, though the horses in the stable blocks on either side had been disturbed by the noise. There was no sign of the admiral’s horse, though its path was clear from the chunks torn out of a hedge.

There were four dead Germans out back, but the one Rosie shot on the helmet was just knocked out. It seemed wrong to kill a man who was unconscious, but he could come round at any moment and she didn’t have time to mess about tying him up.

After shooting him through the heart with the rifle, Rosie made a complete circuit of the cottage, keeping close to the walls in case one of the Gestapo men was hiding out in the bushes. Besides the admiral and his two companions, Rosie counted eight dead Gestapo.

Back in the hallway, Eugene was losing the fight. He’d gone much paler and tried saying something, but all he could do was shake and make a long croak. But his eyes showed Rosie his problem: his grip was weak and his lethal pill floated in the blood pooled between his legs

‘They can’t take me,’ he finally muttered.

Rosie doubted Eugene would survive more than a few minutes, but despite being in agony he seemed anxious about being captured. She crouched down and picked the rugby-ball-shaped pill out of the blood.

‘Do you want it?’ Rosie asked, as tears smudged her vision.

Eugene parted his lips. His face felt cold as Rosie balanced the pill between his teeth and then pushed up his lower jaw to crush it.

‘I let you down,’ Eugene croaked.

As Rosie took the machine gun and made half a step back, the cyanide paralysed Eugene’s breathing and his body began convulsing from a heart attack.

Rosie felt like breaking down. At least fourteen people had died in four crazy minutes and it might have overwhelmed her if she hadn’t had to concentrate on helping Edith.

‘I can’t carry you far,’ Rosie said. ‘I’m not as strong as Eugene.’

Rosie stripped her equipment pack down to essentials: three grenades, pistol, machine gun, her ID, Madame Lisle’s bandages and iodine plus the first aid kit, money, maps, compass, some food and refilled water canteens.

Rosie helped Edith down the stairs, then piggybacked her a dozen paces through the gore in the hallway and left her sitting on the doorstep at the back of the kitchen. There still might be Gestapo in the bushes, so Rosie didn’t hang about as she belted across to the stables, with Eugene’s blood-crusted machine gun slung over her shoulder.

There was a saddle room at one end of the stables, but Rosie had only ridden a few times and had never prepared a horse herself.

Which way round did a saddle go? How tightly? How would she know which horses were good for riding? Should they take one horse or two?

‘I’ve got no clue,’ Rosie confessed, once she’d dashed back to Edith. ‘Do you think you can help?’

Edith had found a pair of Madame Lisle’s rubber boots by the back door. They were slightly too big, but made walking on her badly scarred feet more bearable. She moved across to the stables with an arm around Rosie’s back, but the sight and smell of horses seemed to rejuvenate her.

Friendly heads poked over the stable door and Edith gave two animals handfuls of fresh grass to keep them calm as she led them out and talked Rosie through fitting the saddles.

‘You’re sure you’re OK to ride?’ Rosie asked. ‘It might get hairy.’

‘If I can cling on to Eugene, I can ride a horse,’ Edith said.

It took nearly ten minutes to get the horses ready. Edith asked for her own pistol and Rosie considered running back to the house to get one, but they heard a car approaching and cars only meant Germans, because civilians in the military zone weren’t allowed petrol.

After giving Edith a lift into the stirrup, Rosie mounted her horse as voices sounded fifty metres away, around the front of the house.

‘We were ambushed,’ a German was saying. ‘At least half-a-dozen guns blazing at us.’

Rosie gave her horse a little kick and said gee-up, but the animal regarded this with contempt.

‘Not like that,’ Edith said. ‘A little higher up, and give it more of a snap.’

Rosie looked back anxiously, half expecting men to come running around the house aiming rifles while her horse stood rigid.

‘Gee-up.’

This time Rosie kicked a little too hard and the horse shot off in an indignant gallop, almost knocking Rosie off backwards.

Edith was alarmed as Rosie’s horse stormed off. ‘Hard on the reins,’ she yelled. ‘Got to show her who’s boss.’

Rosie pulled the reins more in hope than expectation. The horse came to a complete halt, but Edith had galloped up alongside, and the presence of Edith’s horse seemed to act as a calming influence on Rosie’s. After their jerky restart, the two animals began trotting side by side.

As the newly arrived Germans took in the full extent of the carnage inside and around the house, the two teenagers vanished out of sight behind the stable block, then down a slight hill and on to a footpath that ran between the surrounding fields.

‘We’ll put a few kilometres in, then find a spot where we can hide out until dark,’ Rosie said.

‘I know all the tracks around here,’ Edith answered, as Rosie noticed that blood was already seeping into the back of Edith’s clean dress. ‘But we should pick up the pace, are you ready for a gallop?’

*

Rosie never got comfortable in the saddle, but the pair rode for thirty minutes without incident. They skirted around villages to avoid being seen, but it was daylight and they still passed horses, carts, and even a gang of prisoners repairing roads, under the eye of grizzled French guards.

Fortunately there were no telephones out here and the local Gendarmes
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didn’t have radios. So unless they encountered men dispatched specifically to look for them, they’d be long gone by the time anyone realised that they’d seen Lorient’s most wanted ride by.

When they reached the abandoned farms of the buffer zone, they found a stream where the horses could drink and settled down in the grass.

Rosie was shocked by how much Edith was sweating when she helped her down off the horse. Edith drank water and nibbled some pieces of fruit, but she doubled over and vomited within minutes of eating them.

‘Let it all come out,’ Rosie said, as she held Edith’s hair back.

‘I can’t get sick now,’ Edith said, clutching her bony fists with frustration. ‘I’ve got to fight it.’

Rosie tried to keep cheerful for Edith’s sake, but her weakness was no surprise. Edith had barely eaten in a week and she’d spent days on a filthy cell floor while covered with open wounds. Rosie suspected that the vomiting and sweats were signs of an infection spreading into Edith’s bloodstream.

‘I feel dizzy,’ Edith said. Then she sobbed. ‘I was ready to die. No offence, but you shouldn’t have tried to rescue me.’

Rosie didn’t reply, but largely agreed. Eugene had known that the rescue was a huge risk. Perhaps if she’d stood up to him he’d be alive right now and so would Madame Lisle.

As the afternoon wore on, Rosie wiped Edith down to keep her cool and tried getting her to drink as much as possible. Eventually Edith fell asleep. After pulling Edith into the shade, Rosie pulled off her own boots and socks and spent a long time sitting with her feet in the stream.

Rosie kept vigilant for search parties as she washed the outside of her boots and wiped the blood off the machine gun. Then she took the map of their escape plan from her backpack and felt miserable as she studied markings and notes made in Eugene’s handwriting.

They’d planned to take photographs and make up a false identity for Edith while at Madame Lisle’s house, then set off as soon as it started getting dark. They would then have ridden fifteen kilometres across country to a single-track railway which supplied coal to a power station at Moelan sur Mer.

War played havoc with train schedules, but Eugene had somehow confirmed that the power station was still operational and fed by a nightly delivery of coal. The train didn’t stop, but was easily boarded when it slowed to a crawl on a hilly section of track near the village of Lisloch.