The Caves of Périgord: A Novel by Martin Walker

Author:Martin Walker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Historical, Art historians, Prehistoric peoples, 1939-1945, British, France, Fiction, Perigord, General, Americans, Cave paintings, War & Military, Suspense fiction, World War, Périgord (France)
ISBN: 9780743222846
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2002-03-05T06:02:12+00:00

The B Mark II transmitter was a feeble but cumbersome beast. It was two feet long, weighted thirty pounds, required an aerial seventy feet long, and could transmit its dots and dashes of Morse at no more than twenty watts. Berger had already lost one radio operator in Bérgerac when the Germans started using the trick of turning off the power in one subsection of the city after another to see when the signal died. Now he refused to use main current at all and had rigged up a small dynamo that could be powered by a bicycle, maintaining that the risk of shifting the transmitter from place to place around the woods of Périgord was less than that of detection.

François and Manners drafted their message, and Berger took the back wheel from one of the bikes to rig the dynamo, and the radio operator pulled off the top silk sheet from his one-time pad and began to encode. Manners checked the coding, and they left him alone to transmit; another of Berger’s security rules. They had cycled about an hour down the woodland tracks and came to the brink of a steep hill where the track wound down to a road. The embankment of a railway loomed up behind it, and the stately arches of a viaduct bridging a steep valley on the far side of the road. Just before the viaduct a small building stood beside the rail track, the raised red-and-white bar of a level crossing beside it, ready to seal off the small road that disappeared steeply into the valley. A red signal flag was tied to the base of the bar.

“Miremont-Mauzens,” said Berger. “It’s a railway halt. That’s where we meet them. The flag means it’s safe.” He turned to his brother. “François, you stay here with the bikes. They know where you’re from. You’d just annoy each other, get into an argument.”

François shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Don’t worry, my dear brother. I am getting quite good at staying out of arguments. Just ask our English friend how polite I am being to our grumbling American, difficult as it is.”

“McPhee’s all right,” Manners said. “He was just cold and tired and irritable this morning. So was I.”

“That I understand,” said François. “Let’s hope that is all it is. But I get the feeling that he likes needling me.”

“So do I,” grinned Manners, to take the sting out of the remark. “So would anybody who knows you. You’re rich, a famous writer, handsome, and a war hero. Don’t be surprised if the rest of us mere mortals try to take you down a peg or two, François. If you were as dumb and ugly as me and Berger here, you’d have no trouble.”

“You see why I like this cunning Englishman?” François smiled at his brother. “Even when he disciplines me, he flatters me.”

“He didn’t flatter me,” said Berger flatly.

“Well, you haven’t seen him fight yet. I did, in North Africa. He has our French élan, and their German thoroughness.

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