* * *
Their saviors took them deeper and deeper into the hills until the noonday sun turned red and fell in the west. Matthew appreciated the size of the mountain from within which they had emerged when they’d considerably distanced themselves from its massive shape. “Where are we?” he asked the nearest man.
“France, monsieur,” the fellow said.
“France? How come?” Stephanie asked the man.
“You’re not French, no?” the fellow asked her in turn. “You’re dressed like us, mademoiselle, but you don’t speak French?”
“We need to get back home,” Matthew tried. “You cannot keep us here.”
“And where is home?”
“Sleepy Lake Town?” Stephanie replied.
“Never heard of it,” a heavily bearded man said. He looked like the group’s leader. “We’ll take you to the coast and you can leave with the British.”
“The British?” Matthew tried to comprehend what he’d just heard. “You’re telling me this is real?”
“As real as the blood we spilled back there, monsieur,” the bearded fellow replied. “We must get as far from here as possible, because they will swarm this area by nightfall.”
“Who are they?” Stephanie asked him.
“The Germans,” he replied.
“And. . . . And where are we?” Matthew was now very curious.
“Dunkerque,” the Frenchman spat out. “The British are abandoning us! They cannot fight the German Blitzkrieg. You will surely meet the cowards near the coast.”
And it dawned on Matthew like a blow. These men were really telling him what they knew to be true. Actors would not go this far without rest, and that German officer who sounded American would never have known about the book now in his hands if the man had never come in contact with it in the past! The fellow might even be the captain whose name was on the first page! Pulling Stephanie aside, Matthew looked pale. “Something’s wrong, Steph,” he whispered to her. “And I think the book is seriously involved.”
“The book?” Stephanie whispered back, her eyes darting about in fright, and her brother nodded.
“It—It must have taken us back in time,” Matthew tried to explain. “There’s no other reason I can find for this—and how did that officer know about it? He could never have survived back there with his men! He must have been . . .”
“You mean he’s dead?” Stephanie asked him without confidence. “Matthew, you’re scaring me.”
“No. Yes. I mean . . . his name must have been written in the book,” Matthew finished with difficulty, beginning to breathe faster.
“He told us he’d stayed here a year,” Stephanie reminded him, realizing the enormity of what he had just revealed to her. “You wrote Nora’s name in the book, too!”
She needn’t have bothered. Matthew was already in shock. Nora’s name wasn’t the only one he’d scribbled into his ‘black book.’ There was Anderson and Barbara, and Rupert. And Fat George, and Yung Ji! There were two of Nora’s friends he couldn’t remember their names anymore, and that in itself was a failure on his part!
“What do we do now?” Stephanie demanded, alarmed. “We don’t even know where we are.”
“I—I think I know where we are, Steph,” Matthew stated with a start, feeling her head jerk up as she turned to him in anticipation. “We’re really in France . . .”
“And she’s fighting the German invaders,” one of their rescuers concluded.
Stephanie could not speak. She knew the man meant the Second World War, because she had a French friend in school who knew about the war from her grandfather.
“We’re the Resistance, monsieur,” the group’s leader announced, scratching his beard as they took a winding path round another mountain. “We’ll still face the Germans squarely in this war.” Then he turned to one of his colleagues, the one carrying the machine gun. “Jean, remember we must officially proclaim we’re the Resistance before making contact with London and General de Gaulle as soon as possible, no?”
“I don’t believe you,” Stephanie cried with vehemence. She turned to her foster brother. “Matthew, I want to go home.”
“I can’t go with you, Steph.”
“Why not?”
“I must find Nora and the others before I do that,” Matthew explained. “I cannot leave them here to die. You must go without me.”
“No!”
“So you’re not alone, eh?” one of their rescuers concluded. “Too bad we cannot find your friends. They could be anywhere in this . . . this vast wilderness we once called home, or even dead by now.”
His words were negative, so Matthew tried to ignore it. He opened the book and realized it was slowly getting warmer. How could this be? This warmth it exuded must be part of its mystery. How wrong he’d been about Nora being on a mission to burn it! There must be a heat source somewhere on its pages and this he must find.
Without warning, someone pushed him to the ground and held him there as he struggled to get up. “Don’t move,” the rebel advised him. “The Germans have crossed our path and they must not see us.”
“Huh?” From his precarious position, Matthew could see the others hugging the road in a similar manner ahead of him, but he couldn’t see any German soldiers. He grabbed Stephanie’s hand to reassure her. Then he heard new voices and realized that some men were emerging from what looked like a cave at the foot of the mountain. Since he was very close to the edge, he could just turn his head and observe them.
Seven trucks loaded with drums and three massive war tanks crawled forward amidst a large number of foot soldiers, oblivious of the figures hiding high up in the mountain. Matthew couldn’t breathe.
“That must be their armory,” one of the rebels whispered to the man whose sharp hearing had saved them all.
“No, Charles,” the man said. “It’s a fuel dump and those tanks must be part of a Panzer Division. They must have met our forces over there.” And he pointed at a distant spiral of black smoke emanating from another heavy tank. “They must have suffered some losses, too.”
“We’ll resume our journey when they’ve gone far,” the lead rebel announced. “We lack the necessary weapons to face them now.”
But just as he finished speaking, one of the soldiers down below passively glanced upwards and started pointing at the sky above the small party with concern, his eagle eyes immediately spotting the group prostrating up on the mountain path.
“Achtung!” the German shouted at his comrades, bringing up his rifle to point at the rebels. “Der Widerstand!”
“Quick, let us get out of here,” the man leading the resistance fighters barked.
They sprang to their feet as the Germans opened fire, Matthew grabbing Stephanie’s hand and scampering like the men with his heart in his mouth. He could hear his foster sister’s scream as the bullets whizzed past him, and shortly jumped over the fellow running ahead of him who had just fallen like a bag of rice. Stephanie stumbled as she tried to keep up and he stooped to lift her with the senseless strength he was getting from the adrenaline pumping through his veins.
The Frenchmen were also shooting down at the Germans as they fled from the cliff’s edge towards a new tunnel facing them, but this return fire was sporadic and had no impact on their predicament.
The first tank shell from one of the German Panzer tanks exploded a considerable distance from their current position, higher up on the mountain’s side, and they ran faster. Only a miracle could save them now because the tunnel’s mouth was still some distance away. A loud thump heralded the second shell and its impact on the mountain’s side caused massive tremors beneath their feet, sending dust and small rocks towards them. An unfortunate rebel immediately lost his life when one of the bigger rocks smashed his head.
“They will kill us all before we get to safety,” a fat man running beside Matthew croaked, but his words were quickly lost in the drone of a plane’s engine.
“Achtung,” a German office
r snarled down below as the remaining rebels got to the safety of the tunnel. “Spitfire! Schnell! Schnell,” the soldier shouted in alarm, already seeing two fighter planes come into view from across the mountain’s top.
This was the sound the German soldier who spotted the rebels thought he initially heard before looking up and catching the resistance fighters by surprise. Getting engrossed in the quest to slaughter the Frenchmen, he had forgotten his original reason for looking up into the sky, and this was to cause him and his colleagues dearly.
Coming down for a strafing run, one of the planes unleashed machine gun fury on the bolting Germans, killing a good number of them as well as stopping the attack on the cliff. The second plane picked out the Panzer tanks and dump trucks and multiple explosions rocked the mountain valley when the falling bombs hit their targets.
The French rebels quickly retreated into the new tunnel’s belly.