Resist Read online

  Samira moved around the backside of the trunk to climb up onto a higher branch, and when she came around again, she would be face-to-face with the soldier. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and shinnied carefully around to the other side.

  He has to be alive. He has to be alive, she told herself, and she opened her eyes.

  Samira’s heart stopped. The soldier wasn’t alive. But he wasn’t dead either.

  The paratrooper was a dummy.

  Samira blinked in surprise. She hadn’t been imagining things when she’d thought of the man hanging from his parachute cords as a dummy filled with straw. That’s exactly what he was! The dummy wore an imitation of a soldier’s uniform, complete with helmet and boots. But underneath, “he” was only rough burlap cloth that had been hastily sewn and stuffed in the shape of a person. A very small person. From the ground, the dummy had looked like a regular-sized human being! It must have been a trick of perspective, because up close the dummy didn’t look much like a man at all. Its head was pear-shaped, its chest was a rectangle, and its arms and legs were perfectly straight and disproportioned.

  Stenciled on his burlap chest was the name RUPERT.

  “Aren’t you a little short for a paratrooper?” Samira asked.

  Rupert didn’t answer, of course. But he did make a noise. Now that Samira was up close, she understood that this was where the sounds of the battle were coming from. There was a tiny speaker inside Rupert, playing a recording of gunshots and mortar explosions! Samira smiled. What a clever trick, to drop dummies over Normandy and make the Nazis run all over the place trying to fight Allied soldiers who weren’t there.

  Samira’s stomach suddenly tied itself into a knot. If the Allied paratroopers weren’t real—if this was all a trick—did that mean the Allies weren’t really invading France tonight? Or that they were invading somewhere else? Farther to the north, where France was closer to England? Or farther south, where the German defenses were weaker? Samira’s arms and legs went limp, and she had to hug the tree trunk not to fall.

  If the Allies weren’t really invading this part of Normandy, the Nazis in Bayeux wouldn’t be distracted in the morning, and her mother and all the other prisoners would be shot at dawn.

  The reality of it sank in, and Samira felt herself tearing up again. All night long, ever since her mother had been captured by the Nazis, she had pinned her hopes for her mother’s rescue on the Allied soldiers coming up from the beaches and dropping from planes. But if the invasion here was nothing more than a bunch of dummies, meant to draw the Germans’ attention away from the real invasion happening somewhere else—no one was coming to save Samira’s mother.

  Which meant she was going to have to do it herself.

  Samira wiped the tears from her eyes and got down to business. Rupert might not be a real soldier, but he could still help Samira with her mission. That helmet would fit, and so would those boots. And that recording inside him—a recording of gunshots and explosions— could be very helpful if she could somehow remove the device and take it with her.

  Keeping one arm wrapped around the tree trunk, Samira began to loosen Rupert’s uniform. The dummy kept spinning on his cords and swinging away from her, and when she reached out to grab hold of him again she yanked down too hard. The parachute tangled up in the branches above her tore with a sound like ripping paper, and suddenly Rupert went tumbling down through the branches. Samira watched him fall like the rag doll he was, and Cyrano ran away in fear of the plummeting thing.

  Then the dummy hit the ground and—Ka-KOOM. It exploded into a ball of fire!

  “Cyrano!” Samira cried.

  Her first thought was for her loyal companion, but a moment later Cyrano danced back into view, barking angrily at the dummy for exploding and scaring him like that. Relieved, Samira hastily climbed back down the tree, black smoke and the smell of burning burlap filling her nose. To avoid Rupert’s fiery remains, she leaped down from higher up than she would have liked. She landed in a heap and scuffed her knee in the fall.

  Cyrano ran over to welcome her back, then was off to bark at the burning dummy again.

  Samira hobbled over to see that Rupert was almost gone. There hadn’t been much of him to begin with, and now there was just a charred spot on the ground where he’d landed. Even his helmet and boots, Samira realized, had been made out of papier-mâché. The whole thing had been designed to explode and burn, leaving almost no trace of what it had been. The recording that had been inside was nothing more than a few burnt wires and a melted battery. Rupert wasn’t going to be any help to her after all.

  Worse, the explosion had alerted some German soldiers nearby. Samira could hear them calling out to each other, saw their electric torches flashing across the field. It was time for her and Cyrano to exit stage left, and fast. She snatched up the little dog and ran. Away from the Nazis. Toward Bayeux and her mother.

  Samira was tired. So tired. She just wanted to be a kid again. Just wanted to go to school and have normal problems, like homework and tests and girls who teased her. But this was her life now, and she had to be brave. Braver than she had ever been before. Brave like her mother.

  Samira thought about her mother as she ducked and ran and slipped through the fields and hedgerows. Her mother had been brave enough to leave her home in Algeria and come here to France, before the war, to study law. How many women did that? And then, when the war started and the Nazis rolled into Paris, Samira’s mom had to be brave again. Her husband, Samira’s father, was killed in the streets protesting the Nazis. That awful night, while seven-year-old Samira had wanted to do nothing more than bury her head under her pillow and cry, Kenza Zidane had bundled up her daughter, thrown everything they could take with them in a knapsack, and carried them both away into the night. Carried her daughter and everything they owned through towns and fields and villages, hiding out from the Nazis all the way, until they found refuge here in Normandy among friends from the university.

  Then, almost immediately, Samira’s mother began working for the French Resistance. Mostly she had run messages to and from the Resistance fighters hiding out in the woods at night, taking Samira along with her under the pretense of taking her sick daughter to the doctor. But more than once they had been asked to house downed Allied bomber pilots working their way back north to cross the Channel to England. If the German army had ever found any of the Allied soldiers hiding in Samira’s house, she and her mother would both have been killed by the Nazis.

  It was a risk Samira’s mother had never questioned.

  Kenza Zidane was the bravest person Samira knew. And now Samira had to rely on her own bravery to save her mother’s life, the way her mother had saved so many others.

  Behind the dark field where Samira walked, something cracked and crashed, making her jump.

  Samira spun around. Exploding through the tops of the trees, coming in for a landing right on top of her, was an Allied airplane!

  Samira threw herself out of the way as the airplane whooshed by overhead. It hit the ground with a sickening crunch, bouncing once, twice, and then flipping straight up into the air, tail first, as the front end carved up the earth. Crash! Crack! Smash! It was so loud the whole of France had to hear it. The plane slammed back down flat on the ground but kept moving. Samira covered her ears as the thing slid, twisted, and skidded toward the hedgerow at the end of the clearing, and then—wham! The plane hit a tree and stopped dead in its tracks.

  Samira peeked up from where she lay on the ground, and Cyrano trotted up beside her nervously. Was it an Allied bomber the Nazis had shot down? Samira braced for the explosion. If it was a bomber, it would be filled with bombs, after all. And even if it had dumped all its bombs, it would have tanks full of petrol to run its engines. Samira held her breath, waiting.

  One of the plane’s wings snapped off and fell to the ground, and Samira jumped. But nothing went boom.

  Had the crew survived the landing? Just the day before, they might have needed the
help of the Resistance to find an escape route from German-occupied France. Today, Invasion Day, it was Samira who needed their help.

  If they were alive.

  Samira pulled herself up and approached the plane cautiously. She was still afraid it was going to blow up. Worse, it didn’t have the usual markings of an Allied airplane. Was it a German plane? The Germans didn’t have many planes left, but it could be. But it didn’t look like a regular airplane either. It was small and boxy, and as Samira got closer, she was stunned to see that the wing that had broken off was made of wood and canvas. The whole thing was made of wood and canvas. It didn’t have any propellers either.

  It was a glider, not an airplane. But what was it doing here? Now? And where was the crew? Why hadn’t anyone come out of it? Samira crept up to the open door on the side of the glider and peeked inside. It was dark, but she could make out a couple dozen shapes. More dummies! They sat slumped over in their seats, helmets lolling to the side.

  Samira’s heart sank all over again. She couldn’t believe it. She understood making the Nazis chase dummies dropped by parachutes. But what was the point of crash-landing a plane full of Ruperts?

  Unless they were all going to explode!

  Samira drew back from the doorway. She had to get out of here! But where was Cyrano?

  Yip! Yip-yip!

  Cyrano was inside the plane! He was running up and down the aisle of the glider, barking at the dummies.

  “Cyrano! Cyrano, come out of there!” Samira cried. “It’s going to blow up!”

  But Cyrano wasn’t coming out. Samira was going to have go in and get him.

  Samira took a step inside the glider, and it creaked and groaned. Cyrano was hopping around at the back of the plane, yipping at the dummies. Samira couldn’t reach him. Not without going farther down the aisle. She turned sideways, trying to slide by the Ruperts, but there wasn’t enough room for her. She brushed up against one of the dummies and it slid toward her in its seat. She yipped louder than Cyrano as she jumped back, and the dummy groaned.

  Groaned?

  Samira looked closer. It wasn’t a dummy after all. None of them were.

  The glider was filled with unconscious soldiers!

  Samira poked the groaning man, gently but firmly. He shook his head and moaned. All around Samira, more of the “dummies” came to life, rubbing their faces and cracking their necks. Cyrano yipped happily, and one of the soldiers shushed him. They must all have been knocked unconscious by the crash, and they were all just now coming to.

  A soldier at the front slapped himself awake and unhooked himself from his seat. He was short, but he held himself with such authority that Samira was sure he was the leader. He had pale skin, wide shoulders, and a bald head underneath his crooked helmet. He straightened his helmet, whispered urgently in English to the other soldiers, then asked Samira a question she didn’t understand. She didn’t speak English, and she said so. In French.

  “Major Hughes wants to know who you are, and how long we’ve been out,” another soldier near her said in badly accented French. He was a young white man with black hair and glasses.

  “Oh! My name is Samira,” she told the soldier. In her surprise, she had forgotten to use her code name, but it hardly seemed to matter now. “And you just crashed a few minutes ago. You almost landed on me.”

  The soldier reported what she had said to the major at the front of the plane, and Major Hughes whispered again to his soldiers, urging them out of the plane. Samira was suddenly caught up in a flurry of soldiers collecting their weapons and trying to climb out of the glider.

  “Pardon us, miss, but we’ve got to get moving,” the soldier who spoke French said. “If you and your dog could get out of the way?”

  Samira grabbed Cyrano and slipped back out of the glider. The soldiers quickly followed, still cracking their necks and blinking, trying to wake themselves up.

  “Where are you from? Are you here for the invasion?” Samira asked the soldier who spoke French.

  “We came from England. My name’s Clarke,” he replied. “And yes, we’re part of the invasion. Now run along. We’ve got a bridge to capture.”

  “The bridge over the Seulles? That’s just down the road!” Samira said. “I can take you there!”

  “You know where it is?” Clarke asked.

  Samira did. Clarke told the major, and Hughes agreed to have Samira show them the way. Samira was delighted. Not only did this mean the invasion was happening, here and now in Normandy, but if the English soldiers were going to take the bridge over the Seulles River, that meant they were headed north too—the same direction Samira was going. That meant they were marching toward Bayeux, where her mother and the other prisoners were being held. There was a chance her mother would be saved by dawn after all!

  Samira waved for Clarke and the other soldiers to follow her. There was no time to waste! They looked a frightful sight, Samira thought as they snuck through the small wood. Twenty-some-odd camouflaged soldiers, each carrying machine guns at their hips and grenades on their belts. All of them had shoe black on their faces—all but the two black soldiers—to blend in with the shadows. They moved as one, skulking silently through the woods like a pack of wolves stalking their prey. Never a misstep. Never a moment’s hesitation. Samira shivered. She was glad they were on her side.

  They came to the edge of the wood, and Samira pointed. Just ahead of them was the bridge they had been sent to take. Samira and her mother had avoided this water-crossing on their way south to pass along the news of the invasion to the French Resistance. It was a steel-girder bridge—bigger and newer than most in Normandy—and its metal trestles loomed big and dark above them. To one side of the road, the Nazis had built a concrete turret to house an anti-tank gun, and Samira could see two figures—Nazi guards—walking the length of the bridge.

  Pakow!

  A rifle shot made Samira jump, and one of the German guards on the bridge crumpled and fell. The English were already attacking!

  “Go! Go! Go!” Major Hughes yelled, and suddenly Samira was in the middle of a battle.

  Bang! Bang! Tut-tut-tut-tut-tut.

  Samira dropped to the ground and pulled Cyrano close as bullets flew. The English soldiers thundered up onto the steel bridge, their boots ringing like a hailstorm on a tin roof. The second German guard fired a flare gun in the air, and it lit up the scene for Samira. She watched as Clarke, the soldier who’d spoken to her in French, cut the second German sentry down with his machine gun.

  English soldiers threw grenades into the pillbox and—POOM. POOM-POOM. PaKOOM!—it exploded in a cloud of concrete dust and flames. The Germans who weren’t on guard duty were awake now, and rifles barked on both sides, but the English soldiers swarmed the bridge and the adjoining bunker. Samira saw a German guard shoot another sun-bright flare into the dark sky, then turn tail and run.

  German machine gunners peppered the attackers, and bullets pinged off the metal struts of the bridge. Samira saw Clarke rush the sandbagged trench where the German gunners were hiding and fire a burst with his own machine gun. Another grenade took care of the rest of the German soldiers in the trench with a POOM.

  There was a second pillbox at the other end of the bridge. Samira heard its big gun fire—paKOW—but it didn’t hit anyone. It was made to hit tanks, not men, and all it did was blast a crater in the grass a hundred meters away. Samira lost sight of Clarke, but she saw another English soldier fire a shoulder cannon at the pillbox right before he was hit by a German bullet and went down. The missile he’d fired was right on target though, and the second pillbox exploded in a gust of fire and smoke.

  From the sound of things, there was another machine gun nest on the other side of the bridge. Samira heard the POOM-POOM-POOM of grenades, and the heavy machine gun fire stopped.

  And then, as quickly as it had begun, the battle was over. The bridge belonged to the English. The first attack of the invasion Samira had been witness to was a success!

 
Samira waited a few minutes after the last of the gunshots had been fired. Then she let Cyrano go and carefully made her way over to the bridge. Cyrano ran from place to place along the bridge, sniffing and investigating.

  The pillboxes were still smoking, and there were scorch marks all over the metal girders. A few of the English soldiers had been wounded, and Samira saw a medic bandaging them up. The only man who had died was the one Samira had seen fire the shoulder cannon that took out the second pillbox.

  There were still German bunkers with soldiers hiding in them, apparently, and the major dispatched soldiers to clear the trenches with phosphorous grenades. Major Hughes stopped briefly to mourn the man who had died, then was just as quickly talking into a radio telephone connected to a pack on another soldier’s chest.

  But where was Clarke? Samira needed to talk to him—needed to tell them all to get moving on to Bayeux!

  Samira found Clarke being treated by a medic. Her heart skipped a beat, worried he might be mortally injured, but he had only taken a bullet to his arm. He would live to fight another day.

  “Thanks for the directions,” Clarke told her. “But you really shouldn’t be here. The Germans might have rigged the bridge to explode.”

  Samira’s eyes went wide, but Clarke was quick to calm her.

  “Don’t worry. If they were going to do it, they would have done it. Our engineers are searching for explosives now. If they find anything, they’ll disable them.”

  Samira breathed a sigh of relief. These soldiers were very good at their jobs. If all the Allies fought like this, the invasion would be over in no time.

  “Bayeux isn’t far from here,” Samira told him. “Just another three hours or so up the road. We can be there before dawn if we hurry!”

  “I’m afraid we’re not going anywhere, miss. Not any time soon,” Clarke said. “Our mission was to take this bridge and hold it until the soldiers come up from the beach—or until the Germans come try to take it back from us. We’re not going to Bayeux. Not today.”