Jackdaws by Ken Follett

doctor."
    "Why would I have two people
with me?"
    "Three. We need Michel to hold
a torch." There was an unvarying procedure for pickups: four Resistance
people held flashlights in the shape of a giant letter "L," indicating
the direction of the wind and where the plane should come down. The small
battery-operated torches needed to be directed at the aircraft to make sure the
pilot saw them. They could simply be placed in position on the ground, but that
was less sure, and if the pilot did not see what he expected he might suspect a
trap and decide not to land. It was better to have four people if at all
possible.
    Claude said, "How would I
explain you all to the police? A doctor on emergency call doesn't travel with
three people in his car."
    "We'll think of some
story."
    "It's too dangerous!"
    "It will take only a few
minutes, at this time of night."
    "Marie-Jeanne will kill me. She
says I have to think of the children."
    "You don't have any."
    "She's pregnant."
    Flick nodded. That would explain why
he had become so jumpy.
    Michel rolled over and sat upright.
He reached out and grasped Claude's arm. "Claude, I'm begging you, this is
really important. Do it for me, will you?"
    It was hard to say no to Michel.
Claude sighed. "When?"
    Flick looked at her watch. It was
almost eleven. "Now."
    Claude looked at Michel. "His
wound may reopen."
    "I know," Flick said.
"Let it bleed."
     
    THE VILLAGE OF Chatelle consisted of
a few buildings clustered around a crossroads: three farmhouses, a strip of
laborers' cottages, and a bakery that served the surrounding farms and hamlets.
Flick stood in a cow pasture a mile from the crossroads, holding in her hand a
flashlight about the size of a pack of cigarettes.
    She had been on a weeklong course,
run by the pilots of 161 Squadron, to train her for the task of guiding an
aircraft in. This location fitted the specifications they had given her. The
field was almost a kilometer long—a Lysander needed six hundred meters to land
and take off. The ground beneath her feet was firm, and there was no slope. A
nearby pond was clearly visible from the air in the moonlight, providing a
useful landmark for pilots.
    Michel and Gilberte stood upwind of
Flick in a straight line, also holding flashlights, and Claude stood a few
yards to one side of Gilberte, making a flare path in the shape of an
upside-down "L" to guide the pilot. In remote areas, bonfires could
be used instead of electric lights, but here, close to a village, it was too
dangerous to leave the telltale burn mark on the ground.
    The four people formed what the
agents called a reception committee. Flick's were always silent and
disciplined, but less-well-organized groups sometimes turned the landing into a
party, with groups of men shouting jokes and smoking cigarettes, and spectators
from nearby villages turning up to watch. This was dangerous. If the pilot
suspected that the landing had been betrayed to the Germans, and thought the
Gestapo might be lying in wait, he had to react quickly. The instructions to
reception committees warned that anyone approaching the plane from the wrong
angle was liable to be shot by the pilot. This had never actually happened, but
on one occasion a spectator had been run over by a Hudson bomber and killed.
    Waiting for the plane was always
hell. If it did not arrive, Flick would face another twenty-four hours of
unremitting tension and danger before the next opportunity. But an agent never
knew whether a plane would show up. This was not because the RAF was
unreliable. Rather, as the pilots of 161 Squadron had explained to Flick, the
task of navigating a plane by moonlight across hundreds of miles of country was
monumentally difficult. The pilot used dead reckoning—calculating his position
by direction, speed, and elapsed time—and tried to verify the result by
landmarks such as rivers, towns, railway lines, and forests. The problem with
dead reckoning was that it was impossible to make an exact adjustment