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'Prologue'

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'Moon Mist'

May 1944

Somewhere above France

Louise Johnson sat in the thrumming fuselage of a Handley Page Halifax bomber, barely able to move, battered by noise. Half an hour earlier, the airmen manhandled her up through the door because she was too encumbered with her parachute to climb the ladder unassisted; now, she was just sat there, the sound of the engines roaring in her ears, with nothing to do but stare at the packages all around her, indistinct and shadowy in the milky pallor of moonlight.

If only I could sleep, she thought. I used to be able to, anywhere, anytime. The boys used to tease me about that.

She sighed, and looked over at her fellow passenger—young, tall, thin, though his cheeks had not yet lost the fullness of adolescence. He was checking his equipment, patting pockets and examining his kit; a light sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead in the half-light. He looked up and caught her eye, and she smiled reassuringly. His fingers stilled on his parachute pack for only a moment before he resumed the nervous inspection of his gear.

The dispatcher, a short airman with slicked-back hair, stumbled towards her through the clamour of the engines. He grinned at her and bent to open the hatch in the floor, releasing night and cold into the fuselage like water rushing from a dam. The huddled buildings of a town slid beneath, smudged with cloud and lit by the moon. Louise leant forward with difficulty to watch the world pass by. The moon was almost full: its pleasant, watery haze spread over the peaceful countryside, rendering it colourless. She thought of the people living down there, simple folk sleeping in their beds, and so used to the sound of aircraft overhead that the Halifax would fly on unnoticed.

Sitting opposite her, the other agent—John Ferraby; codename Alain; her brother Jean-Baptiste—stopped his fiddling for a moment to peer out of the hatch as well. Together they caught a glimpse of the moonlit spires of a cathedral.

"Bayeux!" the dispatcher yelled above the noise. He began to bundle packets of paper out into the darkness, which cracked open as they dropped into the void, and then he handed one over to her so that she could see the writing.

La Revue du Monde Libre, it said, apportée par le R.A.F.

"The Froggies just use 'em to wipe their arses!" the airman shouted. "But it gives us a cover story, see? Jerry thinks that's all we're 'ere for—not dropping someone like you!"

She smiled to herself. Someone like you, indeed. But who, exactly?

Louise Johnson.

Corinne.

Gabrielle Baudin.

A package to be delivered, just like the bundles of leaflets fluttering down towards the ground.

Without warning, the machine began to pitch and roll, and the other agent looked up, his eyes wide. "Flak!" Louise yelled across to him, seeing his look of surprise. She grinned, as if to reassure him that the flak was nothing—and, indeed, there was nothing to be heard besides the racket of the engines, no flashes of light, no sound of shells bursting, nothing to indicate that somewhere down below people were trying to kill them.

"We'll soon be over it!"

And, sure enough, they soon passed over the anti-aircraft battery and the aircraft roared on, the hatch closed, flying calmly onwards.

Later, as they approached the coast near Coutances, and banked sharply towards the north, the dispatcher brought them both a Thermos of tea and some sandwiches. Louise scoffed hers down hungrily, and told Ferraby to eat. He shook his head, unable to eat, she knew, for the same reason that he was unable to eat at the safe house before they went to the airfield: that slow constriction of his stomach muscles, a persistent dull ache, that had begun the moment she had told him they would go that night.

"Are you alright?" she had asked him as they made their final preparations at the airfield.

"Of course."

"You look pale."

"It's the damned English weather."

Now it was the French weather outside, buffeting the aircraft as it thundered on through the night. When Louise had finished the tea she managed to fall asleep, her head nodding awkwardly on her chest. And then, in a matter of minutes, she was awake again, with the dispatcher shaking her shoulder and shouting in her ear.

"Get ready—we're nearly there, love!"

Louise liked that. Love. It reminded her of Eleanor and her motherly English comfort.

The hatch in the floor was opened once more, and she craned her neck to peer down, seeing the fields and dark woods moving past below, almost close enough to touch. The moon glinted on a railway line and then on a sinuous river meandering through a field. She tore her eyes away, wide-awake and alert, patted her pockets, zipped things up, checked the laces on her boots.

The aeroplane tilted, turning in a wide circle, engines screaming, the pressure weighing heavily on her chest. She could imagine the pilot in the cockpit, searching and straining his eyes to see the tiny glimmers of torchlight from the ground. A lamp came on in the roof of the fuselage, a single, unblinking red eye. She remembered her first jump with Easy, the banter, the singing, and felt a wave of nostalgia, which she pushed out of her mind with effort.

"Ready?" the dispatcher yelled, giving them the thumbs-up.

He attached the static line from their parachutes to the rail in the roof of the fuselage and checked the buckles of their harnesses. The aircraft made one pass over the drop zone, and she heard the sound of the containers leaving the bomb bay and saw them flash beneath, their canopies billowing open. Then the machine banked and steadied for the second run.

The airman clapped her on the shoulder. "Your turn now!"

"Merde alors!" Louise mouthed to her fellow agent, and grinned at him.

But as she sat down at the edge of the hatch with her feet dangling out in the slipstream, her smile wavered. The air tugged at her legs, like the current of the sea. In the moment of stasis, she said a prayer—"Please, God, look after me"—a sign of weakness, perhaps, but she wanted no signs of weakness, not at that moment of deliverance with the slipstream rushing past her and the void beneath, and Ferraby pressed against her parachute pack, and the dispatcher giving her a nod. Merde alors, she thought instead, another prayer of sorts, as the red light blinked off and the green came on and the airman shouted, "Go!" and his hand pushed her and she let go, plunging from the rough safety of the aircraft into the raging darkness over France.

A/N: None of this makes any sense right now, so we'll just move swiftly onto the next chapter. It still won't make any sense, but at least you'll get to meet your favourite paratroopers down Toccoa way!