Cry Heaven, Cry Hell. Howard Gordon
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to the inequities of natives of a country being denied educational opportunities or to benefit from new agricultural techniques because a foreigner had moved in their land to benefit her own lackeys and to deny them the fruits of their own labor. Along with the attacks on the thinking that questioned what benefit France had brought to this nation, came training programs. Stolen weapons were diagrammed and assembled and re-assembled; the discipline to face interrogators and tell them lies to mislead them was integrated into their personhood. The points of vulnerability on the body were practiced until they became rote; the most vulnerable point of a tank was learned. Assembly of machine guns, rocket launchers, howitzers was learned in detail so that they could be rapidly assembled or destroyed. Where modern weapons were not available, use of what was there was adapted to defense and offense.
The most difficult skill that Rodin had to learn was non-identity. When blocks of people had learned the abilities he taught them or when French victory seemed imminent, he had to be able to disappear. The people whom he taught, and for whom he agitated were not to know his name or face. Many times he wore a disguise. Sometimes he led boycotts or demonstrations, then he had to disappear on a rooftop or in the sea. The important impact was that he start the anger flowing and disappear at the point of the highest escalation.
He joined the French Foreign Legion after the war and played both ends against the middle in Algeria. He would attack the Berber villages during the day, participate in the raping, pillaging and destruction. At night, he’d dress as an Arab woman named Rebaza and complain to the men about her sons starving because all the land was given to foreigners to cultivate while the natives were left without land, or she would lament about her sons not being educated for anything, but to be cannon fodder for the French wars. Then Hitler invaded France. This was his chance to score points as a French hero and undermine her at the same time.
Much later, at Dien Bien Phu, he had to play a dual role and move between Viet Minh, as a Russian advisor and Frenchmen shouting misconstrued orders to the soldiers. To get from one side to the other, he had to build a tunnel within a tunnel and negotiate it at a rapid speed as the battle progressed. By the time the Americans took over the war, he was long gone. He brought back the principle that the Japanese had used of operating through tunnels, in case the Vietnamese were not familiar with it, which they evidently were.
Chapter 2
Having established rapport with the Vichy government and the Underground during the war, Rodin was able to operate with a free reign. Because of this he was able to affect a rescue that was based on a connection with his past. A B-17 bomber was sent to blow up a munitions plant that was sending rockets across the channel from the Danish peninsula. It was intercepted by a squad of Messerschmitts and shot down. There were two survivors that had to outrace German troops. Suddenly shots rang out ahead of the crewmen. The Germans lay dead behind them. Rodin stepped out of the bushes and demanded to know who the survivors were. The first one answered, “I am Lieutenant Patrick Mikawber, of the U.S. Army Air Force, and this is Sergeant Corlando Moran, of the same. Rodin had thought that this first one looked familiar. He told him that he knew his father and mother from Lafayette Escadrille. He recounted some of their adventures, and Pat updated him on what had happened to his family and their emigration. He did not talk about his father’s escapades, just mentioned that he had started out as a truck driver and had started his own company (which actually happened).
He wanted to accomplish his mission. The Underground unit and the two flyers planned to disguise them as workers in the plant wearing face masks in the likenesses of two Underground that actually worked there. They sneaked dynamite and fusing in their lunch pails and planted it at various sites in the plant. Corlando almost got them caught when he tried to look up the skirt of a female employee that had bent over to pick up a dropped part. They tied the fusing to the ends of the dynamite sticks, then knotted all the sticks together. When they got out, they tied a knot to another length of fusing and tied this length to the detonator. When the plunger was pushed, the explosion rocked the village, and whatever employees could get out barged through the door. Corlando saw the girl at whom he peeked, run out; he ran up to her and kissed her. After the war, he went back and started a relationship with her.
Now the task was to get the flyers out of the country. They were smuggled out in a boatload of llamas, aardvarks, and anteaters bound for an Amsterdam zoo. After this, they were transported to the Cliffs of Dover at the bottom of a garbage scow. Pat wrote his father and Molly about this adventure and added greetings from Rodin.
Rodin was always serious about his dual role. However, he enjoyed the opposite sex and had an opportunity to meet a woman that thought the war was absolutely the most stupid endeavor entered upon by mankind because she felt that men’s egos were not worth the slaughter in which they were engaged. She also did not approve of the hypocrisy of speaking about protecting freedom and creating a minority of the citizens of the indigenous peoples of the nations they colonized. Her name was Liana Dobrovna, and she worked as a dancer in a local bar. She approached him to buy her a drink, but a Nazi officer wanted her attention and pulled her away from him. He also began to twist her arm. Rodin began to sing “Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles” and embraced the officer, encouraging him to walk outside with him and sing along. When they were out in the alley, the Underground leader took out a knife and stuck the German in the throat. As he walked back, he saw a Frenchman trying to sweet talk her into going home with him. Rodin asked the man what he wanted with his wife. The masher turned white and made a hasty exit. Liana asked La Monde to escort her home. They sang all the verses of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” all the way to her apartment and “God Save the Queen” after which they made passionate love. In the morning, their throats were hoarse, and neither could walk, so they stayed in bed and did it again. Over time Liana began to see the double game he was playing and joined in the duplicity.
Liana caught onto the double game that Rodin was playing and joined him in it. On one occasion, he played a pro Vichy prostitute leading some German officers to a hidden allied air base, in the guise of Rebaza, while she pretended to be an Underground male that had been caught by the Gestapo and traded his life for taking the Nazis to a secret arms cache. They led them into a machine gun nest of American infantry men. The Germans were slaughtered.
The war ended and La Monde and his female companion went to Vietnam under the nationalistic guise they had worked so hard to create. It was 1946, and Ho Chi Minh had organized the Vietminh to further confuse the French, disorganized by the war. A propaganda machine was set up that fed the villages and reminded the people in them about the guillotined youth who had dared to stand up to this European invader that used their women and exploited their resources. They also denounced the Americans that boasted of their democracy, yet backed a colonial power out of fear of expanding communism. He and Liana were part of the anti West propaganda machine. The Japanese had made use of tunnels, as part of their strategy in their Asian war. Liana and Rodin used this, whether or not using this device was an invention of General Giap or a memory of the Japanese invaders. Liana and Rodin became part of training the farmers to use such weaponry against France. They were also part of the movement to not support the monarchy proposed that was within the French Union. Dressed as Rebaza, La Monde railed against the death of a son who had died in the war for France so that they could starve at the hands of this European opportunist that was no better than the Nazis were to them.
Suspicion was being aroused, and the couple had to go underground until the agents of the intruder had started to stop asking questions of the other French colonials. They began to pursue their cover jobs as a photographer for a magazine and a historian from the Sorbonne until Dien Bien Phu, where Rodin caused confusion by going back and forth through the French battleground and the Vietnamese by going back and forth through tunnels. Liana continued to lie low.
After France lost its Vietnam colonial privileges, Rodin and Liana felt that they had to mosey on down the line. Their next stop was Quebec. The Parti Quebec had been agitating for freedom from Britain. But Rodin had other ideas. From the British side, Liana sat in on Parliamentary sessions and brought up the issues of bringing Papist doctrine and Mafia influence to a free country. She also talked about the effect of losing the tourist trade, industry, and trade advantage with France, by having an alliance with part of the British Commonwealth.