Free Most Secret by Nevil Shute

Coming from Corbeil, you may not know quite how things are here with us.”
    Charles nodded. “There are difficulties here?”
    The man said: “Not here in Brest. Here we are business people, and we understand that circumstances change. But in the country districts people are more stupid. They are always trying to do things against the Germans, and that makes trouble. In the café monsieur, they are always talking. You will hear the English radio quite openly.” Charles drew in his breath; this was asking for it. “You must be very careful not to get involved in their stupidity. It is trouble—trouble—trouble all the time.”
    Charles said: “I am deeply grateful, monsieur, for the warning. These places I am going to—Lorient, Audierne, Douarnenez, and Morgat—are they bad?”
    The agent said: “Not Lorient, nor Audierne. Morgat is too small for much to happen there. But in Douarnenez, monsieur, it is most difficult. Those fishing people will not understand the new regime. Each week there is some new trouble, each week there is an execution by the Germans, sometimes several. And it has no effect … But for the fishing industry and for the food that they bring in, the town would have been bombarded by the Germans from the air, and razed down to the ground. I have heard German officers say so.”
    “It is as bad as that?”
    “It is bad as it could be, monsieur. Life is terrible for people in Douarnenez just now. You must be very, very careful there.”
    Charles went that afternoon to Lorient, put up at the Hôtel Bellevue, and reported himself next morning to the Germancommandant. He was coldly received, and was informed that work of great importance was completely stopped. He was questioned sharply about the day that he had spent in Brest: it did not seem to the Germans necessary at all that he should have wasted time in visiting his agent. They gave him a good dressing down, then took him to the harbour in a Renault van.
    The cement was stacked in heaps in its sacks in a shed over looking the estuary. He set to work with one Breton lad to help him, numbering the sacks, making a sample briquette in a little mould from each sack, and leaving it to dry. He worked all day. Once or twice, when nobody was looking, he mingled a little of the sample powder from Corbeil into a briquette.
    In the late afternoon he was taken down to see the sacks upon the job. He passed along new quays and under arches of new concrete, stepped over piles of girders and steel reinforcement, walked round great heaps of wooden shuttering. He dared not glance in each direction more than once; that one glance was sufficient, if he could remember. His mind was crowded with the detail he observed. He must, must keep it clear. With each glance he tried to memorise the picture of what lay before him so that he might reconstruct it in the night.
    They took him to the ready-use cement store, and he set to work again to make briquettes of the sacks there. As he performed the simple job he indexed in his mind what he had seen. Seven bays each holding two U-boats, held up on columns one metre twenty-five square section, each with two I beams in the centre, each I beam forty-five by fifteen centimetres, wrapped round with twenty-kilogramme reinforcement. Each bay a hundred metres long and twenty metres wide, and six columns to each bay. The weight of roof could be deduced from that alone. But keep that detail in his mind, treasure it. God, let him not forget!
    His task finished, he was free to go till the next day; it took twenty-four hours for the briquettes to dry. He walked back up the quays. Fifteen-metre girders, each one metre twenty deep—they would be the longitudinal horizontals between columns. Each girder built of webs and angles, each angle twenty centimetres by twenty, each web twenty-two millimetres thick. Mary, Mother of God, help him to remember!
    Shuttering for the arches of the twenty-metre bays—radius of arch thirty to thirty-five