Citadel by Stephen Hunter

before.
    He also noted a new element. Somehow they
had what appeared to be a photograph. They
would look it over, pass it around, consult it frequently
in all meetings. It couldn’t be of him, so
possibly it was a drawing. It meant he had to act
today. As the photo or drawing circulated, more
and more would learn his features and the chance
of his being spotted would become greater by degrees.
Today the image was a novelty and would
not stick in the mind without constant refreshment,
but by tomorrow all who had to know it
would know it. The time was now. Action this
day.
    When he felt he had mastered the schedule and
saw a clear break coming up in which nobody
would report to the car for at least thirty minutes,
he decided it was time to move. It was about three
p.m. on a sunny, if chilly, Paris spring afternoon.
The ancient city’s so-familiar features were everywhere
as he meandered across Boulevard Saint-Germain under blue sky. There was a music in the
traffic and in the rhythm of the pedestrians, the
window shoppers, the pastry munchers, the café
sitters, the endless parade of bicyclists, some
pulling passengers in carts, some simply solo. The
great city went about its business, Occupation or
no, action this day or no.
    He walked into an alley and reached over to
fetch a wine bottle that he had placed there early
this morning, while it was dark. It was, however,
filled with kerosene drained from a ten-liter tin jug
in the garage. Instead of a cork it had a plug of
wadded cotton jammed into its throat, and fifteen
centimeters of strip hung from the plug. It was a
gasoline bomb, constructed exactly to SOE specification.
He had never done it before, since he usually
worked with Explosive 808, but there was no
808 to be found, so the kerosene, however many
years old it was, would have to do. He wrapped the
bottle in newspaper, tilted it to soak the wad with
the fuel, and then set off jauntily.
    This was the delicate part. It all turned on how
observant the Germans were at close quarters,
whether or not Parisians on the street noticed him,
and if so, if they took some kind of action. He
guessed they wouldn’t; actually, he gambled that
they wouldn’t. The Parisians are a prudent species.
    Fortunately the Citroën was parked in an isolated
space, open at both ends. He made no eye
contact with its bored occupants, his last glance
telling him that one leaned back, stretching, to
keep from dozing, while the other was talking on
a telephone unit wired into the radio console that
occupied the small back seat. He felt that if he
looked at them they might feel the pressure of his
eyes, as those of predatory nature sometimes do,
being weirdly sensitive to signs of aggression.
    He approached on the oblique, keeping out of
view of the rear window of the low-slung sedan,
all the rage in 1935 but now ubiquitous in Paris.
Its fuel tank was in the rear, which again made
things convenient. In the last moment as he approached,
he ducked down, wedged the bottle
under the rear tire, pulled the paper away, lit his
lighter, and lit the end of the strip of cloth. The
whole thing took one second, and he moved away
as if he’d done nothing.
    It didn’t explode. Instead, with a kind of airsucking
gush, the bottle erupted and shattered,
smearing a billow of orange-black flame into the
atmosphere from beneath the car, and in the next
second the gasoline tank also went, again without
explosion as much as flare of incandescence a hundred
meters high, bleaching the color from the
beautiful old town and sending a cascade of heat
radiating outward.
    Neither German policeman was injured, except
by means of stolen dignity, but each spilled crazily
from his door, driven by the primal fear of flame
encoded in the human race, one tripping, going to
hands and knees and locomoting desperately from
the conflagration on all fours like some sort of
beast. Civilians panicked as well, and screaming
became general as they scrambled away from