Hautes-Alpes, July 1955

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It was after midnight in the town of La Roche-des-Arnauds, and only the town’s gas lanterns burned along the comparatively small number of streets. The streets were not yet even paved, so small and out of the way was the town. It was a small collection of houses dotting a hill running down towards the Petit Buëch, a cold alpine river. There wasn’t even a local constabulary, and the post office remained the primary means of communication.

Even so, the word of unrest across communist Europe reached sleepy La Roche-de-Arnauds. Some of the local boys and girls had gone off to join the Resistance, the OAS, but their families kept silent about it-- no one knew who might report them to the CRS. Most families didn’t know who else’s children had gone off to resist the communists, so well-kept the secret.

A sudden bright flash reflected off the panes of the town’s southward-facing windows. Scarcely a second passed before the tremendous noise of the blast awoke the town and shattered the windows of the four closest houses. Lights ignited in practically every house in town, and before long a collection of armed men, all in their forties and fifties, emerged and collected near the cemetery. They spoke of defending their town, but as the time wore on nobody came.

One of the town elders announced the source of the noise: the railway bridge over Petit Buëch had exploded, or near enough. A runner was dispatched to the post office, but the telegraph and telephone wires to La-Roche-des-Arnauds had been cut. The townspeople could do little more than wait.

As the men picked around the damaged bridge-- it hadn’t been destroyed completely, daylight revealed-- it began to rattle strangely. Nobody could quite make heads or tails about it until the locomotive rounded the bend just over a quarter-mile away. The townsfolk waved their arms frantically, but the conductor didn’t have the time to stop his freight train with its tons and tons of cargo. He barely leapt from the locomotive before it collapsed the bridge, driving deep into the silt of the Petit Buëch and sending the subsequent cars careening up, left, right, and up again. There was a cacophony of screaming metal and ear-shattering crash of car after car being pitched off the tracks. Coal rained from the sky on both sides of the river, and hoppers unloaded stone and more coal all over the ground and into the waterway.

The train was a complete loss, the locomotive utterly destroyed. The bridge may have survived the shoddy demolitions work, but its fate was sealed as the citizenry could not stop the trains from running. Transportation and freight would move far slower and with much more difficulty through the region over the months this would take to repair, and the economy of southeast France would suffer. CRS investigators would arrive from Grenoble days later, but by then the OAS was long gone, faded back into the mountains.

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Bay of Biscay, August 1955

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Gulls circled pleasantly overhead, perching on the old submarine pens of La Rochelle. It was a peaceful scene, and Guy felt a sense of victory seeing the old, ugly German structures covered in bird shit. Guy had been here when the Germans were, as had much of the population, and he had special reason to hate them. His father had vanished to the east, sent to a German prison from which he never returned. The Gestapo suspected he was an agent of the Resistance, which his mother professed to this day was a falsehood.

Guy simply figured he would live up to his father’s reputation.

Once OAS slipped away from the Army and the rebellions began in Lithuania and elsewhere, he saw an opportunity. His fiancée, Chloé, was related to a veteran of the Resistance-- her uncle, Pierre. The bearded, bespectacled man was indeed up to his old tricks, and brought his niece and her soon-to-be husband into the fold. A new cell of OAS was forming, and right under the noses of CRS. Chloé used her charm to convince the new recruits to call him Oncle Pierre, much to the man’s vexation.

Oncle Pierre had devised an ambitious scheme. The industrial docks at La Rochelle were the nearest major site for the import of many goods from Africa and the Americas, particularly oil. That would be where they would strike-- though there were no willing dockworkers among their number. The unions made them unreliable, any one could be a CRS agent or informer. Oncle Pierre simply couldn’t trust them.

Come nightfall, the cell moved into action. A telephone worker named Henri made sure nobody in the docks could call for help, to a good degree of success-- they attempted to call the dock offices several times and the lines were down.

Before the alarm could be raised, members of the cell hopped over the concrete wall and penetrated the docks. They did not know where precisely to go, but upon reaching the water they could make out the mechanisms used to offload oil and traced the pipeline easily enough. Oncle Pierre and his veteran friends still knew how to brew up homemade explosives, and they worked as well as the real thing.

The pipelines exploded at midnight, a series of dull metallic thuds as the empty pipe blasted apart. The explosions grievously damaged the oil containment there, spilling tons of oil and starting colossal fires that burnt out of control across the docks. As firefighters hurried here and there, rescuing dockworkers, the OAS men and women fell in with the dazed workers and ambled out of the site, even getting looked over by paramedics and police officers before returning home.

Guy and Chloé enjoyed a joyous rendezvous later that night, drinking to their success. Oncle Pierre’s clout in the OAS grew considerably after such a daring strike, the first such strike in a densely populated area. After the first round of drinks, they began to plan for the future.

This would disrupt the oil supply to Brittany and sections of northern and western France, as well as rendering a port out of commission for as long as it takes to clean up the mess. The cost in delayed and redirected shipments would be difficult to quantify, but it would not reflect well on the government in Paris that there were shortages of consumer goods.

CRS would not take long to respond, having an office in La Rochelle, and they heard multiple stories from dockworkers of dozens of assailants weaving between the containers and cranes, always keeping to the shadows and subsequently hard to identify. Their best guess was a cell of anywhere from twenty to one hundred members. They had few leads immediately after the explosion and the fires destroyed much of whatever evidence might be collected. There were no guns found, curiously, and the CRS was left with only eyewitness testimony again, just like in Mijoux.