7. Running With German Shepherds Snapping at Her Heels
In late 1942, Odette Sansom was almost caught when a French Resistance contact, tasked with finding an out of the way landing area, screwed up. The site was supposed to be suitable for the nighttime landing of a modified Hudson bomber, that was to airlift an SOE operative and four French generals back to Britain. Ineptly, the contact selected an airfield located about a thousand yards from a German antiaircraft battery. A new landing site was selected, this one an abandoned airfield about 500 miles away. After dodging Germans and collaborationist Vichy police, Odette and her party made it to the airfield, only to discover that the control tower and a nearby barracks were occupied by German troops. It was a trap, and the party was forced to scatter, with Germans hot on their tail. Odette crashed into bushes, with German dogs snapping at her heels.
She plunged into an icy stream, and battled the freezing current to the other side, before she finally shook off the pursuit. Not long thereafter, Odette was acting as a courier between the SOE and a French Resistance higher up. The mission took longer than expected, and she ended up missing the last train back home. All hotels were booked, and the last thing Odette wanted was to get arrested for violating curfew, and risk a search that might reveal incriminating documents. So she hid in a brothel that catered exclusively to German soldiers, run by a madam sympathetic to the Resistance. It was as safe a hideout as any, because such an establishment was the last place the authorities would expect to find anti-Nazis and enemy spies. However, on that particular night, the brothel was raided by German military police looking for a deserter.
