Scorched Earth (26 page)

The Pole didn’t speak good French but nodded eagerly at the old man’s story. ‘They take torpedoes apart. Then they remove explosive, for demolition of the city.’

PT peeked back inside the truck and realised that he was looking at the explosives from more than thirty disassembled torpedoes. His jaw dropped as he looked at Marc.

‘If we’d dropped petrol bombs on this lot we’d have killed ourselves and blown up half the neighbourhood.’

But Marc still didn’t completely buy the Pole’s story. ‘So the Germans sent out all this explosive with just one guy and an Osttruppen?’

The Pole shook his head. ‘We had a puncture. The other trucks wanted to reach the city centre before dark, but we stayed behind and I guess my driver got lost.’

‘So how many trucks were in the convoy?’ Marc asked.

The Pole shrugged. ‘Fifteen. Perhaps twenty.’

Marc did a calculation in his head. Twenty trucks with thirty large warheads inside made 600 bombs. That amount of explosive dropped from aeroplanes would be nasty, but the destruction would be hundreds of times more effective if the bombs were expertly positioned rather than lobbed out of aeroplanes.

Henderson came running towards the scene with unlaced boots and his shirt buttons undone. Before the war he’d run the Royal Navy’s Espionage Research Unit, which specialised in spying on rival navies’ technology.

‘Two-hundred-kilo torpedo charges,’ Henderson said. ‘The design’s been refined since I last saw one, but they’ll still blow a nice hole in whatever you want them to.’

Henderson then shocked the skinny prisoner by switching to fluent Polish. ‘How long since the other trucks left the torpedo factory?’

The man’s face lit up. ‘Are you Polish?’

‘Good with languages and accents,’ Henderson said. ‘Now answer my bloody question.’

‘We took almost an hour finding a spare tyre after the other trucks left.’

Henderson nodded, then spoke to Marc in French. ‘Use the telephone in the apartment below ours. Contact the Ghost Circuit on five-four-nine-three. It’s probably too late, but someone may be able to identify the trucks with the other bombs in. And they can get word out, asking all resistance groups to keep an eye out for demolition teams using blue cylinders.’

As Marc ran up the hill, Henderson looked at the skinny Pole and pointed inside the truck.

‘I don’t understand what that thing does,’ he said.

‘What thing?’ the Pole asked.

As the Pole turned, Henderson slipped an arm around his neck and started choking him.

PT looked shocked. ‘He told us everything we asked.’

‘Don’t care,’ Henderson said, once he’d dropped the dead Pole between his unlaced boots. ‘Osttruppen betrayed their own country. They swore an oath to Hitler to save their own skins. I might have done the same thing under desperate circumstances. But once someone’s crossed that line, how can you ever trust them?’

PT looked furious. ‘The guy was half starved. He was no threat to anyone.’

‘Don’t you
dare
question my decisions in front of strangers,’ Henderson spat. Then he paused, before reverting to a more normal tone. ‘We need to stop worrying about one dead Polish traitor and start thinking about the best way to kill Germans with all the explosives that just landed in our laps.’

Tuesday 22 August 1944–Wednesday 23 August 1944

‘Take cover,’ Sam yelled, equipment clattering as he ran frantically uphill, tailed by half a dozen armed men and a bunch of kids.

It was Tuesday, almost noon, and three medium Panzer tanks had rolled on to the far end of the bridge. As the lead tank came off, it slowed to a crawl and turned its turret towards the long barricade less than 15 metres away.

A few seconds felt like hours as the two tanks behind slowed up.

‘Panzer mark four,’ a girl crouched in a doorway beside Sam said.

He was no tank expert, but you didn’t need to be one to appreciate the difference in destructive power between the broken 20-mm cannon of the tank that formed the centre of their barricade and the huge muzzles on these beasts, designed to pump out 75-mm shells.

Then, with a rumble of its engine and a blast of sooty exhaust, the lead tank accelerated aggressively across the riverfront. It tore bricks out of a low wall as it pulled on to the street where the truck had been captured the night before.

The second and third tanks did the same and people began returning to the barricade as their noise faded.

‘Those guns were huge!’ a worried-looking boy who’d been on the barricade with his grandfather said. ‘Do you think the German reinforcements have arrived?’

The grandfather had no way of knowing and shrugged.

People looked to Sam, expecting some pearl of wisdom because he was part of Henderson’s team, but he could only copy the shrug.

‘Whatever you do, don’t try and fight ’em,’ Sam said.

‘There’s less noise from the city centre now,’ the doom-faced boy said. ‘Maybe they’ve swept up the resistance there, and now they’re moving out here to the suburbs.’

‘Or it may be a good sign,’ a woman added. ‘If the Germans are sending tanks out of the city centre, it could mean that the Allies are closing in.’

‘The Allies have already gone around Paris,’ another man insisted. ‘So don’t go holding your breath on that theory, flower petal.’

The woman took the insult personally. ‘I am not your
petal
, old man. And watch your mouth, or I’ll knock you out.’

The woman looked tough, but Sam didn’t get a chance to see the argument pan out because Paul was yelling at him.

‘Henderson wants us indoors for a meeting.’

It took a couple of minutes to walk to the apartment building and up to the third floor. Henderson’s whole team was present and the Maquis and other hangers-on had been conspicuously locked out.

‘Did you see the guns on those three Panzers?’ Sam asked. ‘I damn nigh shat myself when the lead tank turned his turret!’

Joel spoke next. ‘If we’d placed some of that torpedo explosive on the bridge, we could have blown them into the water—’

Henderson interrupted noisily. ‘I need
everyone’s
attention. I’ve had a bit of a run-around, but in the early hours of this morning I re-established telephone contact with one section of the Ghost Circuit. I’m told that the situation in the city centre is tense, but that resistance groups still control large areas and important buildings, despite the increased German pressure.’

‘What about the German reinforcements?’ Paul asked.

‘The resistance has seen no sign of German reinforcements arriving by road, and railways coming from the east are now bombed and sabotaged out of action. I’m also told that several vehicles in the convoy of torpedo explosives were attacked and destroyed. The rest of the convoy is being hunted and I understand that the Germans are now finding it difficult to move any non-armoured vehicles through Paris without incurring constant sniper attacks.’

‘That almost sounds like we’re winning,’ Sam said cautiously.

‘Things could certainly be worse,’ Henderson said. ‘But when the Germans surround buildings with tanks, the resistance is helpless and there have been significant casualties. Putting two and two together, it’s not difficult to conclude that we should be using the torpedo explosives we seized last night to target tanks.’

‘I said we should blow up the bridge—’ Sam blurted.

Henderson cut him off. ‘Blowing up bridges suits retreating armies far more than advancing armies. And the more bridges that get destroyed, the more likely it is that Paris will get drawn into a siege.

‘Most of the Paris Garrison’s tanks are being kept in city parks. I’ve been told that one of the largest tank facilities is just across the river, in Bois de Boulogne. German vehicles are distributed throughout the park, and camouflaged to avoid attacks from the air. The Germans have no reliable way of bringing more fuel or spares into the city so we’ll be targeting a refuelling and maintenance depot.’

‘Who’s we?’ Edith asked.

‘It’s a simple blast and run operation,’ Henderson said. ‘So it’ll be me, and I’ll take Marc because he speaks the best German. We’ll only need about half of the explosives, so we’ll leave the rest behind for a rainy day.

‘While I’m gone, I want PT to take overall charge. Luc and Joel can run the ambush points. Sam, Paul and Edith concentrate on the barricades. Questions?’

‘What if you get blown up?’ Luc asked sarcastically.

Henderson looked irritated. ‘You’re all trained. You know how to contact the Ghost Circuit if needs be.’

*

The truck’s windscreen had been shattered by Marc’s bullets, but not so badly that Henderson couldn’t see where he was driving. He wore the dead SS officer’s uniform. Marc sat next to him, dressed in a beige mechanic’s overall. He’d tried putting on the dead Pole’s jacket, but it was absurdly small.

‘Like old times,’ Marc said, as they set off.

Marc was thinking back to the weeks after the Nazi invasion when he’d first met Henderson in Paris. They’d depended on each other and Henderson felt like the father-figure Marc, as a twelve-year-old orphan, had always craved. But nostalgia could only take Marc so far. He was now old enough to see Henderson’s flaws, and his heart belonged to Jae.

Paris wasn’t much like old times either. They got over the bridge with no bother, but after that every street was dead. They imagined resistance snipers looking at their German truck from rooftops and balconies. There were fewer barricades than they’d expected and many of the ones they did see were unmanned and looked like a good stiff breeze would flatten them.

Henderson drove flat out, but the truck still caught a couple of bullets as it pulled on to a large crossroads. A German motorbike messenger had crashed some hours earlier, possibly after being shot at. The bloody rider lay unattended at the kerb, covered with flies as documents from his attaché case caught the wind.

The journey was less than 3 kilometres and, given their explosive cargo, Henderson was relieved to reach parkland where there was far less chance of getting shot at.

The tank park was blocked off with coils of barbed wire. The wooden security booth was burned out and a sturdier entry gate had been built further back, using sandbags and ribbed steel plates which were usually laid flat to help vehicle convoys cross boggy ground.

‘Special destruction unit,’ Henderson told a guard, as he flashed the dead SS officer’s military ID papers, on to which he’d skilfully grafted his own photograph.

The guard looked baffled.

‘I’m carrying demolition explosives,’ Henderson explained. ‘I can’t get into the city centre, so I have orders to transfer my cargo to an armoured vehicle.’

The elderly German guard walked cautiously around the vehicle and peered in the back.

‘Strange explosives,’ he said.

Henderson spoke in his most irritable, pompous German, as two small Panzers drove out of the compound in the opposite lane. ‘This has all been cleared in advance. I was told a vehicle was being prepared for me in the refuelling area.’

The guard shrugged. ‘Nobody tells me anything, sir. You need to drive six hundred metres. Branch left when you see a turnoff to your right, after the two felled trees. You’ll see the maintenance and refuelling sheds right in front of you.’

Henderson and Marc exchanged relieved smiles as they set off through the gate. Most of the park was woodland, but there were also areas of grass. These were beyond the shooting range of any resistance sniper and they drove past German soldiers sunbathing or playing football.

As Henderson drove slowly, Marc stepped into the truck’s rear compartment. He grabbed a bunch of pre-wired detonators and began pushing them into the sockets on twelve drums of torpedo explosive.

There was no additional security around the maintenance and refuelling compound and nobody paid attention as Henderson parked up in front of a 50-metre-long canopy. The corrugated metal roof was covered in camouflage netting and teams worked in the shade beneath, performing routine maintenance on a selection of aged Panzer tanks.

‘I count sixteen tanks in blast range,’ Henderson said, as Marc passed him a pair of trigger wires.

‘All connected up,’ Marc said.

Henderson plugged the wires into a simple clockwork timer. ‘I reckon eight minutes.’

Marc looked surprised. ‘It’s quite a walk, and then we’ve got to find a way through the perimeter.’

‘Change of plan,’ Henderson said. ‘I fancy a quick tan and a chance to see how it goes off.’

As Marc jumped out and walked to the back, he jammed his hunting knife in one of the rear tyres, in case someone tried to move the truck. Henderson moved quickly, but not so fast that anyone would pay attention.

Henderson walked past the fallen trees and started unbuttoning his shirt as he crossed the road and headed towards shouts coming from a football game.

‘Reckon this is far enough?’ Marc asked.

‘Plenty,’ Henderson said, as he glanced at his watch. ‘Just open your mouth in four minutes and fifty seconds, so that your eardrums don’t pop.’

They found a spot in the shade. Marc peeled his overall down, exposing a well-muscled chest, while Henderson rolled up his blazer and tucked it under his head.

‘When the bomb goes—’

Henderson paused as a tatty football rolled their way. Marc kicked it back at a lanky German who gave him a
thank-you
wave.

‘Everyone will duck,’ Henderson said. ‘Then they’ll move towards the explosion to see what’s happening. While everyone’s distracted we’ll back into the trees and cut our way through the wire.’

‘Makes sense,’ Marc said. Then after a pause, ‘How many people do you reckon will die?’

‘If we put those tanks out of action, we’ll save more than we kill,’ Henderson said.

‘You know, I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve killed,’ Marc said solemnly. ‘When did we get so cold-blooded?’

‘War’s shit,’ Henderson said, as the sun broke between clouds and made him squint. ‘People do what they have to.’

‘I just hope it ends soon,’ Marc said.

‘It will,’ Henderson said firmly. ‘And you’ve got your whole future. Don’t waste it torturing yourself over the past.’