Scorched Earth (7 page)

Edith and Paul had begun a stroll back to the house, and Jae gave it a few seconds for them to get out of earshot before pointing at Rosie’s grave and hissing, ‘I suppose
she
was invincible too.’

Marc tried kissing Jae but she put up her hands and spun around to catch Paul and Edith up.

‘Sorry about her,’ Marc said.

‘She cares for you,’ Henderson said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’

‘So what are we up to?’

‘We need to get that German truck out of hiding,’ Henderson began. ‘I’ve got about eight hundred kilos of plastic explosive stashed in a barn two farms over. It’s all got to be taken up to Abbeville by midnight. The message from campus said they need someone who can show the local resistance how to set up detonations, so that’s your job.’

‘Can’t you do it?’ Marc asked.

‘Looks like they’ve got something else planned for me in Abbeville, so we’ll be travelling up together,’ Henderson said. ‘It’s an hour and a half’s drive, but we’ll have to pass through or around Amiens, which is a garrison town, so we can add a good hour to that for all the checkpoints.’

*

It was a full moon and the air was muggy as a stolen German-made truck rolled to the front of a short checkpoint queue. Marc sat in the passenger seat, dressed in a workman’s overall. At the wheel, Henderson wore the brown uniform of Organisation Todt (OT), the paramilitary organisation responsible for all major Nazi construction projects.

The soldier carefully inspected Marc and Henderson’s false paperwork before speaking in German.

‘Don’t go north of here without enough fuel to return,’ the guard said. ‘The resistance have sabotaged two fuel depots and the entire area is dry.’

Marc spoke enough German to understand and Henderson’s reply was fluent. ‘I should be OK,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the tip.’

Henderson pressed the gas pedal as the guard opened the gate and they turned on to the road heading north-east to Abbeville. A large yellow sign warned that they were 15 kilometres from the protected coastal zone, which French civilians could only enter with a special pass.

The moonlit road was eerily quiet and Henderson drove slowly to conserve fuel. As they came around a bend he had to brake because a dead horse lay in the road ahead. There was no apparent blast damage to the trees alongside the road and it looked suspiciously like the animal had been positioned to stop a vehicle from passing in either direction.

‘Not good,’ Henderson said anxiously. ‘Jump in the back.’

Henderson threw the gearbox into reverse the instant he stopped, but before he could start rolling back a man leaped on to the running board and held a pistol through the open window.

‘Resistance!’ the man shouted. ‘Stop the engine or I’ll blow your head off.’

Henderson left the engine running, but raised his hands and spoke in French. ‘I’m one of you.’

The man with the gun laughed, as a much older man opened the passenger side door and clambered into the cab.

‘Outside,’ he ordered.

Nobody had seen Marc vault over the back of his seat and he lay in a canvas-covered cargo area, sandwiched between sacks.

One of the resistance men dragged Henderson out of the cab and spat in his face before slamming him against the side of the truck. Someone else peeked in the back to see what the truck was carrying, but he didn’t spot Marc in the darkness and the sticks of British-made plastic explosive were buried inside sacks filled with powdered chalkstone.

The booze-breathed resister sneered in Henderson’s face. ‘The only thing worse than a German is a Frenchman who puts on their uniform.’

‘You’re making a mistake,’ Henderson said, sounding uncharacteristically desperate. ‘Look in my bag. You’ll find maps and American detonators. If your leaders are connected to anyone, you can easily find out who I am.’

The older of the two men laughed. ‘For sure! I’ll give you a tour of my headquarters. Let you see the faces of all my bosses before we send you back to your Nazi pals.’

‘At least you’re OT,’ the other man added. ‘If you were Milice I’d cut your throat and feed you to my pigs.’

The truck had canvas sides and Marc crawled about in the back, peeking through gaps to work out what was going on. There was no way to tell how many men were hiding out at the side of the road, but as well as the two men interrogating Henderson, there was a man guarding the rear and a pair using metal cans and rubber tubes to siphon fuel out of the tank.

Marc had a gun, but didn’t fancy his chances against five men with the possibility of more in hiding. He thought about setting off a ball of explosive as a scare tactic, but Henderson had taken the basic safety precaution of keeping all the detonators in a bag in the cab.

After a glance between the front seats, Marc decided that he could probably get a hand on Henderson’s bag without being seen. A panicked shout went up as Marc got the bag. He jumped, but realised that the sound came from way back down the road.

Henderson could hear a column of German army trucks driving at speed towards them. He feared a bullet as the resister who’d dragged him out of the cab raised his gun, but the older man pulled him off.

‘There’s a village down there,’ the older man warned. ‘Kill him and they’ll go looking for revenge.’

So Henderson got off with a pistol butt slammed in the gut. The resistance gang disappeared quickly, apart from the pair siphoning fuel, who waited for a German headlight beam on their faces before disconnecting their tubes and scooting into the bushes.

The four-truck convoy squealed to a halt. Just like Henderson, their lead driver assumed that the dead horse was an ambush, and rough-looking German infantrymen jumped out of the lead truck with rifles ready.

Henderson soon had guns aimed at him from all directions, but they backed off when they saw his uniform and heard him speak in German. As Marc jumped out and gave Henderson a canteen of water, two German officers debated trying to flush out the resisters.

‘It was a large group,’ Henderson told them, sticking up for his resistance colleagues even though they’d hardly been friendly. ‘Maquis. At least twenty of them, and armed with American weapons. I’ll bet they know every ditch and hedgerow in these fields as well.’

After hearing about this vicious-sounding Maquis, the officers decided not to send a team into the fields. Instead, they got men to drag the horse to the side of the road and then set a grenade under it so that the resisters couldn’t repeat their ruse.

‘Where are you headed?’

‘Abbeville,’ Henderson said.

The shabby-looking SS officer nodded. ‘The roads around here can be dangerous after dark. You must ride with our convoy until you’re safely inside the town.’

‘I’d be grateful for that,’ Henderson said. ‘I’ve had quite a fright.’

As soon as Henderson was back in the cab he looked nervously at the fuel gauge. ‘We’ll get to Abbeville, but we won’t get back,’ he told Marc.

Henderson had to drive a couple of kilometres sandwiched between real Germans before his nerves settled enough to give Marc a wary smile.

‘No bad thing, really,’ Henderson said, ‘knowing that Germans are no safer moving around France at night than we are.’

Tuesday 6 June 1944

It was a quarter past midnight when the convoy pulled up alongside a small hotel, which had locked its main door at curfew an hour earlier. The sight of five German trucks sent half a dozen senior resistance members scrambling out of the hotel bar, down through a basement wine cellar and into a hidden room with an escape hatch leading into the local sewers.

Henderson was in the sights of three resistance machine guns as he jumped down from the cab, walked to the lead truck and thumped on the passenger’s side door to thank the officer who’d arranged his escort.

‘
Heil Hitler
,’ Henderson said.

Instead of saluting back, the shabby-looking officer raised one eyebrow and tutted. Henderson might have expected that attitude from regular German army, but it was unexpected coming from one of Hitler’s elite SS officers.

Three storeys up, resistance lookouts on the hotel roof changed from being alarmed to curious as four of the five trucks drove away. They watched Marc jump out as Henderson approached the hotel’s front door.

As he rang the bell, Henderson pushed a cigarette-sized detonator through the letterbox and said, ‘Delivery from Beauvais.’

Twenty seconds ticked by, before Henderson heard a bolt slide on the other side of the door.

‘Henderson?’ a smartly suited hotel manager asked warily. ‘Can I see your mouth?’

The Abbeville resistance had been told about Henderson’s missing front teeth and the tension dissipated when Henderson used his tongue to pop out his lower denture plate.

‘A-ha!’ the man said. ‘Your dentist’s name?’

‘Dr Helen Murray, of London.’

‘That’s what I heard,’ the man said, smiling slightly. ‘I’m told that you are a man of influence.’

As Marc came through the door, Henderson turned into a smoky area that combined the hotel’s reception with a small bar. Brandy glasses sat on the tables and a cigar burned in an ashtray, but it took a while for the men and women who’d taken refuge when the German convoy pulled up to start emerging up the steps behind the bar.

‘Sorry if I gave you a scare,’ Henderson said.

There were four men and two women. Henderson had met two of them before in Paris. Both were leaders of important resistance groups and Henderson guessed that the others were too.

‘You certainly know how to make an entrance, Captain Henderson,’ a woman named Celine said, as Henderson kissed her on the cheek. ‘They made
me
crawl in the back through the sewer.’

Celine was only twenty-two. Her mother had formed an important communist resistance group in eastern Paris. Celine’s followers had twice busted her out of prison, but her mother and both sisters had been executed by a Gestapo firing squad.

‘Am I the last to arrive?’ Henderson asked, as he looked around nervously.

It was extraordinarily risky to bring so many resistance leaders to one place. If anyone was being followed or blackmailed, the Germans would be able to move in and sweep up the whole lot of them.

‘Two or three more,’ the barman said. ‘And of course, Ghost herself.’

Ghost was Maxine Clere, a tall, beautiful, thirty-something with a history of sleeping with Henderson. Her highly successful resistance group had begun in Paris, but now spanned northern France.

Dozens of Ghost’s operatives had been arrested and tortured by the Nazis, but painstaking security meant that the Ghost Circuit survived circumstances that had resulted in other groups being rounded up and executed.

As the hotel manager poured Henderson a complimentary brandy, a bodyguard led Marc to less grand surroundings in the hotel’s gas-lit kitchen. The gloomy space had a smell of old cooking fat and a group of boys sitting around a table. Any male aged between seventeen and forty who didn’t have a full set of exemption papers could be swept off the street for immediate deportation, so the resistance increasingly relied on women and boys in their early teens.

After a glass of wine and a chunk of gritty black bread, Marc was allowed to reverse the German truck into a courtyard. One bag of explosives was brought inside and once the powdered chalk in which they’d been packed was swept up, Marc stood in front of a gnarled butcher’s block and began giving Abbeville’s youngest resistance members a crash course in blowing stuff up.

Topics involved were wiring, detonator cords, the merits of various timing devices and the quantity and placement of explosives required for different objectives. These ranged from a simple tripwire used to blow up a motorcycle messenger, to a large multi-stage detonation that would be required to destroy an iron bridge.

When Maxine finally arrived at the back door with two further resistance leaders, it was gone 2 a.m. She’d known Marc for four years, and gave him a hug. When Marc turned back to his pupils, he found the young faces staring in awe.

‘Was that Ghost?’

‘She’s your friend!’ an awe-struck girl blurted.

‘Can’t possibly say,’ Marc said teasingly, as he wondered how Maxine had got through town after curfew, accompanied by a dozen bodyguards.

These guards began positioning themselves in spots ranging from the hotel’s rear courtyard to the rooftop. The hotel only had twenty rooms and as each resistance leader had brought their own entourage, disputes broke out over the best vantage points.

While the leaders in the bar kept things civil, the atmosphere between guards was tense. All resistance groups were fighting to kick the Germans out of France, but beyond that goal lay huge divides. Communists hated nationalists; resistance groups who believed that extreme violence might provoke a people’s revolution were despised by those who’d do anything to avoid provoking Nazi retribution. And besides the big political issues there were local squabbles over territory and equipment drops.

With all the tension and the fact that armed bodyguards were making frequent trips to the hotel’s wine cellar, Marc started wondering whether the odds of the resistance groups starting to shoot at each other were greater than the odds of a Gestapo raid.

On the plus side, this meeting showed how powerful the resistance had become. A couple of years earlier it had been tiny and the Nazi security apparatus had such a grip that its leaders would never have dared assemble like this.

Upstairs in the bar, Henderson found himself squashed against the back wall in a haze of cigarette smoke. When Maxine entered, Henderson was surprised to recognise the man alongside her. He was a US Army colonel named Hawk. Henderson had met him three months earlier, during a short and risky return trip to the UK aboard a Lysander aircraft.

‘Good evening,’ Hawk said, speaking French that was competent, but clearly not his first language. ‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, but the information I’m about to give was extremely time sensitive. It is exactly 0300 hours. We have a full moon, so by now German spotter planes and coastal lookouts can’t have failed to see a massive Allied fleet crossing the English Channel.