One Shot Kill (21 page)

Jean, Justin and Didier smirked knowingly.

‘I think you mean four kilometres
west
, sir,’ Rosie said, as everyone joined the laughter.

‘Ahh …’ Henderson said, glad that it was too dark to see his face redden. ‘Well, hopefully I’ll have worked out which way I’m supposed to be going by Friday.’

*

While Luc, Goldberg, Henderson and all but the most sensitive equipment spent a humid night in the cave, Paul, Marc and Sam shared more comfortable quarters on the floor of Joseph Blanc’s drawing room.

Wednesday’s plan was for Rosie to take Henderson and the boys on a fake hunting trip into the forest, in order to get a good look at the bunker site and its surroundings. Goldberg would stay back with Jean and Didier, giving them a brief introduction to weapons handling and espionage techniques.

But Paul’s day veered off track before he’d even rolled off the comfortable chaise he’d slept on. There was no sign of Marc, but a note in Marc’s hand had been tucked into one of Paul’s boots.

Paul,

I can’t be this close and not see her. I’m going to Beauvais and I’ll be back by Friday latest. Don’t get into trouble by trying to cover for me. I’ll take my punishment but I have to see Jae.

Your friend,

Marc

Paul and Sam considered a cover-up, but there was no obvious way so Paul handed Henderson the note when Rosie and the six parachutists met up near Jean and Didier’s cow shed in the woods.

‘Who is she?’ Henderson spat.

‘Jae Morel, sir,’ Paul explained. ‘Marc’s known her all his life, but he really fell for her when he escaped from prison last year.’

Henderson glowered accusingly at Paul. ‘He must have planned this before we left. Can you
honestly
tell me you knew nothing about this?’

‘On my parents’ graves,’ Paul said. ‘I know how nuts Marc is about this girl. He sleeps with a lock of her hair under his pillow, but I had no idea that he was going to try something crazy like this.’

‘You liar,’ Luc said. ‘I bet I could get the truth out of Paul if you let me smack him about, Captain.’

Rosie turned towards Luc. ‘Shut up, moron. This is serious.’

‘Marc’s got authentic documentation,’ Paul said. ‘He escaped from prison camp in Frankfurt and survived on his own, so I’d think he can pull off a trip to Beauvais without major difficulties.’

‘That’s not the point,’ Henderson said. ‘Every aspect of this plan has been carefully organised in order to minimise risk. Marc’s no fool, but he’s putting our lives at additional risk – as well as his own.’

‘There’s not much we can do,’ Rosie said. ‘Joseph says there’s an early train into Rennes, which connects to the morning express. If things are running on time Marc will be halfway to Paris already.’

Henderson hadn’t shaved and ran his hand over a bristly cheek. He was furious at Marc, but hid his anger because he wanted to come across as the unflappable commander.

‘Makes no difference,’ Henderson said. ‘We’ll carry on without him.’

‘Two other pieces of news,’ Rosie said. ‘Do you want the good or bad first, sir?’

‘I’m not in the mood for games,’ Henderson said, with just enough snap to make Rosie stand upright.

‘Right,’ Rosie said stiffly. ‘I received a scheduled radio message from Joyce on campus last night. The good news is that the two-day weather forecast shows clear skies for Friday night into Saturday morning. Unfortunately, Joyce also received a message from the Ghost circuit in Paris. The Germans have just changed the design of the paperwork required to move foreign labourers around.’

‘Changed how?’ Henderson asked.

‘The new cards are green instead of purple and the layout is completely different,’ Rosie said. ‘The blanks we’ve brought with us for the scientists in the bunker are useless. They’ve also issued a new set of rubber stamps.’

‘Blast,’ Henderson said, as Luc and Goldberg shook their heads in sympathy.

‘The Ghost circuit is doing all it can to either steal or forge sets of the new cards and stamps,’ Rosie said.

‘How confident are they?’

‘They’re sure they can get them,’ Rosie said. ‘Whether they can get them and get twelve sets to us by Friday evening is less certain.’

By this time, Jean and Didier had come out of their shed and caught the end of the conversation. ‘What’s the matter?’ Didier asked.

‘Something’s always the matter,’ Henderson said. ‘But it usually sorts itself out in the end.’

*

They’d all seen the bunker in aerial surveillance photographs, but from fifty metres the rusted fence and armed guards sent a tingle down Paul’s back.

The Germans had recently tarmacked the single-track road leading to the bunker, enabling it to carry bomb-laden Luftwaffe trucks in all weathers. The mesh fence was topped with three strands of barbed wire. Notices with lightning bolts threatened a shoot to kill policy for anyone who tried climbing in, and hanging for anyone who survived that.

There was a single, gated entrance, manned by two guards. Rosie had made more than a dozen visits to the site and told Henderson that she’d never seen guards patrolling the perimeter, from either inside or outside the fence, but occasionally one of the men on duty at the gate would wander into the trees to urinate in preference to a much longer walk to the guard hut.

The fence formed a rectangle which Rosie had counted as three hundred metres wide and five hundred and sixty deep. The French army had replanted trees to hide the bunker from the air after they’d built it, but the trees inside the fence were all less than ten years old and you could even make out a rough outline because the growth of trees planted above the bunker had been stunted when their roots hit concrete.

Apart from trees there were a couple of dilapidated wooden sheds and a clearing where the scientists came up in pairs to exercise and smoke. The only other indications of life below ground were concrete ventilation shafts poking through the soil and a heavily reinforced reception building.

This reception was the only way down into the bunker and critical to Henderson’s planned operation. It was one and a half storeys high and set three hundred metres back from the front gate. On three sides its reinforced concrete roof sloped to the ground in order to deflect any bomb that might hit. The fourth side was a flat wall with two entrances.

The larger entrance went down into a garage where trucks could reverse in to load or unload by a freight elevator, while the smaller entrance was a regular door. In an emergency, or during an air raid, an additional pair of armoured-steel blast doors could slam shut, making the entire building impregnable.

‘Have you ever seen them shut?’ Henderson asked, as he squatted in the undergrowth next to Rosie.

She nodded. ‘From the weight of them, you’d think they’d be slow. But I’ve been here when an air raid warning goes off and they don’t hang about. There’s a whoosh of air, and they clang shut within twenty seconds.’

‘Not much room for error then,’ Henderson said.

‘So what’s your exact plan?’ Rosie asked.

Henderson had briefed the boys before leaving campus, but Rosie had sent her undeveloped photographs back to Britain via the resistance in Paris and since then her only direct communication with campus had been through short radio messages.

‘As soon as we found that the notebook was genuine we put out discreet feelers about the bunker within the French exile community, in both Britain and the USA,’ Henderson began, speaking just above a whisper. ‘We were lucky enough to track down a French draughtsman in Chicago, who worked on the bunker while it was being built. He’s made us a decent drawing from memory, which we’ve used in conjunction with your notes and photographs of more recent German alterations.

‘Our first job is to cut off communications so that nobody can get the message out that the base is under attack. Next we lure as many Germans as possible to the surface and get the snipers to take them out, simultaneously and from a distance. The trickiest part comes next: we’ve got to storm the base and get into the reception building before someone below ground finds out what’s happened and closes those blast doors.

‘Once we’re below ground, we’ve got to go room to room until we’ve killed or secured all the Germans and located the scientists. With so many bombs down there, we can’t go in with guns blazing, so we’ll use knockout gas. It’s absolutely crucial that the Germans don’t know we’ve pulled the scientists out and have no knowledge that this was a resistance raid. So once the bunker is secure, we’ll need to drag all the dead bodies inside, set a couple of explosives to go off underground and prime a few German bombs.

‘As we leave we set off the homing beacon for the USAF. While we drive towards Paris disguised as German guards escorting a work party, three dozen B-17s will bomb the bunker. It’s unlikely that any bombs will break through the reinforced concrete, but the explosives we’ve left will set off the bombs inside the bunker.’

Rosie nodded. ‘So, even if the Americans miss the bunker, the Germans will think that one of their own bombs was triggered accidentally during the air raid?’

‘Exactly,’ Henderson said. ‘Caused by vibration, or whatever. And with hundreds of bombs in storage down there we’re hoping that there’s gonna be nothing but a big crater and a lot of charred trees in the forest come Saturday morning.’

‘And the Germans will think all the scientists died below ground,’ Rosie said as she broke into a smile. ‘So nobody comes looking for them.’

Henderson nodded.

‘It won’t be easy,’ Rosie said. ‘But it’s a perfect plan if it works.’

Henderson laughed as he took another glance through his binoculars. ‘Of course it’ll work,’ he joked. ‘When have I ever given you kids reason to doubt me?’

The train from Rennes to Paris took four and a half hours, but on arrival Marc found the platform barricaded and an hour-long queue while Gendarmes checked identity documents and opened every passenger’s baggage.

‘Is Paris your final destination?’ an officer asked, when Marc finally reached the front. He knew his documents were perfect, but still felt uncomfortable as an elderly officer rifled through his identity card, ration card and employment status document.

‘I’m visiting a friend in Beauvais.’

‘How much money do you have on you?’

‘Twenty-two francs.’

‘No luggage?’

Marc shook his head. ‘I’ll be travelling back tomorrow morning.’

As he spoke another train was steaming into the adjacent platform. People opened doors and jumped off before the train stopped moving, so that they could grab a good place in the inspection line.

‘Let me see.’

Marc peeled some crumpled francs out of his pocket, along with a return ticket for Rennes.

‘Move out,’ the gendarme said rudely, as he looked forlornly down his rapidly swelling queue.

There was a German-manned inspection point at the station exit, but Marc skipped it by going down the steps into the Metro. After a short ride under Paris, a mainline train took him fifty minutes out to Beauvais.

The security around the station looked relaxed, but a new pass had been introduced by the Luftwaffe who controlled the area around Beauvais. Marc had left France the previous summer under heavy fire aboard a stolen German fighter plane, so he was more jittery than he’d been in Paris as a Luftwaffe man copied all his identity details into a ledger and then made him empty his pockets.

Marc left the station office with a square of canary-yellow cardboard which allowed him to enter the Luftwaffe zone and a strip of paper with details of how to apply for a special ration card if he wanted to eat or drink during his stay.

The last stretch was an hour’s walk. Marc felt his emotions rise as he ducked past the orphanage where he’d lived for the first twelve years of his life, reaching Morel’s farm just before three in the afternoon.

‘Are you back to work?’ the farm manager asked eagerly. ‘I lost four workers to German factories. Three more have gone on the run to avoid being rounded up.’

‘Just visiting,’ Marc said.

‘And who might you be looking for?’ the manager asked, before laughing at the absurdity of having to ask. ‘You’ll find her pulling up potatoes between the cow sheds.’

Marc smiled. Although it was relatively safe in the countryside, there was a war on and until that moment he wasn’t even certain Jae was still alive. He bolted off, passing through fields that verged on derelict.

France would face a long and hungry winter if Morel’s farm was typical, but aching legs and doom-laden thoughts vanished the instant Marc saw the girl he loved. Jae had grown a couple of centimetres and farm work had built shoulders atop her thin body. To make the moment more perfect, Jae had her back to Marc, so he crept up.

‘Need a hand with those?’ he asked noisily.

Jae jumped and screamed when she saw who it was. ‘Bloody hell!’

They were both crying as they embraced. Marc gulped Jae’s smell, the mix of earth and sweat dredging up a million memories of the previous summer.

‘I love you so much,’ Marc said. ‘I’ve thought about you every day.’

‘One of Daddy’s Luftwaffe friends mentioned that a plane got stolen,’ Jae said. ‘But I had no idea if you’d made it back to Britain alive.’

‘Our landing was a
bit
bumpy,’ Marc said, but tailed off as they joined at the lips.

The next ten minutes was all slurps and groping. Jae was always in Marc’s dreams and he half expected to wake up in his campus dorm, breathing Luc’s farts. When they finally broke apart, they backed away and stood admiring one another in a state of awe.

‘So how’s life?’ Marc asked.

‘Horrible,’ Jae said. ‘And not just because I miss you. We’ve got nobody to work the land and Mr Tomas and the requisition authority make our lives hell. He’s never liked my dad, and he’s really had it in for him since you left last year.’

Marc shook his head at the thought of Tomas. As orphanage director Tomas had made Marc’s childhood a misery. When the war began, he’d taken a job with the Nazi Requisition Authority. This much-loathed organisation controlled everything France produced, from trucks to tomatoes, and demanded that an ever increasing share of it was sent to Germany to feed the war effort.