One Shot Kill (26 page)

‘When we’re certain it’s safe, you can also go across the hall to the laboratory,’ Marc continued, trying to assert himself above an atmosphere of fear and shock. ‘You can each take a small quantity of scientific notes, along with any equipment that you feel is of high value. But we only have two trucks and whatever you take, you’ve got to be able to carry by yourselves. I also need to take up-to-date photographs of each of you, which I’ll develop en route and attach to the blank documentation.’

‘Are you here because Jaulin passed his notebook to that fat doctor?’ a lanky man dressed in socks and undershorts asked. It was understandable that the scientists had mixed feelings about the sudden shocking arrival of the resistance, but this fellow sounded outright hostile.

‘Yes, we got the notebook,’ Marc said. ‘We’ll have plenty of time to explain when we’re on the road. What matters now is that you pack up and leave as quickly as possible.’

‘Escaping sounds damned dangerous to me,’ the lanky man said. ‘What if we don’t want to leave?’

Goldberg didn’t like the man’s tone and spoke angrily. ‘We’re here because we were led to believe that you’re French scientists being forced to work on a German military project. If you
want
to stay here and continue working for the Nazis, that makes you traitors and war criminals and I’ll have no option but to execute you.’

Another man nodded in agreement with lanky, but most of the others were either neutral or stared at him in disbelief.

‘What right have you to do this?’ the lanky man ranted furiously. ‘You’re American. Are you working with the authority of the French government in exile, or for American imperialist ends?’

‘What about our families?’ another man asked. ‘If we escape they could be persecuted.’

Marc had a lot more sympathy with this last question. ‘We’re going to set this place to blow before we leave. Shortly after that, twenty-five American bombers will wipe this place off the face of earth. Nobody will come looking because the Germans will think you’re all dead.’

‘So our families will think we’re dead?’

‘Possibly,’ Marc said. ‘But think how happy they’ll be when they find you’re not.’

Some of the scientists laughed nervously.

‘We’ve put our lives on the line to save you,’ Goldberg added indignantly. ‘If it wasn’t for what’s in your big brains you’d die down here, like other Nazi prisoners who die every night in Allied bombing raids.’

But the lanky man still wasn’t having it. ‘You have no legitimacy,’ he said, as he got right in Goldberg’s face. ‘You Americans want to steal our technology. You’re no better than the Germans.’

Goldberg wasn’t a big man, but he was tough and his patience had run out. He stepped forward and smashed the skinny Frenchman in the mouth with the metal butt of his machine gun, then floored him with a knockout punch to the temple.

‘He stays here and he’ll be dead in an hour,’ Goldberg told the others. ‘Now start packing. This is a war and I’m not your mother, so no more shit from any of you.’

If anyone still had doubts, none of the scientists dared show them as they started getting dressed and packing up. Marc had taken a pocket camera and a pack of flashbulbs out of his pack, and began taking identity photographs with each man standing in front of a bare wall.

‘We’re glad you’re here,’ one man said, as Marc lined him up in a wire-frame viewfinder. ‘What we do here has been eating me up. Jaulin spent weeks drawing and hiding that notebook. He’ll be over the moon when he gets back from the toilet.’

Another man laughed before butting in. ‘Old Jaulin can spend half a day in that toilet. I don’t know how he stands the smell.’

Marc’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Jaulin’s not here?’ he asked, as he did a quick count and realised that there were ten men moving and one unconscious.

Jaulin was a brilliant scientist. Joyce had found pictures of him, but Marc only now made a connection between the grey-haired scientist in a spotted bow tie he’d seen in a photo on campus and the man in German army trousers who he’d shot emerging from the toilet.

Marc felt like spewing, but before he could tell anyone what had happened, he heard Luc shout from the base of the stairs.

‘Rosie and stick-boy have arrived with the beacon.’

Goldberg let three scientists cross the hall into the laboratory to pick up their research notes before turning to Marc.

‘How long do you need down here?’ Goldberg asked, as the next man in the photo queue stepped up to the wall.

‘Only a couple of minutes for the pictures,’ Marc said. ‘Lift’s a bloody mess and some of the guys are pretty old, so it’s gonna take a while to get them up the stairs.’

‘Fifteen minutes sound about right?’ Goldberg said.

‘Should be plenty of time,’ Marc said.

Goldberg shouted down the hallway. ‘Luc, tell them to turn the beacon on in twelve minutes. We should be at least a mile from here before the bombers arrive.’

The scientists’ fake identity documents had to be ready for the first German checkpoint they encountered, so as soon as the photographs were done Marc pulled the film from the camera and worked with his hands in a light-proof bag, unravelling the film from its roll before dropping it into an insulated metal pot filled with warm developing fluid.

It would take seventeen minutes for the film negatives to develop, after which the canister would be flushed with distilled water. Then he’d add a bleaching agent for a few minutes, flush the canister again and finally add a fixing chemical to stop the negatives from fading.

To make photos from these negatives Marc would then have to make contact prints on to light-sensitive paper using a handheld enlarger and repeat the develop/bleach/fix process on the paper itself. It was a process he’d practised dozens of times in the campus darkroom, but never with the added stress of a mission going on in the background.

While Marc concentrated on photographs, Didier helped two exuberant Jewish scientists carry a chunky wooden mock-up of an FZG-76 nose cone, fitted with the latest prototype of its guidance system, up the spiral stairs.

Other scientists followed, carrying up a mixture of personal items, blueprints and scientific equipment. The lift remained operational after the machine gun blasts, but nobody had the appetite to clean out the gore and even the weakest of the scientists chose ninety-four steps over balancing on mangled corpses.

When Marc was satisfied with the film, he placed the darkroom bag and developing cylinder inside his backpack, then checked his watch, making a mental note of when he had to start the bleaching phase.

‘Everyone out,’ Marc shouted, as he leaned into the laboratory. ‘Time to leave.’

There was nobody in the lab, but the dorm still contained an elderly scientist called Wallanger, who was hovering over the man Goldberg had knocked out.

‘He’s a big mouth,’ Wallanger told Marc. ‘There was no need for that, he’d have settled down.’

‘Maybe,’ Marc said ruefully. ‘But dozens of people will put their lives on the line to smuggle you lot out of France. We can’t take chances with someone who isn’t on our side. And you’d better get upstairs. Make sure you grab a set of overalls before you board the truck.’

‘Getting too old for adventures,’ Wallanger said, as he picked up a battered leather case. ‘How old are you anyway?’

‘Nowhere near as old as I feel right now,’ Marc replied, feeling a surge of emotion as he snatched Wallanger’s case. ‘I can’t leave anyone who knows our plan alive, just in case the bombs don’t go off. So
please
don’t make me shoot you. I’ll carry your case. Our friends in Paris know you’re elderly and I can promise they’ll look after you.’

As Wallanger toddled reluctantly down the hallway, Marc felt tears welling as he pointed his pistol at the lanky fellow lying unconscious on the floor. He turned away before taking two silenced shots, killing the second of the twelve scientists he was supposed to be rescuing.

A bearded physicist called Rivest almost bowled Marc over as he stepped into the corridor. ‘Why are you back down here?’ Marc roared furiously. ‘I’m
trying
to clear you bastards out.’

‘I forgot an important notebook.’

‘Well, hurry up,’ Marc shouted. ‘We’ve got to be out of here in
three
minutes.’

Rivest looked wary, realising that his life was in the hands of a highly stressed fifteen-year-old who was waving a pistol around while tears streaked down his face.

Marc picked up Wallanger’s case and his own backpack. He headed towards the stairs, but stopped and wiped his cheek before stepping into the bomb-storage room.

‘How’s it going?’ he asked.

Luc and Goldberg stood over a bomb rack. They’d set timed plastic explosive charges in four places, and now they were screwing sympathetic fuses into giant 1000kg Hermann bombs.

In theory, any American bomb going off directly above the bunker would set off a shockwave and trigger the sympathetic fuses in half a dozen large bombs. But the air raid was purely a deception designed to ensure that the Germans didn’t come looking for the scientists, so even if all twenty-five bombers missed, the plastic explosives were a failsafe that would trigger the bombs fifteen minutes later.

Whatever set the Hermanns off, their blast would generate enough heat to detonate every other bomb in the room and leave nothing but a large crater in the middle of a forest.

‘These fuses we brought from England are shit,’ Luc told Marc angrily. ‘Whoever machined them made them a fraction too big. It’s taking way longer than we thought to screw them in the detonator shafts.’

‘Just a couple more now though,’ Goldberg said, trying to calm Luc down, because angry psychos and bombs are rarely a good mix. ‘Tell everyone to board the trucks and start the engines. They can drive out the instant we jump in the back.’

‘Right,’ Marc said. ‘I’ll grab my shit and run up now.’

Rivest was helping the elderly Wallanger up the spiral stairs as Marc came back into the corridor. He bounded past the pair and caught an anxious shout from Paul as he neared the top.

‘What’s going on?’ Paul screamed. ‘Why are those idiots still down there?’

Marc glanced at his watch and looked mystified. ‘We’re OK. The bombers won’t get here until after the beacon’s switched on.’

‘The beacon’s been on for ten minutes,’ Paul said.

‘You what?’ Marc shouted. ‘Why did you turn it on?’

‘Luc shouted up the stairs.’

‘He
told
you to turn it on in twelve minutes,’ Marc said. ‘Shit!’

‘I didn’t hear twelve minutes.’

‘I bloody did,’ Marc said. ‘I was right there when Luc shouted.’

Marc had reached the garage by this time. Sam, Jean and Didier had dragged in the bodies killed by sniper shots and piled them up at the base of the metal staircase. This way, they’d get blown up and the Germans wouldn’t find bodies with gunshot wounds. Eight scientists sat in one truck looking anxious, while Henderson was in the other, with Rosie knelt over him giving first aid.

‘Get that truckload of scientists out of here, now,’ Marc said, as he put Wallanger’s case down and threw off his backpack, shedding weight so that he could move as fast as possible. ‘I’m going back down.’

‘Planes could be here any second,’ Paul said.

Didier shouted from up by the garage doors. ‘I think I can hear them.’

Planes on a bombing run fly at over two hundred kilometres per hour, so unless Didier was hearing planes from a very long way off Marc had no chance of warning Luc and Goldberg in time. But Marc wasn’t thinking rationally after shooting the two scientists and he headed back down, even though it was probably a suicide mission.

As Marc set off, Didier was climbing into the truck to drive the scientists out of the garage.

‘You two run,’ Marc screamed, as he pushed past Rivest and Wallanger, a dozen stairs from the top. ‘Luc, Goldberg. Get up here now.’

Paul was shouting from up top. ‘Marc, we’re leaving. Three planes sighted, we’re moving out
right
now.’

Marc gripped the banisters on either side of the staircase and leapt three steps at a time, all the while screaming for Luc and Goldberg. Even in his panicked state Marc saw the irony that he despised one of the people he was rushing to save.

His thoughts were all jumbled: he thought about Jae, he imagined a fireball shooting up the staircase. Then he missed a step and twisted his ankle, but he had too much adrenaline in his system to feel the pain.

‘They’ve set the beacon, planes are coming,’ Marc screamed, when he burst through the door of the bomb room.

In the back of Marc’s mind, he was beginning to think that if Didier really had seen three bombers, he should be dead by now, or should at least have heard some bombs going off nearby.

‘What moron set the beacon?’ Goldberg yelled. ‘They should just be turning it on
now
.’

‘We’ve done five out of six,’ Luc said. ‘It should be enough.’

Goldberg hesitated as Marc turned to race back up the stairs. ‘You said you’ve got two baby daughters back in New York,’ Marc told the American. ‘If you ever want to see them again, you’d better shift.’

Henderson looked up at Rosie as he lay across the slatted wooden floor of a canvas-sided German army truck. She’d put five stitches in his holed right cheek before stuffing the inside of his mouth with bandage. She’d also ordered him to press another wodge of bandage hard against the outside of his cheek to stop the blood flow.

‘Uah uop,’ Henderson said. ‘Uop uop.’

Henderson was used to running the show. Not knowing what was going on was as much of a torture as the missing teeth and the hole in his face.

‘I can’t understand you,’ Rosie said. ‘You’ve got to keep your mouth still until a scab forms.’

As Rosie spoke, Jean started the truck engine, and scientists Rivest and Wallanger were clambering over Henderson’s legs.

‘Leave now,’ Paul said, as he slammed the truck’s rear flap. ‘Drive about a kilometre. We’ll try catching you up. The photographic stuff is in Marc’s pack, if we don’t make it try to rescue the negatives.’