Scorched Earth
Authors: Robert Muchamore
BY ROBERT MUCHAMORE
The Henderson’s Boys series:
1. The Escape
2. Eagle Day
3. Secret Army
4. Grey Wolves
5. The Prisoner
6. One Shot Kill
7. Scorched Earth
The CHERUB series:
1. The Recruit
2. Class A
3. Maximum Security
4. The Killing
5. Divine Madness
6. Man vs Beast
7. The Fall
8. Mad Dogs
9. The Sleepwalker
10. The General
11. Brigands M.C.
12. Shadow Wave
CHERUB series 2:
1. People’s Republic
2. Guardian Angel
… and coming soon:
3. Black Friday
Copyright © 2013 Robert Muchamore
First published in Great Britain in 2013
by Hodder Children’s Books
This ebook edition published in 2013
The right of Robert Muchamore to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form, or by any means with prior permission in writing from the publishers or in the case of reprographic production in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency and may not be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-13: 978 1 444 91408 5
Hodder Children’s Books
A Division of Hachette Children’s Books
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
An Hachette UK company
Hitler boasted that his European empire would last 1,000 years, but by June 1944 it was dying. In the east, the Soviet Union had retaken all of the territory he’d invaded three summers earlier and the Red Army now approached German soil. American forces had fought north through Italy to the outskirts of Rome, while in Britain 6,000 ships and half a million men were making final preparations for a cross-Channel invasion.
France remained under German occupation, but Nazi resources were stretched and the population was becoming rebellious. Resistance organisations had infiltrated every aspect of French life and thousands of young men chose to go on the run, rather than submit to deportation and forced labour in German mines and factories.
Many of these runaways formed gangs, known as the Maquis. Most lived in mountains or woodlands, with limited shelter and no option but to steal to survive. Until Allied boots hit French beaches, these young men were one of the biggest threats to German rule in France, and the Nazis were determined to wipe them out.
June 5th–June 6th 1944
CHAPTER ONE
Monday 5 June 1944
‘Mondays have never liked me,’ Paul Clarke said, trying to keep cheerful as his face creased with pain.
The fifteen-year-old had turned his ankle and skidded down an embankment. A khaki backpack cushioned the muddy slide, but he had dark streaks down his trousers and puddle water trickling into his boot.
‘Nice slide?’ Luc Mayefski asked, offering a hand as rain pelted their waxed jackets.
The teenagers’ hands couldn’t have been more different. Paul’s slender fingers linked with a great ham fist, and even with 30 kilos of explosive in Paul’s pack, Luc didn’t strain as he tugged his skinny cohort out of the mud.
If it had just been the pair of them Luc would have taken the piss out of Paul’s tumble, but these trained members of Charles Henderson’s Espionage Research Unit B (CHERUB) had to show a united front for the benefit of their inexperienced companions, Michel and Daniel.
Michel was an eighteen-year-old Maquis. Nine months’ living in the woods had left him stringy, with wild hair and a wire tourniquet holding on the sole of his right boot. His brother Daniel was only eleven. Their father was a prisoner in Germany and their mother had vanished after being arrested by the Gestapo. Daniel had chosen to live on the run with his brother, rather than be dumped at an orphanage.
‘Are your explosives OK?’ Daniel asked, as Paul joined the brothers on a muddy track at the base of the wooded embankment.
‘Plastic explosive is stable,’ Paul explained, as he tested his ankle and decided he could walk off the pain. ‘You can safely cut it, mould it. It wouldn’t blow up if you hit it with a hammer.’
Luc checked his compass and led off, eyes squinting as the early sun shot between tree trunks. Even with the rain Luc was sweating and he liked the earthy forest smell and the little squelch each time his boot landed.
Paul and Michel were suffering after 15 kilometres under heavy packs, but Daniel had done them proud. He’d walked all night, but refused to stop even when doubled up with a stitch.
Luc had been out this way on a recon trip two days earlier, and he turned off track at a point he’d marked by pushing two sticks into the soft ground.
‘There’s a good view down from this ridge,’ Luc explained, as he led the way. ‘But keep quiet. The sound carries across the valley and we’re not far from the guard.’
‘If there is one,’ Paul added.
The undergrowth was dense and Michel lifted his brother over a fast stream carrying the overnight rain. As Daniel got set down, Paul was touched by the way Michel put an arm around his little brother’s back and kissed his cheek.
‘Proud of you,’ Michel whispered.
Daniel smiled, then squirmed away, embarrassed, when he realised Paul was looking.
After a dozen more paces, Luc crouched and pushed branches aside. He’d opened a view over a ledge into a steep-walled valley cut into chalkstone. Water dripped off leaves on to Paul’s neck as he peered at two sets of train tracks running along the valley’s base. Sixty metres to his right, the tracks entered the mouth of a tunnel blasted through the steep hillside.
‘You’d never be able to bomb this from the air,’ Luc whispered, as he slid a pair of German Zeiss binoculars from their case. After wiping condensation off the lenses, he raised them to his eyes and looked towards a wooden guard hut near the tunnel mouth. The magnified view showed no sign of life and a padlock on the door.
‘We’re in luck,’ Luc said.
The tunnel formed part of a main line running north from Paris, taking trains to Calais on the Channel coast, or forking east into Belgium and Germany. The Germans had built guard huts at the ends of hundreds of important bridges and tunnels, but only had enough manpower to staff a fraction of them.
‘Nice binoculars,’ Paul noted, as Luc passed them over. ‘Where’d you get them?’
‘Drunk Osttruppen
1
,’ Luc explained. ‘They’d swap the uniform on their backs for a bottle of brandy.’
Paul backed away from the ledge as Luc glanced at his pocket watch. ‘If there’s a guard at the other end, we’ll sneak up and take him out from behind. Our target train is due to reach the tunnel at around seven a.m. That gives us half an hour to lay explosives along the tunnel and get in position, but with air raids and sabotage, there’s no guarantee that any train will run on time. Especially one that’s come all the way from Hanover.’
As Luc spoke, Paul slid canvas straps off his badly-chafed shoulders and moaned with relief as his pack settled in the undergrowth. An exploratory finger under the shirt collar came out bloody, but there was no time for first aid.
After unbuckling the pack, Paul took out two grubby cloth sacks. They seemed to be half full of potatoes, but the uneven lumps were plastic explosive, linked with detonator cord like a string of giant Christmas lights.
Paul looked at Michel. ‘Remember what Henderson said. The weakest part of the tunnel is around the mouth, so pack plenty around there.’
As Luc and Michel each grabbed one of Paul’s sacks and slung it over their shoulders alongside their own heavy packs, Paul looked at Daniel and tried to sound upbeat. ‘Ready to hike?’
The brothers quickly hugged, then Luc gave Daniel his binoculars before leading Michel along the side of the valley.
‘You break those and I’ll break you,’ Luc warned.
As there was no guard, Luc and Michel faced an easy journey down to the tunnel mouth using uneven steps carved into the chalkstone. When they reached the mouth, their task was to unravel the chains of explosive along the tunnel’s 300-metre length and retreat to a safe distance, ready to trigger them.
Meantime, Paul and Daniel had to find a vantage point atop the forested hill through which the tunnel cut. Once in position, they had to identify their target: a 600-metre-long cargo train carrying twenty Tiger II tanks, dozens of 88-mm artillery guns and enough spare parts and ammunition to keep the 108th Heavy Panzer Battalion functioning for several weeks.