Scorched Earth (6 page)

By the time Henderson caught up, Paul had stripped off his boots and trousers and taken shelter from the sun under a canopy of woven branches. He now lay fast asleep on top of a sleeping bag, bony ribcage rising and falling with each breath.

Luc was officially in charge of the tunnel mission. He admired Henderson, but they rubbed each other up the wrong way and Luc spoke formally. ‘Would you like a briefing, sir?’

Henderson waved his hand dismissively. ‘You blew the train up and blocked the tunnel. Word from our sources in Beauvais is that the line will be out of action for two weeks. Perhaps more, if the fire buckled the iron trusses holding up the tunnel.’

‘Shame about the passenger train,’ Luc said coldly.

‘It’s a busy line,’ Henderson said. ‘There was always that risk. You did an excellent job. Now try catching some sleep and make sure Paul speaks to me as soon as he wakes up.’

Luc saw the hurt on Henderson’s face and could only think of one reason. ‘Is Rosie OK?’

Henderson almost said it, but it seemed wrong that Luc should find out first and he sounded annoyed. ‘Just do as I say for once.’

A Maquis might spend a few hours a day hunting, fishing, patrolling or collecting firewood. A couple of times per week there might be some extra excitement, like moving camp, a trip into town with a fake ration card or being picked for one of Henderson’s sabotage operations. But that still left a typical Maquis with a lot of free time.

Cards, dice and boxing were common, but the number one pastime was spreading and discussing rumours. Only the participants and a couple of Henderson’s agents knew about the tunnel raid, but everyone knew about the raid on the admin building, and the carnage at the orphanage was a full-blown sensation.

Henderson had asked the Maquis to stay in the forest to minimise the chances of further trouble, but for hard-core rumour mongers this only spurred a widespread belief that the Milice were now out to get them. By the end of a hot afternoon, the main debate was whether the Milice would stage a revenge attack on the orphanage, or come charging into the forest itself, backed up by German tanks and artillery.

Henderson sat under a woven branch canopy as Gilles asked for his opinion.

‘Every day someone tells me we’re doomed,’ Henderson said. ‘If the Germans had the will and resources to flush us out of the woods, why wait until now?’

‘Other Maquis groups have been smashed,’ Gilles pointed out.

‘Mainly in the south and usually when they stopped being mobile,’ Henderson said. ‘Anything is possible, but don’t tie yourself in knots over rumours.’

‘What about the orphanage?’

Henderson was less comfortable on this subject. ‘They’re vulnerable because they can’t vanish into the woods like we do. In our favour, people aren’t exactly queuing out the doors of Milice recruitment offices.’

Gilles nodded. ‘Especially since the communist resistance began killing family members of Milice officers.’

‘There’re many fewer men in Milice uniforms than the Germans would like us to think, that’s for sure,’ Henderson said.

Gilles was about to ask another question when Paul stepped into the shelter, dressed in a vest and ragged undershorts.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Gilles said. His mouth gaped and he put a clumsy foot in Henderson’s mess tin as he backed out.

‘My sister’s dead, isn’t she?’ Paul said.

‘Did Luc tell you?’ Henderson asked irritably. ‘I specifically asked—’

Paul interrupted and pointed back at Gilles. ‘Nobody told me, but everyone reacts like Gilles just did when they see me.’

‘You want to sit down and talk about it?’ Henderson said, standing up as he realised he had the only seat under the canopy.

Paul sounded eerily calm. ‘I don’t feel … I’ve seen so much shit in the last four years, I almost expected something like this.’

‘Shock,’ Henderson said.

Paul nodded, then Henderson took some time explaining what had happened at the orphanage.

‘Any time you want to talk, I’m here. I thought you might want a few days away from the woods. I’m sure you’d be welcome at Morel’s farm.’

‘Have they buried her?’

‘I told PT to wait,’ Henderson said. ‘Though it’s hot and she’s got an open wound, so she can’t stay above ground for too long.’

‘I know she’ll be a mess, but I’d like to see her one last time.’

‘You’re sure?’

Paul nodded.

‘OK,’ Henderson said. ‘I need to see how PT has set up his defences down at the orphanage. I’ll walk down there with you and we can pay our last respects.’

Paul’s feet were painful after a 36-kilometre round trip and his sweaty shirt had been taken away to be washed while he slept. By the time Gilles found a clean shirt, Paul had painfully pulled boots over his blisters.

Henderson was also ready to leave, but Edith and Sam came racing back from the hillside where they handled daily communications with CHERUB campus.

‘So sorry,’ Edith told Paul.

Edith and Paul got along well and he sobbed as the pair hugged. Meantime, Sam urgently presented Henderson with the radio message.

‘We ran back as soon as we saw what was in it,’ Sam said, as he passed over three sheets of squared paper holding the decoded message. ‘It’s a big one.’

The daily message from campus rarely filled more than one sheet. For extra security, the messages contained code words that only Henderson understood and he did a double take when he saw that the opening word was BADGER.

‘Blast,’ Henderson said, as he flicked through the long message, reading a list of three sabotage operations which he’d been ordered to carry out immediately.

The importance of all operations fell into one of four categories. BADGER was the one which meant
Do this even if your entire team gets wiped out
and he’d never seen it in a message until now.

‘Something big must be going down, sir,’ Sam said.

‘Looks like it,’ Henderson agreed, backing out of the canopy into a forest clearing as he continued squinting at the long message. ‘But keep that to yourself. I’m going to need two teams put together. Sam, you run a team. Edith, go to the next clearing and fetch Luc and Joel to run the other one.’

Paul felt abandoned as Edith ran off and Henderson began briefing Sam. As Sam had worked on decoding the message, he already knew that his task was to travel east and deliver two dozen phosphorous grenades to a train guard. The message didn’t say what would happen next, but presumably the guard would pass them on to a resistance group further down the line.

Joel and Luc soon arrived. Henderson ordered them to put a team of four together and cut the phone lines of the Luftwaffe airfield east of Beauvais. When Jean heard what was going on he raced across from his dilapidated French army command tent, in which he’d been working with a team stamping and validating some of their stolen ration cards.

‘We agreed to send teams deeper into the woods and lie low,’ Jean yelled at Henderson. ‘You can only poke your stick into the German hive so many times before the swarm comes out to sting us.’

‘The timing’s bad and I’d never do this out of choice,’ Henderson admitted, as he rattled his decoded message in front of Jean. ‘But these are top priority.’

Jean scoffed. ‘It’s always top priority.’

‘Jean, I know you put your life on the line every day to protect the young men out here. But they’ll only be truly safe when our side wins the war and that’s what
I’m
trying to do.’

‘And what’s the point winning the war if they’re all dead before it’s over?’ Jean spat. ‘I care about these boys. For you they’re just a means to achieve British goals.’

Henderson always got riled when someone suggested that British agents were only in France to protect British interests.

‘You live in a fantasy land,’ Henderson snapped. ‘Without Allied food and clothes drops, half of your boys would have starved or frozen last winter.’

Jean couldn’t deny this, but was too proud to admit how much his Maquis’ survival depended on Allied air drops.

‘I don’t have time for this fight,’ Henderson shouted, as he backed away. ‘Go back to your tent and deal with your ration cards.’

‘Or what?’ Jean hissed. ‘Are you threatening me?’

Jean and Henderson regularly fought over how to run the Maquis, but there were a dozen onlookers, none of whom had ever seen the pair in such a violent public disagreement. Awkwardly for Henderson, Jean was well liked and Henderson knew that he’d be the one kicked out of the woods if it came down to a popularity contest.

‘Do what you have to,’ Henderson told Jean, after a pause. ‘I’ve got orders and I’m sending these teams out.’

Jean glowered then cursed, as he stormed back to his tent.

‘Want me to cut Jean’s throat in the night, sir?’ Luc asked, only half joking.

‘Don’t
you
start winding me up,’ Henderson hissed, as he handed Joel the last sheet of his decoded message. ‘Stop gawping and get on with your jobs.’

While everyone else dashed off to prepare for the latest sabotage operations, Edith and Paul were left facing Henderson.

‘Shall I walk down to the orphanage with Paul?’ Edith asked.

‘Yes,’ Henderson said, as he absent-mindedly reached back under the canopy. ‘You two start walking, I’ll catch you up.’

‘Aren’t you sorting out the operations back here?’ Edith asked.

‘Joel, Luc and Sam are perfectly capable, and there’s another code word in my message. It’s a job only I can do.’

Marc Kilgour had spent his first twelve years living in the orphanage where Rosie had died earlier that day. He’d run away when the Germans invaded four summers earlier, met Charles Henderson, escaped to the UK, trained as part of the first group of CHERUB agents, completed several espionage missions, spent a year as a prisoner in Germany, then escaped and completed two more critical missions.

Marc was sixteen now and felt more man than boy after all that he’d been through. He was still part of Henderson’s team, but while Paul, Luc, Sam, Joel, PT and Edith slummed it in the woods, Marc lived with his girlfriend Jae Morel in the area’s most luxurious farmhouse.

The Morel farm stretched over several hundred acres, but labour shortages meant that over half the land had gone fallow. Even this level of cultivation relied on groups of Maquis coming out of the woods and working the land in exchange for food. But this was dangerous, because farmers caught using undocumented labourers could be thrown in prison and have their land seized by the requisition authority.

‘Paul,’ Marc said softly, as he opened a double front door, with a grand staircase directly behind. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

It was 9 p.m., but being June the sun had barely dropped. Behind Paul stood Edith, and behind her Henderson held the rails of a wooden handcart which bore Rosie’s body wrapped in a cotton sheet.

‘What about the others?’ Marc asked.

‘Luc, Joel and Sam are on operations,’ Edith explained. ‘We asked PT if he wanted to come, but he didn’t want to leave his team at the orphanage.’

‘What’s it like down there?’ Marc asked.

‘PT’s got things well organised and there’s no sign of Milice activity,’ Henderson said. ‘But all the kids saw Sister Magdalene executed. The nuns are doing their best, but you can imagine the state some of the boys are in.’

As Henderson explained this, Marc’s girlfriend Jae came down the staircase. She was taller than Marc, but her slender body probably weighed half as much.

‘I had to put my father to bed,’ Jae said, needing no further explanation because everyone knew that the stress of the war had turned Farmer Morel into an alcoholic.

Jae hugged Paul. He appreciated the gesture, though Paul didn’t much like her. Marc and Paul remained good friends, but Marc was madly in love and Paul was jealous that he spent all of his free time with Jae.

‘You’re welcome to come out of the woods and stay with us for a few days,’ Jae said, as she reached behind the open door and grabbed a basket of wild flowers. ‘I thought Rosie would have liked these.’

Marc led a solemn walk across fields and between two large barns to the side of a lake. It was a peaceful spot, with thick reed beds and pond-skaters darting across the water. Marc and a couple of farm labourers had prepared a deep grave.

With no coffin, Henderson made the most graceful job he could of lifting Rosie’s body off the handcart. She was stiff with rigor mortis and there was no option but to drop her into the hole. Her body rotated, making her toes poke out of the sheet in which she’d been wrapped.

Paul teared up when he saw this, thinking how our fingers and toes are as individual as our faces and how he’d never see these toes again.

‘I’m no priest,’ Henderson said, once he’d realised that everyone was expecting him to say something. ‘Wherever Rosie is now, I hope it’s a better place than this, and that someday I’ll have the pleasure of meeting her there.’

‘Amen,’ Paul said, as he smudged a tear off his cheek and silently mouthed, ‘I love you, Rosie.’

Jae threw a handful of wild flowers on the white sheet and held the basket out so that Paul could do the same.

Starting with Paul, each of them took it in turns to gently drop a shovelful of earth into the grave.

‘I’ll finish filling it in before I go to bed,’ Marc said. ‘There’s food and drink back at the house.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t stay,’ Henderson said. ‘Ideally, I need some muscle to help with heavy lifting.’

‘I’ll come,’ Paul said eagerly. ‘It’s not like I’m going to sleep tonight and I’d rather stay busy.’

‘Absolutely not,’ Henderson said. ‘You’re in no state and you’ve already missed a night’s sleep. Go back to the house with Edith and Jae. I’m sure the girls can fill a bath and sort out your blisters.’

Edith nodded to Henderson, then smiled at Paul. ‘We’ll look after you.’

Marc’s location on the farm meant he didn’t get a crack at Henderson’s operations as often as the others. He liked the idea of an adventure, but Jae looked wary.

‘You be careful,’ Jae said.

Marc broke into a cheeky smile and pointed a thumb at Henderson. ‘All the scrapes we’ve been through, we’re invincible.’