Secret Army (24 page)

‘Eight,’ the waitress said. ‘Come back here in an hour and you’ll be lucky to find six customers.’

‘Thanks very much,’ PT said.

None of the kids had eaten since they’d left Scotland and the toast vanished rapidly as the conversation continued.

‘Why are you so sure that the guns won’t be manned?’ Joel repeated.

‘Because it’s getting light,’ Marc explained. ‘We’re in the west. If the Germans bombed us here at this time of day, they’d have to fly back across Britain and all over the North Sea in broad daylight.’

‘Makes sense,’ Rosie nodded.

‘Our biggest problem is getting up on that roof,’ PT said.

‘There’s ladders bolted to the building,’ Joel said. ‘I counted at least two along each side.’

‘I know,’ PT nodded. ‘We can sneak up the ladders, but that gun is going to be heavy and we’ll have to lower it by rope. That takes time and we’re bound to be spotted.’

‘So what
do
we do?’ Rosie asked.

‘The offices,’ PT said, with a wry smile. ‘Up to the third floor, climb out on to the factory roof, grab the gun and carry it down the stairs.’

*

The floor of the bus’s luggage compartment was bare metal. Rust had eaten through at the corners, leaving holes that were open to spray coming up off the road. To make matters worse, the Pole at the steering wheel was a maniac. Luc got thrown across the slippery floor on every corner and bumps flung him up and slammed him hard against the metal floor.

It was a forty-minute ride and when the engine finally cut out, Luc felt like tenderised meat. A peek through the gap around the boot flap showed that they were parked on a busy dockside.

Luc needed to get out fast to avoid losing track of the Poles, but the compartment wasn’t designed to be opened from inside. The handle that he’d turned effortlessly when getting in linked to a steel rod that dropped into a hole to lock the flap. From inside there was no leverage. Luc’s fingers kept slipping as he gripped the rod and he imagined being stuck for hours.

After five minutes Luc abandoned subtlety and launched a series of double-footed kicks. He made a dent in the metal flap and a lot of noise, but he’d bent the pin in such a way that it was now wedged even more tightly into the hole.

‘Shit, shit, shit, bastard, shit, shit!’ Luc raged as he kicked in all directions and punched the metal over his head.

He was afraid of being stuck in the boot, and no longer cared if the Poles heard him. Then the pin started moving and gloomy morning light hit Luc’s face.

A moustached man spoke with a thick Scouse accent. ‘Now there’s a funny place to end up.’

Luc didn’t appreciate the sarcastic tone, but he crawled out on to the cobbled street and erupted in a relieved smile. The man was clearly hoping for an explanation but Luc was desperate to track down the three Poles.

After scrambling to his feet, Luc stood in the middle of the street and turned a complete circle. A brick wall capped with curved spikes blocked his view over the dockside, but he saw the steam-powered loading crane belching smoke into the sky and the sides of a huge freighter towering over the water.

Desperation returned when he saw no sign of the Poles. The street was busy with dockworkers, while porters ran back and forth taking trolleys and carts through the customs gate to vans and carts parked under a bomb-damaged warehouse across the street.

The dockside was always overcrowded and when the building had burned the debris had been cleared out of its shell, leaving its charred concrete floor as a public loading area. Two crumbling walls stood at either side, with a tangle of charred roof beams spanning between them.

Luc studied the jumble of carts, porters, horses and trucks miserably. He thought his best bet would be to wait near the bus and hope that the Poles returned, but there was no guarantee they would.

Then he looked up through the burned-out roof and noticed a pylon. It was braced between the damaged side wall of the warehouse and the next building, its pristine metalwork suggesting it had been built after the warehouse was bombed. The platform stood ten metres off the ground and the snout of a twenty-millimetre cannon poked out above a wall of sandbags.

Luc still hadn’t sighted the Poles, but he felt sure that he’d found their target.

The eight o’clock siren at Walden’s brought out pattern-cutters, weavers, machinists and warehousemen who’d begun work at midnight. Their seats wouldn’t cool down before the eight o’clock shift took their places and this went on three shifts a day, seven days a week. War’s end or German bombs were the only things that would stop trucks filled with parachutes from leaving the front gates.

The shift change provided a screen for entering the factory. The idea behind using kids for espionage work was that nobody would suspect them. However, being young was a liability in places where kids didn’t belong. Any adult could have walked into Walden’s at shift change without raising an eyebrow, but Marc, Joel and Rosie would stand out.

At fifteen, PT was the same age as an apprentice machinist or a warehouse boy, so he went in alone. Figuring that appearing busy was the best way to look inconspicuous, he bustled purposefully through the crowd at the front gate and then cut inside the building.

The newly arrived workers took paper cards from wall racks and queued to stamp them in punch clocks mounted on the far wall. PT pushed his way through the women and found the factory floor. To his left was a space fitted with giant tables for cutting patterns, each with a roll of shimmering parachute silk hanging above it. The workers were settling in, hanging their coats and adjusting workspaces. A man in a brown suit stood in the corner urging the girls on.

‘Come on, my ladies,’ he said, clearly thinking that he was god’s gift to women. ‘Don’t dilly-dally.’

PT tried not to catch his eye, but he pulled him in like a magnet.

‘What are you here for?’

‘A bucket,’ PT said, as he pointed towards the office block. ‘We’re decorating over there and we need to scrub up before Mr Walden arrives.’

The supervisor smiled. ‘I wouldn’t worry about Mr Walden, he’s been dead fifteen years. You’ll find cleaning stuff through the blue door where you came in. Just you make sure it comes back when you’re done.’

‘Brilliant,’ PT nodded. ‘Thank you, sir.’

PT shoved his way back through the women queuing to punch in and found his way into a large cupboard. There was a sink at the back and he part-filled a bucket and grabbed a mop before heading outside.

It was a hundred-metre walk to the offices. The doorman didn’t bat an eye as PT strode into a marble-clad hallway. A line of headless dummies dressed in Walden nightgowns stood guard as he waited for the lift to the third floor.

PT thought getting on to the roof might prove difficult, but the office staff didn’t start until nine. He crossed a deserted typing pool and stepped into an open manager’s office. The large sash window overlooked the factory’s asphalt roof, less than a metre below. As Marc had predicted there was nobody manning the guns or searchlights, though there was a solitary maintenance woman repairing the asphalt on the far side of the roof, more than a hundred metres away.

Satisfied that he’d found the right place to climb on to the roof, PT crossed the typing pool and entered another office on the opposite side. From here he could see Joel standing behind a damaged section of the fence. He opened the window and gave a thumbs-up before dashing downstairs.

Rosie was first into the marble lobby. She was too young to be an employee and the doorman looked up from his counter.

‘You look a little lost,’ he said sympathetically. ‘And rather soggy too.’

PT emerged from the stairwell and pretended to be angry as he came through the double doors. ‘Why don’t you leave me alone?’ PT shouted to Rosie. ‘I don’t owe you anything.’

The doorman was surprised by this, but he stayed put until PT grabbed Rosie by her collar and smacked her around the face.

‘Hey,’ the doorman shouted, as Rosie howled with fake pain. ‘You’re out of order, young man.’

‘What’s it to you?’ PT roared. ‘Keep your nose out, fatty.’

The doorman was past his prime, but he was a big fellow and he bunched his fist. ‘Little hooligan,’ he roared. ‘Do you want a taste?’

PT allowed Rosie to fight herself free, and she backed away as the doorman charged forwards. PT ducked the big fist, then Rosie smashed her palm into the doorman’s temple, knocking him sideways to the ground.

The blow would have knocked most men out, but the doorman hit the polished floor, rolled over and tried getting back up. PT kicked him in the ribs as Marc and Joel ran into the lobby holding lengths of pre-tied rope.

‘Rosie, get the elevator,’ PT shouted, as he jumped on the doorman to try and subdue him.

They hadn’t anticipated such a struggle and everyone was tense. It would take one secretary to arrive for work early and run outside screaming and they’d be totally screwed.

Rosie stood in the door of the lift, holding the metal grilles open so that it couldn’t leave. After a struggle Joel tied the doorman’s hands behind his back. They lifted him off the floor, still kicking and yelling.

As Marc held the doorman by the scruff of his shirt, he craned his neck forwards and sank his teeth into the boy’s wrist. Marc howled in pain and let go. The other two boys couldn’t carry him alone, and the heavy body hit the marble floor. PT had lost his temper and he punched the doorman hard in the solar plexus.

‘Keep still,’ PT yelled. ‘Don’t make me knock you out.’

Eventually they bundled him into the lift. Rosie had to step out as the gates slammed shut and she could hear the doorman yelling all the way as she chased the lift car up the stairs.

*

Nobody paid Luc much notice as he sauntered around the burned-out warehouse. Besides the legitimate trade coming through the customs gate he watched a thriving black market in everything from a trolley stacked with boxes of nails to stolen fruit stuffed inside dockworkers’ pockets. Luc spent a few coins and breakfasted on peanuts and oranges, a fruit he hadn’t tasted since leaving France more than six months earlier.

All the while Luc kept one eye on the Poles. They’d been back to the coach and found a toolkit designed for changing tyres and basic repairs on the engine. They’d met no resistance in climbing the pylon. In peacetime a heavy-calibre machine gun would be kept under close guard, but there were tens of thousands of anti-aircraft installations across Britain. Finding bodies to man the batteries by night was difficult; deploying scarce manpower to guard all these installations by day was impossible.

As the Poles worked to unbolt the cannon from its steel platform, Luc plotted their downfall. There were porters everywhere: tough old men willing to shift a load on a trolley or handcart for a few pence.

Luc’s biggest problem was with the Poles themselves. If you stuck Luc in a room with ten other thirteen-year-olds and told them to fight, he’d be the one who came out on his feet. But these opponents were grown men who’d done the same kind of espionage and combat training as he had. His sole advantage was that the Poles had no idea that he was stalking them.

The area beneath the pylon and the two warehouses was five metres wide. Fire-damaged timber and molten glass had been shovelled in and the resulting mound had spawned a few weeds and a lot of rats. Currently the rubble was capped with snow.

Luc watched the Poles release the final bolts and lift the gun from its mounting. As two men began disassembly, the third clanked down metal rungs towards the ground. He might be going back to the bus, or maybe he was planning to steal or hire a handcart to make moving the gun easier.

The rungs were icy, and he made a relieved gasp when he finally stood on the rubble.

‘Don’t you like ladders then?’ Luc said, making a poor attempt at sounding like an Englishman.

The Pole turned, but before he had a chance to see who he was talking to, Luc smashed him in the face with a huge blob of slate and melted glass. As blood spewed and five front teeth buckled inside the Pole’s mouth, Luc hit him again in the back.

Luc took a quick glance to check that nobody else had seen him before kneeling down across the Pole and using his right arm to choke him out. On a real operation Luc would probably have cut the Pole’s throat, but this was an exercise.

Luc smiled crazily as he wiped his hand across the Pole’s bloody face. ‘Now let’s see how we can fix your two pals.’

Rosie stayed inside the third-floor office, keeping lookout while holding a hefty torque wrench that would deliver a nasty surprise to anyone arriving early for work. The doorman lay under the desk, gagged and trussed but his eyes still defiant.

Out on the roof the three boys were hidden behind sandbag walls as they disassembled the twenty-millimetre cannon. Clearing ammunition and stripping the gun down was no different to cleaning rifles after target practice on campus, except that the pieces were bigger. The tricky part was removing the body of the cannon from the metal turntable on which it was mounted.

Marc lay awkwardly with his back on the metal footplate, pulling a spanner with all his might.

‘Jesus,’ he sighed breathlessly. ‘This nut must have been tightened by a gorilla.’

Joel shook his head with frustration. ‘Where’s Luc’s muscle when you need it?’

‘He’s probably got his feet up on a nice warm train with Paul and Takada,’ PT sighed. Then he laughed. ‘Either that or he’s dangling off a tree by his parachute strings.’

‘Get me the hammer,’ Marc ordered, as he sat up. ‘Joel, you hold the spanner.’

PT gave Marc a hammer from the tool sack, then stood over the end of the gun holding the barrel so that the turntable didn’t swing around. Marc lay back down and swung the hammer.

‘Owww!’ Joel yelped, stumbling backwards and clutching his thumb. ‘Look what you’re doing, you prat.’

‘I’m upside down here,’ Marc protested, as he craned his head upwards and smiled. He gave the spanner another pull and the nut started twisting free. ‘Am I a genius, or what? Let’s do the next one. Grab the spanner, Joel.’