Henderson's Boys: Eagle Day (27 page)

After a final glance, Henderson patted his jacket for a reassuring touch of his silenced pistol. He then took the key and moved quickly towards the double doors of the Oberst’s office.

Marc waited for the Mercedes by the main dockyard entrance and signalled for Schroder to pull over. He crouched at the open window beside Kuefer.

‘Just spoke to Louis,’ Marc explained. ‘They’ve had a power failure in one of the huts. They’ll be working in the warehouse building until the generator comes back up.’

Kuefer always downed a bottle of wine with his lunch. He chilled out under the influence and Marc could have told him that his mother had died without getting any more than a dumb smile in return.

‘Better hop in then,’ Schroder said.

Marc hoped Kuefer didn’t look across and see his hands shaking as the big Mercedes drove the three hundred metres down a badly cracked road. About a million things could go wrong: Rufus and Khinde could chicken out, Louis or one of the foremen could spot them entering the warehouse and come over to investigate, Schroder didn’t drink as much as his boss and might suspect something …

‘You been running?’ Kuefer asked, as they got out of the car.

Marc’s mouth was almost too dry to speak, but he had damp patches around his armpits and his shirt was stuck to his back.

‘I ate lunch sitting in the sun,’ he croaked, as he grabbed the handle of the warehouse door.

‘There’s nothing in here,’ Kuefer said as he stepped under the badly burned roof beams.

Schroder looked suspiciously at Marc as he followed him into the warehouse. ‘What did Louis tell you exactly?’

Before Marc could answer, Khinde whipped the piano wire around the driver’s throat and pulled tight.

Kuefer was small, but Rufus hesitated and the Kommodore ducked beneath the wire and reached for the gun holstered around his waist. Marc made himself wide and ploughed forwards, wrapping his arms around Kuefer’s waist. Rufus grabbed the German’s arm and snatched the gun as Kuefer clattered backwards into one of the metal tar drums.

‘Don’t shoot – half the dockyard will hear,’ Marc warned.

Khinde let go and the German driver hit the floorboards with a thud. Rufus bludgeoned Kuefer with the base of the pistol before Khinde knocked him out with a blow from his huge fist.

‘This one’s for Houari,’ Khinde said, looking half crazed as he crushed Kuefer’s throat under his boot.

Marc leaned on one of the tar drums and caught his breath. He recoiled when he noticed the growing pool of blood around Kuefer’s head.

Rufus put his hand on Marc’s shoulder. ‘You OK?’

Marc felt queasy, but managed to nod. ‘Put the bodies in the tar barrels and turn them upside down. I’ll go get the explosives from the back of the Mercedes.’

*

Henderson hung around inside Oberst Ohlsen’s office until he was certain that most of the admin staff had gone to lunch. After hurriedly relocking the office door, he cut back through the kitchen and meeting room, struggling with a large box of files which contained the latest draft of the invasion map and three reams of important documents.

After the short walk back to his desk in the empty admin office, Henderson removed his two good fountain pens from his desk drawer and pocketed the tubs of Benzedrine pills which he relied upon when he was tired or stressed. Then he loaded the box on to a two-wheeled trolley and took them down to the ground floor in the lift.

The security guards thought nothing of Ohlsen’s personal translator coming in and out with a document box and one guard even lifted the base of the trolley as he went down the steps.

After Marc and Henderson had been dropped off, PT and Paul had taken the truck a few hundred metres in a quiet side turning behind a laundry.

‘You’re late,’ PT said to Henderson. ‘I was starting to wonder.’

‘Your old friend Major Ghunsonn took an interest. He locked Ohlsen’s office, and this little trolley’s a pig on the cobbles.’

As Henderson raised the documents up into the truck, Paul dragged a pair of identical boxes across the floor of the van. As he held one out for Henderson to grab it, his fingers slipped from the handle and the box thumped against the tailgate.

‘
Careful!’
Henderson yelled, as his heart missed several beats. ‘That’s explosive in there.’

Paul looked sheepish as he jumped out of the truck, and Henderson gave him a friendly pat on the head.

‘Don’t worry,’ Henderson said. ‘Just keep calm. Now, I’ve got to get this lot back to headquarters. Have you boys got some food?’

PT nodded. ‘Maxine made us sandwiches and stuff.’

‘Good,’ Henderson said. ‘And you know where you’re supposed to be meeting Eugene?’

‘Quarter to three, in the café de la Pomme,’ PT said. ‘Then we’ll drive over to the stables and wait for a big bang.’

‘That’s it.’ Henderson nodded. ‘If I’m not there within ten minutes of the bomb going off, start without me. If the bomb hasn’t gone off by six o’clock and you haven’t seen me, drive back to the farm and help Rosie deal with the boat.’

‘Gotcha,’ PT said. ‘Good luck.’

Henderson headed back towards army headquarters with the two document boxes balanced on his trolley. The same German guard helped him carry the trolley back up the stairs and Henderson walked along the ground-floor corridor towards an archive room, which sat directly beneath the offices of several senior German officers.

There were two Germans and a French admin assistant in the room, but the shelves went up to the ceiling and the boxes and files stacked on them provided anonymity. Henderson found a row of shelving that ended at a large window and looked out into the busy square. Flocks of pigeons raced between the pedestrians and picked at crumbs dropped by French girls eating packed lunch on the wrought-iron benches.

Henderson felt guilty, knowing the bomb would kill people inside the building and injure many more as shards of hot glass blasted across the square. It was one of thousands of bombs that would go off that day and far from the largest, but that didn’t make it any easier to look out of the window and know that some of the pretty office girls and the young soldiers flirting with them were in the last hours of their lives.

After looking back to check that nobody was watching, Henderson took the cardboard lid off the first box and shifted a dozen sticks of gelignite explosive into the second. He then took a brass three-hour detonator tube from his jacket, crushed the end under his heel and dug it into one of the soft gelignite sticks.

The crushing released acid into a chamber inside the detonator. This acid would slowly eat through a piece of metal and release a spring. The freed spring would create a spark, which would ignite a small gunpowder charge. This in turn would detonate the twenty-four sticks of gelignite.

Unlike a clockwork detonator, which is bulky and makes a ticking noise, the acid detonator was silent. However, whereas a good clockwork detonator can be set to explode within a five-minute window, acid detonators are only accurate to within thirty per cent. So the bomb was likely to go off in somewhere between two and four hours.

Henderson put the lids back on the two boxes and slid them on to a high shelf. Then he left army headquarters for the last time.

Marc felt weird, squatting on the warehouse floor, knowing that the two dead Germans and the rags they’d used to clean up their blood were squeezed into the tar drums beside him. He opened the canvas bag and pulled out a sketch drawn by Paul, before explaining to Khinde and Rufus.

‘This drawing shows the port,’ Marc explained. ‘One big harbour, one even bigger harbour and the canal system behind it. Right where the canal meets the harbours is the coal yard and, most importantly, these two large tanks for boats that run on diesel. If we can blow those tanks, we can get an explosion going that lights up the sky. The only problem is that fuel burns fast, so we need these.’

Marc pulled a grenade-sized package out of the bag and handed it to Rufus.

‘Phosphorous bombs,’ Marc explained. ‘These explode into fragments that burn white hot for up to half an hour and set light to anything they come into contact with.’

Marc pulled something that looked like a block of marzipan out of the bag. ‘This is plastic explosive. Powerful, sticky, and you can mould it to any shape you like. What we have to do is get up into the fuel yard and drop a bunch of these phosphorous bombs into the fuel tank. At around eight-thirty tonight we go back to the fuel tanks and stick a lump of this plastic to the side of each canister, we light a two-minute fuse, then run like hell, and drive away in Kuefer’s Mercedes.’

‘They’ll miss us before then,’ Khinde said. ‘The Germans will search.’

Marc shook his head. ‘Kuefer’s moody, nobody wants to upset him. If I say Kuefer’s taken you two on some special assignment nobody is going to care enough to ask any more questions.’

‘What about getting through the perimeter security?’ Rufus asked.

‘Everyone knows Kuefer’s car. Nobody ever stops us.’

‘Sounds like you’ve thought of everything.’ Khinde smiled.

Marc shook his head. ‘Not me. Henderson came down here the Sunday before last and scouted the whole place. All I’m doing is following his instructions.’

‘So what now?’ Khinde asked.

‘I’ve got Kuefer’s camera and a fifty-metre rule so that you guys can pretend to take measurements.’

Marc hooked the Leica camera around his neck, grabbed the bag and walked several hundred metres, passing the huge open-sided coal shed. A small crew worked in the shed repairing a narrow-gauge steam train that distributed coal around the docks, but nobody took any notice as Marc stepped up to the diesel tanks and began taking photographs, while Khinde and Rufus held opposite ends of the measuring tape.

Marc was climbing up a ladder on to the top of the tank when he saw Louis, the head draftsman and engineer, heading towards them.

‘Where’s your boss?’ Louis asked angrily. ‘I saw his car, but I’ve been waiting for him in the office like a goddamn turkey for forty minutes.’

‘I’ve got no idea,’ Marc said. ‘Something weird’s going on. I met him up by the gate, but he drove off in another car with some black uniforms inside.’

‘The SS?’ Louis said warily. ‘What do they want with Kuefer?’

Marc shrugged and acted irritated. ‘Why do you people think know everything? The boss tells me to get two labourers, then come out here and measure these tanks, then wait for him to come back. He says it might be a few hours.’
I

‘The Germans only installed those tanks a few weeks back,’ Louis said. ‘I wonder what they’re playing at now.’

Marc pointed at Rufus and Khinde. ‘And these two guys are worried that they’ll be missed down at the yard. Can you make sure everyone knows they’re working for Kuefer?’

‘Sure,’ Louis said. ‘If Kuefer comes back, tell him I need to see him. I’ve got three docks sitting still, waiting for his approval on revised drawings. And I don’t know why he’s got you taking measurements and pictures. The Germans must have full sets of engineering drawings somewhere.’

‘I’ve told you all I know,’ Marc said. ‘I don’t like it either. I’ve got cows to milk no matter how late I get home.’

‘German arseholes,’ Louis said, as he turned to walk away. ‘Shouldn’t be using a kid your age anyway.’

‘Smooth talker,’ Rufus said, smiling at Marc as Louis disappeared around the side of the coal shed.

Marc reached the top of the ladder and swung back an inspection hatch. The diesel fumes made his eyes sting as he looked inside. Khinde passed up the canvas bag and a few seconds later the first phosphorous bomb sploshed down into the tank.

There were two labourers working somewhere out in the fields, but to all intents Rosie was alone. She’d spent the morning making sure everything was packed. After preparing lunch for Eugene and the other two prisoners who worked on the farm she’d gutted three chickens Eugene had killed before he left for Calais on a bike and put them in the oven together with a leg of pork.

As three o’clock approached she crossed the road and the overgrown field of a neighbouring farm, eventually reaching a cottage with a small shed at the end of the garden. She checked the battery meter on the transmitter before flicking the power switch and watching the familiar orange glow of the valves behind the perforated metal grille.

Every Morse operator has slightly different preferences and as Henderson had used the key last, Rosie adjusted a pair of knobs to set the keying height and the power of the spring. The set was still warming up so she tapped out I FEEL SORRY FOR GUTTED CHICKENS, to make sure she had everything right before plugging in the Morse key and her headphones.

On the stroke of three Rosie double checked the frequency dial and began to transmit a coded message saying that everything was fine. Usually, McAfferty would only transmit a short phrase to say that she’d received the message, but today she transmitted more and Rosie jotted down the letters. When the transmission ended, she took out a pencil and decoded the message.

TELL SERAPHIM ALL IS GOOD. 337 BIRDS SET FOR RAID. WEATHER CLEAR. YOU’LL BE HOME IN TIME FOR BREAKFAST. LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING YOU, MCAFFERTY OUT.

It was a warm afternoon and the stuffy meeting room was giving Henderson a headache. He stood at the head of a table beside an SS officer translating a long rant from the chairman of the Calais Chamber of Commerce.

‘… furthermore, we feel that it is impossible to work in an environment where the Germans do business with a gun to our head. The army sets ridiculously low prices for our goods and labour and if we refuse to sign contracts on their terms either our businesses are confiscated, or the goods are requisitioned. The French economy will be nothing but ashes if affairs continue in this way.’

The SS officer stood up and spoke angrily. ‘The Reich is at war and French business must serve the war economy, in addition to this—’

Before the German uttered another word, the glass rattled and it felt like the air was being sucked out of the entire room. In the next instant the window frames flew inwards. A huge roaring sound filled the air, the floor shook and broken glass sprayed across the tabletop, embedding itself deep into the far wall.