Henderson's Boys: Eagle Day (30 page)

Eugene broke into a big smile. ‘That’s decent of you, sir. I’ll be sure to buy you a drink at the least.’
very

‘And I’ll be glad to accept it,’ Wimund said, nodding again.

‘I’m stepping out for a piss,’ PT said, ‘excuse me.’

Eugene said thanks to Wimund as he turned around. ‘Better not lose my brother,’ Eugene said. ‘He’s only sixteen.’

It took another couple of minutes for the two teenagers to make it through heat and smoke into fresh outdoor air.

‘You get them?’ Eugene asked.

PT pulled a set of keys from his trousers and jangled them. ‘I couldn’t see them bulging,’ he explained. ‘Had to feel my way down three pockets, but it’s reassuring to know that I’ve still got the magic fingers, just like my dad taught me.’

*

Henderson was loading the last of the suitcases into the truck when Dumont’s dad Luc Boyle came up the dirt driveway on a bicycle. Henderson hurriedly pulled the cloth flaps over the back of his truck so that the farmer couldn’t see inside.

‘Evening,’ Henderson said cheerfully, as Luc stepped off the bike. ‘What can I do you for?’

‘Have you seen my son around?’ Luc asked.

‘Can’t say I have,’ Henderson lied. ‘My boys have been in town all day. Marc’s working, and PT took Paul to the doctor in Calais.’

Luc combed tense fingers through his hair as he stepped off the bike. ‘Wife’s giving me hell,’ he complained. ‘Can’t find Dumont and after what happened before with those Germans in the village she’s going frantic.’

Henderson shrugged. ‘Sorry I can’t help.’

‘That kid,’ Luc cursed. ‘My other two boys are prisoners, you know? Good lads, bright as you’d wish, but Dumont’s always struggled. I don’t think there’s a mean bone in his body, but he’s just not bright enough to stay out of trouble.’
bloody

Henderson didn’t agree that Dumont was harmless after what he’d tried doing to Rosie, but he couldn’t let on. ‘He’s always seemed nice enough to me. How are Lucien and Holly doing, by the way?’

‘Not too bad,’ Luc said. ‘They miss their mum. Holly goes on and on about her all the time and it breaks my heart. Where’s the Jag by the way?’

‘Maxine’s got it,’ Henderson explained. ‘You know, I’m still working on getting you a fuel permit and like I said you’re always welcome to use the truck if needs be.’

‘Appreciated.’ Luc smiled. ‘I’m going to ride back towards the village to see if anyone’s seen Dumont. If he’s not back soon I’ll have to speak to the police.’

Henderson glanced at his watch. They wouldn’t be leaving for up to two and a quarter hours and the last thing he wanted was police, locals and possibly even the Germans getting involved in a search.

‘I do know where Dumont is,’ Henderson said, as he ripped out his gun. ‘I’ll take you up to the cowshed. The labourers will untie you in the morning after we’ve gone.’

Having invaded three large European nations in the space of two years and Nazi doctrine dictating that women should stay home and raise families, the German Army relied upon random searches and checkpoints – not because they were particularly effective, but because there was a shortage of men.

Guarding the kilometres of docks and wharves at Dunkirk would have tied up half a battalion, and Eugene and PT were relieved to arrive by the mesh gates around the dry dock and find the security post unmanned.

‘Twenty minutes till the planes arrive,’ PT noted, before jumping out into near darkness to unlock the main gate with Wimund’s keys. They were behind schedule and it didn’t help that PT had to try half a dozen keys before the padlock sprang open.

PT jumped back in the truck and Eugene drove cautiously along the wall of the dry dock with his headlamps switched off. The steel dock gates were nearly a metre thick at the base, and in the black void below lay more than sixty barges, tugs and patrol boats.

The Royal Navy had operated a fleet from Dunkirk in the run-up to the war and had sent Henderson detailed instructions. By opening the gates of a huge dry dock too quickly, the resulting wall of water will destroy the small boats sitting at the bottom. An engineer who’d worked in the docks even provided sketches of the control room, which had been dropped the previous Saturday along with Bernard and the plastic explosives.

While PT headed into a wooden shed to pull some hydraulic levers that opened two huge inlet channels built around the side of the dock gates, Eugene leaned against the truck, using binoculars to study the patrol-boat base less than a hundred metres away.

The Germans had used a mixture of netting, trawlers and fishing equipment spread over decks to disguise these precious high-speed boats from British reconnaissance planes, but from ground level the disguise was feeble.

While barge conversion work shut down at night because the artificial light needed to continue would make it an easy target for bombing, the German patrol fleet operated twenty-four hours a day.

More than twenty patrol boats lay beneath grey tarps that looked like bare concrete from two thousand metres up, but three fast launches were moored abreast at the dockside. Diesel plumes rose from their funnels, while a fourth was being refuelled at a pier. On the dockside, crew members in navy uniform hopped between boats, while others stood around looking bored and smoking.

Inside the control room by the dock gates, PT was alarmed by the crash of water as it rushed into the dry basin. He’d been told that the dock walls and heavy gates would make the sound virtually inaudible from the naval base a hundred metres away, but he was far from convinced as he pressed a coin-sized lump of plastic explosive against the base of the control levers and inserted a ten-minute acid fuse.

This would only produce a tiny explosion, but with luck it would wreck the control levers and make life difficult for any German engineers who tried to stop the deluge.

Eugene was back inside the truck with the engine running by the time PT ran out. ‘Why’s it so noisy?’ Eugene asked anxiously. ‘The patrol crews don’t seem to have noticed yet, but they’re gonna.’

‘I just did what I was told,’ PT said defensively. ‘I say screw going over the bridge with the main bomb, let’s reverse back from here and hope the bombers finish the patrol boats.’

But Eugene looked determined and put the truck into first gear rather than reverse. ‘We came this far,’ he said. ‘I’m not backing out now.’

The sun had all but disappeared and the yard in front of the cottage was black. The old truck needed a hand crank to get going and Henderson yelled after Rosie as the engine spluttered to life.

‘Come on, sweetheart. It’s a good job it’s less than two kilometres to the harbour. We’re running on fumes. I should have topped up in town this morning, but I had about a thousand other things on my mind.’

Rosie had milked the cows for the last time, now she threw food into the chicken pens and felt a little sad as Lottie the goat followed her across the grass, expecting a handful of scraps.

‘Out,’ Rosie said firmly, as the goat chased her into the kitchen. But they wouldn’t be back. Rosie remembered that there were some vegetables in the rack so, for the first time, the goat didn’t find herself shoved out of the kitchen doorway on to the lawn.

As Lottie buried her face in carrots, Rosie grabbed a basket piled high with sandwiches and a metal jug filled with fresh milk.

‘Sorry about the hold-up,’ Rosie gasped, as she sat next to Henderson inside the truck with the basket on her lap. ‘I wanted to make sure the animals would be all right until the labourers get here in the morning.’

She set the jug on the floor and squeezed it tight between her ankles.

‘All set? Nothing forgotten?’ Henderson asked.

‘We’ve still got a while,’ Rosie said. ‘If it was important we could walk back in no time.’

Henderson pulled away and drove off the farm for the second time that day.

‘Do you think I made enough sandwiches?’ Rosie asked. ‘We had eggs left over, so I hard boiled some to eat on the boat and left the rest for the prisoners.’

Henderson laughed as he turned on the road. ‘I think you could feed half of Paris with that lot.’

Marc felt good as he stepped out of the Mercedes. After six hours waiting it was a relief to get underway. He looked around for any sign of Germans before throwing the canvas bag over his shoulder and starting to jog towards the fuel tanks.

His pulse quickened when he realised that the heavily insulated car had disguised the sound of approaching aircraft. And it wasn’t a rogue German fighter, it sounded like the armada of bombers was running ahead of schedule.

‘You hear them?’ Khinde asked, startling Marc as he bobbed up behind a diesel tank.

‘We’ve got to shift,’ Marc said. ‘We’re gonna be in the middle of a shit storm if we’re still standing here in five minutes’ time.’

He took the bag off his shoulder and passed out six butter-pat-sized blocks of plastic explosive. ‘Two on each tank, pull the pins out of the detonators and we’ll have two minutes until they blow.’

As Khinde and Rufus stuck the sticky lumps of plastic explosive to the tanks, Marc began running the two hundred metres back to the Mercedes. The two grown men were faster and Marc was several metres behind as he got into the driver’s seat and started the engine.

More than sixty bombers roared overhead, and an air-raid siren started up as Marc squeezed the accelerator pedal. Rufus and Khinde couldn’t drive, so Maxine had given him a crash course behind the wheel of her Jaguar, but the Mercedes felt huge in comparison and even with Schroder’s leather coat folded up under his bum Marc could barely see over the wheel as he approached the gate.

The guard was supposed to stop everyone coming in or out, but after thousands of kilometres’ driving with Schroder, Marc knew that big Mercedes driven by German officers were rarely troubled.

As the wooden gate rose in front of them, Marc jammed the brake as he realised he was going way too fast for the sharp turn on to the road. He made eye contact and got a strange look when the guard saw how young he was, but before he could react the first of the three diesel tanks exploded and the German dived for cover.

‘That one’s for Houari!’ Khinde shouted, thumping ecstatically on the padded roof as the big car accelerated away from the port.

A thirty-metre tower of flame seared up into the darkness, but the real spectacle took a few seconds longer. The exploding fuel had tossed two dozen phosphorous bombs across the heart of the docks. They burned with an intense blue light that lit up the entire dockyard, as white-hot fragments began burning through the tin roof of the neighbouring coal-yard.

Paul stood over the rusting bed. He popped the last square of Belgian chocolate in his mouth, then double checked that he had the key for the bike lock in his pocket before igniting the three-minute length of detonator cord curled inside the lid of the suitcase.

‘Watch it!’ a man shouted, as Paul burst out of the room and raced past him on the stairs.

‘There’s planes coming,’ Paul shouted back. ‘Get outta here.’

But the man thought he was just some crazy kid and by the time Paul hit the street he felt guilty. He’d left two dozen sticks of gelignite and twenty phosphorous bombs in the hotel room, which would create a blast double the size of the one that ripped apart the army headquarters.

The man would die, as would the nice woman who worked on reception and pretty much everyone else unlucky enough to be inside the hotel or one of the buildings on either side.

Paul’s bike was a horrible contraption which Henderson had bought in a junk shop. It had solid tyres and a frame that had buckled and been knocked back into shape. Despite this it had attracted the attention of a couple of local kids.

It was the last thing Paul needed. They sized him up as he approached breathlessly.

‘You’ve got no right,’ the bigger of the two kids stated. ‘This is our territory. You gotta pay tax to park your bike here.’

Paul’s heart was thumping. The bomb would go off in under a minute and the bike was his only way back to the farm. Even the larger of the kids was probably two years younger than Paul, but he was only a few centimetres shorter and he looked strong.

‘I’ll get my dad on to you,’ Paul shouted, as he pointed back at the hotel.

Both kids smiled. ‘Go get him then, skinny.’

‘Can’t fight your own battles,’ the younger one added. ‘What a wimp!’

Paul realised he’d made a useless threat: the kids weren’t scared because they’d disappear down an alleyway as soon as any adult showed up.

Although Paul had mostly recovered from his cold he still had muck on his chest, and running down the stairs had set some of it free. He took a deep breath and coughed a huge string of phlegm into his mouth. The warm blob felt disgusting, but as he was about to spit into the kerb he realised that other people would find it even more gross and flobbed it into the palm of his hand.

‘I’m gonna rub this in your hair,’ Paul warned, sweeping his snotty hand from side to side.

‘Germs!’ the little kid shouted, as both lads backed away enough for Paul to bend down and get his key in the bike lock.

Paul flicked the snot off his hand as he straddled the bike and started pedalling up the narrow lane. He just made it around the corner into the next street as the bomb went off. The huge blast shook the ground and ripped the handlebars out of his hand.

He tried to straighten up, but he looked up and saw that he was heading into the path of an oncoming car.

Naval Leutnant Baure was seventeen years old and had spent the last three hours doing repairs inside the baking hot engineroom of a torpedo boat. The vessel had sprung a leak out at sea. A bank of six cylinders had seized up and the Kapitan was threatening to discipline Baure because he’d performed the final maintenance check before leaving port and had apparently failed to notice a critical drop in oil pressure.

The charge could ruin a career that had barely even started and Baure felt angry and miserable as he sauntered behind the wharfside building inside which numerous officers were doubtless cursing his name.