Scorched Earth Read online

  ‘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.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  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.’

  Edith and Paul had begun a stroll back to the house, and Jae gave it a few seconds for them to get out of earshot before pointing at Rosie’s grave and hissing, ‘I suppose she was invincible too.’

  Marc tried kissing Jae but she put up her hands and spun around to catch Paul and Edith up.

  ‘Sorry about her,’ Marc said.

  ‘She cares for you,’ Henderson said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’

  ‘So what are we up to?’

  ‘We need to get that German truck out of hiding,’ Henderson began. ‘I’ve got about eight hundred kilos of plastic explosive stashed in a barn two farms over. It’s all got to be taken up to Abbeville by midnight. The message from campus said they need someone who can show the local resistance how to set up detonations, so that’s your job.’

  ‘Can’t you do it?’ Marc asked.

  ‘Looks like they’ve got something else planned for me in Abbeville, so we’ll be travelling up together,’ Henderson said. ‘It’s an hour and a half’s drive, but we’ll have to pass through or around Amiens, which is a garrison town, so we can add a good hour to that for all the checkpoints.’

  *

  It was a full moon and the air was muggy as a stolen German-made truck rolled to the front of a short checkpoint queue. Marc sat in the passenger seat, dressed in a workman’s overall. At the wheel, Henderson wore the brown uniform of Organisation Todt (OT), the paramilitary organisation responsible for all major Nazi construction projects.

  The soldier carefully inspected Marc and Henderson’s false paperwork before speaking in German.

  ‘Don’t go north of here without enough fuel to return,’ the guard said. ‘The resistance have sabotaged two fuel depots and the entire area is dry.’

  Marc spoke enough German to understand and Henderson’s reply was fluent. ‘I should be OK,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the tip.’

  Henderson pressed the gas pedal as the guard opened the gate and they turned on to the road heading north-east to Abbeville. A large yellow sign warned that they were 15 kilometres from the protected coastal zone, which French civilians could only enter with a special pass.

  The moonlit road was eerily quiet and Henderson drove slowly to conserve fuel. As they came around a bend he had to brake because a dead horse lay in the road ahead. There was no apparent blast damage to the trees alongside the road and it looked suspiciously like the animal had been positioned to stop a vehicle from passing in either direction.

  ‘Not good,’ Henderson said anxiously. ‘Jump in the back.’

  Henderson threw the gearbox into reverse the instant he stopped, but before he could start rolling back a man leaped on to the running board and held a pistol through the open window.

  ‘Resistance!’ the man shouted. ‘Stop the engine or I’ll blow your head off.’

  Henderson left the engine running, but raised his hands and spoke in French. ‘I’m one of you.’

  The man with the gun laughed, as a much older man opened the passenger side door and clambered into the cab.

  ‘Outside,’ he ordered.

  Nobody had seen Marc vault over the back of his seat and he lay in a canvas-covered cargo area, sandwiched between sacks.

  One of the resistance men dragged Henderson out of the cab and spat in his face before slamming him against the side of the truck. Someone else peeked in the back to see what the truck was carrying, but he didn’t spot Marc in the darkness and the sticks of British-made plastic explosive were buried inside sacks filled with powdered chalkstone.

  The booze-breathed resister sneered in Henderson’s face. ‘The only thing worse than a German is a Frenchman who puts on their uniform.’

  ‘You’re making a mistake,’ Henderson said, sounding uncharacteristically desperate. ‘Look in my bag. You’ll find maps and American detonators. If your leaders are connected to anyone, you can easily find out who I am.’

  The older of the two men laughed. ‘For sure! I’ll give you a tour of my headquarters. Let you see the faces of all my bosses before we send you back to your Nazi pals.’

  ‘At least you’re OT,’ the other man added. ‘If you were Milice I’d cut your throat and feed you to my pigs.’

  The truck had canvas sides and Marc crawled about in the back, peeking through gaps to work out what was going on. There was no way to tell how many men were hiding out at the side of the road, but as well as the two men interrogating Henderson, there was a man guarding the rear and a pair using metal cans and rubber tubes to siphon fuel out of the tank.

  Marc had a gun, but didn’t fancy his chances against five men with the possibility of more in hiding. He thought about setting off a ball of explosive as a scare tactic, but Henderson had taken the basic safety precaution of keeping all the detonators in a bag in the cab.

  After a glance between the front seats, Marc decided that he could probably get a hand on Henderson’s bag without being seen. A panicked shout went up as Marc got the bag. He jumped, but realised that the sound came from way back down the road.

  Henderson could hear a column of German army trucks driving at speed towards them. He feared a bullet as the resister who’d dragged him out of the cab raised his gun, but the older man pulled him off.

  ‘There’s a village down there,’ the older man warned. ‘Kill him and they’ll go looking for revenge.’

  So Henderson got off with a pistol butt slammed in the gut. The resistance gang disappeared quickly, apart from the pair siphoning fuel, who waited for a German headlight beam on their faces before disconnecting their tubes and scooting into the bushes.

  The four-truck convoy squealed to a halt. Just like Henderson, their lead driver assumed that the dead horse was an ambush, and rough-looking German infantrymen jumped out of the lead truck with rifles ready.

  Henderson soon had guns aimed at him from all directions, but they backed off when they saw his uniform and heard him speak in German. As Marc jumped out and gave Henderson a canteen of water, two German officers debated trying to flush out the resisters.

  ‘It was a large group,’ Henderson told them, sticking up for his resistance colleagues even though they’d hardly been friendly. ‘Maquis. At least twenty of them, and armed with American weapons. I’ll bet they know every ditch and hedgerow in these fields as well.’

  After hearing about this vicious-sounding Maquis, the officers decided not to send a team into the fields. Instead, they got men to drag the horse to the side of the road and then set a grenade under it so that the resisters couldn’t repeat their ruse.

  ‘Where are you heade
d?’

  ‘Abbeville,’ Henderson said.

  The shabby-looking SS officer nodded. ‘The roads around here can be dangerous after dark. You must ride with our convoy until you’re safely inside the town.’

  ‘I’d be grateful for that,’ Henderson said. ‘I’ve had quite a fright.’

  As soon as Henderson was back in the cab he looked nervously at the fuel gauge. ‘We’ll get to Abbeville, but we won’t get back,’ he told Marc.

  Henderson had to drive a couple of kilometres sandwiched between real Germans before his nerves settled enough to give Marc a wary smile.

  ‘No bad thing, really,’ Henderson said, ‘knowing that Germans are no safer moving around France at night than we are.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Tuesday 6 June 1944

  It was a quarter past midnight when the convoy pulled up alongside a small hotel, which had locked its main door at curfew an hour earlier. The sight of five German trucks sent half a dozen senior resistance members scrambling out of the hotel bar, down through a basement wine cellar and into a hidden room with an escape hatch leading into the local sewers.

  Henderson was in the sights of three resistance machine guns as he jumped down from the cab, walked to the lead truck and thumped on the passenger’s side door to thank the officer who’d arranged his escort.

  ‘Heil Hitler,’ Henderson said.

  Instead of saluting back, the shabby-looking officer raised one eyebrow and tutted. Henderson might have expected that attitude from regular German army, but it was unexpected coming from one of Hitler’s elite SS officers.

  Three storeys up, resistance lookouts on the hotel roof changed from being alarmed to curious as four of the five trucks drove away. They watched Marc jump out as Henderson approached the hotel’s front door.

  As he rang the bell, Henderson pushed a cigarette-sized detonator through the letterbox and said, ‘Delivery from Beauvais.’

  Twenty seconds ticked by, before Henderson heard a bolt slide on the other side of the door.

  ‘Henderson?’ a smartly suited hotel manager asked warily. ‘Can I see your mouth?’