‘You’re a capitalist an optimist.’ Eugene managed a smile. ‘If my knee hadn’t been injured at the time I would have escaped in the early days, before the Boche got their security patrols organised. It’s harder now, but I still reckon I could reach the south if I put my mind to it.’and
*
After five weeks in the military zone Henderson was starting to look haggard. He worked sixty hours a week at army headquarters under the constant threat that his spying would be uncovered. When he got home each night there were messages to encode and problems on the farm to deal with.
On a good night he’d get five hours’ sleep before he had to get up, walk three kilometres through the darkness to the transmitter’s latest hiding place and then decode McAfferty’s message. He rarely got back to sleep when he returned home and he’d lie awake, watching Maxine’s chest rise under the blanket. Then he’d worry about everything, from a meeting the following morning, to the kids, to bigger stuff like politics and the course of the war.
Sometimes Henderson felt trapped, but the message he’d received from McAfferty that morning had led him to a decision. Once the labourers returned to their prison camp for the night he called a family meeting around the kitchen table.
‘It’s time to plan our exit,’ Henderson said, in a dramatic tone that made Maxine and the four kids look up at him.
Everyone thought the same thing, but Maxine actually said it. ‘Why would British intelligence want you to leave when you’re in an ideal position at headquarters?’
Henderson shrugged. ‘made this decision. I’m sure headquarters in London would like me to stay here working as Ohlsen’s translator until inevitably I make some small mistake and arouse suspicions. But I didn’t sign up for a suicide mission and I most certainly didn’t sign you five up for a suicide mission. I’m going to tell McAfferty that we’re leaving before September sixteenth.’I’ve
‘What if they order you to stay?’ Maxine asked.
‘Then I’ll be court marshalled for disobeying orders. More importantly, you’ll all be safe.’
PT looked pleased. ‘How do we escape?’
‘It’s more complicated than that,’ Henderson said. ‘Last night I received two important pieces of information from McAfferty. The first confirmed that the Free French
12 Government in London want to parachute two spies and some equipment into this area. I’ve agreed to meet their men when they land and to get hold of all the paperwork they’ll need to reach Paris.
‘Secondly, McAfferty says that the RAF is planning a major bombing raid along the coastline on September ninth. They want intelligence on the locations of the biggest concentrations of invasion barges, I’m going to send McAfferty a counter proposal.but
‘If we can get those two Free French spies to bring us explosives and set them in the right locations around the dockyards, we can start fires. If they’re big enough, they’ll act like beacons and the RAF bombers should be able to hit all their targets much more accurately.’
‘Sounds good, boss.’ Marc smiled. ‘And after pulling that off, the Boche would be on the warpath so we’d have to escape?’
‘Exactly,’ Henderson said. ‘Although it won’t be easy because we’ll have to steal one of the invasion barges and get away at the same time that the RAF are trying to bomb them out of the water.’
PT sounded less than enthusiastic. ‘I thought you said that you sign us up for a suicide mission.’didn’t
‘It’s just an idea,’ Henderson emphasised. ‘I’m not saying that I’m going ahead with this, but I’d like all of us to put our heads together and work out whether this is doable. A successful air raid on the barge fleet will make it impossible for the Germans to launch an invasion before winter sets in.’
Rosie spoke after a brief lull. ‘The Germans would ramp up security as soon as anything happened, so you’d need to attack all the bombing sites at once, and then somehow all meet up to escape afterwards.’
‘Would you escape from one point, or would groups of us cross the channel on separate boats?’ Paul asked.
‘Unless you did it all with timers or something,’ Marc said.
Henderson shook his head. ‘You make timed detonators, but they’re not accurate and there’s always a risk of the bombs being discovered. To pull this off we’d need men on the scene, setting off timed explosions.’can
‘What about manpower?’ Maxine asked. ‘You’re surely not expecting the kids to be involved?’
‘It might be the only way,’ Henderson said uneasily. ‘It’s a lot to ask of anyone, let alone a youngster, but the stakes are huge and there aren’t many people I can trust. We’ll probably be able to use the two Free French spies and we could try recruiting some of the prisoners.’
‘Eugene’s desperate to escape,’ Paul suggested. ‘Although I think he wants to go back to his family farm rather than across the Channel to Britain.’
‘Isn’t he a communist?’ Rosie asked. ‘He’s always going on about the workers taking over.’
‘I don’t care what his politics are so long as he hates the Nazis,’ Henderson said. ‘I’ll sound him out next time I see him.’
Marc smiled. ‘You know I told you about that Algerian getting shot in Bordeaux just after I started working for Kuefer? If you want people who hate the Nazis, the black men down there are your guys.’
‘But we have to trust them,’ Maxine said. ‘I mean, Eugene is someone we’ve known for a few weeks and I’d say we can trust him. But bringing in people you don’t know just because they hate the Nazis is a huge risk.’
‘I know them,’ Marc said. ‘After Houari was shot the Germans started treating all the black guys even worse. They don’t even get the same food as the other workers now. I feel sorry for them. Half the French prisoners still think they’re gonna get released any day, but the North Africans know the Germans will never let them go. I’ve played dice with them a few times and sneaked them jam and tinned peaches because they’re half starved.’
Paul shot up indignantly from his chair. ‘jam and peaches?’My
‘I didn’t see your name on ’em.’ Marc smiled. ‘Eugene says that all property is theft anyway.’
‘Bollocks to that communist,’ Paul shouted, as he pointed accusingly at Marc. ‘You owe me for those peaches.’
‘Language,’ Maxine said, as she jumped up and slapped Paul’s face. ‘How you speak like that at my table.’dare
‘Calm down,’ Henderson said fiercely, as Paul sat back down and buried his stinging face in his arms. ‘Approaching Eugene and offering him a chance to escape across the Channel with us is probably a good idea. I’ll have a think about the North Africans and how we can approach them.’
Henderson looked across the table at Rosie. ‘How long until tonight’s transmission window?’
‘About an hour,’ she answered.
‘OK,’ Henderson said. ‘Meeting over. Rosie, you get the notebook and start encoding for me. I’ve got a proposal and a long list of questions to send to McAfferty.’
* * *
12 Free French – While the Germans recognised the puppet Vichy Government led by Marshal Pétain, the alternative Free French Government had set up in London and claimed to be the legitimate government of France.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
7 September
Of all the people living on the farm, the relationship between Henderson and PT was the most awkward. It was one a.m. and the pair walked through a forested area in their darkest clothes. They each grasped one leather handle of the heavy bag stretched between them.
‘Are you sure you really want to be part of this?’ Henderson whispered breathlessly.
‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ PT replied. ‘I’ve done all you’ve asked.’
‘It to be your choice,’ Henderson said. ‘I’ve got spare identity papers, and I can get a travel permit from headquarters if you want to head back to Bordeaux.’has
‘I’m not scared.’
‘I?
??m not accusing you of cowardice,’ Henderson said. ‘But you’ve spent most of the last two weeks making it pretty clear that you don’t like my plan.’
PT sighed as Henderson crouched down to pull the bag through a gap in a hedge. After a lot of crunched branches and some scratched skin, the pair made it through to a dirt road.
‘You gave me the option to split before we left Bordeaux,’ PT said, as they started walking uphill. ‘I’d much rather we crept on board a barge and snuck across the Channel without any crazy plans involving beacons, explosions or Free French spies, but you laid it out to me. I knew what was on the cards when I agreed to come north with you.’
‘This air raid could cripple the entire German invasion plan,’ Henderson explained, as they moved off the opposite side of the road into dense trees. ‘You told us what the escaping Poles you met on board ships said about the way the Nazis treated them, so you understand how important it is that I try to save my country.’must
‘You don’t understand,’ PT said dourly. ‘I was into all this adventurous stuff. When I was three years old, my dad used to squeeze me through open windows and tell me to open the front door so that he could get inside and burgle houses.born
‘I spent three months digging a tunnel under Wall Street. My dad told me we were going to pull off the biggest robbery in history. We’d have fancy cars and a massive house and everything we could ever want. But what happened? My dad, big brother and two cops ended up dead. I end up on the run halfway around the world, I haven’t seen my little brother in two years and I didn’t have a friend worth the name until Maxine invited me back to the pink house to stay with you lot.’
‘So why’d you try to steal my gold and run away?’ Henderson asked. ‘You were getting along with Maxine and the kids. It never even entered my head that you’d do a runner at that point.’
‘I guess once you’ve seen your family ripped apart, you’re scared of getting close to people. You remind me of my dad in a lot of ways. When you first started going on about going north to spy on the invasion and hatching your plan to help destroy the barges, you had the exact mischievous expression that my dad used to get when he was thinking up a robbery.’
‘I guess I’ve always been an adventurer,’ Henderson admitted, as the trees ended and they broke into an open expanse of grazing land. ‘I’d sooner live a short life that counts for something than a long one that counts for nothing.’
PT stopped walking. ‘No offence, Mr Henderson, but after what happened to my family, my ambition is to buy a little farm or a shop, live a quiet life and die peacefully in my sleep aged about seventy-five. I’ll work with you because I hate the Nazis and want to get out of France, but I’ve got no taste for crazy schemes.’
Henderson slapped PT gently between the shoulders. ‘Thanks for being honest with me.’
‘It’s OK,’ PT said, as the bag thudded down in the shaggy grass. ‘But if Paul, Marc or Rosie end up getting hurt in all this, don’t expect me to forgive you.’
‘I don’t like using those youngsters,’ Henderson admitted. ‘But you saw what happened when the Germans invaded here. How many kids like Paul, Rosie and Marc will die if three Panzer divisions start blasting their way towards London?’
PT didn’t answer. Instead he pulled a small torch from his pocket and inspected a map sketched by Paul.
‘This is our spot,’ PT said. ‘How are we for time?’
Henderson glanced at his watch. ‘Eight minutes past one, which gives us seven minutes to set up.’
The pair crouched down. Henderson unzipped the bag and pulled out three identical units. Each one comprised a pair of car headlights mounted in the base of a wooden vegetable pallet. These were linked by twenty metres of electrical wire to a pair of car batteries. The whole apparatus was controlled by a single switch.
The master lighting unit remained by the batteries. PT and Henderson each took one of the slave units twenty metres across the field. When they were both back by the batteries, PT flipped the switch on and off quickly to ensure that all six lamps worked.
‘Three minutes,’ Henderson said, as he craned his neck up to look at the stars in the moonlit sky. ‘At least the sky’s clear.’
They listened intently for the sound of an aeroplane, but as Henderson’s watch passed one-fifteen there was no sign. All they could do was turn the lights on and hope for the best.
‘I’ll handle the lights,’ Henderson said. ‘You go uphill and check on the other two.’
A lot of effort had gone into scouting a good landing zone for the two French spies. Henderson’s main criteria had been open land with a high vantage point nearby. As the lights blazed behind him, PT found his way towards a rusted metal shed. Marc crouched in the tangle of weeds surrounding it, with binoculars swinging around his neck.
‘Any sign?’ PT asked.
‘Couple of German trucks went along the main road way over back about twenty minutes ago,’ Marc answered. ‘No sign of our plane yet.’
‘And Rosie?’
‘She’s looking around the other side of the hill. She’ll let us know if she sees anything coming.’
PT was knackered after lugging the lights and batteries across five kilometres of fields. He greedily drank water from Marc’s hip flask as the minutes dragged.
‘Where the hell’s this plane?’ PT moaned to himself as he watched the stars.
‘Sssssh!’ Marc said, moving suddenly and aiming the binoculars up at the sky.
PT heard the rumble of propellers. Down in the field, Henderson heard the same and began repeating an agreed signal: three quick flashes of light, followed by the lights staying on for five seconds. This was designed to prevent the spies from being dropped if the Germans captured the lamps. The wrong sequence or continuous beams would make the pilot fly back to Britain without dropping the spies.
The droning grew louder over the next half minute, but Marc and PT still got a fright as the twin-engined Whitley bomber swooped overhead, rattling the trees and making the metal shed behind them shake.
Aircraft technology had improved rapidly in the build-up to the war and the Whitley’s five-year-old design lacked speed and manoeuvrability. Flying without a fighter escort, the medium bomber would be easily picked off by German fighters. Its only defence was to hedge hop – the technique of flying extremely low in pitch darkness. This required a highly-skilled pilot but made the aircraft nearly impossible to detect either on radar or from the confines of a fighter cockpit several thousand metres above.
Henderson watched the bomb doors open as the aircraft skimmed the hillside at more than a hundred and fifty miles an hour. A large pod dropped out of the bay and slammed down in the field a few seconds later.
After signalling four flashes to indicate a safe drop, Henderson switched out the lights, grabbed the large canvas bag and raced across to check the next field, where the pod had landed.
‘That’s our cue,’ Marc said.
As PT ran back downhill to help Henderson, Marc and Rosie watched through binoculars as the Whitley applied full power and went into a steep climb. While it was safe to drop items like plastic explosives and guns into a field, more delicate items like radios, detonators and humans need parachutes, which require a much higher altitude to open safely.
After climbing to more than three hundred metres, the Whitley turned in a wide arc. Once the bomber was facing back towards him, PT flicked the lamps on. Rosie had moved around to the same side of the hill as Marc and the pair now acted as spotters, watching as the parachutes opened and then tracking their path to the ground.
‘I’m following the one on the left,’ Marc said, as he watched the moonlight reflecting off the top of a white ’chute through his binoculars.
‘Right,’ Rosie said, as she momentarily lost track of the second parachutist. She took the binoculars away from her eyes and saw that the wind was blowing her target severely off course. ‘He’s going way left of the field,’ she said anxiously. ‘It’s all woods ov
er that way, he’ll get tangled.’
Rosie began sprinting downhill towards the trees, glancing up occasionally to track the parachute. Once Marc was certain that the first parachutist was going to land on target he chased after her.
As the pair neared the bottom of the hill, the bomber had passed behind and was making a rapid dive for its treetop-skimming ride home.
PT switched out the signalling lights for the last time as Marc and Rosie crashed through the undergrowth beneath the trees. It was pitch black and as neither of them had a torch their only option was to feel blindly until they heard a crash in branches less than twenty metres ahead, followed by a blood-curdling moan.
‘That’s not good,’ Marc gasped, as he charged towards the noise.
The moonlight illuminated streams of white parachute silk hanging down between the branches, but there was no sound apart from mulch crackling underfoot.
‘Hello?’ Rosie called, cupping her hands around her mouth. ‘Hello?’
Marc looked up and saw that the ropes attached to the parachute led high up into the trees. He couldn’t see the parachutist, but there was the unmistakeable outline of a large backpack snagged in a fork between the branches.
‘Mate?’ Marc asked uncertainly, as he gave a gentle tug on the rope.
This produced some rustling, until the pack overbalanced and the whole thing came crashing down. Marc dived back so that it missed his head, but the pack was heavy enough to knock him down when it hit the lower part of his leg.
‘Ooof!’ Marc groaned, as tree roots jarred his back.
Rosie closed in, half expecting to see a man hooked into the arm straps. ‘You OK?’
‘I guess,’ Marc said. ‘But where the hell is he?’
As Marc shoved the pack off his legs and stood up, Rosie noticed torchlight coming through the trees behind them.
‘We’ve spotted traffic,’ PT reported when he’d made a few more steps. ‘Looks like a Boche truck coming up the road. Might be routine, but they could have spotted the parachutes. Whatever it is, Henderson’s run off with the other parachutist and the equipment from the pod. He wants us to escape around the back of the hill so that we don’t cross the Germans’ path.’