Other scientists followed, carrying up a mixture of personal items, blueprints and scientific equipment. The lift remained operational after the machine gun blasts, but nobody had the appetite to clean out the gore and even the weakest of the scientists chose ninety-four steps over balancing on mangled corpses.
When Marc was satisfied with the film, he placed the darkroom bag and developing cylinder inside his backpack, then checked his watch, making a mental note of when he had to start the bleaching phase.
‘Everyone out,’ Marc shouted, as he leaned into the laboratory. ‘Time to leave.’
There was nobody in the lab, but the dorm still contained an elderly scientist called Wallanger, who was hovering over the man Goldberg had knocked out.
‘He’s a big mouth,’ Wallanger told Marc. ‘There was no need for that, he’d have settled down.’
‘Maybe,’ Marc said ruefully. ‘But dozens of people will put their lives on the line to smuggle you lot out of France. We can’t take chances with someone who isn’t on our side. And you’d better get upstairs. Make sure you grab a set of overalls before you board the truck.’
‘Getting too old for adventures,’ Wallanger said, as he picked up a battered leather case. ‘How old are you anyway?’
‘Nowhere near as old as I feel right now,’ Marc replied, feeling a surge of emotion as he snatched Wallanger’s case. ‘I can’t leave anyone who knows our plan alive, just in case the bombs don’t go off. So please don’t make me shoot you. I’ll carry your case. Our friends in Paris know you’re elderly and I can promise they’ll look after you.’
As Wallanger toddled reluctantly down the hallway, Marc felt tears welling as he pointed his pistol at the lanky fellow lying unconscious on the floor. He turned away before taking two silenced shots, killing the second of the twelve scientists he was supposed to be rescuing.
A bearded physicist called Rivest almost bowled Marc over as he stepped into the corridor. ‘Why are you back down here?’ Marc roared furiously. ‘I’m trying to clear you bastards out.’
‘I forgot an important notebook.’
‘Well, hurry up,’ Marc shouted. ‘We’ve got to be out of here in three minutes.’
Rivest looked wary, realising that his life was in the hands of a highly stressed fifteen-year-old who was waving a pistol around while tears streaked down his face.
Marc picked up Wallanger’s case and his own backpack. He headed towards the stairs, but stopped and wiped his cheek before stepping into the bomb-storage room.
‘How’s it going?’ he asked.
Luc and Goldberg stood over a bomb rack. They’d set timed plastic explosive charges in four places, and now they were screwing sympathetic fuses into giant 1000kg Hermann bombs.
In theory, any American bomb going off directly above the bunker would set off a shockwave and trigger the sympathetic fuses in half a dozen large bombs. But the air raid was purely a deception designed to ensure that the Germans didn’t come looking for the scientists, so even if all twenty-five bombers missed, the plastic explosives were a failsafe that would trigger the bombs fifteen minutes later.
Whatever set the Hermanns off, their blast would generate enough heat to detonate every other bomb in the room and leave nothing but a large crater in the middle of a forest.
‘These fuses we brought from England are shit,’ Luc told Marc angrily. ‘Whoever machined them made them a fraction too big. It’s taking way longer than we thought to screw them in the detonator shafts.’
‘Just a couple more now though,’ Goldberg said, trying to calm Luc down, because angry psychos and bombs are rarely a good mix. ‘Tell everyone to board the trucks and start the engines. They can drive out the instant we jump in the back.’
‘Right,’ Marc said. ‘I’ll grab my shit and run up now.’
Rivest was helping the elderly Wallanger up the spiral stairs as Marc came back into the corridor. He bounded past the pair and caught an anxious shout from Paul as he neared the top.
‘What’s going on?’ Paul screamed. ‘Why are those idiots still down there?’
Marc glanced at his watch and looked mystified. ‘We’re OK. The bombers won’t get here until after the beacon’s switched on.’
‘The beacon’s been on for ten minutes,’ Paul said.
‘You what?’ Marc shouted. ‘Why did you turn it on?’
‘Luc shouted up the stairs.’
‘He told you to turn it on in twelve minutes,’ Marc said. ‘Shit!’
‘I didn’t hear twelve minutes.’
‘I bloody did,’ Marc said. ‘I was right there when Luc shouted.’
Marc had reached the garage by this time. Sam, Jean and Didier had dragged in the bodies killed by sniper shots and piled them up at the base of the metal staircase. This way, they’d get blown up and the Germans wouldn’t find bodies with gunshot wounds. Eight scientists sat in one truck looking anxious, while Henderson was in the other, with Rosie knelt over him giving first aid.
‘Get that truckload of scientists out of here, now,’ Marc said, as he put Wallanger’s case down and threw off his backpack, shedding weight so that he could move as fast as possible. ‘I’m going back down.’
‘Planes could be here any second,’ Paul said.
Didier shouted from up by the garage doors. ‘I think I can hear them.’
Planes on a bombing run fly at over two hundred kilometres per hour, so unless Didier was hearing planes from a very long way off Marc had no chance of warning Luc and Goldberg in time. But Marc wasn’t thinking rationally after shooting the two scientists and he headed back down, even though it was probably a suicide mission.
As Marc set off, Didier was climbing into the truck to drive the scientists out of the garage.
‘You two run,’ Marc screamed, as he pushed past Rivest and Wallanger, a dozen stairs from the top. ‘Luc, Goldberg. Get up here now.’
Paul was shouting from up top. ‘Marc, we’re leaving. Three planes sighted, we’re moving out right now.’
Marc gripped the banisters on either side of the staircase and leapt three steps at a time, all the while screaming for Luc and Goldberg. Even in his panicked state Marc saw the irony that he despised one of the people he was rushing to save.
His thoughts were all jumbled: he thought about Jae, he imagined a fireball shooting up the staircase. Then he missed a step and twisted his ankle, but he had too much adrenaline in his system to feel the pain.
‘They’ve set the beacon, planes are coming,’ Marc screamed, when he burst through the door of the bomb room.
In the back of Marc’s mind, he was beginning to think that if Didier really had seen three bombers, he should be dead by now, or should at least have heard some bombs going off nearby.
‘What moron set the beacon?’ Goldberg yelled. ‘They should just be turning it on now.’
‘We’ve done five out of six,’ Luc said. ‘It should be enough.’
Goldberg hesitated as Marc turned to race back up the stairs. ‘You said you’ve got two baby daughters back in New York,’ Marc told the American. ‘If you ever want to see them again, you’d better shift.’
CHAPTER-THIRTY SIX
Henderson looked up at Rosie as he lay across the slatted wooden floor of a canvas-sided German army truck. She’d put five stitches in his holed right cheek before stuffing the inside of his mouth with bandage. She’d also ordered him to press another wodge of bandage hard against the outside of his cheek to stop the blood flow.
‘Uah uop,’ Henderson said. ‘Uop uop.’
Henderson was used to running the show. Not knowing what was going on was as much of a torture as the missing teeth and the hole in his face.
‘I can’t understand you,’ Rosie said. ‘You’ve got to keep your mouth still until a scab forms.’
As Rosie spoke, Jean started the truck engine, and scientists Rivest and Wallanger were clambering over Henderson’s legs.
‘Leave now,’ Paul said, as he slammed the truck’s rear fla
p. ‘Drive about a kilometre. We’ll try catching you up. The photographic stuff is in Marc’s pack, if we don’t make it try to rescue the negatives.’
‘What about you?’ Rosie asked.
‘If I don’t stay, Marc will think we’ve abandoned them when they get up here.’
Rosie wanted to say something to her brother, but Jean was terrified that he was about to get blown up and floored the gas pedal.
As the truck shot up the ramp and out into the night, Paul moved up to the exit, figuring he might stand some chance of surviving if he broke towards the woods when he heard planes passing over. After half a minute, with no more sign of planes, Paul felt a rumbling under his boots and saw red in the sky.
It looked as if the USAF’s diversionary raid on Rennes had started. Paul now suspected that the three aircraft Didier had spotted a couple of minutes earlier had been German night fighters sent out to intercept them. But even though that had been a false alarm, the beacon had now been running for over fifteen minutes and this was the last place on Earth Paul wanted to be.
‘They’ve bloody abandoned us,’ Luc shouted furiously, as he came around the top of the stairs with Marc and Goldberg and saw the trucks gone.
Paul shouted from the doorway. ‘I’m here. I sent the truck out into the woods for safety, but we can run and pick it up.’
‘You deaf shit,’ Luc roared, when he got close to Paul. ‘Twelve minutes I said. If we do make it out of here alive, I’m going to kill you.’
‘It’s tough to hear up the stairs with the echo,’ Paul protested.
‘You two argue, I’m running,’ Goldberg said, as he set off for the main gate at a sprint.
By the time they’d reached the fence the Americans really were on their way. Twenty-five four-engined bombers, minus however many had been shot down en-route. The entire sky seemed to vibrate with the hum of propellers.
Paul was slowest, and Marc’s kit was already in the truck, so he took Paul’s backpack when they were a hundred metres past the exit gate and gave him an encouraging shove.
‘I’m sorry about the beacon,’ Paul said. ‘I didn’t hear.’
Luckily Rosie had ordered Jean to stop a few metres down the road, rather than the full kilometre that Paul had suggested. Rosie stood by the rear canopy and caught the four running figures in the beam of her torch.
‘Come on,’ she screamed, as Jean put the truck in gear.
The first six bombers swept overhead in pairs, each releasing thirty-two five-hundred-pound bombs when their aimers pushed a button. Marc’s ankle was starting to swell and he was last into the truck, hauled aboard by Rosie.
‘Drive,’ Wallanger shouted frantically, as he banged on the metal partition behind Jean in the driver’s seat.
The first bombs landed as Jean moved into second gear. There was a tangle of arms and legs in the back and Henderson cursed as Paul trod on his hand.
‘I need my bag,’ Marc shouted, as he crawled up to the back. ‘I’ve got to get the film out of the developer or they’ll turn out black.’
Despite the beacon, the first bombs fell well wide, shaking the ground and silhouetting the trees against brilliant orange flashes. At least one fell close to the road, and they all sprawled to the floor as shards of bark speared the truck’s canvas awning.
It was fortunate that the Americans didn’t trigger the sympathetic fuses until the truck was another half-kilometre along the road, because when it happened it made one of the biggest bangs that the world had ever seen.
From the driver’s seat, Jean felt the back of the truck lift up and watched the tarmac ripple as if it was water. The sky blazed white and the heat from the fireball was so intense that treetops ignited.
In the back everyone screamed and grabbed each other. For a few horrific seconds, they were all convinced that the explosion was going to engulf them, but the light and heat did fade, and somehow Jean had kept the truck on the road, even while he’d been blinded.
‘Some fireworks,’ Luc said, as he peered over the truck’s rear flap, ears still ringing from the blast. His bad boy act meant he didn’t smile much, but he exchanged helpless grins with Rosie because they’d both expected to die.
*
The drive from Rennes to Paris took six hours and since it was after curfew the two German army trucks cruised empty roads with no speed limit.
The original plan was for Henderson to drive the lead truck, dressed in German army uniform. Fortunately German manpower shortages meant that it wasn’t uncommon for Frenchmen to drive military vehicles, especially ones filled with forced labourers dressed in grubby overalls.
Marc’s photos came out fine and the Ghost circuit had done a beautiful job providing forged or stolen documents. The first test came after two hours, when both trucks pulled into a roadside fuel depot to fill up.
Jean and Didier were ready with wodges of military documentation and permits, but the lone soldier on guard waved them towards a roadside tanker and told them to get on with things.
A more thorough check came on the outskirts of Paris. Two German privates went through the individual workers’ documents and shone torches in the back of the vehicle. They were suspicious when they saw Henderson’s bandaged face, but the documents said they were a construction crew and the hole in his cheek was explained away as a painful encounter with a swinging pickaxe.
‘OK, get out of here,’ one of the privates said.
Everyone was relieved, because a physical search would have revealed weapons, notebooks and scientific equipment.
It was 7 a.m. Saturday as the trucks reached Paris’s western suburbs and split up. Each one had three drop-off points for the scientists. Originally a pair of scientists were to be dropped at each location, but as two had died, two men were dropped singly.
After leaving the trucks, the scientists would be met by associates of the Ghost circuit. Each drop was different. One pair had to enter a barber’s shop and ask for Daisy, one was given a Metro ticket and told to report to the station’s lost luggage office, and another pair were told to join a short queue outside a public baths.
They’d all be bathed, shaved, given new clothes and civilian identity papers before setting off on the next phase of carefully planned escape routes. Some would spend a week or more in a safe house, others would be on trains heading towards the Swiss border by lunchtime.
Their chances of making it to Allied territory were excellent. They’d have money, documents and experienced guides from a well-run resistance circuit. Most important of all, the Germans thought they’d all died inside the bunker so nobody was out looking for them.
After the drop-offs, the two trucks met up at a meat warehouse. What little meat was available in Paris came through the black market, so the meat hooks hung bare and only metal wheel rims remained from porter’s handcarts that had been chopped up for firewood.
‘Leave the scientists’ notes and equipment from the laboratory,’ a man dressed like an undertaker told them politely. ‘It will be picked up by Lysander and should arrive in Britain before the scientists.’
‘Upp ruh uh,’ Henderson said, as he found his feet and wobbled slightly.
‘I don’t have a stretcher, but I could bring out a coffin,’ the undertaker suggested.
Nobody could understand a word Henderson said, but it was pretty clear he didn’t like the idea of travelling in a coffin and although he was lightheaded from the blood loss he managed to walk OK with one arm around Luc’s back.
‘I’ll arrange for a doctor,’ the undertaker said. ‘We have an excellent man and decent medical supplies thanks to American equipment drops.’
The undertaker led Henderson, Goldberg, Marc, Paul, Luc, Sam, Rosie, Jean and Didier across the empty marketplace and down some steps to a cellar. The walls to the next building had been knocked through and they emerged into the mortuary beneath the undertaker’s shop.
Then it was up three floors to a luxurious top-floor apartment. They’d made more noise on the stai
rs than they should have and Edith opened the door before they reached the landing.
‘How did it go?’ she asked.
‘Could have gone a lot worse,’ Paul said, as he stepped in and breathed real coffee and bread baking.
‘Paul’s getting his ears syringed when we get back to campus,’ Marc added before crashing into an armchair and yelling with pain.
‘You don’t sound so good either,’ Edith said.
‘It’s not good,’ Marc explained. ‘My ankle hurts if I stand up, but my arse stings when I sit down.’
There were some laughs at Marc’s expense as Maxine Clere came in from the kitchen and Luc laid Henderson out on a sofa.
‘Henderson’s not as bad as he looks,’ Rosie told Maxine. ‘But I took three loose teeth out of his mouth so he’ll need a dentist as well as a doctor.’
Maxine gave Henderson the gentlest of kisses on his good cheek. Henderson smiled for an instant, but any movement of his face was painful and he’d decided to give up trying to speak because it hurt like hell and nobody understood a word.
‘I might just prefer Henderson like this,’ Maxine said. ‘Can’t usually get a word in when you’re around.’
Luc grunted. ‘I’d heard you preferred Henderson naked in your bed.’
He wouldn’t have dared say that if Henderson was healthy. Maxine looked uncomfortable. Marc, Rosie and Paul couldn’t help smirking.
‘I can’t stay,’ Maxine said. ‘But I’ve arranged for everything you need. Hot water, towels, clothes, food, identity documents. Don’t go out. Keep the noise down and try not to flush the toilet too much because the people downstairs might wonder who you are.’
Rosie looked at the undertaker. ‘You’ll get the doctor here soon?’
He nodded. ‘Hopefully half an hour.’
Marc looked at Maxine as she pulled on a navy coat that seemed too heavy for a July morning.
‘What happens next?’ Marc asked.
‘If you wish to return to Britain it can be arranged,’ Maxine said. ‘But if any of you want to stay, I’m sure I can keep you busy.’