Henderson's Boys: Scorched Earth

  ‘I can’t see, but there’s a lot of dust and exhaust smoke.’

  ‘Shall I go and tell the others?’ Edith asked.

  As Edith said this, a small command tank bristling with radio aerials passed a gap between trees. It was followed closely by something much bigger.

  ‘Tiger!’ Daniel said happily.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  Daniel nodded. ‘Get running!’

  As Edith scrambled off to Marc at the detonation point, Daniel watched fourteen vehicles passing the gap, including four Tigers, a gunless command tank and several support trucks. By the time he’d counted this lot and made it back to the ground, Edith had alerted Marc and now ran towards PT and Michel in their hidden artillery position.

  Marc smiled uneasily at Luc, who’d stripped off his pissy shirt and sat poised with a sniper rifle. The German convoy was led by a truck, with three men manning a 20-mm anti-aircraft cannon on its open rear platform. This crew was on full alert, and things would be hotter than PT’s team had anticipated if the men got a chance to swing around and shoot the rapid-firing cannon along the embankment.

  ‘Deal with them,’ Marc told Luc.

  Luc understood Marc’s logic, but was irritated because he was keen to shoot the guy who’d pissed on him. As Luc crawled forward to a better sniping position, the gun truck and command tank reached the bridge.

  After that came two of the much prized Tigers. Marc had seen them hidden in the fields around Morel’s farm, but these exhaust-belching slabs of armour were far more impressive in motion. When the first set of tracks reached the bridge, its iron structure creaked. Vibration threw up dust and, to Marc’s alarm, sent a couple of the plastic-explosive balls sploshing into the water.

  As the first Tiger reached the bridge’s midpoint the front tracks of a second began the crossing. Marc touched two bare wires together to complete the explosive circuit. He buried his face as the section of road directly beneath the mining pan exploded upwards. The blast was deafening and its heat turned water beneath the bridge into clouds of steam.

  The lead truck and command tank had made it across. Clods of earth pelted the ground as Luc bobbed up and targeted the gun crew. He got two men with two shots, but the third swung the gun in Luc’s direction, then ducked behind its armoured flanks and opened fire on Luc’s position.

  As Luc sprinted desperately for cover, PT pulled a lever that sent an artillery shell across the water towards the rear of the convoy. Edith jumped out of cover at the roadside and rolled a stick of plastic with a pressure-sensitive detonator under the track of the command tank.

  Flames blinded Marc, and even 50 metres from the blast the water vapour was painfully hot. As this cleared, he saw that the bridge’s metal framework had buckled, directly beneath the mining pan. Most of the guards were on the ground, either dead or writhing in agony with blood pouring from burst eardrums.

  The explosion had lifted the rear of the first Tiger tank, but its driver had accelerated and made it across the river. The second tank had smashed into the buckled section of road and now balanced precariously over the water, with its crew clambering out of the turret.

  An open-topped German staff car had been running between the second and third Tigers. Its driver had slammed the brakes when he’d heard the blast, but the tank behind took longer to stop. Its front track had rolled up on to the Kübelwagen, flattening the rear end and pulverising the two officers in the back seats.

  As Edith’s plastic successfully blew the track off the small command tank, Marc and Luc used their sniping skills to hit crew members scrambling out of the Tiger stranded in the middle of the bridge. One of the tank crew reached cover as the bridge started creaking again. A slab of road tilted off into the water, followed by the stranded Tiger.

  The huge tank hitting water sent an enormous wave downriver. Meantime, the crew of the Tiger which had made it across swung its turret towards PT and Michel’s artillery position.

  The pair got 20 metres clear before the 88-mm shell tore up their position, but both lads were still knocked down by the mud and plants thrown up by the blast. PT found himself going head over heels down the embankment, before being engulfed in the wash thrown up when the tank hit the water.

  Marc and Luc scrambled away from the bridge. They took out two men escaping from the stricken command tank, then watched aghast as Daniel crept up behind the first Tiger. The gun aimer inside had spotted Michel pulling a muddy and half-drowned PT up the embankment about 100 metres away and was making fine adjustments to his second shot.

  As the 88-mm blast rang out, Daniel hopped on the back of the tank. Marc thought the eleven-year-old had gone insane. But it was a hot morning, which meant that the inside of the tank was even hotter, and one of the last things Daniel had noticed before climbing out of the trees was that the lead tank was travelling with its turret flap open.

  Marc couldn’t bear to watch as Daniel clambered on top of the turret, pulled a pin from a grenade and then kept hold for five seconds so that the crew inside didn’t have time to lob it out again.

  ‘Run, you crazy little bastard!’ Marc screamed.

  Daniel took a dramatic leap off the turret and scrambled to the roadside as the grenade erupted. This blast was muffled, but the secondary explosion when the magazine of 88-mm shells exploded was louder than the plastic and dynamite that took out the bridge.

  While Daniel grabbed all the glory, Edith had cut around the back of the 20-mm gun. The truck’s driver had been shot by Luc when he tried to run, but there was still a single German shielded behind the cannon and trying to reload. She took him out with a rifle shot in the back.

  As the sounds of battle dwindled to a few panicked Germans shooting at ghosts, PT and Michel scrambled away from the river in dripping clothes.

  ‘Are we in control on this side of the bridge?’ PT gasped, as he looked at the three wrecked vehicles.

  ‘Truck, command tank and one Tiger made it across,’ Luc reported. ‘No signs of life.’

  ‘Nice one,’ PT said. ‘There’s more dust coming up behind the trees. I think there’s another column of tanks coming. The good news is, there’s no way you’ll get anything as wide as a tank, or even a car, across the bridge. But it’s not completely broken. They can send men after us, so we need to get back to the truck and ship out.’

  The six members of Team A set off at a jog, as smoke from the explosions billowed into the sky at their backs.

  ‘Can’t be certain we killed every German that made it across the bridge,’ Luc warned. ‘One of them might be waiting in the bushes with a surprise.’

  They were back at the truck within a minute. PT’s 108th uniform was a muddy disaster, so Marc got behind the wheel. As the others packed up all the equipment, Luc stayed on the road and kept lookout until the last second.

  ‘They just sent a couple of men across,’ Luc said, as he hopped into the clattering truck beside Marc. ‘But they don’t seem in any rush to come and see what’s over here.’

  As Marc turned on to the road, Luc pointed up at the sky. ‘Does that look like a Mustang to you?’

  Marc nodded as the American plane made a tight arc around the spirals of smoke. ‘I’d bet it’s a spotter,’ he said. ‘It’s broad daylight. If they can get the Tempests out here before the 108th doubles back, they’ll blow the shit out of them.’

  The lightly armed spotter plane had four 7.7-mm machine guns. These would be useless against tanks and there was no hope of taking on a convoy protected by anti-aircraft guns. But as the American pilot radioed a squadron of rocket-firing Tempests 30 kilometres north, he saw a single, canvas-covered German army truck travelling west towards Gournay-en-Bray.

  The truck would get away before the Tempests arrived, so the pilot swooped low and decided to hunt it down.

  ‘Marc,’ PT screamed, as he looked out the back of the truck at the silver plane coming in low towards them. ‘Pull off the road. The bloody Mustang’s coming right for us!’

  CHAP
TER TWENTY

  ‘How far are we walking?’ Henderson asked, as he glanced around warily.

  Gaspard had led him out of the Gare de Rouen and now they were on a cobbled street. Areas close to stations usually had checkpoints, or at least a German presence, but the local garrison was busy dealing with the aftermath of the bombings and securing the route for the 108th.

  ‘Twenty minutes, maybe.’

  Henderson wondered if Gaspard was giving him the run-around, knowing that his resistance colleagues would soon find the two bodies in the station café. But on the other hand, it was natural for a resistance group to keep their supplies somewhere remote.

  ‘If you’re messing with me …’ Henderson said.

  Gaspard cracked a sly smile. ‘You’ll kill me in a horrible way, blah, blah, blah … I’ve heard your spiel already, Englishman.’

  The walk took them out of the city centre, passing main roads closed down for the 108th. They saw no military vehicles, because most had arrived before daylight, while the Tigers and their escort vehicles were unlikely to hit town for another couple of hours.

  ‘We have to cross the river,’ Gaspard said.

  Three of Rouen’s road bridges had been shut off for the 108th. The fourth was a melee of locals, queued back a kilometre with bicycles and handcarts. But trains crossed the river too. A pair of railway policemen nodded reverentially to Gaspard as he led Henderson across the Seine via a metal gangway alongside train tracks.

  ‘It’s still not too late,’ Gaspard said, as he held a hand over his cap to stop a warm river breeze from blowing it away. ‘I’ll put you on the next train to Paris. My people wouldn’t dare follow you into Ghost’s territory, although it would be wise not to return to Rouen after what you’ve done.’

  Henderson laughed. ‘But I’d report back to my superiors and tell them to stop supplying your group with equipment. Give me some equipment. With luck I’ll get myself killed, and you’ll have no more bother.’

  Gaspard had lost two men, but still laughed at Henderson’s logic. At the end of the bridge the two tracks split, with some heading east to Paris and others hugging the side of the river. An express steamed past as Gaspard clambered over a patch of weeds and kicked away gravel to expose a rectangular metal cover.

  He strained as he pulled it up. Henderson thought Gaspard was opening a drain, but a metal ladder led down to a narrow concrete chamber with a puddled floor.

  ‘You first,’ Henderson said. Then, as his eyes adjusted to the gloom below ground, ‘What is this?’

  ‘There was once an engine shed here,’ Gaspard explained. ‘There were tracks above and this was an inspection pit.’

  Henderson was impressed that Gaspard’s resistance circuit had such a perfect hiding place. The floor was damp, so metal racks had been run along each side. The neatly organised contents must have come from several hundred containers, dropped by different Allied nations. There was tinned food and milk from the USA, canned beef from Australia and tins of a revolting concoction that the British called MV, short for ‘meat and veg’.

  There were boots and winter clothes. The British and Americans were generally reluctant to drop weapons into areas where the resistance had communist sympathies. But there was a good selection of knives and grenades, plastic explosive packs disguised as ‘Best French Butter’, bundles of detonators, machine guns, rifles and stacked boxes of ammunition. Except for a few spots of rust caused by the damp conditions, every piece was in factory-fresh condition.

  ‘Are you planning to start another war after this one?’ Henderson asked, as he ran his hand over a shelf of torches and spare radio valves.

  ‘We’ve fought too hard to hand France back to capitalists,’ Gaspard said. ‘I hope it never comes to civil war in France. But if it does, we communists will be prepared.’

  ‘I’d love to take you to the Soviet Union some day,’ Henderson sneered.

  Gaspard spat on the floor. ‘I don’t care what you say, English Officer. Take what you like, then I’ll escort you back over the bridge. And don’t waste your time coming back here. We have many hiding places. I’ll make sure there’s nothing here, should you return.’

  *

  The Mustang’s wings skimmed treetops as Marc floored the brake pedal and swerved off-road. The plane was doing over 200 kph, so the four machine guns had less than a second on their target. Most bullets just chewed up the road, but there were some horrible noises as ricochets pelted the truck’s underside.

  A big chunk of tree fell into the road ahead as the plane roared up in a wide loop, preparing for a second attack run. Marc’s neck jerked painfully as he rolled the truck through a roadside ditch and banged to a stop against a large oak.

  As Marc bailed, the plane was skimming treetops again. This second attack mainly ripped off branches. Luc had jumped out the back of the truck and shot wildly into the air with his pistol.

  PT wrenched his firing arm. ‘What are you doing, he’s on our side!’

  ‘Shoot at me, I’ll shoot at you,’ Luc roared furiously. ‘We’re the good guys, Yankee bastard!’

  ‘We’re in a German truck, in German uniform.’

  As PT and Luc squabbled, Marc chased Edith, Michel and Daniel on a mad scramble through a copse of trees. As the plane arced around they reached a field and dived forward into waist-height barley.

  Marc rolled on to his back to see if the plane was coming around for a third run, but it kept on climbing.

  ‘I scared him off!’ Luc shouted.

  ‘I doubt he even saw you,’ PT said.

  They’d only driven a couple of kilometres from the bridge. It was well out of sight, but the Germans must have seen the plane and would probably work out that it was their truck being attacked.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Marc said, as he sprang up. ‘All aboard!’

  But while there’d been no dramatic explosions, one of the truck’s rear tyres was flat and fuel was draining into the road. PT crawled under the chassis to inspect the gas tank. He hoped he’d be able to stop the leak by plugging a hole, but the fuel dribbled from a long crack.

  ‘We’re going nowhere in this,’ PT declared. ‘I hope the bikes are OK.’

  The news was better inside the truck. Edith’s backpack had taken two bullets, but the grenades and ammunition inside it were intact. Another shot had splintered the stock of PT’s rifle, but everything else, including the bicycles, was OK.

  ‘We won’t be mounting any more attacks,’ PT said. ‘But there’s enough stuff to defend ourselves and we’ll hide the fuel cans in the field in case we find a use for them. Grab what you can carry. Hopefully we’ll pick up a track and we can ride cross-country.’

  ‘I’ll rig the truck with a couple of booby traps,’ Luc said. ‘Should blast a couple of limbs off, with any luck.’

  The others didn’t share Luc’s enthusiasm for blowing off limbs, but booby traps were a common resistance tactic. The rest of the team let Luc do his worst as they unloaded the bikes and sorted out what they could carry on their backs.

  *

  Henderson would have liked to take the precaution of killing Gaspard, or at least tying him up. But he needed the little train driver’s influence to get back across the railway bridge. They parted awkwardly, on open ground next to one of the railway bridge’s brick pylons.

  Henderson broke into a run, made painful by stiff new boots. His pack was stuffed with explosives, detonators and ammunition, but he still had no civilian ID.

  Gaspard hurried back towards the railway guards. Henderson suspected he’d walk the tracks back to the Gare de Rouen. Once there, he’d tell his communist buddies that they’d been ripped off by a British officer, who’d ensure that they never got another equipment drop if he made it out of town alive.

  Paul, Joel and Sam were waiting close to Rouen Cathedral. They’d hunted down food, but their stolen ration cards could only buy black bread. After they’d all used a tap over a horse trough to rinse the sweat and grime from their skin, Joel had
cut the back out of a spare shirt and used it to bandage the gash on Sam’s arm.

  They’d arranged to meet Henderson on a set of steps close to the cathedral. Instead of speaking to the boys, Henderson stopped a couple of paces away and spoke while faking a coughing fit.

  ‘See if I’m being followed.’

  The boys let Henderson go 20 metres before standing up, then they moved off once he’d turned a corner.

  ‘Something must have gone wrong,’ Sam said.

  They were all tense, but Paul managed a smirk. ‘You think, Sherlock?’

  It was around 10 a.m. The streets were quieter than they’d been an hour earlier, but still busy enough to make it hard to see if Henderson was being followed. Joel stayed 10 metres back as Henderson walked briskly, heading away from the cathedral into a maze of back streets. Paul and Sam held back even further, hoping to identify any tail and take him from behind.

  There was no tail, but Gaspard’s men had phoned around with Henderson’s description. As Henderson stepped through a brick archway, two men ran out of an apartment entrance. The older of the pair pulled a gun, but Henderson elbowed him in the face before he could shoot. Joel broke into a sprint, barging the younger man to the ground as Henderson ripped the revolver out of his attacker’s hand.

  By the time Paul and Sam raced in, both attackers were on the ground. Henderson pulled his silenced pistol and shot the older man in the head. The second, much younger man gasped with terror as Henderson rammed the gun in his face.

  ‘On your feet,’ Henderson ordered. ‘Walk with us.’

  It had all happened so fast that they only got a decent look at the young attacker as Henderson began marching him off. The lad wore a white shirt, navy railway worker’s trousers and looked no older than fifteen.

  ‘You live near here?’ Henderson asked.

  The lad nodded.

  ‘Who do you live with?’

  ‘Two sisters, my mother. Plus my aunt’s family.’

  ‘That’s no good,’ Henderson grunted. ‘You know anyone near here who lives alone? A friend, an elderly person?’