Henderson's Boys: Eagle Day (17 page)

PT felt a blast of lust as he closed in to kiss Rosie’s lips. Although Paul and Marc were only a couple of metres away, the dark and the tall grass gave them privacy. Savouring the moment, PT paused with his lips millimetres from Rosie’s and moved his hand up her chest to cup the bottom of her breast.

But the boys weren’t the only ones who could play a trick and the instant PT’s weight shifted off her thighs Rosie brought her knee up, hitting him hard in the kidneys.

‘Arsehole,’ Rosie hissed, as PT groaned with pain. She bunched her fist and thumped him in the eye before rolling him away. ‘This isn’t a game you know, you goddamn moron.’

It wouldn’t have been appropriate for PT to hit back at a girl, but this was academic because as Rosie stormed back towards home he was rolling around in the grass, howling like a wounded dog and seeing nothing but blurs of light from his right eye.

Paul grinned proudly as Marc gave PT a hand up.

‘Henderson’s right, you know,’ Paul laughed. ‘My sister has a crush on you.’
definitely

Paul liked his daily walk down to the beach. After heading off the farm, he crossed the heavily trafficked coast road and found the chalky stone path with reed beds on either side. You didn’t get to see the water until you’d walked up a slight cliff, then four kilometres of coastline broke out in front of you.

The weather had been stormy the previous day and German swimming lessons had been cancelled, but today’s sky was clear and sunlight dazzled off a sea that was as calm as Paul had ever seen it.

The beach was abuzz and Paul crouched down low, doubting that every German would be as welcoming as the slim officer he’d encountered two days earlier.

Today was clearly a special occasion. There were double the usual number of troops and no sign of old men or fatties. Every soldier seemed to have big shoulders and blond heads, as if they’d been hand-picked for a photo-shoot.

A wooden pathway stretched down to the sea. There were several artillery pieces, each tethered to horses made uneasy by the stones underfoot and the unfamiliar crashing waves. Three barges hovered off shore. The largest was a self-powered beast with a huge cavity, designed for hauling coal. The other two were tied behind a Dutch harbour tug which bobbed uncomfortably, even in such a modest sea.

Paul waved as the slim officer emerged from the crowd and raised a thumb. ‘Come to watch the show?’ he asked cheerfully when he neared the top of the shallow cliff.

‘I’ve never seen all this lot before,’ Paul noted.

The officer handed Paul his set of binoculars. ‘Look on the pier over there,’ the officer said. ‘The fat man in the pale blue uniform.’

Paul’s dad had always refused to give him a coin to look through the telescopes on weekend visits to the Eiffel Tower, so the enlarged view was a minor thrill in itself.

‘You can see much detail,’ Paul said excitably. ‘All the yellow braid on their uniforms and everything. Who are they?’
so

‘The pale blue uniform belongs to Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, supreme commander of the Luftwaffe. There’s also an admiral or two, three generals and the fellow in black is a StandartenFührer from the SS
¹⁰
.’

Paul shuddered slightly as he saw that the group of VIPs were guarded by black SS uniforms. These were a rare sight in the military zone, but he knew from experience that the SS and their Gestapo police units were the most dangerous Germans of all.

‘So what’s all this for?’

‘A little show,’ the officer explained. ‘We’ve begun converting river and canal barges into landing ships for the invasion. Goering has moved to Luftwaffe headquarters in Beauvais to coordinate the air attacks on Britain and the generals are putting on a little show for his benefit.’

Paul turned the binoculars around and studied the barges bouncing on the relatively small waves. ‘Is it me, or do those things look dodgy?’

‘They’re river barges. We’ve been assured that they’re seaworthy,’ the officer said. ‘Not that I’d fancy crossing the channel in one on a stormy night.’

Paul handed the binoculars back to the officer and picked his pad up off the rocks. ‘I did your drawing, sir.’

The officer was delighted when he saw it. Paul had drawn portraits before and knew that people were happiest when the image flattered them. He’d made a notebook-sized pencil drawing with thousands of neat strokes. The daughter and wife were both recognisable, but somehow more beautiful than in the original photograph.

‘I hope you like it,’ Paul said. ‘It’s from a photograph, so I had to guess all the colours.’

‘It’s fabulous,’ the officer said, beaming. He clearly missed his family and seemed genuinely touched. ‘I was going to send it to my wife, but you know what? I think I might keep it in my quarters.’

‘I can see there’s a lot going on today,’ Paul said. ‘I can get the jam another day if you’re busy.’

‘No,’ the officer said. ‘I want to put this drawing back in my car before it gets crushed. You can walk with me.’

The officer’s car was parked at the kerb of the coast road, half a kilometre away. The exercise had brought a huge amount of traffic into the area and the parked trucks and cars were causing horn blasts and frayed tempers.

As they walked, three huge Panzer tanks blasted along the pebble beach. Their tracks spun, throwing stones and grit in a huge plume as the engines revved and diesel smoke billowed through the exhaust towers at the rear.

‘Have you ever driven a tank?’ Paul asked.

‘No, thank god,’ the officer said. ‘I’ve ridden in one a few times and they’re merciless: hot, smelly and you wake up the next morning with a backache and twenty bruises.’

The officer’s car was a Renault with French number plates that had presumably been commandeered from one of the locals. After laying Paul’s drawing flat in the glovebox, the German opened the boot and pulled out an aluminium can with a small brown label.

‘It’s more like a paint can,’ Paul smiled, as the weight dragged on his arm. ‘It’s really lucky because all I’ve got left is a tiny blob in the bottom of the jar and my mum can’t find any more in the village shop.’

‘My pleasure,’ the officer said. ‘Go straight home with it. It’s best not to get seen running around with a big tin of German jam with all these SS officers around.’

Paul looked disappointed. ‘But I wanted to watch the barges.’

‘Run it home and come back,’ the German suggested. ‘And when you do, stay at this end of the beach. I wouldn’t stray too close to the VIPs and their bodyguards if I were you.’

There were so few civilians in the area that Paul decided it would be safe to cross the coast road and hide his jam behind a tree on the path back to the house. Once this was done, he retreated to his usual spot amongst the rocks as the empty barges headed towards the beach.

*

While Oberst Ohlsen stood on the pier behind Hermann Goering and a line of SS guards, his staff back in Calais were enjoying his absence. As well as working as Oberst Ohlsen’s personal translator, Henderson had been tasked with giving six senior officers a basic grounding in French.

The classroom at the Calais headquarters had formerly been the executive dining room of a French shipping line. The walls were hung with pictures of steamships, although the one over the fireplace had been taken down and replaced with a swastika.

Henderson had never taught languages before, but rather than bore a roomful of busy officers with written exercises he made them take turns enacting scenes such as ordering drinks from a bar, or speaking to a telephone operator.

When the class grew bored, he’d liven things up with blue jokes or more risqué scenarios, such as what to say to a Frenchman who aims a shotgun at you when he catches you in bed with his daughter.

This teaching technique worked well, but Henderson’s style was all part of his real intention, which was to get friendly with as many senior German officers as possible.

‘Now our beloved Oberst is at the beach in his little pink trunks,’ Henderson said in German, as he looked at his watch and saw that it was a quarter to one. Then he switched to French, ‘So I suggest that we all adjourn for a very long lunch break.’

It took the six officers several seconds to grasp what he was saying and rise up from their desks.

A young major smiled at Henderson. ‘If my teachers at school had been as much fun as you, Mr Boyle, I never would have ended up in the bloody army.’ A few of his colleagues laughed in agreement as they headed out the door. ‘Would you care to join us for lunch?’

Henderson shook his head. ‘I have a pile of translations to type up. Another time, perhaps.’

As the officer’s boots clattered down the marble stairs outside, Henderson gathered his papers into a briefcase and took a side door through a disused kitchen. He then cut across a thickly carpeted corridor and found himself in the reception area outside Oberst Ohlsen’s office.

The reception was usually manned by the Oberleutnant who worked as Ohlsen’s assistant, but Henderson had sent him to lunch, so he opened the double doors and peered cautiously into the empty room. The office was opulent, with models of steamships in glass cases and a private bathroom behind a huge desk with marble columns for legs.

Hitler gave a reproachful look from the wall and a vase was filled with the miniature swastika pennants that were usually attached to the bonnets of cars. They reminded Henderson of the paper flags he’d pushed into sandcastles as a child.

In the two days since becoming Ohlsen’s personal translator Henderson had taken part in half a dozen meetings with city officials, directors of the local ports and railways and a variety of shipyard and dock owners.

All of these produced intelligence and gave clues about the German invasion plans. However, the highest level meetings between military officers took place entirely in German, which meant there was no reason for Henderson to sit in. The only way he’d get his hands on the actual plans would be to steal them.

At the end of the room nearest the double doors was a huge plan chest with more than thirty slim drawers. It had been designed for naval charts and blueprints belonging to the steamship company, but served as well for maps of German positions and diagrams of the invasion plans.

Henderson checked the corridor outside before opening the assistant’s desk and snatching a bunch of keys from the top drawer. Back inside, a tiny key unlocked the plan chest, allowing Henderson to slowly open the top drawer. He drew a terse breath, awed at what lay within.

Henderson had seen the plan laid out on the Oberst’s desk, but had been ordered to stand well back as he was told to deal with a dispute over a car repair with a garage in town.

The original map had been drawn on linen-backed paper by a German draughtsman. The English Channel and the French and British coastlines ran top and bottom. There were hundreds of markings and symbols, denoting everything from towns and sea lanes to the locations of German tank divisions and British coastal defences.

Corrections had been added. Some were drawn over patches of correction fluid. In other places sections of the map had been sliced out with a craft knife and everything redrawn on fresh paper. This had happened several times in some spots, turning the map into a delicate collage of postcard-sized pieces held together with sticky tape.

It was unacceptably risky to view the map in the open office, so Henderson carried it quickly to the bathroom where he pushed the bolt across, laid one of the Oberst’s thick bath towels over the floor tiles and put the map on top of it.

There was a mass of details and so many markings that it was difficult for anyone other than the person devising the plan to distinguish between truly important information and notes and crossings-out jotted during telephone conversations with Berlin.

But as Henderson studied the whole map it became clear that the invasion plan had been scaled back since it was first conceived. The Germans had originally planned to invade with 250,000 men, launching out of a dozen occupied ports stretching from Bruges to Cherbourg. This had now been downsized to a force of just 100,000 troops which would land on a strip of England’s southern coast between Portsmouth and Dover, with the aim of rapidly advancing to London.

The plan to invade across the sea with less than a fifth of the manpower that had taken France was undeniably bold. The physical reality of the map, with the names of German divisions written over English towns, stirred up Henderson’s sense of patriotism and made him even more determined to do all he could to stop it.

He began his work by writing as many details as he could in shorthand and sketching a rough outline of the main landing zones and current locations of German troops.

Balancing risks is the heart of a spy’s job. If you take too many you’ll be caught, but you’ll achieve nothing if you take none at all. Henderson could have spent his entire lunchbreak noting more details from the map, but he’d personally known spies who’d ended up dead after hanging around too long, or going back to steal a few extra sheets of discarded carbon paper from a waste bin. And the knowledge that the lives of Maxine and the kids would be at risk if he were caught made him more cautious than if he’d been acting alone.

After no more time than a man can reasonably spend locked in a bathroom, Henderson checked that the office and the room outside were empty before sliding the plan back into the chest.

As he pushed shut the drawer he noticed a faint scribble in the bottom right corner of the map:
S-Tag 16-9
. He realised it was probably the most important snippet of information he’d find in his whole life: the Germans were planning to invade Britain on 16 September.

*

The huge coal barge had been cut open at the front and fitted with a drop-down ramp. Paul got a good view as the hand-picked troops with full kit strapped on their backs waded through half a metre of seawater and climbed aboard. They were followed by two pieces of horse-drawn artillery.

Everyone seemed edgy as the first Panzer III tank rolled up. The tracks clattered against the slippery ramp and the barge tilted forwards as twenty-two tonnes of metal crept aboard.