Henderson's Boys: Eagle Day (32 page)

‘Walk, you lazy French scum,’ one officer shouted, as he pointed along the clear road.

Eugene and PT’s youth and peasant clothing meant that the Germans dismissed them as dockworkers, or some of the crazed locals who continued to live in the bombed-out town centre. They certainly didn’t regard the boys as a threat and seemed far more concerned with brushing the dust off their black uniforms.

‘Kill them,’ Eugene mouthed to PT as he pulled his gun.

PT pulled his gun too, and it was only as he pulled the trigger that he remembered that both guns had been underwater. He got the horrible feeling that it was about to jam or explode in his hand. But it didn’t.

Eugene had been a top-ranked marksman in the French army and he’d shot both Germans clean through the heart as PT’s shot skimmed the falling bodies and ricocheted off rubble.

‘That’ll teach them to be so vain.’ Eugene smiled. ‘Bloody fascists.’

After pushing the three dead Germans into the sea, Henderson drove the truck to the edge of the pier and hauled three sacks of coal up towards a tug called
Madeline
IV
. He then climbed aboard and felt a pang of nostalgia for his days in the regular navy as he went below deck to stoke up the boiler.

Rosie sat on a stool at the base of the pier with a German machine gun resting on her lap. She reached out to grab it when she saw a figure moving on the cliffs.

‘Only me,’ Paul said, as he came scrambling down the clifftop with one arm held up rather limply. ‘Shampoo,’ he added, as he remembered the password.

‘My god,’ Rosie said, when she saw the grazes all down his arm and across his face. ‘The state of you! What happened?’

‘I don’t exactly remember,’ Paul said. ‘The explosion knocked me off the bike. Then I was sitting on the pavement with all these people around me. I’ve got a bump on the back of my head, and the bike was smashed to pieces where it went under a car.’

‘Smashed!’ Rosie gasped. ‘So how’d you get here so quick?’

‘The German officer who ran me over. I was all confused and said I had no way to get home, so he put me in the car and gave me a ride to the farm. He dropped me off down on the main road. I started walking towards the house, then doubled back and came here once he was out of sight.’

‘You’re so lucky.’ Rosie smiled as she shone a torch at her brother’s cheek and felt around the back of his head. ‘You’ve got quite an egg back there, but the grazes are nothing to write home about.’

‘The whole front of the bike was mangled,’ Paul said. ‘The woman who picked me out of the road said the front tyre barely missed my leg.’

‘And now we’ve got a boat ride to look forward to,’ Rosie said warily.

The sinking of the was still fresh in both of their minds.
Cardiff Bay

‘Don’t jinx it,’ Paul said. ‘Besides, we can’t get sunk twice in a row. What are the odds of that?’

‘Henderson said he wants whoever gets here first to start carrying everything in the truck up the pier to the tug, but you should sit down if you don’t feel up to it and I’ve made sandwiches if you’re hungry.’

Paul shook his head. ‘I’m a bit queasy, but I can take some of the lighter stuff up to the boat.’

The truck was parked less than five metres away and the back flap was already down from where Henderson had grabbed the coal sacks. Paul looked inside and saw his case, along with everyone else’s and the documents Henderson had stolen from headquarters. But he quickly realised something was missing.

‘Rosie, where’s my tins?’ he asked.

Rosie laughed. ‘Paul, I packed your clothes, your drawing stuff and all the money you’ve made, but we’re not lugging dozens of tins of food across to England. I left them on the kitchen countertop with a note telling the prisoners to take them.’

‘Bloody hell!’ Paul moaned. ‘You said you were going to pack them for me.’

‘Don’t be an idiot!’ Rosie said. ‘Why don’t we take Lottie and the chickens while we’re at it?’

‘I’m going back to the cottage,’ Paul said bitterly.

‘How are you gonna carry them? And besides, you just got whacked on the head – you should probably rest.’

Paul glowered at his sister. ‘I got here early. I can easily get to the house and back before Marc and PT arrive.’

‘Henderson won’t like it if you break his plan.’

But Paul was determined. ‘I can’t carry all the tins of fruit, but I’m getting the two big tins with my strawberry jam and the dark chocolate sauce.’

‘You’re an idiot,’ Rosie said angrily, as her brother started walking back up the cliff. But she didn’t go after him because she had the machine gun and Henderson had ordered her to guard the dock.
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Rosie was still annoyed at her little brother when she saw the big Mercedes drive down the approach road towards the harbour. She was sure it was the car that had dropped Marc off at the farm a few times, but she backed cautiously into the reeds beside the guard hut and kept the machine gun ready until she saw the two African men coming out of the back.

‘Khinde and Rufus,’ Marc said, as Rosie shook each of them by the hand. ‘This is my sister Rosie.’

‘A beautiful name,’ Khinde said. Rosie was overawed by his massive physique and a hand that enveloped half her arm.

‘I think we can stop pretending to be brother and sister now,’ Rosie pointed out. ‘Did you get here all right?’

‘Wasn’t bad,’ Marc said, nodding. ‘Sailed through the checkpoint in Boulogne without getting stopped and the one on the coast road wasn’t manned. I think they must have legged it when the bombing started. The only problem was a cratered road near Marquise. I had to turn back and divert through this crummy village. Windy little roads, pitch black, and it took to find the main road again.’
for ever

‘Making it’s what matters.’ Rosie smiled. ‘Henderson’s gonna set a timed fuse to blow the harbour after we leave. If you start wiring up the charges, Khinde and Rufus can carry the stuff up from the truck.’

Paul had taken the walk between the beach and the cottage hundreds of times and knew the way even in pitch dark. His cuts stung and his head hurt, but his mind was focused on his anger at Rosie for not packing the tins in the truck – she knew how many drawings of Germans he’d had to do to get them. But he was also slightly scared. He thought Henderson might shout at him for breaking with the plan and leaving the harbour, but he reckoned it would be OK as long as he got back before everyone else arrived.

Paul was shocked when he headed out of the trees and saw the blazing headlights of a police car lighting up the front lawn. Vivien Boyle stood by the car, alongside a gendarme who bore a strong family resemblance. Paul remembered one of Dumont’s many boasts: that his uncle was a local policeman who’d let him off after several burglaries.

‘They’ve packed up and gone,’ Vivien explained tearfully, as she walked up to the side of the cottage. ‘Dumont hasn’t been seen since lunchtime, so I sent Luc up to see if he was here. I waited an hour, then I walked up here and found the whole place empty. Just as I was leaving I saw Luc’s bike abandoned on the driveway.’

Having been in Calais all day, Paul had no idea that Luc and Dumont were tied up in the cowshed. The gendarme adopted a slightly superior tone, as Paul backed into the bushes and listened intently.

‘I didn’t like it when that lot turned up,’ the officer said. ‘The whole set-up seemed odd. I saw that Maxine in the village. She was no farmer’s wife to my eyes, with her boutique clothes and a Jaguar.’

‘I know,’ Vivien said. ‘But they acted decently enough, and when this Charles fellow called, out of the blue, offering to bring Lucien and Holly home, what choice did we have?’

The officer leaned into his car and grabbed a torch. ‘I’ll take a quick look around. If we don’t find anything we’ll drive into the village and form a search party.’

‘The family must have been here earlier,’ Vivien explained. ‘The chickens had fresh food and the cow’s udders are empty. There’s also a note on the counter telling the labourers to take whatever tins they want and to see what they could find in the cowshed.’

‘Did you go up there?’ the policeman asked.

Vivien shrugged. ‘Why would I? It’s probably just butter or cheese.’

‘You never know,’ the gendarme said. ‘Let’s start up there.’

Paul knew that whatever had happened to Luc and Dumont, the last thing the rest of them needed was a search party. He had to go back and warn Henderson, but he was less than twenty metres from his prized tins, so as Vivien and her brother set off on the hundred-metre walk towards the cowshed, Paul darted out of the bushes and kept low as he raced across the lawn and into the kitchen.

It was pitch black and Paul flew up into the air in fright as Lottie bleated noisily and crashed into the kitchen table before running outside.

‘Damned goat,’ Paul whispered to himself.

He felt blindly around the worktop until he found one of the large tins of jam and the distinctive barrel-shaped tin containing dark chocolate sauce. With one large can under each arm, Paul raced out of the door and headed back for the bushes as he heard Vivien scream out.

‘Dumie, my poor baby! Oh my god, are those teeth marks on your nose?’

Paul was mystified and decided to wait. There seemed no point going back to warn Henderson without a clearer idea of what had happened to Dumont and Luc Boyle.

‘They’re blowing up the harbour and then leaving on a tug,’ Luc shouted furiously, as he staggered out of the barn, glistening with cow shit. ‘I don’t know why they’re doing it, but as Charles dragged me out here, the girl Rosie asked him a question about how many charges they’d need to blow up the harbour.’

‘The harbour hasn’t blown up,’ Vivien said. ‘We’d have heard it from the village.’

Paul was still baffled as to how Luc and Dumont had got involved, but Rosie and Henderson clearly knew and his priority was now to run back and warn them.

‘I’ll drive into the village and warn the soldiers who drink at the bar,’ the gendarme roared. ‘treats members of my family like this!’
Nobody

Eugene knew that the forty-kilometre drive between Dunkirk and the farm a few kilometres west of Calais took roughly an hour. In theory this gave them twenty spare minutes, even with the delay caused by the loss of the motorbike – but with a soundtrack of explosions as hundreds of bombers pounded the coastline and the real possibility that roads would be blocked off or damaged he drove as fast as darkness, acrid smoke and regulation covered headlamps allowed.

Their worst moment came at a snap checkpoint where they’d abandoned SS helmets and presented the travel permits Henderson had given them for the truck. Fortunately, the bored looking guard didn’t notice the discrepancy in registration numbers.

PT glanced at his watch as they entered the village and sped past Luc Boyle’s three-storey house. ‘Twenty to ten. We’ll make it easy.’

As they drove past the village square, PT noticed a police car parked on the village green and a gendarme gesticulating wildly.

‘Looks like Luc Boyle and Dumont are with him,’ PT said, as he noticed German soldiers running from the tables outside the bar and jumping into a pair of open-topped Kübelwagens.

‘Who’s Luc Boyle?’ Eugene asked.

‘Big-shot local farmer,’ PT said. ‘Slow down, I want to see this.’

Eugene squeezed the brake pedal, but they were doing sixty and their little Peugeot saloon didn’t have the world’s greatest brakes.

‘What do you make of that?’ PT asked.

‘I’m concentrating on the road,’ Eugene said irritably. ‘I’m not making much of anything beyond whether or not I smash into a ditch and throw the pair of us through the windscreen.’

PT grew even more suspicious as he looked behind and saw the headlamps of the two Kübelwagens less than a hundred metres behind them.

Paul was back and he’d given warning that Dumont had been found. The last of three hundred and thirty-seven British bombers had dropped its load twenty minutes earlier, and as Henderson stood on the rear deck of the tug he could see fires burning in Calais and all along the coast in both directions.

‘I see headlights,’ Marc shouted, from the opposite end of the pier.

Rosie stood in the wheelhouse as Henderson grabbed a machine gun. ‘Are we going to wait for Eugene and PT on the motorbike?’

‘We’ll stick it out for another nine minutes if we can,’ Henderson shouted. ‘You be ready at the helm. Paul, keep your head down on deck, but be ready to cast off and light the fuses as soon as you get the shout.’

There was only one road down to the harbour. Khinde and Rufus squatted in the reeds ready to stage an ambush. Marc lay on the clifftop fifty metres away, watching through binoculars.

‘It’s three cars full of Germans,’ he shouted.

Henderson had to decide whether to cast off or stand his ground until Eugene and PT arrived. But he knew the gendarme had only had time to drive to the village and fetch the German regulars out of the bar. They were young, lightly armed and probably drunk, so Henderson fancied his chances.

‘They’re shooting at ,’ Eugene yelled, diving to one side as bullets pelted the front of the car. ‘Get your head out the window. They’re expecting us to arrive on a motorbike.’
us

‘It’s us,’ PT screamed. ‘Shampoo, shampoo! The Germans are behind us!’

Streams of bullets whizzed past PT’s head and Eugene had no option but to turn off the narrow harbour road. The two Kübelwagens running behind had stopped at the first sign of gunfire and soldiers were jumping out and running on to the beach, or taking firing positions behind their vehicles.

More bullets crashed into the bodywork as Eugene’s Peugeot pitched upwards on to a sandbank and clattered through reed beds before breaking on to open beach. The tide was in and they came to a halt with the front wheels and steaming radiator in the sea.

‘Shampoo!’ Eugene yelled, raising his hands in surrender as he stepped out into the wash and ran towards the pier. PT followed, but lowered his hands as the Germans running along the beach started shooting from behind.