Life seemed increasingly cheap but Rosie knew he was right, as she looked back to make sure that Paul was still behind her.
The dive bomber had hit the Cardiff Bay less than five kilometres out of Bordeaux, in the broad channel that led from the port to the Atlantic Ocean. The ancient steamer was steadily tilting forwards as water poured through a hole in the bow.
As Rosie made it up the near-vertical steps and into the twilight, she looked along the deck and saw that the bow was already touching the waterline and the stern was way out of the water. The passengers stood on deck in their life jackets as the crew pulled tarps away from the lifeboats and began the clumsy process of lowering them over the side into a mercifully calm sea.
Below decks, the seawater reached the boiler room in the heart of the ship. As it rushed into the furnaces, the mass of water hit flaming coals and the result was superheated steam. Horrific screams echoed from below as men boiled alive and the extraordinary pressure ruptured one of the funnels and blew several deck hatches into the air.
Rosie grabbed Paul tight as the air filled with the tang of burning paint and hot metal. High above, a German Stuka had started a near vertical bombing run. Its bombs missed by more than twenty metres, but a series of underwater explosions threw the ship to one side. The hull levelled off, but this was a false dawn and a mass of water rebounded towards the front of the ship and dragged the bow underwater.
There was a deathly grinding noise as the front of the ship sank. Screams came from all around as people charged towards the stern, grabbing whatever they could hold on to as the angle of the deck grew steeper.
Many seemed to hope for a miracle, but Rosie was a realist and she knew they were going down.
‘We either jump now or go down with it,’ she shouted, grabbing her brother by his life jacket and straddling the handrail as adults charged past in one direction, whilst an increasing amount of debris barrelled down the deck towards them.
The hull had been more than fifteen metres out of the water when Paul and Rosie boarded, but the old steamer was plunging like a torpedo and they touched water the instant they were over the handrail.
Rosie was an excellent swimmer, but Paul’s stroke was weak and she held on to his life jacket and begged him to kick. The jackets made them buoyant, but the rapidly sinking ship created a vortex under the water that was dragging them down.
After half a minute of fighting to get away and as more desperate souls threw themselves into the water, the stern of the Cardiff Bay went under, leaving a great circular depression into which everyone and everything was sucked. The epicentre was less than ten metres from the Clarkes and the twisting water flipped one of the few lifeboats to have been successfully launched. A dozen passengers were trapped under the upturned hull as it was sucked down.
As a huge air bubble blew out of the depression, a powerful current gripped Rosie’s legs and pulled her deep underwater. She tried keeping hold of Paul, but it was pitch black and they broke apart when a wooden oar smashed her in the back. She reached in all directions, but he was gone.
The urge to breathe was becoming overpowering and Rosie was sure that she’d drown. While the cold water made her skin feel as if it was filled with needles, she knew she’d die if she didn’t surface quickly.
Then, as swiftly as the current had swept her under, the water around Rosie became still. No bubbles, no chunks of debris, and she felt the life jacket start to pull under her arms. The current rushed against her body as she came back to the surface and she put her ankles together and arms at her side to streamline her shape.
Her ears popped as she broke the surface and took the biggest breath of her life. But her relief was short-lived.
‘Paul,’ she screamed, as she gulped air and spun around, studying the debris and bobbing heads on the flat plane of water surrounding her. The nearest was a fit-looking fifteen year old with curls of black hair stuck to his face. He ploughed through the water towards Rosie and took it upon himself to rescue her.
‘Are you hurt?’ he asked, in French tinged by a slight American accent.
But Rosie was frantic for her brother. ‘Paul!’ she screamed. ‘Paul, where the hell are you?’
‘Calm down, save your breath,’ the American said firmly. ‘Did Paul have his life jacket on?’
‘Of course!’ Rosie said.
‘We all got sucked down. He could have surfaced a hundred metres from here. How about you? Are you OK?’
Rosie nodded as she kicked her legs gently under the water. ‘Something hit me in the back, but it’s not that bad.’
‘Name’s PT,’ the teenager said. ‘Hold on to me and we’ll be just fine. We’re probably less than a kilometre from the coast.’
Rosie glanced around and while she could hear distant cries, there seemed to be no one else nearby. Her eyes were close to the water and all she could see was the moon and a few buildings lit up along the coastline.
‘I guess the current pulled us some distance,’ Rosie said.
‘I’m a good swimmer and you don’t look bad yourself,’ PT said. ‘We can make it to shore, but the cold will do us in if we hang about.’
A tear welled in Rosie’s eye as the life-jacketed pair started swimming towards the coast. Images flashed through her mind like fireworks: Mannstein’s documents lying on the riverbed, her mother white and thin the day before she died of cancer, her father coughing blood, Hugo’s last gasp and Yvette’s smile as Paul handed her his beautiful drawing before leaving the cottage that morning.
She looked across at the young American.
‘I hope my brother’s out there somewhere,’ Rosie choked. ‘He’s all I have left.’
* * *
6U-boat – a German submarine.
READ ON FOR THE FIRST CHAPTER
OF THE NEXT HENDERSON’S
BOYS BOOK, EAGLE DAY.
CHAPTER ONE
It was eleven at night, but the port of Bordeaux crackled with life. Refugee kids slumped in humid alleyways, using their mothers’ bellies for pillows. Drunken soldiers and marooned sailors scrapped, sang and peed against blacked-out streetlamps. Steamers lined up three abreast at the wharves, waiting for a coal train that showed no sign of arriving soon.
With roads clogged and no diesel for trucks, the dockside was choked with produce while people went hungry less than twenty kilometres away. Meat and veg surrendered to maggots, while recently arrived boats had nowhere to unload and ditched rotting cargo into the sea.
A man and a boy strode along the dock wall, alongside rusting bollards and oranges catching moonlight as they bobbed in the water between a pair of Indian cargo ships.
‘Will the consulate be open this late?’ Marc Kilgour asked.
Marc was twelve. He was well built, with a scruffy blond tangle down his brow and his shirt clutched over his nose to mask the sickly odour of rotting bananas. The pigskin bag over Marc’s shoulder held everything he owned.
Charles Henderson walked beside him: six feet of wiry muscle and a face that would look better after a night’s sleep and an encounter with a sharp blade. Disguised as peasants, the pair wore corduroy trousers and white shirts damp with sweat. A suitcase strained Henderson’s right arm and the metal objects inside jangled as he grabbed Marc’s collar and yanked him off course.
‘Look where you’re putting your feet!’
Marc looked back and saw that his oversized boot had been saved from a mound of human shit. With a hundred thousand refugees in town it was a common enough sight, but Marc’s stomach still recoiled. A second later he kicked the outstretched leg of a young woman with dead eyes and bandaged toes.
‘Pardon me,’ Marc said, but she didn’t even notice. The woman had drunk herself into a stupor and no one would bat an eye if she turned up dead at sunrise.
Since running away from his orphanage two weeks earlier, Marc had trained himself to block out the horrible things he saw all around: from mumbling old dears suffering heat stroke to escaped pigs lapping the
blood around corpses at the roadside.
The port was under blackout, so Henderson didn’t see Marc’s sad eyes, but he sensed a shudder in the boy’s breathing and pressed a hand against his back.
‘What can we do, mate?’ Henderson asked soothingly. ‘There’s millions of them … You have to look after number one.’
Marc found comfort in Henderson’s hand, which made him think of the parents he’d never known.
‘If I get to England, what happens?’ Marc asked nervously. He wanted to add, Can I live with you? but choked on the words.
They turned away from the dockside, on to a street lined with warehouses. Clumps of refugees from the north sat under corrugated canopies designed to keep goods dry as they were loaded on to trucks. Despite the late hour a half-dozen boys played a rowdy game of football, using cabbages stolen from the wharves.
Henderson ignored Marc’s tricky question, instead answering the one he’d asked two minutes earlier.
‘The consulate will be closed, but we have nowhere to stay and the office is sure to be inundated by morning. We might be able to find our own way in …’
Henderson tailed off as a pair of German planes swept overhead. The lads playing cabbage football made machine-gun noises and hurled curses over the sea, until their parents yelled at them to cut the racket before it woke younger siblings.
‘I’m French,’ Marc noted seriously. ‘I don’t speak a word of English, so how can you get me a British passport?’
‘We’ll manage,’ Henderson said confidently, as he stopped walking for a moment and switched his heavy case from one arm to the other. ‘After all we’ve been through, you should trust me by now.’
The consulate was only a kilometre from the dockside, but Henderson insisted he knew better than the directions jotted down by an official at the passenger terminal. They traipsed muggy streets where the smell of sewage mixed with sea air, until a friendly-but-sozzled dockworker set them back on the right path.
‘I wonder where Paul and Rosie are,’ Marc said, as they broke into a cobbled square with a crumbling fountain at its centre.
‘They’ll be upriver, close to open sea by now,’ Henderson reckoned, after a glance at his watch. ‘There’s U-boats1 prowling and the captain will want to reach the English Channel before daylight.’
A courthouse spanned one side of the square, with a domed church opposite and a couple of gendarmes2 standing watch, their main purpose apparently to stop refugees settling on the church steps. The British consulate stood in a neat terrace of offices, jewellers, pawnbrokers and banks.
One end of this row had suffered structural damage from a bomb meant for the docks. Even in moonlight you could see the dramatically warped façade above a jeweller’s shop and broken roof slates swept to a tidy pile at the side.
With low-flying bombers and the German forces expected to reach Bordeaux within the week, the Union Jack flag had tactfully been removed from the consulate, but nothing could be done about the British lions woven into wrought-iron gates padlocked across the front door.
Several of His Majesty’s subjects gathered on the front steps, with noticeably better clothing and luggage than the refugees scavenging food along the dockside, but Henderson was wary. The Gestapo3 were still after him and they could easily have spies watching what remained of Bordeaux’s British community.
Henderson would stand out amongst the other Brits in his peasant clothing and Marc spoke no English, so rather than join the queue and wait for nine a.m., he led Marc around the rear of the terrace and was pleased to find that it backed on to a sheltered alleyway. The bombing had fractured a water pipe beneath the cobbles and their boots swilled through several centimetres of water.
‘Have you still got my torch?’ Henderson whispered, when they reached the rear door of the consulate.
The batteries were weak and the beam faltered as Marc scanned the brickwork. After snatching his torch Henderson squatted down and aimed light through the letterbox.
‘Nobody home,’ he said, as the metal flap snapped shut. ‘No sign of an alarm, no bars at the windows. If I give you a boost, do you reckon you can get yourself through the small window?’
Marc craned his head up as Henderson aimed the torch so that he could see.
‘What about the two cops in the square?’ Marc asked. ‘They’ll hear if the glass goes.’
Henderson shook his head. ‘It’s a sash window; you should be able to force it open with a lever.’
Henderson stepped back out of the puddle and found dry cobbles on which to lay and open his case. Marc noticed shadowy figures passing the end of the alleyway, then jolted at the distinctive click of Henderson loading his pistol.
Marc was delighted that a British agent was going to all this bother on his account. Henderson could have abandoned him at the passenger terminal and sailed aboard the Cardiff Bay with Paul and Rosie. But as well as a soft heart, Henderson had a ruthless streak and the gun made Marc uneasy.
In the three days since Marc first met Henderson in Paris, Henderson had shot or blown up half a dozen Germans and machine-gunned a grovelling Frenchman in his bathtub. If the next figure at the end of the alleyway chose to come and investigate, Marc knew Henderson would kill them without a thought.
Henderson passed over a crowbar before screwing a silencer to the front of his pistol. Marc ran his hand along the oiled bar and glimpsed inside the suitcase: ammunition, a compact machine gun, a zipped pouch in which Marc knew lay gold ingots and a stack of French currency. The clothes and toilet bag seemed like an afterthought, squeezed into the bottom right corner. Marc found it miraculous that Henderson could lift all this, let alone carry it several kilometres through the port.
After fastening leather buckles and tipping the jangling case back on its side, Henderson faced the building and lowered his knee into the puddle. Marc leaned against the wall and stepped up so that his wet boots balanced on Henderson’s shoulders.
‘Now I’m really glad you didn’t tread in that pile of turds,’ Henderson noted.
Despite nerves and his precarious position astride Henderson’s shoulders, Marc snorted with laughter.
‘Don’t make me giggle,’ he said firmly, walking his hands up the brickwork as Henderson stood, raising Marc level with the landing window between ground and first floors.
Marc rested his chest against the wall, then took the crowbar from his back pocket.
‘You’re heavier than you look,’ Henderson huffed, as Marc’s unsteady boots tore at his skin.
The oak window frame was rotting and Henderson felt a shower of flaking paint as Marc dug the forked tongue of the crowbar under the frame and pushed as hard as he dared. The catch locking the two sliding panes together was strong, but the two screws holding it in place lifted easily from the dried-out wood.
‘Gotcha,’ Marc whispered triumphantly, as he threw the window open.
To Henderson’s relief, Marc’s weight shifted as the boy pulled himself through the window. He crashed down on to plush carpet inside, narrowly avoiding a vase and a knock-out encounter with the banister.
Beeswax and old varnish filled Marc’s nose as he hurried downstairs. The building was small, but its pretensions were grand and paintings of wigged men and naval battles lined the short flight of steps down to the back door.
Henderson grabbed his suitcase as Marc pulled across two heavy bolts and opened the back door. Beyond the stairwell the ground floor comprised a single large room. They moved amongst desks and cabinets, separated from the waiting area at the opposite end by an ebony countertop and spiralled gold rails.
Marc was fascinated by the tools of bureaucracy: typewriters, rubber stamps, carbon papers and hole punches.
‘So they keep blank passports here?’ Marc asked, as he stared at the banks of wooden drawers along one wall.
‘If they haven’t run out,’ Henderson said, as he slammed his heavy case on a desktop, tilting a stack of envelopes on to the parquet floor. ‘But we can’t make
a passport without a photograph.’
Henderson pulled a leather wallet out of his case. The miniature photographic kit comprised a matchbox-sized pinhole camera, tiny vials of photographic chemicals and sheets of photographic paper large enough to produce the kind of pictures used in identity documents.
‘Go stand under the wall clock,’ Henderson said, as he worked with the tiny camera, inserting a small rectangle of photographic paper.
Henderson looked up and saw a peculiar mix of apprehension and emotion on Marc’s face.
‘Nobody ever took my photograph before,’ he admitted.
Henderson looked surprised. ‘Not at the school or the orphanage?’
Marc shook his head.
‘We’ve got very little light,’ Henderson explained, as he propped the camera on a stack of ledgers. ‘So I need you to stay absolutely still and keep your eyes open.’
Marc stood rigid for twenty seconds, then rushed forwards on Henderson’s signal.
‘When can I see it?’ he asked, as he blinked his stinging eyes repeatedly.
‘I have a developing kit,’ Henderson explained. ‘There must be a kitchen somewhere. I need you to find me three saucers and some warm water.’
As Marc raced upstairs to find the kitchen, Henderson began looking around the offices for blank passports. He discovered an entire drawer full of them, along with a wooden cigar box containing all the necessary stamps and, most helpfully, a crumpled blue manual detailing the correct procedure for dealing with a consular passport application.
One of the telephones rang, but Henderson ignored it and began shaking his photographic chemicals, ready for when Marc came back with the water.
A second phone thrummed as Marc came downstairs with three saucers and a tobacco tin filled with hot tap water. Henderson found the ringing irritating, but with France in chaos it didn’t surprise him that the consular phones would ring through the night.
‘I need absolute darkness to develop the photograph,’ Henderson explained, as he spread out the three saucers and dipped a fragile glass thermometer in the hot water. ‘Get the lights.’
The Escape Page 19