Scorched Earth

by Robert Muchamore

  ‘Judging by the rat shit downstairs, I’d bet that moggy eats better than we do,’ Jean said, shaking his head with relief.

  As the cat sloped off, PT holstered his gun and opened the middle of three desk drawers. He picked out two vellum folders and a pair of keys dropped out from between them.

  ‘Looks like your friend has done us proud,’ PT said.

  Jean nodded. ‘I’ve known this woman thirty years. Taught all of her sons.’

  The cat stared from the top of the grand staircase as they crossed the hallway into Office 2B. This was a larger space, with five desks, a wooden counter and a waiting area lined with unmatched chairs.

  A noticeboard above the chairs had the latest German regulations covering curfew times, penalties for spitting in the street and a reminder that anyone failing to report resistance or Maquis activity faced the death penalty.

  PT made a dramatic slide over the polished counter, while Jean took the trouble to lift a flap and step through. They both had the same destination, a huge black and gold safe built into a wall at the far side of the room.

  The two keys fitted into slots 3 metres apart. They had to be turned simultaneously, which made it impossible for a single key holder to steal its contents. After some fuss over which key went on which side, Jean began a count.

  ‘One, two …’

  They turned on three. There was a clank as a bolt dropped and the squeal of hinges that needed oiling. The safe was tall and shallow, with shelves designed to hold documents such as blank identity cards, curfew passes and birth certificates. All of these held some value, but for the Maquis the most precious were the small, lime-coloured ration cards which were required to buy any kind of food.

  Jean’s informant had not only secured copies of the two safe keys, she’d also told them that the fortnightly ration card delivery had arrived the previous afternoon.

  ‘Beautiful,’ PT said, kissing one stack of cards before scooping mounds of them into a leather satchel.

  As PT picked smaller quantities of less valuable documents, Jean moved between desks stealing the rubber stamps, embossers and wax seals needed to validate their stash of blank documents.

  ‘Nearly there,’ Jean said, dropping assorted stamps into his backpack. ‘I’m looking for a bottle of the radium ink they use on identity cards.’

  PT closed the safe and slid back over the counter. He hadn’t buckled his satchel properly and a few purple tobacco-ration cards trailed behind him. As he crouched to pick them up there was a gunshot.

  Jean’s neck snapped towards the sound. PT leaned cautiously into the hallway and saw the huge cat belting towards him with half its innards hanging out. The jumpy marksman who’d shot it was coming around the top of the stairs, dressed in a navy jacket and dented French soldier’s helmet.

  ‘Milice 2,’ PT shouted, as the agonised cat tripped over its own intestines. ‘I thought you trusted this woman.’

  Their planned exit was via a ladder lowered out of a window in the ladies’ toilet. But if they’d been betrayed, would the ladder be there?

  PT decided that attack was the best form of defence and took aim at the man coming around the stairs. He couldn’t tell where his bullet struck, but it knocked the man backwards and grunts and shouts came up as his body fell on to men further down the steps.

  Jean now reached the office door. The balding teacher held a service revolver from the last war in hand as he gave PT a bag filled with stamps and ink pads.

  ‘You’re younger and faster,’ Jean said. ‘You run, I’ll cover.’

  Jean covered with wild shots as PT sprinted down the hallway to the ladies’ toilet. He booted the toilet door, half expecting someone to burst out of a stall. But the only sound was a drizzling tap and the long ladder was where he’d been told to expect it.

  ‘We’re OK,’ PT shouted, as he opened a boarded sash window.

  Edith was down below in the rubble and she’d swapped her basket of onions for a compact STEN machine gun.

  ‘Who’s shooting?’ she shouted up, as PT went for the ladder.

  ‘Jean, let’s go!’ PT shouted. ‘It’s clear out back.’

  PT almost threw the ladder out and Edith kicked rubble out of the way to allow it to stand level.

  ‘Jean,’ PT shouted again, as he lobbed the satchels and bag out the window and swung a leg on to the ladder.

  PT hurried down, half expecting never to see Jean again, but the elderly teacher put his boot on to the window ledge and caught him up by sliding down the outside of the ladder.

  ‘Shot two of the buggers,’ Jean said.

  Edith knocked the ladder away to stop anyone else getting down, while PT and Jean grabbed the bags of loot and set off across shattered bricks and roof tiles. As Edith turned she noticed a figure taking aim out of a first-floor window and opened up with the STEN. It wasn’t an accurate weapon, but the shooter ducked out of the hail of bullets for long enough to let the trio clear the open rubble and get behind the chimney breast of a bombed-out house.

  From here they clambered through the roofless shell of a cobbler’s shop and began sprinting down a curving road between houses.

  ‘I thought you’d known her for thirty years,’ PT said breathlessly.

  They’d reached a point where the alleyway met one of the main routes out of town. There was no sign of any Milice following as PT stretched over a low garden wall and lifted the first of three getaway bikes.

  ‘Someone might have betrayed us, but not her,’ Jean replied, as he straddled a bike. ‘If they’d known about the ladder they’d have ambushed us out back.’

  ‘Well someone certainly told them we were coming,’ Edith said as PT handed her the second bike. ‘And when I find out who, they’ll be sorry.’

  Note

  2 Milice – A police organisation set up by the Germans in 1943. Milicens were all Frenchmen. They were notoriously brutal and specialised in operations that regular French police were reluctant to undertake, especially hunting down Jews, communists and members of the resistance.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘Daniel, I hear a train,’ Paul shouted.

  Branches rustled, but Paul got nervous when there was no answer.

  ‘Daniel?’

  Twenty metres up, Daniel gasped as he grabbed madly to steady himself and realised that he’d dozed off momentarily. The eleven-year-old shuddered, imagining what might have happened as he tightened his thigh grip on the branch between his legs. His throat was dry, his vision blurry and his head weighed down by the loss of a night’s sleep.

  The youngster had his reputation as a lookout to protect, so he tried not to sound like he’d scared himself to death. ‘Don’t worry, I’m on it.’

  There had been a freight train just after seven that had caused some confusion, but Daniel had no doubt this time.

  ‘It’s the one,’ Daniel yelled. ‘Send the signal.’

  Paul pulled the grenade out of his pocket. ‘Are you completely sure?’

  ‘Two locomotives pulling. I can see tanks under tarpaulins and an anti-aircraft draisine hooked on the back of the train.’

  ‘Good stuff,’ Paul said happily. ‘Cover your ears and hang on tight.’

  ‘Kinda hard to do both,’ Daniel noted, but not loud enough for Paul to hear.

  The grenade had to be thrown carefully, because the forest was dense and the result might be deadly if it bounced off a branch and came back at him. Paul had used some of the hour he’d spent standing at the base of Daniel’s tree to find the best aiming point and after pulling the pin he flung the grenade in a high arc between two trees, before taking cover behind the trunk.

  ‘Hold it,’ Daniel shouted.

  Before Paul could respond a bang echoed down the hillside and clumps of burning white phosphorus shot off in all directions. Paul shielded his eyes as the blast cracked and when he stood up, Daniel’s bare feet swung off the branches barely a metre above his head.

  ‘There’s another train,’ Daniel said anxi
ously, before jumping to the ground and gasping as the side of his foot scraped on a tree root.

  Paul’s ears rang from the blast. ‘How can there be two trains?’

  ‘Coming the other way,’ Daniel explained.

  ‘Passenger or cargo?’

  ‘Eight passenger coaches.’

  ‘Could it reach the tunnel before the tank train?’ Paul asked, horrified at the prospect of accidentally blowing up a train full of passengers. And with Allied bombings wrecking France’s railway network and the resistance regularly sabotaging rolling stock, every passenger train ran full.

  As Daniel went down on one knee to put his boots back on, Paul thought about the distance to the track and spoke rhetorically.

  ‘Even if we could make it down there in time, how would we signal the train to stop?’

  ‘I don’t wanna be anywhere near that tunnel when all that explosive goes off,’ Daniel answered, now wide awake from the adrenaline rush. ‘What if we could get to Luc and Michel and stop them setting the explosion?’

  ‘Any train you see can’t be more than three minutes from the tunnel,’ Paul said. ‘It took us over ten minutes to get up here from the ridge and we don’t know exactly where they’re hiding out with the detonators.’

  Paul didn’t add that his orders were to do everything necessary to stop the tank train, and that even if they found the others in time, Luc was completely ruthless and would blow the tunnel anyway.

  ‘Gotta be eighty people in each carriage,’ Daniel said. ‘Eight carriages times eighty people, comes to—’

  Paul grabbed his backpack and interrupted as Daniel completed the sum in his head. ‘Nothing we can do, and it’s dangerous to stick around here any longer than necessary. Let’s start walking.’

  ‘What about Michel and Luc?’

  ‘They might catch us up, but there’s no point waiting around for them.’

  *

  ‘Two for one,’ Luc said, smiling at Michel.

  They were crouching on a chalkstone ledge, 50 metres from the tunnel mouth, with candlewax plugs in their ears. The clanking military train directly below moved at no more than 20 kilometres per hour, even though it was being pulled by a pair of Germany’s most powerful locomotives.

  The lads’ low-lying position and plugged ears meant they had no clue about the passenger train coming the other way. Luc’s ‘two for one’ comment referred to their plan to incapacitate a tank battalion while simultaneously wrecking a tunnel on a railway line the Germans would desperately need when the Allies invaded.

  Trackside explosions could derail a train, but it took a blast reflecting off tunnel walls and the intense fire that was sure to follow to wreck heavily-armoured Tiger tanks. Luc watched as the twin locomotives entered the tunnel, followed by several cargo wagons.

  To detonate he needed to make a circuit by touching two bared wires together. His hands trembled as he thought about the pummelling the fragile detonators had taken during their rainy overnight trek, and the fact that their explosives were stretched out across a puddled tunnel and had been laid hurriedly in the dark as the sooty air choked them. One broken wire in the firing circuit and the whole show would fizzle.

  ‘Take cover,’ Luc ordered. ‘Keep your mouth open so the shockwave doesn’t burst your eardrums.’

  Because of the earplugs, Luc accompanied his words with gestures. As he counted a sixteenth tarpaulin-covered tank entering the tunnel, Luc touched the bare wires and felt the crack from a blue spark as he dived behind a tree trunk on top of Michel.

  Within a second the ground shook. A shockwave stripped leaves off the trees and filled the sky with fleeing birds. The train made a huge metallic shriek as the explosion filled the length of the tunnel. Luc was scared that the ledge was going to collapse down on to the tracks and he made the mistake of taking a peek around the trunk as the tunnel mouth spat a vast fireball.

  The air was unbreathably hot as Michel’s anxious fingers clawed Luc’s back. The ground shook again as the part of the train that hadn’t entered the tunnel began to concertina. Birds killed by the shockwave rained through the trees as Luc gave Michel a tug.

  ‘I think we should have backed up further!’

  But Luc’s humour didn’t last. The fireball down on the tracks had reached a truck filled with high-explosive tank shells. Two went off in rapid succession and as carriages continued to grind and buckle the remaining shells went off in a deafening chain reaction. White-hot chunks of shell case were flung several hundred metres in the air, slicing through the canopy of leaves and igniting smoky fires in the damp hillside.

  Michel looked terrified as Luc led him up the hillside. Less than 20 metres ahead a red-hot train wheel smashed through the canopy, shattering a trunk and forcing the pair to dive and hope for the best.

  When Luc looked up, he saw a huge, smouldering chunk of tree balanced precariously in branches overhead.

  ‘Move!’

  This time Michel didn’t need any pulling and he charged off ahead of Luc. They both had sweat dripping into their eyes as they reached a path that crossed the hill, back to the spot where they’d split from Paul and Daniel ninety minutes earlier.

  ‘We bloody did it,’ Michel shouted, grinning as he picked out a wax plug that had been softened by the intense heat.

  Luc could only nod as his heart slammed under his shirt. The rumbling had become more subdued but there were still shells exploding and metal grinding as the carriages that had derailed outside the tunnel continued shedding their cargoes.

  ‘There might be survivors at the back,’ Luc said. ‘We need to—’

  Before Luc could say keep moving, the ground shifted again and he looked up, half expecting to see a tree coming down on top of him. But the sounds that played out were like the easy-listening version of what had happened a moment earlier, and they echoed from the other side of the hill.

  ‘Is that another train?’ Michel asked.

  Rather than answer, Luc started running. At first he thought he was hearing an echo, or perhaps some part of the train that had broken its coupling and rolled clean out of the tunnel, but it was soon clear that the noise was too much for that.

  He ran for several minutes, with Michel gradually falling behind. When Luc reached a broader path, he caught a reflection 30 metres further uphill. It was like two little discs of light. Shouting was a risk, but he’d rambled around this area two days earlier without seeing a soul.

  ‘Paul?’

  Luc saw the reflections again, this time pointing his way, and he was certain he was seeing the low sun hitting his binoculars. He didn’t want to lose his companion, but as soon as Michel came into sight Luc started charging uphill.

  ‘Michel?’ Daniel shouted down anxiously.

  Luc reached Paul and snatched the binoculars. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I sent your signal before Daniel spotted the train coming the other way,’ Paul explained, as he noticed that Luc’s cheek and forehead had reddened in the blast. ‘The driver slammed the brakes on when he saw the explosion, but he didn’t have time to stop completely.’

  Luc adjusted the focus and looked down into the valley. A locomotive and two passenger coaches had entered the tunnel and been annihilated by the inferno. The two carriages nearest the tunnel mouth were twisted out of recognition and scorched by the blast, but by slowing down, the driver had saved many lives in the rear four coaches. All the coaches had derailed, but remained upright after scraping along the chalkstone embankments leading towards the tunnel mouth.

  ‘I’m seeing mostly Germans down there,’ Luc said, looking at a man throwing up on the tracks while others staggered about in shock. Most seemed to be nursing minor injuries, while the more seriously hurt were being brought out of the carriages by survivors.

  When Michel arrived, Daniel gave his big brother a hug.

  ‘You did good,’ Michel said, rubbing his brother’s clammy back.

  Daniel shook his head and tried to say something, but he was overwhe
lmed and only managed to sob.

  ‘Hey,’ Michel said softly, as he scooped Daniel off his feet. ‘Don’t cry.’

  Luc lowered his binoculars and shook his head contemptuously as Michel tried to soothe his little brother.

  ‘Daniel, mate, there’s nothing you could have done,’ Paul said. ‘Think of how many soldiers those tanks could have killed.’

  ‘I know,’ Daniel said, rubbing his eye. ‘But all those poor people …’

  ‘If there’s a couple of officers and a few fit soldiers down on the tracks, the first thing they’ll do is send out search parties,’ Luc warned. ‘So let’s cut all the boo-hoos and get moving.’

  Paul scowled at Luc, but didn’t say anything.

  ‘Big baby,’ Luc sneered as he started walking. ‘I’m out of here. Stick around and let the Nazis catch you, then you’ll have something worth crying about.’

  Michel was angry at Luc’s attitude, but he was right about not sticking around.

  ‘Come on,’ Paul said, tousling Daniel’s hair as he set off after Luc. ‘You’ll be a massive hero when we get back to camp.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A fast fifteen-minute ride took PT, Jean and Edith into the country north-east of Beauvais. There were no tanks or bomb-damaged buildings out here, but the effects of the occupation were just as obvious. Over four years the Germans had forced manpower from rural areas into mines and factories, commandeered hundreds of thousands of French farm horses and diverted minerals needed to make fertiliser into explosives factories.

  The trio were lashed by branches from untended hedgerows as the bikes passed poorly-maintained fields. France was surviving on starvation rations and with the farmland continuing to decline, people feared that the next winter would bring famine.

  Jean had been caught by a piece of shrapnel in the crossfire back at the town hall. The wound wasn’t debilitating, but there was a large bloody patch across the back of his shirt and the wound would clearly benefit from stitching. PT gave Edith all the stolen documents and told her to ride on into the woods, while he accompanied Jean to a nearby boys’ orphanage.