Henderson's Boys: Eagle Day

by Robert Muchamore

  The Royal Navy had operated a fleet from Dunkirk in the run-up to the war and had sent Henderson detailed instructions. By opening the gates of a huge dry dock too quickly, the resulting wall of water will destroy the small boats sitting at the bottom. An engineer who’d worked in the docks even provided sketches of the control room, which had been dropped the previous Saturday along with Bernard and the plastic explosives.

  While PT headed into a wooden shed to pull some hydraulic levers that opened two huge inlet channels built around the side of the dock gates, Eugene leaned against the truck, using binoculars to study the patrol-boat base less than a hundred metres away.

  The Germans had used a mixture of netting, trawlers and fishing equipment spread over decks to disguise these precious high-speed boats from British reconnaissance planes, but from ground level the disguise was feeble.

  While barge conversion work shut down at night because the artificial light needed to continue would make it an easy target for bombing, the German patrol fleet operated twenty-four hours a day.

  More than twenty patrol boats lay beneath grey tarps that looked like bare concrete from two thousand metres up, but three fast launches were moored abreast at the dockside. Diesel plumes rose from their funnels, while a fourth was being refuelled at a pier. On the dockside, crew members in navy uniform hopped between boats, while others stood around looking bored and smoking.

  Inside the control room by the dock gates, PT was alarmed by the crash of water as it rushed into the dry basin. He’d been told that the dock walls and heavy gates would make the sound virtually inaudible from the naval base a hundred metres away, but he was far from convinced as he pressed a coin-sized lump of plastic explosive against the base of the control levers and inserted a ten-minute acid fuse.

  This would only produce a tiny explosion, but with luck it would wreck the control levers and make life difficult for any German engineers who tried to stop the deluge.

  Eugene was back inside the truck with the engine running by the time PT ran out. ‘Why’s it so noisy?’ Eugene asked anxiously. ‘The patrol crews don’t seem to have noticed yet, but they’re gonna.’

  ‘I just did what I was told,’ PT said defensively. ‘I say screw going over the bridge with the main bomb, let’s reverse back from here and hope the bombers finish the patrol boats.’

  But Eugene looked determined and put the truck into first gear rather than reverse. ‘We came this far,’ he said. ‘I’m not backing out now.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  20:28 The Farm

  The sun had all but disappeared and the yard in front of the cottage was black. The old truck needed a hand crank to get going and Henderson yelled after Rosie as the engine spluttered to life.

  ‘Come on, sweetheart. It’s a good job it’s less than two kilometres to the harbour. We’re running on fumes. I should have topped up in town this morning, but I had about a thousand other things on my mind.’

  Rosie had milked the cows for the last time, now she threw food into the chicken pens and felt a little sad as Lottie the goat followed her across the grass, expecting a handful of scraps.

  ‘Out,’ Rosie said firmly, as the goat chased her into the kitchen. But they wouldn’t be back. Rosie remembered that there were some vegetables in the rack so, for the first time, the goat didn’t find herself shoved out of the kitchen doorway on to the lawn.

  As Lottie buried her face in carrots, Rosie grabbed a basket piled high with sandwiches and a metal jug filled with fresh milk.

  ‘Sorry about the hold-up,’ Rosie gasped, as she sat next to Henderson inside the truck with the basket on her lap. ‘I wanted to make sure the animals would be all right until the labourers get here in the morning.’

  She set the jug on the floor and squeezed it tight between her ankles.

  ‘All set? Nothing forgotten?’ Henderson asked.

  ‘We’ve still got a while,’ Rosie said. ‘If it was important we could walk back in no time.’

  Henderson pulled away and drove off the farm for the second time that day.

  ‘Do you think I made enough sandwiches?’ Rosie asked. ‘We had eggs left over, so I hard boiled some to eat on the boat and left the rest for the prisoners.’

  Henderson laughed as he turned on the road. ‘I think you could feed half of Paris with that lot.’

  20:31 Boulogne

  Marc felt good as he stepped out of the Mercedes. After six hours waiting it was a relief to get underway. He looked around for any sign of Germans before throwing the canvas bag over his shoulder and starting to jog towards the fuel tanks.

  His pulse quickened when he realised that the heavily insulated car had disguised the sound of approaching aircraft. And it wasn’t a rogue German fighter, it sounded like the armada of bombers was running ahead of schedule.

  ‘You hear them?’ Khinde asked, startling Marc as he bobbed up behind a diesel tank.

  ‘We’ve got to shift,’ Marc said. ‘We’re gonna be in the middle of a shit storm if we’re still standing here in five minutes’ time.’

  He took the bag off his shoulder and passed out six butter-pat-sized blocks of plastic explosive. ‘Two on each tank, pull the pins out of the detonators and we’ll have two minutes until they blow.’

  As Khinde and Rufus stuck the sticky lumps of plastic explosive to the tanks, Marc began running the two hundred metres back to the Mercedes. The two grown men were faster and Marc was several metres behind as he got into the driver’s seat and started the engine.

  More than sixty bombers roared overhead, and an air-raid siren started up as Marc squeezed the accelerator pedal. Rufus and Khinde couldn’t drive, so Maxine had given him a crash course behind the wheel of her Jaguar, but the Mercedes felt huge in comparison and even with Schroder’s leather coat folded up under his bum Marc could barely see over the wheel as he approached the gate.

  The guard was supposed to stop everyone coming in or out, but after thousands of kilometres’ driving with Schroder, Marc knew that big Mercedes driven by German officers were rarely troubled.

  As the wooden gate rose in front of them, Marc jammed the brake as he realised he was going way too fast for the sharp turn on to the road. He made eye contact and got a strange look when the guard saw how young he was, but before he could react the first of the three diesel tanks exploded and the German dived for cover.

  ‘That one’s for Houari!’ Khinde shouted, thumping ecstatically on the padded roof as the big car accelerated away from the port.

  A thirty-metre tower of flame seared up into the darkness, but the real spectacle took a few seconds longer. The exploding fuel had tossed two dozen phosphorous bombs across the heart of the docks. They burned with an intense blue light that lit up the entire dockyard, as white-hot fragments began burning through the tin roof of the neighbouring coal-yard.

  20:33 Calais

  Paul stood over the rusting bed. He popped the last square of Belgian chocolate in his mouth, then double checked that he had the key for the bike lock in his pocket before igniting the three-minute length of detonator cord curled inside the lid of the suitcase.

  ‘Watch it!’ a man shouted, as Paul burst out of the room and raced past him on the stairs.

  ‘There’s planes coming,’ Paul shouted back. ‘Get outta here.’

  But the man thought he was just some crazy kid and by the time Paul hit the street he felt guilty. He’d left two dozen sticks of gelignite and twenty phosphorous bombs in the hotel room, which would create a blast double the size of the one that ripped apart the army headquarters.

  The man would die, as would the nice woman who worked on reception and pretty much everyone else unlucky enough to be inside the hotel or one of the buildings on either side.

  Paul’s bike was a horrible contraption which Henderson had bought in a junk shop. It had solid tyres and a frame that had buckled and been knocked back into shape. Despite this it had attracted the attention of a couple of local kids.

  It was the
last thing Paul needed. They sized him up as he approached breathlessly.

  ‘You’ve got no right,’ the bigger of the two kids stated. ‘This is our territory. You gotta pay tax to park your bike here.’

  Paul’s heart was thumping. The bomb would go off in under a minute and the bike was his only way back to the farm. Even the larger of the kids was probably two years younger than Paul, but he was only a few centimetres shorter and he looked strong.

  ‘I’ll get my dad on to you,’ Paul shouted, as he pointed back at the hotel.

  Both kids smiled. ‘Go get him then, skinny.’

  ‘Can’t fight your own battles,’ the younger one added. ‘What a wimp!’

  Paul realised he’d made a useless threat: the kids weren’t scared because they’d disappear down an alleyway as soon as any adult showed up.

  Although Paul had mostly recovered from his cold he still had muck on his chest, and running down the stairs had set some of it free. He took a deep breath and coughed a huge string of phlegm into his mouth. The warm blob felt disgusting, but as he was about to spit into the kerb he realised that other people would find it even more gross and flobbed it into the palm of his hand.

  ‘I’m gonna rub this in your hair,’ Paul warned, sweeping his snotty hand from side to side.

  ‘Germs!’ the little kid shouted, as both lads backed away enough for Paul to bend down and get his key in the bike lock.

  Paul flicked the snot off his hand as he straddled the bike and started pedalling up the narrow lane. He just made it around the corner into the next street as the bomb went off. The huge blast shook the ground and ripped the handlebars out of his hand.

  He tried to straighten up, but he looked up and saw that he was heading into the path of an oncoming car.

  20:33 Dunkirk

  Naval Leutnant Baure was seventeen years old and had spent the last three hours doing repairs inside the baking hot engineroom of a torpedo boat. The vessel had sprung a leak out at sea. A bank of six cylinders had seized up and the Kapitan was threatening to discipline Baure because he’d performed the final maintenance check before leaving port and had apparently failed to notice a critical drop in oil pressure.

  The charge could ruin a career that had barely even started and Baure felt angry and miserable as he sauntered behind the wharfside building inside which numerous officers were doubtless cursing his name.

  He squatted down on a bollard and pulled a cigarette from a metal case. As he flipped the lid off his lighter he saw a truck coming over a bridge out the corner of his eye. He noted to himself that he’d never seen trucks moving in the docks after dark, but shrugged, thinking it was no concern of his.

  As Baure took his first puff he noticed that there was an unusually strong current in the canal alongside him. Then the truck stopped at the top of a mild slope which led down to the wharfside building behind him and he started to get curious as two men got out and dragged a motorbike out of the back.

  ‘Guys!’ Baure shouted, as he ran around the front of the building. But his name was mud after the engine failure and he only attracted contempt from his crewmates. ‘I think something’s going on by the bridge.’

  ‘What have you ballsed up now, tit head?’ someone asked.

  ‘Truck came over the bridge and stopped dead,’ Baure explained urgently. ‘Two guys pulled a motorbike out of the back. I don’t know what’s going on but I don’t like it.’

  The men didn’t know what to make of this, but within five seconds another man jumped ashore nearby and made an announcement. ‘Water’s running into the dry dock. Someone’s opened the gate.’

  It didn’t take a genius to put the two bits of information together and realise that the docks were being sabotaged. A stocky officer shot to his feet and started shouting orders.

  ‘You, you, you – inside. Grab some weapons. Get up there and see what’s going on. Move!’

  Less than a hundred metres away, Eugene leaned on the motorbike and gave it a kick start. PT pulled off the handbrake inside the truck and jumped out of the cab.

  ‘Three minutes,’ PT shouted, as Eugene threw him a crash helmet. ‘Let’s roll this thing.’

  As the motorbike engine throbbed, PT and Eugene lined up behind the tailgate of the truck and put their backs in. The slope was gentle, but with the handbrake off the truck soon began rolling down the wharf, just as they noticed torch-beams and German voices, followed by figures running out the back of the building towards them.

  ‘Shit!’ Eugene yelled as he straddled the motorbike. ‘Get on, get on!’

  Two gunshots sounded as PT climbed aboard and locked his arms around Eugene’s waist. More shots rang as the motorbike blasted across the bridge, then swerved left and right to run along the side of the dry dock.

  The holes in the dock gates were now fully open and the torrent of water had sent the small boats crashing against the sides of the dock like rubber ducks clattering around a bathtub. The navy officers were on foot and had no chance of catching the motorbike, but a bullet clipped the truck as it continued rolling towards the patrol boats.

  The instant the bullet hit the gelignite an area fifty metres around the truck erupted into a vast fireball, vaporising several dozen naval officers and the wharfside building as men further back dived into the water beneath the flames.

  The explosions in Calais and Boulogne were beacons, designed to start fires and light the way for incoming bombers. The three hundred sticks of gelignite spread over the floor of the truck help British pilots to find their target, but their primary aim was to destroy as many German patrol boats as possible.would

  ‘Jesus,’ PT screamed. ‘Where’d our two minutes go?’

  Even from two hundred and fifty metres the heat from the fireball seared PT’s back as he watched curling flames reflected in the back of Eugene’s crash helmet.

  But fire was the least of their problems. The early blast had sent a huge shockwave through the canal system. A wave more than three metres high seared over the wall of the dry dock. When it landed two small barges washed up over the end of the dock as the boats inside smashed deafeningly against the walls.

  PT looked back a second before water spewed up over the side of the dock and hit the bike. No rider could have kept upright as the force of water lifted the wheels off the ground and sent the two teenagers skimming helplessly towards a metal-sided hut.

  PT covered his face as his back slammed the metal. A huge wooden mast speared through the building less than twenty centimetres above his head.

  ‘Eugene,’ he shouted, using the impaled mast to lever himself up as the water drained back into the dock.

  Eugene had almost been flushed back inside the dock and had ended up clutching one of the giant bollards, perilously close to the edge. PT ran towards him, fearing he’d been knocked out, but Eugene was only winded and was standing by the time a smaller, reflex wave washed over their ankles.

  ‘You OK?’ Eugene asked, as he pulled off his sodden crash helmet.

  ‘Fine.’ PT nodded, looking back for any sign of someone coming after them. ‘But the bike’s wrecked. How the hell are we gonna get back to the farm?’

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  20:42 The Harbour

  Henderson parked the truck fifty metres from the pier that formed one side of the small harbour, then set off along the dusky coast road with Rosie.

  ‘Remind me what Manfried told you,’ Henderson said, as explosions and flashes of light pulsed over Calais directly behind them.

  ‘Three guards,’ Rosie said. ‘Two in the hut, one on patrol, but he said sometimes they all play cards inside because it’s so quiet. The shift change is at eleven and they eat what they bring with them. Nobody comes to deliver food or anything.’

  ‘Works for me.’ Henderson nodded as he paused behind a white boulder, opened the cartridge of his silenced pistol and replaced the four bullets he’d shot at the stables in Calais earlier on.

  ‘He’s a decent guy,’ Rosie said, as Hend
erson started walking again. ‘Manfried, I mean.’

  ‘He’ll die fast, before he even knows it,’ Henderson grunted.

  ‘Isn’t there another way?’ Rosie asked. ‘Couldn’t we tie them up or something?’

  ‘A plan’s a plan once it’s underway.’

  Rosie hated the calculating way that Henderson plotted death.

  ‘Manfried’s only about eighteen and he seemed really nice,’ Rosie said desperately, but only succeeded in irritating Henderson.

  ‘This is a war, honey,’ he said patronisingly. ‘I have one silenced pistol, there’s three of them and they have machine guns. What do you think this Manfried was doing during the battle for France? You think none of those soldiers shot any Frenchmen, or burned any villages?’

  Rosie didn’t like the answer, but supposed Henderson was right. They stopped behind a low ridge overlooking the harbour. A chink of light escaping the guard hut illuminated a pair of crude fishing rods that the guards had hooked on the pier.

  ‘Two tugs,’ Rosie noted, as she pointed across the harbour.

  ‘Tugs are ideal,’ Henderson whispered. ‘Designed for towing, so they’re nippy when there’s nothing tied behind them. Crossing to England should take around three hours. It’d be more like six or seven in a powered barge or canal boat.’

  ‘Great,’ Rosie said, though Henderson could tell she was still thinking about Manfried as he pulled a .38 revolver out of his jacket.

  ‘You don’t have to do this, Rosie, but I’m taking on three men and I’d feel a lot better with someone covering my back.’

  Rosie looked solemn as she took the unsilenced revolver. What if she ended up having to kill Manfried?

  ‘It’s double action, no safety lock,’ Henderson warned. ‘It’ll fire cocked or uncocked, but the trigger pull is very light when it’s cocked.’