CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Rosie and Henderson were largely hidden by the crew bunker’s entrance building, Joel was exposed but he kept low and was so muddy that you’d have to look damned hard to spot him, but Luc and Antoine were up on the roof with the illuminated scaffold lighting them up.
A shout went up and Luc saw three Kriegsmarine guards charging out of a command post by the main gates a couple of hundred metres away. But the first shot came from the other direction, hitting the roof and spraying up concrete shrapnel. The next gunshot ended with a whoosh of air from Antoine’s lungs and a squelching sound like a boot being swallowed by deep mud.
Luc was aware of a mist of blood on his face. The three guards were charging in from one side and there was a shooter up in the scaffold behind. One of the guards went down, though Luc had no idea if he’d been shot by Joel at one end or Henderson at the other.
Luc had an impossible choice, but marginally preferred his chances of going back the way he’d come, rather than risk running straight into the two surviving guards, who’d now taken cover behind a tin shed.
‘Let’s move,’ Luc said, but his mind was racing and it was only now that he put the mist of blood and the squelch together and grasped that Antoine had been shot.
The black commando gear made it difficult to see blood, but there was a spike of bone sticking out of Antoine’s leg. Luc grabbed him by the arm and gave him a push. As another bullet slammed the concrete less than a metre away, Antoine rolled helplessly down the roof into the broad gutter where the roof met the mud.
There was a loud bang as the explosive Joel had left in the junction box went off and the site plunged back into darkness. Another shot came, spattering the mud some distance away as Luc crouched over Antoine.
‘It’s agony,’ Antoine said, with pleading eyes. ‘Get Henderson.’
‘Of course it’s agony, you’ve been shot,’ Luc said coldly, as he glanced back over his shoulder, acutely aware that Henderson would set off the first explosion within seconds.
Luc reached inside Antoine’s jacket and removed the pin from one of his grenades. Then another, then another. They had ten-second fuses and Antoine realised what he’d done.
‘Bastard,’ he shouted.
‘They’ll kill you anyway,’ Luc said, as he turned to run. ‘See you in hell.’
Luc sprinted about eight paces then dived blindly off the edge of the steep, muddy embankment. He wasn’t sure whether Antoine or the entrance building exploded first, but the oven blast of hot air toasted his bum, vented up his back and propelled him with enough force to double his normal jumping range.
He landed in the mud with such force that he made a huge bow wave and ploughed on for more than three metres, hitting his shoulder on something hard somewhere along the way. As he caught his head, the sky above was bright orange. Chunks of rubble fell like rain, and the six storeys of scaffolding around the inland bunker flexed dramatically, sending boards, tools and men over the edge.
*
Henderson knew a good deal about explosives. The quantity they’d carried into the base was less than one third the amount contained in a single RAF bomb, but positioning and tactics made it more effective than a whole planeload.
The first explosion comprised four eighteen-kilogram blocks in the crew bunker’s entrance. Each was positioned close to a load-bearing wall and this had caused the entire structure to collapse in on itself, and more importantly on to the bunker’s main entrance.
The twenty-four two-kilogram charges spread through the ventilation system were set off by the shock wave from the first explosion. The U-boat crews panicked as these blasts sent jets of flame and hot gas out of the vents into every room across the bunker’s entire length. The force also knocked down or ignited the lightweight wooden partitions between rooms.
Less than a dozen men were killed by these explosions, but those that survived found themselves trapped. Most went for the main exit and wasted precious seconds trying to force it open. When they gave up, these men found themselves at the wrong end of a sixty-metre-long corridor, with choking smoke and men crawling along the floors trying not to breathe.
About twenty men made it out of the back of the bunker and into the tunnel. The men who came after that were crawling and panicking and soon there was a massive jam around the narrow doorway. Joel heard screams and coughs as the first few staggered out of the end of the tunnel and into the mud. He counted seconds in his head, eighteen, nineteen, twenty.
On twenty he wound a small lever to charge the handheld detonator, lifted a safety flap and pressed the red button. More than thirty small charges erupted inside the tunnel, blowing the men inside to pieces, bringing down the tunnel’s roof and sealing the last remaining exit, with more than two hundred men choking to death inside.
A few seconds after this explosion, the sympathetic fuse in the football-sized slab went off, spouting a thirty-metre geyser of mud and engulfing the dozen or so men who’d made it out of the tunnel alive.
The sky was an orange fog as Joel heard desperate screams and German curses. He was already caked in mud, but the next layer that pelted him from above was hot. Not enough to burn, but hot like a bath when you need to run a drop more cold.
It fizzed and steamed as it slapped the ground and took the air out of Joel’s lungs. He felt sick, as he began to run and the heat and smoke sapped his strength. They’d come here to kill five U-boat crews and it seemed they’d killed five U-boat crews, but the reality of the shouts and coughs was haunting and he wondered how many men he’d killed when he’d pressed that little red button.
Joel was staggering toward a pair of Germans. He was ready with his machine gun, but they didn’t see his commando gear or his backpack, just a young man staggering out of a mud bath.
‘Are you OK, boy?’ one asked. ‘Did you see what happened?’
‘I …’ Joel gasped in German. ‘I don’t know. I just ran.’
He clearly wasn’t hurt, so the Germans carried on. The lights were still out and the smoke made it difficult to see more than a few metres.
Joel had lost all sense of time, his boots were slipping in the mud and he started getting paranoid that he was walking in the wrong direction. But within a couple of minutes he’d reached concrete and he saw the moonlit railway sidings up ahead.
Antoine’s Spanish friend had promised to leave a railway handcart out in the sidings. This simple device comprised a small flat-bed railway truck with a two-sided pivot lever. Pushing down on the lever made the cart move. Rosie and Henderson bobbed up behind it as Joel got close.
‘Enough mud for you?’ Rosie asked, as Joel staggered towards her like some kind of swamp creature. But she saw that he looked upset and changed her tone. ‘Is everything OK?’
‘It all worked,’ Joel said. ‘But it was brutal down there, watching them escape and then pushing the button to blow them up.’
Henderson put a hand on his shoulder. ‘When you stop feeling it you’re not human any more,’ he said. ‘Did you see Antoine or Luc?’
‘I saw them under fire when the lights came on,’ Joel replied. ‘They went sliding down the roof, but I never saw anything after the bunker went up.’
Henderson spoke after his three hundredth glance at his watch. ‘We’re four minutes behind. The Germans will get the lights back up any minute, and their wits about them pretty soon after.’
‘Shouldn’t we wait a few more minutes?’ Rosie asked.
Henderson shook his head. ‘If Luc and Antoine are alive, they can still get away by running along the tracks. If they don’t catch up in time to reach our boat, they can go to the safe house, but it’s too dangerous to stick around here.’
*
Luc was on his feet by the time the third explosion went off, but the shock wave blew a wall of warm mud towards him, knocking him sideways until he slammed into an embankment. His nose and throat were clogged and he coughed for several seconds. He grasped blindly inside his pack, found his cantee
n and swished the choking combination of mud and smoke out of his mouth with water
When he peeled himself out he’d left an indentation, like a gingerbread man cut from a pastry sheet. He realised that he must have spent a minute or so in a daze because his head was thumping, he didn’t remember seeing some of the lights come back on and several Kriegsmarine police were lined up on the undamaged roof of the crew bunker.
Luc tried to ignore the pounding in his skull and think straight. With men up on the roof he didn’t fancy his chances of walking the full length of the bunker and then crossing three hundred metres of open ground to reach the railway sidings.
Then he remembered that he had a watch. It was 10.16, and that was the final nail in that idea. If Henderson hadn’t left already, he definitely would have done by the time he reached the sidings. He considered going back the way they’d come along the tunnel beneath the inland bunker, but the entrance was close to the blown crew bunker tunnel and there were dozens of Germans around there searching the mud for signs of life.
So Luc’s only chance of escape was over the partially collapsed scaffold around the inland bunker. Luc was terrified as he crept through the mud, aware that one of the men on the roof only had to glance down and he’d be killed, or captured. Several boards from the scaffold had toppled into the mud and one that rested against the embankment made his life easier.
He was now at ground level, with scaffold less than five metres away. The scaffold here looked OK, but the blast had shifted each level by more than a metre, and at the top several upright poles had buckled, leaving the entire structure close to collapse.
Luc was strong, and even with the weight of weapons, backpack and ten kilos of mud he reached up and clambered effortlessly on to the first level. All but one board had been knocked down by the explosion and he held on to a pole with his hand and walked heel to toe. He was now at the corner where the scaffold along the rear of the building joined the scaffold down the side leading to the dock.
Down below, a French engineer was shining a torch beam across the face of the building, while loudly expressing his opinion that the whole scaffold would have to be torn down. Luc deduced that he’d feel safer if he climbed up another level. He reached up to grab a pole above his head, used an angled pole as a step and pulled himself up on to the next layer of boards.
He repeated this until he was four storeys up. There was a childlike thrill to being up high and the clear air helped his head. He wished he’d had a lump of plastic and a fifteen-minute time pencil, because it would have been great to bring the scaffold down into the hole and kill even more Germans.
Most boards along the side were intact and Luc moved easily towards the dockside. At one point he passed a vent and peered down on hundreds of workmen in a gloomy U-boat pen, smoking and talking excitedly about what had happened.
When Luc reached the front of the bunker he crouched down, planning his next step. He chose to drop down and run fifty metres to the spot on the dockside where they’d landed less than an hour earlier. There was a chance the boat would still be bobbing somewhere along the dockside, but more likely they’d have discovered the dead Germans in the coal yard and the whole place would be infested with soldiers.
The only certainty was that it wouldn’t be easy and he’d almost certainly need to kill someone, so Luc pulled a dry cloth out of his backpack and made the best job he could of cleaning the mud out of his machine gun and pistol.
When he was reasonably satisfied, he walked to the edge of the boards and began climbing down. As he was about to drop from the second level a huge searchlight swung around and blinded him.
Someone shouted and he heard German boots running up the alleyway towards him as a shot ricocheted off the wall. He had no idea where it came from, but he was hemmed in and needed to escape before reinforcements arrived.
He ripped a grenade off his shoulder belt, pulled the pin, then lobbed it into the alleyway towards the advancing Germans. After swinging out over the edge of the scaffold he slid down a pole to the ground, fireman style. As his mud-caked boots touched down the grenade exploded, instantly killing one German and blowing the other one back more than ten metres, minus several fairly important body parts.
After a sprint, Luc glanced out on to the dockside and was surprised to find nobody nearby, but his relief didn’t last. The coal yard on the opposite side of the docks was ablaze with light, and the searchlight that had picked him out in the scaffold soon traced him to the ground.
Bullets pinged across from the opposite side of the dock, as well as from some unseen position behind him. It would only be a matter of seconds before he got shot so he started a run, took a huge breath and launched himself over the dockside into the moonlit water.
The water was salty and contaminated with effluent flushed out from one of the U-boat pens. His eyes burned as the weight of the pack dragged him down. He kept sinking until he’d fought himself free of the pack. But he was still heavy and he abandoned his machine gun as he kicked up powerfully.
Random bullets punched the water as he gulped two huge breaths and dived down, trying to swim as far and as fast as he could underwater. After another dash he surfaced under the floating pontoon on the western side of the dock. His proximity to the high dock wall made it impossible for the Germans on this side to pick him out with their searchlight or shoot at him, but they’d spot him soon enough if he didn’t find somewhere to go.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Henderson worked the handle on one side of the handcart, while Joel and Rosie shared the other. It was a job getting it moving, but once they were underway it was exhilarating and exhausting, bobbing up and down with the wind in their hair and the wheels clattering on the iron rails.
The railway lines that led from the docks to the freight yard where they’d attacked the trains a few weeks earlier were only guarded by occasional foot patrols. They left the Lorient navy base unhindered and clattered on through the centre of town, passing the crummy warehouses and tenement blocks that backed on to the railway line.
They were keen to put distance between themselves and the navy base, but the lines were designed for slow-moving cargo trains and the handcart almost threw Henderson off as they juddered over an uneven join between two rails.
After this shock they kept the speed down to running pace, which also had the advantage of being quieter. There were bridges across the railway lines in central Lorient, but as they reached the outskirts they faced several ungated level crossings.
It was after curfew, so the only people on the streets were Germans and workers with special passes. As they approached one crossing they heard, but couldn’t see, a speeding motorbike. Henderson had previously tried the brake lever when they’d picked up momentum on a slope, but it was simply a wooden lever with a brake shoe at the end that rubbed against the wheels. It caused a great deal of noise and sparks, but had little effect in terms of altering the cart’s speed.
There was a collective gasp as the German motorbike blasted its horn and slammed on brakes. Joel and Rosie saw terror in the rider’s eyes as he swerved around the back of the cart, missing it by less than a metre. He came off the bike, tumbling across the opposite track, and hit a tangle of bushes with enough force to uproot them.
The next and final crossing was less distressing. The track beyond it ran alongside the Lorient’s northernmost entry point. This checkpoint had been beefed up following the raid, and they sped up as they passed within five metres of heavily armed guards and a roadblock comprising four parked Kübelwagens and a sign saying All Checkpoints Closed.
The trio pumped the handcar another few hundred metres.
‘I reckon that’s enough,’ Henderson said, as he let the handle go.
They’d intended to cruise to a stop about a kilometre beyond the edge of the city, but there was a train stalled on the opposite track half a kilometre ahead. It had been kept from completing its journey because of the raid, and while it was hard to see in the d
ark, it looked enough like one of the heavily guarded trains that brought men and equipment from Germany for Henderson to yank the brake and pull with all his strength.
The lever shuddered violently, shaking his whole body and sending a sharp driving pain up both arms. As they slowed to jogging pace they were passing a level patch covered with gravel and weeds. Joel jumped off first and landed with a squelch from his muddy clothes, Rosie stifled a yell as her elbow hit a rock, while Henderson landed hard and needed a hand up because his arms were numb after fighting the brake.
As the cart trundled on, they scrambled up an embankment and emerged on to a stretch of country road. Henderson recognised it from the night when they’d blown up the trains.
‘We’re roughly three kilometres from the cliff at Lamor Plage,’ he said. ‘Be ready to shoot first and ask questions later: we’ve got no papers and the Krauts are on high alert.’
*
Luc was a powerful swimmer. The searchlights swept across the water as he swam out of the dock. After a brief tangle with a torpedo net, he squatted on a muddy embankment and prepared himself for a long swim across the river mouth.
Water and driftwood lapped against his legs as he stripped down. He’d ditched his machine gun, backpack and grenades already, now he removed his thick outer jacket and dumped the spare ammunition from his pockets. He knew he’d swim better without his heavy boots, but didn’t fancy the idea of walking barefoot on the other side.
After pulling the boots off, he tied them together by the laces and knotted them around his waist. Besides his boots, trousers and T-shirt the only equipment he had left was his hunting-knife, watch, silenced pistol and compass.
‘Did you hear that?’ a German asked, as he peered over the end of the dock.
By the time he’d looked down, Luc had slid off the embankment and plunged underwater.
Lorient and the Keroman dock were on a peninsula with rivers feeding into the ocean on either side. Luc now had to swim five hundred metres to reach the opposite shore. The distance would be no problem for him in a pool, but the water was bitterly cold and the tide pushed him downstream.
Henderson's Boys: Grey Wolves Page 27