As he swam, he could hear the engines of patrol boats, and caught the odd glimpse of searchlight beams, but his bobbing head was a tiny object in a huge bay and his real battle was with himself.
After ten minutes he was halfway across and felt fine, but at two-thirds distance he hit the pain barrier. Every kick strained his thighs and the shoulder he’d injured earlier was screaming for mercy. The pain was so bad that he was tempted to scream for help or ball up and let his body sink.
Somehow he made it to the far embankment, but he found himself several metres below a flood defence wall. As he swam along the wall searching for a way up he started going cross-eyed and sensed that he was close to blacking out.
The wash from a fast-moving patrol boat slammed him against the wall and when he came to he was underwater with no strength in his arms or legs. It almost didn’t seem worth making the effort to surface, but when he broke back into the moonlight and took a huge yawning breath he saw a set of stone steps reflecting the moonlight.
Half convinced that his mind was playing tricks, Luc swam the hardest ten metres of his life and only believed they were real when he’d propped himself on to the first stone step. His heart pounded at more than two hundred beats per minute and he gulped air as he shivered, and clutched his sides fighting a stitch.
When he’d caught some breath he moved shakily up a couple more steps, clearing the lapping water. He untied the boots around his waist and tipped out the water before pulling them back over his feet. Whatever had been in the water around the dock was making his skin itch like crazy and his eyes were on fire as he staggered up the steps.
He kept low as he reached the landing at the top and peered out on to a tatty wooden promenade spattered with gull droppings. At the limit of his blurred vision a German pill-box was built above the wall.
The Germans were short of manpower and the chances of it being occupied were only about one in three, but he still kept low as he raced across the promenade, vaulted a wall and collapsed in a shuddering heap.
It was after curfew so being outdoors was suspicious and being outdoors in soggy British commando gear doubly so. As he crept up the alleyway and peered out he recognised the outline of a plain little church. He didn’t know the place well, but he was less than a kilometre from Kerneval and he’d been here three weeks earlier, stashing some of the equipment that Madeline II delivered in the home of a friendly blacksmith.
He thought about visiting the blacksmith, but he couldn’t remember the exact street. He checked his watch and saw that it was twenty to eleven. The extraction point was less than two kilometres from here. He’d make it if he moved quickly and didn’t encounter any Germans, but with the patrols likely to be on high alert and his body weakened after the swim it would be a close thing.
*
All the beaches were well defended, so Henderson had chosen a cliff for their extraction point. He arrived with fifteen minutes to spare and located a marine signalling lamp and some supplies that Olivier and Michel had hidden under bushes that afternoon.
They all drank copious amounts of water from a canteen and Joel washed the worst of the mud from his hands and face.
‘There’s a German pill-box fifty metres that way, and another eighty-five metres that way,’ Henderson whispered. ‘So keep your heads down and your guns ready.’
At three minutes to eleven, Henderson moved up to the cliff’s edge. He flashed the signalling light for an instant as Rosie looked down fifteen metres of sheer cliff face into a choppy sea.
‘How do we know it’s deep enough?’ she asked nervously.
‘Trust me,’ Henderson said. ‘Put your hands on your shoulders, jump two-footed. You’ll be fine.’
Henderson flashed the light again, and this time he got a little flash back, from an open motorboat about a hundred metres from the cliff.
‘Get the life jackets out of the bush,’ Henderson said. ‘Fetch mine over, and tell Joel to start strapping his on. Best if you lose some of the heavier clothes too.’
As Rosie turned around, she bumped into Joel coming the other way.
He sounded anxious. ‘Someone’s riding a bike up the path.’
‘OK,’ Henderson said, as he processed the new information. ‘I’ve got to stay here with the signal light. Put your life vests on so that you’re ready to jump if needs be, then take flanking positions covering my back and be ready to shoot if you don’t see a signal. Use your silenced weapons if you possibly can.’
Rosie crawled rapidly through the long cliff top grass behind Joel with her machine gun and pistol ready. Joel pulled on a life jacket, and threw one across to Henderson.
Henderson looked down and saw a double flash from the small motorboat at the base of the cliff.
‘They’re in position,’ he said. ‘Time to go.’
Joel’s eyes were fixed on the meandering path. The cycle was a women’s model with a basket on the front and it wavered as if it was being pedalled by an OAP. He aimed the gun sight at the rider’s chest.
‘I think it’s Luc,’ Rosie said.
Moments later a hand came off the handlebar and punched the air three times.
‘It’s Luc,’ Rosie told Henderson.
‘Alone?’
‘No sign of Antoine,’ she confirmed.
Joel ran twenty metres downhill to meet Luc as he clambered off the bike. He was pouring sweat and he could hardly stand up straight.
‘You look beat,’ Joel said.
‘I’m completely buggered,’ Luc said, as Joel took his arm to help him stay upright. ‘I’ve already thrown up twice.’
‘Where’s Antoine?’
‘Dead,’ Luc said.
Joel grabbed the water and handed it to Luc as Rosie helped him into a life jacket.
‘We’re ready to jump,’ Henderson said, as he gave three flashes to the boat below.
‘Luc’s exhausted,’ Rosie said.
Henderson threw the signalling lamp aside and stood up to inspect Luc. He put a hand on the boy’s forehead.
‘You’re close to passing out,’ Henderson said, as he saw Luc’s eyes drifting out of focus. ‘We’ll jump together, holding hands, OK?’
‘Right,’ Luc agreed.
Rosie thought she saw something move in the long grass about thirty metres away. As she backed up from the bushes for a better look she saw a German helmet bob up above the tall grass.
‘Duck,’ she shouted.
They all hit the ground as a rifle-shot cracked the air above their heads. Joel rolled over and started blasting through the bushes with his Sten gun, as two more soldiers revealed themselves. The shots were wild, but they were enough to send the Germans diving for cover.
‘Rosie, Joel, jump now,’ Henderson ordered.
Henderson covered them with his pistol as they crawled to the cliff edge. They had to stand to jump, but the threat of being shot in the back meant that they didn’t fanny around on the edge worrying about the drop.
As Rosie and Joel hit the water, Henderson spotted one of the Germans making a charge. He shot with the pistol, knocking the man down, but at the same time a shot came at Henderson from the opposite direction. The plan had been to jump individually so that the crew inside the small motor launch could focus on picking one person at a time from the water, but there was now more chance of getting shot on the cliff top than of drowning in the sea.
Henderson quickly lobbed a couple of grenades in opposite directions, then grabbed Luc’s hand.
‘Ready?’
A bullet whizzed overhead as they stood up and ran for the cliff’s edge.
The first grenade exploded as their feet left the ground. Luc gripped Henderson’s hand so tightly that it hurt as the water came towards them. They speared the sea feet first, as a half-metre wave knocked them back towards the cliff.
Henderson felt his boot touch the bottom. As he surfaced he grasped at a life preserver attached to a rope. Two tough New Zealanders hauled the rope in and within moments they were
alongside the open motor launch.
‘Take him first, he’s weak,’ Henderson shouted.
As the sailors took care of Luc, Joel and Rosie grabbed Henderson’s life jacket and helped him aboard.
‘Is that everyone, Captain?’ one of the New Zealanders asked, as Henderson lay gasping in the bottom of the boat. ‘Can we head back to HMS Gulliver?’
‘Better get a move on before the Germans find my lantern and spot us in the water,’ Henderson said.
As the small launch turned towards the British torpedo boat anchored a few hundred metres off shore, Rosie knelt over Henderson with a look of concern.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked.
‘Got winded when I hit the water is all,’ Henderson said as he managed a slight smile. ‘That and the fact that I’m getting far too bloody old for this nonsense.’
EPILOGUE
Two weeks later
The mission control building on CHERUB campus was a prefabricated Nissen hut and new enough that you could still smell wood glue and paint when you walked in. The main internal feature was a bulky radio set, which would enable direct communication with agents in the field, instead of relying on MI6 for reception and decoding as had happened up to now.
But there were currently no agents in the field, so seventeen-year-old radio operator Joyce Slater was spending most of her time working on indecipherables: transmissions where the decoded signal made no sense. She was part of a highly skilled group of girls – radio operators were all girls – with a talent for unscrambling them.
Joyce usually received five or six each morning in the secure post, and regarded it as a good day if she managed to solve half of them. Today’s envelope had arrived half an hour earlier. Her first step was always to eliminate the hopeless cases. These were usually ones where the message source was a long way away, which meant it was completely garbled, or ones where the notes indicated that an able colleague had already been given a chance to solve it.
As well as the usual typed messages and accompanying notes on the codes used by the operators, today’s messages came with a handwritten note from the head of the MI6 radio section:
Dear Joyce,
Caroline had a go at this first one overnight, but I thought you might do better as you and Lavender were pals.
Lavender is on sked at two p.m. today, so please let me know if you crack it so that she avoids a tiresome and risky repeat transmission.
GLT
Joyce smiled at the thought of Lavender sending an indecipherable message. They’d trained together and Lavender had always scraped through her examinations by one or two marks.
‘Right, let’s see what we’ve got,’ Joyce told herself as she grabbed a clean sheet of squared paper and pulled her wheelchair up to her desk.
Almost immediately, Joyce realised that Lavender had missed the first line of the poem she’d used to encode the message. But Caroline had also worked that out and still got nowhere. Joyce tried a few other tricks such as guessing some of the words and looking for repeated phrases or patterns, but the whole thing was utterly garbled.
Joyce was close to giving up when she remembered that Lavender had an eccentric habit of sometimes writing left to right when she encoded her messages, and sometimes top to bottom. What if she’d encoded top to bottom and transmitted left to right?
This didn’t work, but what if she’d encoded left to right and transmitted top to bottom.
‘Eu-bloody-reka!’ Joyce squealed, as the words started to make sense.
The first part of the message was routine information from the Lorient resistance circuit: movements of U-boats, requests for supplies and a report that Hitler had personally ordered the hanging of the German security chief at the Lorient base after the raid. But the final part of the message made Joyce excited:
Madame Mercier has received a brief letter from Marc. His location was cut out by a censor, but he appears to be in a German labour camp awaiting a work assignment. He says he is as well as can be expected and not to worry about him.
Joyce had never met Marc, but she’d attended his memorial service and the mood on campus had been subdued ever since. She decided to tell Captain Henderson immediately.
There was a telephone within reach, but unfortunately they were still on the waiting list for an army engineer to hook it up. Joyce spun her wheelchair around and pushed herself energetically towards the door at the far end of the hut.
Beyond this door was a fairly steep ramp and she got a thrill as she wheeled down it at speed, turned in a broad arc and pushed on across the concrete playground towards the main building. Her progress was halted by the single step at the main door, but she saw someone through the frosted glass inside and yelled.
‘Excuse me.’
Unfortunately it was Luc. He came to the door in his PE kit, looking strong and healthy with sweat running down his face.
‘What can I do for you, legless?’ he said, grinning nastily, before adopting a squeaky voice. ‘Oh the little cripple girl can’t get up the step. How saaaaad.’
‘Let me in now, you brainless moron,’ Joyce shouted.
‘Not if you’re going to swear at me,’ Luc said, pretending to be outraged.
‘Learn manners, you scum!’ Instructor Takada shouted, as he came out of the school hall behind Luc. He’d been demonstrating the use of a baton to some of the younger kids and gave Luc a brutal whack across the back of the knees, knocking him to the floor. ‘Sometimes I wonder if you’re even human.’
As Luc rolled around the floor howling, Mr Takada helped Joyce up the step and knocked on Henderson’s door. As Joyce rolled in, she saw Henderson sitting at his desk looking like it was the last place on earth he wanted to be.
‘I’ve cracked an indecipherable, sir,’ Joyce said proudly as she handed over the paper. ‘And I think you’re going to like what it says.’
READ ON FOR AN EXCLUSIVE FIRST CHAPTER OF THE NEXT HENDERSON’S BOYS BOOK, THE PRISONER.
CHAPTER ONE
Frankfurt, Germany, May 1942
The sky was the colour of slate as Marc Kilgour crossed a damp gangplank on to the Oper. The old steamer had spent three decades taking passengers along the River Main before fire crippled her. After years sulking at dockside, layered with rust and soot, war had brought her second life as a prison hulk.
Oper was bedded in a remote wharf east of Frankfurt’s centre and only floated off her muddy berth on the highest tides. All windows above deck had been boarded and the passenger seating ripped out and replaced with stacks of narrow bunks.
Marc had lived aboard for eight months; enough time that the fourteen-year-old barely noticed the stench of bodies and cigarettes, as he walked down a gangway between bunks that was barely wider than his shoulders. Almost all the other men were out at work, leaving behind sweat-soaked straw mattresses and graffiti etched into pine bed slats.
A man groaned for attention as Marc passed. To get off work you had to be seriously ill and while Marc didn’t know him, he’d heard how the big Pole had crushed his hand while coupling freight wagons, then picked up a nasty infection that was working up his arm.
The words came in a half-delirious strain of Polish. The man wanted water, or maybe a cigarette, but he was crazed with pain and Marc upped his pace, wary of getting involved.
The timber stairs that led below Oper’s main deck still bore the scars of fire. Charcoal black rungs creaked underfoot as Marc’s hands slid down a shrivelled stair rail. The stench below deck was denser because the air got less chance to move.
All three light bulbs in the passageway had burned out. Marc felt his way, counting eight steps, passing a foul-smelling toilet, then stepping through a narrow door. A mouse scuttled as he entered the wedge-shaped room. Mice were no bother, but the rabbit-sized water rats Marc occasionally encountered freaked him out.
Marc had no watch, but guessed he had an hour before his five roommates returned from twelve-hour shifts in the dockyard. He groped in the dark, finding the Y-
shaped twig they used to prop open their oblong porthole.
Fresh air was a privilege – not many cabins below deck had them. The light revealed two racks of three bunks against opposing walls, with a metre of floor space between them. Upturned crates made chairs and a wooden tea chest served as a table.
One of Marc’s predecessors had fixed up a shelf, but everyone kept their mess tins and any other possessions tucked under straw mattresses: theft was rampant and it was riskier feeling around a bunk than stealing from an open shelf.
Marc dug into his trouser pockets, pulled out two small, rough-skinned apples and let them rest on the table. He’d swiped them from the Reich Labour Administration (RLA) office earlier. He was easily hungry enough to eat them, but the six cabin mates always shared food.
They were a decent bunch who looked out for each other. Sometimes Marc would score fruit, bread, or even cake left over after a meeting in the admin offices. His cabin mates who worked in the dockyard or train depot occasionally got their mitts into cargos of food.
The mouse resurfaced, scuttling along a bed frame and out the door as Marc climbed on to his bunk. It was on the third tier of four. With half a metre to the next bunk, it was impossible to sit up.
After sweeping some dead bugs off his blanket, Marc unlaced his wrecked boots. His feet had grown and his only pair of socks was stained dark red where his heels and toes rubbed raw. But the itching under Marc’s shirt bothered him more than his bloody feet.
The straw mattress rustled as he unbuttoned his shirt. Marc was naturally stocky, but prisoner rations had been poor – particularly during the cold months between December and February – and he’d lost all the fat over his rib cage. He scratched at a couple of new flea bites as he aligned his hairy armpit with the light coming through the porthole.
Henderson’s Boys 4: Grey Wolves Page 28