Henderson's Boys: Eagle Day (26 page)

‘Sorry Marc’s late,’ Henderson said. ‘This old truck isn’t so swift.’

Unless it was raining Kuefer and Henderson always exchanged a few words in German. Henderson wanted to make sure that no last-minute alteration would ruin Marc’s schedule.

‘Boulogne today?’ Henderson asked.

‘Meeting here in Calais first, then down to Boulogne,’ Kuefer confirmed. ‘If ever you’re down that way you have to eat at Gérard’s, the food is
magnificent
.’

Kuefer blew a kiss to emphasise his point as Marc climbed into the car. The German hadn’t met the other boys before. Henderson introduced Paul as his younger son and PT as his nephew and the two lads politely shook Kuefer’s hand.

Marc stared at the back of Schroder’s head as the Mercedes drove out of the cobbled square, uncomfortable with the thought that if everything went to plan the two Germans only had a few hours to live.

*

Henderson acted like a model employee and never missed an opportunity to please Oberst Ohlsen. He’d set a regular schedule each morning, spending ten or fifteen minutes flirting with the female admin staff and picking up the latest gossip. Then he’d go to the wireless room and collect any radio messages or telegrams that had arrived overnight, which meant that he often knew what was going on in Berlin before the Oberst himself.

When Ohlsen and his assistant arrived shortly after seven o’clock, Henderson would be waiting with fresh coffee, German newspapers and the urgent messages. Unless Ohlsen was exceptionally busy, Henderson would be invited to stay for coffee and the Oberst’s general mood and off the cuff remarks often contained as much valuable intelligence as the official communications.

On this particular Monday, Henderson also sprinkled a vial of toxic crystals into the sugar bowl. He wasn’t sure what it contained, only that it had been specially prepared by a London chemist and carried over by the dead parachutist.

‘How was your day off?’ Ohlsen asked cheerfully as he came into the office ahead of his assistant.

‘Any day off is a good one,’ Henderson replied, as he took the Germans’ coats and hooked them up outside. When he got back, Ohlsen’s assistant was pouring coffee into the three cups.

‘You don’t take sugar, do you Boyle?’ he asked.

‘Four spoons for me,’ Ohlsen said, as Henderson shook his head.

Marc yawned as the Mercedes pulled up across the street from Gérard’s fish restaurant.

‘You don’t look so good, Marc,’ Kuefer noted.

‘Tired,’ Marc said, as he looked behind for traffic before opening the car door out into the road.

‘Things should calm down in a week or two when we run out of barges to convert,’ Kuefer said. ‘I can go back to designing gun turrets instead of converting rotten canal barges, and I’ve heard that the administration will be reopening schools once the harvest is in.’

‘And I’ll not have to drive up and down these damned coast roads,’ Schroder added. ‘I’ll probably have the pleasure of fighting my way through the English countryside instead.’

Marc looked across the street and saw that Gérard’s was already filling up with its usual lunchtime crowd of German officers and wealthy French. It rankled Marc that in all the time he’d worked with Kuefer he’d never once been invited inside.

‘If you see Louis at the dockyard, tell him I’ll be arriving at around two-thirty.’

‘Right,’ Marc said, as he started to walk.

Gérard’s ma”tre d’ stepped out beneath the grubby cloth canopy over the doorway. ‘Good to see you, Kommodore Kuefer. Your garden table is ready.’

Once his boss was out of sight Marc quickened his pace. If he was hungry he’d usually go straight to the dockyard to beat the queue of labourers to a hot lunch, but the dockyard stew only took a few minutes to eat so Marc had often used his boss’s leisurely lunch breaks to explore, and he’d come to know Boulogne well.

After turning off the street, Marc broke into a run. Like all the ports in the Pas-de-Calais, Boulogne had a heavy German presence, but he was known as Kuefer’s translator and nobody ever bothered him. After skimming past a pair of miserable looking soldiers he sprinted down an alleyway between two rows of houses, ducking beneath strands of washing and getting yelled at when he crashed into an old man hidden behind yellowed bed sheets.

At the end of the alleyway, he ran past filthy wire cages crammed with ducks, then jumped over a fence into the overgrown garden of a bombed-out house. There were two mature oaks and a tall hedgerow between himself and a convoy of German trucks blurring past on the main route east.

As instructed Maxine had left a canvas bag between the trees. Marc crouched down and unbuckled it to check what was inside: phosphorous bombs, plastic explosive, detonators, fuse cord, piano wire and two pistols. He noticed a sheet of pink paper jutting from the front pocket and smiled when he read it:

I saved you the last piece! Good Luck. M.

Marc pulled a soggy block of bread pudding out of the pocket. Maxine cooked a mixture of French and English dishes and bread pudding had become his favourite. He checked the pocket watch Henderson had given him and made sure he had time before tucking in greedily.

The last mouthfuls were tinged with sadness. Would he ever see Maxine or taste her bread pudding again?

When there was nothing left he licked the sugar off the greaseproof paper and realised that Maxine was the closest thing he’d ever had to a mother. Rather than throw her pink note away, he folded the paper three times and tucked it deep into his trouser pocket.

Marc struggled with the heavy bag and took a different alleyway back towards the docks. Rather than risk being searched on his way into the secure perimeter around the docks, he stopped by Kuefer’s Mercedes, unlocked the trunk and buried the bag deep inside beneath rolled-up plans, umbrellas and leather coats.

The roads around the dockyards were sealed off by gates and sentry boxes, but the German on the gate was used to Marc coming and going and barely glanced at his paperwork.

‘Where’s your boss?’ the guard asked miserably.

‘Stuffing his face at Gérard’s,’ Marc said. Although his German still wasn’t fluent, it had improved hugely over the weeks he’d spent working as Kuefer’s translator.

‘Officers,’ the guard said, making the word sound like a curse and giving an gesture as Marc ducked under the gate.
up yours

‘Tell me about it,’ Marc smiled.

The port had two large rectangular harbours which were separated by a natural peninsula. The sun was high and as he walked along the waterfront more than two hundred barges bobbed on the twinkling water, tied ten to fifteen abreast at each mooring.

They varied from huge coal barges more than a hundred metres long and now converted to carry tanks, down to narrow boats made for the still waters of the Dutch canal system. All had been given a thin coat of grey paint and had numbers stencilled on the side of their hulls.

At the far side where the harbour broke on to the open sea, Marc noticed that there were fewer barges than there had been the previous Thursday. This confirmed intelligence picked up by Henderson that the Germans were beginning to spread the barges across beaches in preparation for the invasion in exactly one week’s time.

Behind the twin harbours lay a broad canal that was a kilometre long and lined with the small boatyards where the conversion work was still progressing. The prisoners took lunch in two shifts and Marc sidled up to two African men. They formed part of a larger group of dark-skinned prisoners who’d finished eating and were throwing dice against the upturned hull of a fishing boat that hadn’t touched water in a decade.

‘Khinde, Rufus,’ Marc said, as he pulled a length of wire out of his trouser pocket and raised one eyebrow teasingly. ‘You all set?’

Khinde was a fearsome looking man who always worked bare-chested. Rufus was a Moroccan. Pale skinned, slender, and whose accent had more in common with a wealthy Frenchman than a North African.

‘You got the equipment, Peaches?’ Rufus asked, as he and Khinde backed away from the boat and the dice game. Marc’s nickname came from the tins of fruit he brought them.

‘It’ll come in the boot of the Mercedes,’ Marc explained. ‘Did you hear your message on the BBC?’

Marc had been friendly with Khinde and Rufus since the day the Germans murdered Houari, but tins of peaches weren’t enough to convince them that a twelve-year-old boy offered a genuine chance of escape, so Henderson had arranged for the BBC to transmit a message in the list of announcements that were made after the evening news.

‘It’s not easy getting your ear to a radio in the prison camp,’ Rufus smiled. ‘But we managed:
Peaches sends best wishes to the friends of Houari
.’

‘So you believe me now?’ Marc asked.

‘We believe,’ Rufus said, as he pulled Marc into a heartfelt embrace.

Khinde spoke loudly. ‘These Germans call us apes. They won’t ever let a black man go. So better to die trying to escape, eh?’

A couple of the other African prisoners overheard. Rufus moved further back and gave Khinde a withering stare.

‘Peaches
said
it was a small boat,’ Rufus growled. ‘We can’t help the others.’

‘We could take more men,’ Khinde said. ‘Let them escape, let them find another boat.’

‘If there’s no escape plan they’ll be massacred,’ Rufus said. ‘The French hate us as much as the Germans. How far do you think they’ll get?’

‘The other men look up to you,’ Khinde said. ‘You’re a leader.’

Marc knew he had to act, but he wasn’t comfortable ordering grown men around. ‘I need to know,’ Marc said resolutely. ‘You help me with the plan
exactly
like we discussed and you’ll have a good chance to escape. Otherwise I’ll walk away and you can slave for the Nazis until they either shoot or starve you. Decide
now
.’

Marc started walking towards the draftsmen’s huts and was hugely relieved when the two Africans started to follow.

‘I like Peaches when he’s angry,’ Rufus smiled, and Khinde laughed noisily.

Marc stopped at one of the wooden picnic benches where the French supervisors ate lunch. ‘Kuefer wants a couple of men,’ he explained. ‘I’m taking these two.’

The supervisor looked baffled as he scraped a dirty hand through his hair. ‘Why the hell does Kuefer want labourers?’

Marc shrugged. ‘Ask him yourself. You think he discusses every detail with me?’

‘Are you sure you want blacks?’ the foreman asked. ‘Or does he want someone who’ll actually do some work?’

The other foremen all laughed and Marc pretended to be irritated. ‘If you want to argue with Kuefer I’ll send ’em back, but he’s in a shit mood today, so I wouldn’t recommend it.’

The foreman waved his hand towards the offices and smiled. ‘And who am I to argue with the orders of our mighty occupiers?’

‘Dickhead,’ Marc mumbled to himself as he led Khinde and Rufus between two recently built huts where the drawings were made for the barge modifications. Beyond this was a storage yard stacked with dozens of empty tar drums.

‘Take one each,’ Marc said.

At the far side of the yard was a fire-damaged warehouse that had served as the draftsmen’s office until the construction of the weatherproof huts.

‘Go in there and keep quiet,’ Marc said, as he passed Rufus and Khinde strands of piano wire. ‘You’ve got to be ready as soon as they come through the door.’

Henderson spent most of the morning translating at a planning meeting between a German major and French railway bosses. The railway officials had mastered the art of appearing to cooperate while subtly raising objections and declaring that virtually everything the occupiers asked for was impossible.

He’d struggled not to laugh aloud when one railway controller abruptly told the Germans that the best way to bring fuel and other supplies required for the invasion would be to release the thousands of French railway engineers who were being held in prisoner-of-war camps and then wait six months while repairs were completed, or better still to have not bombed so many French railway lines and bridges in the first place.

When the railway meeting was over, Henderson walked across the square and headed up to Oberst Ohlsen’s office with a bunch of papers tucked under his arm. He feigned surprise when one of the Oberst’s French admin assistants stepped in front of him.

‘They both looked green,’ she explained. ‘The Oberleutnant walked out, but Oberst Ohlsen ended up in an ambulance and the noises that were coming out of his bathroom … He may be a Boche, but I must admit I felt sorry for him.’

‘What a shame,’ Henderson said as he stepped towards the Oberst’s office.

‘It’s locked,’ the assistant said. ‘The military police said it could have been a poisoning attempt by French rebels. Major Ghunsonn gave orders that the door was to be locked and nobody allowed to go anywhere near the office.’

‘Damn,’ Henderson said. ‘I have these papers and they need to be signed and sealed today.’

The papers were junk, but the curse was well founded. Henderson needed to get inside Ohlsen’s office. The crystals were supposed to give Ohlsen stomach cramps bad enough to make him go back to his quarters and rest, but it seemed the reaction had been too violent and now Major Ghunsonn suspected foul play.

‘Oh well,’ Henderson sighed. ‘It’ll have to wait, I suppose.’

He backed down a wood-panelled hallway and stepped into the executive dining room at the top of the main staircase. He was ready with an apology if there’d been a meeting inside, but all he found was a cleaner dusting the model ships.

‘Afternoon,’ Henderson said politely, but the miserable old girl didn’t bother to respond.

After cutting through the old kitchen, Henderson leaned into the hallway, unsure whether Major Ghunsonn had left a guard on the door of the Oberst’s office. Mercifully, the only step taken was to lock the door and slide the Oberleutnant’s desk in front of it.

Henderson paused for a moment, calculating the risks: if he was caught he’d be tortured and shot, but the main plan to create the beacons wouldn’t be affected and his whole team had fall-back escape and liaison plans. If he pulled this off, he could be on the other side of the English Channel before anyone found that a British spy had stolen the three dossiers containing every detail of the invasion plan.