Henderson's Boys: The Escape (26 page)

‘I’m sure he will,’ Rosie said. ‘He’s well connected.’

‘And the way you two were chattering in the back of the truck,’ Paul teased. ‘You’re such a flirt.’

‘Give over,’ Rosie tutted. ‘I was just being nice to him.’

‘If I hadn’t been there you’d have been kissing or something.’

Rosie wagged her finger in her brother’s face. ‘Don’t think you can wind me up just because you’re queasy,’ she said. ‘I’ll still smack you one.’

Suddenly there was a booming sound and the ship rose up as if it had been picked out of the water. Then, just as sharply, the invisible hand let go.

‘What was that?’ Paul gulped, as all the lights flickered.

A second bang tilted the boat forwards and this time there was an ear-splitting explosion, magnified by the metal walls and decks all around. The lights went out for good and a siren sounded in the corridor as a crackly announcement broke over the tannoy:

‘All passengers collect your life jackets and move on to the deck. I repeat, all passengers collect your life jackets and move on to the deck.’

‘Where are they?’ Rosie shouted anxiously.

Paul remembered the
Titanic
and how there hadn’t been enough safety equipment, but Rosie found the life jackets under the bed and quickly pulled the stiff yellow bib over her head. Outside, the steward was banging on the cabin doors shouting, ‘All out, all out. Everyone on deck!’

Rosie grabbed the case containing the documents and stepped into the hallway, which was suddenly crammed with passengers queuing to climb the narrow staircase up to the main deck.

‘What’s happened?’ Rosie asked desperately.

‘Air raid,’ someone shouted. ‘Didn’t you hear the planes?’

But they’d heard nothing over the grinding of the prop shaft.

‘Leave your bags,’ the steward ordered as he grabbed the case containing the documents from Rosie’s hand and threw them back inside the cabin.

‘They’re important,’ Rosie said, as the queue moved forwards towards the steps.

‘Don’t be stupid, girl,’ the steward said unsympathetically, as he barged on through the passengers.
‘People
are important.’

Life seemed increasingly cheap but Rosie knew he was right, as she looked back to make sure that Paul was still behind her.

The dive bomber had hit the
Cardiff Bay
less than five kilometres out of Bordeaux, in the broad channel that led from the port to the Atlantic Ocean. The ancient steamer was steadily tilting forwards as water poured through a hole in the bow.

As Rosie made it up the near-vertical steps and into the twilight, she looked along the deck and saw that the bow was already touching the waterline and the stern was way out of the water. The passengers stood on deck in their life jackets as the crew pulled tarps away from the lifeboats and began the clumsy process of lowering them over the side into a mercifully calm sea.

Below decks, the seawater reached the boiler room in the heart of the ship. As it rushed into the furnaces, the mass of water hit flaming coals and the result was superheated steam. Horrific screams echoed from below as men boiled alive and the extraordinary pressure ruptured one of the funnels and blew several deck hatches into the air.

Rosie grabbed Paul tight as the air filled with the tang of burning paint and hot metal. High above, a German Stuka had started a near vertical bombing run. Its bombs missed by more than twenty metres, but a series of underwater explosions threw the ship to one side. The hull levelled off, but this was a false dawn and a mass of water rebounded towards the front of the ship and dragged the bow underwater.

There was a deathly grinding noise as the front of the ship sank. Screams came from all around as people charged towards the stern, grabbing whatever they could hold on to as the angle of the deck grew steeper.

Many seemed to hope for a miracle, but Rosie was a realist and she knew they were going down.

‘We either jump now or go down with it,’ she shouted, grabbing her brother by his life jacket and straddling the handrail as adults charged past in one direction, whilst an increasing amount of debris barrelled down the deck towards them.

The hull had been more than fifteen metres out of the water when Paul and Rosie boarded, but the old steamer was plunging like a torpedo and they touched water the instant they were over the handrail.

Rosie was an excellent swimmer, but Paul’s stroke was weak and she held on to his life jacket and begged him to kick. The jackets made them buoyant, but the rapidly sinking ship created a vortex under the water that was dragging them down.

After half a minute of fighting to get away and as more desperate souls threw themselves into the water, the stern of the
Cardiff Bay
went under, leaving a great circular depression into which everyone and everything was sucked. The epicentre was less than ten metres from the Clarkes and the twisting water flipped one of the few lifeboats to have been successfully launched. A dozen passengers were trapped under the upturned hull as it was sucked down.

As a huge air bubble blew out of the depression, a powerful current gripped Rosie’s legs and pulled her deep underwater. She tried keeping hold of Paul, but it was pitch black and they broke apart when a wooden oar smashed her in the back. She reached in all directions, but he was gone.

The urge to breathe was becoming overpowering and Rosie was sure that she’d drown. While the cold water made her skin feel as if it was filled with needles, she knew she’d die if she didn’t surface quickly.

Then, as swiftly as the current had swept her under, the water around Rosie became still. No bubbles, no chunks of debris, and she felt the life jacket start to pull under her arms. The current rushed against her body as she came back to the surface and she put her ankles together and arms at her side to streamline her shape.

Her ears popped as she broke the surface and took the biggest breath of her life. But her relief was short-lived.

‘Paul,’ she screamed, as she gulped air and spun around, studying the debris and bobbing heads on the flat plane of water surrounding her. The nearest was a fit-looking fifteen year old with curls of black hair stuck to his face. He ploughed through the water towards Rosie and took it upon himself to rescue her.

‘Are you hurt?’ he asked, in French tinged by a slight American accent.

But Rosie was frantic for her brother. ‘Paul!’ she screamed. ‘Paul, where the hell are you?’

‘Calm down, save your breath,’ the American said firmly. ‘Did Paul have his life jacket on?’

‘Of course!’ Rosie said.

‘We all got sucked down. He could have surfaced a hundred metres from here. How about you? Are you OK?’

Rosie nodded as she kicked her legs gently under the water. ‘Something hit me in the back, but it’s not that bad.’

‘Name’s PT,’ the teenager said. ‘Hold on to me and we’ll be just fine. We’re probably less than a kilometre from the coast.’

Rosie glanced around and while she could hear distant cries, there seemed to be no one else nearby. Her eyes were close to the water and all she could see was the moon and a few buildings lit up along the coastline.

‘I guess the current pulled us some distance,’ Rosie said.

‘I’m a good swimmer and you don’t look bad yourself,’ PT said. ‘We can make it to shore, but the cold will do us in if we hang about.’

A tear welled in Rosie’s eye as the life-jacketed pair started swimming towards the coast. Images flashed through her mind like fireworks: Mannstein’s documents lying on the riverbed, her mother white and thin the day before she died of cancer, her father coughing blood, Hugo’s last gasp and Yvette’s smile as Paul handed her his beautiful drawing before leaving the cottage that morning.

She looked across at the young American.

‘I hope my brother’s out there somewhere,’ Rosie choked. ‘He’s all I have left.’

⁶
U-boat – a German submarine.

READ ON FOR THE FIRST CHAPTER
OF THE NEXT HENDERSON’S
BOYS BOOK,
EAGLE DAY
.

It was eleven at night, but the port of Bordeaux crackled with life. Refugee kids slumped in humid alleyways, using their mothers’ bellies for pillows. Drunken soldiers and marooned sailors scrapped, sang and peed against blacked-out streetlamps. Steamers lined up three abreast at the wharves, waiting for a coal train that showed no sign of arriving soon.

With roads clogged and no diesel for trucks, the dockside was choked with produce while people went hungry less than twenty kilometres away. Meat and veg surrendered to maggots, while recently arrived boats had nowhere to unload and ditched rotting cargo into the sea.

A man and a boy strode along the dock wall, alongside rusting bollards and oranges catching moonlight as they bobbed in the water between a pair of Indian cargo ships.

‘Will the consulate be open this late?’ Marc Kilgour asked.

Marc was twelve. He was well built, with a scruffy blond tangle down his brow and his shirt clutched over his nose to mask the sickly odour of rotting bananas. The pigskin bag over Marc’s shoulder held everything he owned.

Charles Henderson walked beside him: six feet of wiry muscle and a face that would look better after a night’s sleep and an encounter with a sharp blade. Disguised as peasants, the pair wore corduroy trousers and white shirts damp with sweat. A suitcase strained Henderson’s right arm and the metal objects inside jangled as he grabbed Marc’s collar and yanked him off course.

‘Look where you’re putting your feet!’

Marc looked back and saw that his oversized boot had been saved from a mound of human shit. With a hundred thousand refugees in town it was a common enough sight, but Marc’s stomach still recoiled. A second later he kicked the outstretched leg of a young woman with dead eyes and bandaged toes.

‘Pardon me,’ Marc said, but she didn’t even notice. The woman had drunk herself into a stupor and no one would bat an eye if she turned up dead at sunrise.

Since running away from his orphanage two weeks earlier, Marc had trained himself to block out the horrible things he saw all around: from mumbling old dears suffering heat stroke to escaped pigs lapping the blood around corpses at the roadside.

The port was under blackout, so Henderson didn’t see Marc’s sad eyes, but he sensed a shudder in the boy’s breathing and pressed a hand against his back.

‘What can we do, mate?’ Henderson asked soothingly. ‘There’s millions of them … You have to look after number one.’

Marc found comfort in Henderson’s hand, which made him think of the parents he’d never known.

‘If I get to England, what happens?’ Marc asked nervously. He wanted to add,
Can I live with you
? but choked on the words.

They turned away from the dockside, on to a street lined with warehouses. Clumps of refugees from the north sat under corrugated canopies designed to keep goods dry as they were loaded on to trucks. Despite the late hour a half-dozen boys played a rowdy game of football, using cabbages stolen from the wharves.