Marc nodded knowingly, but hoped that Henderson wouldn’t test him because he’d learned all this during his training and forgotten every word.
Henderson stopped speaking and used his fingertip to draw a childlike steam engine in the dust on the dining table. ‘Down here by the wheels is the cylinder head. Steam pressure pushes the cylinder, which in turn pushes the coupling rods that make the wheels turn round. The cylinder is made from cast iron, which is brittle. Even a small explosion will shatter it.
‘Cylinder ends never break in normal usage so nobody keeps spares and to replace it you have to dismantle half the locomotive. In peacetime, you might be able to get a new cylinder head cast and fitted within a few weeks, but with the current shortages of materials and mechanics there’s a real chance that we could put every train in that depot out of action for a long time.’
Michel and Olivier looked at each other. ‘We’re up for that,’ Olivier said.
‘I hoped you’d feel that way,’ Henderson said, with a smile.
‘This is the Gestapo, you are completely surrounded!’ Edith shouted, as she ran into the kitchen accompanied by her usual whiff of manure. Her voice was too childish to fool anyone, but she still raised a laugh.
‘How’s it looking up there?’ Henderson asked. ‘Did anybody see you?’
‘I had a wander around,’ Edith said. ‘All I could see was one little old guard. I even got inside the fence and climbed up into a train.’
‘That wasn’t what I asked you to do,’ Henderson said firmly. ‘Never take unnecessary risks.’
‘What risk?’ Edith said. ‘I could outrun that old fart any day.’
‘How many engines did you count?’
‘Eleven,’ Edith said. ‘Three of the big ones that go up and down the main line. The rest were the titchy ones that take the cargo backwards and forwards to the docks.’
‘Perfect!’ Henderson said. ‘We’ve got fifteen charges. That’s one each on the small trains. To maximise damage on the three big trains, we’ll put a charge on the cylinder end on each side, and we’ll still have one left over for luck.’
*
PT was angry at Rosie, or angry about how he’d behaved towards Rosie. He couldn’t decide which, but either way he was wound tight and couldn’t stand being in the house, with Nicolas in the next room moaning about his back and constantly shouting for someone to fetch a hot flannel, or help find his glasses.
‘You can’t take a day sick and then go into town,’ Nicolas’ long-suffering wife warned. ‘You signed a contract with OT. Do you want to end up in a labour camp in Germany?’
But PT was sixteen and didn’t let old ladies tell him what to do. He grabbed his jacket, crossed the bridge into town and went into Le Petit Prince. He recognised a few faces from the building site, but none of his gang were around, which seemed like a good thing because they reminded him of work.
He sat at the bar, ordered a beer and two large shots of vodka. The men sitting next to him were talking about Russia. One said the invasion was the end of communism and Hitler’s final masterstroke.
‘I hate old Adolf, but you can’t deny he’s a military genius,’ he said.
The guy he was talking to was a quiet sort who just kept nodding, so the loudmouth turned to PT.
‘What do you think about Russia, young fella?’
‘I think I want to drink in peace,’ PT said.
He didn’t say it in a nasty way, but the man was cocky and a little drunk. He put his hand on PT’s shoulder.
‘You want to watch your mouth,’ he said. ‘That’s why the Germans piss all over us. Their kids have discipline. Ours have smart mouths.’
As the man spouted opinions to nobody in particular, PT sneakily fed his hand inside the man’s jacket and pulled out his wallet. Unnecessary risks like this were contrary to his espionage training, but turning such an easy haul down was like asking a hungry baby to turn down its mother’s tit.
‘Would you think more of the younger generation if it bought you a drink?’ PT asked.
The man laughed warmly as PT put money on the bar, not realising it was his own. As the barman got more beers, PT stripped out all the banknotes before dropping the wallet back in the loudmouth’s jacket.
‘What a decent young fellow,’ the man said, as he held up his glass. ‘Thank you.’
‘No, thank you,’ PT said, smirking slightly. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I just saw a good friend of mine.’
He gulped the beer and dropped the empty glass on the bar. Two shots and two beers in ten minutes made him pretty drunk as he walked across the floor towards the bottom of the staircase. He paid the man three francs for a room, headed up and gave a sleazy smile to the little honey he’d caught Joel eying up the night before.
‘You’re what I need,’ PT said, groping the girl’s bum as she led him down a dingy hallway. ‘Girlfriends are too complicated.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Edith had done her job and headed home, while Troy walked back to Kerneval. The others – Henderson, Marc, Michel and Olivier – played cards until it was dark enough to head out. The yard was perfect territory for a raid: the sidings were surrounded by woodland on three sides and there was only a single-track gravel road.
In peacetime the adjoining goods yard would have been hectic as wagons shunted up from the docks were pushed together to make cargo trains up to half a mile long. But no civilian cargo had been unloaded at Lorient in a year and some tracks in the loading area were already disappearing under weeds.
Henderson dished out balaclavas and scanned the moonlit dockyard through a small pair of binoculars. He pointed out the guard’s shed and looked at Michel.
‘Can’t have the guard finding the explosives, or taking a walk and getting himself blown up,’ Henderson said, as he pulled a bottle of K tablets out of his jacket. ‘Edith said he was a little fellow, so a couple of these should knock him out for a few hours. Do you want to give that a go?’
Michel and Olivier smiled, proud and scared at the same time. Marc now understood why Henderson had invited them along. Young men like these had many reasons to hate the Germans. Their fathers and older brothers had been imprisoned or killed. The Germans told them what jobs to do and when they could leave their homes. They kept food and fuel on tight ration, and most galling of all, money and smart uniforms made German soldiers magnets for the prettiest French girls.
‘For sure,’ Olivier said. ‘What’s the best way?’
‘Take a guess,’ Henderson said. ‘If we’re going to beat the Germans, you have to start thinking for yourself.’
‘We could scout around the hut, peer through the window,’ Michel said. ‘Once we know he’s in there, we burst in and grab him.’
Olivier nodded keenly. ‘Maybe we should cut off the phone line, in case he calls out?’
Marc stifled a smile as Henderson spoke. ‘You could do that,’ he said. ‘But the guard has no reason to be suspicious yet. Why not make him come to you?’
‘How do we do that?’ Michel asked.
‘I’d suggest going up to the hut and knocking on the door. When he opens up, you point the gun at him. Or if he doesn’t open it, you know he’s not in there.’
‘Right,’ Olivier said. ‘I guess that is simpler.’
Michel shook his head. ‘We’re no good at this,’ he confessed.
‘Espionage is ninety per cent common sense and ten per cent luck,’ Henderson said warmly. ‘A bit of experience is all you boys need.’
Michel and Olivier were eating up the praise.
‘Pull your masks down and take this. It’s loaded and ready to shoot. And don’t call anyone by name.’
Michel pocketed the gun and led the way towards the guard’s wooden hut. Marc moved to follow them, but Henderson pulled him back.
‘Let them do it,’ he said, then began a slow walk out of the trees.
Olivier knocked and the guard moaned as he opened the door.
‘There’s no work o
ut here,’ the guard said. He was a rotund little man in an oily French railways uniform.
‘Inside, sit down,’ Olivier ordered, as his older cousin aimed the gun at the guard’s head.
The guard clutched his chest, like he was having a heart attack.
‘We’re not here to hurt you,’ Michel said, as the shuddering guard backed up into a well-padded armchair. ‘You need to swallow these pills. You’ll wake up in the woods in a couple of hours.’
‘There’s nothing here to steal, boys,’ the guard said nervously. ‘If you want a couple of buckets of coal, go and grab it.’
Michel shoved the gun right up to the guard’s head. ‘Take the pills or take a bullet. Decide right now.’
The guard looked across at a hip flask. ‘Can I take something to swallow them with?’
He put the two pills on his tongue and crunched them up a little before chasing them down with a shot of whatever was in his little flask. By this time Henderson stood in the doorway.
‘Takes about three minutes before he gets woozy,’ Henderson said. ‘We want him well away from here, so walk him into the woods and make sure he is laid out somewhere comfortable.’
Marc stayed back on the edge of the woods, keeping lookout with Henderson’s binoculars, while occasionally scratching the rash that had come up on his stomach. The little man weighed less than a net full of fish, so Michel and Olivier had no problems carrying him into the woods and laying him out with his back up against a tree.
Henderson spoke to Marc. ‘You stay as lookout, OK? I want these boys to enjoy themselves.’
Marc understood why Henderson was letting the new boys do all the exciting stuff, but he was used to being Henderson’s favourite and felt jealous as he led the pair through the gate into the train depot.
Henderson surveyed the layout of the yard. The engines were spread over six sidings stretching back two hundred metres. He picked a large engine parked halfway down the second nearest siding as a starting point.
‘I’ll put one time pencil on this train,’ Henderson said, as he showed the boys where to position the explosive. ‘And a reserve with a time pencil a couple of sidings over. Always put the timed explosive at a central point, with your sympathetic fuses radiating out. Now check your watches.’
‘We haven’t got watches,’ Olivier said.
Henderson smiled. ‘Well, that’s something we’ll have to sort out. To activate the time pencil, you snap it like so, then you push it back into the explosive. In theory that explosive won’t go off for an hour, but it’s not an exact science. For safety, always aim to be well out of the blast zone in half the pencil time. So in our case that’s thirty minutes for a sixty-minute pencil.’
Michel and Olivier smiled eagerly as Henderson gave each of them a drawstring bag containing five sticky explosive cakes.
‘Move quickly but quietly,’ Henderson said. ‘Keep your ears open for a shout from Marc or any other noise. If something happens and we get split up, go back to the safe house. But if you wait more than half an hour and I don’t arrive, head for home. Is all that clear?’
‘Completely, sir,’ Olivier nodded.
Henderson laughed. ‘You don’t need to call me sir. Now let’s get on with it.’
*
‘Here,’ PT said, throwing over an extra five-franc note as he grabbed his trousers off the floor.
The girl stood by a grotty sink in her stockings, shamelessly washing between her legs with a flannel before squirting herself all over with perfume. Her body was beautiful, but it was the least sexy, and possibly saddest, sight PT had ever seen.
‘So what time do you get off?’ PT asked.
‘After your bedtime,’ she said, as she grabbed her bra and the five francs in a single sweep. ‘I don’t want a boyfriend.’
PT noticed scratches down her back and fingertip-shaped bruises where men had groped her breasts. He’d come here expecting relief, but now felt disgusted with himself. How many labourers, scaffolders and dock workers had had sex in this room? What made a beautiful young girl so desperate that she had to lie on a bed and let men screw her for money?
PT wanted the girl to know that he was better than all the others, but how could he do that? Besides, it was probably standard to go in full of lust and come out feeling ashamed and hoping that you hadn’t caught something nasty.
The girl kicked his boots across the floor. ‘I’ll get yelled at if you hang around any longer,’ she said as she clicked her fingers. ‘Snap out of the daydream, eh?’
PT looked back as he headed out of the room towards the balcony. Sex had sobered him up a little and he wondered what to do. Stay here and drink? Go to another bar? Go home and sulk? Try and find where Rosie was staying and tell her he was sorry? Or maybe just get a big knife and slash his wrists.
He saw Gilles’s head above the crowd along with a couple of his other workmates. They would have had a tough day with one man down and might not be happy to see him cavorting, so he moved downstairs quickly, hiding his face.
‘Get your money’s worth from Mona?’ the man at the bottom asked cheerfully.
‘Great,’ PT said, raising a false smile before cutting outside into what was now moonlight.
He tried to cheer himself up as he started the walk home. He made a plan: he’d apologise to Rosie and try persuading Henderson to help him find a less physical job. Maybe he could complain about a bad back or something. Though he had to be careful with that little game because people who signed OT contracts and didn’t pull their weight had a habit of getting sent to chemical plants in deepest Bavaria.
‘Coincidence or what?’ a man shouted. ‘How you doing, mate?’
PT turned, expecting someone he’d met in a bar or someone from the bunker site, but it was red beard’s hired muscle from the night before and this time he’d decided to spice matters up with a dirty great bread knife. It was clearly no coincidence and PT realised that if he’d been thinking with his brain instead of his dick he would have given Le Petit Prince a wide berth for at least a week.
But here he was, with a saw-edged blade catching moonlight as it lunged towards PT’s chest.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Marc watched the three figures jog across the gravel. Michel and Olivier grinned like kids who’d posted dog crap through an old lady’s letterbox.
‘All good?’ Marc asked.
‘So far,’ Henderson nodded. ‘We should have at least half an hour until the blast, but I don’t trust time pencils so let’s not hang about.’
They hurried through the trees, halting briefly to check that the guard was still unconscious. At the farmhouse they dropped off weapons, balaclavas and binoculars before washing the Vaseline off their hands. Henderson found four mugs and poured a shot of whisky in each.
‘Quick shot to calm your nerves, boys. Cheers!’
Only Henderson enjoyed the taste, but they all liked the drinking ritual and the sense of accomplishing something together.
‘Remember what I’ve told you about security,’ Henderson warned. ‘When that guard wakes up he’ll mention two boys, so walk home separately. One of you set off now, one of you give it a few minutes. If you can think up slightly different routes that’s even better.
‘Be proud of what you’ve done, but don’t mention it. Not even to your uncle or grandfather. And especially not when you’ve had a few beers and you’re trying to impress some girl, or one of the other lads at the harbour.’
‘Can we do something like this again?’ Olivier asked.
‘Let’s see if the explosives go off on this one first,’ Henderson said. ‘But there should be other chances. Now, which one of you is going to leave first?’
*
PT dodged the main thrust at his stomach, but somehow the bread knife snagged him between the knuckles.
‘Slippery bastard,’ the man roared.
PT yelped from the pain as he stumbled sideways into a man who had no idea what had just happened. They were on Lorient’s
main drag, with a crowd outside a café less than twenty metres away.
‘Look where you’re going,’ he said, giving PT an angry two-handed shove back towards his attacker. This time the blade whistled across PT’s chest, opening up his shirt and making a twenty-centimetre gash across his belly.
Most passers-by kept walking in the dark, but a few noticed the fight and people in the café stood up to get a look. With two knife wounds PT’s plan was to run as fast as he could but as he turned away in a disorientated state his foot landed awkwardly, half in the road and half on a raised pavement. His ankle twisted painfully and he fell down hard, banging his hip on the cobbles.
As PT rolled on to his back one of the passers-by grabbed the big man’s arm.
‘He’s a kid, you’ll kill him.’
‘That’s the plan,’ the big man roared, shrugging his anchor off with his elbow before charging back towards PT.
The crowd was growing. Someone tried to give PT a hand up, but he didn’t think he could stand on his twisted ankle and shoved it away. As the big man lunged, PT kicked explosively with both legs, hitting his opponent so hard that he lifted clean off the ground.
PT’s ankle was excruciating and the hand over his stomach glistened with blood, but he still felt satisfied as the big man doubled up and crashed to on his knees, badly winded. Onlookers gasped as a two-man German patrol ran towards the scene.
The smaller of the two soldiers got there first. ‘Put the knife down.’
It was risky to stand around now that Germans were involved. Onlookers moved off as PT finally accepted the friendly hand and found himself propped against an unlit lamppost, feeling faint.