A lightning bolt lit up the whitewashed wall behind them.
‘Static electricity will play havoc with our signal,’ Boo said.
Boo and Rosie halved the shortened message, and sat at a table with pencils and squared paper converting it into code. This was done using a specially prepared book of Dutch poems. On each day, they’d pick a different poem based upon a prearranged schedule. The first line of today’s poem was:
Myn Ideeën zyn de times van myn ziel.
And the first line of the message was:
Sailing four subs Thur next week. Atlantic.
To convert the message into code, they added the numeric values of the letters together, or took them away, depending on which day of the week it was. Monday was a subtraction day.
M from myn was the 13th letter of the alphabet, S from sailing was the 19th letter of the alphabet. So Rosie had to calculate 13 minus 19 to give –6. She would then have to transmit the 6th letter from the end of the alphabet, which is U.
This calculation was repeated for every letter in the message and would have to be reversed at the receiving end to decode what they were saying. The only way for the Germans to decipher this message would be if they got hold of the poetry book.
‘Paul,’ Boo said, as she glanced up from her squared paper. ‘Turn the radio on to warm up, then unroll the aerial and head uphill to your lookout position.’
Paul looked pretty miserable at the prospect as Rosie stuck her tongue out. ‘You’re gonna get soaked, baby face.’
‘Oh get stuffed,’ Paul moaned, as he headed out the front door.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Boo and Rosie could transmit Morse code at around thirty words per minute. Their message was less than two hundred words, but the actual transmission took much longer than the six minutes this raw speed implied.
To avoid detection, their suitcase-sized radio could only transmit a weak signal. Even in ideal conditions, Rosie or Boo would be delayed by three-letter Q code instructions sent by their receiving station in England. QTC was a request to confirm the number of letters sent. QRS meant slow down the speed of transmission. Worst of all was QSM, which was a request to repeat the last section of the message.
The thunderstorm caused interference with the radio signal and Rosie had to send some chunks of the message seven or eight times before hearing confirmation of safe receipt in her earpiece.
Paul was utterly miserable, hunched on a hillside a couple of hundred metres from the cottage. He was under a tree, but the breeze was whipping up the rain so it gave him little protection. He had his arms folded and it felt like such a long time that he was half convinced the girls were playing a joke on him.
Then he spotted a car.
One of the reasons they’d rented this cottage was its location at the end of a long gravel track that nobody else had any business using. Paul grabbed a small pair of binoculars from his coat pocket and wiped beads of rain off the lenses before taking a look.
There was no doubt it was trouble. The car moved fast and a fellow leaned out of the front passenger-side window aiming a long direction-finding aerial.
‘Rosie,’ Paul screamed, the binoculars swinging from his neck as he broke into a sprint.
The route downhill was precarious, with loose rocks and prickly bushes, but he kept focused on the house as water spattered his trouser legs.
‘We’ve get to out,’ he shouted, as he heard car tyres splash through a puddle less than fifty metres from the front of the cottage. There was a second car and a motorbike behind and he looked over his shoulder half expecting to find Gestapo officers stalking in the bushes.
As Paul reached the cottage’s back door, Boo burst out and almost knocked him flying. She didn’t need Paul to explain because she’d heard the motorbike and the squealing brakes on the other side of the house.
Rosie was still hunched over the Morse key as she heard Boo shout. As she stood up, she transmitted QXX, to indicate an emergency, while her other hand freed a grenade taped into the lid of the leather radio case.
As two Gestapo officers got out of the car, Rosie pulled the pin and lobbed the grenade underarm through the open window above the kitchen sink. She then grabbed papers and the poetry book off the table and ran barefoot towards the back door, as the motorbike rolled around the side of the house and stopped in the back yard.
Paul and Boo dived into bushes behind the house as the grenade exploded around the front, taking out every window and blowing a Gestapo officer out of his boots as he was about to shoulder-charge the front door.
‘Get moving,’ Boo shouted to Rosie, as Paul turned over a heavy stone and pulled up a metal box buried in the sodden earth.
Rosie took one step towards the bushes, but the German motorcyclist was less than ten metres away. He’d recovered from the shock of the grenade blast and was pulling a pistol from its holster. There was no way she’d make it into the bushes before he fired so she dived back into the house.
Paul opened the metal box, took out an automatic pistol and loaded the ammunition clip while Boo grabbed a net with six grenades inside.
‘Where are you going?’ Boo shouted, as Paul swung back towards the house.
‘My sister’s in there,’ Paul said.
‘You’ll get shot,’ Boo said.
Paul didn’t argue further because two armed Germans were running around the near side of the cottage towards them. The leading German took aim with his machine gun as Boo yanked Paul out of the firing line and broke into a run.
Inside, Rosie charged down a short hallway, reaching the kitchen in three steps. The grenade blast had pulled down a section of the front wall, making it impossible to get through the front door.
‘Halt!’ the motorbike rider shouted as he followed her inside.
He took a wild shot as Rosie spun around and started up the narrow staircase. She was dead if he fired at her from this range and she moaned with relief as she reached the top of the stairs and charged into the bedroom she shared with Boo.
She reached under her bed to grab a kitchen knife stashed there for emergencies, but in her panicked state she misjudged and knocked it back under the far side of the bed, out of reach. As the motorbike rider burst in, the only thing that came to hand was a china piss-pot.
Rosie lobbed it, more in hope than expectation. It rotated as it flew, hitting the German in the head as he took aim, then shattering against the wall. Another wild shot hit Boo’s mattress with a muffled thud as Rosie charged forwards and kicked the German in the balls. As he went down hard on his knees she grabbed the biggest shard of the chamberpot and speared his throat with the jagged end.
As the German gurgled blood, Rosie grabbed his gun and a shout came up the stairs in German. She only knew about fifty words of German that she’d learned on campus, but she put on her deepest voice and a corny German accent and took a shot. ‘Girl dead. Two ran off.’
She froze in terror as the voice shouted a long stream of words up the stairs. The only bit she understood was that someone was dead.
‘Yes, sir,’ Rosie said.
By some miracle – possibly because the grenade blast had set the soldiers’ ears ringing – Rosie’s terrible German had held them off. She crawled to the door and listened as the two sets of hobhailed boots moved outside and broke into a run.
Rosie stepped on to her bed and peered through the shattered window at two regular German soldiers and two Gestapo officers chasing across the fields behind the house. There was no sign of Boo or her brother.
She tried to work out if there were more Germans in or near the house. She’d seen a motorbike and two cars and calculated that four men in each car and one on the bike made a likely maximum of nine men. She’d killed one man, another had been blown up on the doorstep and four were chasing after Paul and Boo. So there were up to three men waiting to machine-gun her at the front or sides of the house.
The only certainties were that Rosie could see nobody in the back yard, and tha
t she’d get caught for sure if she stayed in the house. Rosie quickly grabbed the knife from under her bed and stuffed it into a canvas bag, along with her identity documents, a dress and some underwear. She slid her feet into a pair of canvas plimsolls before opening the little window, knocking away a few triangles of broken glass and swinging herself out on to the cottage roof.
She shuffled down the sloping thatch on her bum, then jolted with fright as a grenade exploded a couple of hundred metres away. It set a large tree ablaze and sent a cloud of birds into the sky. One of the Germans wildly blazed his machine gun until a Gestapo officer furiously ordered him to calm down.
The explosion and gunfire gave Rosie a good moment to jump down off the roof, clattering into wet bushes. She glanced through the back door of the cottage and to her annoyance saw that there were no Germans inside, meaning she could have walked down the stairs.
Almost a minute had passed since she’d last heard a German, but she still crept around the front with the pistol poised. The grenade blast had concertinaed the roof of the Gestapo Mercedes. The officer who’d caught the full force of the grenade was breathing, but his face was bloody and his right arm was wedged between two fence posts several metres away.
Henderson probably would have told Rosie to shoot the injured man to prevent him identifying her later on, but she didn’t have the heart and her attention turned towards the machine gun lying halfway between the body and the road. It would give her a lot more firepower than the pistol if she got into a scrap.
She picked it up and made a quick visual inspection. It seemed OK, though the only sure test would be to fire the weapon, and she didn’t want to do that because the noise might attract the other Germans back in her direction. She slung the gun strap over her shoulder and walked around the back of the Mercedes, whose trunk had been blown open by the blast.
Inside was a wooden box containing ammunition clips and grenades. Rosie didn’t want to slow herself down with too much weight, so she threw three of each into her bag, along with what looked like instruction manuals for the German radio detection equipment.
Rosie planned to walk up the hill, going in the opposite direction to Paul, Boo and the four chasing Germans, but she saw the motorbike resting on its kickstand with the engine still running. She was no expert rider, but she’d driven cars, trucks and bikes around campus during training and realised it was the most effective way to quickly put several kilometres between herself and the Germans.
After glancing over into the scrubland beyond the cottage to make sure none of the Germans had turned back, Rosie buckled her bag, hitched up her skirt and swung her leg over the saddle. She hoped Paul and Boo were OK as she opened the throttle and drove the bike precariously up the rutted hill.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
‘How was the library?’ Luc asked.
‘I struck gold,’ Henderson said coyly.
They sat in a garden square in one of Lorient’s better neighbourhoods. The blazing sun was evaporating the aftermath of heavy rain. The four-storey houses set around the square had large windows and elaborate wrought-iron balconies across the first and second floors.
‘Bauer lives at number seven,’ Luc said, as he pointed discreetly with his little finger.
‘Is he home?’ Henderson asked.
‘The car parked outside matched the number plate you gave me. He took lunch on the first-floor balcony, served by an elderly woman. Housekeeper, I guess.’
‘Live in?’
‘No, she left an hour ago. You can’t be totally certain he’s alone but I’ve not seen anyone else go in or out.’
‘I suppose an Oberst isn’t quite important enough to have his own bodyguard,’ Henderson said.
‘Quite a few Gestapo officers and other senior Germans seem to live in this square,’ Luc said. ‘And a patrol comes by at least once per hour.’
‘I’d assumed that from the number of German cars,’ Henderson said. ‘Did anyone pay much attention to you?’
‘Not unless they’re watching from a distance with binoculars, or something,’ Luc said. ‘So when do we make a move?’
‘Right now,’ Henderson said, as he stood up from the bench.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Bauer’s the main reason Marc is in custody,’ Henderson said. ‘Once he’s dead, I’ll have a much better chance of securing his release.’
*
Paul and Boo ran along a pre-planned escape route with the four Germans about fifty metres behind. The first stretch was heavily wooded, then they vaulted a crumbling wall and sprinted down a steep valley to the edge of a stream.
It was usually only a few centimetres deep, but after the heavy rain it was a half-metre torrent of thrashing muddy water. One of the Germans took aim as they waded through, hitting a tree trunk and sending a cloud of splinters into the air.
Paul saw a ten-centimetre piece of wood sticking out of his arm, but his adrenaline was pumping and he was only aware of a vague stinging sensation as they stumbled up the muddy embankment on the other side.
‘Get the bikes out,’ Boo said, as she snatched the pistol. ‘I’ll hold them back.’
Paul splashed across a single-track dirt road, ran around the side of an abandoned cottage and pulled down a sheet of mouldy timber covering the entrance of a tool shed. They’d left three bikes inside, along with a small cache of food and weapons.
Boo took a couple of pistol shots at the Germans as they came over the top of the embankment. She missed her first target, but hit a Gestapo officer in the chest and knocked him head over heels down the embankment. But with a pistol versus the Germans’ sub-machine guns she couldn’t stand her ground.
As Paul wheeled two bikes out of the shed, Boo cut behind him and dived inside. She grabbed a Sten machine gun and slotted in a stick of ammunition. By this time, the three surviving Germans had reached the front of the house, but seeing their comrade shot had made them cautious and they made no attempt to come down the near side of the house towards the shed.
‘Take these,’ Boo told Paul, as she walked out of the shed. ‘They’ll split up and try to flank us.’
Boo handed Paul the pistol and a grenade, and grabbed a pair of grenades for herself.
‘I’ll throw one forwards to the road, you throw yours to the side. We’ll get on our bikes as soon as they go bang and ride as hard and fast as we can. If we do it right, we’ll be out of shooting range by the time the dust clears.’
‘Gotcha,’ Paul said, pulling the pin out with his teeth because he had the pistol ready to shoot.
‘On three,’ Boo said, before giving a quick count. ‘One, two, three.’
Paul lobbed his grenade on a low trajectory so that it landed in a low hedge at the far side of the house twenty metres away. Boo threw one grenade up towards the road, before quickly tugging the pin from the second and lobbing it through a frameless window into the house.
‘Grenade,’ one of the Germans on the road shouted, as Paul and Boo grabbed their stuff and straddled the bicycles.
A Gestapo officer poked his head around the back of the house. Boo couldn’t shoot straight because she was straddling the bike, with a bag of heavy equipment on her back, but the blast of the Sten gun was enough to send the German into retreat.
Two seconds later the first two grenades exploded.
‘Ride,’ Boo shouted, though she barely heard her own words because her ears rang from the explosive shock wave.
Paul pedalled towards the road, fighting for breath and balance as he charged blind and half deaf into smoke and rubble. Boo’s starting position was only a couple of metres behind, but this difference was enough for her to catch the secondary blast inside the house. The shock wave knocked her bike sideways and chunks of rubble pelted her back.
As he turned on to the road, Paul looked behind where a dusty German was running back from the house, afraid of more explosions. He got fifty metres up the road before realising that Boo wasn’t following. He thought abou
t stopping, but the dust was clearing and he was still easily within shooting range of German machine guns.
The secondary explosion inside the house was meant to go off after they’d pedalled away, further distracting the Germans, but Boo had mistimed. The blast had knocked her off her bike and she’d badly grazed her arm.
Her back wheel had buckled and she’d kicked the bike away furiously. Her leg was hurting and she wasn’t sure if she could stand, so she pulled out the Sten trapped awkwardly under her body and crawled forwards until she had a clear sight of the German in the road who was targeting Paul.
Paul heard the gunshot and glanced back, seeing a vague outline of the German writhing in the road. He was now beyond the range where machine-gun fire was accurate so he swerved off and threw the bike into a ditch. Then, abandoning everything except the pistol and a couple of grenades, he ran back towards the house.
He kept close to the bushes along the roadside, with his head low. The ringing in his ears made him feel detached, like it was a dream. The air had the freshness that you only get after a big storm, his eyes were gritty and his shirt sleeve was soaked in blood with the wooden splinter still sticking out of his arm.
He kept focused on the German in the road. He was writhing around, but he wasn’t dead and it was impossible to tell if he was capable of shooting. Paul was a decent shot and wished he’d had a rifle to finish him off from long range.
Paul knew they’d been chased by four Germans. Boo had shot one as he came out of the valley, one was lying in the road, the one who’d peeked around the side of the house seconds before the grenades blew had to be dead or seriously injured. That left one man unaccounted for.