‘Hi, I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I think I’m lost. I arrived in town this morning and I was trying to find …’
As she spoke, she reached behind her back and signalled with three fingers, indicating the number of men she could see inside.
‘How’d you get that muck all over your face?’ the soldier asked, as four silenced shots pulsed through the small window at the rear of the hut. As he looked back at two colleagues who’d been shot through the chest and head, Rosie snatched her pistol from its holster, took a backward step and shot him through the heart.
She saw Luc’s smile and thumbs-up through the back window as she stepped into the hut.
‘Clear,’ she said.
She spotted the telephone and cut the cord with her multi-tool. Antoine dragged the dead soldier inside the hut and they closed the door as they left so that the attack wasn’t obvious to anyone passing by.
Meanwhile Henderson had led Antoine and Joel through the main gate and moved across the dockside with his pistol ready. Edith’s best guess was that somewhere between three and five men patrolled the coal yard.
The fourth man got taken unawares as he sat with his legs hanging over the dockside crunching into an apple. After slitting his throat, Henderson dragged him out of sight between two huge pyramids of coal.
The three small patrol boats were moored around a pontoon, accessed by a steep ramp. The first boat Henderson stepped aboard had a hole where the engine was supposed to be. The others came down the ramp with the two heavy bags as Henderson moved to a slightly smaller boat, studied its controls and checked the fuel gauge.
All the watches said 8.59, which meant they’d made up the two minutes they’d lost before leaving the house. As Antoine unwound the mooring ropes and stepped aboard the small patrol craft, a huge klaxon sounded in the bunker complex across the water, signalling a shift change.
Henderson gave the starter cord a good yank and the boat’s engine thrummed to life. As he pulled off, the bow rose alarmingly out of the water.
‘Move forwards,’ he ordered, but there was already water pouring over the stern. They were still alongside the pontoon and Luc and Rosie saved the day by jumping out on to it.
The small craft were designed for three or four men. Henderson had assumed that they’d take five easily enough for the short ride across the dock, but hadn’t properly accounted for heavy backpacks and two hundred kilos of explosive.
As Luc and Rosie grasped the slippery deck of the floating pontoon and found their feet, Antoine and Joel used their helmets to frantically bail out the small boat.
Luc’s eye caught a man running on the dockside. It seemed he’d discovered his colleague with the slit throat and was running towards the security shed to warn his colleagues, not realising that they were all dead.
The dockside was littered with coal that crunched underfoot and the Kriegsmarine police officer turned back when he heard Luc. The boy commando was less than fifteen metres from his target and took a good aim at the chest, but heard nothing but the click of the gun’s hammer when he squeezed the trigger.
The German swung around with his automatic rifle. Luc panicked, because even if he didn’t get hit the German’s unsilenced weapon would alert the much larger security teams on the other side of the dock.
Unlike Marc, Luc had never mastered knife throwing, but with no gun, the blade and a desperate dive towards the nearest coal heap was his only choice. A bullet whistled past his shoulder, but there was no gunshot, which meant it was silenced.
Confused, Luc looked behind and saw that Rosie had covered him. He’d almost stepped into her line of fire, but her hasty shot had missed him by centimetres and hit the German in the gut. As he stumbled backwards Rosie shot again. This bullet entered the neck and passed out the back of his skull. He plunged over the dockside and landed with a mighty splash.
If Luc had had time to think, his pride might have been dented at being saved by a girl, but for now he was just glad to be alive. The splash had seemed loud from where they stood, but it was nothing compared to the crack of a gunshot and it had caused no obvious commotion on the other side of the dock.
Luc cursed his jammed pistol as he jogged back down to the pontoon. Henderson had made it across. Joel and Antoine had climbed on to the eastern dockside using one of the rickety wooden ladders built into the wall and were now using a rope to pull up the second equipment bag.
To their right, the recently completed dockside bunker formed a menacing dark slab. There were U-boats inside three of its seven pens, while the others were still being fitted out with lights, winches and electrical gear.
Behind and to the left of the first bunker, the inland bunker where U-boats would be repaired out of the water was floodlit. Tired construction workers climbed down the massive scaffolds on all four sides as their replacements stood at ground level waiting to take over.
Luc began casting off the second boat, but neither he nor Rosie were sure how to start the engine or confident about steering a boat accurately into the wall across the dock, so they were pleased to see Henderson coming back for them. He’d been spooked by his uncharacteristic miscalculation and the near sinking of the boat, and had no idea about the drama with Luc’s pistol except a vague notion that he’d heard a splash in the water.
‘Let’s hope the rest of your plan isn’t as screwed up as this,’ Luc said with a typical lack of tact.
As they crossed the water, Luc took the clip out of his pistol and saw that it was a simple jam caused by an improperly expelled cartridge casing. Tapping the gun against the side of the boat dislodged the casing and he pumped a shot into the water to make sure he was up and running.
‘I thought it made a funny sound when I shot the German in the shed,’ Luc told Rosie. ‘At least I’ll know what it means next time.’
The ladder on the dock wall was slimy and Antoine gave Rosie and Luc a hand up. Henderson switched the boat’s engine off and came up last.
They’d elected to cross during the shift change because it offered the lowest chance of being spotted. The old shift would be tired and wanting to get home without making a fuss, the new shift would see them and assume that they were supposed to be down there and the Kriegsmarine police who guarded the area would be at full stretch checking identity papers of new arrivals and making sure the departing workers weren’t pilfering tools or lumber.
The major downside was that Henderson’s team now had to hide out inside the base, because it wouldn’t be dark enough to attack the crew bunker for another thirty-five minutes.
The German master plan for Keroman involved building not only the three huge submarine bunkers, but subsidiary buildings of which the crew bunker was the first. There were to be workshops, torpedo storage bunkers and zones for crew training and leisure activities. This armoured complex would be linked by tunnels that would enable the base to function normally even during aerial bombing.
None of the main tunnels linking the bunkers together had been built yet, but sections had been put in place under the bunkers as they were constructed. After scrambling down a muddy embankment, the five set off through a hundred metres of partially flooded tunnel that took them directly underneath the inshore bunker and to within twenty-five metres of their target.
If their intelligence was correct, no less than five complete U-boat crews would be spending the night in the crew bunker, before sailing as a pack on a late morning tide the following day. The bunker itself consisted of eight dormitories filled with wooden bunks, each designed to hold the forty-eight-strong crew of a U-boat.
According to Antoine’s source, the interior of the bunker comprised simple wooden partitions that could easily be reconfigured if the bunker was repurposed. At the northern end was the entrance and recreation building. This was built above ground with a canteen and a few basic facilities such as ping-pong tables and a postbox. The southern exit was below ground. Eventually it would be linked to the rest of the complex, but currently there was ten m
etres of bare concrete followed by a half-metre-deep mud pool.
By the time Henderson’s team exited the long tunnel they were all panting from the weight of their packs and the bags of explosives. The final stretch to the exit tunnel from the crew bunker was through knee-deep mud and had to be traversed quickly because there was a chance they’d be spotted by workmen up in the scaffolds.
They made it to the temporary wooden exit door at the rear of the crew bunker, gasping and clutching their sides. Henderson shone his torch about the tunnel around them and was alarmed to see hundreds of cigarette butts, which suggested that some of the submarine crews escaped the noise and smell of their crewmates by sneaking into the tunnel for a smoke.
Henderson’s team spoke in whispers as everyone downed their equipment packs, reloaded their weapons and took drinks from their water bottles. After a few minutes’ respite, Rosie and Joel began unzipping the equipment bags, which were filthy after dragging through the mud.
Antoine lit the gloomy tunnel with the torch as the other four worked quickly, pushing fist-sized chunks of explosives against the tunnel walls and sticking sympathetic detonators into each one. As Joel worked near the back door, a pair of young Germans almost hit his head with the door as they stepped out.
Luc turned to shoot, but Henderson saw them off by shouting in German. ‘This is a construction area. This exit is out of bounds.’
‘Pardon me,’ one of the men said, and they both shot back inside like little boys who’d been caught stealing from a cookie jar.
When there were more than thirty explosive charges rigged around the door and along the length of the tunnel, Henderson decided that they had enough explosive left over to leave a football-sized slab in the middle of the mud pool outside the tunnel.
When this was done he checked his watch and saw 9.27.
‘We’re on schedule,’ Henderson said. ‘Joel, it’s time to go and put out the lights.’
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Workers on the inland bunker toiled twenty-four hours a day, in two twelve-hour shifts. To work through the night, the Germans trained huge lamps on the site. This light spilled on to the adjacent crew bunker, making it impossible for Henderson’s team to rig the rest of their explosives without being seen.
PT had hated every moment working on the construction site – Henderson and Rosie even joked that he’d stabbed himself just to get out of the job – but before his safe return to Britain he’d passed on detailed information about the layout of the construction site. Most importantly he’d learned that when the air-raid sirens sounded the entire site was blacked out and the workmen climbed down from the scaffolds and sheltered in the U-boat pens.
The base received air-raid warnings by telephone from Luftwaffe radar stations along the coast. Henderson had considered raiding the command area, killing the base’s senior staff and triggering an air-raid warning from the main communications room. But the command bunker was a secure facility twenty metres below the U-boat pens. So rather than tackle this head on, the plan was to set off the air-raid siren illicitly at a remote electrical junction box.
Joel had been picked because he was fast and a good climber. He left his heavy pack in the tunnel with Henderson and the others before cutting back across the mud, ending up at the mouth of the tunnel under the inland bunker.
The next part was trickiest. With muddy hands and boots he had to run up a steep embankment and clamber on to the tunnel roof using the reinforcing wires jutting out of the concrete as handholds.
As his head rose over the tunnel roof, Joel could see six storeys of brilliantly lit scaffold, with men and buckets hanging over the side. After waiting a few seconds for two men to pass, he bobbed up and walked over the bouncing scaffold boards until he reached a rectangular metal cabinet attached to the bunker’s wall.
After unlocking the cabinet with a T-shaped key, Joel swung the metal cabinet door and cautiously glanced left and right before studying the rows of switches and knotted bundles of wire inside. They were all labelled in French and German and controlled the temporary supplies of light and power to the various sections of the six-storey scaffold.
In the top row was a yellow switch box marked Sirens Test – Do not activate without clearance. Two wires fed into the bottom of the switch. Flipping it would complete the circuit and set off the air-raid warning, but flipping it back again would instantly turn the sirens off. Joel needed them to stay on long enough to trigger a full-scale base-wide alert.
To begin he used a set of wire cutters to cut off the telephone handset in the bottom of the box. This would delay any attempts by staff in the command bunker to find out why the siren had sounded. He then pulled the first wire out of the siren test switch, peeled a two-metre length of insulated wire from his trouser pocket and twisted the bared ends together.
He looped this wire around several bundles of cables to hide its path before pulling the second wire out of the siren switch. This wire had plenty of slack and he used the same trick, winding it through several other cable bundles so that it would take a significant amount of time to track it down and disconnect it.
When the two wire ends were dangling out of the wiring loom a few centimetres apart, Joel took a golf-ball-sized lump of plastic explosive out of his trouser pocket, inserted a three-minute time pencil detonator and moulded it into a recessed corner of the cabinet.
‘Mind your back, son,’ someone shouted.
Joel pressed his body against the wall as two workmen passed behind carrying a cauldron of hot tar. As soon as they were past, Joel snapped the end of the time pencil to activate the three-minute countdown to the explosion. Then he joined the two bare pieces of wire together and looked up as the massive sirens on the bunker roof began warbling.
Within ten seconds about half the lights on the scaffold around the inland bunker were out. The rest stayed on a bit longer to allow men over the sides or moving heavy equipment to get to a safe position before everything went black.
Joel jumped off the tunnel roof, splashing down into half a metre of mud. After wading across to the crew bunker he grabbed his pack from the tunnel mouth and clambered up a slushy embankment where he found Henderson squatting on his haunches holding an electric hand detonator.
‘Nice work,’ Henderson said. ‘You stay here to trigger this, I’ll run along and catch up with Rosie. If possible, give it a good twenty seconds after the main explosions before blowing the tunnel, OK?’
‘Gotcha,’ Joel said, as he looked at the crew bunker’s arched roof less than twenty metres away, and the shadowy hulk of the inland bunker, with workmen climbing down off the scaffold in the darkness behind him.
‘See you at the railway siding,’ Joel said.
The crew bunker was about sixty metres long. Henderson saw Luc and Antoine walking up the gently sloping roof as he ran along the side of the building. Rosie was struggling with seventy kilos of plastic and was grateful as Henderson grabbed one of the handles.
Their target was the overground building at the head of the crew bunker. The lights inside had gone out as soon as the siren sounded. Any U-boat crews who were above ground had descended into the bunker behind an armoured, blast-proof door. The only men above ground were two navy police officers standing in a gloomy lobby under a giant portrait of Hitler.
Henderson drew his silenced pistol as he walked through the main door. He clinically shot the two guards and an unexpected U-boat crewman who’d apparently failed to get into the bunker before the blast door was closed. He then turned back and held the door open, enabling Rosie to drag the bag of explosives inside.
The heavy door that led into the bunker would easily withstand a blast from a hundred kilos of explosive, so rather than attack the door, the plan was to bring the building down on top of it to prevent the Germans getting out.
As Rosie and Henderson linked four charges together with fast-burning detonator cord and placed them against the building’s load-bearing walls, Luc and Antoine were at the top
of the crew bunker’s gently sloping roof.
This structure was made from two metres of concrete and thick steel plate, and was angled in such a way that the energy of a bomb blast would be deflected away. But with hundreds of men inside, the bunker needed a hefty ventilation system, which came in the form of four armour-plated vents fitted on the roof. These vents could be sealed in the event of a gas attack, but Henderson correctly guessed that they’d be left open on a warm summer night when there were two hundred and fifty men down below.
The two lads started at opposite ends. Luc hurriedly dropped six grapefruit-sized balls of explosive through the first ventilation shaft. Each was fitted with a sympathetic fuse, which would go off in reaction to the main explosion being set by Henderson and Rosie.
As he dropped six more balls through the second vent, the wailing air-raid siren faded out. Luc could hear German voices echo up the ventilation shafts, and while his German was rubbish he definitely got the impression that they’d heard the explosive balls dropping into the aluminium channels over their heads.
He looked anxious as he scrambled along to the middle of the roof where he met Antoine.
‘Done your two OK?’ he asked. ‘They’ve stopped the siren, so the lights could come back on at any second.’
‘All good,’ Antoine said, his voice crackling with excitement and fear.
Luc pulled a torch out of his pocket and flashed it three times, aiming towards the main entrance. After a couple of seconds he got an identical return signal from Henderson.
‘We’ve got two minutes to get out of here,’ Luc said, as he pulled the straps of his backpack up his shoulders in preparation for a slide down the roof and a sprint across open ground towards the railway sidings three hundred metres away.
And then all the floodlights came back on.