He swung the handlebars and veered off-road as one of the giant lorries thundered past. The front tyres ploughed through standing water, showering Luc in mud and rock salt as he clattered into thick undergrowth.
A gritty taste filled his mouth and salt burned his eyes. The truck’s second axle gave him a smaller shower, but as he shielded his face he lost his grip on the bike. The first wheel of the trailer caught the back of his bike, bursting the tyre and flipping it into the air. If Luc hadn’t been falling in the opposite direction he would have gone under the truck with his bike.
Luc crashed into bushes, getting stabbed by the ends of branches. His ear flooded as the last wheels ploughed through the puddle. The bike landed with a crash several metres away and its buckled frame pirouetted.
Luc trembled as he sat up, fearing – in some ways almost hoping – that the truck driver would stop and pick him up. But the driver knew of nothing except a satisfying bow wave as he roared through the puddle.
The salt in Luc’s eyes was excruciating. He sat still for several minutes, trembling and blinking as he tried to get his sight back. Once he could keep his eyes open for more than a couple of seconds he stood up. His clothes were saturated and his face spattered in brown sludge.
Luc checked for traffic before staggering down the road and inspecting the bike. It was scrap metal, but his satchel remained in the basket mounted behind the saddle. His map was soggy around the edges, but everything else seemed OK.
He then grabbed the policeman’s packed lunch, but the glass-lined vacuum flask had disintegrated and the lid had popped, soaking the corned beef sandwiches in steaming Bovril.
‘Broken glass sandwiches,’ Luc moaned to himself. ‘Bon appétit.’
The bike’s chain had snapped and lay in the road a couple of metres away. He picked it up and shoved it in his pocket, figuring that it made a better long-distance weapon than the truncheon.
Luc felt desperate. He was exhausted and didn’t want to walk another step, particularly not the half-mile up the steep hill that led out of the valley. Without the bike he couldn’t find the others. There was no chance of stealing a gun on his own, so he decided to surrender.
Even this wasn’t easy because there was nobody around to surrender to. Luc cut across the road and studied the factory building behind a tall wire fence. There had to be an entrance, so he began trudging along looking for a gate.
The only good thing to say about the rain was that it was helping with his eyes. He even tilted his head back and let rainwater in his mouth to swish out the dirt.
He eventually came to a striped barrier and a bored soldier in a wooden sentry box. He clearly wasn’t used to seeing people approach his gate on foot, least of all a soggy thirteen-year-old at six in the morning.
‘What’s this, then?’ the guard asked as he opened out the door of his hut and leaned cautiously into the rain.
Luc clutched the surrender letter in his hand. ‘I’m here to give you this,’ he explained. ‘You need to show it to the authorities and have me returned to London.’
‘Who put you up to this?’ the guard asked. He was a tough-looking fellow. He wore army uniform with most of his shirt buttons undone and had a cigarette tucked behind his ear. ‘You run away from home or something? This is a right idiot place to end up in if you have.’
‘This letter explains everything,’ Luc said. ‘Just read it.’
The soldier shook his head. ‘Hoppit,’ he said, as he pointed his thumb towards the road. ‘One more word and I’ll give you a thick ear.’
Luc lost his patience. ‘I need to get out of here,’ he shouted desperately. ‘I’m lost.’
The soldier snorted with contempt. ‘You think I’m gonna bugger around sorting out some snot-nosed kid in this rain? You got here, didn’t you? All you’ve gotta do is turn tail and do it backwards.’
Luc considered throwing a punch. Hopefully if he attacked the soldier he’d get arrested, but he might also get a good thumping and he didn’t fancy that. So he turned away and started back towards the fence.
The soldier finally took pity and shouted after him. ‘There’s a bus depot down on the left. The next big shift change is at seven and any bus will take you up to the village. There’s a police station there if you want to hand yourself in. Or you can change on to the local bus. That’ll take you right into Manchester.’
The depot was outside the entrance to the biggest factory in the valley. A sign proudly displayed the logo of the Royal Manchester Armaments Corporation, though all the words underneath had been painted over for security reasons.
There were fifty metres of curved bus shelter, with a corrugated metal roof that pinged and clattered in the rain. The clock at the centre of the shelter read twenty to seven. A dozen grey buses with RMAC stencilled on the sides were parked driverless on a concrete lot behind, while at the far end was a small block with toilets and a canteen. There was a light on inside and a sign over the door that read Facilities strictly for use of bus drivers.
Luc was freezing and the building seemed deserted. He pushed his way through double doors and found an empty hallway with cigarette vending machines and toilets off to one side. The toilets were spotlessly clean and the heat blasting off the radiator felt incredible after being out in the cold for more than three hours.
Luc locked himself in one of the stalls and started to undress. He wrung his shirt, vest, socks and trousers out over the toilet bowl. He had no way to dry them completely, but at least they were damp rather than saturated as he put them back on.
Once out of the cubicle, Luc grabbed a towel and did the best he could to dry his hair and wipe the streaks of rock salt off his face. It was far from perfect, but the end result was a huge improvement on the swamp creature who’d entered ten minutes earlier.
Rather than heading out into the cold, Luc decided to chance the canteen. He figured the worst thing that could happen was that someone would kick him out, but the canteen was as deserted as the bathrooms, apart from a fierce tea lady with a big nose and a frilly apron.
‘Look at yous!’ the woman gasped, as Luc stepped up to the counter. ‘I saw that rain. My god, you poor thing!’
Without even asking the woman stepped across to a big tea urn and poured out a cup for Luc. Luc reached into his back pocket for the policeman’s wallet, but the woman just smiled.
‘Don’t be daft,’ she said. ‘You think I’d charge someone in your state?’
Luc hated tea, but it warmed his insides as it went down. ‘I’m not a driver,’ he explained.
The tea lady laughed noisily. ‘You don’t say,’ she shrieked. ‘Come here looking for your dad, did you?’
Luc could see no reason to disagree with this ready-made excuse and nodded as he sat at a table by the window. ‘I see plenty of buses, but no drivers,’ he noted.
‘They do bacon sandwiches off ration in the factory,’ she explained. ‘They’re supposed to be for factory workers, but the drivers sneak in and I can’t compete with free bacon. Would you like some hot toast, love?’
Luc nodded as the woman put three thick slices of bread under a gas grill. ‘What time is the next bus out of here?’ he asked.
‘Shifts swap at seven,’ the woman explained. ‘So you’ll have more buses arriving soon as they bring in the next shift. It takes the workers a good ten minutes to get here and the buses go up the village as soon as they’re full.’
‘Right,’ Luc nodded, as he swigged the hot tea. ‘So I guess I’ll sit here and warm up for a bit.’
Someone had left the previous day’s newspaper on the next table. Luc had nothing better to do so he reached over to grab it. As he did he glanced out of the window and saw four men moving between the parked buses. At first he assumed they were drivers and thought nothing of it, but then he recognised the long legs and distinctive gait of Lieutenant Tomaszewski.
The presence of the Poles made sense. Although all four teams had separate targets on their maps, the Poles had been dropp
ed nearby and there would certainly be more than two anti-aircraft guns to protect this expanse of factories and warehouses.
Luc wondered if they’d succeeded in stealing a gun, but their body language answered him: the Poles were disconsolate, soaked to the skin and snapping at one another. They hadn’t given up though, because they were walking between the two parked buses trying to find a way inside.
The hot toast and a fresh cup of tea hit the table and made Luc jump.
‘Deep in thought,’ the woman said.
‘Something like that,’ Luc replied.
A few moments earlier the woman had been helpful, but now Luc was irritated because he was trying to see what the Poles were up to.
The woman propped her bum on the edge of the next table. ‘You know, it’s good to talk things through if there’s trouble at home?’ she said warmly. ‘I’m a good listener.’
Outside, one of the Poles was tugging at the sliding driver’s door of a bus. Luc tutted with contempt. ‘Why the hell would I want to pour my heart out to a tea lady?’ he snapped.
The woman was shocked by the rudeness. ‘Young man, if you’re going to speak like that you can leave my canteen. I’ve been kind to you and in return you might at least show me—’
Luc had lost sight of the Poles, though he guessed that they’d seen the lights in the canteen building and decided to try another bus parked further away.
‘I’ve seen some rudeness in my time, but you’ve really taken the biscuit.’
‘Shut up, you old bag,’ Luc shouted, as he sprang furiously out of his seat and shoved the tea lady against the wall. ‘Now you’ve gone and made me lose them.’
False teeth flew out of the woman’s mouth as she spun off the wall and hit the floor hard. ‘Get out,’ she screamed, as she clutched her nose. ‘You bloody horror.’
‘Your toast looks shit anyway,’ Luc sneered, as he knocked the hot tea off the table towards her.
He grabbed his satchel and made a point of crunching the false teeth under his boot as he headed for the exit. The tea lady was screaming and bawling as Luc stepped out into the cold with a huge grin across his face.
The rush of aggression made Luc feel like his usual self. He couldn’t believe he’d acted so wimpishly and considered giving up just because of a bit of bad luck before the jump and a few spots of rain. Now he was determined to succeed.
Luc couldn’t find the rest of his team and couldn’t steal a gun on his own, but what if he stalked the Poles and robbed their cannon after they’d stolen it?
As he ran towards the parked buses, the tea lady staggered out of the café, screaming her head off.
Luc sighted two of the Poles fifty metres up ahead. One was in the driver’s seat of a bus trying to hotwire the engine while Lieutenant Tomaszewski stood on the concrete nearby.
Luc realised he should have made sure that the tea lady was unconscious before he’d walked out. Her screaming had attracted a posse of guards and factory workers who were fanning out to look for him.
Up ahead, Tomaszewski yelled triumphantly as the engine of the bus clattered to life. Luc was less than ten metres away as he watched Tomaszewski and one other Pole get on board. The three men all stood at the front of the bus and, while Luc didn’t understand their words, it didn’t take a genius to work out that they were waiting for someone called Adamczyk.
Adamczyk was the smallest of the four Poles and had taken a stroll into nearby bushes to take a leak before their journey. As he emerged, buttoning his fly and waving a hand apologetically to his lieutenant, a burly soldier sprang out of the darkness and almost snapped his head off with a brutal neck tackle.
‘Got the little bugger!’ the guard roared, as he choked Adamczyk with one hand and used the other to punch him hard in the face. ‘What kind of sick animal punches an old lady, eh? Let’s see how you like it.’
Luc laughed to himself as he reached the back of the bus. As he looked up at the emergency exit by the rear door an alarmed Lieutenant Tomaszewski gave the order to leave without Adamczyk.
Luc had to get on board, and fortunately the inexperienced driver stalled and took several seconds to restart the engine. There was no easy way into the passenger compartment, so Luc dived through a cloud of exhaust smoke and twisted the metal lever that opened the luggage bay. It wasn’t locked and Luc dived into the empty compartment, slamming it shut as the bus pulled away.
By the time the guards realised that the pint-sized-but-balding Adamczyk wasn’t the young lad who’d attacked the tea lady, Luc would be miles away.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Hugh Walden Garments factory was a cavernous single-storey shed with a five-level office block sprouting off the far end. There were hundreds of machine shops in north Manchester’s garment district, but Walden’s modern production line was a rarity amidst streets crammed with back-to-back houses and dingy workshops built along waterways in the age of hand looms and water wheels.
In peacetime Walden’s produced ladies’ silk underwear and nightgowns which sold in expensive department stores all over the world. At the outbreak of war the factory was reorganised. Production of silk cloth was expanded and the skilled machinists turned their hands to the production of parachute canopies.
The Walden facility produced over half the parachute canopies made within the British Empire, but its size and modernity also made it an easily visible target for German bombs. A dozen barrage balloons hovered over the surrounding streets to prevent low-level attacks and the factory’s flat roof bristled with lookout posts, searchlights, flak guns and four of the sought-after twenty-millimetre cannons.
But while German bomber crews faced a tough time, security on the ground wasn’t up to much. It was half past seven and the sun was struggling to produce anything more than a glimmer of light. PT, Marc, Joel and Rosie had walked a complete mile-long circuit of the factory and they liked what they’d seen.
Silk cloth was in great demand and there was heavy security at the main gate, where trucks and workers were selected for random inspection by a team of elderly security guards. The effort discouraged casual theft by employees, but a more organised villain would have no difficulty getting over the shoulder-height wire fence that enclosed the compound. There were even stretches where twenty or thirty metres of fence lay flat on the ground.
The four kids were soggy and tired, but stealing the gun looked doable and spirits were the highest they’d been all night as they headed into a sixty-table cafeteria directly opposite the factory. It was packed out and the three boys felt conspicuous as they cut through the noise and cigarette smoke, slowly realising that they were the only men in the joint.
The women were all shapes and ages. The older ones wore headscarves and aprons, the younger ones plain dresses. None of them wore make-up, lest it rub off on to the precious fabric. Everyone seemed to be slagging off their husband or boyfriend and when laughter broke out it was a shrill explosion that ended with the smokers’ rattling coughs.
PT spotted a group standing up and grabbed their table.
‘Lovely bum, ducks,’ one of them told him, before pinching his backside and laughing noisily.
PT flushed red with embarrassment as he sat down. Plenty of male drivers and warehousemen worked in the factory across the street, but he now understood why none of them came in here.
‘What’s off ration?’ Rosie asked, when the waitress came to the table.
‘Tea and toast.’
‘Fantastic,’ Rosie smiled, as PT pulled out his wallet.
‘Pay at the counter on the way out,’ the waitress explained.
They took off as many wet clothes as decency allowed and rubbed cold hands as they waited for the toast. There was enough noise at the surrounding tables that they wouldn’t be overheard and it was unlikely that anyone in this room full of Mancunian machinists understood French anyway.
‘I like what we saw out there,’ Joel said.
PT and Marc both nodded from the opposite side of th
e table. Rosie was more cautious. ‘We can’t actually see what’s up on the roof.’
‘Guns and searchlights won’t be manned,’ Marc said.
‘How can you know that?’ Joel asked, as the waitress put down a tray with four teas and eight slices of buttered toast on a chipped plate.
‘Bit short of plates, you’ll have to share,’ the waitress said, as she tore a bill off her pad. ‘Always hectic at this time of the morning because of the shift change.’
‘When is that?’ Rosie asked. ‘I’m waiting for my older sister to come out.’
‘Eight,’ the waitress said. ‘Come back here in an hour and you’ll be lucky to find six customers.’
‘Thanks very much,’ PT said.
None of the kids had eaten since they’d left Scotland and the toast vanished rapidly as the conversation continued.
‘Why are you so sure that the guns won’t be manned?’ Joel repeated.
‘Because it’s getting light,’ Marc explained. ‘We’re in the west. If the Germans bombed us here at this time of day, they’d have to fly back across Britain and all over the North Sea in broad daylight.’
‘Makes sense,’ Rosie nodded.
‘Our biggest problem is getting up on that roof,’ PT said.
‘There’s ladders bolted to the building,’ Joel said. ‘I counted at least two along each side.’
‘I know,’ PT nodded. ‘We can sneak up the ladders, but that gun is going to be heavy and we’ll have to lower it by rope. That takes time and we’re bound to be spotted.’
‘So what do we do?’ Rosie asked.
‘The offices,’ PT said, with a wry smile. ‘Up to the third floor, climb out on to the factory roof, grab the gun and carry it down the stairs.’
*
The floor of the bus’s luggage compartment was bare metal. Rust had eaten through at the corners, leaving holes that were open to spray coming up off the road. To make matters worse, the Pole at the steering wheel was a maniac. Luc got thrown across the slippery floor on every corner and bumps flung him up and slammed him hard against the metal floor.