Jae thinned her lips and looked determined. ‘He’s got other things on his mind right now. But I’m growing up and he’s short of labourers on the farm. So Daddy can like it or lump it, but I am going to carry on seeing you.’
*
After Jae left, Marc realised he was madly in love with Jae and found it scary that someone else had such power over his emotions.
Had Marc punched Lanier out, the other orphans would have regarded him as a conquering hero, or at least showed the kind of reverence his physical dominance deserved. But beating Lanier senseless, then spending three hours snivelling and staring into space had earned Marc loony status instead. Even his ultra-loyal bunkmate Jacques didn’t know what to say.
The next morning on Morel’s farm passed as normal, but at lunchtime Jae told Marc to have lunch with her at the main house, rather than hiding out by the pond.
‘Will I live?’ Marc asked warily.
Jae shrugged. ‘Daddy’s eyes didn’t bulge much when he asked me to fetch you.’
After they’d stripped wellies and washed hands in the boot room, the Morels’ cook served Marc and Jae chicken and wild mushrooms, cooked in wine and served with boiled potatoes.
Marc was touched, realising that Jae had given up a meal this good every time she’d gone to the pond with him. But he expected her dad at any second and found himself apologising to the cook, because his nerves meant he could hardly swallow a mouthful.
Marc thought he’d escaped the encounter, but just before 2 p.m. Morel walked into the servants’ dining room. The incident with the Requisition Authority had knocked something out of him. His hair looked flat and he lacked the casual authority that usually made him so intimidating.
The cook gave Morel a plate, but he struck an eccentric pose, eating quickly with a large serving spoon while standing over the kitchen counter.
‘Do you read and write well?’ Morel asked.
Marc found Morel’s tone offensive, as if being an orphan meant he was ignorant.
‘I speak, read and write well in French and German, sir,’ Marc said, as the small amount of lunch he’d managed to eat did back flips in his stomach.
Morel smiled slightly. ‘German. The language of our future, perhaps?’
‘Hope not,’ Marc said, although he regretted it instantly because Morel was close to the Germans who lived in his house. But on the other hand, wasn’t the German-controlled Requisition Authority prosecuting him?
Marc tried to stay calm and stop over-thinking.
‘I bloody well hope to see the back of the Boche too,’ Morel said. ‘They’ve left a job for you. Come upstairs.’
Marc and Jae both stood, but Morel made a down-down gesture at his daughter.
‘You go back to the fields. I only need him.’
Marc looked anxiously at Jae. He remembered what she’d said the night before about her father having to get used to him being part of her life, but her determination did him no good if there were a couple of burly farm hands waiting upstairs with horse whips.
Marc sized Morel up as he led the way out of the basement. He was slim like his daughter, average height. But with Morel it had always been his money and status that was intimidating, not his physique.
‘I’m not well liked by my staff,’ Morel said. ‘Do you think it likely any of them will denounce me to the Requisition Authority?’
The farm workers constantly slagged Morel off for his tight pay, and reluctance to invest in farm equipment, while no expense was spared on the lavish family house. But Marc sensed this wasn’t the time for brutal honesty.
‘Everyone moans and groans,’ Marc said. ‘I don’t think there are many fans of the Germans out there.’
‘I could go to prison for selling my grain direct to the bakery,’ Morel said, as they reached the ground floor, and turned on to the much grander staircase leading up to the first. ‘Felix and I would probably have stayed behind bars if I didn’t have friends high up in the Luftwaffe. They’re doing what they can, but Tomas has always disliked me, so I expect he’ll keep baying for blood.’
Marc nodded sympathetically. ‘I’ve heard of people deported to Germany as tobacco smugglers, just because they were non-smokers taking a few packs of cigarettes to relatives.’
‘The officers who board here tell me it’s not much better for Germans,’ Morel said sourly. ‘German men go into the military, the women into factories, while their children are indoctrinated at school. This entire continent has been enslaved by a tiny cult of brainless thugs and racists.’
Morel stopped on the first-floor balcony and looked at Marc, to see if he’d understood what had been said. Marc realised he was being sized up and tried to think of an intelligent answer.
‘I just hope the Russians can hold out until winter bogs the war in the east down again. By spring, the Americans should be much better prepared.’
‘So you believe the Allies can win?’ Morel asked, as he approached a set of ornate double doors. ‘Or just hope?’
‘Believe,’ Marc said firmly. ‘I’m less sure how much of France will be left standing by the time everyone else finishes fighting over it.’
Morel was clearly satisfied by Marc’s answer and laughed as he opened the double doors.
‘Speaking of destruction,’ he said.
Marc had never been beyond the main hall and servants’ area of the Morel house. He was stunned to find himself in a library which ran the entire length of the first floor. There was also a collection of curiosities: scientific instruments, fossils, a huge wooden globe.
The Requisition Authority had been through like a tornado, pulling thousands of books from shelves until it was impossible to move along the aisles. It was a shocking scene, but Marc was mainly just relieved that he wasn’t being dragged out to the stables for a whipping.
‘It should take you two or three days to put everything back in place,’ Morel said. ‘Work quickly, or I’ll be most displeased.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Marc said.
He jolted when Morel’s fingers dug into his shoulder.
‘And the matter of my daughter,’ Morel said chillingly.
Marc felt like as if every drip of water had suddenly been sucked from his body.
‘I was your age once,’ Morel began. ‘Fathers protect daughters because they know exactly what races through the mind of a teenage boy. It’s why we get so uncomfortable when we see some randy young bull like you, with eyeballs wandering up his daughter’s legs.
‘Marc, I love my daughter more than anything else in the world. I can see how much Jae likes you and if I broke you up it would only drive a wedge between us. But if you ever treat her with anything other than absolute respect, I guarantee you a thrashing that will make the worst Director Tomas gave you look like a pillow fight between two six-year-olds.’
‘I’d never do anything to hurt Jae,’ Marc said, as he placed his hand over his heart. ‘I swear on my life.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Two days later
‘Daddy misses my brothers,’ Jae explained, as she stood with Marc in the boot room at the back of her house. ‘I think he actually rather likes having you around.’
Marc had spent the day reshelving library books, and felt guilty because he was clean and dry, while Jae had spent a stormy day in the fields.
‘I don’t get why you’re outdoors while I’m warm and dry in the library,’ Marc said. ‘Mind you, I’ll be finished by tomorrow lunchtime.’
Jae got the cutest look of frustration on her face when she tried pulling her muddy boot off, and Marc stood behind and helped, before nuzzling the back of her neck.
‘You could stay for dinner,’ Jae said.
‘It’s my night for washing pots at the orphanage,’ Marc said. ‘Best not to piss off the nuns.’
Marc missed Jae as soon as he’d left the Morel’s house. It had just stopped raining. The air felt fresh and the first leaves were dropping.
The orphanage was a melee of cooking
smells and nuns yelling at kids who’d got muddy playing on the wet grass. Sister Peter whispered, as Marc unlaced his boots on the front step.
‘There’s a lady waiting at the convent house,’ she said. ‘With Joseph and Noah.’
Maxine embraced Marc warmly when he reached the Canadians’ room. One of the beds had been tilted on to its side to make space. The floor was spread with maps and aerial surveillance photographs of a German airfield.
‘I thought you were hiding something from us,’ Joseph told Marc. ‘But not something this big.’
Clearly Maxine had told the Canadians that he was a trained agent.
Marc smiled awkwardly. ‘In which case, I guess it’s time I knew who you two are.’
‘We’re commandos,’ Noah said. ‘If we’d got off the beach at Dieppe before getting captured, our job would have been to break away from the main force and destroy a factory near Rouen that makes cockpit instruments for aeroplanes.’
Marc looked around at all the maps, then up at Maxine. ‘Looks like you’ve found another job for them.’
Maxine nodded and picked one of the photos off the floor. ‘It’s a stroke of luck, having an agent and two highly capable commandos turning up within a few kilometres of Luftwaffe headquarters. This is your target. It’s a Junkers 88 night fighter, equipped with the latest mark four radar.’
Marc looked at the twin-engined fighter. It seemed normal, but had an all-black paint job and a criss-crossed scaffold of aerials protruding from the nose.
‘If we can get the radar from a German night fighter, the boffins hope to be able to develop countermeasures against it,’ Maxine explained. ‘The night fighter radar signals are monitored from the ground. The women who operate the sets tell the pilots what height and speed to fly at, even down to the split second when they need to open fire.
‘The RAF have tried jamming German ground-to-air communications, but the system remains stubbornly effective. For every hundred Allied bombers crossing French airspace, we’re losing two to the night fighters. That may not sound huge, but it means the average British bomber crew flying three missions a week is going to be taken down by night fighters in under four months. And of course, many other things that can go wrong in a bomber – mechanical failure, flak, or anti-aircraft guns on the ground. At present, the average life expectancy of a British bomber crew is less than two months.’
‘Why has nobody ever shot one of these night fighters down and picked up the pieces?’ Marc asked.
‘It’s a ground-controlled radar system,’ Maxine said. ‘These planes only ever fly over German-occupied territory.’
‘So our job is to raid the workshop where the radar sets are fixed?’ Marc asked.
The Canadians both laughed, before Maxine explained.
‘The radar set is large, and most of the critical components are bolted into the nose of the aircraft. The only way to get hold of an entire functioning system is to steal a plane and fly it home.’
Marc raised one eyebrow suspiciously as he looked at the Canadians. ‘You’re not pilots as well, are you?’
‘They’re not,’ Maxine said. ‘But the British captured several examples of the bomber version of the Junkers 88 in the Libyan Desert, and these have been flown extensively by British test pilots. One of these test pilots will be parachuted in, making you a four-man team.
‘A local resistance group has been observing one of the night fighter bases about fifteen kilometres from here for several months. They’ve given us excellent information on base procedures and security.
‘Your job will be to penetrate the base during the chaos of a night-time operation, board a fully fuelled night fighter and fly it across the Channel to an airfield in Britain. The JU-88 has two seats behind the pilot and a spot for a rear gunner lying flat directly below the cockpit, so you all get a ride home into the bargain.’
‘Provided we make it off the ground alive,’ Noah said.
‘Or don’t get shot down by a British fighter when we turn up over the Channel in a plane that looks nearly identical to a Junkers 88 bomber,’ Joseph added.
‘There will be more operational details, of course,’ Maxine said.
Marc backed up to the wall, feeling sick. ‘I just don’t know,’ he mumbled.
‘Is something the matter?’ Maxine asked anxiously.
Marc hesitated before answering. ‘It’s just, this feels like my home again now. I’ve got friends, and …’
Maxine looked confused. ‘You’ve got friends on CHERUB campus too: PT, Paul, Rosie, Joel. But this is what you’ve trained for. I set all this up, assuming you were raring to get back to campus.’
Joseph smiled at Maxine, then put an unwelcome arm around Marc’s back. ‘Don’t you know the young fella’s in love? Couple of nights back he half killed some lad just for making a few sly remarks about her.’
‘Ahh …’ Maxine said, as her lower jaw dropped.
She didn’t know how to react. As an experienced resistance leader, Maxine expected everyone who signed up to follow orders. But Marc was hardly a normal case. He’d signed up when he was twelve years old. He’d already shown bravery on two daring missions, escaped captivity in Germany and was still only fourteen.
‘If that’s what you want,’ Maxine said weakly. ‘I suppose I could make up the team with one of our other people up from Paris. But it’s very short notice.’
Marc felt bad: not just for letting down Maxine, but also the idea of abandoning Henderson’s team. Rosie, Paul, Joel and PT were the strongest group of friends he’d ever made. But he loved Jae so much that the thought of leaving her made him feel like his body was being ripped in half.
While Maxine and Marc didn’t know what to do, Noah faced Marc off. He was an intimidating man. His enormous chest came level with Marc’s face and his arms looked like they could punch you clean through a brick wall into the next room.
Marc backed up when Noah’s hand came out of his trouser pocket, half expecting a knife or knuckleduster. Maxine looked anxious too, but it was only a photo. One of the few colour photographs Marc had ever seen.
‘That’s my wife and twin daughters,’ Noah said. ‘I could get court-martialled for taking their picture with me on a covert operation, but this photo is all I’ve ever seen of my babies and I love my wife.
‘I sit here all day thinking about ’em. But every one of us Canadians are volunteers. I came over to fight, because what kind of world would my wife and daughters end up living in if men like me sit on their asses?’
After the cruelty Marc had seen in Germany, he realised he couldn’t leave other people to fight the war just because he’d fallen for a girl. He felt a touch pathetic as he looked away from Noah towards Maxine.
‘If it needs doing, then,’ Marc said determinedly. ‘When does this happen?’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Two days after finding out about the mission, Marc met Jae for lunch by the pond. For security purposes it would have been better to just vanish, but Marc cared too much to simply abandon his girlfriend without a word.
Marc explained how he’d been trained in Britain, arrested in Lorient, spent a year in Frankfurt, escaped and wound up back at the orphanage more or less by accident. It wasn’t an everyday story. Jae had trouble believing all of it and once she did she sounded both shocked and impressed.
‘Now I have to leave,’ Marc said.
‘When?’
‘After work, provided the weather stays clear.’
‘What’s the weather got to do with it?’
Marc shouldn’t have told her, but hiding stuff from someone he was so crazy about seemed wrong.
‘Parachute drop,’ he explained. ‘The pilot can’t accurately drop the equipment for our mission if it’s raining, or there’s low cloud.’
‘It’s so soon,’ Jae said. ‘I can hardly take this all in.’
‘I know it’s brutal, but that’s how it always works, for security. I only found out the day before yesterday. The fewer pe
ople who hear about an operation and the less time there is before it kicks off, the less chance there is of someone snitching, or getting picked up and interrogated.’
‘I want to come with you,’ Jae said, close to tears. ‘If my dad gets sent to prison I’ll be all on my own.’
‘Your dad’s a wily one,’ Marc said. ‘He’ll work out a deal. Wouldn’t be surprised if he stitched Tomas up into the bargain.’
‘I hope,’ Jae said.
‘Besides, when you tell your dad that I’ve run away again, he’ll be able to say I told you so.’
Jae managed a slight smile. ‘Why does this have to happen?’ she moaned.
‘I wish it didn’t,’ Marc said. ‘But the war’s too important to sit out.’
‘We might never see each other again,’ Jae said.
Marc’s eyes glazed over as he shook his head. ‘Don’t say never. We’ll be sitting here again before you know it.’
Marc pulled a knife out of a leather sheath. Jae looked curious as Marc stroked her long hair.
‘Memento,’ Marc explained. ‘OK?’
Jae nodded, then sniffled as Marc sliced off a few dozen long strands of her hair. He tied the bunch in a knot and gave them a kiss before pushing them into his pocket.
‘What do I get to chop off?’ Jae asked, as she ran her hand over Marc’s head.
Marc had been virtually bald when he got back from Germany, and even now there were only a couple of centimetres of hair on his head.
‘I want your shirt,’ Jae said, as she undid the top button.
Marc looked at her like she was mad. ‘I’ve been wearing this all week. It stinks.’
‘Of you,’ Jae said. ‘I like your smell.’
‘I’m kinda wearing it,’ Marc pointed out.
Jae thought for a couple of seconds. ‘Put it on the wall outside the orphanage when you leave. I’ll ride over and collect it before sunrise.’
The idea seemed both romantic and crazy, but it showed Marc that Jae really cared about him. They were both miserable so he tried a joke.