Secret Army

by Robert Muchamore

  ‘Do you think you’ll have a problem with jumping again?’ Henderson asked.

  Paul shrugged. ‘I think I’ll be OK, but I guess you can’t know for sure until you’re standing on that platform ready to jump off.’

  ‘Of course,’ Henderson smiled. ‘I think that’s a realistic attitude. And unless you have any questions, I think we’re about done.’

  ‘The insignia,’ McAfferty interrupted.

  ‘Oh, good god!’ Henderson said. ‘I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on. You’re a bit of an artist, aren’t you, Paul?’

  ‘Yes sir,’ Paul agreed.

  ‘I’d assumed that Rosie and the lads who passed jump training would get parachute wing badges, but I checked with the training school and it’s a military badge for enlisted men and women only.’

  Paul looked disappointed. ‘That’s a bit naff. We did the same training as everyone else.’

  ‘I totally agree,’ Henderson nodded. ‘So I was hoping that you’d turn your artistic skills to drawing a little insignia for Espionage Research Unit B. We could have an embroidered badge, or have it stamped on a metal disc to be presented to all trainees when they finish training.’

  ‘What sort of badge?’ Paul said.

  ‘It’s up to you,’ McAfferty said. ‘A parachute maybe, or a child. Perhaps you can do a couple of different designs and see which one everybody likes.’

  ‘I like the name CHERUB,’ Paul said. ‘Cherubs are like babies with wings, in Renaissance paintings and stuff, which ties in with parachute wings.’

  Henderson smiled. ‘Paul, you’d know more about Renaissance art than I do, but I’m sure you’ll be able to come up with something good.’

  *

  Luc was the last person to be debriefed by Henderson. It was after lunch and McAfferty was out, taking Paul to a local hospital to have a check-up on his broken nose.

  ‘Take a pew,’ Henderson told Luc, as he looked up from a sheet of notepaper covered with messy handwriting.

  Luc held his back and moaned as he sat down. Henderson studied the boy across the desktop: short hair combed neatly, a huge neck and thick arms ending in man-sized fists.

  ‘I’ve been reading the report you wrote on the train back from London yesterday. It looks more like a horror novel than a debriefing document.’

  Luc looked mystified. ‘I don’t know what you mean, sir.’

  Henderson read from the lined paper in front of him: ‘I picked up a big blob of molten glass with sharp bits of slate stuck in it and gave him a good smash in the head with it. His teeth flew in all directions. Luc, reading this not only makes me feel queasy but I get the feeling that you enjoyed doing it.’

  ‘I just wrote what happened,’ Luc said. ‘That’s what Miss McAfferty asked us to do.’

  ‘And was it necessary to smash the Pole in the face with a jagged object as he came down the ladder? You had the advantage of surprise. You could have choked him, or at least hit him with a blunt object.’

  ‘It seemed reasonable to me,’ Luc said. ‘Three adults versus one kid. I had to even up the odds.’

  ‘Did you enjoy hitting him?’ Henderson asked. ‘Because, frankly, I think you did.’

  Luc paused for a few seconds before drawing a long breath. ‘And what if I did enjoy it?’ he asked. ‘I got the job done. Isn’t that what counts?’

  ‘Not entirely,’ Henderson said. ‘What you achieved over the last two days was outstanding, but the way you did it was disturbing and before sending you on a mission I need to be certain that I can trust you.’

  Luc shot up furiously and placed both palms against the desktop. ‘I did the job I was asked to do. I thought I was training for a war, not a ladies’ tea party.’

  ‘Sit down,’ Henderson snapped. ‘And lower your voice.’

  ‘My dad’s dead,’ Luc steamed, ignoring the order to sit down. ‘My mum pissed off with some bloke when I was four. The only one who ever looked out for me was my big brother. But he was conscripted into the army and got blasted when the Germans invaded. Nobody in the world cares about me and I don’t care about any of them.’

  ‘Do you seriously think that nobody here cares about you?’ Henderson asked.

  Luc laughed as he finally sat back down. ‘I don’t see a lot of love coming my way.’

  ‘So what do you care about?’

  Henderson hoped his question would make Luc pause for thought, but the answer came instantly. ‘The only thing that I care about is parachuting back into France and massacring as many of the German bastards who killed my brother as I can.’

  ‘Luc,’ Henderson said softly. ‘I can understand why your past makes you reluctant to form close attachments, but if you treat other people with decency you’ll come to learn the value of—’

  ‘Decency!’ Luc interrupted, before making a loud snort. ‘Who the hell are you to lecture me about decency? Marc has told me plenty about you: how you machine-gunned an unarmed man in a bath tub and threw a grenade into a room filled with Germans.’

  ‘In a war situation when there was no other choice,’ Henderson roared, as he stood up. ‘The difference is, you won’t find me beating up a training comrade in the toilet just for the fun of it.’

  ‘What about your poor little wife, then?’ Luc asked, as he shot up again and stood eyeball to eyeball with Henderson. ‘Joan went mental after your daughter died, but you still went off to work in France. Everyone knows you cheated on her with a woman called Maxine and god knows how many others.

  ‘Then you came back and got your wife pregnant. When you’ve pissed her off so much that she wants you dead, you incinerate all her pets and have her thrown in the loony bin. So what kind of person are you to question my decency and ask whether you can trust me?’

  Henderson reached across the desk and grabbed Luc around the neck. ‘You have no business speaking about my wife like that,’ he hissed. ‘You poisonous little shit.’

  Luc was gasping, but he was determined not to look weak and stretched his lips into a thin smile.

  ‘Touched a nerve, did I?’

  ‘I ought to thrash the daylights out of you,’ Henderson said, as the phone on the desk between them started to ring.

  ‘No matter how much you thrash me, it won’t make me wrong, will it?’ Luc sneered.

  Henderson’s whole body trembled with rage as he looked down at the ringing telephone, then up at Luc, who was starting to turn blue. He shoved Luc violently away and snatched the receiver.

  ‘Henderson speaking.’

  He recognised the voice of Admiral Hammer as Luc thumped against the wall. The boy rubbed his injured back and gulped air.

  ‘I hear one of your boys took out an entire Polish unit on Walker’s training exercise,’ Admiral Hammer said jovially.

  Henderson found it hard to focus on the conversation so soon after losing his temper. ‘Yes, Admiral,’ he said stiffly. ‘Everyone in Group A did exceptionally well.’

  ‘Good,’ Hammer said. ‘Because the Prime Minister is taking a keen and detailed interest in Special Operations right now. He wants all SOE training programmes scaled up and at least twenty agents dropped throughout occupied Europe within six weeks.’

  ‘That’s excellent news,’ Henderson said, as he eyed Luc warily across the room.

  ‘We’re meeting in Baker Street at ten on Wednesday morning to discuss missions. I want you and McAfferty there and be warned that the PM will sit in if his schedule allows.’

  ‘I’ll try and behave myself, sir,’ Henderson said.

  After exchanging goodbyes, Henderson put the phone back in its cradle. He felt guilty about the red marks he saw on Luc’s neck and couldn’t decide whether to hate or pity him.

  ‘Don’t ever speak to me like that again,’ Henderson said calmly.

  ‘I don’t care if you’re gonna kick me out,’ Luc said, trying to sound casual but coming over as desperate.

  Henderson shook his head. ‘You’re too damned good to kick out,’ he explained rel
uctantly. ‘You’re a vile creature. I’m probably a vile creature too. So I suppose it’s best if we don’t probe too deeply into each other’s heads from now on.’

  Luc nodded and gave a surly, ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You’ve got two weeks to rest, relax and have fun. Try to act like a member of the human race and when you come back you’re going to help us to win this damned war. Now get the hell out of my office.’

  READ ON FOR THE FIRST CHAPTER

  OF THE NEXT HENDERSON’S

  BOYS BOOK, GREY WOLVES.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sunday 20 April 1941

  Marc Kilgour had jumped out of aeroplanes, belted around the countryside on an old Triumph motorbike, shot a straw dummy through the heart with a sniper rifle, studied the correct procedure for attaching limpet mines to the hull of a boat, survived in the wild on berries and squirrel meat, stuffed dead rats with dynamite, swum freezing lakes and done physical jerks until he was as fast and strong as any thirteen-year-old was likely to get.

  But training counts for nothing if you lose your head, and Marc felt uneasy squatting in the two-man canoe with damp trousers, an oar resting between his legs and Commander Charles Henderson seated behind.

  It was near midnight on a moonless night – the only kind dark enough to infiltrate occupied France by boat. The sea was calm, the air had bite and the blacked-out French coastline was a total mystery. They might have been fifty metres from shore, or a thousand.

  They’d trained to drop into occupied France by parachute, but the RAF refused to spare prized bombers for espionage work. A fast torpedo boat for the long voyage down France’s western coast would have been second best, but the Royal Navy was no more willing.

  In the end they’d made the two-day journey from Porth Navas Creek in Cornwall aboard Madeline, an elderly French steam tug designed for harbour work rather than open sea. Their canoe was a leisure craft that had spent years hanging from the ceiling in a Cambridge junk shop, before being discovered by Henderson, who patched its cloth hull with fish-glue and pieces cut from a coal tarp.

  The rest of their equipment was no better. The radio transmitter was an unreliable beast. Twice the weight of more recent sets, it left the canoe precariously low in the water and compromised the amount of equipment they could carry. Henderson had kicked up a stink, but Britain was fighting alone against a Nazi empire and CHERUB wasn’t the only unit muddling through with scraps.

  ‘Nerves holding out?’ Henderson asked quietly, as his oar cut into a wave.

  ‘Just about,’ Marc said.

  Henderson was the one thing that gave Marc confidence. He was a flawed human: drinker, womaniser, a short-tempered maverick who rubbed senior colleagues up the wrong way. But as some men turn genius when you give them a football, or set a maths problem, Henderson had a gift for espionage. He was completely ruthless, able to speak the five major European languages in a variety of accents, and had a magical ability to devise practical and sophisticated operations.

  ‘Are those young eyes seeing things I can’t?’ Henderson asked.

  Marc squinted, but could barely see beyond the end of the boat. ‘What if the tide’s carrying us further out?’ he asked. ‘I mean, are you even rowing in the right direction? Shall I take a compass bearing?’

  Henderson gave a restrained laugh. ‘You don’t have much faith in my nautical skills, do you? Listen to the gulls. Are they getting louder or quieter?’

  ‘Louder,’ Marc said, realising that the gulls lived in colonies onshore.

  Marc felt foolish: he might have been blind in the dark, but Henderson had been using his other senses to navigate.

  ‘Clever old goat, aren’t you?’ Marc said cheekily.

  A dark mass loomed beyond the bow. Marc thrust his oar out ahead of the canoe, then pushed hard against rocks jutting from the water. The boat tilted as its canvas side-scraped barnacles. Henderson threw himself sideways to counterbalance, but with the canoe so heavy it wasn’t enough to stop water spilling over the side.

  Marc threw down his oar and reached around to grab an old paint tin used for bailing out. He’d been soaked down one side when the wave came in and the pool in the hull now topped his canvas plíímsolls.

  Directly behind, Henderson tried pushing the boat off the rocks with his oar. The back end drifted out, but the bow was impaled on something. Marc bailed speedily, but the water kept rising. As no more had come over the side it could only mean one thing.

  ‘Hull’s torn,’ Marc said, alarmed, but still having the wits to keep his voice low.

  Henderson stood up. As he jumped on to the rocks the back of the boat rose up. He’d hoped taking his weight out might save the canoe, but the shift of balance set all the water running towards Marc at the front. The heavy case with the radio inside whacked Marc’s back as the Atlantic engulfed his legs.

  As the bow dived, a sharpened metal prong shot through the breach in the hull. Marc clambered up the tilting boat as she hit sand a metre and a half below the surface. Shallow water meant land was close, but Marc’s relief didn’t last. As he kicked to stay afloat his foot snared a coil of barbed wire.

  Marc squeezed his face, stifling a howl. Henderson had pulled two floating suitcases and a backpack on to the rocks before realising his companion was in trouble. He recognised the metal spearing the upright canoe as the leg of a tank trap. These criss-crossed metal tripods were designed to prevent tanks and amphibious vehicles driving up beaches.

  Their presence was mystifying: Henderson had targeted a landing beach with cliffs beyond the sand. Tanks didn’t do cliffs, so either the Germans had installed tank traps for no reason or they’d come ashore in the wrong spot.

  But that concern was for later. Right now, Marc was stuck and kept himself afloat by locking his arms around the tank trap. In sheer frustration, he yanked his leg upwards, but the result was excruciating pain as a barb punched through his plimsoll into the top of his foot.

  ‘For Christ’s sake be gentle,’ Henderson warned, as he knelt on the slippery rocks and leaned out. ‘What if they’re rigged?’

  It hadn’t occurred to Marc that the wire might be linked to an explosive. ‘Eh?’ he gasped. ‘Do they do that?’

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ Henderson said. ‘If you have snagged an anti-tank mine, neither of us will ever know much about it. Now pull your ankle up gently. High as you can without straining the wire.’

  They’d expected wire, and Henderson had a pair of snips clipped to his belt, alongside his gun, holster and torch. As Marc pulled his knee towards his chest, Henderson felt blindly underwater, running a hand down the boy’s leg until he reached the wire, and cut one side.

  Marc expected the wire to peel away, but with barbs stuck in his flesh Henderson had to cut the other side and bring him up with a short length of wire still embedded. Henderson dragged Marc on to a flattish section of rock. The boy lay on his elbows and took three gulps of air, before rolling on to his back and studying the length of wire, with two barbs in his ankle and one in the top of his foot.

  ‘You weigh enough,’ Henderson said breathlessly.

  Marc went up on one knee, braced for pain and ripped out the wire. As blood pooled into his sock he put some weight down on his bad foot.

  ‘Think it’s up to much?’ Henderson asked.

  ‘Hurts, but I’ll manage.’

  Henderson began lifting the empty canoe clear of the tank trap. Simultaneously a wave swept over the rocks, floating one of the rescued suitcases. Marc scrambled on all fours, grabbing the case handle as it teetered, but when he looked back he realised that one case was already missing.

  ‘Where’s the transmitter?’

  ‘Six feet under,’ Henderson said.

  ‘Is it worth pulling up?’

  ‘Not after a soaking,’ Henderson said, as he threw loose rocks into the back of the canoe. ‘I’ll weight the boat down. The Germans will spot her when the tide goes out, but we’ll be long gone, provided your leg holds out.’r />
  The plan was to land on a lightly defended beach, bury the canoe and reclaim it for the return trip, but that wouldn’t be happening now.

  ‘Looks like these rocks form a natural jetty back to dry land,’ Henderson said, as he handed Marc the snips. ‘You start moving. Take one case and keep an eye out for more wires.’

  Marc’s wounds were excruciating, but Instructor Takada had taught techniques for managing pain. People calmly endured surgery in the days before anaesthetic and what were a few gouges compared to that?

  In places the barnacled rocks dipped below the water and Marc had to paddle, though never above his knee. He held the case in front of himself, because that would hit any coils of wire before his legs did.

  When the rocks ended his plimsoll squelched into mushy sand. There was a chance of buried mines, but it was too dark to deal with them, so the only strategy was to hope for the best.

  ‘Keep low,’ Henderson warned, when he stepped up behind, carrying the backpack and the other suitcase.

  A shelf in the beach offered limited cover and the pair nestled down. Henderson took a moment to find a small pair of binoculars and used them to scan the landscape.

  ‘Anything?’ Marc asked.

  ‘Too bloody dark,’ Henderson said. ‘Though if we can’t see them, they can’t see us.’

  The sea brought in a strong breeze, which rustled through reed beds beyond the sand. When the wind stopped, they heard noise coming from not far beyond. It was the sound of men in good spirits.

  ‘Shall we move?’ Marc asked impatiently.

  Henderson traced the line of the horizon with his finger. ‘If they’ve put all those tank traps on the beach, there has to be defensive positions along there. I’m not moving until I know where they are.’

  It made sense, but Marc was cold and bloody. After four minutes of fear and pain, he broke silence with a childish whine.

  ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  Henderson looked cross. ‘It doesn’t get light for six hours, but sooner or later we’ll hear a door clank, or someone will step outside for a smoke. Until then …’