Scorched Earth

by Robert Muchamore

  ‘I don’t need an escort,’ Jean said.

  PT shook his head. ‘It’s hot, you’re out of breath and you’ve lost blood.’

  Edith suspected that PT wanted to see the nurse rather than help Jean, but she chose not to tease him.

  The orphanage and adjoining monastery felt like an oasis amidst decay. Neat vegetable plots stretched across land that had once been reserved for play and, as the local school had closed down, cross-legged boys were taking their first morning lesson under the sun.

  A young nun carrying a bail of damp washing stepped aside, allowing the speeding bikes down the path to a nearby cottage. It had once been the home of the orphanage’s director, but the earth-floored house now served as a secret nursing station for the Maquis who lived in the surrounding fields and woodland.

  ‘Anyone home?’ PT shouted, thumping the cottage door as Jean hopped off the bike behind him. He smiled when seventeen-year-old Rosie Clarke answered. ‘I hoped you’d be here.’

  Her attractive figure was disguised by a nun’s habit. She tried to mouth something, but tripped over her words and only managed a come in gesture.

  PT and Rosie had once been an item, but it had ended after PT pressured her into having sex. Eighteen months on, the pair remained fond of each other, but their interactions were spoiled by jarring memories of nakedness and a bitter break-up.

  ‘You been OK?’ PT asked.

  ‘Enough Maquis injuring themselves to keep me busy,’ Rosie said, as her lower jaw toyed with the idea of yawning.

  ‘Wanna go for a walk some time, get a break from it all?’

  Rosie snorted as Jean stepped through the door. ‘Might look weird while I’m disguised as a nun,’ she pointed out as she backed away from PT and looked towards Jean. ‘Get that bloody shirt off and I’ll take a look at you.’

  Jean was breathless, but shunned PT’s offer of a supporting arm.

  The cottage’s ground floor was a single room, with a sink, a kitchen range and a dining table softened with blankets for examinations. A grubby teenaged Maquis slept on cushions by the staircase with one foot elevated. He’d been carried in a few hours earlier with a badly gashed leg and his BO hung in the air, even though Rosie had all the windows open.

  As Jean sat on the blanketed table, unbuttoning, Rosie scrubbed her hands under the cold tap.

  PT whispered in her ear, ‘I don’t wanna harass you, Rosie, but I still think there’s something between us.’

  ‘Maybe there is,’ Rosie said, as she dampened a sterile cloth. ‘But I told you I need time.’

  ‘How much longer?’ PT asked.

  But Rosie ignored him and stepped across to the table. Jean’s blood had started to clot and the balding teacher winced as Rosie peeled the bloody linen of his shirt away from the cut.

  ‘I’m trying to be gentle,’ she said, adopting her best nurse’s manner. But her tone stiffened when she threw Jean’s shirt at PT. ‘Run that under the standpipe outside before the blood sets. Then take it next door to the orphanage and see if one of the nuns can put it in with today’s laundry.’

  As PT turned on the tap outside, Rosie carefully dabbed clotted blood from the shoulder wound. Bullets and shrapnel travel at such high speed that a small entry wound doesn’t guarantee that there isn’t serious internal bleeding. Rosie was always conscious of this fact, because a small piece of shrapnel after a bomb blast had killed her father.

  ‘This will sting,’ Rosie said, as she picked up tweezers. ‘I need to open the wound to see what’s going on.’

  Jean gripped the edges of the table as Rosie dug tweezers into his shoulder wound. The metal tips immediately tapped something hard and Jean hissed with pain as his young nurse dug the object out and dropped it into an enamel bowl.

  ‘Hold this cloth in place to stop the bleeding,’ Rosie ordered.

  As fresh blood streaked down Jean’s back, Rosie inspected the bloody lump and saw that it was a piece of thin, curved glass.

  ‘Looks like part of a broken light bulb,’ Rosie said, as she held it up with the tweezers so that Jean could see.

  ‘One of the Milice shot a light fitting as I was running away,’ Jean said, nodding. ‘I didn’t feel it, but I guess I had other things on my mind.’

  ‘The cut could do with stitching,’ Rosie said. ‘But we’re out of sterile cord and low on bandages. I’ll paint on some iodine to stop an infection, but you’ll have to hold that gauze there until it scabs over.’

  ‘Henderson said we were good for medical supplies,’ Jean noted.

  Rosie nodded. ‘We picked quite a bit of stuff up in the last parachute drop, but Sister Honestus used three whole packs stitching up our fragrant friend in the corner.’

  ‘His nickname’s Franco,’ Jean said. ‘He’s a good man if you can stand the smell.’

  PT came back in holding a tattered man’s shirt. ‘The nuns gave me this. Yours should be scrubbed and dried by this evening.’

  Jean held up the shirt for inspection, but Rosie swept it away when he moved to pull it on.

  ‘You’ve lost a fair bit of blood,’ Rosie said. ‘Stay here and sleep for a couple of hours.’

  ‘I could fetch some medical supplies from the woods,’ PT said. ‘What else do you need, apart from cord and bandages?’

  Rosie looked longingly at the sun before giving PT an awkward smile. ‘I need fresh air and a break from this dingy cottage,’ she said. ‘How about I borrow Jean’s bike and ride with you?’

  PT smiled, but before he could answer a figure darted past the open window. As she stepped forward to investigate, a man in a navy Milice tunic booted the cottage door open and charged in with a rifle poised, shouting, ‘Hands in the air!’

  *

  The Maquis band in the woodland north of Beauvais was a fluid movement. A hard core of sixty young men and a couple of girls were led by Jean Leclerc. The sixty were supplemented by up to a hundred others, who drifted in and out of the woods depending upon climate, availability of food and the latest gossip on whether a young draft dodger was safer in town, in the woods or hiding in his mother’s attic.

  The other authority figure in this chaotic group was Captain Charles Henderson. Some of the young runaways admired this tough, broken-toothed British intelligence officer, but many others were communists who resented having an Englishman calling the shots.

  While Jean had assumed leadership through a mixture of an old teacher’s natural authority, good judgement and his soldiering experience in the Great War, Henderson earned respect because he was connected with the near-legendary Ghost resistance circuit in Paris, and had the power to control Allied parachute drops to Maquis and resistance groups.

  These supply drops brought everything from dried oats to plastic explosives. Henderson regularly received lists of sabotage targets via a coded radio link with CHERUB campus, and a hungry, bored Maquis who successfully carried out one of Henderson’s operations could earn his own rifle, new boots and, most importantly, a few days with a full belly.

  But parachutes could only drop light weapons. Larger Maquis groups in southern France had tried holding territory, but got ripped apart by German tanks and artillery. So Jean ensured that his group was split into half a dozen mobile squads, which regularly switched between farm buildings, cottages and temporary shelters erected in the woods.

  Edith hid her bike behind a hedge before heading into the woods and finding Henderson at an abandoned logging camp. She relayed the story of the ambush at the administration building as Henderson squatted on a tree stump.

  Four bored-looking Maquis listened in, along with trained CHERUB agents Joel and Sam Voclain. Joel was a good-looking fifteen-year-old who’d let his blond hair grow wild in the woods. At thirteen, Sam was a clone of his older brother and the youngest member of Henderson’s team.

  ‘Milice,’ Henderson said, before squirting spit through a gap where he’d lost three front teeth the year before. ‘Absolute scum.’

  Sam and Joel joined the spitting.


  In the eighteen months since the organisation had been formed, Milice had become the dirtiest word in the French language. As the war turned against Germany, Nazis had run short of military manpower and French police became reluctant to carry out their most extreme orders. The occupiers solved this problem by forming the Milice.

  The first Milice were loyal French Nazis, but after four years of occupation these were thin on the ground. The net was cast wider and Milice were recruited from the dregs of society. Thugs and criminals were given navy tunics and metal helmets. Answerable only to the Nazis’ Gestapo secret police, Milice units enthusiastically infiltrated resistance groups, rounded up homosexuals and Jews and ruthlessly hunted down Maquis.

  The Milice terrorised their own countrymen and often used their new authority for criminal ends. In many areas the Milice took control of the black-market food supply, set up brutal extortion rackets and used their search powers to rob homes and shops.

  ‘You must have been betrayed by the informant inside the office,’ Joel told Edith.

  ‘If it was her, why was the getaway ladder still in the toilet where she’d promised to leave it?’ Edith asked.

  Joel shrugged. ‘Well, who else could it be?’

  ‘She could have been under duress,’ Joel’s younger brother Sam pointed out. ‘Like, suppose the Gestapo found out somehow and threatened her. But she didn’t tell them everything, so you still had a chance of getting away?’

  Edith nodded. ‘If she’s never seen again, we’ll know the Gestapo got to her.’

  ‘Too many people knew Jean was going into Beauvais,’ Sam said. ‘We’re not secure here with so many men coming and going. Any one of them could be a Nazi spy.’

  ‘But we keep operational details to a core group, plus anyone going on the operation,’ Joel said.

  ‘Someone could easily have followed you into Beauvais.’

  ‘Or—’ Edith began, but Henderson had lost patience with the chatter.

  ‘Stop,’ Henderson said, as he stood up. ‘Why spend all morning speculating when you know it won’t get you anywhere? When we have the facts we’ll make use of them. For now, we remain vigilant in case someone has ratted us out. We’ll station extra lookouts and make sure everyone moves deeper into the woods.’

  ‘You want me to take a message around to the other squads’ camps?’ Edith asked.

  Henderson shook his head. ‘You get some rest. Joel and Sam can get word around. The Nazis will be jumpy after a shootout in town and the Milice will be out for blood. Everyone must lie low for a couple of days. Tell every squad to double up on lookouts and make it clear that nobody is allowed to leave until this dies down.’

  ‘A lot of the lads won’t take orders from you,’ Sam said.

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ Henderson said, with a shrug. ‘But if Jean was here, he’d say exactly the same.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Milice were ruthless, but poorly trained. Any decent soldier would have kept low and pointed rifles through the cottage’s open windows. Booting the door and charging in gave PT a second to spread himself out and launch a rugby tackle.

  As Rosie took cover and Jean went for his pistol, the Milice officer shot the ceiling before PT locked an arm around his neck and started choking him.

  The shoulder wound meant Jean had to shoot left-handed, but his aim was good when another Milice bobbed up at the window less than 3 metres away. After PT’s victim made his last gurgle, things went quiet apart from Rosie thumping upstairs to grab a hidden gun and get a look out of the upper windows.

  Franco sat up, looking startled as PT crawled to the open door. There were two cars on the road in front of the orphanage and some kind of disturbance amongst the kids taking outdoor lessons. Rosie glanced out front from the upper floor and saw the same, but gasped when she got to the rear.

  Two Milice crouched behind a low garden fence and one had just lobbed something towards an open window.

  ‘Grenade!’ Rosie shouted.

  PT thought about scrambling out of the door as the grenade bounced off the table and hit the dirt floor. Jean instinctively flicked it away with his boot before PT bravely intercepted and flipped it backwards over his head out of the rear window.

  He’d come within a second of getting his arm blown off. Glass blasted across the room as the grenade exploded and splinters of window frame speared the ceiling.

  ‘Is anybody hurt?’ PT yelled, as debris settled and his ears rang.

  Upstairs, Rosie pulled a pistol from under a loose floorboard and aimed out of the window. Her three bullets tore through the back fence, halting a second grenade throw and knocking both men back with large stomach wounds.

  Miraculously, nobody downstairs got hurt by shrapnel, but a bottle of medical alcohol had shattered and combusted in the heat from the blast. Lines of blue flame shot across the kitchen dresser and into a coal bucket. Within seconds the coal, dresser and front curtains were ablaze and choking smoke curled up to the ceiling.

  ‘Rosie, we’re on fire,’ PT shouted.

  Rosie charged downstairs, as fast as her billowing nun’s habit allowed. ‘I hit the two guys out back,’ she said. ‘Can’t see anyone else on that side.’

  ‘What if there’s an ambush?’ Franco asked, coughing from the smoke as he grabbed hold of his boots and tried standing on his good leg.

  ‘I doubt it,’ Rosie said. ‘If they had a lot of men they’d have surrounded us rather than sneaking up and bursting in.’

  ‘Gotta get out one way or another,’ PT said, trying not to breathe the smoke as he headed for the rear.

  There was no back door so they had to straddle through the window. This wasn’t hard, but it was impossible not to tread on the gruesome remains of the Milice, who Jean had killed with a headshot before his corpse caught the grenade blast.

  As Rosie and Jean covered with their pistols, PT hauled Franco out and supported him as they hobbled to the back gate.

  One of the guys Rosie had shot behind the fence looked dead, but the other still writhed. She finished him with a shot through the heart, then reached down, grabbed his MP35 sub-machine gun and tugged off a shoulder-belt fitted with grenades and ammo clips.

  Rosie looked comical in her nun’s habit, accessorised with ammo belt and machine gun, but nobody was in the mood to laugh. She reached cover 20 metres from the burning cottage and tried to work out what they were up against as Jean arrived, trailed by PT who was still helping Franco.

  One Milice officer had escaped from the vicinity of the cottage, but Rosie didn’t get a chance to shoot before he vanished into the lines of flapping laundry pegged out behind the orphanage. Their position gave no view over the front of the orphanage, but they could hear Milice officers shouting orders over the wails and shouts of distressed kids.

  ‘There’s a car down here and another further up the road,’ Rosie said. ‘I reckon we’re up against eight or ten Milice at most.’

  PT nodded in agreement. ‘And we took out four of them already.’

  Round the front of the orphanage a nun screamed and young boys wailed in a way that made you know something horrible had just happened.

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ PT said.

  Jean shook his head. ‘You’d abandon defenceless nuns and children?’

  ‘They’ll probably give the nuns a hard time and slap a few of the older boys around,’ PT said. ‘If we attack, we’ll be shooting towards the kids you’re so eager to protect.’

  Jean tutted with frustration. ‘I suppose.’

  A cocky, amplified voice echoed through a megaphone. ‘Jean Leclerc.’

  Rosie, PT and the others exchanged confused glances before megaphone man spoke again.

  ‘Jean Leclerc, I am Milice Commander Robert. I know you’re out there. I’ve got eighty men surrounding your position. Come out with your hands raised and nobody else will be harmed.’

  ‘Eighty men, my arse,’ PT said.

  ‘How does he know we�
��ve not scarpered?’ Franco asked.

  ‘He doesn’t,’ Rosie said. ‘But what’s he got to lose by bluffing?’

  ‘If you don’t show yourself, the orphanage will be destroyed and three nuns executed,’ Robert continued. ‘I will execute the first nun in thirty seconds.’

  Jean stepped forward, but PT pulled him back.

  ‘You can’t surrender,’ PT said firmly. ‘They’ll torture you for the names of everyone in the woods. Then they’ll start going after their families.’

  ‘Twenty seconds.’

  Clutching the German machine gun, Rosie handed Franco her pistol. At the same moment part of the cottage roof caved, releasing plumes of trapped smoke.

  ‘Five seconds.’

  ‘He’s bluffing,’ PT said. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’

  A gunshot rang out, closely followed by the sound of kids screaming hysterically and cries of ‘No!’.

  ‘One dead nun,’ Commander Robert shouted through the megaphone. ‘Thirty seconds until the next one gets it.’

  Jean moved and this time PT didn’t stop him.

  ‘I’m not giving in,’ Jean said resolutely. ‘But we can’t let them behave like this.’

  ‘He’s relying on your decency,’ PT said. ‘Don’t fall into their trap.’

  Jean scowled back at PT as he started walking towards the orphanage. ‘It’s home to over a hundred children. Where will they go if it’s burned down?’

  ‘I doubt there’s more than six Milice left,’ Rosie said as she jogged to catch up with Jean.

  ‘You keep out of sight,’ PT told Franco. ‘We’ll come back for you.’

  ‘Twenty seconds,’ Commander Robert announced.

  Jean kept low and used the thick smoke as cover.

  ‘You two go outside the wall by the road,’ Jean ordered. ‘I’ll surrender to buy time. Do your best to stop them taking me away. If it goes bad you’ve got to kill me rather than let them take me back to Beauvais for torture.’

  The crumbling wall ran parallel with the road. The orphanage was slightly uphill, but it gave Rosie and PT decent cover and a clear view of what was happening out front.