Scorched Earth

by Robert Muchamore

  ‘This pack is heavy,’ Henderson said. ‘I’ll stick it here while I run out to tell my friends that I’ve found a table.’

  ‘No problem,’ the waitress said.

  As Henderson set the backpack down, he sneaked a hand under a flap and snapped a glass time-pencil detonator. This detonator was rated for one minute, but they weren’t the most accurate devices so he actually had somewhere between thirty seconds and two minutes to get away.

  Running across the square might alert the waitress, so Henderson could only go at a brisk walk, making signals like he was beckoning his imaginary friends towards him. When Paul saw Henderson exit without his pack, he reached up as though he was stretching into a yawn.

  Joel had already shorted out the car’s ignition to start the engine and he pulled out on Paul’s signal. Sam glanced around furtively before unfurling a bed sheet on which was scrawled a message:

  THE REAL ROUEN RESISTANCE

  ACCEPTS NO COMPROMISE WITH NAZIS

  Below the message, Paul had carefully drawn out the resistance’s Cross of Lorraine emblem.

  Sam quickly draped the bed sheet between the Mercedes’ silver-star hood ornament and the driver’s side door-mirror. Joel stopped the car just past the square’s entrance. Paul hopped in the back, followed closely by Sam.

  As Henderson scrambled into the front passenger seat, his backpack exploded in the restaurant 100 metres away. The entire glass and wood façade got blown out, instantly killing everyone inside and spitting a powerful fireball.

  As a dozen of Rouen’s most senior German officers got incinerated, shards of hot glass and debris flew across the square, causing serious injuries and leaving almost nobody sitting around the small square without burns or cuts.

  The quickest way out of town and the most direct route to Paris would involve crossing the Seine, but the bridges would all have a German checkpoint, so they headed south. Cars were a rare sight, so the plan was to drive 4 kilometres and abandon the car when they reached the Dominaile Forest.

  They passed the heavily-guarded gates of the fuel depot they’d sabotaged the night before with no problem, but as the terrain turned rural and the first trees scrolled past the side windows a truck roared out of a side turning and T-boned them.

  Joel fought the steering wheel, but the truck was much heavier and their little car tilted on to its side. Injuries might have been far worse had the sideways skid not been absorbed by a huge hedge. The car had no seatbelts and Henderson found himself lying on top of Joel with a smell of fuel and the sound of free-spinning wheels.

  When he looked in the back, Sam was clambering out, but Paul appeared to be unconscious. The car windows had been open. Paul’s shirt was in shreds and his shoulder bled profusely where it had been dragged along tarmac.

  Henderson realised he had a slight concussion himself, because it seemed like one second he was looking at Paul, then his memory blanked and Sam had him halfway out of the car.

  The truck was 30 metres away, stationary. The way it had come out of nowhere had to be deliberate and there appeared to be a group of scruffy young men peering cautiously around it.

  ‘Let’s move,’ Henderson said, as he flopped to the ground and found his feet.

  There were dense trees on both sides of the road. Henderson grabbed Sam’s arm, but he was trying to climb back into the car.

  ‘My brother’s still in there,’ Sam protested.

  The young men were still cautiously moving around the truck and it was now clear that they were local Maquis, not Germans. Finally, the bravest of the young men shouted, ‘Surrender.’

  Henderson gave Sam a tug and the teenager found branches scraping his face as Henderson dragged him into the woods.

  *

  Team A’s mood relaxed after a few hours’ sleep in a barn. An accidental encounter with a lonely old farmer earned PT, Edith, Marc, Luc, Daniel and Michel a generous cooked dinner of eggs and wild mushrooms, served with local wine.

  The farmer told them about a downed British airman he’d helped two years earlier and as he regularly foraged for mushrooms, he gave excellent information on the best paths for riding bikes and likely places for German checkpoints.

  They left the farm at sunset and the Germans were now spread so thin that the convoy of bikes went 20 kilometres before seeing any sign of the enemy.

  It was an abandoned Tiger tank. At first they thought it had been shot by an Allied plane or blown up by local resistance, but the outside was in good shape and when Luc climbed cautiously on to the turret he caught a strong whiff of burnt rubber and saw dials and controls melted from some kind of electrical fire.

  ‘Shorted out in the heat, I guess,’ Luc said.

  The Germans were sure to be back. Even if the tank couldn’t be repaired, undamaged parts could be used for spares, so PT reached inside and dropped their last ball of plastic and a thirty-minute timed fuse down by the gunner’s position. Hopefully the small explosion would ignite all the ammunition and blow the tank apart when it went off.

  Their next encounter with the 108th came an hour later and had been caused by Allied bombing. Two Opel trucks had been hit by rockets. One must have been full of ammunition crates because its blackened chassis had burned so hot that it had melted to the surface of the road. The second truck had a burned-out cab and they’d already rolled past when Edith looked back and saw something like a face.

  ‘Wait,’ she gasped.

  It was a short night so PT looked frustrated as he turned back. Edith had spotted three boys laid out on the roadside. The only obvious damage was blood congealed in their ears, which meant that delicate blood vessels inside their skulls had been ruptured by the shockwave from a large explosion. Most likely when the truck full of ammunition blew up.

  The boy in the middle didn’t seem to be bloody and Edith reached forward to see if there was a weak pulse. As she was about to lift his arm, Luc grabbed her slim waist and yanked her backwards.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ Edith shouted furiously, as Luc threw her down in the dirt. ‘Why’d you do that?’

  Instead of answering, Luc shone a small torch between two of the bodies. When Edith stood, she saw the torch beam illuminating a grenade nestled in the middle boy’s armpit. The pin was pulled, and had almost certainly been wound down to a one- or two-second delay.

  ‘You just saved my life,’ Edith gasped, and she was so relieved that she kissed Luc’s cheek.

  ‘Would have got me as well,’ Luc said coldly. ‘The 108th are bad-asses. There’s always gonna be a trap if they lay bodies out like that.’

  PT and Marc were the last to double back. ‘Are they from your orphanage?’ Daniel asked.

  Marc choked back tears as he looked into young dead faces and nodded. ‘I grew up with those three.’

  Marc, Edith and Daniel all started crying and for once Luc kept his mouth shut.

  ‘We can’t leave ’em like that,’ PT said. ‘It’s disrespectful, but the poor bastard who turns up next might get their arms blown off.’

  They all got back on their bikes and rode about 100 metres. Marc was the best shot, but he was in a state, so Luc knelt on one knee and aimed Marc’s sniper rifle at the body in the middle. The bullet jerked the body and the exploding grenade made a gory mess across the road.

  Marc was sobbing. ‘I wonder what’s happened to the other two?’ he said.

  PT put an arm around his back. ‘Don’t let it get to you. The Allies are landing more equipment every day. They’re gonna break out of Normandy and push every Nazi out of this country.’

  ‘Hope you’re right.’ Marc sniffed. ‘Because I don’t think I can take much more of this shit.’

  Part Three

  August 15th–August 24th 1944

  Resistance and Maquis activity meant that the 108th Heavy Tank Battalion arrived at the front lines in Normandy three days late, critically short of fuel, spares and ammunition, and with a quarter of its Tiger tanks destroyed or out of action.

  It too
k two months of brutal fighting for the Allied armies to break out of Normandy. But once they’d smashed through German lines they began a rapid advance, sweeping west to Lorient and Nantes and south to the River Loire.

  In mid-August, Operation Dragoon saw 95,000 Americans landing in southern France. They advanced further in one week than the Normandy invasion managed in its first two months. In the north, a vast Allied army now charged west towards the River Seine and the cities of Rouen and Paris which lay on its banks.

  An increasingly desperate Hitler made arrangements to send heavy artillery and huge quantities of explosives to the French capital. Many people believed that Paris was the most beautiful city in the world, but if Hitler got his way, scorched-earth tactics would see it razed to the ground.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Tuesday 15 August 1944

  Marc stood peeing. The little window in front of him was open and he stared over rooftops at the hilly and affluent suburb of Saint Cloud, 9 kilometres west of central Paris. The sun was bright and already hot enough to make his brow bead with sweat.

  He washed his hands, but kept them wet. Marc’s bedroom was tiny. All the covers were on the floor and Jae was sprawled on his bed, face down and naked. Marc held his fingertips above her shoulder blades and let the cold water drip.

  Jae’s slim body shuddered as drops hit her skin and she moaned as she rolled on to her back.

  ‘Hey you,’ she said, smiling.

  The bed was a single and Marc shivered as he laid on sheets cold with sweat. The air felt thick and there was a smell of stale breath and armpits that would have been gross coming from anyone but a girl he was madly in love with.

  As Marc snuggled up, Jae threw a surprise by swinging a leg across his midriff and sitting astride his chest.

  ‘You’re putting on weight,’ Marc gasped. ‘Get off.’

  ‘Make me,’ Jae teased.

  Marc raised his right leg and effortlessly knocked her off. As Jae slid off the bed on to the floorboards, Marc snatched her ankle. Jae went into a spasm as he tickled the sole of her foot.

  ‘No!’ Jae shrieked.

  ‘Ticklish there, aren’t you?’ Marc said.

  Jae squirmed and giggled helplessly as Marc let go of her foot and started tickling her under the arms. Drool spilled out the corner of Jae’s mouth as Marc moved in for a kiss.

  ‘Aye-aye, what’s going on here then?’ PT said.

  Marc sprang up as Jae dived under tangled bedclothes.

  ‘Haven’t you heard of knocking?’ Marc asked, half smiling, half angry.

  ‘Where’s the fun in that?’ PT replied, as he rattled a single-sheet newspaper. ‘I need a quick word.’

  Marc tutted. ‘It better be important.’

  The two lads ended up in the kitchen. The five-bedroom apartment was on the third floor and the living-room’s giant bay window gave a sweeping view downhill, across the Seine towards central Paris. On a good day you could see the Eiffel Tower, but right now the heat made it too hazy.

  Jae was visiting from Beauvais, but Marc, Luc, Sam, PT, Edith and Henderson had been living here for eight weeks. They’d done a few little delivery jobs for Maxine’s Ghost Circuit, but they’d mostly been twiddling thumbs and slowly turning the apartment into a tip.

  ‘I know Henderson’s gone to Rouen,’ Marc said. ‘But where’s everyone else?’

  ‘Sam and Edith are out looking for food. I haven’t seen Luc this morning, but I expect he’s two floors down, with that married mother of two.’

  Marc laughed. ‘Must be tough not having a girlfriend when even a scumbag like Luc is getting some action.’

  ‘I certainly need something to relieve the tedium,’ PT said, as he pulled a chunk of hard black bread from a loaf and tucked it in his cheek to soften. ‘Remember our old friend, Milice Commander Robert?’

  ‘He killed Rosie,’ Marc said. ‘I’m not likely to forget, am I?’

  ‘Read this,’ PT said, as he handed over the underground newspaper.

  The two-day-old paper was tissue thin. Some sections were smudged where several people had already read it.

  ‘This is a communist paper,’ Marc sneered, then more angrily as he saw the depleted loaf on the kitchen dresser, ‘How much bread have you scoffed? That’s all we’ve got between seven and who knows when we’ll find more?’

  ‘Second article,’ PT said, as he struggled to chew. ‘The Nazis would still be winning the war if they built their bunkers out of this bread.’

  Marc took the sheet. With paper and ink in short supply, the headlines in underground newspapers were only a few millimetres high. Stories stayed short and usually stirred propaganda into the news.

  DON’T LET THE MILICE GET AWAY!

  As the Allies advance towards an inevitable battle in Paris, France’s vilest traitors are abandoning their Milice uniforms and going into hiding.

  These sub-humans use stolen identity papers and take new names so that they can avoid retribution by the communist brotherhood.

  Comrades are urged to root out this cancer! Destroy the Milice! Act before they vanish!

  THEY SHALL HAVE NO PART IN THE NEW COMMUNIST FRANCE.

  ‘I don’t know about you, but I don’t much like the idea of Rosie’s killer vanishing on us,’ PT said. ‘I found a map of Paris. The address Paul found for Robert’s café is only four stops from here on the Métro.’

  ‘And when did you last see the Métro open?’ Marc asked. ‘We haven’t had electricity at all for the last three days.’

  ‘An hour’s walk, then,’ PT said. ‘What else are we gonna do all day?’

  ‘Henderson ordered us to stay here,’ Marc said.

  PT laughed. ‘Since when did his orders bother you?’

  ‘Look,’ Marc said, as he glanced back over his shoulder to make sure that his girlfriend was still out of earshot in the bedroom. ‘It’s not that I don’t care about Rosie, but Jae’s only here for one day. She’ll get in a right mood if I say I’m leaving.’

  PT understood where Marc was coming from, but still felt a bit irritated. ‘All right then,’ he sighed. ‘You stay here working up a sweat with your little farm girl. I’ll track him down on my own.’

  *

  Paul shuffled back nervously when he heard boots clank on the wooden hatch in the ceiling.

  ‘Joel,’ he whispered, reaching across the tiny black space and tapping his fellow prisoner’s foot.

  When the hatch opened a shaft of light made both lads shield their eyes. For the first three weeks they’d been hauled out of the basement every few days for a nurse’s visit. But that stopped once their cuts from the car accident healed. Now, their guard just threw down scraps of food and hauled up their slop bucket on a rope.

  ‘How’s the weather down there?’ the doughy guard asked, finding his own joke hilarious.

  Paul and Joel couldn’t hold their eyes open in the dazzling light, but the sound of a revolver being cocked made them try. Getting shot would be unfortunate, but Paul reckoned he might choose a bullet over another eight weeks holed up in darkness.

  ‘I hear you can be tricky,’ the guard warned. ‘So I want you to climb out one at a time. Real slow.’

  Paul was nearest the ladder. He knew the layout of the little cellar well enough to find anything with his eyes shut, but when he tried climbing his brain went into meltdown, as if his muscles had forgotten how to do stuff.

  ‘Ain’t got all day,’ the guard barked. ‘Move out!’

  ‘I can’t see,’ Paul shouted back, panicked by his state of mind. ‘My eyes need to adjust.’

  ‘What are you bringing us out for?’ Joel asked.

  ‘It’ll be for an arse whooping if you don’t hurry up.’

  Paul eventually got it together. Hands on the side of the ladder, one clumsy step at a time. It was getting so that his eyes would stay open for a couple of seconds at a time when he got to the top. He breathed clean air and felt sun-warmed tiles on the soles of his feet.

  ‘Throu
gh there,’ the guard said, as he shoved Paul towards an open door.

  The place sparked vague memories of the night they’d arrived. It was a boarded-up ticket office but the trains that regularly shook their cell never stopped at the platform outside.

  Two thuggish railway workers leaned against the far wall and there was a bucket and some clean rags on a table. Paul and Joel were both ordered to strip and wash, which wasn’t easy because the water was cold and there was no soap.

  Paul didn’t shave yet, but Joel was handed a cut-throat razor and gave himself a couple of nicks as he sheared off 3 centimetres of ragged beard. Paul could almost tolerate the light by the time he got told to put on some army boots and a tattered railway worker’s uniform.

  He still needed to think about every routine movement and he was fascinated by scabs and lumps that he’d only been able to feel in the darkness. His torn shoulder muscle had healed, but he had scars where he’d scraped across tarmac through the car’s open window.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Joel asked, as he buttoned his shirt.

  ‘It’s on a need-to-know basis,’ one of the railway workers said.

  ‘And the likes of us don’t need to know,’ the other added, as he smiled at his colleague.

  Paul felt cautiously optimistic as he was led out of the ticket office and on to a deserted platform. The nightmare had always been that the Nazis would get them, but Rouen’s communist resistance wouldn’t bother getting them washed and dressed up for that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The Nazis banned civilians from driving in Paris soon after the invasion. The occupied city had always been quiet, but now it was eerily so. The Germans kept their own journeys to a minimum, saving fuel for battle or a retreat. The Métro opened for one hour in the morning and one in the evening, but only if the electricity was on. Mainline trains couldn’t go south or west because the Allied advance had cut the lines off.

  PT got lucky and found a horse-drawn taxi-cart for a sunny half-hour ride to an industrial district on the other side of the Seine. There weren’t even food queues now. The Germans wanted to discourage any kind of public assembly and all official rations had been reserved for the army.