Henderson’s Boys 4: Grey Wolves

by Robert Muchamore

  The guard gave Marc an almighty shove towards the door, then ordered Carlos’ friend to drag his body out of the cell. Marc looked up at the gun-toting German, expecting a boot or a shove, but saw surprising kindness in his teenaged face. Even though he was scared, Marc enjoyed his first breath of outdoor air in over a week.

  The French guard jabbed Marc between the shoulder blades with the end of his baton. ‘Start walking, you dumb turd. You’d better have a good story for the commandant if you don’t want a bullet through the back of your head.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  After hosing off in the warehouse, Troy gave the two newly arrived adult agents their travel documents. Henderson had ordered them to stop using the artist’s house for a while, in case neighbours got suspicious, so the agents would spend the night lying low in the dockside café, while the newly arrived explosives and equipment were taken to an unlet shop a few doors from Alois’ workshop.

  Luc spent his first night undercover in Nicolas’ house. After a fish supper, he went upstairs, sat on the end of Joel’s bed and produced a screw-top aluminium can, with the label of an upmarket brand of French coffee beans.

  Joel inspected the tin and nodded with approval. The label was faded and the tin itself battered and scratched, exactly like the old coffee tins they used to store things in the workshop at Keroman. He felt extremely tense as he unscrewed the lid.

  He’d taken a risk, photographing the inside of the U-boat batteries with Henderson’s miniature camera. There hadn’t been time to send pictures back to Britain aboard Madeline II so Henderson had developed them using supplies scrounged from a local newspaper reporter, then the girls – Boo and Rosie – had transmitted as many details as they could back to Britain.

  Joel delved into the can and took out one of the metal washers, then reached under his bed for an example of the original.

  Luc leaned forward anxiously. ‘Is it good?’

  ‘Well I can’t tell the difference,’ Joel said, as he held it up to the flickering bulb on the ceiling. ‘I still don’t understand how these washers can make so much difference. And it’s so secret, they wouldn’t tell us over the radio even though everything we send is in code.’

  Luc had never been undercover before, so he was eager to impress, instead of being his usual arrogant self.

  ‘I went down to London to pick the tin up and met the professor who designed them,’ Luc explained. ‘He calls it a platinum pill. The normal washers are made from hardened steel. The ones in that can are made from an alloy of steel and platinum. When the platinum touches the acid inside the battery it reacts, producing a toxic chemical which stops the battery from producing energy.

  ‘Apparently, the biggest problem was getting the platinum to release slowly enough. If you just made the washer from solid platinum it would kill the battery before the U-boat left port. But he’s found a way to get the platinum to react very slowly so that the U-boat’s battery doesn’t die until it’s been used for about a hundred hours, by which time it’ll hopefully be stuck in the middle of the Atlantic.’

  Joel finished the story, ‘So the boat has no battery to move underwater. The Royal Navy closes in, drops a few depth charges, blows the Krauts to smithereens and everyone celebrates with tea and crumpets.’

  ‘Sounds right,’ Luc said, smiling. ‘So do you think you’ll have problems getting the washers inside the batteries?’

  ‘Nah,’ Joel said. ‘Every time a battery comes in for servicing you have to unscrew the electrodes and clean all the furry muck off. You switch the regular washer for one of these when you put it back together. There must be a hundred washers in the tin and there’s six battery units in each boat. That makes enough for sixteen or seventeen boats.’

  Luc nodded. ‘That’s what the professor said. He reckons it’s easy enough to make another batch if they work well.’

  ‘I’m just glad we’ve found a way to sabotage the boats,’ Joel said. ‘Otherwise I’d have spent the last two months wasting my time. So what’s it been like on campus lately?’

  Luc shrugged. ‘Henderson’s wife’s as nutty as ever. McAfferty’s looking after the baby more than she is and they’re trying to find a nanny. Khinde and Takada have started training the group C recruits.’

  ‘And what are people saying about the war?’

  Luc put his hands over his head. ‘It’s too depressing,’ he said. ‘They’ve had more big bombing raids all over the country. More boats than ever are going down in the Atlantic and they reckon the Germans are advancing east into Russia by up to thirty kilometres a day.’

  Joel nodded. ‘Sounds about the same as what we’ve been hearing from Radio France. They reckon the Germans could be in Moscow by November. If that happens we’ll be up the creek without a paddle.’

  Luc pulled off one of his boots and lay down on what had been PT’s bed until he got stabbed. ‘Well I don’t care what the odds are,’ he said, as he interlocked his fingers behind his head. ‘The Germans killed the only person in the world I ever cared about, so I’d get blown to bits sooner than surrender to any of those Nazi shitbags.’

  *

  Rennes prison had rows of tiny solitary cells in the basement that made the converted workshop on the second floor seem like paradise. Fortunately for Marc they were full up and he found himself sitting cross-legged with both wrists manacled to the outer wall of the prison’s administrative building.

  Fresh air and sunlight were welcome, but the view over a small courtyard to the opposite wall pitted with bullet holes where men had faced firing squads was depressing. Marc envied the birds circling overhead as he wondered if all he had left was a short walk across the dried-out grass and a bullet through the chest. But was death really so bad compared to a year crammed in the cell upstairs, getting weaker and sicker by the day?

  ‘Left or right?’ a German asked, as he placed a metal can on the floor. It was the same guard who’d stood in the cell doorway. Chubby and no older than nineteen, he’d grown several centimetres in all directions since he’d been fitted for his uniform.

  After freeing Marc’s right hand, the German gave him the freshly opened tin of fruit.

  The chubby soldier struggled with his French. ‘From a Red Cross parcel.’

  Marc looked down at the brightly coloured chunks of fruit. He was too nervous to feel hungry, but he forced them down because he wanted the German to see that he was grateful. And with his life balanced so precariously, it hardly seemed to matter if he spoke in German.

  Marc knew that civilians didn’t get Red Cross parcels. ‘So you have prisoners of war here?’

  The soldier smiled at hearing Marc speak his own language. ‘About eighty,’ he replied. ‘They get treated better than the civilians. You looked hungry.’

  ‘So they’re definitely gonna shoot me?’ Marc asked, as he tipped up the can and drained the syrup in the bottom.

  The soldier didn’t know how to answer this and looked down at the ground. ‘You’ll have to give me your hand now you’re finished.’

  Marc let the German lock his wrist back inside the manacle.

  ‘What’s so great about being alive anyway?’ Marc said, half smiling.

  ‘Commandant’s gone home for the day,’ the guard replied. ‘So they won’t be shooting you at dawn tomorrow and nobody gets shot on a Sunday, so you’ve got until Monday at least.’

  *

  Henderson prided himself on his mental strength. He focused on his job at Mamba Noir and his burgeoning espionage network, and felt ashamed when he caught himself in a private moment worrying about Marc. He worked harder and pretended to be happier, but angst gnawed at his insides.

  Saturday was a few minutes old. Mamba Noir heaved with Germans and their female guests, with the jazz trio in full swing. With her wealthy French customers banned, Madame Mercier’s business brain had gone into overdrive to keep Mamba Noir profitable.

  She’d put German dishes on the restaurant menu, lowered the price and quality of the coc
ktails and shipped in a dozen beautiful girls to keep lonely German officers company until their wallets ran dry.

  ‘Where’s that blasted cigarette boy?’ a German captain asked, as Henderson stepped behind the bar carrying a tray of dirty glasses.

  He took a moment to recognise him, because one eye was half closed and his neck was swollen.

  ‘Captain Hartt,’ Henderson said warmly. ‘Good to see you. Hopefully we’ll have a new boy in tomorrow night, sir. Have you come up from the restaurant? You’re a whisky man, aren’t you? We’ve actually got hold of some American bourbon if you’d like to try.’

  ‘American?’ the German said curiously. ‘What harm can it do?’

  Henderson grabbed a shot glass. ‘This one is on the house. See what you think.’

  Hartt knocked it back and sloshed it around his mouth a few times before slamming his glass down. ‘Smooth, different to Scotch but I can’t taste much wrong with it.’

  ‘It’s not bad, is it? Would you like another?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Hartt said. ‘I have enough sorrows to drown the crew of a battleship.’

  As a barman, you never pried into people’s business unless they gave you an opening. ‘Nothing too serious I hope, sir.’

  Hartt lifted his chin and pulled down his shirt collar, revealing blotchy red skin. Henderson was tired and a little drunk, and it was only now that he recognised the distinctive rash that Marc had on his stomach after testing the itching powder.

  ‘The men started getting it almost as soon as we were out of port,’ Hartt explained. ‘Thought it was odd, but we kept sailing. By the following morning, half the crew was coming up with red welts and peeling skin. Couple of fellows started getting breathing problems. I had no choice but to turn around.’

  Henderson was delighted, but couldn’t show it. ‘Any idea what caused it?’

  ‘The lord alone knows,’ Hartt said. ‘Some kind of infection, or a parasite I suppose. Probably some dirty bugger on my crew picked it up from a French whore. When you’ve got forty-eight men crammed together like that, disease spreads like wildfire. And it’s not just us. U-53 was headed down to the Mediterranean. She had to pull in for emergency medical assistance at Vigo.’

  ‘Christ,’ Henderson said. ‘So when can you sail?’

  ‘Days, weeks, who knows?’ Hartt said, giving a shrug. ‘Until we work out the cause of this we’re crippled.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Marc couldn’t get comfortable with his wrists chained to the wall, but somehow managed fitful sleep under the stars, with the shouts of caged men coming from cells along three sides of the courtyard. At first light a metal door crashed open. A three-man firing squad and two cuffed and hooded prisoners clanked up a basement staircase.

  There was no great drama as the first man knelt down facing a wall, barely twenty metres from where Marc sat. The instructions were shouted in German: take aim, fire. His body crumpled, but they didn’t bother moving him.

  The second man gave more of a fight, jabbering in Russian and begging for someone called Anna. He got himself clubbed a couple of times and had to be manacled to the wall, but he died just the same. The Germans disappeared and a few minutes passed before two prisoners came along with a handcart and took the bodies away.

  As ways of dying went, the firing squad didn’t seem so bad. Marc decided he’d go like the first man: strong and silent, don’t give the Krauts any satisfaction. Though when he thought about Henderson and McAfferty and his mates, he wasn’t so sure. He wanted to hear them all talking and eating, the sound of footsteps on the stairs at campus and waking up in his own bed, all snug on a frosty morning.

  He imagined the prison wall blowing up and Henderson charging through, though it seemed unlikely. They’d used every stick of plastic blowing the trains and Henderson probably didn’t even know where he was.

  Prisoners and guards walked past as the sun came up and he got a tin cup filled with water and chunks of bread so hard that he had to soak them to bite through. It was past nine when an elderly French prison guard took his manacles off.

  ‘Where am I going?’ Marc asked.

  ‘Where I tell you,’ the guard said grumpily, before leading Marc down to a basement room with a puddled floor.

  Marc was ordered to strip, abandoning his clothes to a huge metal basket. The guard threw de-lousing powder at him before following up with two buckets of cold water over the head. There was nothing to dry off with and he got dressed in a freshly laundered singlet and baggy cotton trousers with a length of rope for a belt. Once his trousers were fixed, his hands got cuffed behind his back.

  The clothes were ragged, but it was Marc’s first proper wash or change of clothes in two weeks and he felt wonderfully fresh as he was marched barefoot across the prison yard, past the spot where he’d spent the night. He ended up in a corridor, behind a queue of a dozen similarly dressed men waiting to see the commandant. A sign hanging from the ceiling read Absolute Silence.

  At the head of the corridor were the double doors to the commandant’s office. The first prisoner out was frogmarched into a side room by two guards. The door closed and the prisoner screamed as he was brutally flogged.

  ‘They pickle the whip in brine,’ one of the men in front whispered. ‘So it burns like hell itself when it cuts you. Then they sterilise by rubbing salt into your wound.’

  Some men were escorted out of the commandant’s office unscathed, but most would return to their cells with blood and sea salt on their backs. The pain made every victim scream, so Marc was quaking when the double doors opened in front of him.

  ‘Face forward,’ a fierce-looking prison officer named Verne shouted from the back of the room. ‘State your name and number for the commandant. Any smart-mouthing and I’ll flog you till you pass out.’

  The prison commandant – who much to Marc’s surprise was also a Frenchman – sat behind an antique desk. To Marc’s partial relief, the chubby German soldier who’d given him canned fruit the evening before stood alongside him.

  ‘Name and number, what are you waiting for?’ Verne repeated, giving Marc a shove towards the desk. ‘And stand straight when you address the commandant.’

  ‘Marc Hortefeux,’ Marc said, as he stood bolt upright. ‘6060452.’

  The commandant looked down through half-rimmed glasses as he picked up a set of papers which Marc had last seen at the Gestapo HQ in Lorient.

  ‘Verne, what’s the charge against this young man?’ the commandant asked, in a surprisingly soft voice.

  ‘Murder of inmate 6059738.’

  The commandant looked at Marc, raising one eyebrow suspiciously. ‘What do you have to say for yourself?’

  Marc took a deep breath, knowing that the commandant only had to squiggle a signature to sentence him to death.

  ‘It was self-defence, sir. It was dark. He was very much larger than me.’

  The commandant looked up at Verne, ‘Any idea what sort of age and build 6059738 was?’

  Verne nodded. ‘Big Spanish fellow, sir. Nasty piece of work, raped and murdered a fifteen-year-old girl.’

  ‘But the boy came off best in this altercation?’ the commandant said, frowning at the apparent unlikeliness of this. ‘How old are you, Hortefeux?’

  ‘Thirteen,’ Marc said.

  ‘Are you sure it wasn’t another man in your cell that killed him?’ the commandant asked. ‘It’s no good covering up for someone in this situation, is it?’

  Marc shook his head. ‘I don’t know how it happened, sir. I’ve always been strong for my age. I must have caught him with a lucky punch in the dark and then I think his heart gave out.’

  ‘I could put him over the bench and flog the truth out of him,’ Verne suggested.

  The commandant shook his head as he looked at Marc’s file. ‘Black market trading, one-year sentence,’ he said irritably. ‘How does a boy caught smuggling a few bits of illegal food end up in a place like this?’

  The commandant’s obvious frustra
tion hung in the air for a few moments, until he spoke again.

  ‘I’ll ask you one final time, Hortefeux. Did another man in your cell kill the Spaniard and force you to take the blame?’

  Marc thought about lying, but knew that the next question would be about the identity of this alleged killer, and as the commandant seemed sympathetic, honesty seemed the best policy.

  ‘It was me, sir,’ Marc said.

  ‘Shall I flog him, sir?’ Verne asked eagerly.

  The commandant stood up from his desk. ‘We are not going to flog him, Monsieur Verne. He’s a thirteen-year-old boy, for Christ’s sake. He shouldn’t even be in here.’

  Now the young German spoke for the first time. ‘Commandant, the Spaniard has a brother-in-law inside the prison and several good friends. If you put Hortefeux back in the cells after this incident, it’s very likely he’ll end up dead.’

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ the commandant said with a sigh. ‘So my options are to flog the boy, have him put before a firing squad, or send him back to an overcrowded cell where he’ll most likely wind up dead within a week.’

  The young German leaned across the desk and spoke quietly, as if he was taking the commandant into his confidence. ‘Can I suggest we use him to help fill the quota?’

  ‘He’s too young,’ the commandant said.

  The German looked at Marc. ‘Do you have any experience of agricultural work?’

  ‘A bit,’ Marc said warily.

  ‘He’s obviously a tough little lad,’ the German said. ‘Change his year of birth from twenty-eight to twenty-six on his papers and he’ll be old enough for agricultural work. It’s no picnic, but even if he doesn’t get murdered in a cell, how long before he picks up TB, or a group of men tries to take advantage of him? We’d at least be giving him a fighting chance.’

  The commandant nodded reluctantly before looking up at Marc. ‘How would you feel about agricultural work, Hortefeux?’

  Marc hated everything about farms, but compared to the filthy cell and the threat of getting murdered, manure and hard graft seemed attractive.