Scorched Earth - Robert Muchamore Page 0,12

jumped on top of the giant and used his cuffed hands to ram home a small dagger that he kept concealed inside his boot.

Down by the gate, Commander Robert braved machine-gun bullets as he jumped into the back of the open-topped car without bothering to open a door. As his two colleagues scrambled in the front and started the engine, Robert dived flat across the back seat.

The crying kids were all back inside the orphanage as Jean rolled off the giant, leaving his dagger sticking out of his neck, and the car began moving.

‘Christ,’ Jean gasped, keeping low as he searched the giant’s pockets for handcuff keys.

‘We need to keep an eye out,’ PT said, as he stood up and glanced around. ‘That commander looked so scared, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d left a man behind.’

Down by the gate, Rosie took aim at the retreating car, but only got an empty click from her machine gun. It would be out of range before she could reload, so she decided to take cover by scrambling over the wall. As she prepared to vault, Commander Robert sat up in the back seat and took two quick pistol shots.

One bullet skimmed PT’s arm, close enough for its vortex to ruffle his shirt sleeve. He dived clumsily into weeds growing close to the wall and grazed his knuckles on bricks as the bullet tore up a bush metres behind.

‘Too bloody close,’ PT gasped, assuming Jean was within earshot. ‘That commander’s either a very lucky shot, or a very good shot.’

PT didn’t want to move until the Milice car was out of sight, but he could hear Jean running on the other side of the wall.

‘Rosie!’ Jean shouted.

Down by the gate, Rosie lay on her back with her legs sprawled. PT began a sprint towards her as Jean ran through the gate, doubled back and got down on one knee in front of Rosie.

‘Is she OK?’ PT shouted.

When PT got close enough to see the blood he felt like he’d been smashed across the back of the head with a brick. Commander Robert’s pistol shot had hit the base of Rosie’s nose as she’d straddled the wall. The bullet had splintered inside her brain and torn a great chunk out of the back of her skull.

‘Rosie?’

Gravel and dirt spewed up as PT dived down on his knees in front of her. When he looked up, he saw Jean, with tear-filled eyes and the half-unlocked cuffs swinging off his right wrist.

‘You can’t be,’ PT gasped, tears welling as he snatched Rosie’s wrist and felt for a pulse where he knew there couldn’t possibly be one. ‘It can’t …’

PT felt like his chest was in a vice as his eyes fixed on Rosie’s glazed face and her blood trickling between chunks of gravel.

CHAPTER SIX

Reliable news on the successful tunnel blast reached Henderson just after 10 a.m., via a nineteen-year-old Maquis whose girlfriend worked inside the Beauvais telephone exchange.

Henderson and his squad had retreated from the logging camp, delving a full kilometre into woodland. With the tunnel blast and the raid on the admin building in town, there was a good chance of German retaliation, so he doubled up on lookouts and advised the eight other Maquis squads spread through the woods to do the same.

Henderson was a poor radio operator, so he relied on Edith and Sam for his daily Morse code communication with CHERUB campus. But Sam was out running messages and Edith had cooled off in a stream before taking a nap, so Henderson sat under a tree, grumpily encoding that afternoon’s radio transmission using a printed silk square known as a one-time pad.

These highly flammable squares had been devised by British cryptologists. They made encoding messages fairly easy, and once a tissue-thin square was burned – or torn up and swallowed if you got desperate – the message could only be decoded by a radio operator with a codebook containing an identical grid of printed letters.

‘Shit, shit, shit!’ Henderson muttered, as his fountain pen made a blotch that spoiled several letters on his squared paper.

Whenever Henderson blobbed ink, his mind always wandered back to the rap on the knuckles his schoolmaster had given him when he’d done it as a boy. This flashback to a life of inkwells and wooden desks was shattered by a barefoot teenager named Gilles. He wasn’t one of Henderson’s trained agents, but he was loyal and had been on several raids.

‘Couple of bodies seen walking up the hill,’