Scorched Earth - Robert Muchamore Page 0,15

and pointed back at Gilles. ‘Nobody told me, but everyone reacts like Gilles just did when they see me.’

‘You want to sit down and talk about it?’ Henderson said, standing up as he realised he had the only seat under the canopy.

Paul sounded eerily calm. ‘I don’t feel … I’ve seen so much shit in the last four years, I almost expected something like this.’

‘Shock,’ Henderson said.

Paul nodded, then Henderson took some time explaining what had happened at the orphanage.

‘Any time you want to talk, I’m here. I thought you might want a few days away from the woods. I’m sure you’d be welcome at Morel’s farm.’

‘Have they buried her?’

‘I told PT to wait,’ Henderson said. ‘Though it’s hot and she’s got an open wound, so she can’t stay above ground for too long.’

‘I know she’ll be a mess, but I’d like to see her one last time.’

‘You’re sure?’

Paul nodded.

‘OK,’ Henderson said. ‘I need to see how PT has set up his defences down at the orphanage. I’ll walk down there with you and we can pay our last respects.’

Paul’s feet were painful after a 36-kilometre round trip and his sweaty shirt had been taken away to be washed while he slept. By the time Gilles found a clean shirt, Paul had painfully pulled boots over his blisters.

Henderson was also ready to leave, but Edith and Sam came racing back from the hillside where they handled daily communications with CHERUB campus.

‘So sorry,’ Edith told Paul.

Edith and Paul got along well and he sobbed as the pair hugged. Meantime, Sam urgently presented Henderson with the radio message.

‘We ran back as soon as we saw what was in it,’ Sam said, as he passed over three sheets of squared paper holding the decoded message. ‘It’s a big one.’

The daily message from campus rarely filled more than one sheet. For extra security, the messages contained code words that only Henderson understood and he did a double take when he saw that the opening word was BADGER.

‘Blast,’ Henderson said, as he flicked through the long message, reading a list of three sabotage operations which he’d been ordered to carry out immediately.

The importance of all operations fell into one of four categories. BADGER was the one which meant Do this even if your entire team gets wiped out and he’d never seen it in a message until now.

‘Something big must be going down, sir,’ Sam said.

‘Looks like it,’ Henderson agreed, backing out of the canopy into a forest clearing as he continued squinting at the long message. ‘But keep that to yourself. I’m going to need two teams put together. Sam, you run a team. Edith, go to the next clearing and fetch Luc and Joel to run the other one.’

Paul felt abandoned as Edith ran off and Henderson began briefing Sam. As Sam had worked on decoding the message, he already knew that his task was to travel east and deliver two dozen phosphorous grenades to a train guard. The message didn’t say what would happen next, but presumably the guard would pass them on to a resistance group further down the line.

Joel and Luc soon arrived. Henderson ordered them to put a team of four together and cut the phone lines of the Luftwaffe airfield east of Beauvais. When Jean heard what was going on he raced across from his dilapidated French army command tent, in which he’d been working with a team stamping and validating some of their stolen ration cards.

‘We agreed to send teams deeper into the woods and lie low,’ Jean yelled at Henderson. ‘You can only poke your stick into the German hive so many times before the swarm comes out to sting us.’

‘The timing’s bad and I’d never do this out of choice,’ Henderson admitted, as he rattled his decoded message in front of Jean. ‘But these are top priority.’

Jean scoffed. ‘It’s always top priority.’

‘Jean, I know you put your life on the line every day to protect the young men out here. But they’ll only be truly safe when our side wins the war and that’s what I’m trying to do.’

‘And what’s the point winning the war if they’re all dead before it’s over?’ Jean spat. ‘I care about these boys. For you they’re just a means to achieve British goals.’

Henderson always got riled when someone suggested that British agents were only in France to protect British interests.

‘You live in a fantasy land,’ Henderson snapped. ‘Without Allied food and clothes drops, half of your boys would have