before he could start rolling back a man leaped on to the running board and held a pistol through the open window.
‘Resistance!’ the man shouted. ‘Stop the engine or I’ll blow your head off.’
Henderson left the engine running, but raised his hands and spoke in French. ‘I’m one of you.’
The man with the gun laughed, as a much older man opened the passenger side door and clambered into the cab.
‘Outside,’ he ordered.
Nobody had seen Marc vault over the back of his seat and he lay in a canvas-covered cargo area, sandwiched between sacks.
One of the resistance men dragged Henderson out of the cab and spat in his face before slamming him against the side of the truck. Someone else peeked in the back to see what the truck was carrying, but he didn’t spot Marc in the darkness and the sticks of British-made plastic explosive were buried inside sacks filled with powdered chalkstone.
The booze-breathed resister sneered in Henderson’s face. ‘The only thing worse than a German is a Frenchman who puts on their uniform.’
‘You’re making a mistake,’ Henderson said, sounding uncharacteristically desperate. ‘Look in my bag. You’ll find maps and American detonators. If your leaders are connected to anyone, you can easily find out who I am.’
The older of the two men laughed. ‘For sure! I’ll give you a tour of my headquarters. Let you see the faces of all my bosses before we send you back to your Nazi pals.’
‘At least you’re OT,’ the other man added. ‘If you were Milice I’d cut your throat and feed you to my pigs.’
The truck had canvas sides and Marc crawled about in the back, peeking through gaps to work out what was going on. There was no way to tell how many men were hiding out at the side of the road, but as well as the two men interrogating Henderson, there was a man guarding the rear and a pair using metal cans and rubber tubes to siphon fuel out of the tank.
Marc had a gun, but didn’t fancy his chances against five men with the possibility of more in hiding. He thought about setting off a ball of explosive as a scare tactic, but Henderson had taken the basic safety precaution of keeping all the detonators in a bag in the cab.
After a glance between the front seats, Marc decided that he could probably get a hand on Henderson’s bag without being seen. A panicked shout went up as Marc got the bag. He jumped, but realised that the sound came from way back down the road.
Henderson could hear a column of German army trucks driving at speed towards them. He feared a bullet as the resister who’d dragged him out of the cab raised his gun, but the older man pulled him off.
‘There’s a village down there,’ the older man warned. ‘Kill him and they’ll go looking for revenge.’
So Henderson got off with a pistol butt slammed in the gut. The resistance gang disappeared quickly, apart from the pair siphoning fuel, who waited for a German headlight beam on their faces before disconnecting their tubes and scooting into the bushes.
The four-truck convoy squealed to a halt. Just like Henderson, their lead driver assumed that the dead horse was an ambush, and rough-looking German infantrymen jumped out of the lead truck with rifles ready.
Henderson soon had guns aimed at him from all directions, but they backed off when they saw his uniform and heard him speak in German. As Marc jumped out and gave Henderson a canteen of water, two German officers debated trying to flush out the resisters.
‘It was a large group,’ Henderson told them, sticking up for his resistance colleagues even though they’d hardly been friendly. ‘Maquis. At least twenty of them, and armed with American weapons. I’ll bet they know every ditch and hedgerow in these fields as well.’
After hearing about this vicious-sounding Maquis, the officers decided not to send a team into the fields. Instead, they got men to drag the horse to the side of the road and then set a grenade under it so that the resisters couldn’t repeat their ruse.
‘Where are you headed?’
‘Abbeville,’ Henderson said.
The shabby-looking SS officer nodded. ‘The roads around here can be dangerous after dark. You must ride with our convoy until you’re safely inside the town.’
‘I’d be grateful for that,’ Henderson said. ‘I’ve had quite a fright.’
As soon as Henderson was back in the cab he looked nervously at the fuel gauge. ‘We’ll get to Abbeville, but we