won’t get back,’ he told Marc.
Henderson had to drive a couple of kilometres sandwiched between real Germans before his nerves settled enough to give Marc a wary smile.
‘No bad thing, really,’ Henderson said, ‘knowing that Germans are no safer moving around France at night than we are.’
CHAPTER NINE
Tuesday 6 June 1944
It was a quarter past midnight when the convoy pulled up alongside a small hotel, which had locked its main door at curfew an hour earlier. The sight of five German trucks sent half a dozen senior resistance members scrambling out of the hotel bar, down through a basement wine cellar and into a hidden room with an escape hatch leading into the local sewers.
Henderson was in the sights of three resistance machine guns as he jumped down from the cab, walked to the lead truck and thumped on the passenger’s side door to thank the officer who’d arranged his escort.
‘Heil Hitler,’ Henderson said.
Instead of saluting back, the shabby-looking officer raised one eyebrow and tutted. Henderson might have expected that attitude from regular German army, but it was unexpected coming from one of Hitler’s elite SS officers.
Three storeys up, resistance lookouts on the hotel roof changed from being alarmed to curious as four of the five trucks drove away. They watched Marc jump out as Henderson approached the hotel’s front door.
As he rang the bell, Henderson pushed a cigarette-sized detonator through the letterbox and said, ‘Delivery from Beauvais.’
Twenty seconds ticked by, before Henderson heard a bolt slide on the other side of the door.
‘Henderson?’ a smartly suited hotel manager asked warily. ‘Can I see your mouth?’
The Abbeville resistance had been told about Henderson’s missing front teeth and the tension dissipated when Henderson used his tongue to pop out his lower denture plate.
‘A-ha!’ the man said. ‘Your dentist’s name?’
‘Dr Helen Murray, of London.’
‘That’s what I heard,’ the man said, smiling slightly. ‘I’m told that you are a man of influence.’
As Marc came through the door, Henderson turned into a smoky area that combined the hotel’s reception with a small bar. Brandy glasses sat on the tables and a cigar burned in an ashtray, but it took a while for the men and women who’d taken refuge when the German convoy pulled up to start emerging up the steps behind the bar.
‘Sorry if I gave you a scare,’ Henderson said.
There were four men and two women. Henderson had met two of them before in Paris. Both were leaders of important resistance groups and Henderson guessed that the others were too.
‘You certainly know how to make an entrance, Captain Henderson,’ a woman named Celine said, as Henderson kissed her on the cheek. ‘They made me crawl in the back through the sewer.’
Celine was only twenty-two. Her mother had formed an important communist resistance group in eastern Paris. Celine’s followers had twice busted her out of prison, but her mother and both sisters had been executed by a Gestapo firing squad.
‘Am I the last to arrive?’ Henderson asked, as he looked around nervously.
It was extraordinarily risky to bring so many resistance leaders to one place. If anyone was being followed or blackmailed, the Germans would be able to move in and sweep up the whole lot of them.
‘Two or three more,’ the barman said. ‘And of course, Ghost herself.’
Ghost was Maxine Clere, a tall, beautiful, thirty-something with a history of sleeping with Henderson. Her highly successful resistance group had begun in Paris, but now spanned northern France.
Dozens of Ghost’s operatives had been arrested and tortured by the Nazis, but painstaking security meant that the Ghost Circuit survived circumstances that had resulted in other groups being rounded up and executed.
As the hotel manager poured Henderson a complimentary brandy, a bodyguard led Marc to less grand surroundings in the hotel’s gas-lit kitchen. The gloomy space had a smell of old cooking fat and a group of boys sitting around a table. Any male aged between seventeen and forty who didn’t have a full set of exemption papers could be swept off the street for immediate deportation, so the resistance increasingly relied on women and boys in their early teens.
After a glass of wine and a chunk of gritty black bread, Marc was allowed to reverse the German truck into a courtyard. One bag of explosives was brought inside and once the powdered chalk in which they’d been packed was swept up, Marc stood in front of a gnarled butcher’s block and began giving Abbeville’s youngest resistance members a crash course in blowing stuff up.
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