Scorched Earth - Robert Muchamore Page 0,8
because a small piece of shrapnel after a bomb blast had killed her father.
‘This will sting,’ Rosie said, as she picked up tweezers. ‘I need to open the wound to see what’s going on.’
Jean gripped the edges of the table as Rosie dug tweezers into his shoulder wound. The metal tips immediately tapped something hard and Jean hissed with pain as his young nurse dug the object out and dropped it into an enamel bowl.
‘Hold this cloth in place to stop the bleeding,’ Rosie ordered.
As fresh blood streaked down Jean’s back, Rosie inspected the bloody lump and saw that it was a piece of thin, curved glass.
‘Looks like part of a broken light bulb,’ Rosie said, as she held it up with the tweezers so that Jean could see.
‘One of the Milice shot a light fitting as I was running away,’ Jean said, nodding. ‘I didn’t feel it, but I guess I had other things on my mind.’
‘The cut could do with stitching,’ Rosie said. ‘But we’re out of sterile cord and low on bandages. I’ll paint on some iodine to stop an infection, but you’ll have to hold that gauze there until it scabs over.’
‘Henderson said we were good for medical supplies,’ Jean noted.
Rosie nodded. ‘We picked quite a bit of stuff up in the last parachute drop, but Sister Honestus used three whole packs stitching up our fragrant friend in the corner.’
‘His nickname’s Franco,’ Jean said. ‘He’s a good man if you can stand the smell.’
PT came back in holding a tattered man’s shirt. ‘The nuns gave me this. Yours should be scrubbed and dried by this evening.’
Jean held up the shirt for inspection, but Rosie swept it away when he moved to pull it on.
‘You’ve lost a fair bit of blood,’ Rosie said. ‘Stay here and sleep for a couple of hours.’
‘I could fetch some medical supplies from the woods,’ PT said. ‘What else do you need, apart from cord and bandages?’
Rosie looked longingly at the sun before giving PT an awkward smile. ‘I need fresh air and a break from this dingy cottage,’ she said. ‘How about I borrow Jean’s bike and ride with you?’
PT smiled, but before he could answer a figure darted past the open window. As she stepped forward to investigate, a man in a navy Milice tunic booted the cottage door open and charged in with a rifle poised, shouting, ‘Hands in the air!’
*
The Maquis band in the woodland north of Beauvais was a fluid movement. A hard core of sixty young men and a couple of girls were led by Jean Leclerc. The sixty were supplemented by up to a hundred others, who drifted in and out of the woods depending upon climate, availability of food and the latest gossip on whether a young draft dodger was safer in town, in the woods or hiding in his mother’s attic.
The other authority figure in this chaotic group was Captain Charles Henderson. Some of the young runaways admired this tough, broken-toothed British intelligence officer, but many others were communists who resented having an Englishman calling the shots.
While Jean had assumed leadership through a mixture of an old teacher’s natural authority, good judgement and his soldiering experience in the Great War, Henderson earned respect because he was connected with the near-legendary Ghost resistance circuit in Paris, and had the power to control Allied parachute drops to Maquis and resistance groups.
These supply drops brought everything from dried oats to plastic explosives. Henderson regularly received lists of sabotage targets via a coded radio link with CHERUB campus, and a hungry, bored Maquis who successfully carried out one of Henderson’s operations could earn his own rifle, new boots and, most importantly, a few days with a full belly.
But parachutes could only drop light weapons. Larger Maquis groups in southern France had tried holding territory, but got ripped apart by German tanks and artillery. So Jean ensured that his group was split into half a dozen mobile squads, which regularly switched between farm buildings, cottages and temporary shelters erected in the woods.
Edith hid her bike behind a hedge before heading into the woods and finding Henderson at an abandoned logging camp. She relayed the story of the ambush at the administration building as Henderson squatted on a tree stump.
Four bored-looking Maquis listened in, along with trained CHERUB agents Joel and Sam Voclain. Joel was a good-looking fifteen-year-old who’d let his blond hair grow wild in the woods. At thirteen, Sam was a clone of his older brother and