Eagle Day - Robert Muchamore Page 0,60
You’re in very deep shit, young man.’
Marc had an awkward time boarding the truck with his hands bound together, but he’d fared better than the other two. PT got dragged from the trees, with his head hanging forwards and blood streaming down his face.
Dumont was worst of all, barely conscious with his clothes shredded and welts the shape of rifle parts all over his body. It took two Germans to lift him. They bent him forwards, so that he stood in the gravel with his head in the back of the truck. Marc watched as the driver grabbed a length of towing rope, then made a noose out of it before pulling it tight around Dumont’s neck.
‘End of the line for you, fatty,’ the biggest German said.
‘Please,’ Dumont sobbed. ‘Please don’t kill me.’
Marc and PT exchanged a desperate glance as they lay on the floor of the truck.
‘Just gotta find a nice strong branch to hang you from,’ the German smiled, pulling hard on the noose, before grabbing Dumont’s belt and hitching him up into the truck.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
‘Their dinners will be stone cold again,’ Maxine said angrily, as Paul helped her wash the dishes. ‘And Luc Boyle said those cows need regular milking if we’re going to get a decent yield out of them.’
‘I said I’ll speak to them,’ Henderson answered, with a touch of annoyance creeping into his voice. ‘Let me concentrate on encoding this message.’
He sat at the table with Rosie. A road map of northern France was spread out and notepaper sprawled around it.
If Henderson had been deliberately sent on a long-term spying operation, he would have been accompanied by a professional radio operator who could transmit and receive Morse code at between forty and sixty words per minute. Henderson and Rosie struggled to transmit any more than twenty words per minute. The maximum safe transmission time was ten minutes, restricting them to a two-hundred-word message each night.
While Henderson used the notes he’d made that lunchtime, carefully sorting all the facts in the order of importance, Rosie compressed them. The 106 characters of was slashed to the thirty-three characters of I have viewed the official German invasion map at headquarters and you can regard the following information as authoritative VWD OFFICL INVSIN MAP AT HQ.RGD INFO AS VG.
When Rosie wasn’t sure if the compressed message was comprehensible, she’d get Paul or Maxine to read it back. If they didn’t understand she’d rewrite it.
‘I think we can get most of the pertinent information into two ten-minute messages,’ Henderson said, as he chewed the end of his pencil.
Rosie looked up from the notebook she was using to encode the message. Henderson’s key phrase was a short chapter from Dickens’ entitled ‘Mr Merdles’ Complaint’. Henderson knew the words by heart and over the last few weeks Rosie almost felt that she knew them herself.Little Dorrit
‘Put the trimmings out for the chickens and see if there’s any eggs,’ Maxine said, as she handed Paul a mixing bowl filled with potato peelings and carrot tops. ‘You’d best get a move on if you want to listen to the news.’
Henderson glanced at his watch and saw that it was almost eight. As Paul headed out into the evening light, Rosie went through to the living room to warm up the radio they’d brought up from the pink house in Bordeaux.
There was a cool breeze as Paul headed outside. He didn’t want to stir Maxine up by complaining, but he was cross because the chickens were supposed to be PT’s job. As he hurried across the front lawn, Lottie the goat caught the smell of vegetables and thrust her head into the bowl.
‘Scoot,’ Paul ordered, but the goat didn’t take the hint so he tossed a few shavings off into the distance and gave her a shove.
The chickens knew food was coming and ran to the wire as Paul approached the cage, but he stopped because there were two cars coming up the road. None of the nearby farms was occupied and as this was the first traffic he’d seen since they’d moved in, he dropped the peelings and ran back to the house.
‘Cars,’ Paul gasped, as he broke into the kitchen. ‘I think they’re coming here.’
‘Shit, shit, shit,’ Henderson said, as he frantically folded the road map and stacked away the papers and the encoding grid. ‘Rosie, get back in here.’
‘I heard,’ Rosie shouted, ‘I’m just tuning the radio away from the BBC.’
Pas-de-Calais was a special military zone and listening to an overseas