Eagle Day - Robert Muchamore Page 0,65

come right. Our single biggest problem remains a lack of decent translators and I couldn’t help wondering about your boy.’

‘He’s only twelve,’ Henderson said. ‘I think he’d struggle with the kind of intense translation work that’s expected of us. And the hours – I have a thirteen-kilometre bike ride to and from headquarters and some nights I don’t finish work until gone seven.’

‘I realise he’s young,’ Ohlsen said. ‘But I had one specific task in mind. We have a naval architect named Kuefer. He’s working on barge conversions, but he wastes a lot of time trying to communicate with the local shipbuilders. It’s creating a bottleneck, but I don’t have enough translation staff to give him someone full time. Your boy might fit the bill.’

Henderson instantly understood the intelligence potential of the position, but he didn’t know how Marc would cope with the job.

‘Perhaps you could give him a trial,’ Henderson suggested. ‘The thing is, I only have one bike. With the ban on us French purchasing petrol I can’t use our car.’

‘I can arrange papers and fuel tokens,’ Ohlsen said. ‘And Marc will be paid the going rate for translation. We don’t have any other boys so I expect he’ll be paid the women’s rate.’

‘A trial then,’ Henderson said warmly. ‘It’ll keep the boy out of mischief, might even do him some good.’

*

Maxine ironed a set of clothes for Marc before subjecting him to a severe haircut and a barely warm bath. Henderson roused him at six the following morning and made him put on the smart boots he’d stolen two days earlier, before an instantly forgotten lesson in the art of knotting a tie.

Henderson had lugged a can of petrol home the previous night and after a short battle to get Maxine’s Jaguar started he blasted across empty countryside with the roof down and the speedometer touching seventy miles an hour.

After a brief stop at a regular checkpoint on the edge of Calais, the Jaguar created a stir as Henderson parked in the cobbled courtyard behind army headquarters.Two guards stepped out to look at it and a small fellow who turned out to be the naval architect, Kuefer, got out of a Mercedes limousine to stroke it.

‘Beautiful,’ he purred. ‘They say if a design looks right it right, and this looks very right indeed.’is

The Jaguar SS100 was a beautiful car, famed for being the world’s first production car capable of a hundred miles an hour. But at that moment Henderson would have happily swapped it for a battered Citroën. Jaguars were the tools of ch‰teau owners and playboys (play, in Maxine’s case), and the vehicle jarred horribly with his back story of being a poor farmer.girls

Henderson also worried that some greedy officer might try to commandeer her and Maxine had already told him that he’d not be sharing her bed if any harm came to her most prized possession.

‘Be good, listen carefully and do what you’re told,’ Henderson said, as he kissed Marc on both cheeks. ‘I think I’d better move the Jag out to a side street.’

Kommodore Kuefer had a slight build and a feminine air. Despite the warm weather, he wore a leather overcoat on top of his navy uniform. Marc groaned as he settled into the rear of the Mercedes beside him.

‘You’re much too young to be making sounds like that,’ Kuefer laughed.

‘I got on the wrong end of a rifle butt and a couple of German boots,’ Marc explained, giving Henderson a quick wave as the car pulled away. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Dunkirk first,’ Kuefer said. ‘It’s about forty kilometres east. Then lunch, then back to my office. Hopefully you’ll have a good sense of what I do by day’s end.’

Dunkirk had been the last pocket of northern France held by allied forces. More than three hundred thousand soldiers – mainly British – had escaped across the Channel over a two-week period, while a million and a half French, Dutch and Belgians were forced to surrender.

Two and a half weeks of intense shelling and aerial bombardment had left little but rubble. Barely a handful remained from a pre-war population of fifty thousand, but every open space, from cemeteries to stadiums, contained malnourished and lightly guarded prisoners.

‘They’re our labour pool,’ Kuefer explained, as the back wheels juddered over a thigh-width crack in the road. ‘A herd. They throw in a few bread rolls and it’s like feeding time at the zoo. You have to hose off the filth and feed them for a couple of