Eagle Day - Robert Muchamore Page 0,83

fist.

‘This one’s for Houari,’ Khinde said, looking half crazed as he crushed Kuefer’s throat under his boot.

Marc leaned on one of the tar drums and caught his breath. He recoiled when he noticed the growing pool of blood around Kuefer’s head.

Rufus put his hand on Marc’s shoulder. ‘You OK?’

Marc felt queasy, but managed to nod. ‘Put the bodies in the tar barrels and turn them upside down. I’ll go get the explosives from the back of the Mercedes.’

*

13:41 Calais

Henderson hung around inside Oberst Ohlsen’s office until he was certain that most of the admin staff had gone to lunch. After hurriedly relocking the office door, he cut back through the kitchen and meeting room, struggling with a large box of files which contained the latest draft of the invasion map and three reams of important documents.

After the short walk back to his desk in the empty admin office, Henderson removed his two good fountain pens from his desk drawer and pocketed the tubs of Benzedrine pills which he relied upon when he was tired or stressed. Then he loaded the box on to a two-wheeled trolley and took them down to the ground floor in the lift.

The security guards thought nothing of Ohlsen’s personal translator coming in and out with a document box and one guard even lifted the base of the trolley as he went down the steps.

After Marc and Henderson had been dropped off, PT and Paul had taken the truck a few hundred metres in a quiet side turning behind a laundry.

‘You’re late,’ PT said to Henderson. ‘I was starting to wonder.’

‘Your old friend Major Ghunsonn took an interest. He locked Ohlsen’s office, and this little trolley’s a pig on the cobbles.’

As Henderson raised the documents up into the truck, Paul dragged a pair of identical boxes across the floor of the van. As he held one out for Henderson to grab it, his fingers slipped from the handle and the box thumped against the tailgate.

‘Careful!’ Henderson yelled, as his heart missed several beats. ‘That’s explosive in there.’

Paul looked sheepish as he jumped out of the truck, and Henderson gave him a friendly pat on the head.

‘Don’t worry,’ Henderson said. ‘Just keep calm. Now, I’ve got to get this lot back to headquarters. Have you boys got some food?’

PT nodded. ‘Maxine made us sandwiches and stuff.’

‘Good,’ Henderson said. ‘And you know where you’re supposed to be meeting Eugene?’

‘Quarter to three, in the café de la Pomme,’ PT said. ‘Then we’ll drive over to the stables and wait for a big bang.’

‘That’s it.’ Henderson nodded. ‘If I’m not there within ten minutes of the bomb going off, start without me. If the bomb hasn’t gone off by six o’clock and you haven’t seen me, drive back to the farm and help Rosie deal with the boat.’

‘Gotcha,’ PT said. ‘Good luck.’

Henderson headed back towards army headquarters with the two document boxes balanced on his trolley. The same German guard helped him carry the trolley back up the stairs and Henderson walked along the ground-floor corridor towards an archive room, which sat directly beneath the offices of several senior German officers.

There were two Germans and a French admin assistant in the room, but the shelves went up to the ceiling and the boxes and files stacked on them provided anonymity. Henderson found a row of shelving that ended at a large window and looked out into the busy square. Flocks of pigeons raced between the pedestrians and picked at crumbs dropped by French girls eating packed lunch on the wrought-iron benches.

Henderson felt guilty, knowing the bomb would kill people inside the building and injure many more as shards of hot glass blasted across the square. It was one of thousands of bombs that would go off that day and far from the largest, but that didn’t make it any easier to look out of the window and know that some of the pretty office girls and the young soldiers flirting with them were in the last hours of their lives.

After looking back to check that nobody was watching, Henderson took the cardboard lid off the first box and shifted a dozen sticks of gelignite explosive into the second. He then took a brass three-hour detonator tube from his jacket, crushed the end under his heel and dug it into one of the soft gelignite sticks.

The crushing released acid into a chamber inside the detonator. This acid would slowly eat through a piece of metal and release a spring. The freed