cleared enough for him to see some of the damage his gelignite sticks had caused to headquarters. A huge section of the façade had been ripped away, whilst inside the second and third floors had concertinaed down into the first, making a further collapse likely.
Blood drizzled from a cut over Henderson’s right eye, but he couldn’t stop to investigate because he needed to meet the boys at a stables, five minutes’ walk away, that was used as a supply depot.
The ports along France’s northern coasts were prime bombing targets so the Germans split their supplies between fourteen depots. The stable block was lightly guarded because it usually stored nothing more deadly than office supplies and a few spare boxes of ammunition. However, Henderson had forged Oberst Ohlsen’s signature and used his position inside the German bureaucracy to arrange for boxes of detonators and half a truckload of high explosives to be transferred from an armoury further out of town.
Henderson walked past his truck and gave the slightest of nods to Paul and PT as they peeked between the canvas flaps at the back.
The guard on the gate leading into the stables knew Henderson and was anxious for news. ‘What’s going on up there? I didn’t see any bombers.’
‘Some kind of explosion, gas leak maybe. Luckily I was in a meeting across the square, but there’s a lot of injured and the French haven’t got much, so I ran around to pick up all your medical supplies.’
‘Good thinking,’ the guard said. ‘Vogt’s inside, he knows where to find everything.’
The Germans kept their horses elsewhere, but the place still had a whiff of manure as Henderson walked around to a small office and found Vogt, a First World War veteran with a wooden stump at the end of his right leg.
‘Boxes delivered from the barracks yesterday,’ Henderson said urgently. ‘Ohlsen needs them.’
‘The explosives?’ Vogt said incredulously. ‘I had them put over in the end stable, well away from and everything else. But I can’t release weapons to anyone but German army personnel, you should know that.’me
Henderson knew this would be a problem and resolved it by pulling his pistol. Two gasps from the silenced weapon made a textbook execution: one bullet through the heart and one through the head. Henderson strode briskly across the courtyard and banged on the entry gate. As the guard opened up, Henderson punched him hard in the face and yanked him inside. The German reached for his machine gun, but Henderson beat him to the trigger and shot him through the head.
After looking up and down the street to make sure nobody was coming, Henderson yelled across the road to his truck. Eugene had started the engine the instant he saw the guard disappear and Henderson had to drag the dead guard away by his ankles before the truck’s front wheels ran him over.
Henderson closed the gate as Eugene, PT and Paul jumped out.
‘Paul, come with me,’ Henderson ordered. ‘You boys pick your vehicles from the paddock.’
Henderson’s closeness with Oberst Ohlsen had enabled him to keep Maxine’s Jaguar and the ancient truck, but most Frenchmen faced a different reality. The German Army had requisitioned hundreds of vehicles, sometimes with the promise of compensation and sometimes by outright theft. Two dozen of these were kept in a paddock at the side of the building.
While Henderson stripped the machine guns from the dead guards and helped Paul to load some of the explosives and detonators into the back of his truck, Eugene and PT shopped for an extra truck and a motorbike.
Any which had been painted with German markings were out. Eugene identified a newish Renault truck and jumped in to check the fuel gauge as PT found an elderly but solid looking motorcycle with a big leather seat.
‘Keys in the ignition,’ Eugene said, as the pair lifted the motorbike and some fuel cans into the back of the Renault truck.
As Henderson helped PT and Eugene load the rest of the German explosives into the Renault, Paul leaned into the back of Henderson’s truck and wrote the vehicle registration numbers on to a set of stolen travel permits with Eugene’s name on them.
‘Don’t fold the paper until the ink dries,’ Paul said, as he gave PT the documents, then helped him transfer phosphorous bombs and some other equipment from Henderson’s truck into the Renault.
Five minutes after entering, Henderson, Eugene and the three boys ended up standing on the cobbles in between the two loaded trucks.
‘I believe that’s everything,’ Henderson