noted, before jumping out into near darkness to unlock the main gate with Wimund’s keys. They were behind schedule and it didn’t help that PT had to try half a dozen keys before the padlock sprang open.
PT jumped back in the truck and Eugene drove cautiously along the wall of the dry dock with his headlamps switched off. The steel dock gates were nearly a metre thick at the base, and in the black void below lay more than sixty barges, tugs and patrol boats.
The Royal Navy had operated a fleet from Dunkirk in the run-up to the war and had sent Henderson detailed instructions. By opening the gates of a huge dry dock too quickly, the resulting wall of water will destroy the small boats sitting at the bottom. An engineer who’d worked in the docks even provided sketches of the control room, which had been dropped the previous Saturday along with Bernard and the plastic explosives.
While PT headed into a wooden shed to pull some hydraulic levers that opened two huge inlet channels built around the side of the dock gates, Eugene leaned against the truck, using binoculars to study the patrol-boat base less than a hundred metres away.
The Germans had used a mixture of netting, trawlers and fishing equipment spread over decks to disguise these precious high-speed boats from British reconnaissance planes, but from ground level the disguise was feeble.
While barge conversion work shut down at night because the artificial light needed to continue would make it an easy target for bombing, the German patrol fleet operated twenty-four hours a day.
More than twenty patrol boats lay beneath grey tarps that looked like bare concrete from two thousand metres up, but three fast launches were moored abreast at the dockside. Diesel plumes rose from their funnels, while a fourth was being refuelled at a pier. On the dockside, crew members in navy uniform hopped between boats, while others stood around looking bored and smoking.
Inside the control room by the dock gates, PT was alarmed by the crash of water as it rushed into the dry basin. He’d been told that the dock walls and heavy gates would make the sound virtually inaudible from the naval base a hundred metres away, but he was far from convinced as he pressed a coin-sized lump of plastic explosive against the base of the control levers and inserted a ten-minute acid fuse.
This would only produce a tiny explosion, but with luck it would wreck the control levers and make life difficult for any German engineers who tried to stop the deluge.
Eugene was back inside the truck with the engine running by the time PT ran out. ‘Why’s it so noisy?’ Eugene asked anxiously. ‘The patrol crews don’t seem to have noticed yet, but they’re gonna.’
‘I just did what I was told,’ PT said defensively. ‘I say screw going over the bridge with the main bomb, let’s reverse back from here and hope the bombers finish the patrol boats.’
But Eugene looked determined and put the truck into first gear rather than reverse. ‘We came this far,’ he said. ‘I’m not backing out now.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
20:28 The Farm
The sun had all but disappeared and the yard in front of the cottage was black. The old truck needed a hand crank to get going and Henderson yelled after Rosie as the engine spluttered to life.
‘Come on, sweetheart. It’s a good job it’s less than two kilometres to the harbour. We’re running on fumes. I should have topped up in town this morning, but I had about a thousand other things on my mind.’
Rosie had milked the cows for the last time, now she threw food into the chicken pens and felt a little sad as Lottie the goat followed her across the grass, expecting a handful of scraps.
‘Out,’ Rosie said firmly, as the goat chased her into the kitchen. But they wouldn’t be back. Rosie remembered that there were some vegetables in the rack so, for the first time, the goat didn’t find herself shoved out of the kitchen doorway on to the lawn.
As Lottie buried her face in carrots, Rosie grabbed a basket piled high with sandwiches and a metal jug filled with fresh milk.
‘Sorry about the hold-up,’ Rosie gasped, as she sat next to Henderson inside the truck with the basket on her lap. ‘I wanted to make sure the animals would be all right until the labourers get here in the morning.’
She set the jug on the floor and squeezed it tight between