her ankles.
‘All set? Nothing forgotten?’ Henderson asked.
‘We’ve still got a while,’ Rosie said. ‘If it was important we could walk back in no time.’
Henderson pulled away and drove off the farm for the second time that day.
‘Do you think I made enough sandwiches?’ Rosie asked. ‘We had eggs left over, so I hard boiled some to eat on the boat and left the rest for the prisoners.’
Henderson laughed as he turned on the road. ‘I think you could feed half of Paris with that lot.’
20:31 Boulogne
Marc felt good as he stepped out of the Mercedes. After six hours waiting it was a relief to get underway. He looked around for any sign of Germans before throwing the canvas bag over his shoulder and starting to jog towards the fuel tanks.
His pulse quickened when he realised that the heavily insulated car had disguised the sound of approaching aircraft. And it wasn’t a rogue German fighter, it sounded like the armada of bombers was running ahead of schedule.
‘You hear them?’ Khinde asked, startling Marc as he bobbed up behind a diesel tank.
‘We’ve got to shift,’ Marc said. ‘We’re gonna be in the middle of a shit storm if we’re still standing here in five minutes’ time.’
He took the bag off his shoulder and passed out six butter-pat-sized blocks of plastic explosive. ‘Two on each tank, pull the pins out of the detonators and we’ll have two minutes until they blow.’
As Khinde and Rufus stuck the sticky lumps of plastic explosive to the tanks, Marc began running the two hundred metres back to the Mercedes. The two grown men were faster and Marc was several metres behind as he got into the driver’s seat and started the engine.
More than sixty bombers roared overhead, and an air-raid siren started up as Marc squeezed the accelerator pedal. Rufus and Khinde couldn’t drive, so Maxine had given him a crash course behind the wheel of her Jaguar, but the Mercedes felt huge in comparison and even with Schroder’s leather coat folded up under his bum Marc could barely see over the wheel as he approached the gate.
The guard was supposed to stop everyone coming in or out, but after thousands of kilometres’ driving with Schroder, Marc knew that big Mercedes driven by German officers were rarely troubled.
As the wooden gate rose in front of them, Marc jammed the brake as he realised he was going way too fast for the sharp turn on to the road. He made eye contact and got a strange look when the guard saw how young he was, but before he could react the first of the three diesel tanks exploded and the German dived for cover.
‘That one’s for Houari!’ Khinde shouted, thumping ecstatically on the padded roof as the big car accelerated away from the port.
A thirty-metre tower of flame seared up into the darkness, but the real spectacle took a few seconds longer. The exploding fuel had tossed two dozen phosphorous bombs across the heart of the docks. They burned with an intense blue light that lit up the entire dockyard, as white-hot fragments began burning through the tin roof of the neighbouring coal-yard.
20:33 Calais
Paul stood over the rusting bed. He popped the last square of Belgian chocolate in his mouth, then double checked that he had the key for the bike lock in his pocket before igniting the three-minute length of detonator cord curled inside the lid of the suitcase.
‘Watch it!’ a man shouted, as Paul burst out of the room and raced past him on the stairs.
‘There’s planes coming,’ Paul shouted back. ‘Get outta here.’
But the man thought he was just some crazy kid and by the time Paul hit the street he felt guilty. He’d left two dozen sticks of gelignite and twenty phosphorous bombs in the hotel room, which would create a blast double the size of the one that ripped apart the army headquarters.
The man would die, as would the nice woman who worked on reception and pretty much everyone else unlucky enough to be inside the hotel or one of the buildings on either side.
Paul’s bike was a horrible contraption which Henderson had bought in a junk shop. It had solid tyres and a frame that had buckled and been knocked back into shape. Despite this it had attracted the attention of a couple of local kids.
It was the last thing Paul needed. They sized him up as he approached breathlessly.
‘You’ve got no right,’ the bigger of the two kids stated. ‘This is