One Shot Kill - Robert Muchamore Page 0,36

When more people come here to help me, you’ll receive training and weapons.’

Both lads smiled, but as they reached for the money, Rosie snatched it away before taking a grave tone.

‘If you’re caught, you’ll be tortured and killed. You have to follow my orders and if you betray the resistance, we’ll be every bit as ruthless as the Gestapo when we catch up with you. If you say no now, I’ll walk out of this shed and you’ll probably never see me again. But once you take this money, there’s no stepping back.’

This time the lads hesitated. Didier took his money first and Jean a couple of tense seconds later. Rosie picked an open wine bottle off the rug and took a slug before passing it to Didier.

‘I drink to the resistance,’ Rosie said.

‘And to France,’ Didier said enthusiastically, as streaks of red wine drizzled down his chin.

Part Two

12 June 1943–3 July 1943

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

‘I’ve got nineteen boys and one girl in total,’ Captain Charles Henderson explained as he led a man in US Army uniform through the hallway of the old village school on campus. ‘Three are currently deployed in France, one in the French colonies and one in Switzerland. At first a lot of people sneered. What’s the point of training kids? But now those same people call me up, desperate to use my agents.’

‘Is there a shortage of adult agents?’ the American asked. He wore thick-framed glasses and the brim of his cap barely reached Henderson’s nose.

‘It’s become impossible for males of military age to live openly in occupied France without being scooped off the street and sent to work in Germany,’ Henderson explained. ‘But I’ve got bilingual twelve-to sixteen-year-olds who are fully trained and ready to drop.’

The American was momentarily distracted by a glass cage with a fist-sized spider inside it, but before he could comment Henderson had led him through swinging doors into a small school hall. There was a good deal of grunting and pained expressions as a dozen shirtless boys grappled on crumbling rubber mats.

‘Attention,’ the Japanese combat instructor Takada shouted as he made a sharp clap.

Red-faced lads in baggy white shorts lined up, with feet apart and hands locked behind their backs. The only motion came from heaving chests and the sweat streaking down their faces.

‘Marc, Luc, Paul, Sam, get your kit on and meet me out front in one minute,’ Henderson said, not quite shouting. ‘The rest of you, get back to it.’

As Takada paired off grapplers who’d lost their partners, Marc, Luc, Paul and Sam exchanged what are we in for looks as they pulled on freezing muddy combat gear in which they’d run seven kilometres earlier that morning.

Marc and Luc were fifteen, similar height and solid build, but where Marc was blond and dashing, Luc was dark, hairy and thuggish. Hard training had given fourteen-year-old Paul a bit of muscle, but he still looked as though a stiff breeze would knock him over. At twelve, Sam was the baby of the group, but he’d trained with older boys for two years and always fought hard, even when he was outmatched.

‘Get a bloody move on,’ Henderson snapped, as the boys paced out into a drizzly June afternoon. ‘Go to the firing range at a jog. And Sam, do that boot lace up properly before you trip and crack your head open.’

Hearing that they were going to the firing range was a relief: shooting guns was a lot less taxing than running with packs, swimming the lake or most of the other reasons for which they could have been dragged out of the gym.

When campus was first set up, shooting practice took place on an open field. But Espionage Research Unit B now had use of a swish new range built by their USAF7 neighbours. There was a wooden armoury building, linked to a partially-covered pistol shooting range. The much larger rifle range was in the open, with rows of sandbagged shooting positions and targets ranging from tin rabbits to the buckled snout of a fighter that had been written off on landing.

For this morning’s exercise a selection of man-shaped paper targets had been set out at varying distances. Each figure had a Hitleresque moustache and target rings on the chest with tiny swastikas in the bull’s-eye.

‘Listen up, boys,’ the American began. ‘I’m Staff Sergeant Hiram Goldberg, United States Army. Captain Henderson tells me that you four are his best marksmen. Over the next ten days, my job is to push those