One Shot Kill - Robert Muchamore Page 0,53

jump.

‘I nearly landed on top of you,’ Marc said, as he came out of the dark, dragging billowing silk behind him. ‘Ground feels soft. Shall I start digging a hole for the chutes while you find the others?’

‘Makes sense,’ Henderson said.

Parachuting in darkness carries risks, from bad landings to the pilot dropping you in the wrong place, but within ten minutes of touchdown Henderson was satisfied that the two abandoned houses on the brow of the next hill were the ones he’d seen in aerial surveillance photos, and injuries could have been far worse than Sam bending his fingers back and Goldberg bashing his leg on an abandoned horseshoe.

‘Patty was flying into a headwind the whole way, so we’re tight on time,’ Henderson told them. ‘Sam, help Marc bury the rest of the chutes. Paul, Luc, we need to fan out and head south. We need all four equipment drops, or we’ll be stuck until we’re resupplied.’

Paul found the first equipment chute two fields over. The aluminium canister was two metres long and had landed nose first, ploughing a long track in the soft ground. He bunched up the chute, then tugged at the ropes, but he couldn’t raise it out of the mud and had to call Luc over.

‘This must be canister one,’ Luc said. ‘Henderson and Goldberg sighted two and three. They’re just moving on further, trying to hunt down number four.’

As Luc wound the parachute ropes around his wrist and yanked the big canister out of the mud, Paul stared at a house across the field.

‘Get round the other side and help me,’ Luc said angrily.

‘There’s washing out behind that cottage,’ Paul said. ‘And it looks like a vegetable plot. Anyone in there must have heard this lot crash down.’

‘I don’t care,’ Luc said, as the canister finally came out of the mud with a big sucking noise.

‘I thought this was the coastal exclusion zone,’ Paul said. ‘There’s not supposed to be anyone around.’

‘People avoiding labour service, or German deserters,’ Luc said dismissively, as he went down on one knee. ‘If they were gonna come out shooting they’d have jumped us already and we’ll be long gone before they can mouth off.’

The long canister was an ingenious design. As Paul wound ropes around the parachute canopy, Luc used a T-shaped tool to break the canister down into four pieces. The nose and tail were hollow aluminium designed as shock absorbers that crumpled on impact, while the two cargo-packed central sections had hooks and straps.

They could be carried as a backpack when filled with lightweight items, but canister one contained sniper equipment and ammunition, while most of canister two was filled with a state-of-the-art radio-location device designed to guide bombers to a target. To move this heavy load, Luc and Paul each grabbed a set of small-spoked pram wheels from the nose piece and slid axles through holes in the base of the cargo sections.

‘Take this one, it’s lighter,’ Luc said.

As Paul set off, with the weight of the trolley straining his arms and the narrow wheels carving ruts in the soft ground, Luc stayed back to throw the nose and tail sections in the ditch at the fields’ edge.

If the mission had been near to the drop zone they’d have been more thorough about hiding evidence of their landing, but they were over a hundred kilometres from Rennes so it was a question of not leaving anything that might be sighted before sunrise.

As he was about to lob the metal, Luc was startled by a girl squatting in the base of the ditch, less than four metres away. Her age hadn’t reached double figures and she was unarmed, but Luc instantly ripped a jagged knife from his belt holster and lunged towards her.

‘What did you see?’ Luc growled as he held the blade to her throat.

The girl’s nightdress was ripped and she looked like she hadn’t washed in a month.

‘I heard the bang,’ she said, in a voice barely above a squeak. ‘I got out of bed to peek.’

‘You saw nothing,’ Luc said firmly. ‘Say it.’

‘Nothing,’ the girl said, as she nodded frantically. ‘I won’t even tell my brothers.’

‘If you do, I’ll come back another night,’ Luc said.

He toyed with the idea of stabbing the girl, but her family would be angry when they found her dead and might alert the Germans, so he went down his jacket and threw her a small paper twist containing four lemon sherbets.

‘Here,’ he grunted, as he pushed his knife back