ended up doing cooking and laundry because she was a girl. ‘I’ll go meet Henderson in the woods and tell him everything’s ready to roll.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
‘You know your jobs,’ Henderson said, as he looked at his wristwatch.
They formed a circle of nine, crouching amidst moss and tree roots, three hundred metres from the bunker: Henderson, Goldberg, Rosie, Paul, Marc, Sam, Luc, Jean and Didier. Despite the forecast of clear weather, wispy cloud blotted out the moon and an on-off drizzle would make sniping tricky.
‘Let’s synchronise our watches,’ Henderson said. ‘Remember, the bomber crews are at risk while they’re circling and the Germans will smell a rat if they’re up there for too long. We have to keep this on schedule.’
As everyone pulled up sleeves to expose wristwatches, or took out a pocket watch, Henderson studied the second hand of his own timepiece.
‘11:07 dead, on my mark,’ he said. A few seconds later, ‘Mark,’ was followed by clicks as people pushed in their watch crowns to set them running.
Everyone shook hands with everyone else before they split into teams. Goldberg went left; Sam and Paul headed to a position near the bunker’s front gate; Henderson, Marc and Luc went to the right side. Rosie stayed where she was and had to warm up the homing beacon, while Jean and Didier stayed with her because they had no role in the first phase of the operation.
It was important that none of the base guards alerted the local garrison, so the first job was cutting communications and fell to Henderson’s team. The trio didn’t speak as they crunched through the woodland, dressed in black commando gear with their faces darkened with coal dust. Marc and Luc had sniper rifles over their shoulders, pistols, knives and grenades hooked to their belts, and backpacks loaded with everything from gas masks to emergency ration packs.
The bunker was connected by a single telephone line and a radio. Cutting the telephone was easy, because the French had destroyed the underground phone line before abandoning the bunker during the invasion. Rather than dig a new trench through several kilometres of woodland, the Germans had strung their replacement cable through the treetops.
Luc shimmied up a tree a hundred metres from the perimeter fence, snipped the line with a pair of wire cutters and threw both ends to the ground. While Luc climbed, Marc had unzipped his pack and removed the bulkiest item from it: a battery-powered field telephone that dated back to the Great War. After pulling the line leading into the base out of the branches, Marc squatted by a tree trunk and used a knife to strip insulation from the wires.
The base radio was harder to get at. While Marc connected the phone up using his pen-knife and a small screwdriver, Luc and Henderson headed for the base perimeter. Rosie had all but confirmed that the perimeter was never patrolled, but they stayed low just in case, as they used giant bolt-cutters to snip the wire fence.
‘You crawl, I’ll cover,’ Henderson said, once they had a decent gap.
While Henderson sat inside the fence with his pistol ready, Luc sprinted fifty metres through the trees towards an aeriel. The thing was rusty and had partly tipped over in the wind.
The base of the aerial was enclosed in a metal cabinet. Luc had a crowbar ready to break the cabinet open, but all it needed was a good tug and a sweep of his boot to clear away mulch that had built up around the opening since its last service.
Once he was in, Luc slid the hooked end of the crowbar behind wires soldered to the aerial’s base and ripped them out.
‘All good,’ Luc whispered, when he got back to Henderson.
Seconds later they were back with Marc, who proudly held the phone up so that Henderson could hear a vague hum on the line.
‘I’ll make the call in a couple of minutes,’ Henderson said. ‘Marc, tell the gate team we’re ready for their bit, then circle around and join up with Goldberg.’
‘Aye-aye, captain,’ Marc said, before scrambling off.
*
While the rest of the team came in combat gear, Sam approached the perimeter gate dressed like a typical French boy and carrying a hunting knife and a blood-stained cloth bag with a dead rabbit poking out of the top.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ Sam said, sounding meek and anxious as he aimed his voice towards a guard hut. ‘Do you speak a little French?’
There were two guards in a small wooden hut, set five