One Shot Kill - Robert Muchamore Page 0,79
lanky man said. ‘What if we don’t want to leave?’
Goldberg didn’t like the man’s tone and spoke angrily. ‘We’re here because we were led to believe that you’re French scientists being forced to work on a German military project. If you want to stay here and continue working for the Nazis, that makes you traitors and war criminals and I’ll have no option but to execute you.’
Another man nodded in agreement with lanky, but most of the others were either neutral or stared at him in disbelief.
‘What right have you to do this?’ the lanky man ranted furiously. ‘You’re American. Are you working with the authority of the French government in exile, or for American imperialist ends?’
‘What about our families?’ another man asked. ‘If we escape they could be persecuted.’
Marc had a lot more sympathy with this last question. ‘We’re going to set this place to blow before we leave. Shortly after that, twenty-five American bombers will wipe this place off the face of earth. Nobody will come looking because the Germans will think you’re all dead.’
‘So our families will think we’re dead?’
‘Possibly,’ Marc said. ‘But think how happy they’ll be when they find you’re not.’
Some of the scientists laughed nervously.
‘We’ve put our lives on the line to save you,’ Goldberg added indignantly. ‘If it wasn’t for what’s in your big brains you’d die down here, like other Nazi prisoners who die every night in Allied bombing raids.’
But the lanky man still wasn’t having it. ‘You have no legitimacy,’ he said, as he got right in Goldberg’s face. ‘You Americans want to steal our technology. You’re no better than the Germans.’
Goldberg wasn’t a big man, but he was tough and his patience had run out. He stepped forward and smashed the skinny Frenchman in the mouth with the metal butt of his machine gun, then floored him with a knockout punch to the temple.
‘He stays here and he’ll be dead in an hour,’ Goldberg told the others. ‘Now start packing. This is a war and I’m not your mother, so no more shit from any of you.’
If anyone still had doubts, none of the scientists dared show them as they started getting dressed and packing up. Marc had taken a pocket camera and a pack of flashbulbs out of his pack, and began taking identity photographs with each man standing in front of a bare wall.
‘We’re glad you’re here,’ one man said, as Marc lined him up in a wire-frame viewfinder. ‘What we do here has been eating me up. Jaulin spent weeks drawing and hiding that notebook. He’ll be over the moon when he gets back from the toilet.’
Another man laughed before butting in. ‘Old Jaulin can spend half a day in that toilet. I don’t know how he stands the smell.’
Marc’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Jaulin’s not here?’ he asked, as he did a quick count and realised that there were ten men moving and one unconscious.
Jaulin was a brilliant scientist. Joyce had found pictures of him, but Marc only now made a connection between the grey-haired scientist in a spotted bow tie he’d seen in a photo on campus and the man in German army trousers who he’d shot emerging from the toilet.
Marc felt like spewing, but before he could tell anyone what had happened, he heard Luc shout from the base of the stairs.
‘Rosie and stick-boy have arrived with the beacon.’
Goldberg let three scientists cross the hall into the laboratory to pick up their research notes before turning to Marc.
‘How long do you need down here?’ Goldberg asked, as the next man in the photo queue stepped up to the wall.
‘Only a couple of minutes for the pictures,’ Marc said. ‘Lift’s a bloody mess and some of the guys are pretty old, so it’s gonna take a while to get them up the stairs.’
‘Fifteen minutes sound about right?’ Goldberg said.
‘Should be plenty of time,’ Marc said.
Goldberg shouted down the hallway. ‘Luc, tell them to turn the beacon on in twelve minutes. We should be at least a mile from here before the bombers arrive.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The scientists’ fake identity documents had to be ready for the first German checkpoint they encountered, so as soon as the photographs were done Marc pulled the film from the camera and worked with his hands in a light-proof bag, unravelling the film from its roll before dropping it into an insulated metal pot filled with warm developing fluid.
It would take seventeen minutes for the film negatives to develop, after which the canister