Scorched Earth - Robert Muchamore Page 0,5

blast cracked and when he stood up, Daniel’s bare feet swung off the branches barely a metre above his head.

‘There’s another train,’ Daniel said anxiously, before jumping to the ground and gasping as the side of his foot scraped on a tree root.

Paul’s ears rang from the blast. ‘How can there be two trains?’

‘Coming the other way,’ Daniel explained.

‘Passenger or cargo?’

‘Eight passenger coaches.’

‘Could it reach the tunnel before the tank train?’ Paul asked, horrified at the prospect of accidentally blowing up a train full of passengers. And with Allied bombings wrecking France’s railway network and the resistance regularly sabotaging rolling stock, every passenger train ran full.

As Daniel went down on one knee to put his boots back on, Paul thought about the distance to the track and spoke rhetorically.

‘Even if we could make it down there in time, how would we signal the train to stop?’

‘I don’t wanna be anywhere near that tunnel when all that explosive goes off,’ Daniel answered, now wide awake from the adrenaline rush. ‘What if we could get to Luc and Michel and stop them setting the explosion?’

‘Any train you see can’t be more than three minutes from the tunnel,’ Paul said. ‘It took us over ten minutes to get up here from the ridge and we don’t know exactly where they’re hiding out with the detonators.’

Paul didn’t add that his orders were to do everything necessary to stop the tank train, and that even if they found the others in time, Luc was completely ruthless and would blow the tunnel anyway.

‘Gotta be eighty people in each carriage,’ Daniel said. ‘Eight carriages times eighty people, comes to—’

Paul grabbed his backpack and interrupted as Daniel completed the sum in his head. ‘Nothing we can do, and it’s dangerous to stick around here any longer than necessary. Let’s start walking.’

‘What about Michel and Luc?’

‘They might catch us up, but there’s no point waiting around for them.’

*

‘Two for one,’ Luc said, smiling at Michel.

They were crouching on a chalkstone ledge, 50 metres from the tunnel mouth, with candlewax plugs in their ears. The clanking military train directly below moved at no more than 20 kilometres per hour, even though it was being pulled by a pair of Germany’s most powerful locomotives.

The lads’ low-lying position and plugged ears meant they had no clue about the passenger train coming the other way. Luc’s ‘two for one’ comment referred to their plan to incapacitate a tank battalion while simultaneously wrecking a tunnel on a railway line the Germans would desperately need when the Allies invaded.

Trackside explosions could derail a train, but it took a blast reflecting off tunnel walls and the intense fire that was sure to follow to wreck heavily-armoured Tiger tanks. Luc watched as the twin locomotives entered the tunnel, followed by several cargo wagons.

To detonate he needed to make a circuit by touching two bared wires together. His hands trembled as he thought about the pummelling the fragile detonators had taken during their rainy overnight trek, and the fact that their explosives were stretched out across a puddled tunnel and had been laid hurriedly in the dark as the sooty air choked them. One broken wire in the firing circuit and the whole show would fizzle.

‘Take cover,’ Luc ordered. ‘Keep your mouth open so the shockwave doesn’t burst your eardrums.’

Because of the earplugs, Luc accompanied his words with gestures. As he counted a sixteenth tarpaulin-covered tank entering the tunnel, Luc touched the bare wires and felt the crack from a blue spark as he dived behind a tree trunk on top of Michel.

Within a second the ground shook. A shockwave stripped leaves off the trees and filled the sky with fleeing birds. The train made a huge metallic shriek as the explosion filled the length of the tunnel. Luc was scared that the ledge was going to collapse down on to the tracks and he made the mistake of taking a peek around the trunk as the tunnel mouth spat a vast fireball.

The air was unbreathably hot as Michel’s anxious fingers clawed Luc’s back. The ground shook again as the part of the train that hadn’t entered the tunnel began to concertina. Birds killed by the shockwave rained through the trees as Luc gave Michel a tug.

‘I think we should have backed up further!’

But Luc’s humour didn’t last. The fireball down on the tracks had reached a truck filled with high-explosive tank shells. Two went off in rapid succession and as carriages continued to grind and buckle the