against the wall. ‘Now you’ve gone and made me lose them.’
False teeth flew out of the woman’s mouth as she spun off the wall and hit the floor hard. ‘Get out,’ she screamed, as she clutched her nose. ‘You bloody horror.’
‘Your toast looks shit anyway,’ Luc sneered, as he knocked the hot tea off the table towards her.
He grabbed his satchel and made a point of crunching the false teeth under his boot as he headed for the exit. The tea lady was screaming and bawling as Luc stepped out into the cold with a huge grin across his face.
The rush of aggression made Luc feel like his usual self. He couldn’t believe he’d acted so wimpishly and considered giving up just because of a bit of bad luck before the jump and a few spots of rain. Now he was determined to succeed.
Luc couldn’t find the rest of his team and couldn’t steal a gun on his own, but what if he stalked the Poles and robbed their cannon after they’d stolen it?
As he ran towards the parked buses, the tea lady staggered out of the café, screaming her head off.
Luc sighted two of the Poles fifty metres up ahead. One was in the driver’s seat of a bus trying to hotwire the engine while Lieutenant Tomaszewski stood on the concrete nearby.
Luc realised he should have made sure that the tea lady was unconscious before he’d walked out. Her screaming had attracted a posse of guards and factory workers who were fanning out to look for him.
Up ahead, Tomaszewski yelled triumphantly as the engine of the bus clattered to life. Luc was less than ten metres away as he watched Tomaszewski and one other Pole get on board. The three men all stood at the front of the bus and, while Luc didn’t understand their words, it didn’t take a genius to work out that they were waiting for someone called Adamczyk.
Adamczyk was the smallest of the four Poles and had taken a stroll into nearby bushes to take a leak before their journey. As he emerged, buttoning his fly and waving a hand apologetically to his lieutenant, a burly soldier sprang out of the darkness and almost snapped his head off with a brutal neck tackle.
‘Got the little bugger!’ the guard roared, as he choked Adamczyk with one hand and used the other to punch him hard in the face. ‘What kind of sick animal punches an old lady, eh? Let’s see how you like it.’
Luc laughed to himself as he reached the back of the bus. As he looked up at the emergency exit by the rear door an alarmed Lieutenant Tomaszewski gave the order to leave without Adamczyk.
Luc had to get on board, and fortunately the inexperienced driver stalled and took several seconds to restart the engine. There was no easy way into the passenger compartment, so Luc dived through a cloud of exhaust smoke and twisted the metal lever that opened the luggage bay. It wasn’t locked and Luc dived into the empty compartment, slamming it shut as the bus pulled away.
By the time the guards realised that the pint-sized-but-balding Adamczyk wasn’t the young lad who’d attacked the tea lady, Luc would be miles away.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Hugh Walden Garments factory was a cavernous single-storey shed with a five-level office block sprouting off the far end. There were hundreds of machine shops in north Manchester’s garment district, but Walden’s modern production line was a rarity amidst streets crammed with back-to-back houses and dingy workshops built along waterways in the age of hand looms and water wheels.
In peacetime Walden’s produced ladies’ silk underwear and nightgowns which sold in expensive department stores all over the world. At the outbreak of war the factory was reorganised. Production of silk cloth was expanded and the skilled machinists turned their hands to the production of parachute canopies.
The Walden facility produced over half the parachute canopies made within the British Empire, but its size and modernity also made it an easily visible target for German bombs. A dozen barrage balloons hovered over the surrounding streets to prevent low-level attacks and the factory’s flat roof bristled with lookout posts, searchlights, flak guns and four of the sought-after twenty-millimetre cannons.
But while German bomber crews faced a tough time, security on the ground wasn’t up to much. It was half past seven and the sun was struggling to produce anything more than a glimmer of light. PT, Marc, Joel and Rosie had walked a complete