Secret Army - Robert Muchamore Page 0,90

focus on the conversation so soon after losing his temper. ‘Yes, Admiral,’ he said stiffly. ‘Everyone in Group A did exceptionally well.’

‘Good,’ Hammer said. ‘Because the Prime Minister is taking a keen and detailed interest in Special Operations right now. He wants all SOE training programmes scaled up and at least twenty agents dropped throughout occupied Europe within six weeks.’

‘That’s excellent news,’ Henderson said, as he eyed Luc warily across the room.

‘We’re meeting in Baker Street at ten on Wednesday morning to discuss missions. I want you and McAfferty there and be warned that the PM will sit in if his schedule allows.’

‘I’ll try and behave myself, sir,’ Henderson said.

After exchanging goodbyes, Henderson put the phone back in its cradle. He felt guilty about the red marks he saw on Luc’s neck and couldn’t decide whether to hate or pity him.

‘Don’t ever speak to me like that again,’ Henderson said calmly.

‘I don’t care if you’re gonna kick me out,’ Luc said, trying to sound casual but coming over as desperate.

Henderson shook his head. ‘You’re too damned good to kick out,’ he explained reluctantly. ‘You’re a vile creature. I’m probably a vile creature too. So I suppose it’s best if we don’t probe too deeply into each other’s heads from now on.’

Luc nodded and gave a surly, ‘Yes, sir.’

‘You’ve got two weeks to rest, relax and have fun. Try to act like a member of the human race and when you come back you’re going to help us to win this damned war. Now get the hell out of my office.’

READ ON FOR THE FIRST CHAPTER

OF THE NEXT HENDERSON’S

BOYS BOOK, GREY WOLVES.

CHAPTER ONE

Sunday 20 April 1941

Marc Kilgour had jumped out of aeroplanes, belted around the countryside on an old Triumph motorbike, shot a straw dummy through the heart with a sniper rifle, studied the correct procedure for attaching limpet mines to the hull of a boat, survived in the wild on berries and squirrel meat, stuffed dead rats with dynamite, swum freezing lakes and done physical jerks until he was as fast and strong as any thirteen-year-old was likely to get.

But training counts for nothing if you lose your head, and Marc felt uneasy squatting in the two-man canoe with damp trousers, an oar resting between his legs and Commander Charles Henderson seated behind.

It was near midnight on a moonless night – the only kind dark enough to infiltrate occupied France by boat. The sea was calm, the air had bite and the blacked-out French coastline was a total mystery. They might have been fifty metres from shore, or a thousand.

They’d trained to drop into occupied France by parachute, but the RAF refused to spare prized bombers for espionage work. A fast torpedo boat for the long voyage down France’s western coast would have been second best, but the Royal Navy was no more willing.

In the end they’d made the two-day journey from Porth Navas Creek in Cornwall aboard Madeline, an elderly French steam tug designed for harbour work rather than open sea. Their canoe was a leisure craft that had spent years hanging from the ceiling in a Cambridge junk shop, before being discovered by Henderson, who patched its cloth hull with fish-glue and pieces cut from a coal tarp.

The rest of their equipment was no better. The radio transmitter was an unreliable beast. Twice the weight of more recent sets, it left the canoe precariously low in the water and compromised the amount of equipment they could carry. Henderson had kicked up a stink, but Britain was fighting alone against a Nazi empire and CHERUB wasn’t the only unit muddling through with scraps.

‘Nerves holding out?’ Henderson asked quietly, as his oar cut into a wave.

‘Just about,’ Marc said.

Henderson was the one thing that gave Marc confidence. He was a flawed human: drinker, womaniser, a short-tempered maverick who rubbed senior colleagues up the wrong way. But as some men turn genius when you give them a football, or set a maths problem, Henderson had a gift for espionage. He was completely ruthless, able to speak the five major European languages in a variety of accents, and had a magical ability to devise practical and sophisticated operations.

‘Are those young eyes seeing things I can’t?’ Henderson asked.

Marc squinted, but could barely see beyond the end of the boat. ‘What if the tide’s carrying us further out?’ he asked. ‘I mean, are you even rowing in the right direction? Shall I take a compass bearing?’

Henderson gave a restrained laugh. ‘You don’t have much