The Prisoner (26 page)

Jae got the cutest look of frustration on her face when she tried pulling her muddy boot off, and Marc stood behind and helped, before nuzzling the back of her neck.

‘You could stay for dinner,’ Jae said.

‘It’s my night for washing pots at the orphanage,’ Marc said. ‘Best not to piss off the nuns.’

Marc missed Jae as soon as he’d left the Morel’s house. It had just stopped raining. The air felt fresh and the first leaves were dropping.

The orphanage was a melee of cooking smells and nuns yelling at kids who’d got muddy playing on the wet grass. Sister Peter whispered, as Marc unlaced his boots on the front step.

‘There’s a lady waiting at the convent house,’ she said. ‘With Joseph and Noah.’

Maxine embraced Marc warmly when he reached the Canadians’ room. One of the beds had been tilted on to its side to make space. The floor was spread with maps and aerial surveillance photographs of a German airfield.

‘I thought you were hiding something from us,’ Joseph told Marc. ‘But not something
this
big.’

Clearly Maxine had told the Canadians that he was a trained agent.

Marc smiled awkwardly. ‘In which case, I guess it’s time
I
knew who you two are.’

‘We’re commandos,’ Noah said. ‘If we’d got off the beach at Dieppe before getting captured, our job would have been to break away from the main force and destroy a factory near Rouen that makes cockpit instruments for aeroplanes.’

Marc looked around at all the maps, then up at Maxine. ‘Looks like you’ve found another job for them.’

Maxine nodded and picked one of the photos off the floor. ‘It’s a stroke of luck, having an agent and two highly capable commandos turning up within a few kilometres of Luftwaffe headquarters. This is your target. It’s a Junkers 88 night fighter, equipped with the latest mark four radar.’

Marc looked at the twin-engined fighter. It seemed normal, but had an all-black paint job and a criss-crossed scaffold of aerials protruding from the nose.

‘If we can get the radar from a German night fighter, the boffins hope to be able to develop countermeasures against it,’ Maxine explained. ‘The night fighter radar signals are monitored from the ground. The women who operate the sets tell the pilots what height and speed to fly at, even down to the split second when they need to open fire.

‘The RAF have tried jamming German ground-to-air communications, but the system remains stubbornly effective. For every hundred Allied bombers crossing French airspace, we’re losing two to the night fighters. That may not sound huge, but it means the average British bomber crew flying three missions a week is going to be taken down by night fighters in under four months. And of course, many other things that can go wrong in a bomber – mechanical failure, flak, or anti-aircraft guns on the ground. At present, the average life expectancy of a British bomber crew is less than two months.’

‘Why has nobody ever shot one of these night fighters down and picked up the pieces?’ Marc asked.

‘It’s a ground-controlled radar system,’ Maxine said. ‘These planes only ever fly over German-occupied territory.’

‘So our job is to raid the workshop where the radar sets are fixed?’ Marc asked.

The Canadians both laughed, before Maxine explained.

‘The radar set is large, and most of the critical components are bolted into the nose of the aircraft. The only way to get hold of an entire functioning system is to steal a plane and fly it home.’

Marc raised one eyebrow suspiciously as he looked at the Canadians. ‘You’re not pilots as well, are you?’

‘They’re not,’ Maxine said. ‘But the British captured several examples of the bomber version of the Junkers 88 in the Libyan Desert, and these have been flown extensively by British test pilots. One of these test pilots will be parachuted in, making you a four-man team.

‘A local resistance group has been observing one of the night fighter bases about fifteen kilometres from here for several months. They’ve given us excellent information on base procedures and security.

‘Your job will be to penetrate the base during the chaos of a night-time operation, board a fully fuelled night fighter and fly it across the Channel to an airfield in Britain. The JU-88 has two seats behind the pilot and a spot for a rear gunner lying flat directly below the cockpit, so you all get a ride home into the bargain.’

‘Provided we make it off the ground alive,’ Noah said.

‘Or don’t get shot down by a British fighter when we turn up over the Channel in a plane that looks nearly identical to a Junkers 88 bomber,’ Joseph added.

‘There will be more operational details, of course,’ Maxine said.

Marc backed up to the wall, feeling sick. ‘I just don’t know,’ he mumbled.

‘Is something the matter?’ Maxine asked anxiously.

Marc hesitated before answering. ‘It’s just, this feels like my home again now. I’ve got friends, and …’

Maxine looked confused. ‘You’ve got friends on CHERUB campus too: PT, Paul, Rosie, Joel. But this is what you’ve trained for. I set all this up, assuming you were raring to get back to campus.’

Joseph smiled at Maxine, then put an unwelcome arm around Marc’s back. ‘Don’t you know the young fella’s in love? Couple of nights back he half killed some lad just for making a few sly remarks about her.’

‘Ahh …’ Maxine said, as her lower jaw dropped.

She didn’t know how to react. As an experienced resistance leader, Maxine expected everyone who signed up to follow orders. But Marc was hardly a normal case. He’d signed up when he was twelve years old. He’d already shown bravery on two daring missions, escaped captivity in Germany and was still only fourteen.

‘If that’s what you want,’ Maxine said weakly. ‘I suppose I could make up the team with one of our other people up from Paris. But it’s very short notice.’

Marc felt bad: not just for letting down Maxine, but also the idea of abandoning Henderson’s team. Rosie, Paul, Joel and PT
were
the strongest group of friends he’d ever made. But he loved Jae so much that the thought of leaving her made him feel like his body was being ripped in half.

While Maxine and Marc didn’t know what to do, Noah faced Marc off. He was an intimidating man. His enormous chest came level with Marc’s face and his arms looked like they could punch you clean through a brick wall into the next room.

Marc backed up when Noah’s hand came out of his trouser pocket, half expecting a knife or knuckleduster. Maxine looked anxious too, but it was only a photo. One of the few colour photographs Marc had ever seen.

‘That’s my wife and twin daughters,’ Noah said. ‘I could get court-martialled for taking their picture with me on a covert operation, but this photo is all I’ve ever seen of my babies and I love my wife.

‘I sit here all day thinking about ’em. But every one of us Canadians are volunteers. I came over to fight, because what kind of world would my wife and daughters end up living in if men like me sit on their asses?’

After the cruelty Marc had seen in Germany, he realised he couldn’t leave other people to fight the war just because he’d fallen for a girl. He felt a touch pathetic as he looked away from Noah towards Maxine.

‘If it needs doing, then,’ Marc said determinedly. ‘When does this happen?’

Two days after finding out about the mission, Marc met Jae for lunch by the pond. For security purposes it would have been better to just vanish, but Marc cared too much to simply abandon his girlfriend without a word.

Marc explained how he’d been trained in Britain, arrested in Lorient, spent a year in Frankfurt, escaped and wound up back at the orphanage more or less by accident. It wasn’t an everyday story. Jae had trouble believing all of it and once she did she sounded both shocked and impressed.

‘Now I have to leave,’ Marc said.

‘When?’

‘After work, provided the weather stays clear.’

‘What’s the weather got to do with it?’

Marc shouldn’t have told her, but hiding stuff from someone he was so crazy about seemed wrong.

‘Parachute drop,’ he explained. ‘The pilot can’t accurately drop the equipment for our mission if it’s raining, or there’s low cloud.’

‘It’s so soon,’ Jae said. ‘I can hardly take this all in.’

‘I know it’s brutal, but that’s how it always works, for security. I only found out the day before yesterday. The fewer people who hear about an operation and the less time there is before it kicks off, the less chance there is of someone snitching, or getting picked up and interrogated.’

‘I want to come with you,’ Jae said, close to tears. ‘If my dad gets sent to prison I’ll be all on my own.’

‘Your dad’s a wily one,’ Marc said. ‘He’ll work out a deal. Wouldn’t be surprised if he stitched Tomas up into the bargain.’

‘I hope,’ Jae said.

‘Besides, when you tell your dad that I’ve run away again, he’ll be able to say
I told you so
.’

Jae managed a slight smile. ‘
Why
does this have to happen?’ she moaned.

‘I wish it didn’t,’ Marc said. ‘But the war’s too important to sit out.’

‘We might never see each other again,’ Jae said.

Marc’s eyes glazed over as he shook his head. ‘Don’t say
never
. We’ll be sitting here again before you know it.’

Marc pulled a knife out of a leather sheath. Jae looked curious as Marc stroked her long hair.

‘Memento,’ Marc explained. ‘OK?’

Jae nodded, then sniffled as Marc sliced off a few dozen long strands of her hair. He tied the bunch in a knot and gave them a kiss before pushing them into his pocket.

‘What do I get to chop off?’ Jae asked, as she ran her hand over Marc’s head.

Marc had been virtually bald when he got back from Germany, and even now there were only a couple of centimetres of hair on his head.

‘I want your shirt,’ Jae said, as she undid the top button.

Marc looked at her like she was mad. ‘I’ve been wearing this all week. It stinks.’

‘Of you,’ Jae said. ‘I like your smell.’

‘I’m kinda wearing it,’ Marc pointed out.

Jae thought for a couple of seconds. ‘Put it on the wall outside the orphanage when you leave. I’ll ride over and collect it before sunrise.’

The idea seemed both romantic and crazy, but it showed Marc that Jae really cared about him. They were both miserable so he tried a joke.

‘Expect I’ll change my socks as well before I set off,’ he said. ‘Do you want them too?’

‘Oh, you’re funny,’ Jae said drily, before rolling into Marc’s lap so that he could give her another kiss.

Then she dug her nails into his wrists and begged him not to leave.

‘I’ve got to,’ Marc said, as he tasted Jae’s salty tear on his tongue. ‘Please don’t make this harder than it is already.’

*

The first time Marc left the orphanage he’d been running, scared out of his wits. This time he was trained, he was in love, he had a mission. He didn’t feel like a boy any more, though trailing through countryside struggling to keep pace with two burly Canadian commandos was a stark reminder that he wasn’t a man yet, either.

It was after curfew so they kept to the woods, navigating by compass and moonlight. Four kilometres east of the orphanage they met up with a guide from a local resistance cell.

‘Nice evening for hunting,’ the guide said.

Joseph answered with a pre-planned reply. ‘The only thing I’ve caught is a cold.’

The woman was in the early stages of pregnancy, dressed in trousers and rope-soled shoes. For security’s sake, nobody exchanged names, or details of where they’d come from.

Despite the woman’s state, the pace didn’t flag. Marc battled a stitch down his right side, but with a pregnant woman leading the way he was too proud to admit anything beyond a stiff back from labouring on Morel’s farm.

With half of Europe to run and their best men committed to the brutal war with Russia, German security was spread thin. The guide led them through woodland, across open fields and even braved a section of country road. Despite a full moon, they didn’t spot a German patrol, or even hear a passing vehicle.

Their first halt was just before midnight.

‘Welcome,’ a man said, before beckoning the quartet down a short ladder. He wore an English huntsman’s suit, and his accent established him as true French aristocracy.

They stepped down into an air-raid trench, built within sight of a country house that made the Morels’ place look like a tin shack. Marc shook hands with two lads, probably a year either side of his own age. Although nobody gave names or asked unnecessary questions, these were undoubtedly sons of privilege, in hand-tailored sport coats and polished leather riding boots.

Before the war, much of France’s wealthy elite had held more sympathy for Hitler than their own socialist government. But two years of Nazi occupation had shattered a lot of illusions, and Marc drew strength from the fact that he was squatting in a muddy shelter, toe-to-toe with some real-life toffs.

‘You’ve got half an hour to rest,’ the aristocrat said, as he glanced at a fine wristwatch. ‘There’s bread and cheese, plus a little wine while we wait for the show to start.’

Marc thought
show
was a reference to a parachute drop. But when they eventually moved from the shelter to a hedge overlooking the rear of the huge house, it seemed something more elaborate was about to take place.

Twenty members of the local resistance were spread over the perfectly mown lawn behind the grand house. Old men, younger women and a few peasant boys. Hay bails had been lit at the corners and there was a distant hum of two aircraft.

Marc was impressed by the scale of whatever was about to take place, but knew better than to ask what it was. As the sound of propellers grew, a pair of peasant girls dashed to the far end of the lawn, close to a lake. They waved phosphorous-dipped sticks that burned bright white.

When the two little planes came into view, they swept close to the tree tops, silhouetted against the full moon.

‘Surely that’s too low?’ Noah said anxiously. ‘What are they playing at?’

Marc had done parachute training and realised from their height and approach angle that these planes weren’t about to drop anything.