Scorched Earth

  www.hodderchildrens.co.uk

  BY ROBERT MUCHAMORE

  The Henderson’s Boys series:

  1. The Escape

  2. Eagle Day

  3. Secret Army

  4. Grey Wolves

  5. The Prisoner

  6. One Shot Kill

  7. Scorched Earth

  The CHERUB series:

  1. The Recruit

  2. Class A

  3. Maximum Security

  4. The Killing

  5. Divine Madness

  6. Man vs Beast

  7. The Fall

  8. Mad Dogs

  9. The Sleepwalker

  10. The General

  11. Brigands M.C.

  12. Shadow Wave

  CHERUB series 2:

  1. People’s Republic

  2. Guardian Angel

  … and coming soon:

  3. Black Friday

  Copyright © 2013 Robert Muchamore

  First published in Great Britain in 2013

  by Hodder Children’s Books

  This ebook edition published in 2013

  The right of Robert Muchamore to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form, or by any means with prior permission in writing from the publishers or in the case of reprographic production in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency and may not be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN-13: 978 1 444 91408 5

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  Hitler boasted that his European empire would last 1,000 years, but by June 1944 it was dying. In the east, the Soviet Union had retaken all of the territory he’d invaded three summers earlier and the Red Army now approached German soil. American forces had fought north through Italy to the outskirts of Rome, while in Britain 6,000 ships and half a million men were making final preparations for a cross-Channel invasion.

  France remained under German occupation, but Nazi resources were stretched and the population was becoming rebellious. Resistance organisations had infiltrated every aspect of French life and thousands of young men chose to go on the run, rather than submit to deportation and forced labour in German mines and factories.

  Many of these runaways formed gangs, known as the Maquis. Most lived in mountains or woodlands, with limited shelter and no option but to steal to survive. Until Allied boots hit French beaches, these young men were one of the biggest threats to German rule in France, and the Nazis were determined to wipe them out.

  Part One

  June 5th–June 6th 1944

  CHAPTER ONE

  Monday 5 June 1944

  ‘Mondays have never liked me,’ Paul Clarke said, trying to keep cheerful as his face creased with pain.

  The fifteen-year-old had turned his ankle and skidded down an embankment. A khaki backpack cushioned the muddy slide, but he had dark streaks down his trousers and puddle water trickling into his boot.

  ‘Nice slide?’ Luc Mayefski asked, offering a hand as rain pelted their waxed jackets.

  The teenagers’ hands couldn’t have been more different. Paul’s slender fingers linked with a great ham fist, and even with 30 kilos of explosive in Paul’s pack, Luc didn’t strain as he tugged his skinny cohort out of the mud.

  If it had just been the pair of them Luc would have taken the piss out of Paul’s tumble, but these trained members of Charles Henderson’s Espionage Research Unit B (CHERUB) had to show a united front for the benefit of their inexperienced companions, Michel and Daniel.

  Michel was an eighteen-year-old Maquis. Nine months’ living in the woods had left him stringy, with wild hair and a wire tourniquet holding on the sole of his right boot. His brother Daniel was only eleven. Their father was a prisoner in Germany and their mother had vanished after being arrested by the Gestapo. Daniel had chosen to live on the run with his brother, rather than be dumped at an orphanage.

  ‘Are your explosives OK?’ Daniel asked, as Paul joined the brothers on a muddy track at the base of the wooded embankment.

  ‘Plastic explosive is stable,’ Paul explained, as he tested his ankle and decided he could walk off the pain. ‘You can safely cut it, mould it. It wouldn’t blow up if you hit it with a hammer.’

  Luc checked his compass and led off, eyes squinting as the early sun shot between tree trunks. Even with the rain Luc was sweating and he liked the earthy forest smell and the little squelch each time his boot landed.

  Paul and Michel were suffering after 15 kilometres under heavy packs, but Daniel had done them proud. He’d walked all night, but refused to stop even when doubled up with a stitch.

  Luc had been out this way on a recon trip two days earlier, and he turned off track at a point he’d marked by pushing two sticks into the soft ground.

  ‘There’s a good view down from this ridge,’ Luc explained, as he led the way. ‘But keep quiet. The sound carries across the valley and we’re not far from the guard.’

  ‘If there is one,’ Paul added.

  The undergrowth was dense and Michel lifted his brother over a fast stream carrying the overnight rain. As Daniel got set down, Paul was touched by the way Michel put an arm around his little brother’s back and kissed his cheek.

  ‘Proud of you,’ Michel whispered.

  Daniel smiled, then squirmed away, embarrassed, when he realised Paul was looking.

  After a dozen more paces, Luc crouched and pushed branches aside. He’d opened a view over a ledge into a steep-walled valley cut into chalkstone. Water dripped off leaves on to Paul’s neck as he peered at two sets of train tracks running along the valley’s base. Sixty metres to his right, the tracks entered the mouth of a tunnel blasted through the steep hillside.

  ‘You’d never be able to bomb this from the air,’ Luc whispered, as he slid a pair of German Zeiss binoculars from their case. After wiping condensation off the lenses, he raised them to his eyes and looked towards a wooden guard hut near the tunnel mouth. The magnified view showed no sign of life and a padlock on the door.

  ‘We’re in luck,’ Luc said.

  The tunnel formed part of a main line running north from Paris, taking trains to Calais on the Channel coast, or forking east into Belgium and Germany. The Germans had built guard huts at the ends of hundreds of important bridges and tunnels, but only had enough manpower to staff a fraction of them.

  ‘Nice binoculars,’ Paul noted, as Luc passed them over. ‘Where’d you get them?’

  ‘Drunk Osttruppen 1,’ Luc explained. ‘They’d swap the uniform on their backs for a bottle of brandy.’

  Paul backed away from the ledge as Luc glanced at his pocket watch. ‘If there’s a guard at the other end, we’ll sneak up and take him out from behind. Our target train is due to reach the tunnel at around seven a.m. That gives us half an hour to lay explosives along the tunnel and get in position, but with air raids and sabotage, there’s no
guarantee that any train will run on time. Especially one that’s come all the way from Hanover.’

  As Luc spoke, Paul slid canvas straps off his badly-chafed shoulders and moaned with relief as his pack settled in the undergrowth. An exploratory finger under the shirt collar came out bloody, but there was no time for first aid.

  After unbuckling the pack, Paul took out two grubby cloth sacks. They seemed to be half full of potatoes, but the uneven lumps were plastic explosive, linked with detonator cord like a string of giant Christmas lights.

  Paul looked at Michel. ‘Remember what Henderson said. The weakest part of the tunnel is around the mouth, so pack plenty around there.’

  As Luc and Michel each grabbed one of Paul’s sacks and slung it over their shoulders alongside their own heavy packs, Paul looked at Daniel and tried to sound upbeat. ‘Ready to hike?’

  The brothers quickly hugged, then Luc gave Daniel his binoculars before leading Michel along the side of the valley.

  ‘You break those and I’ll break you,’ Luc warned.

  As there was no guard, Luc and Michel faced an easy journey down to the tunnel mouth using uneven steps carved into the chalkstone. When they reached the mouth, their task was to unravel the chains of explosive along the tunnel’s 300-metre length and retreat to a safe distance, ready to trigger them.

  Meantime, Paul and Daniel had to find a vantage point atop the forested hill through which the tunnel cut. Once in position, they had to identify their target: a 600-metre-long cargo train carrying twenty Tiger II tanks, dozens of 88-mm artillery guns and enough spare parts and ammunition to keep the 108th Heavy Panzer Battalion functioning for several weeks.

  Since handing over the explosives, the weight of Paul’s pack had dropped from 30 kilos to less than four. The bread, cheese and apples that had spent the night at the bottom were squashed, but the two lads scoffed eagerly and shared a canteen of milk as they followed a track to the top of the hill.

  Two trains steamed south through the tunnel as they walked and Paul was glad to be up here in fresh air, rather than laying explosives along the dank, soot-filled tunnel.

  ‘Hope they’re OK,’ Daniel said warily, as he eyed plumes of smoke billowing from either end of the tunnel.

  ‘You have to keep low and put a wet cloth over your face,’ Paul said. ‘It’s not fun, but they’ll survive.’

  Daniel stopped worrying when he found a bend in the narrow footpath, and spotted another marker from Luc’s recon trip. The dense forest made trainspotting hopeless from ground level, but Luc said he’d climbed to a position where he could see trains approaching along several kilometres of snaking track.

  The eleven-year-old wasn’t just along for the ride. Growing up in Paris, Daniel had earned a reputation as a daredevil, clambering over rooftops, diving off bridges and breaking both arms when he’d leapt between two balconies for a dare. After joining the Maquis in the woods north of Paris, Daniel made a name for himself as a forest lookout, able to climb branches too slim to hold an adult’s weight.

  ‘I’ll have to lose all this gear,’ Daniel said. ‘Put it in your pack in case we need to make a quick getaway.’

  Paul didn’t like taking orders from an eleven-year-old, but Daniel was a good kid and he watched the youngster pull off his boots and strip down to a stocky frame, clad in grotty vest and undershorts. Regular climbing had toughened Daniel’s skin and he looked more ape than human as he launched himself into the branches with Luc’s binoculars swinging from his neck.

  ‘Careful,’ Paul warned, as Daniel vanished into the leafy canopy, becoming nothing but rustling sounds and occasional shifts in the early sunlight.

  Paul burrowed down his pack and found the phosphorous grenade he’d use to warn Luc and Michel when they spotted their target. Twenty metres up, Daniel swung his leg over a fork, clamped the thick branch between his thighs and wiped a palm smeared in bird crap down the front of his vest.

  ‘Slippery, but the view’s great,’ Daniel said, happy with himself as he stared over the treetops at fields, villages and a clear view of the railway tracks approaching both ends of the tunnel. ‘Why don’t you hop up and join me?’

  Note

  1 Osttruppen – German soldiers recruited from occupied countries such as Russia, Ukraine and Poland. Most volunteered to avoid starvation in labour camps. Osttruppen were regarded as poor soldiers and were usually given lowly duties such as emptying latrines, burying bodies and working as servants to senior officers.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Edith Mercier looked uncomfortable as she lugged a wicker basket along Beauvais’ Rue Desgroux. The rain had stopped, but the slim fifteen-year-old trod cautiously because the cobbles were still damp. She’d passed a postman and a few folks heading to work, but this municipal district would stay quiet for another hour.

  Allied bombs had demolished shops and houses behind the Rue Desgroux and opened deep cracks in the façade of the town’s main administrative office. Behind stacked sandbags and a side wall braced with wooden props, staff inside the offices continued with duties, ranging from civil weddings to issuing bicycle licences.

  The upper floor was used by the city’s German administrators, so the building warranted a rain-soaked swastika pennant and a single German guard out front. Edith quickly glanced at this guard before taking a long step and deliberately losing her balance. Her basket spilled, sending onions bobbling in all directions, and she howled to make sure that her ‘accident’ wasn’t missed.

  She’d hoped the guard would rush to her aid. But the young soldier had arranged sandbags into a kind of lounger and had the air of someone who’d only get up if a bomb went off, or a senior officer threatened a court martial for lying down on the job.

  Edith steamed. She’d practised realistic falls back in the woods and the slippery cobbles should have made her stunt believable.

  ‘Oh, my back,’ she moaned. ‘Can you give me a hand?’

  Edith’s summer dress was getting soaked and the young German still wasn’t taking the bait. She righted the basket and started crawling around, picking up the onions. She went for the onions nearest the sandbag wall and growled at the guard.

  ‘What a gentleman you are!’

  The guard raised one eyebrow sarcastically as he rested a small book in his lap. He was handsome, no older than twenty. Edith found this odd because the German army sent young men to fight, and left older ones playing night watchmen in small French towns. But as the man leaned out of shadow, his horribly scarred cheek emerged, followed by a knotted sleeve where his left arm ended in a stump.

  The German gave a sly smile, then spoke slow but accurate French. ‘What if mademoiselle is a resistance spy sent to distract me?’ he asked. ‘What if one of your onions explodes when I pick it up?’

  ‘Do I look like someone with explosive onions?’ Edith replied, hands on hips as she scowled over the sandbags.

  ‘How should I know what a spy looks like?’

  It didn’t matter how Edith distracted the German and, while he hadn’t offered to help, a night alone on guard duty had bored him enough to crave conversation.

  ‘What happened to your arm?’ Edith asked.

  ‘The war happened,’ he said grumpily.

  ‘Could have worked that one out,’ Edith said. ‘Don’t you like talking about it?’

  ‘Saw plenty come off worse,’ the guard said. ‘And I can’t hold a rifle, so I can’t go anywhere there’s bullets flying.’

  As he said this, the guard finally stepped out from behind the sandbags. He kicked an onion backwards with his heel, let it roll up the front of his other boot and skilfully flipped it into the air. A clumsy one-handed catch spoiled the stunt, but it still made Edith smile.

  ‘You play football?’ she asked.

  ‘I was apprenticed to a factory team, before I ran off to join the army.’

  ‘You volunteered?’ Edith asked.

  The German shrugged and gestured towards his stump. ‘Not my greatest decision, but
they would have conscripted me within a year anyway.’

  *

  As the guard focused on his trick with the onion, CHERUB agent PT Bivott shot out of a doorway 20 metres away. The eighteen-year-old had dark, slicked back hair and a frame that had bulked up in the two years since he’d stopped growing taller.

  PT was trailed by a middle-aged teacher named Jean Leclerc. The pair kept low as they ran 10 metres over cobbles, then cut down four stone steps into a passageway where the administrative building adjoined a disused fire station.

  After doing their best not to crunch rubble and broken glass, they came to a peeling blue door at the end. Their key was a handmade copy and it took rattling and hand strength to turn, but Edith was still speaking to the one-armed German as they ducked to safety through the low entrance and breathed mildew and rodent piss in the admin building’s basement.

  Flipping the light switch did nothing, but Jean had a battery-powered torch to guide them over mounds of rubbish and cleaning gear. They turned into a gloomy hallway running beneath a stage, and looked through metal grilles into a 200-seat hall.

  ‘Married my second wife in there,’ Jean whispered.

  A door took them out beneath a staircase, then past the brass rails and oil paintings into the building’s deserted foyer.

  PT led the way up two thickly carpeted flights through the gloomy light created by the boarded-up stained glass on the landing. They ignored the German commander’s double-doored office and cut into a long corridor with offices off either side.

  ‘She told me it’s F, halfway down on our left,’ Jean said.

  The door of Room F was already ajar and as PT stepped in, a movement made him jolt.

  ‘Shit,’ PT blurted, taking a step back and ripping a silenced pistol out of its holster. When there was no further movement, he jumped into the room, sweeping the weapon from side to side.

  PT had just about convinced himself that he was imagining things when a vast ginger cat belted out of the gap between two filing cabinets. It brushed PT’s trousers and shot out into the hallway.