Eagle Day - Robert Muchamore Page 0,1

a half-dozen boys played a rowdy game of football, using cabbages stolen from the wharves.

Henderson ignored Marc’s tricky question, instead answering the one he’d asked two minutes earlier.

‘The consulate will be closed, but we have nowhere to stay and the office is sure to be inundated by morning. We might be able to find our own way in …’

Henderson tailed off as a pair of German planes swept overhead. The lads playing cabbage football made machine-gun noises and hurled curses over the sea, until their parents yelled at them to cut the racket before it woke younger siblings.

‘I’m French,’ Marc noted seriously. ‘I don’t speak a word of English, so how can you get me a British passport?’

‘We’ll manage,’ Henderson said confidently, as he stopped walking for a moment and switched his heavy case from one arm to the other. ‘After all we’ve been through, you should trust me by now.’

The consulate was only a kilometre from the dockside, but Henderson insisted he knew better than the directions jotted down by an official at the passenger terminal. They traipsed muggy streets where the smell of sewage mixed with sea air, until a friendly-but-sozzled dockworker set them back on the right path.

‘I wonder where Paul and Rosie are,’ Marc said, as they broke into a cobbled square with a crumbling fountain at its centre.

‘They’ll be upriver, close to open sea by now,’ Henderson reckoned, after a glance at his watch. ‘There’s U-boats

1 prowling and the captain will want to reach the English Channel before daylight.’

A courthouse spanned one side of the square, with a domed church opposite and a couple of gendarmes2 standing watch, their main purpose apparently to stop refugees settling on the church steps. The British consulate stood in a neat terrace of offices, jewellers, pawnbrokers and banks.

One end of this row had suffered structural damage from a bomb meant for the docks. Even in moonlight you could see the dramatically warped façade above a jeweller’s shop and broken roof slates swept to a tidy pile at the side.

With low-flying bombers and the German forces expected to reach Bordeaux within the week, the Union Jack flag had tactfully been removed from the consulate, but nothing could be done about the British lions woven into wrought-iron gates padlocked across the front door.

Several of His Majesty’s subjects gathered on the front steps, with noticeably better clothing and luggage than the refugees scavenging food along the dockside, but Henderson was wary. The Gestapo3 were still after him and they could easily have spies watching what remained of Bordeaux’s British community.

Henderson would stand out amongst the other Brits in his peasant clothing and Marc spoke no English, so rather than join the queue and wait for nine a.m., he led Marc around the rear of the terrace and was pleased to find that it backed on to a sheltered alleyway. The bombing had fractured a water pipe beneath the cobbles and their boots swilled through several centimetres of water.

‘Have you still got my torch?’ Henderson whispered, when they reached the rear door of the consulate.

The batteries were weak and the beam faltered as Marc scanned the brickwork. After snatching his torch Henderson squatted down and aimed light through the letterbox.

‘Nobody home,’ he said, as the metal flap snapped shut. ‘No sign of an alarm, no bars at the windows. If I give you a boost, do you reckon you can get yourself through the small window?’

Marc craned his head up as Henderson aimed the torch so that he could see.

‘What about the two cops in the square?’ Marc asked. ‘They’ll hear if the glass goes.’

Henderson shook his head. ‘It’s a sash window; you should be able to force it open with a lever.’

Henderson stepped back out of the puddle and found dry cobbles on which to lay and open his case. Marc noticed shadowy figures passing the end of the alleyway, then jolted at the distinctive click of Henderson loading his pistol.

Marc was delighted that a British agent was going to all this bother on his account. Henderson could have abandoned him at the passenger terminal and sailed aboard the Cardiff Bay with Paul and Rosie. But as well as a soft heart, Henderson had a ruthless streak and the gun made Marc uneasy.

In the three days since Marc first met Henderson in Paris, Henderson had shot or blown up half a dozen Germans and machine-gunned a grovelling Frenchman in his bathtub. If the next figure at the end of the alleyway chose