but Instructor Takada had taught techniques for managing pain. People calmly endured surgery in the days before anaesthetic and what were a few gouges compared to that?
In places the barnacled rocks dipped below the water and Marc had to paddle, though never above his knee. He held the case in front of himself, because that would hit any coils of wire before his legs did.
When the rocks ended his plimsoll squelched into mushy sand. There was a chance of buried mines, but it was too dark to deal with them, so the only strategy was to hope for the best.
‘Keep low,’ Henderson warned, when he stepped up behind, carrying the backpack and the other suitcase.
A shelf in the beach offered limited cover and the pair nestled down. Henderson took a moment to find a small pair of binoculars and used them to scan the landscape.
‘Anything?’ Marc asked.
‘Too bloody dark,’ Henderson said. ‘Though if we can’t see them, they can’t see us.’
The sea brought in a strong breeze, which rustled through reed beds beyond the sand. When the wind stopped, they heard noise coming from not far beyond. It was the sound of men in good spirits.
‘Shall we move?’ Marc asked impatiently.
Henderson traced the line of the horizon with his finger. ‘If they’ve put all those tank traps on the beach, there has to be defensive positions along there. I’m not moving until I know where they are.’
It made sense, but Marc was cold and bloody. After four minutes of fear and pain, he broke silence with a childish whine.
‘Come on, let’s go.’
Henderson looked cross. ‘It doesn’t get light for six hours, but sooner or later we’ll hear a door clank, or someone will step outside for a smoke. Until then …’
Henderson cut himself off because they’d been blessed with light. It came from a road beyond the reeds. The wavering front lamp of a bicycle was enough to make out silhouettes and, as Henderson had predicted, two pill-shaped bunkers bulged out of the reeds like frog’s eyeballs.
CHAPTER TWO
Shivering and sodden, the white sand stuck to their clothes in clumps and got in all the places you don’t want it to. A cautious five-minute crawl over seventy metres of beach had brought Marc and Henderson to the edge of the reeds.
Higher ground had brought the roofline of a grand house into view. The people celebrating were German men, officers judging by their accents. Apparently they’d not only landed on the wrong beach, they had found the Nazi high-ups’ back garden.
This limited knowledge raised more questions. Were there men in the pill-boxes less than ten metres ahead of them? Could they walk on to the road where they saw occasional traffic, or were they behind the fences of a secure compound? And if they made it out of here alive, where the hell were they and how far from where they were supposed to land?
The squat concrete pill-box was the first problem. These circular boxes were a standard design, made from bomb-proof concrete, with an armoured door at the rear and a long open slot facing out to sea, through which mortars and machine-gun fire could be directed across the entire beach.
Henderson crept forward, while Marc stayed back with the luggage. It was impossible to move silently through reeds but the breeze and squawking gulls gave cover. Then came the first gunshot.
White birds crowed before launching into the air. Henderson assumed either he or Marc had been spotted and grabbed his pistol from its holster.
He looked up, but there was no sign of anything happening in the pill-box and no sound of men advancing through into the reeds, though Marc was spooked and crawled up frantically behind him.
‘Where did that come from?’ Marc asked.
Henderson gave a don’t know gesture, then jolted again at a shotgun blast aimed high into the sky.
‘Can’t shoot for shit!’ a German shouted drunkenly.
‘In this dark,’ the shooter said defensively. ‘How can I see?’
With that, more pistol shots fired into the dunes, sending up plumes of sand and seabirds. This time the shotgun was more accurate and the Germans cheered as a gull fell out of the sky.
‘Give me a blast,’ another German shouted.
‘Piss off, it’s my turn!’ another howled childishly. ‘Do we have more shotguns?’
There were four or five men in the group. All drunk, all loud. Marc and Henderson couldn’t see them because of the reeds, but the tone of the man who now took the shotgun indicated seniority.
‘I’ll show you proper Prussian shooting!’ the officer