Free Henderson's Boys: The Escape by Robert Muchamore Page A

open the draw-string of his bag and placed the bottle inside, nestled between a cloth and his dirty shorts so that it didn’t break.
    After backing the bike out, he gave a quick wave as he pedalled off. When he turned to face the road he noticed a soldier just a few metres ahead.
    ‘Coming through,’ Marc shouted, swerving to avoid the scruffy figure. His chest was bare beneath a muddy army jacket and Marc guessed he was drunk.
    But as Marc pedalled by the soldier kicked out. The bike clattered over and Marc’s knee banged hard on the stone as the soldier pounced on top and slapped him across the mouth.
    ‘Stay down,’ the soldier ordered, shaking his fist in Marc’s face as he ripped the bike away.
    Marc was less than twenty metres from the café and the waitress and the two men who’d teased him came running. But by the time they arrived the soldier was pedalling off into the night.
    ‘Are you all right, son?’ one of the men asked, as he gave Marc a hand up.
    He’d taken a nasty blow in the mouth and gasped with pain when he put weight on his knee.
    ‘Damn nice bike that, too,’ the other drunk noted, as he picked Marc’s bag off the ground.
    Marc tried not to cry as they helped him hobble towards the café, but he already had a tear streaking down his cheek.
    ‘Looks like a nasty cut,’ the waitress said. ‘Better bring him inside and I’ll clean it up.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN
     
    The first stretch out of Paris was a crawl, but the hard work really started when the Citroën joined up with the main road heading south. Mr Clarke had hoped to travel 120 kilometres to Orléans and then stop overnight with an old friend who was a buyer at the town’s department store.
    Clarke had the advantage of a car, and the thousands of kilometres he’d driven as a salesman for Imperial Wireless had left him with excellent knowledge of France’s back roads. But the refugees formed an impenetrable mass of slow-moving carts and bodies. Driving through them was agonising – constantly stopping and starting, rarely managing to break out of first gear and, in spots where the road narrowed, the car was actually a disadvantage. A blast of the horn achieved nothing and he had to use the car to physically push people aside. This was easily overdone and arguments regularly flared between drivers and foot-sloggers.
    The Citroën suffered small attacks – from people pounding it with fists and boots or scratching the paint with keys. In one instance a man whose daughter suffered a painful knock from the front bumper ripped off a door mirror. Fearing that he would smash a window next, Clarke placed a hand on the gun he’d seized from the German, but luckily the man hurled the mirror into a hedge and backed off in a volley of foul language.
    Paul knew he was in the midst of something extraordinary. He grabbed a pad from his satchel and made quick sketches of refugees, overloaded carts and bombed cottages. Alarmingly, he kept seeing cars similar to their own that had succumbed to slow driving and warm weather and blown their radiators.
    While Paul withdrew into himself Rosie did the opposite, and constantly expressed pity as she gave a running commentary on some of the more pathetic refugees. There were people on crutches, people so old that they could barely walk; while the dead and unconscious littered the sides of the road. A few casualties were the result of air raids, but most had simply collapsed after walking hundreds of kilometres, laden with possessions.
    ‘Enough,’ Mr Clarke said finally, after his daughter noticed a British serviceman with his arm in a sling amidst the crowd. ‘I can see! I have eyes! I can’t think straight with your constant babbling.’
    Rosie sulked, crossing her arms and staring directly ahead. After a few minutes of defiance she opened the door and got into the back beside Paul. When it started getting dark they pulled the curtains in the spacious rear compartment and arranged the luggage so that