Rosie glanced around and while she could hear distant cries, there seemed to be no one else nearby. Her eyes were close to the water and all she could see was the moon and a few buildings lit up along the coastline.

‘I guess the current pulled us some distance,’ Rosie said.

‘I’m a good swimmer and you don’t look bad yourself,’ PT said. ‘We can make it to shore, but the cold will do us in if we hang about.’

A tear welled in Rosie’s eye as the life-jacketed pair started swimming towards the coast. Images flashed through her mind like fireworks: Mannstein’s documents lying on the riverbed, her mother white and thin the day before she died of cancer, her father coughing blood, Hugo’s last gasp and Yvette’s smile as Paul handed her his beautiful drawing before leaving the cottage that morning.

She looked across at the young American.

‘I hope my brother’s out there somewhere,’ Rosie choked. ‘He’s all I have left.’

6U-boat – a German submarine.

READ ON FOR THE FIRST CHAPTER
OF THE NEXT HENDERSON’S
BOYS BOOK, EAGLE DAY.

CHAPTER ONE

It was eleven at night, but the port of Bordeaux crackled with life. Refugee kids slumped in humid alleyways, using their mothers’ bellies for pillows. Drunken soldiers and marooned sailors scrapped, sang and peed against blacked-out streetlamps. Steamers lined up three abreast at the wharves, waiting for a coal train that showed no sign of arriving soon.

With roads clogged and no diesel for trucks, the dockside was choked with produce while people went hungry less than twenty kilometres away. Meat and veg surrendered to maggots, while recently arrived boats had nowhere to unload and ditched rotting cargo into the sea.

A man and a boy strode along the dock wall, alongside rusting bollards and oranges catching moonlight as they bobbed in the water between a pair of Indian cargo ships.

‘Will the consulate be open this late?’ Marc Kilgour asked.

Marc was twelve. He was well built, with a scruffy blond tangle down his brow and his shirt clutched over his nose to mask the sickly odour of rotting bananas. The pigskin bag over Marc’s shoulder held everything he owned.

Charles Henderson walked beside him: six feet of wiry muscle and a face that would look better after a night’s sleep and an encounter with a sharp blade. Disguised as peasants, the pair wore corduroy trousers and white shirts damp with sweat. A suitcase strained Henderson’s right arm and the metal objects inside jangled as he grabbed Marc’s collar and yanked him off course.

‘Look where you’re putting your feet!’