Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(9)

It must have just happened, or the railway would have already called the unexploded bomb people out to deal with it. The scavenging boy who wanted Rob’s knife was standing there with a shiny cylindrical metal case in his hand. It looked like a soup tin with the paper label missing. And, like he’d said, it was attached by a couple of wires to the inside of the bomb.

‘I’ve got the fuse!’ the boy yelled triumphantly, and then he saw me and Maddie staring at him with our mouths open.

The kid glanced around – there was no place to hide. He reached towards the wires inside the plane as if he was about to yank them free.

Maddie dropped her suitcase and tried to scramble over the wall. ‘Don’t pull! Don’t move! Just hold still –’

I beat her to it. I didn’t have a case, just my flight bag over my shoulder.

‘Don’t drop it –’

Maddie was yelling at me now. ‘Get him to put it down gently! There’s an electrical charge in the fuse and some of them are timed to go off after they’ve landed!’ She made it over the wall and was three steps behind me as we raced across the tracks. ‘That fuse could blow your fingers off on its own, you daft lad, even without being attached to a ton of explosive!’

Then the boy stood very still. He didn’t drop the fuse. He held it out to me across both palms. I remember thinking that this was hugely unfair of God and the universe in general, because now I had to take the fuse. I had got there first and it was mine.

For a moment we were stuck like that, a little boy and a big girl, holding the living heart of a V-1 flying bomb between us.

The silver cylinder had a type number stamped on the cap, and a manufacturer’s name: RHEINMETALL

Incredible to think that someone else’s fingers had fitted this destructive thing together, inserted the fragile switches and connected the wires and screwed on the cap, and now it was balanced ready to blow my own fingers off. Or this boy’s.

I took it from him very carefully.

‘Now scoot,’ I said sadly, because I really thought I was as good as dead.

As he handed it over, the wires simply fell free. They probably had been disconnected the whole time. At least if the fuse went off it wasn’t going to take the bomb with it.

‘Get out of here!’ I yelled at the boy.

He hurtled back across the tracks. As for me, my body acted on behalf of my frozen brain. I wound up for a pitch and hurled the fuse away from the bomb, away from the railway, into the scrubby thin woodland along the tracks.

It hit a beech sapling with a small crack and bang. Bits of bark exploded around the tree, and the trunk sagged – it bent right in half as though it had been caught in a tornado. It wasn’t a very big explosion. But we all saw it. Maddie crouched next to the wreckage of the bomb with her arms over her head, like she’d done in the bus.

I said to her, ‘Come on, Maddie – get away.’

I tugged her across the tracks and over the stone wall. Wouldn’t you know it, I tore my skirt going back over the wall when everything was safe again and not when I was racing to save a kid from blowing himself up! And unbelievably – or very believably, I guess, as my ten years’ experience of being a big sister to those hooligan twins Karl and Kurt ought to have taught me by now – the three boys were still standing there rooted to the spot, staring at the destruction with wide, excited eyes.

‘Would that have gone off in my hand, miss?’

‘How do I know? Maybe! Come on, you’ve got to let the authorities know what you’ve found. Come down to the airfield with us and make a proper report. Get going!’

Maddie pulled herself together and began to herd the boys along the road. ‘Go go go!’

The kids let themselves be bullied now, eyeing me respectfully. ‘You don’t throw like a girl,’ one of them commented.

‘That’s ’cause I played softball at school. Like baseball. Or cricket, sort of – none of us “throw like girls”.’

‘You a Yank?’ asked the boy who’d extracted the fuse, pointing to the ‘USA’ flash on my sleeve.

‘Obviously.’

‘You proud of it?’

Smart aleck.

I had to think about the answer to this question.

‘Yes,’ I said after a moment. ‘Yeah, I am.’

‘That bomb’s dead now, right, miss? A dead doodlebug –’ They all snickered. ‘That’s what the UXB teams do, they take out the fuse –’

I hesitated. I don’t know a lot about bombs. Maddie said, ‘Listen, that dead doodlebug’s still full of TNT, and if that fuse had gone off inside the aircraft, it would have blown you up and probably the rest of us too. What were you doing, playing UXB team?’

‘We saw it come down!’ one of them explained eagerly, and they all broke into grins. ‘We heard it and came running up to the station bridge to watch – Rob had his dad’s field glasses –’

(Crazy kids.)

‘– And we realised it was heading straight for us and we lay right down on the road next to the wall till the noise stopped, because we thought we were dead for sure!’

They were all still completely white around the gills, but they were enjoying themselves more than anything else. Ten-year-old boys are crazy.

We escorted them to the airfield and called out the local Air Raid Precautions warden. He was really nice to the kids, and took them along with him to watch from a safe distance as the road and railway were closed off in preparation for the UXB squad to come along and work their magic.