“Hello, Macht. I know only that by emergency directive from Luftwaffe Command I am to obey your orders.”
“Do you have planes up tonight?”
“No, the bomber streams are heading north tonight. We have the night off.”
“Sorry to make the boys work, Herr Oberst. It seems your seatmate is returning to your area. I need manpower. I need you to meet and cordon off the Cherbourg train at the Bricquebec stop. It’s due in at eleven-thirty p.m. Maximum effort. Get your pilots out of bed or out of the bars or brothels, and your mechanics, your ground crews, your fuelers. Leave only a skeleton crew in the tower. I’ll tell you why in a bit.”
“I must say, Macht, this is unprecedented.”
“Oberst, I’m trying to keep you from the Russian front. Please comply enthusiastically so that you can go back to your three mistresses and your wine cellar.”
“How did—”
“We have records, Herr Oberst. Anyhow, I would conceal the men in the bushes and inside the depot house until the train has all but arrived. Then, on command, they are to take up positions surrounding the train, making certain that no one leaves. At that point I want you to lead a search party from one end to the other, though of course start in first class. You know who you are looking for. He is now, however, in a dark blue pin-striped suit, double-breasted. He has a dark overcoat. He may look older, more abused, harder, somehow different from when last you saw him. You must be alert, do you understand?”
“Is he armed?”
“We don’t know. Assume he is. Listen here, there’s a tricky part. When you see him, you must not react immediately. Do you understand? Don’t make eye contact, don’t move fast or do anything stupid. He has an L-pill. It will probably be in his mouth. If he sees you coming for him, he will bite it. Strychnine—instant. It would mean so much more if we could take him alive. He may have many secrets, do you understand?”
“I do.”
“When you take him, order your officers to go first for his mouth. They have to get fingers or a plug or something deep into his throat to keep him from biting or swallowing, then turn him facedown and pound hard on his back. He has to cough out that pill.”
“My people will be advised. I will obviously be there to supervise.”
“Oberst, this chap is very efficient, very practiced. He’s an old dog with miles of travel on him. For years he’s lasted in a profession where most perish in a week. Be very careful, be very astute, be very sure. I know you can do this.”
“I will catch your spy for you, Macht.”
“Excellent. One more thing. I will arrive within two hours in my own Storch, with my assistant, Abel.”
“That’s right, you fly.”
“I do, yes. I have over a thousand hours, and you know how forgiving a Storch is.”
“I do.”
“So alert your tower people. I’ll buzz them so they can light a runway for the thirty seconds it takes me to land, then go back to blackout. And leave a car and driver to take me to the station.”
“I will.”
“Good hunting.”
“Good flying.”
He put the phone down, turned to Abel, and said, “Call the airport, get the plane flight-checked and fueled so that we can take off upon arrival.”
“Yes, sir.”
“One moment,” said Boch.
“Yes, Herr Hauptsturmführer?”
“As this is a joint SS-Abwehr operation, I demand to be a part of it. I will go along with you.”
“The plane holds only two. It loses its agility when a third is added. It’s not a fighter, it’s a kite with a tiny motor.”
“Then I will go instead of Abel. Macht, do not fight me on this. I will go to SS and higher if I need to. SS must be represented all through this operation.”
“You trust my flying?”
“Of course.”
“Good, because Abel does not. Now, let’s go.”
“Not quite yet. I have to change into my uniform.”
Refreshed, Basil left the loo. But instead of turning back into the carriage and returning to his seat, he turned the other way, as if it were the natural thing to do, opened the door at the end of the carriage, and stepped out onto the rattling, trembling running board over the coupling between carriages. He waited for the door behind him to seal, tested for speed. Was the train slowing? He felt it was, as maybe the vibrations were further apart, signifying that the wheels churned slightly less aggressively, against an incline, on the downhill, perhaps negotiating a turn. Then, without a thought, he leaped sideways into the darkness.
Will I be lucky? Will the famous St. Florian charm continue? Will I float to a soft landing and roll through the dirt, only my dignity and my hair mussed? Or will this be the night it all runs out and I hit a bridge abutment, a tree trunk, a barbed-wire fence, and kill myself?
He felt himself elongate as he flew through the air, and as his leap carried him out of the gap between the two cars the slipstream hit him hard, sending his arms and legs flying wildly.
He seemed to hang in the darkness for an eternity, feeling the air beat him, hearing the roar of both the wind and the train, seeing nothing.
Then he hit. Stars exploded, suns collapsed, the universe split atomically, releasing a tidal wave of energy. He tasted dust, felt pain and a searing jab in his back, then high-speed abrasion of his whole body, a piercing blow to his left hand, had the illusion of rolling, sliding, falling, hurting all at once, and then he lay quiet.
Am I dead?
He seemed not to be.
The train was gone now. He was alone in the track bed, amid a miasma of dust and blood. At that point the pain clamped him like a vise and he felt himself wounded, though how badly was yet unknown. Could he move? Was he paralyzed? Had he broken any bones?
He sucked in oxygen, hoping for restoration. It came, marginally.
He checked his hip pocket to see if his Browning .380 was still there, and there indeed it was. He reached next for his shin, hoping and praying that the Minox had survived the descent and landfall.
It wasn’t there! The prospect of losing it was so tragically immense that he could not face it and exiled the possibility from his brain as he found the tape, still tight, followed it around, and in one second touched the aluminum skin of the instrument. Somehow the impact of the fall had moved it around his leg but had not sundered, only loosened, the tape. He pried it out, slipped it into his hip pocket. He slipped the Browning into his belt in the small of his back, then counted to three and stood.
His clothes were badly tattered, and his left arm so severely ripped he could not straighten it. His right knee had punched through the cheap pinstriped serge, and it too had been shredded by abrasions. But the real damage was done to his back, where he’d evidently encountered a rock or a branch as he decelerated in the dust, and it hurt immensely. He could almost feel it bruising, and he knew it would pain him for weeks. When he twisted he felt shards of glass in his side and assumed he’d broken or cracked several ribs. All in all, he was a mess.
But he was not dead, and he was more or less ambulatory.
He recalled the idiot Luftwaffe colonel on the ride down.
“Yes, our squadron is about a mile east of the tracks, just out of town. It’s amazing how the boys have dressed it up. You should come and visit us soon, monsieur. I’ll take you on a tour. Why, they’ve turned a rude military installation in the middle of nothing into a comfortable small German town, with sewers and sidewalks and streets, even a gazebo for summertime concerts. My boys are the best, and our wing does more than its share against the Tommy bombers.”
That put the airfield a mile or so ahead, given that the tracks had to run north–south. He walked, sliding between trees and gentle undergrowth, through a rather civilized little forest, actually, and his night vision soon arrived through his headache and the pain in his back, which turned his walk into Frankenstein’s lumber, but he was confident he was headed in the right direction. An
d very shortly he heard the approaching buzz of a small plane and knew absolutely that he was on track.
The Storch glided through the air, its tiny engine buzzing away smoothly like a hummingbird’s heart. Spindly from its overengineered landing gear and graceless on the ground, it was a princess in the air. Macht held it at 450 meters, compass heading almost due south. He’d already landed at the big Luftwaffe base at Caen for a refueling, just in case Bricquebec proved outside the Storch’s 300- kilometer range. He’d follow the same route back, taking the same fuel precautions. He knew: in the air, take nothing for granted. The western heading would bring him to the home of NJG-9 very soon, as he was flying throttle open, close to 175 km per hour. It was a beautiful little thing, light and reliable; you could feel that it wanted to fly, unlike the planes of the Great War, which had mostly been underpowered and overengineered, so close to the maximum they seemed to want to crash. You had to fight them to keep them in the air, while the Storch would fly all night if it could.
A little cool air rushed in, as the Perspex window was cranked half down. It kept the men cool; it also kept them from chatting, which was fine with Macht. It let him concentrate and enjoy, and he still loved the joy of being airborne.
Below, rural France slipped by, far from absolutely dark but too dark to make out details.
That was fine. Macht, a good flier, trusted his compass and his watch and knew that neither would let him down, and when he checked the time, he saw that he was entering NJG-9’s airspace. He picked up his radio phone, clicked it a few times, and said, “Anton, Anton, this is Bertha 9-9, do you read?”
The headset crackled and snapped, and he thought perhaps he was on the wrong frequency, but then he heard, “Bertha 9-9, this is Anton—I have you; I can hear you. You’re bearing a little to the southwest. I’d bear a few degrees to the north.”
“Excellent, and thanks, Anton.”
“When I have you overhead, I’ll light a runway.”
“Excellent, excellent. Thanks again, Anton.”
Macht made the slight correction and was rewarded a minute later with the sudden flash to illumination of a long horizontal V. It took seconds to find the line into the darkness between the arms of the V which signified the landing strip. He eased back on the throttle, hearing the engine rpm’s drop, watched his airspeed indicator fall to seventy-five, then sixty-five, eased the stick forward into a gentle incline, came into the cone of lights, and saw grass on either side of a wide tarmac built for the much larger twin-engine Me110 night fighters, throttled down some more, and alit with just the slightest of bumps.
When the plane’s weight overcame its decreasing power, it almost came to a halt, but he revved back to taxi speed, saw the curved roofs of hangers ahead, and taxied toward them. A broad staging area before the four arched buildings, where the fighters paused and made a last check before deploying, was before him. He took the plane to it, pivoted it to face outward-bound down the same runway, and hit the kill switch. He could hear the vibrations stop, and the plane went silent.
Basil watched the little plane taxi to the hangers, pause, then helpfully turn itself back to the runway. Perfect. Whoever was flying was counting on a quick trip back and didn’t want to waste time on the ground.
He crouched well inside the wire, about 300 meters from the airplane, which put him 350 meters from the four hangars. He knew, because Oberst Scholl had told him, that recent manpower levies had stripped the place of guards and security people, all of whom were now in transit to Russia, where their bodies were needed urgently to feed into the fire. As for the patrol dogs, one had died of food poisoning and the other was so old he could hardly move, again information provided by Scholl. The security of NJG-9’s night fighter base was purely an illusion; all nonessential personnel had been stripped away for something big in Russia.
In each hangar Basil could see the prominent outlines of the big night fighters, each cockpit slid open, resting at the nose-up, tail-down, fifteen-degree angle on the buttress of the two sturdy landing gears that descended from the huge bulge of engine on the broad wings. They were not small airplanes, and these birds wore complex nests of prongs on the nose, radar antennae meant to guide them to the bomber stream 7,600 meters above. The planes were all marked by the stark black Luftwaffe cross insignia, and their metallic snouts gleamed slightly in the lights, until the tower turned them off when the Storch had come to a safe stop.
He watched carefully. Two men. One wore a pilot’s leather helmet but not a uniform, just a tent of a trench coat that hadn’t seen cleaning or pressing in years. He was the pilot, and he tossed the helmet into the plane, along with an unplugged set of headphones. At the same time he pulled out a battered fedora, which looked like it had been crushed in the pocket of the coat for all the years it hadn’t been pressed or cleaned.
No. 2 was more interesting. He was SS, totally, completely, avatar of dark style and darker menace. The uniform—jodhpurs and boots under a smart tunic, tight at the neck, black cap with death’s head rampant in silver above the bill at a rakish angle—was more dramatic than the man, who appeared porky and graceless. He was shakier than the pilot, taking a few awkward steps to get his land legs back and drive the dizziness from his mind.
In time a Mercedes staff car emerged from somewhere in the darkness, driven by a Luftwaffer, who leaped out and offered a snappy salute. He did not shake hands with either, signifying his enlisted status as against their commissions, but obsequiously retreated to the car, where he opened the rear door.
The two officers slid in. The driver resumed his place behind the wheel, and the car sped away into the night.
“Yes, that’s very good, Sergeant,” said Macht as the car drove in darkness between the tower and administration complex on the left and the officers’ mess on the right. The gate was a few hundred meters ahead. “Now, very quickly, let us out and continue on your way, outside the gate, along the road, and back to the station at Bricquebec, where your commanding officer waits.”
“Ah, sir, my instructions are—”
“Do as I say, Sergeant, unless you care to join the other bad boys of the Wehrmacht on an infantry salient on some frozen hill of dog shit in Russia.”
“Obviously, sir, I will obey.”
“I thought you might.”
The car slipped between two buildings, slowed, and Macht eased out, followed by Boch. Then the car rolled away, speeded up, and loudly issued the pretense that it was headed to town with two important passengers.
“Macht,” hissed Boch, “what in the devil’s name are you up to?”
“Use your head, Herr Hauptsturmführer. Our friend is not going to be caught like a fish in a bucket. He’s too clever. He presumes the shortest possible time between his escape from Paris and our ability to figure it out and know what name he travels under. He knows he cannot make it all the way to Cherbourg and steal or hire a boat. No indeed, and since that idiot Scholl has conveniently plied him with information about the layout and operational protocols of NJG-9, as well as, I’m certain, a precise location, he has identified it as his best opportunity for an escape. He means, I suppose, to fly to England in a 110 like the madman Hess, but we have provided him with a much more tempting conveyance—the low, slow, gentle Storch. He cannot turn it down, do you see? It is absolutely his best—his only—chance to bring off his crazed mission, whatever it is. But we will stop him. Is that pistol loaded?”
Boch slapped the Luger under the flap of his holster on his ceremonial belt.
“Of course. One never knows.”
“Well, then, we shall get as close as possible and wait for him to make his move. I doubt he’s a quarter kilometer from us now. He’ll wait until he’s certain the car is gone and the lazy Luftwaffe tower personnel are paying no attention, and then he’ll dash to the airplane, and off he goes.”
“We will be there,” said Boch, pulling his Luger.
“Put that thing away, please, Herr Hauptsturmführer. It makes me nervous.?
??
Basil began his crawl. The grass wasn’t high enough to cover him, but without lights, no tower observer could possibly pick him out flat against the ground. His plan was to approach on the oblique, locating himself on such a line that the plane was between himself and the watchers in the tower. It wouldn’t obscure him, but it would be more data in a crowded binocular view into an already dark zone, and he hoped that the lazy officer up there was not really paying that much attention, instead simply nodding off on a meaningless night of duty far from any war zone and happy that he wasn’t out in the godforsaken French night on some kind of insane catch-the-spy mission two kilometers away at the train station.
It hurt, of course. His back throbbed, a bruise on his hip ached, a pain between his eyes would not go away, and the burns on knee and arm from his abrasions seemed to mount in intensity. He pulled himself through the grass like a swimmer, his fear giving him energy that he should not have had, the roughness of his breath drowning out the night noise. He seemed to crawl for a century, but he didn’t look up, because, as if he were swimming the English Channel, if he saw how far he had to go, the blow to his morale would be stunning.
Odd filaments of his life came up from nowhere, viewed from strange angles so that they made only a bit of sense and maybe not even that. He hardly knew his mother, he had hated his father, his brothers were all older than he was and had formed their friendships and allegiances already. Women that he had been intimate with arrived to mind, but they did not bring pride and triumph, only memories of human fallibility and disappointment, theirs and his; and his congenital inability to remain faithful to any of them, love or not, always revealed its ugliness. Really, he had had a useless life until he signed with the crown and went on his adventures—it was a perfect match for his adventurer’s temperament, his casual cruelty, his cleverness, his ruthlessness. He had no problem with any of it: the deceit, the swindles, the extortion, the cruel manipulation of the innocent, even the murder. He had killed his first man, a corrupt Malaysian police inspector, in 1935, and he remembered the jump of the big Webley, the smell of cordite, the man’s odd deflation as he surrendered to gravity. He thought it would have been so much more; it was, really, nothing, nothing at all, and he supposed that his own death, in a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, a few weeks, or next year or the year after, would mean as little to the man who killed him, probably some Hanoverian conscript with a machine pistol firing blindly into the trees that held him.