Chapter 15: Schmitt
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Field Marshal Schmitt was ecstatic when he heard the news. The spy that had humiliated him a month ago by steeling his uniform and escaping from his airbase had been captured. And better yet, the SS Wolf Corps were bringing him to the nearest airbase for interrogation—his airbase. For the past month, he had dreamed about nothing else but revenge, and now he would have it.
“Prepare my uniform,” he said to his adjutant. “I will meet them at the gate.” The young man ran off to obey his commander. He was the same sentry that had let Henrik walk off the base in the marshal’s parade jacket a month ago. To say he was lucky to still have his post after such a mistake would be an understatement. He was lucky to be alive. But he was mostly lucky to be the nephew of Reichsfuhrer Himmler. This, more than anything, made him pretty much untouchable.
The SS arrived in a convoy of five black Mercedes coupes, quite a parade for a solitary prisoner. But Henrik was more than just a prisoner. He was a celebrity. His exploits over the past few days were becoming the stuff of legend. There were sightings of him all across Eastern Europe, from the Russian border to Poland, through central Germany and finally ending up in Amsterdam. What mayhem he was up to, nobody really knew. But the SS were sure to find out.
“Colonel Hausenberg, I am honored that—”
“I’m sorry, marshal, but there is no time for pleasantries. Take the prisoner to a holding cell immediately, preferably one with a generator to accommodate electric shock treatments.”
“Of course,” the marshal replied, his pride still stinging from the colonel’s abrupt rebuke. “Electric shock treatments?” he asked, not quite sure what kind of generator was necessary for such a procedure. Hausenberg ignored the question.
“And my men will need to be fed. We have been on the road for fourteen hours in pursuit of this madman.” He looked up at the marshal who seemed frozen in indecision. “I assure you, marshal, time is of the essence.”
“Yes, of course, Colonel. Please, come this way.” Although Schmitt hated the SS, his feelings paled in comparison to that of their captured prisoner. Henrik walked past the marshal in an old World War I colonel’s uniform with his hands cuffed in front of him.
“Why, marshal. What a pleasant surprise,” he said with a smile before an SS Wolf Corps drilled him in the back with the butt of his FG42. The marshal was speechless.
Despite Hausenberg’s insistence that time was of the essence, he did not interrogate Henrik right away. Instead, he let the traitor cool his heels in the infirmary under guard while he sat down with his men to a warm meal. The marshal was fuming. How dare this impudent little SS martinet presume to order him around? He was the commander of this base and the field marshal of occupied Holland. He had served the Fatherland in two major wars. He was a proud Prussian of royal descent.
And then an idea occurred to him.
If the strutting SS were too busy to perform a timely and thorough interrogation of the insolent traitor who had stolen the marshal’s favorite parade jacket, then he would do it himself. He would learn all of his secrets and reveal all of his contacts. He would plumb the deepest depths of this conspiracy and root it out at the core. And then he would return to his rightful place at the Chancellery in Berlin as a hero of the Third Reich. So while Hausenberg and his men continued to feast themselves on the marshal’s best wine and sausage, Schmitt arrived at the infirmary with two of his biggest guards.
“Well, my young spy, are you still happy to see me?” he said with a dramatic flare as he entered the room. Henrik was sitting on the edge of the bed, his hands still cuffed in front of him. He looked up at the marshal, the two giants behind him and the heavy generator that was supported between them on a wooden plank.
“That depends,” he said coolly. “Did you bring cookies?”
The marshal laughed humorlessly. “Oh, we’ve brought you something much better than cookies, my dear, dear, friend.” The guards dropped the heavy generator on the floor and the marshal swore at them. Then he turned back to Henrik. “You know, we repaired your damaged fighter plane and I must admit, it is a remarkable machine, perhaps even faster than our old Messerschmitt Bf 109.”
Henrik smiled, eager to talk about something other than torture. “The Mustang is the fastest fighter plane in the world.”
“No, no, my friend. The new Messerschmitt turbojet is a much superior aircraft. It’s really too bad that we are in such a hurry this evening. I would have given you a demonstration. Guards!”
And with that word they were on him. Henrik put up a valiant fight, but with his hands cuffed, there was little he could do to stop them. Eventually the two gorilla guards yanked down his jacket and shirt and immobilized him on the infirmary bed, one pinning down his bare shoulders and the other his legs. Then they realized that they really needed a third soldier to operate the generator and perform the actual torture.
“I don’t know how to use it,” the gorillas each said in turn, looking at each other dumbly. The marshal swore at them again, this time in both Dutch and German. For a moment, Henrik thought he had narrowly escaped his ordeal through the guards’ mere incompetence. But then the old, Prussian general cranked up the generator himself and tested the livewires together with cool efficiency. They sparked loudly and the marshal smiled as he brought them near the exposed skin of Henrik’s heaving chest.
In the moment before the wires made contact, Henrik looked up at the guard who was holding down his shoulders and laughed. A second later, the startled guard was jumping for the ceiling, his hair standing straight up on his head and 50 000 volts coursing through his beefy body. Apart from a slight burn, the livewires had done little damage to Henrik, the bulk of the electric shock being conducted cleanly through his body and into the guard that was holding his bare shoulders.
A lucky break.
Henrik wasted no time. Grabbing the livewires from the startled marshal, he gave the old man the shock of his life. The general screamed horribly and collapsed to the ground. Henrik wondered if he’d caused the old man to have a heart attack, but there was no time to find out. Instead, he pulled the marshal’s Luger from its holster and aimed it at the stunned gorilla who was still holding his feet.
“You can let go now, and take these off,” he said coolly. The guard looked at him, still unable to release his hands from Henrik’s feet or accept the sudden reversal of fortune. “The keys!” Henrik yelled. The guard let go suddenly and fell back onto his ample bottom.
“We don’t have the keys,” the guard grunted. “The SS have them.”
Henrik cursed his luck, but really, he shouldn’t have. He was darn lucky to have gotten this far. “Give me the keys to the door.”
The guard complied.
“Now get against that wall.” He motioned with the Luger. The marshal stirred from his temporary slumber, saw the gun in Henrik’s hand and swore under his breath. “Get down on your knees,” Henrik ordered. “Face the wall. Put your hands behind your head.”
“He’s going to kill us,” the big guard whined.
“Shut up!” the marshal snapped. “I swear I will kill you myself. You are such a little girl.” The marshal was just beginning to break into another litany of formidable cuss words when Henrik locked the door and ran off towards the airfield.
The marshal’s command wasn’t the largest on the Baltic by any means, but it was the largest airbase in Holland. With only two hundred aircraft on hand, mostly scouts and fighter planes, it served mostly as reconnaissance and support for the larger bomber squadrons that would occasionally fly over to engage the RAF and bomb London. Most of the fighters were lined up in formation out on the field. He could probably snag one of those without attracting too much attention, but he didn’t want one of those.
He wanted his Mustang back.
His reasons were not just personal. If he snatched one of those old Focke-Wolfs or
Messerschmitts, they might conceivably catch up with him in the air and shoot him down. But not the X-50. It was the fastest plane in Germany and therefore gave him the best chance of escape. It was worth the risk to search for it. He eventually found the Mustang in one of the smaller hangars. It wasn’t fully fueled or completely ready for take off. That would have been too much to ask for. But the marshal’s men had done a fine job of fixing up the damage they’d done to her. Henrik would have to write them a note of thanks if he ever got out of there alive.
After taking a few precious minutes to fill her gas tank and remove the wheel blocks, Henrik climbed up onto the beautifully polished wing and jumped into the cockpit. It smelled of engine oil and axle grease. Boy, had Henrik missed that smell. To him, it was like fresh flowers in May. Normally he would have taken a few more minutes at this point to attach his parachute straps to his Mae West life jacket, strap on his helmet and put on his oxygen mask, but as he had none of this equipment with him, he was pretty much ready to fly as is. He sent up a quick prayer that she had fresh starter caps and flicked the switch. With a satisfying bang, the engine turned over and the seven-foot long props began to spin.
He was about to jump out to open the big, forty-foot square hangar doors when a sentry called to him from below. Henrik recognized him immediately. It was the same young man that had let him escape in the marshal’s parade jacket a month ago. Henrik reached for the Luger on his lap.
“What are you doing up there?” the sentry asked.
“The marshal has ordered another test flight.”
“Now? Who are you?” The man still had not seen Henrik’s face. Henrik was reluctant to show him, but he knew he would have to eventually. There was no way he could fly out of there with the doors closed. Henrik held the Luger out of sight, stood up and leaned out of the cockpit.
“It’s you!” the sentry exclaimed with surprise.
Henrik braced himself to fire. If the sentry set off the alarm now, it would all be over. But there was a chance that he would not, just as there was always the remote chance that a pair of twos would win the pot.
“I thought somebody important was here when the marshal called for his parade jacket and I saw all those expensive vehicles in the motor pool, but I didn’t know it was you,” the sentry said with dumbstruck awe. “They say you’re a hero. Is it true that you escaped from America, and that you wiped out a whole Spitfire squadron single-handedly?”
“Yes and no. Perhaps we can discuss this later.”
“Of course. Heil Hitler!” The sentry stepped back to watch the takeoff, perhaps feeling a little dejected but not likely to set off any alarms. Henrik sighed with relief. He didn’t want to shoot the young man. But he still had a problem. The handcuffs. Surely the sentry would see them when Henrik jumped out of the cockpit to open the hangar doors. And handcuffs are not something easily explained away.
“Ah, private?” Henrik called over the noise of the Mustang’s powerful Rolls Royce engine. “The doors, if you please.”
The sentry immediately dropped his single-shot carbine rifle and ran to open the hangar doors, visibly overjoyed to help a bona fide hero of the Third Reich.
“Thanks, boy. If I could, I’d give you a medal.” Henrik called out as the Mustang taxied forward. Unfortunately, the young sentry was not likely to get a medal when the marshal discovered that he had unwittingly aided Henrik’s escape not once, but twice in the past month. Oh well. That was war, Henrik thought.
Once out on the airfield, Henrik revved up the engine to full power and let her loose. It was quite a trick to adjust flaps, throttle and steer all while wearing handcuffs, but he somehow managed. He just hoped he wasn’t called upon to perform any fancy acrobatics or he’d be in real trouble. But straight on flying should be doable. There was still a chance that some gunner with an itchy trigger finger would shoot him down before he took off. But if the alarm never sounded, they would probably just watch him go. They might even wave goodbye.
No such luck.
Just as Henrik lifted off the end of the runway, he heard the wail of the sirens. A moment later there was the familiar ack ack of machine gun fire from the tower. Several armor piercing rounds punctured the right wing and the fuselage just in front of the cockpit. He was leaking fuel, but there was no fire. Still only yards up, he banked hard to the left to avoid the next burst of machine gun fire. He stayed low, less than ten feet of the ground, and a few seconds later he was through a gap in the trees.
The chase was on. They would scramble a squad of fighters to hunt him down but at least he was safe from the base guns. He was confident he could stay ahead of the Messerschmitts and Focke-Wolfs he’d seen on the field, but how far could he get? Not across the channel and not all the way back to Berlin that was for certain. His fuel gauge was dropping rapidly, and now the landing light was flashing. A stray bullet must have ruptured the hydraulics, locking the wheels in upright position. He’d have to ditch somewhere soon, but he couldn’t land and he could bail. He didn’t even have a parachute or a life jacket.
Just as he was considering the bleakness of his current situation, bullets raked his tail like a deluge of hail, reminding him that he was still at war. He saw the glimpse of a shadow, like a bat, and then heard the deafening roar of an engine Doppler past him. What was that? Henrik didn’t know. He scanned all 360 degrees around him, but there was no sign of another plane. Whatever it was, Henrik had been lucky. He’d only suffered minor damage to his tail fin and the rear section of his fuselage. But he wasn’t about to let the vanishing phantom have another crack at his rear.
Henrik pulled back on the stick with both hands, balanced it between his knees and throttled up the accelerator. He was climbing fast, the Mustang’s powerful engine slicing into the wind. He put both hands back on the joystick and banked slightly to the right, keeping the sun to his port side. It was a clear, sunny day with low clouds pocking the otherwise blue blanket of the morning sky. The phantom, whoever or whatever it was, could be hiding in the nearby clouds or perhaps behind the patches of forest that sprouted between the rolling Dutch dairy farms. Henrik kept an eye out, but the mysterious plane was nowhere to be seen. He hoped to lose him in the high altitudes. No fighter plane could match the climb of the X-50 Mustang.
Henrik saw a shadow cross his windscreen. Although he could not believe it, he was ready for it. He reacted instinctively, cranking the stick hard over in a sharp roll to the left. Another hailstorm of incendiaries and tracers scraped through the air, missing Henrik by mere inches. He looked off to his right just in time to see his opponent dive like a falcon in front of him and then level out. He cranked the stick over to follow but it was no use. Even as Henrik reached top speed in excess of 430 miles per hour, the other plane continued to pull away, and in another few seconds it disappeared behind the low-lying clouds.
But Henrik had a good look at it and now he knew what he was up against—the Messerschmitt 262 Turbojet. Henrik recognized the swallow-shaped design and overly large, prop-less jet engines. If Goering wasn’t just bragging, the new Messerschmitt could exceed 500 miles per hour and out climb any propeller-driven fighter plane in production, including the American X-50. If he was smart, the Messerschmitt pilot would hang out in the clouds, circle around behind Henrik again, and sweep in for another attack when least expected. In fact, he could do it all day, and there wasn’t a darn thing Henrik could do to stop him. He couldn’t even touch him. By the time he heard the approaching jet engines, he would already be in his crosshairs. Henrik’s X-50 was completely outclassed.
Henrik had been lucky already. The pilot had overshot him the first time, possibly underestimating his own attack speed. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. And the second time Henrik had been lucky enough to roll off in the right direction. He had a fifty-fifty chance of doing that again, except that he’d already used up his fifty and then some. The Messerschmitt ha
d all the time in the world to make his move. Henrik did not. Even if by some miracle he didn’t get shot down in the next few minutes, sooner or later he was going to have to ditch. And then he really would be a sitting duck. The Turbojet would swoop down from above and mow him down like tall grass.
Henrik passed over a thatched roof barn and then a red windmill, keeping the sun at his six and scanning the green fields for the slightest shadow. A careful pilot would not attack until his shadow was perfectly matching his prey, but Henrik couldn’t count on that. With a Turbojet, you didn’t need to be careful, just ruthless. Henrik watched the fuel leaking from the bullet hole in the reserve tank. Time was running out.
Pulling back on the stick, he banked around in a slow arc until the windmill and barn were in his crosshairs. The windmill was still operating, the forty-foot canvas sails doing their slow circuit in the afternoon breeze, but the barn looked completely abandoned, a gaping hole in its thatched roof. Henrik hoped that it was, but he had no time to be sentimental over a few farm animals. Pushing forward on the stick, he rapidly dove towards the old barn. It reminded him of the old barnstorming shows he’d witnessed as a small child. Except Henrik had no intention of crashing into this barn.
At the last second with only feet to spare, Henrik pulled up on the stick and reached for the fuel tank jettison switch. This required another trick with his knees to hold the stick in place as the jettison switch was on the far side of his instrument panel. If the stick slipped out from between his knees, he would crash head first into the barn at 400 mph. But Henrik managed to hold it long enough to reach the switch. The leaking drop tank detached from the underside of the wing and impacted the barn roof. There was a deafening explosion and in seconds the barn was engulfed in flame. Thick, black smoke rose up in a hundred-foot plume.
Henrik throttled up and began climbing at full power. He felt a weight like a ton of bricks land on his chest. He forced the air out of his lungs with a yell, willing himself to breathe. The Messerschmitt pilot would undoubtedly have oxygen to keep himself from passing out when he performed his high-G maneuvers, but Henrik had no such luxury. He’d left all of that equipment behind at the air base, along with his Mae West and parachute. He’d just have to ride this baby out the old fashioned way. He gritted his teeth and cursed defiantly, coaxing his bird the last few hundred feet into the puffy, marshmallow cumulus.
He’d made it, at least this far. Now it was his turn to circle back around on the Messerschmitt’s six. While in the clouds, Henrik had to fly completely by instruments—airspeed, altimeter and eight ball. The three “A”s the Yank pilots liked to call it in Hawaii. He’d had plenty of practice at instrument flying over the Pacific where there were clouds rolling in all the time and nothing but hundreds of miles of open sea between the islands and the mainland. Compared to dog fighting, it was academic, but some careless pilots still managed to put themselves into the drink even before they saw their first Jap.
In a few minutes, he was back to his previous position plus a few thousand feet. He poked his head out of the clouds and there she was—the Messerschmitt 262 Me, circling like a hawk a few hundred feet over the burning barn. Presumably he’d heard the explosion, just as Henrik hoped he would, and had gone down to take a look. With all the smoke and debris it was hard to tell if Henrik’s Mustang was burning in the barn or not. He obviously hadn’t seen Henrik climb into the clouds or he wouldn’t be down there now prancing around like a caged turkey waiting to be plucked.
And now Henrik had a choice to make. He could have escaped. He could have slipped back into the clouds, climbed another five thousand feet and headed southeast into the heart of Germany until his fuel bottomed out or he found a nice soft place to ditch. Why waste precious fuel and ammo going after a faster, more powerful, far superior aircraft? It was a foolhardy and needless risk. But if Henrik’s mind actually worked that way, he never would have become a spy or a fighter pilot in the first place. He had the high ground, the sun at his back, and his prey in his crosshairs. To Henrik, there was no risk, only a golden opportunity for a righteous kill. To ignore such a gift was a sin against the Almighty, the worst kind of sin, the type of sin that would haunt you for the rest of your life.
Henrik wasn’t about to let that happen.
He pushed forward on the stick gently, being careful to stay in the cloud’s shadow. He felt the slow creep of acceleration as he closed in on the Messerschmitt’s swallow-shaped tail. She was a beautiful bird, perfectly streamlined, glinting silver wings with those monstrous engines hanging beneath them, like ripe pears on a tree. Henrik could see now as she banked slowly around for another pass of the burning barn that she only had one flaw. Yes, she could climb, dive, and accelerate better than any plane in the air. But she turned like a beached whale. Henrik had seen midrange bombers with sharper turning circles. Perhaps he could use this to his advantage. He would hold his fire until the last possible second.
500 yards. 400. 300. Henrik flicked off the safety on his .80 caliber cannons. They were targeted for 300 yards, but at this close range he had a choice of targets—the pilot or his engines. Henrik opted for the man. It was a shame to shoot up such a lovely airplane. Just at the last second, the sun glinted out from behind the clouds causing a shadow of Henrik’s Mustang to flit across the Messerschmitt’s wing, spooking the pilot. He banked hard to the left. Henrik’s strafing fire, already in flight, missed its mark by inches, putting large, round holes in the Messerschmitt’s right wing and turbojet engine. Smoke began pouring out of the engine.
Henrik eased the stick over to follow the retreating Messerschmitt. He was still in a power dive going 450 miles per hour. This perfectly matched the Messerschmitt’s reduced speed while banking allowing Henrik to stay within optimum firing range. He let loose another timed burst, this time with his tracer incendiaries. The exploding bullets missed the cockpit again but clipped the Messerschmitt’s other wing. The German pilot banked back to the left to avoid the fire, causing him to lose more speed and altitude. The Messerschmitt was coming dangerously close to the ground and now Henrik was only a few hundred yards away.
Although his guns were not aligned for this distance, he decided to open up with a combined blast of all three of his weapons—cannons, incendiaries and armor piercing rounds. The bullets lit up the Messerschmitt’s tail like a Roman candle. The inexperienced jet pilot panicked. Making another sharp turn back to the left, he dropped another fifty feet and collided head-on with one of the slowly spinning sails of the nearby windmill. A prop plane like a Mustang or Spitfire might have survived such a collision. They’d been known to fly through all sorts of debris—hail, shrapnel, flocks of geese—and still come out the other side. But not a turbo jet. The intake of the jet engines sucked up the canvas sail like a vacuum cleaner, bringing the plane down in a brilliant explosion that would have rivaled any American fireworks demonstration on the fourth of July.
As Henrik surveyed the devastation through his smoke-stained cockpit, he felt little sympathy for the dead pilot, although he knew perhaps he should have. There was very little difference between them. They were both German, both pilots, and until a month ago, both loyal soldiers of the Third Reich. But at the moment, none of that mattered. Henrik was simply the victor. He was a lion in the jungle, a falcon in the sky, a shark in the ocean, and for a few seconds at least, he felt nothing but the primal joy of the kill.
But the feeling didn’t last long. He looked at his fuel gauge and rolled his eyes. He had five minutes, ten at the most, and then his fuel tanks would be completely empty. His two-stroke piston engine would sputter to a stop. If he was high enough, he could still glide for a few miles. With his wheels jammed, it would be better to land with an empty tank at any rate. But then again, he would lose a lot of fuel just climbing.
A second later, the decision was made for him. Henrik saw the tracer bullets tag his left wing before he even heard t
he .30 caliber machine guns firing. He swiveled his head around and saw a full squadron of Bf 109s on his tail. Henrik checked his firing counter. He was nearly out of ammo. Even fully stocked and fully fueled, he could never take on a squadron, despite the rumors about him. It was suicide. There was only one thing left to do. He pulled back on the stick, reversing his dive into a gut-wrenching power climb. The G-forces piled on like brick and mortar. The 109s were good fighters, but they were older model, propeller-driven Messerschmitts. They couldn’t hope to match the power of the Mustang’s new generation, Rolls Royce engine. They fired a few more bursts at the retreating airplane but soon fell back, out of range and soon out of sight.
Henrik leveled off in a cloud patch at ten thousand feet and took a big gulp of cold air. He’d gone from predator to prey in a matter of seconds, and now he was running scared and flying blind. But things were about to get a lot worse.
It began as a few sputters and then the engine coughed. There was a loud bang and then the propeller blades just stopped. Without the sound of the Mustang’s roaring engine, it was all very peaceful up there in the clouds and Henrik might actually have enjoyed it if his altimeter didn’t keep reminding him that his life was about to end. He watching the altitude count down with increasing rapidity. At five thousand feet he broke out of the clouds. The Bf 109s were out of sight. At least that was good news.
He scanned the green countryside below him for distinguishable landmarks. He saw the Weser River far off to the east, the Rhine to the south and the gray haze of the Baltic Sea to the north. In another second, the picture of a map superimposed itself in his mind’s eye. He’d just crossed the Dutch border into Germany, three hundred miles due west of Berlin. He had a couple options open to him, assuming he survived his crash landing. He could head to the northeast, catch a train or steal a car in Bremen and make his way directly to Peenemunde. Or he could head south to Dusseldorf, meander his way slowly through Germany until he was sure he’d eluded his pursuers, and then make his final move when it was least expected.
Henrik prayed for a crystal ball.
But as it turned out, neither choice made much difference. While Henrik had been playing cat and mouse in the skies, Colonel Hausenberg’s SS Wolf Corps task force was fanning the countryside in hot pursuit. They’d radioed every guard post and checkpoint in western Germany. In the end, it was a junior lieutenant by the name of Hauser who spotted Henrik’s unmarked Mustang through field glasses just as it belly landed on a farmer’s green field. He had no idea who and what awaited him, but when he pulled up in his shiny, new Kubelwagen, he couldn’t believe his luck.
For most of the war, Hauser had been cooling his heels. Being the third son of a rich, Prussian nobleman, he wasn’t allowed to fight for fear he might get killed and cause grief to his dear mother. So his father had spared no expense to procure him a nice, safe home front command in Wildeshausen, a rural village with just under a thousand inhabitants, most of them dairy farmers. All his attempts to join the Western and Eastern fronts had met with firm resistance from his powerful father. But now he was finally going to have a chance to show Germany what he was made of.
“Why Hauser,” Henrik said when he saw the surprised look on the young lieutenant’s face, “fancy us meeting like this. I was just out for a spin and ran into a little engine trouble. Beautiful day, isn’t it?”
“Stand up slowly and drop your weapon out of the cockpit,” Hauser said with cool German efficiency.
Henrik complied cheerfully. He didn’t know how good a shot Hauser was, but that was the great thing about using an MP40. You didn’t need to be good to hit anything with it. And besides, Henrik had no desire to waste his last two bullets on Hauser, especially when there were infinitely more evil people still out there for him to kill.
Filled with childlike pride, Hauser escorted his prize back to the local jail in Wildeshausen. The SS Wolf Corps were still too far away to reach the little village before nightfall, but there was someone else nearby who was very eager to pay Henrik a visit—a former SS chauffeur and bodyguard by the name of Sergeant Klein.