Of course, there was the added danger that the truck was going to blow up just as Max lifted the plane over the top of it. The way things had gone here this morning, he wouldn’t have been surprised if that was the way this mission was going to come to a messy end.
Go now or not at all.
He set the tail-wheel lock to ON, and turned to look at Pieter.
‘We’re going,’ he said as he eased his foot off the brake and opened the throttle. The plane’s four powerful engines roared angrily at 3000 rpm, and the bomber began to roll forward down the grass strip, hungrily consuming the distance between it and whatever consequence lay ahead at the end of the strip.
‘Stupid damn thing’s stuck!’ Koch shouted aloud as he fumbled with the door handle, lying flat across the seats with one foot still down on the accelerator. He pulled hard enough on it to crack the ceramic handle, but the door remained closed.
‘Shit!’
The driver-side door had taken a volley of bullets, which had dented and buckled the metal outside. The truck was still bouncing along on suspension that had given in while the truck’s hood and cabin rattled and clanked with the impact of small-calibre bullets raining in. He quickly stuck his head up to snatch a glimpse through the shattered windscreen. They were no longer ahead of him; he was now amongst them. Both the passenger- and driver-side windows exploded as bullets whistled in from the left and the right of him. He instinctively dropped back down onto the passenger seat as bullets slammed into all sides of the cabin. He looked down at the stick grenade in his hand.
Five . . . six . . .
For a moment he considered throwing it out through the passenger side window and aborting his plan to detonate the truck. But then there was the bomber to think about. Already he could hear it approaching, its engines roaring loudly, pulling the giant plane rapidly towards him, the truck and the American soldiers.
No, the truck needed to go up. There wasn’t time now for foolish indecision.
He smiled, it might not have been a Gran Sasso, but today’s fun and games had done the regiment proud.
. . . Seven . . . Eight . . .
He was intrigued about the last thing the pilot had said to him. The thing they were doing was going to win the war for Germany . . . so, it wasn’t just an escape plan for some cowardly general. The pilot hadn’t seemed like the kind of man who would part on a lie.
. . . Nine . . .
He was curious, though - how a single stolen American bomber was going to do that, win them the war.
. . . Ten . . .
Ahead, Max could see the fuel truck slowing down amongst the American soldiers. It had almost come to a full stop when it was suddenly ripped apart by an immense explosion.
‘Bloody hell,’ Pieter muttered, instinctively bringing his hands up to cover his face.
A brilliant ball of flame rolled upwards into the grey overcast sky, while flaming gasoline rained down around the carcass of the truck.
‘We’re going to fly through that!’ cried Pieter.
‘Over it, if we’re lucky,’ answered Max through clenched teeth. He checked their speed; they were running at seventy miles per hour, not fast enough yet. She would lift only over one hundred miles per hour, and they were rapidly running out of strip to achieve that speed.
‘We’re going to hit that bloody thing!’ Pieter shouted.
There was nowhere for him to go with the throttle, and all four engines were screaming at full capacity, the ailerons were fully extended in the vertical position, there was nothing he could do but watch the fireball race towards them and hope to God that the plane lifted off before they smashed into the remains of the fuel truck.
Fifty yards to go.
Some of the Americans had been caught by the blast and had suffered the same agonising end as Schröder’s men earlier. The majority, it seemed, had been far enough away to escape that, but nonetheless had been thrown off their feet by the blast. Max watched as some of them had their wits about them to scramble to their feet and grab their weapons in a last-ditch attempt to shoot out the canopy glass and prevent the plane from taking off.
He felt his face contort in anticipation of the bullets that awaited them as they approached the raging wall of fire.
Twenty yards left.
Max checked their speed, ninety-two miles per hour. He sensed the plane beginning to pull upwards, her giant wings grabbing hungrily at the air and forcing it under them.
‘Hold on!’ he heard himself shout as the burning chassis of the fuel truck raced towards them and disappeared from view beneath the nose of the plane. For the briefest moment the cockpit of the plane was immersed in the churning column of oily flames below.
Max felt the landing gear smash into something below, and the plane shuddered violently as it cleared the smoke.
‘Shit!’ Pieter shouted once more.
The plane was now at one hundred miles per hour; the lift beneath her wings and the hot air of the inferno below pushed the plane upwards. He felt the lift and pulled back on the yoke. The bomber’s nose rose and they were off the ground and climbing steeply.
Schöln watched the B-17 recede to the west, tailed closely by three of the Messerschmitts. The sporadic fire from the Americans had ceased. It seemed everyone, through unconscious collaboration, had agreed to momentarily suspend the fight in order to watch what happened to the bomber as it had charged down towards the flaming truck. Now it was away, it appeared that normal business was ready to be resumed.
Koch’s order had been to surrender once the planes were up. The few men that were left were probably ready to do that now; he knew he was. They’d given a good account of themselves, and more importantly the job was done. The planes had made it away.
The gunfire hadn’t started up yet; it was silent save for the gentle hiss of drizzling rain, and to his right, the crackling fire amidst the burned carcasses of the 109s. He decided to take advantage of this lull.
‘Okay, lads, put your weapons down,’ he shouted, his voice echoed loudly across the airfield.
The men huddling behind the crates nearby did as they were ordered, clearly relieved that this particular skirmish was over. He raised his hands above his head and slowly raised his head above the crates.
A single shot rang out, thudding mercifully into the ground nearby and he immediately heard the sharp voice of an officer calling a ceasefire.
Schöln slowly got to his feet and shouted loudly in heavily accented English, ‘We surrender!’
There were no further shots, and one by one the men near him rose from behind their crates, hands raised unequivocally. He saw movement from the canteen and movement from the hangar doorway. Only a single man emerged from the canteen, and three others from the hangar. Schöln totalled up the survivors. There were twelve of them left. Twelve out of the original thirty.
He thought there would have been more.
One of the American soldiers stood up from behind the sandbags and walked slowly across the grass towards Schöln, his rifle raised warily. From the uniform and rank insignia Schöln could see he was a captain. The American came to a halt a few feet away and studied him silently for a full minute, his jaw working hard behind sealed lips on a piece of gum. He shook his head and tutted like an adult admonishing a child.
‘I mean . . . what is it with you guys? The war’s over, and yet you people still insist on giving us a hard time here.’
He shook his head once more, ‘Jeeeezz . . .’
Chapter 46
Getting Wallace
Mark brought the Cherokee to a halt. Devenster Street was empty save for a man walking his dog, and, across the way, three kids dressed in jeans and hooded tracksuits, doing their best to look urban. Other than that, it was deserted.
Chris scanned the road for anyone else, perhaps hiding in a shop doorway, or in the opening of some side street, or watching patiently from one of the many pools of darkness between the sparsely spread streetlights.
‘It looks cl
ear, I guess,’ Chris uttered quietly, not entirely sure that it was.
‘So where’s this Wallace guy staying?’ asked Mark.
Chris pointed towards a small, traditional-looking wooden house, halfway up the street, with a colonial-style porch in front of it. All it needed was a dinky front lawn surrounded by a white picket fence, he mused, to fit the olde New England cliché. ‘That place over there. At least, I think that’s the one.’
‘Okay, how are we going to do this?’
Chris wondered whether he should just have Mark race up the street, stop and drop him outside. With the engine still running he could race inside and hopefully, by knocking on one or two doors, find and rouse the old boy quickly and then hop back into the car and speed out of town. Screw doing this carefully, he thought, just be in and out again in the bat of an eyelid.
But then, on the other hand, it might be wiser to take a more cautious approach. If those men had tracked down Wallace they could be, probably would be, watching from a distance now. They might even be using Wallace as bait, anticipating Chris would come back for him.
‘Shit, I don’t know, Mark. They could be waiting for us,’ Chris mumbled unhappily.
Mark sat upright in his seat, and nodded towards the bed and breakfast. ‘Hang on! Somebody’s coming out of that place,’ said Mark quickly.
A door on the porch swung slowly open. Muted amber light from inside spilled out across the whitewashed woodwork momentarily. Chris could see someone coming out, the silhouetted form stooped, tired.
‘I think that’s him! Wallace.’
The old man shuffled out onto the porch, looking up and down the street warily. Then, he moved away from the single lamp above the door into the darkness of one corner of the porch and settled down on a seat. A moment later, Chris saw the momentary flicker of a cigarette lighter, and, a few seconds later, a cloud of pale blue smoke emerged from the darkness, caught in the amber glow of the porch light.
Having a hard time getting to sleep.
It was not surprising at all, given how jumpy he had been earlier that night in Lenny’s. Even if he hadn’t been jumped by those two goons in his room, Chris wondered if he would have been able to get much sleep tonight. His mind had begun going to work on the story as he had headed back from Lenny’s - which pictures he would use, whether to take the story to any larger publication or dutifully deliver it to News Fortnite first.
Wallace was probably just as wound up and twitchy as he was. And right now, Chris could happily have joined him indulging in some nerve-settling cigarette therapy. The nicotine gum his jaws were industriously working on was doing no bloody good at all.
Why’s he sitting outside for a fag? Probably some stringent ‘no smoking’ policy inside the bed and breakfast, he decided, answering his own question. Then again, maybe the old boy felt a whole lot safer watching the road outside. After this evening’s run-in, Chris could empathise with that. Right now there was no way he could see himself curling up in a nice warm quilt somewhere and nodding off, not with some armed psychotic nuts out there roaming the town looking for him.
‘Well, that makes our job a whole bunch easier, then. You ready to do this?’ said Mark, his hands firmly gripping the steering wheel.
‘Okay, mate, nice and easy. Let’s not tear up the street and burn rubber in front of him. We’d probably kill him with the shock.’
Mark nodded and had begun to slowly ease the vehicle forward. It was then that Chris spotted something reflective glinting in the darkness towards the other end of the street. ‘Hold the phone, what’s that?’
‘What?’ replied Mark.
‘I saw something,’ said Chris, ‘up the other end.’
It emerged out of the darkness, the light from the streetlamp above flickering across the windscreen. A dark, unmarked van approached them from the opposite end of Devenster Street. Like them, it was rolling forward slowly, with the headlights off.
‘That doesn’t look good,’ said Mark.
‘Fuck it then, just go!’ snapped Chris. ‘I’ll jump out and grab him.’
Mark pushed the pedal down hard, and with a squeal of rubber that robbed the quiet town of its silence, the Cherokee lurched forward down the narrow road towards the old man. The van, still several hundred yards up the street, further away than them, all of a sudden turned on its headlights and accelerated, the driver obviously aware that he had been spotted and casting caution aside.
Mark slammed the brakes on outside the bed and breakfast, the vehicle slewing to a halt. Chris leaped out of the passenger side and up the steps to the porch, taking the gun with him.
‘Wallace! Get up!’ he shouted as he approached the old man. Wallace’s eyes widened with fear when he saw the handgun. ‘What’s going -?’ he managed to splutter before Chris grabbed him roughly by the arm and pulled him up out of the chair.
The van came to a noisy halt on the opposite side of the street. Chris saw the driver-side and passenger-side doors swing open and the dark shapes of two men emerge. From their profiles, and the way one of them moved, he guessed they were the same two men he had encountered a little earlier. That wasn’t so good, since the older guy with the crewcut hadn’t seemed too worried last time about using his gun indiscriminately.
‘Quick!’ he heard Mark shout from the Cherokee.
Chris started down the steps of the porch dragging Wallace after him, half expecting shots from across the road to already be coming at him.
‘Stop!’ he heard one of the men call out. Both men had their arms raised, and legs spread, both aiming handguns.
Trained firing stance.
The posture was a learned one, Chris noted fleetingly, not the Tarantino posture you see gangsters adopt in the movies. These guys were definitely agency or ex-agency.
Wallace was panicking, struggling, tugging against Chris as best he could. He realised he must have scared the old boy waving the Heckler and Koch in his face.
‘Don’t piss around. Keep moving!’ Chris shouted at him as they hit the pavement. He pulled the back door of the Cherokee open, and then all but hurled the old man across the back seat.
And that was when both men across the road decided to start firing.
This time neither of their guns were fitted with sound suppressors, and the crack of gunfire bounced off the wooden walls down the still street.
Two bullets whistled over the roof of the car as Chris ducked down.
‘Shitshitshit,’ he muttered.
The kids up the street started yelling in panic and dropped to the ground. The man walking his dog dived into a shop doorway.
Mark ducked down in his seat, as best his big frame could, at the same time reaching into the back to push Wallace’s head down. ‘Just stay low!’ he shouted, as Wallace, still it seemed bewildered by the sudden and rapid sequence of events, tried to sit up.
Chris stuck his gun over the roof of the car, not aiming, and fired the entire clip of twelve rounds towards the van. Both of the men dropped down behind their open doors as several of the bullets thudded noisily into the side of the van, dislodging a shower of paint flecks.
Chris used the mere seconds of time that he had bought himself as both men cautiously waited for any more follow-up shots to come their way before they stuck their heads back up. Chris raced around the back of the Cherokee and pulled open the passenger-side door.
‘Go GO GO!’ he yelled as he hurled himself in.
Mark once more floored the accelerator and the vehicle rode the pavement before swinging back onto the road and down the street. Chris twisted round in his seat and looked back through the rear window to see one of the men aiming his gun at the retreating vehicle, the other one climbing back into the van.
Wallace looked up at Chris, seeing the gun in his hand. ‘What . . . what’re you going to -?’
‘Just shut up a sec,’ he muttered as he watched the van shrink into the distance. It was beginning to turn round, but its size, and the relatively narrow width of the street
, meant that it had to do a two-point turn, buying them a few more seconds.
‘Mark, get us onto the interstate and then we’ll take the next turning off. I really don’t give a toss where that takes us!’
‘You got it,’ replied Mark, his trademark demeanour of calm once more returning. Chris was glad that Mark had a cool head in a tight situation, and that it was him behind the wheel right now. If Chris had been driving, they undoubtedly would have hit every street lamp and post box on the way out of town.
He continued to watch the van through the rear window until, turning the corner at the end of Devenster, he lost sight of it. Then he looked down at the old man, still lying prone across the back seat. ‘We ran into those bastards a little earlier. I think they were looking for you.’
Wallace said nothing. Chris couldn’t tell if it was unmitigated relief or abject fear that had rendered the old boy speechless.
Chapter 47
Mission Time: 6 Hours, 22 Minutes Elapsed
150 miles across the Atlantic
Max heaved a sigh of relief. The coast of France had been left behind them. The only hint of its presence being a thin, grey line on the horizon, the thick cloudbank that had seemed to end where the Atlantic started. The heavy skies seemed to be for Europe only, blue skies for the rest of the world.
They had been flying on a steady course of two-seventy degrees, due west, at an altitude of 4500 feet, just low enough that they’d been able to do without the oxygen system.
Max was certain that the Americans would have scrambled several squadrons of fighters to deal with them. They surely had to have some stationed near enough to the airfield they’d just left to easily intercept them before they flew beyond fighter range. All of them had kept a silent vigil, scanning the skies behind them intently for the first signs of an avenging Vee-formation.