by Matt Killeen
“What is cricket?” the Captain replied after a moment.
“Never mind—no, they’re not the types to surrender. Everyone thinks we can do to England what we did to the communists. You were in Spain, weren’t you?” The Captain went to answer, but Hasse continued. “They’re a strong people, Helmut. No, we’re going to need an alternative strategy to take them out of the war before the Americans decide they’re going to be the Seventh Cavalry charging over the hill. They need to find a burnt-out homestead when they finally get there.”
“I thought you liked the British?” the Captain interjected.
“Just a metaphor, dear Helmut. So, what brings you to Tripolitania?”
There was a millisecond’s pause. Lies will tie you up, thought Sarah.
“I’ve been asked to escort some German missionaries home.”
“Interesting use of your talents.”
“Well, I have some experience moving across lines from my days in Spain. Someone, mentioning no names, of course, is concerned about a family member in the party. They seem to think that the territories of our new French allies are due to pass into the control of more radical elements—”
“And they’re right,” Hasse interrupted. “The Afrique Équatoriale Française is siding with de Gaulle as we speak.”
The Captain nodded sagely. “And, it is very useful to be owed favors by senior figures in the party. Ends, Kurt. You know.”
“Of course.” Hasse frowned. “Yet you’re bringing your niece? And your Neger?” He looked around for her.
“Time was the cream of German youth would have traveled the world, perhaps visited the outskirts of our empire. I want Ursula to have experience of that. This is not really a demanding endeavor. And”—he laughed—“someone has to clean.”
Sarah’s eyes narrowed before she could stop them.
“Indeed. And perhaps if you wanted someone to blend into a dark continent, you’d want someone dark.” Hasse began to cackle.
The Captain shrugged and smiled. Sarah wanted to lift the silver spoon from the table and scoop out this man’s eyeball.
“And why are you here?” Sarah inquired, with mock attention.
Hasse flinched. It was so slight, Sarah wasn’t sure it happened, but the riotous laughter that followed was just that bit too forced, too enthusiastic.
“Gosh,” he began in English before switching back. “German manners aren’t what they were! Replaced by a rapacious curiosity I see. Fräulein, I am on my way to Abyssinia, to see how the glorious Regia Aeronautica used our gas to defeat the natives, carrying spears. See what we can learn from the experience.”
“The Führer doesn’t like poison gas,” Sarah interrupted.
Hasse stared at Sarah. “Our leader has the luxury of scruples. Those of us in his service do not,” he said seriously. “Ends, you see,” he added quietly.
Oh, shut up, dumme Schlampe. He would have underestimated you, now he’s wary of you. Well done. Good job.
“Forgive my niece, she’s a zealous National Socialist. She has yet to learn about the shades of gray, or ends.”
Oh, verpiss dich, thought Sarah, regret and resentment in equal balance.
“Well, my flight takes off at midday,” Hasse declared. “I must finish packing. Should have brought a Neger to do that for me, hey?” He stood, guffawing and bowed. “Enjoy your trip, Helmut, Fräulein.”
They watched him leave the dining room.
“He seems nice,” said Sarah.
“Oh, yes. Delightful.”
“What’s cricket?”
“A very dull sport that I haven’t played in almost twenty-five years . . . ”
“Your niece, he said. He said it first. We didn’t tell him,” Sarah said slowly.
“I think he knows a lot about us that we didn’t tell him.” The Captain placed a small bottle in front of Sarah. “Here.”
“What is that?”
“Chloroquine. We have enough problems without getting malaria.”
“Shall I share this with Clementine?”
The Captain froze. “Yes. I’ll . . . find some more.”
ELEVEN
September 3, 1940
THE LIGHT WAS blinding. From horizon to horizon there was nothing but searing white sand, and it hurt the eyes.
Sarah vomited again into the paper bag, nothing but bile. It was nearly full, and the smell made her retch again.
The pilot nudged his navigator, and they laughed. They called the constant falling and climbing aidtirab. The Captain, now dressed as a missionary, translated into German—Turbulenz.
The brightness, the endless ups and downs, the incessant thudding, howling drone of the engine, the stench of oil and sweat, added to the unceasing broiling, suffocating heat, was too much for Sarah. The cramped Storch was so small and fragile-looking that even before she had been pushed on board by the Captain, her body had gone into panic mode and stayed there. It was as if every gram of energy and fluids had drained from her body. Her head was sandpaper, and she felt like a dried-out fruit skin.
Clementine rubbed Sarah’s back gently.
“I’m not your Eva,” muttered Sarah.
“Shut up,” Clementine said, sighing.
“Don’t close your eyes, you’ll just make it worse. Look at the horizon,” the Captain called out.
“Too . . . bright . . .” muttered Sarah. The Captain leaned over and pushed a pair of white-rimmed sunglasses onto her head. They had a visor of some kind over the nose. It was uncomfortably warm, but the pain in her head eased slightly.
The copilot seemed preoccupied with something outside. Sarah almost wished there was something wrong with the wing. Death seemed preferable to continuing a moment longer.
He nudged the pilot, and after a moment’s conversation, they both stared out of the starboard windows.
Eventually the pilot turned and called out.
“What are they saying?”
“I’m not sure,” the Captain replied.
“You speak Arabic,” Sarah groaned.
“I speak classical Arabic. This is Libyan . . . something else.” The Captain screwed up his face before replying. “Seguiti? Nous sommes suivis?”
“Oui,” the pilots shouted together.
Followed.
The Captain made a flat, circular motion with his finger, and the pilot shrugged. The plane banked slightly to the right, and the landscape tipped up and began to slide slowly to the left. Sarah fought the ripples of nausea and pressed her face to the glass to look behind her.
Against the blinding white and blue, the aircraft’s black tailplane looked like a piece cut out of the world. The featureless sand seemed to be crawling uphill from the heart of this void.
A tiny black shape appeared from behind the airframe. It looked like a bird, but its wings did not move, and it hung in the sky in a way that gliding or hovering raptors did not. Sarah watched it slowly slip along the horizon until it was level with the wing.
“Là,” called the pilot.
The birdlike dot shifted orientation and began to drift back toward the tail.
The Captain and the pilot began to bicker in a quick succession of hybrid Arabic, French, and Italian phrases. The pilot tapped a nearby fuel can, and the copilot shook his head in support.
Catch-up, pursue, frighten . . . limits, consumption, burning, risk.
The Captain tossed them a bundle of banknotes. The pilots began to argue among themselves.
“What’s the problem?” Sarah asked.
“The one on the right doesn’t want Reichmarks,” the Captain replied.
“No, I mean, what don’t they want to do?”
“They don’t want to chase our friend out there,” the Captain answered. He had pulled something heavy from a bag and was beginning to unwrap the cloth that surrounded
it. The pilot turned and shouted something back. The Captain nodded. “Put your seat belt on.”
“Why?” complained Sarah, who couldn’t think of anything worse than to be bound to this bucking, shaking animal and lose the illusion of escape.
“Because you’re going to get hurt otherwise.”
He was assembling something made of three black metal and brown Bakelite pieces. Something from behind his shelves of forbidden books. Sarah began scrabbling for the straps behind her.
The pilot called out.
For the first time Sarah saw something other than carefree, grinning, oily insouciance on his unshaven face. She tightened her belt.
“Al-ann,” the Captain commanded in Arabic.
The plane lurched, rolled, and dived for the ground, engines screaming. The airframe rattled and shook as the desert landscape filled the windows. Sarah’s sunglasses shot from her face, but she managed to grab them before they disappeared onto the floor. The plane hung, weightless, above the sand for just a moment, but it felt endless.
Then it rolled onto its back and pulled up sharply. Desert. sky. The color drained from everything.
They were now low over the dunes and rocks. Watching them flash by, Sarah was suddenly aware of their speed and her own fragility. The Captain clicked a magazine into the submachine gun and opened a window.
The cabin filled with a howling wind. Sarah’s hair pulled free of her clips and braids and attacked her face, so she pushed her glasses tight onto her nose. Clementine had her eyes tightly shut and hands clasped, seemingly in prayer.
A shadow passed over the plane.
“Now!” called the Captain.
The engines rose in volume, and the plane started to climb. Sarah was pushed back in her seat and found she couldn’t move her arms. Panic started to seep through the seams of her control. The sun filled the cabin and then vanished as they turned.
“Là,” the Captain shouted, pointing at something Sarah couldn’t see. “Plus proche.” The pilot shook his head and pointed up. “D’accord. Vite, vite.”
Sarah placed her hands around her fear and squeezed, using its energy to regain control. Take the fear and use it. The pressure eased on her arms as the plane leveled out. She unbuckled her seat belt and leaned toward the open window. She could now make out the aircraft ahead. A black cross shape, with the wings, body, and tail making one sleek whole. It looked like a threat . . . but it also looked uncertain. It waggled its wings in indecision before slowly descending before them.
The pilot began to shout, an excited babble of French and Italian.
“He says it’s Italian . . . Look at the white cross,” Sarah translated. “Regia Aeronautica. Italian. Bf one-oh-eight. They’re friendly.”
“Yes, but to whom?” the Captain said. He turned to Sarah. “Remind them that they’re mercenaries. They don’t have any friends.”
With difficulty, Sarah climbed to the front. “Pas d’amis. Vous êtes des mercenaires,” Sarah jabbed a finger toward them. “Pirata . . .”
The copilot yelled to his friend.
And they broke into laughter and pushed the throttles forward.
The target grew in the cockpit windows with the Sahara Desert laid out behind it, like a yellow canvas. Sarah took it in and swallowed it whole, owning the terror. She found she was panting.
Closer. Bigger. Until it filled the windows and Sarah thought they’d plow into it.
The Captain opened fire.
Thrack. Thrack thrack thrack thrack thrack thrack.
Shell casings were tossed across the cabin. One bounced off Sarah’s arm. It was hot.
The Bf 108 shuddered and seemed to spring a leak. Something black and spotty tumbled into the air as it shrieked and banked sharply away.
Thrack thrack thrack thrack thrack.
“Down! Giù!” the Captain called as he grabbed Sarah’s arm and tried to pull her back to her seat. She shook his hand loose and pushed his arm away, burning her hand on his gun as she did so.
“No,” she growled. She clasped the metalwork above her firmly and rode the descent, feeling the lightness in her feet and the pressure in her face. She wanted to see, to be part of it, rather than it be something that just happened to her. The other plane was now clearly visible against the sky, dragging a tail of dirt and smoke in its wake. It was looking for them, a wounded hunter.
The Captain was reloading and calling to the pilots in Arabic. Whatever he was saying was not going down well, but his voice was commanding and brooked no argument. They shrugged and turned the plane back toward the enemy.
The 108 turned tighter and moved into profile. The Storch straightened out. Both planes were close to the sand dunes now and heading right for each other.
Sarah looked at the man at the controls. He was rigid in concentration. The 108 seemed to swell in the cockpit windows with terrifying speed.
The copilot was chanting something.
It sounded like laysa-baad.
The 108 was huge, black, and demonic, trailing its tail of filth behind it. Surely someone would move out of the way?
Sarah could now see the figures in the opposing cockpit and its pilot, taking in his round, surprised mouth.
The Storch climbed slightly, showing every sign of breaking off. Sarah exhaled in relief.
Al-ann.
They dipped back in front of the other plane.
Thrack, thrack, thrack.
Then their plane tipped into a vertical climb and turned on its tail.
As the 108 screamed under it, the Storch stalled immediately and dropped belly first toward the sand. The wings caught the air, the plane bounced twice on the sand, throwing Sarah through the cabin, and with a roar of strangled noise, it staggered into the air. A drunk on his way home from the bar.
Sarah lay among the cargo between the seats, staring at the ribs of the ceiling, uncertain if she could move. Clementine’s face appeared.
“Put your gottverdammt seat belt on, Eva,” she sneered. “Get up, you’re missing everything.” She pulled on Sarah’s arms and manhandled her onto a seat.
“Where’s the other plane?”
Clementine pointed out of the window as the Storch banked, revealing the 108, at the end of a long dirty streak in the sand, its nose resting in a dune. No one had yet emerged.
“This is quite a little aircraft, isn’t it?” Clementine smiled. “Safe as houses, huh? No need to be so scared.”
Sarah was still scared. The terror was deep in her toes. She just had command of it.
The copilot turned and put his chin on the seat back. He waved a finger to the Captain, who was stripping his gun and spoke to Sarah in broken Italian.
“He says that was an impossible shot you made with that,” Sarah recounted. “You scare him.”
“Good.”
“He also says that we need to land soon. We’ve used too much fuel . . . having fun, he says . . . to get to Al Wigh.”
“Also good.”
Sarah looked at the Captain, noting the sweat on his upper lip and the very slight tremor in his right hand.
“Are you all right?” Sarah asked.
“I’m fine,” he snapped. “Just leave me alone,” he added more quietly and looked away.
Sarah closed her eyes and, sitting back, began to write.
Dearest Mouse,
You know how you tried to tell me about Elsa’s father, but something stopped you actually saying the words?
I had trouble talking to my mother about the things she did. These were not secrets, these were things we both knew about. We just didn’t talk about them. About what they did to us. What they did to me.
I swore that I wouldn’t ever do that again. I swore I wouldn’t keep denying something that I knew to be true and pretending it would go away.
Yet here I am.
> Is it because we were little more than children that we let that happen? Is this just the way that the world works? Are we broken?
IF WE TALKED, IF WE COULD NOT BE SILENCED, THEN PEOPLE LIKE ELSA’S FATHER COULDN’T DO WHAT THEY DO. ROTHENSTADT COULDN’T HAVE RUN. THE NAZIS EVIL COULDN’T EXIST, BECAUSE WE’D ALL BE POINTING AT IT, SCREAMING, WARNING EVERYONE ELSE.
Every girl, every woman calling out danger and then dealing with it.
But our lives are full of secrets, aren’t they?
I have a secret, something that can’t be screamed out.
And that’s how it starts, doesn’t it?
Alles Liebe,
Ursula
TWELVE
September 3–14, 1940
THERE WERE TEN stops. Maybe more. Sarah lost count.
This night, in a tiny oasis near the border of French West Africa, the swirling sunset of purples, oranges, and yellows brought more than a steady breeze. It was accompanied by a long, sustained humming. It sounded like a choir of bass voices or the vibration of a distant airplane.
Sarah stood up and walked to the edge of camp, wrapped in a blanket. She scanned the skies for the 108, but although the booming rose, swelled, and faded, it wasn’t uniform like a plane. And it droned on and on.
“What is that noise?” she wondered aloud.
the pilot called out from the fire. “La sabbia, sta cantando,” he added.
“The sand . . . is singing?” Sarah laughed incredulously.
The Captain appeared at her side. “If the conditions are right, the drifting sand makes this sound.” He was wistful and alert despite the hour. “I didn’t know it did this outside of Arabia, though. Special, isn’t it?”
If it were a choir, it would be vast and inhuman, an orchestra playing string instruments the size of the earth. The words, if there were any, would have been dark and primal, the tale of the world since the dawn of time. It was beautiful and frightening in equal measure.
