by Alan Gratz
Fritz pulled a big blue piece of paper from his rucksack and pressed it into my hands. He smiled at me, eyes wide, like I should be amazed at what I was seeing. To tell the truth, I didn’t understand what I was looking at. Not at first. But when I did, I woke up for good. Fast. It was a secret so big it could change the course of the war. Maybe change the fate of the world.
And I had it right there in my hands.
The big blue piece of paper was a blueprint. A technical drawing of a new kind of airplane that hadn’t been built yet. An airplane without propellers.
The same airplane Simon had been trying to catch on camera when he was shot down.
Projekt 1065. It said the name of the project right there in the corner!
I caught myself doing the German Look to make sure no one else was watching us.
Fritz was practically hopping. “It doesn’t have any propellers, see? It has two jet engines,” he said. “It’s a new kind of plane. A jet plane! It will go twice as fast as any other airplane in the world!”
Goose bumps crawled up my arms.
“Where did you get this?” I said. I quickly scanned as much of the paper as I could. There were lines and numbers and detailed instructions written all over it.
“My father’s on the design team,” Fritz said proudly. “He’d kill me if he knew I took this from his study. I was going to show the whole troop, but then they beat me up. So I decided I would just show it to you.”
I shook my head. I guess sometimes people did hand you their secrets. But only if you saved them from getting beat to a pulp.
“Isn’t it amazing!?” Fritz was saying. “With this plane, Germany will smash the Allies!”
That’s exactly what I was worried about. The only reason Hitler hadn’t been able to invade England was because of its amazing Royal Air Force, the RAF. They’d beaten the Nazis in the skies over London in the Battle of Britain, fighting against regular old propeller-driven planes with propeller-driven planes of their own. But if this “jet” engine really was twice as fast as any regular airplane, they could fly circles around the RAF. The German Luftwaffe would defeat the RAF, Hitler would invade England, and the Allies would crumble. The Nazis would rule the world.
“This says page one of twelve,” I said, my voice no more than a whisper. I tried to hide my desperation. “Where are the rest of the plans?”
Before Fritz could answer, the air was split with a siren so familiar, none of us even jumped.
Air raid.
As a member of the junior Hitler Youth ranks, I had a job during air raids—the same job every other Jungvolk had. Each of us had a section of a Berlin street that was “ours,” and our job was to run there are soon as the sirens rang and make sure that everyone who lived on that street got to the air raid shelter before the Allied bombs started to fall.
At the sound of the siren, we were all out of our seats and running for the door. Class hadn’t even started yet. The Allies were up early today too.
Fritz snatched the blueprint from me and stuffed it back into his rucksack. I caught myself reaching out for it and had to pull my hand back, watching the paper disappear with a gnawing ache like hunger. I had to get my hands on the rest of those blueprints. The Allies had to have a jet fighter of their own to survive.
“Talk to you later!” Fritz said as he ran off to do his job.
“You bet you will,” I said under my breath. I was going to stick to him now like medals on a Nazi general’s uniform.
I ran to my street. Mostly young married women lived there, some of them with babies, others with children in school off doing their own jobs during the air raid. Hardly any men. Most any man old enough to fight was away in the army—or dead. The air raid sirens wailed as I hurried the women and little kids to the shelter underground. I was supposed to shut myself in with them when I was sure we were all present and accounted for, but today I had another person I needed to check in on, and now was the perfect time to do it.
The first bombs started to fall across the city as I ran back to the embassy. I could hear the dull poom-poom-poom in the distance, and then the ack-ack guns—the antiaircraft guns—began firing back. Tuf-tuf. Tuf-tuf-tuf. They were far enough away that I wasn’t worried. Besides, I had a deal with the Allied bombers. I didn’t shoot at them, and they didn’t shoot at me. That was a joke, of course—they had no idea who or what their bombs were hitting when they dropped them from the planes by the ton—but I liked to think it was true.
I ran through empty streets full of empty houses. Anyone could have walked right in and stolen all the silverware, food, radios, anything of value. And sometimes that was just what people did during air raids. People who were poor, or starving, or just looking out for themselves. That was part of the job of the Gestapo and the SRD: to patrol the empty neighborhoods during air raids and make sure nothing was stolen. They took the job very seriously too. The penalty for stealing from houses while everyone was underground in bomb shelters was death.
There weren’t any Gestapo or SRD on the street near the embassy when I got there, and I ran up the steps and plowed inside. It was strange to not be met by a servant, to be entirely alone in the house. It was creepy, actually. It felt like everyone in the world was dead and gone except for me.
But of course I wasn’t the only person there.
I ran for my father’s study and knocked on the door, calling out for Simon. I hoped he was already out of the secret room, walking in circles on his injured foot. Air raids were the only time he could really get out and walk around without anybody seeing him.
Simon unlocked the door and let me in. “Good lord, Michael! You scared the life out of me! What are you doing here?”
“The Nazi … jet plane … ” I stammered, trying to catch my breath. “Projekt 1065 … I saw the … I saw the blueprints.”
“Projekt 1065? The blueprints?” Simon said. “How the devil did you—?”
I grabbed a pencil and paper from my father’s desk and sketched out everything I could remember. I drew the shape of the plane and a few of the numbers and words I’d seen before the air raid siren had sounded and Fritz had ripped the page from my hands.
Simon stared at the paper with an open mouth. “But … this is extraordinary! You saw this? Today? When? Where? And how do you remember so much of it?”
I told Simon everything—about Fritz, his father, page one of twelve, my photographic memory.
“I don’t believe it,” Simon said. “Do you know what this means? I can finish my mission after all—and even better than before! I can bring home actual blueprints, not just photographs taken from twenty thousand feet!” He took me giddily by the shoulders. “You may just save my bacon—and all of England, America, and Russia’s bacon too—if you can get another look at those plans. Can you? And memorize more of them?”
“Sure!” I said. “All I have to do is stay close to Fritz and I’m sure he’ll show them to me again. It’ll be easy. We’re in the same Jungvolk squad and—”
And then it hit me. We wouldn’t be for much longer. “Oh. Oh, no.”
“What? What is it?”
“I’m not going to be in the Jungvolk anymore. They’re calling up all the seventeen-year-old boys from the Hitler Youth to fight in the German army, which means they’re promoting all the thirteen-year-olds like me out of the Jungvolk a year early.”
“Good lord,” Simon said. “Seventeen-year-olds, fighting in the army? The Jerries must be getting pretty desperate. Boys too young to shave, drafted to fight on the front lines.” He frowned at me. “But I still don’t understand what any of that has to do with buddying up to this boy whose father has the plans.”
“The initiation test into the senior Hitler Youth is in less than a week,” I explained. “If I don’t pass the test, Fritz will join the SRD and I’ll never see him again unless he busts me for sneaking into a movie theater. I’ll never be able to get close to him.”
“And who says you’re not going to pass the Hi
tler Youth initiation?” Simon asked.
“The last test is jumping off a two-story building into a pool,” I said. “And I’m afraid of heights. Not just afraid. I mean pee your pants, freeze up, fall flat on your face afraid of heights.” Just thinking about the two-story jump made me queasy. “I’ve tried to get better at it, but—”
“But?”
“But I can’t do it,” I said meekly.
“Right,” Simon said, clapping his hands. “So we have less than a week to get you over your fear of heights, then, eh?”
It wasn’t that simple. “You don’t understand—” I started to tell him.
“Believe it or not, I do,” Simon said. “Look, I’ve some experience with this. I can help you overcome your fear. Enough at least to pass your test. But to do it, we’re going to have to get started right away, all right? Let’s head up to the roof.”
I quailed. The roof? I couldn’t! “D-during an air raid?” I asked. I was more afraid of the rooftop than the bombs falling all around us—far more afraid of the rooftop—but I hoped reminding Simon of the air raid would stop this crazy plan.
“Why not?” Simon said. “How else is no one going to see us? Now let’s hop to it!”
Berlin was on fire. That’s what it looked like from the roof. Orange-red glows silhouetted the broken shapes of buildings, each inferno sprouting a thick, acrid mushroom cloud of smoke. The air smelled like burning metal and spent firecrackers, tasted like fireplace ash and cement dust. The Americans knew the way to Berlin now as if they were flying from New York to Philadelphia and back, and they dropped their bombs on the city all at once, like children opening their fists to let handfuls of pebbles drop to the ground.
Hundreds of thousands of bombs fell on Berlin, illuminated by the giant German searchlights that swept the dull gray skies for bombers.
The thundering, teeth-clattering explosions of the bombs was accompanied by the staccato poom-poom-poom-poom-poom of the Nazis’ antiaircraft guns. Yellow streaks shot into the sky, exploding among the planes with pops like fireworks. One of the AA guns in the streets detonated like a cherry bomb, and I flinched. The searchlights made the guns perfect targets for the bombers they were trying to shoot down.
I had never been outside during an air raid before.
“This is what’s going to happen to that factory,” I said.
“What factory?” Simon asked.
“The one I stole the secret location for,” I said. I told Simon about finding the numbers in the playing card in the automaker’s study. “Da sent the message off in the diplomatic pouch this morning. In a few weeks, a few days maybe, British planes will fly over it and do … this. I was always so excited to help, but … but it won’t be soldiers in those factories, will it?”
“No,” Simon said. “It’ll be prisoners, most likely.”
I shrank. I had been worried enough when I thought it would be German civilians, but prisoners? Innocent people? Now they were all going to die. Because of me.
“If we didn’t bomb those factories, if we didn’t drop these bombs here, today, the Nazis would win, and then there would be even more prisoners. Even more innocent people would die,” Simon said. “Sometimes good people have to be sacrificed to win a war.”
I nodded. My mother had told me the same thing, in her way, about leaving Simon behind. But we hadn’t sacrificed Simon, and it was good that we hadn’t. How did you decide who to sacrifice and who to save?
“Bad as this is,” Simon continued, “the Nazis did ten times worse to us during the Blitz.” He spoke quietly, even though it was hard to hear over the explosions. “German planes overhead almost every night, dropping hundreds of thousands of firebombs on London. People huddled in Tube tunnels, lying down along the subway tracks. Little kids crying. Babies wailing. And up top, the whole blooming city reduced to rubble. More than eight months of it. Fifty-seven nights in a row one time.” He paused, watching buildings explode. “Payback. That’s what this is.”
I knew about the Blitz. Short for Blitzkrieg: “lightning war.” Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, France—they had all fallen in a matter of months, sometimes weeks. Sometimes even hours.
But Hitler hadn’t been able to conquer England. The Battle of Britain, fought entirely in the skies, was supposed to have crippled England and demoralized her people. Made it ripe for an amphibious assault across the English Channel. When it didn’t, Hitler gave up on England and turned east toward Russia. England got knocked down and got back up again. But it might not be able to do that a second time if the Nazis developed jet planes.
Which was why I was up here in the first place, I remembered. To get over my fear of—
My stomach seized up as I suddenly remembered where I was. My head bobbed like a barrage balloon. My legs went wobbly, and the rest of me froze. I fell face-first toward the floor of the roof.
Simon put a hand to my chest, saving me from hitting the deck.
“Whoa there!” he said. “Keep it together, O’Shaunessey. Stay with me.”
I fought to regain control, but I couldn’t make my arms and legs work. My heart worked, though. It worked overtime. It beat so fast it threatened to overload my system, like a penny stuck in an electrical socket.
“You stood up here for ten minutes before you remembered you were two stories up,” Simon told me. “That’s lesson number one. Distraction. We have to find something to distract you. Here—do sums with large numbers. That’ll keep your mind occupied. What’s 67,821 plus 91,725?”
Math already paralyzed me when I had my two feet on solid ground. I closed my eyes and teetered.
“All right, all right, not math!” Simon said. “Come on, then, tell me a joke about what prats the English are. I’m sure you have hundreds.”
I shook my head to clear it, but that just made me dizzier. All I wanted to do was to curl up into a ball and pass out. I leaned into Simon, and he had to fall back against a chimney to keep us standing with his sprained ankle.
“Right, then,” Simon said, “here’s another one for you. An Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman meet a magical fellow at the top of a tall building. The wizard tells them that if they jump off the building, whatever they say while they’re falling will appear at the bottom. So the Englishman, he jumps off first, being the bravest of them of course, and he yells, ‘Pillows!’ and he lands on a big pile of pillows. The Scotsman jumps off next, and on the way down he yells, ‘Hay!’ and he lands in a big pile of hay. Last up is the Irishman, but he trips on the edge of the building right as he’s about to jump, and as he falls he yells, ‘Oh, crap!’ ”
I laughed in spite of myself.
“There we go!” Simon said. “You hate the English, right? Of course you do—you’re Irish. So every time you start to lose control, you think of some insult to throw at me, whether I’m there or not. That’ll give you something else to focus on.”
It was a good idea, but I was too far gone. My stomach heaved. I leaned over and threw up my breakfast and collapsed into a heap on the rooftop.
Simon slid down with me. “Well, we’ll just have to keep working at it, won’t we?” He sat with me while I fought to stay conscious. “So, funny story,” he said. “I’m deathly afraid of something too. And you’ll never guess what.”
“Birds,” Simon said. “That’s what I’m afraid of. Birds.”
I looked up at him. Bombs and antiaircraft tracers still flared and boomed all around us, and Simon didn’t bat an eye at them. But he was afraid of birds?
“My hand to God,” Simon said. “Birds frighten the pants off me. One bird I’m all right with, though I’m still not a fan. But get a group of them together, all lingering about in a tree or on an electrical wire … ” He shuddered. “A murder of crows kills me. A pandemonium of parrots makes me panic. A bevy of quail makes me quail. Which is ironic, don’t you think? Seeing as how the birds and I both love to fly. I once almost crashed a de Havilland twin-engine Mosquito just trying to get away fr
om a row of geese flying south for the winter.”
I chuckled.
“My father was a hard man,” Simon said, his eyes on the bombers in the sky. “Solicitor. Very serious. Didn’t take it lightly that his son had some irrational fear of a bunch of birds. Told me the best thing for it was to confront my fear head-on. So one evening he took me up onto a rooftop much like this one and stood me on a chimney. He told me it was to get used to birds. What he didn’t tell me was that the chimney was full of swifts.”
I sat up and wiped my mouth with my sleeve.
“Have you ever seen swifts emerging from a chimney, Michael? At a precise time each evening, they burst forth from the chimney where they nest, like water from a garden hose. Hundreds of them at a time. They battered me, clawed me, flapped their terrible wings in my face as they hurtled by. I was absolutely surrounded by them. I tried to leap away, but my father grabbed me by the shoulders and held me in place. Made me stand there and be swarmed by them. The idea was that by facing my worst fear, I would just … get over it.”
There was a haunted look in Simon’s eyes now, and I knew he wasn’t joking. About any of it. It sounded silly to be afraid of birds, but a real fear, a real phobia, was a serious thing. People without one couldn’t understand.
Simon worked at steadying his breathing. Was he doing sums in his head to distract himself? Whatever he was doing, I gave him the time and space to do it.
“Didn’t work, of course,” Simon said when he had recovered a little. “I think I can confidently say it made things very much worse. So I won’t be dangling you off the side of the building, in case you were wondering. But confronting your fear in a controlled situation and learning to deal with your responses helps prepare you for the big ones. To that I can attest. Small steps, Michael. Small steps.”
All around us, the Allies pounded Berlin, leveling the city to rubble a little more.
