by Peter Albano
Doggedly, Randolph bore in to a hundred yards. His hunger to kill Kochling was so voracious, so overwhelming, he ignored the mortal peril charging in from his right rear. At zero deflection he opened fire, his tracers smashing into his enemy’s engine. A twenty-millimeter shell blew the hood off, there was a puff of smoke, the yellow flame of burning petrol, and the ME rolled on its back. A black figured dropped out of the cockpit and a white parachute blossomed.
A blow struck the Spitfire like a pneumatic tool. Abruptly the Plexiglas panels were punched and rent open, wind pouring in and raging about the cockpit like a ravening beast. Randolph’s instrument panel dissolved and exploded in his face and he was suddenly sprayed with blood. He screamed, fear and icy despair clutching and squeezing his guts. Instinctively, he rolled away from the burst. Frantically, he ripped off his goggles and wiped his cheeks with the back of his glove. Hydraulic fluid. A line had been severed by thirteen-millimeter bullets. Immediately Randolph felt the drag of trapped air. He must have been damaged in the fuselage, back of the cockpit, too.
Correcting his trim with stick and rudder, Randolph continued his roll into a dive without reducing throttle and glanced into his rearview mirror. The black ME was boring in closer for the kill and Burroughs was racing in from the German’s port side. The young man was firing and the German suddenly ignored Randolph and turned to meet the new threat. Burroughs never wavered, never changed course, his attack as true as the arrow painted on the side of the Messerschmitt. He charged into the ME.
“No!” Randolph screamed. The Spitfire’s spinner slashed into the ME’s cockpit and the two aircraft enveloped each other like two lovers maddened by passion. The impact hurled the locked aircraft across the sky in a single spinning mass that shed huge chunks of aluminum and broken, bent debris. There was a flash. Flames. And the two locked fighters whirled and tumbled into the Channel like a great flaming pinwheel.
Pulling out of his dive, Randolph pounded his combing in anger and frustration, his soul riven by a silent scream of anguish. Another young man dead. Poor Burroughs with his nervous tick and frightened voice. Had he frozen at the controls, misjudged his distance, or actually rammed deliberately to save his commanding officer? He would never know. What he did know was that the lad’s sacrifice had saved his life. Had attacked bravely with dash and verve. You could never tell what stuff made up a man until his life was on the line and you fought by his side. This would go into the letter—the blasted, bloody letter.
Forcing the horror from his mind, he choked back the sour gorge in his throat, reduced throttle, and looked around. The sky was absolutely empty and the fighter circuit quiet. This miracle happened so often in the most ferocious dogfights. One moment the sky would be filled with snarling, twisting, burning fighters, the next it was empty. The fight had taken him far to the southwest. He could see the Cotentin Peninsula just a few miles to the southeast. To the far north the clouds were still thick as if God was cooperating with the Germans and covering the escape of the enemy warships. Where was Kochling?
Banking and losing altitude, he leaned over the combing. There was something down there in the Channel. Something large and gray that bobbed in the water like a buoy. Dropping beneath a thousand feet, Randolph nodded to himself. A German rescue float equipped with blankets, rations, and medical supplies. The enemy anchored them in the Channel close to the French coast in hopes that downed flyers could paddle to them in their dinghies and await rescue by small craft. There was a parachute floating nearby and a man was sitting with his back to the float’s small tower. He was blond and very white. Kochling. It had to be Kochling.
Randolph’s lips pulled back from his teeth in a hard line and his mouth was suddenly filled with saliva as if he were savoring a gourmet meal. Slowly he swept around the float in a complete circle and then turned in to bring his armament to bear. Kochling stood, pulled a pistol from his holster, and pointed it at him. The man was no coward. Randolph throttled back just above stalling speed. With his reflector sight shot out, he would use the top cowling panel for his open sight. It would be easy. Kochling would die the same way Freddie “Coop” Hansen died.
He pushed the red button. The first bullets and shells hit short. A slight pull on the stick marched them into the float, blasting open the tower and hurling Kochling against it. Torso ripped open, entrails pouring onto the deck, he slid across the small platform. As Randolph passed over, the eviscerated corpse slipped from the float and plunged into the water, held on the surface by its life preserver. The German floated head down, arms and legs extended in a ragged cross the way all dead men float. A stain began to spread in the blue water like a red dye marker. Kochling looked just like Hansen. Nothing separated them in death. Here, all men are equal.
Randolph was startled by a voice in his earphones. It was scratchy with static. He looked around but could not find even a sea bird. Despite the interference and the wavering carrier wave, he recognized Rhoads’s incongruously gay voice carried from beyond the horizon. He was singing a song popular with the RAF. “We’re off to see the wizard. . .”
With Rhoads’s voice in his ears, Randolph looked down at the corpse one last time. Staring at the German, he felt a warm glow inside, a fullness, the same feeling as after making love with Elisa. But instead of Elisa, he saw Bernice. He laughed until he felt tears on his cheeks, “You’re right, Bernice!” he screamed. “You’re right.”
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 1990 by Peter Albano
ISBN 978-1-4976-3506-7
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
PETER ALBANO
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
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