The Dead Alone (Empires Lost Book 3)

by Charles S. Jackson

  “He was always proud of you… that much I could tell, even as a boy…”

  “Don’t…” Levi said quickly, snapping perhaps a little more than was his intention in his haste to change the subject there and then. “Don’t…” he repeated, with less anger this time as he caught the fleeting but unmistakeable flash of shame and embarrassment in the older man’s face. “He’s gone now anyway, and I don’t want to hear about things that might have happened… about a future we’ll never have…”

  It was sometimes easy to forget that the young man standing before him had seen and suffered through far more death and horror than any human being should have to in one lifetime, and it had left Levi Lowenstein with an overarching air of dark, sad wisdom that often made him seem far older than his fourteen years. The older Lowenstein had also seen more than his own fair share of torture and suffering as a Nazi prisoner over the course of the last decade, yet as he finished with the razor, rinsed it off in the sink and placed it to one side, he couldn’t even begin to imagine what the boy had gone through… what he must’ve seen with his own eyes.

  “If it goes wrong tomorrow…” Lowenstein began, lifting the towel hanging over one shoulder to his face as he turning fully toward the boy and wiped away the excess soap. “If we don’t get out of there, they’ll make sure you and Evie get across the border. They’ll keep you safe.”

  “And if they capture us all…?” The dark intensity of the gaze that came with that loaded question shook Lowenstein to the core of his being.

  “This isn’t Masada…” He began slowly, thinking back to a reference Levi had made to that great, historic siege during a heated late night discussion of just a week before. “I’m not drawing lots with you.”

  “I’m not asking you to…” the boy countered quickly, steel in his tone that hid the fear he too inwardly felt “…but I expect you to do what’s necessary if the time comes.” He paused for a moment, then added: “If not for me, then for your mother… you know what they’ll do before they kill us.”

  And Samuel Lowenstein indeed knew all too well from personal experience exactly what vile tortures and atrocities the SS could imagine and act out upon a helpless prisoner, often for their own enjoyment as much as for any ‘legitimate’ use as a method of interrogation.

  “Now you’re not playing fair,” He shot back with more than a little sourness behind his wan smile.

  “Neither do the Nazis,” Levi observed coldly, the fires of hatred burning in his eyes now. “There is one thing you can tell me about this future you come from…” he continued, intent on making brutally sure his point was taken clearly. “How many of us do they drag from our beds in the dead of night…? How many do they murder?”

  “S-six…” Lowenstein began, his voice faltering as the threat of tears inexplicably rose at the corners of his eyes. “…Six million… but…” he paused again, a scientist’s compulsion for accuracy forcing him on regardless of the discomfort he now felt regarding the entire conversation: he was unable to hold back the truth in spite of the fact that he knew it would be used against him. “The Nazis lost the war… it took six terrible years but in the end, they lost…”

  “Will they lose now…?”

  There was a long pause as conflicting emotions battled for control within Samuel Lowenstein’s mind. His childhood carried with it the memories and teachings of a future that would now never exist, and teenage boy or not, there was no way he could lie to the young man standing before him who in another, lost reality would’ve grown up to become his own father.

  “No…” he answered eventually, his voice hoarse and hollow. “No, they won’t lose… they can’t lose…”

  “And how many do you think they’ll murder now, then… now that they hold all of Europe in their hands?”

  “You can’t ask me to do this…”

  “Again, I’m not asking: this, I am demanding of you!” He hissed softly, the righteous rage in Levi’s eyes sharp and clear now as he took a step forward, fists clenched. “They took away families… Mama and Papa… my sisters and brothers… cousins, aunts, uncles… everyone…!” The words were spat with the venom of abject hatred, and lost nothing for lack of volume. “Whole communities rounded up and dragged off to the camps… to gas chambers, if the rumours we’ve heard are true!”

  So close to the bone, that last statement caused Lowenstein to flinch visibly, and Levi was suddenly overcome by the terrible realisation that what they’d all heard whispers of – of the real nature of those Jewish concentration camps in Germany, Poland, France and the English Midlands – were clearly all completely true.

  “They will torture us before they kill us! Is that what you want…?”

  “No…” The denial came out as a weak whisper of defeat from the man standing before Levi that was four times his age.

  “They will torture and rape your mother before they drag her away to the gas chamber! Is that what you want…?”

  “No…! For God’s sake, no…!”

  “Then you know what you must do for us, should the time come.” Levi stated with hard, emotionless precision. “To suicide is a sin before God: if there’s no hope of escape, you must kill us… we cannot let those monsters take us alive…!”

  Aldergrove Air Base

  County Antrim

  The airfield had originally been opened as RAF Station Aldergrove in 1925 and had been home to a number of fighter and bomber squadrons since. Just a few miles south of Antrim, and twenty northwest of Belfast, the opening months of the Second World War had also seen it become important for RAF Coastal Command as a base for long-range maritime patrol aircraft taking the fight to German U-boats in the North Atlantic. All that had come to an end however with the British surrender of December 1940, and the airfield had since become home to a number of Luftwaffe units that included I Gruppe of fighter wing JG2 and several coastal patrol squadrons of the Kriegsmarine’s new air arm; the Marineflieger.

  Spread across several square miles of Irish countryside, the units stationed there had seen no combat whatsoever since the British surrender, and the administration had become quite complacent as a result. Certainly there’d been reports of localised rebel activity over the last week or so, however that had all been concentrated on one part of the border on the north-western side of the country. It was true that there were still occasional attacks or bombings by republican dissidents here and there, but they were generally ineffectual and none had ever been mounted against an operational military installation such as Aldergrove.

  Unteroffizier Rayner Kalb stood his post at the western gates to the base and yawned comprehensively. The eastern sky behind him had been brightening along the horizon for some time now, but at 07:15 hours it certainly wasn’t dawn yet. Just twenty-two years of age, he’d not travelled further than ten miles from his family home his entire life prior to enlistment in the Luftwaffe at the outbreak of the Second World War. Yet now he stood a thousand from his Bavarian homeland, staring out into the pre-dawn darkness of a chilly Irish morning unlikely to be more than four or five degrees centigrade.

  He and his colleague, Selig – a 20-year-old gefreiter from the Ruhr – had been unlucky enough to draw the duty of graveyard shift all weekend, much to the teasing and delight of their barrack-mates, and both now stood on either side of a red-and-white-striped boom gate on the main road into Aldergrove, perhaps twenty yards or so from the intersection of Ballyrobin and Antrim Roads. They were both tired and cold and both very ready for a hot meal and a hard-earned sleep. Neither of them were feeling particularly alert or at all interested in the approach of the small convoy of grey-painted Bedford lorries down Antrim Road, all sporting standard Wehrmacht insignia and licence plates.

  The trucks had clearly been army vehicles prior to German occupation, with an open hatch above the passenger’s head fitted with a mounting ring for a medium machine gun, one of which was fixed in position above the roof of each vehicle, covered with canvas hoods but each nevertheless loaded
with a metal box forward of the trigger guard large enough to carry 200 rounds in a continuous belt. The fact that the weapons were loaded went completely unnoticed by the guards as they approached.

  With no other traffic whatsoever on the roads so early that morning, there was no reason for the lead vehicle to slow down as it crossed Ballyrobin Road, and it instead only came to a gradual halt as it drew up to the boom gate. Kalb and Selig approached slowly from either side of the vehicle, and as they drew near, the last thing either was expecting was for the doors of the truck’s cab to be thrown suddenly open to reveal men in Wehrmacht uniforms holding silenced pistols.

  Both guards collapsed to the ground, instantly dead as the weapons discharged with just a few soft ‘snorts’ of suppressed fire that would’ve been inaudible beyond just a few dozen yards. As their bodies crumpled and their shouldered submachine guns fell uselessly to the ground, several balaclava-clad figures clambered from beneath the tarpaulins covering the cargo bed of the first lorry and quickly dragged them off the road and out of sight.

  Two more passengers, both wearing field-grey Luftwaffe uniforms, swept up the fallen weapons and took up position on either side of the boom gate, looking for all the world as if everything were completely normal. With some minor exertion, one pressed down on the counterweight and raised the red-and-white-striped boom as all four vehicles rumbled through without a moment’s hesitation, splitting up at the intersection at the far end of the entrance road and moving off in three different directions.

  The two lead trucks turned right and motored quickly along an access road that took them past a large vehicle park that was mostly empty. A thousand yards further west the pair pulled in to a huge tank farm for aviation fuel surrounded by eight-foot chain-link fences and barbed wire. Once again, silenced shots were fired and the guards on duty neutralised before the second truck in line drove through the gates and on into the farm, disappearing between the towering, iron-walled tanks.

  The lead vehicle waited patiently on the verge of the access road with engine idling as two men again alighted from its canvas-covered rear tray and dragged the dead guards quickly out of sight. The second lorry’s driver and passenger reappeared on foot no more than five minutes later, jogging back to the waiting truck and climbing into the rear.

  The vehicle drove away quickly, taking the same access road right around the perimeter of the base at the western end of the main Runway 07/25. Near that end of the runway, a single large aircraft – a P-200C Condor maritime patrol bomber – awaited clearance for take-off, its radial engines clattering in the cold air. The lorry drove past behind it, not far from the end of the tarmac where it stood idling.

  On the opposite side of that end of the runway, the lorry veered off the road between a cluster of five huge hangars that housed the fighters of JG2 and also a staffel of SH-6G attack helicopters. Amid those towering structures, they came upon another of their convoy, parked against the wall of one of the hangars with its crew waiting patiently by the tailgate. The first truck pulled to a halt just long enough for that pair to also clamber into the rear of the vehicle, aided by the reaching arms of their colleagues as they disappeared within.

  Turning left at the end of that row of buildings, it took another ten minutes or so to loop back around the southern end of the base’s second, shorter Runway 17/35 and turn back along that same main access road heading north. The main control tower lay on that side of the base, not far from the joining point of the two intersecting runways, and perhaps a hundred yards back from the tower lay a small vehicle park that currently held just a handful of official sedans and one or two trucks.

  One of the trucks parked there – the fourth of their convoy – kicked over its engine at the sight of their approach and pulled back into formation as they passed, following on behind as the road turned north-east. Near the far end of the main runway, both vehicles pulled off the access road and rolled up to a pair of long, low-set wooden barracks huts. There appeared to be a little more activity in that area by comparison as the occasional uniformed soldier came and went, but it was still very quiet for all that.

  The base hadn’t been on active duty for many months now and even drills or exercises were few and far between. A heavy build-up of men and materiel along the eastern borders of Grossdeutschland meant that there was little by way of funding or resources available for ongoing training of any kind in the outlying regions of the Reich. Generally-speaking, the British Isles and most of Western Europe had been completely subdued almost two years earlier, with little required in the way of real military might to maintain the peace other than rear-echelon security forces.

  Without a word or even a nod of recognition to any of the men passing, the pair of lorries trundled down between both barracks lines, coming to a halt halfway along. As had been standard practice on each preceding occasion, the driver and passenger of the following truck again dismounted and quickly climbed up into the rear of the lead vehicle. At that moment, an alert siren suddenly wound up from somewhere across the other side of the runway, splitting the night with its mournful wailing.

  “That’s it, fellas: we’ve been tumbled!” The driver called out sharply, dismay clear in his expression. “Let’s get out o’ here!” With a sharp grind of the gears, he selected first and gunned the engine, the lorry surging away in a cloud of exhaust.

  The remaining Bedford QLD roared off at full speed, turning north once clear of the buildings and leaving the road completely. It rumbled jarringly across a broad expanse of grass and then back onto solid tarmac as it crossed onto the taxiways for the main runway. To their left they could see the operating lights of the Condor patrol bomber as it obtained clearance for take-off and began to accelerate along the strip toward them, intending to take off. Running without lights, it was unlikely the pilot would even see them until it was too late.

  “Slow down, Eddie, fer Christ’s sake…!” The front passenger howled a warning, his judgement of their trajectories and closing speeds suggesting to him that a collision might well be imminent.

  “Fook that, Patrick,” the driver snarled in response, his knuckles white with fear as he gripped the steering wheel and stared straight ahead. “I’ll take that feckin’ airplane over what’s behind us any day o’ the feckin’ week…! If you’re that bloody worried, get on that bloody gun up there and send ‘em to meet St Peter! We’ve only got seconds left before it all goes t’ shite, and it sounds like the buggers are on to us anyway – might as well light these bastards up!”

  Patrick rose from his seat and raised his head and shoulders through the circular opening directly above his head. Flinging the canvas cover off the MG3 mounted there, he racked the bolt and levered the first round into the chamber before swinging it about in the direction of the approaching bomber. He opened fire on the aircraft without a moment’s hesitation, fingers of sparkling tracer reaching out toward it as he poured fire into the portside main wheel. It disintegrated instantly and the huge Focke-Wulf slewed violently to the left as what was left of the undercarriage framework bit into the runway in a shower of lurid sparks, dragging the aircraft around.

  The truck veered to the right, forced to make a concession to evasive manoeuvres by the sliding aircraft as its damaged undercarriage failed completely and the entire port wing crashed to the ground. Flame erupted from the fuel tanks within, boiling up into the sky and illuminating the nearby buildings in a bright, orange glow. The lorry continued on, the heat from the burning bomber intense at such close range but nowhere near enough to slow them down in their desire to escape.

  The departure of that last Bedford had caught the attention of a platoon commander of the 9. Luftwaffe Feld-Division as he’d stepped from a doorway at the far end of one of the long huts. So far as he could see, both trucks carried standard Wehrmacht insignia and registration, however the space between the two huts certainly wasn’t an authorised parking area and was no place for such a vehicle to be left abandoned as now appeared to be the case. Ther
e’d also been something about the way the two men had leaped from the cab and ran to the rear of the other waiting lorry that didn’t sit well in his mind, not the least of which being the fact that neither man seemed to have been wearing regulation dress.

  It was still early however, and the leutnant had barely woken up ten minutes earlier. It took far too long for his sleep-addled brain to process the significance of what he’d just seen against the howl of what was ostensibly an air raid siren, and even as it began to register, he realised with a sudden, growing horror, that another soldier – a private – had also noted the unusual nature of the truck’s presence. Having approached the vehicle, he was now reaching out to grasp the handle of the passenger side door.

  The young officer began to call out but it was far too late. Even as his mouth opened and he raised a hand in warning, the soldier took hold of the handle and pulled the door wide. The last thing the leutnant or anyone else nearby saw was a blinding, actinic flash before the entire area was vaporised in a huge ball of expanding smoke and flame.

  Even at a distance of five hundred yards and shielded by the barracks huts, the blast was still sufficient to batter the speeding lorry and cause it to swerve wildly under the force of the shockwave. Some in the rear cargo bed suffered superficial injuries from flying glass and debris that managed to cut through the vehicle’s canvas cover.

  “Get into ‘em, boys; the game’s afoot now and that’s for sure…!” Eddie, the driver called back over his shoulder with a grim smile. “Let’s give these bastards somethin’ to be goin’ on with…!”

  The tarpaulin was thrown free from the rear of the truck and immediately blew away in the slip stream, revealing a trio of tripod-mounted machine guns bolted to the cargo bed. A pair of MG3 medium weapons pointed outward to the left and right, while a 13mm MG6 heavy machine gun was aimed directly astern, covering their retreat. Behind each weapon, one of the trucks’ crewmen sat on a low, padded seat while another sat to one side, ready to supply belts of ammunition, and all six men had taken care to don padded ear protection against the sound.