“Ah, Christ, Samuel… now we’re both fooked…!”
“Then shut the fuck up and we can die in peace…!” Lowenstein shot back with a forced grin, at least drawing a pained snort of laughter from Kelly,
“Take him…!” Stahl ordered, and men stepped forward to lift Kelly roughly between them, the Irishman using every ounce of his remaining strength to stifle the cry of pain that rose from him, desperate not to give them the satisfaction of hearing it. “Throw him in the Fennec and have someone look at him… we don’t want him to die just yet…!
“Don’t… move…!” He added sharply, turning his attention and the aim of his weapon back to Lowenstein, and as he studied him carefully for the first time, the realisation of who he was spread across Stahl’s features like a glowing sunrise.
“You…!” He continued in English, elation creeping into his tone now, his eyes wide with adrenalin. “You’re the Jew...! The Jew…!”
“Everyone keeps saying it, so I suppose it must be true…” Lowenstein spat with heavy sarcasm. “There’s about sixteen million Juden on the planet at the moment,” he continued bitterly, “and notwithstanding the six of those millions you fucking pigs are going to murder over the next few years, that still raises the question of why I’m so special…?”
“You are the Jude they’ve been looking for all over France,” Stahl continued, only half listening. “You are the one Reuters wants to find so very badly!” Lowenstein’s heart sank in that moment. To hear the Reichsmarschall mentioned meant that this SS officer really did know who he was, and knew at least something of where he’d escaped from two years before.
Half of Schmidt’s units were still on the Irish side of the bridge, attempting to reverse or turn around, as more firing began at the site of the crash, three hundred yards or so to the south. At the head of the procession, Wisch’s Panthers had been in a clearer area that had allowed a quick about face, and his panzer was now halted beside his commander’s Puma in a small courtyard off to one side of the bridge’s approach as they watched over the withdrawal of the rest of their men.
There was nothing to be seen from their position, with the area completely obscured by buildings and the general haze of smoke from the fire, but it was easy enough to pick out the heavier hammering of the Fennec’s 13mm gun over the usual sounds of rifle fire.
“This is going to be bad…very bad…” Wisch observed, throwing in his entry for understatement of the year.
“You think so, Milo,” Schmidt replied darkly, more angered over the situation than anything that had been said. “I think that we shall soon be happy, if ‘bad’ is all that comes of this…!”
“Message from command, Mein Herr…!” the call came from his communications officer below, and he gave Wisch an indication to wait as he lifted his headset back into position.
“Green-Leader receiving, over…”
“Green-Leader, this is Operations Command… be advised: we have notification of a large number of low-level aircraft enroute to your position… fifty plus… ETA two minutes…”
“Thank you, Operations Command… a little late for air support, but always happy to have reinforcements…” Schmidt replied with a dry smile, not knowing what use extra manpower was likely to be under the circumstances.
“Negative, Green-Leader… negative… Approaching aircraft are not Luftwaffe… I repeat… not Luftwaffe…” the transmission came back immediately, with far more urgency in its tone this time as both men stared at each other in disbelief. “New units are approaching bearing one-eight-zero… identity unknown at this point but definitely not ours…”
“Understood, Operations…” Schmidt answered after a short pause, unsure of what to make of this new information. “Green-Leader… out…”
Levi Lowenstein had been hiding under cover the whole time the shooting had continued. He’d thrown himself on top of Evie and held here there, desperately trying to protect her as a hail of bullets of varying calibres whizzed all about. Both of them had cried out as the Fennec’s main gun had opened up, the deafening roar of its heavy machine gun completely overpowering any other weapons firing around it, and as Evelyn whimpered in fright, he hugged her tighter and closed his own eyes tight as he fought to control his own fear.
The Fennec was a smaller, four-wheeled variant of the standard P-7 Puma armoured car. Weighing in at less than seven tons, it was a far lighter vehicle with a crew of just three and able to also carry a small squad of just four extra men. Far too small to fit the standard Puma turret, it instead carried a far more compact unit mounting just a 13mm heavy machine gun and 7.92mm co-axial weapon.
Although far less powerful than the Puma’s automatic cannon, the 13mm MG6C however was nevertheless an incredibly lethal weapon in its own right. Directly (and quite illegally) copied from the American Browning M2 .50-calibre machine gun, it was quite capable of penetrating substantial thicknesses of wood, concrete, brick and even steel, and as the gunner let fly with several long, deadly bursts, it found no problem at all in punching straight through several layers of the nearby stone walls at such a close range.
The first instinct Levi experienced as stone chips and earth sprayed about where they lay was to curl himself tighter around Evelyn and tense his whole body, trying to ignore the sting of fragments against his exposed head and neck. It was only as the stream of fire passed away once more and he was able to breath a premature sigh of relief that he suddenly realised Evelyn was no longer whimpering… that she seemed to no longer be making any movement at all.
As he drew back, a general sense of fear within him suddenly erupting into full-blown terror, everything he felt was just as quickly absorbed into an all-encompassing black rage as he stared down at the ragged red hole that had been punched into the top of Evelyn’s head. Impossible as it might’ve been with Levi shielding her, a direct hit from the Fennec’s guns would’ve been more than enough at that range to have blown her head completely apart. That she’d instead been hit by a random ricochet off the surrounding stone walls – one that therefore came from an unprotected angle – was of no comfort whatsoever as Levi stared down now into her lifeless eyes, with not another mark on her save for the relatively small wound in her skull.
There were no words… no words came to him in that moment as tears of limitless rage and anguish flowed through him. As a young teen he’d not experienced enough of some parts of life to understand what adult love truly was, but for all that he’d come to love Evelyn Graham in the years they’d grown up together as neighbours before the war and in the two years they’d spent trying to stay alive after London fell.
In that moment, the rage within him drew not just on the sight of her, dead before him, but also on every single other slight, wrong and grievance he’d experienced over the course of his short, Jewish life. The body of that dead girl in front of him suddenly became the culmination of a life of persecution… of discrimination… of the deaths of his immediate family and so many others of his faith at the hands of a nation of fanatical murderers.
Looking around with eyes wide, his first sight was of Stahl, standing on the road just a few metres away on other side of the yard’s front fence: Stahl… the blond-haired Aryan… the personification of the Nazi ideal. Almost without conscious thought, Levi’s hand reached out to the grass beside him and found a last piece of broken broom handle left over when they’d fixed Brendan’s splint. No more than perhaps a foot in length, it was nevertheless quite solid, with one end viciously jagged where it had been snapped off during construction. As Levi’s hand closed about it, something about the power of the smooth wood between his fingers somehow felt so terribly right.
“You’re – you’re mad,” he countered weakly, not even convincing himself. “I’m British…! I’m from bloody London for Christ’s sake…!”
“And you are the one they want, all the same…” Stahl dismissed immediately with a shake of his head. “I know a lying bloody Jew when I see one. You’re just lucky Herr Heydric
h wants a little chat with you, or I’d kill you right now…!” Stahl paused then as the sound of aircraft engines reached them faintly through the hazy smoke and cloud above. It wasn’t more than a few seconds before it became quite clear that it was it was the sound of helicopters – quite a few of them – and it was also clear that they were getting closer.
“You see…?” Stahl asked with a smug grin. “You think The Fatherland would leave us stranded here? Our relief comes now, and where we’re taking you after that will redefine your whole idea of what torture means…!”
“Fuck you…!” Lowenstein spat with every ounce of hate and loathing within him loaded into those two simple words. “Fuck all of you…!”
A pair of fighters howled suddenly overhead at that moment, barely dipping low enough to appear below the clouds for just a few seconds, and as they disappeared once more into the sky above, the smug, self-satisfied smile on Pieter Stahl’s face died completely with the realisation that the aircraft he’d just seen had been painted in an unfamiliar two-tone blue camouflage scheme and had sported on their fuselage the white star insignia of the United States Navy.
Samuel Lowenstein had seen that fighter clearly too, and had instantly identified it as what he knew of as an F4U Corsair, known simply as an F-4A in current US Navy service. It took a second or two before the information truly registered at which point, in defiance of the dire predicament he was most certainly in, he began to laugh.
“Silence…!” Stahl bellowed, needing no great genius to recognise that the man before him was laughing at his expense.
“Over there, over there…” Lowenstein started singing softly, the smile growing wider on his face as he recalled the words of an old, American patriotic song of the same name from the last year of the First World War. “Send the word, send the word over there…!”
“Shut up…!” Stahl screamed in fury and waved the pistol in Lowenstein’s face, but he knew he couldn’t shoot the man no matter how much he wanted to, and the sound of those approaching helicopters – a sound that now frightened rather than reassured – continued to grow ever louder.
“For the Yanks are coming… the Yanks are coming…”
The first of the choppers dropped below the clouds then, no more than a few hundred yards off as it came in low from the west at what had to be close to top speed. It was followed by many more, all approaching in loose formations that amounted to thirty or more in total. Most settled in short of the road, disappearing behind the homes and trees on the western side as they each touched down to unload squads of armed men. Half a dozen however continued on and came in to hover directly above the crash site, the buffeting blast of their main rotors forcing everyone to duck and cover their eyes.
Each UH-9A Chickasaw was painted the same bland overall matte finish of olive drab, with a black patch across the nose directly below the cockpit to cut out excess sun glare. Each aircraft wore the same US star insignia on its fuselage sides, and each black-painted nose also carried the unit insignia of a large, yellow shield displaying a diagonal black bar along with the silhouette of a horse’s head in the top right corner.
“All ground units stand down… I repeat, stand down…!” The words echoed tinnily from loudspeakers mounted beneath one of the lead Chickasaws as it circled in low over the houses. “This is Colonel Glenn Finley, US Seventh Cavalry, operating under orders of the Irish Second Division. All ground units will cease fire immediately and await further orders. German combatants: you are currently in direct violation of Irish neutrality… any aggressive action will be considered an act of war and will be answered accordingly… be advised; we will respond with deadly force if these orders are not obeyed…!”
A second chopper came in to hover directly above Stahl and Lowenstein, the crewman standing in the doorway manning a squad machine gun that was pointed directly at them as the same announcement was immediately re-broadcast in German by a different but no-less authoritative voice.
Two more UH-9As settled down in the middle of the road a few dozen yards south of the action, each immediately disgorging a ten-man squad. The troopers broke into a jog, their day packs and webbing rattling and jangling as they moved quickly up to draw level with Lowenstein and Stahl, taking position in two extended groups on either side.
PFC Esprit stood closest of Gianelli’s squad on the river side while a 2nd Lieutenant stood in command on the opposite side of the road. He held his rifle at the ready, trying desperately not to show any nervousness or fear as he and he and his comrades stared across that short distance at the cold, hard eyes of some of the most heavily-trained elite troops on the planet.
“Damn, Jean-Antoine,” Farmer muttered softly, standing close in by his right shoulder. “Them’s the Waffen-SS right there! They look like some hard-ass soldiers, sure enough!” The gunner stood ready with his own M7A2 cocked and loaded, a 200-round box of belted ammunition clipped beneath its receiver, and the large machine gun seemed surprisingly small in his huge hands.
“They bleed red, same as us…” Esprit whispered back, his eyes wandering up to where Bauer’s body still lay across the front of the Fennec’s turret. “Dat guy sure as hell does…” The colonel’s blood had stained the turret face and gun mantle of the armoured car’s 13mm machine gun, pooling darkly on the hull beneath.
“Amerikaner have no authority here…!” Stahl snarled angrily in English, forgetting Lowenstein for a moment and taking a step around him to face off against the US lieutenant. “Your country boasts of its neutrality, and yet you push in your noses where it is not your concern: you think The Führer will ignore this insult…?”
“Lieutenant-colonel, I don’t give a good Goddamn what your ‘Führer’ thinks about all o’ this…!” The Kentuckian voice of Colonel Finley cut through as he approached with a steady, purposeful gait, accompanied by a pair of armed troopers as bodyguards. His personal chopper had dropped him off just seconds after the other two had taken off again, and all three now circled about the area with their door guns trained on the German troops below. “It’s y’all who’re violating Irish neutrality, and the Irish Government has requested urgent assistance from the United States as a result…” Finley’s confident grin grew even wider as fury burned in Stahl’s eyes. “So y’all are gonna collect what’s left o’ your men there and ‘mark snell’ back over the other side of the river where y’ belong!” That he exaggeratedly mispronounced the German phrase in that sentence was an added and quite intentional insult.
“We have wounded…!” Stahl countered, stalling for time as his mind sought desperately for some way to retake control of the situation. “There are many dead and injured from the crash behind us…”
“…And you can take with you anyone able to walk or be carried… I have medics who’ll render any assistance required, and any men unable to be moved will be treated and cared for until such time as they’re able to be returned back to your side of the border.” Finley had spent months going over the briefings for the operation he was now commanding, and he’d memorised every official response to any question or demand they’d expected to receive from their German counterparts.
“Then, colonel,” Stahl continued, eyes narrowing as he threw Lowenstein a smug smile that was barely-concealed, “I will take this fellow officer and we will indeed withdraw back to our vehicle …”
“That dog ain’t gonna hunt, Fritz,” Finley shot back with derision, dropping all pretence of respect from his tone. “You and I both know the guy ain’t no officer, and it’ll be a cold day in hell before I or my men allow you to take him.”
“He is coming with me…!” Stahl howled, waving the pistol about once more in renewed rage and drawing the aim of several US riflemen standing nearby in response. At the same time, PFC Esprit took the initiative to step forward and place his own body directly between Stahl and Lowenstein, his eyes cold as he stared down the Nazi officer.
“No he ain’t, colonel…” Finley replied sharply, a hardened edge in his tone and featur
es now “…and unless you want you’re men carryin’ you outta here feet first, you’d Goddamn better start listenin’ to what I’m sayin’…!”
“You would go to war over a German officer shooting one of his own…?” Stahl screamed, pointing the Walther directly at Esprit. “Get out of my way, neger…!”
“The hell I will, suh…!” Esprit spat back with venom, not needing a translator to pick out the insult in those words “…and with all due respect, you can kiss my ‘Neger’ ass…!”
“Sergeant, would you be so kind as to help Doctor Lowenstein here to his feet… we got a real nice helicopter waiting to take him back to base.”
Lowenstein glanced sharply up at Finley in surprise, the fact that the US officer knew his name not lost on Kransky either as he and Turner remained under cover nearby, neither man particularly happy about the questions that raised in their minds.
“Colonel, we both know the doctor here ain’t no German officer…” Finley continued, returning his attention to Stahl as Gianelli motioned to two other men nearby, and the trio stepped forward to lift Lowenstein to his feet, “and maybe I can’t stop you from shootin’ a guy wearing the same uniform as you, but you so much as break a nail on one o’ my men, mister, and I’ll bring down a whole world o’ hurt on you and yours…” As if to underline that very point, another pair of Corsairs chose that moment to again howl past at low level, rocket pods and auxiliary fuel tanks slung beneath their wings. “This ain’t your show no more… it’s ours… and unless you want to be responsible for startin’ a war with the United States of America, you better get your Jew-hatin’, Nazi asses back over that bridge without further ado!”
“We need to withdraw, Mein Herr...!” That came from Strauss now, who’d moved up to stand by Stahl’s right shoulder. “My men are brave, sir…” he added quickly, as if feeling some clarification was needed “…give the word and we’ll fight and die for you here… we might even take a few Amerikaner with us… but no purpose will be served by it. Take a look around, Mein Herr… they have the advantage…”
The Dead Alone (Empires Lost Book 3) Page 20
