“What purpose can this possibly serve?” Reuters snarled in exasperation, unable to look at his wristwatch and instead craning his neck to pick out a clock hanging on the wall about halfway down the corridor. “In… thirty minutes, we will all be dead!”
With perfect timing, there came the deafening, crackling roar of jet engines as at a quartet of Sabres howled past overhead at that moment, the walls and ceiling of the entire hospital shaking under the force of the sound. Their passing was followed by the unmistakeable crump of exploding ordnance in the distance, a few seconds later.
“As you can hear, we have support on its way: there’ll be choppers here in twenty…!” Donelson countered, having no heart to sound smug under the circumstances. “You and the rest of your colleagues there are going to be on one of ‘em!”
“No…!”
That barked denial came quite unexpectedly from Ritter as he stiffened his back and strode purposefully out into the middle of the hallway, intentionally placing himself between Donelson and Reuters.
“Are you insane? Get out of the bloody way, colonel!” Eileen warned sharply, trying hard not to scream over the shock of this sudden action.
“I will not…!” He declared shakily, his voice cracking under the strain as he held himself at attention in the face of all those dark and deadly gun muzzles. “We made a bargain, and you will honour this.”
What’re you doing…? She wondered in silent anguish. This is the solution to everything! The end of our mission… your mission…!”
“Don’t force me to shoot… colonel…!” She pleaded, her eyes clearly, desperately trying to ask Carl what the hell he was doing.
“You will not fire, Captain Donelson… Eileen…” he corrected, taking a calculated gamble that the effect the use of her first name would have was worth the possible danger of any awkward questions later. “Our bargain was made in good faith, but you also owe us a debt: the debt of your life and so much more…”
Don’t...! Her mind wailed forlornly, the fears and fragility she was still bottling up inside unable to comprehend the pain she would feel to have the terrible events of the night before revealed before everyone in the room. Please… don’t do this…!
“At home, I have a wife and… and two sons…” he continued, faltering a moment as he was forced to think about what he almost said. “To kill me would make her a widow… make them orphans… again, I do not want this,” he added, reading the hurt and pain in her eyes and hating himself for what he was about to do, “but you leave me no choice…”
“We don’t need this bloke anyway,” someone growled softly from somewhere behind Langdale and his squad. “We’ve got those big bloody Jerry officers: someone just shoot the bastard and be done with it!”
“Stand fast and shut the fuck up, corporal…!” Langdale hissed venomously in return, never letting his eyes stray for a moment form the scene developing before him in that hallway. He could already tell from Donelson’s tone that her resolve was wavering badly. “Trooper calling Harbinger…” he hissed softly, turning to his radio for urgent orders as the situation took a completely unexpected turn. “Trooper calling Harbinger, come in please…”
He was met with nothing but static and released a growl of frustration as he realised the transmitter’s frequency settings were off. He worked desperately to reacquire the correct frequency and quickly repeated his original call. Short and to the point, Thorne’s response came through within seconds.
“Harbinger, we’ve rescued the captain but… well… I think she’s gonna let the Krauts go, sir…”
There was another short response, this one far louder and more expletive-laden than the first.
“They’re trying to walk out right in front of us. I know you said she was in charge sir, but there’s no way you wanted this… no way…!” He paused again, but this time the reply seemed to be cut short, leaving left confused and concerned. “Harbinger, come in…!” He called again, turning his head down and away and raising the volume and level of urgency in his tone as much as he dared. “Come in please… sir…? Please…”
“Don’t you bastards move…!” Langdale bellowed, making a call on instinct alone and striding forward until he was almost level with Donelson, his weapon shouldered and aimed in the Germans’ general direction near the open doorway. Two others moved up to stand on her other side, Bluey Johnston one of them.
“Mal… no…” Eileen breathed, struggling to overcome the conflicting emotions and instincts swirling within her mind at that moment.
“Ma’am, they are not leaving this hospital!” He shot back instantly, his eyes never leaving his point of aim on Ritter’s chest. “My orders are clear… they’re coming with us…!”
“We will not, sergeant…” Ritter countered as calmly as he was able, voice cracking now as he pushed far too close to the boundary revealing his prior involvement with the Hindsight Team.
“Shut it… colonel…” Langdale spat in return, barely catching himself from also addressing him by name. “Take another step, and I will shoot you.”
“Will you, sergeant…?” Ritter asked carefully with a raised eyebrow, glad of the fact that no German could see the expression on his face at that moment. He took a step back, his gaze never leaving Langdale’s. “You would shoot an unarmed man? A defenceless man…?”
“Mal… you can’t…” Donelson moaned softly, tears streaming down her face now. “You just can’t…”
Regardless of his ancestry or the uniform he wore, the man standing before them, using his body as a human shield was one of their own… a man who’d risked his own life countless times over the last two years to provide Commonwealth forces with information that had been vital to the war effort against Axis forces all over the world. He was their man, and Langdale and Donelson both knew it.
“Captain…” Langdale pleaded, frustration clear in his tone. “Captain, I…”
“Please…” A tear trickled down the side of Eileen’s face, cutting a path through the dust, grim and faint stains of blood that still remained on her cheeks as her eyes flicked between him and Ritter.
“You will have to kill me, captain… if you want to stop my kameraden from leaving this place.” Ritter shrugged sadly, resolute now and filled with a strength he’d not felt for many years. “We saved you...” he continued, forcing the emotion from his voice as it threatened to be his undoing in that moment. “We saved you from rape and murder, and you will not shoot us in the back as we walk out this door.”
“Oh, Christ…” Langdale breathed upon hearing that revelation, finally realising the depth of the conflict raging within Donelson in that moment.
I’m sorry…! For the second time in three days, Ritter’s eyes conveyed that terrible, hollow apology to her in the face of a brutality he was powerless to prevent, although this time, the brutality was that of his own words.
“Get out, Herr Reichsmarschall…” Ritter whispered softly in German, not daring to move a muscle as he continued to stare her down. “Get them all out… I’ll join you shortly…”
“Carl…!”
“Now, if you please, Mein Herr: I doubt I can hold them much longer…”
“Scheisse…!” Reuters hissed angrily, yet he made a move all the same, a sailor stepping forward to assist him as several others busied themselves with Schiller’s wheelchair.
“You can’t ask me to do this… not this…”
“This need not be the end, captain…” Ritter continued, hoping desperately she understood what he was really saying. “This conversation isn’t over: it can be finished another time… We are enemies…” he added coldly, attempting to remind her of the precariousness of his situation as a Commonwealth agent “…but if we are enemies without honour, then we are nothing! These men are wounded… these men are defenceless… and this is not the time to exact revenge. I would protect these men with my life – as if they were my own sons!”
He knows… sweet Jesus, he knows…! That terrible realis
ation flowed through her and her stomach lurched, filling her with the sudden urge to vomit. In that split second, the fear and guilt that swept across her face was the last piece of evidence Ritter needed – the piece he’d been fishing for in the first place – and confirmation of it was all he needed to know somehow that he had won: that Donelson would capitulate.
“I will leave, now…” he announced softly, the tension inside that hospital so much greater in the silence that surrounded his words. “I will leave, and you will not follow. I wish you God speed, captain… our time is short, and I suggest you do not waste it.”
With a single, final nod of recognition and the terrible, burning fires of guilt and apology in his eyes, Carl Ritter backed slowly out through the front doors, guided down the steps by Schultz and another junior officer as they too formed a human shield around Reuters and Schiller.
Thorne’s power climb had taken him beyond forty thousand feet as he streaked away above Paso and the isthmus that joined Ambon’s two main peninsulas. Circling back around and skirting the island’s northern coast, he’d then turned inland once more and dived back down to low level at a blistering rate, starting to revel in the exhilaration of speed and a dangerously-growing sense of invulnerability.
The lighter anti-aircraft guns in use both on warships and on the ground below – predominantly the ubiquitous Type 96 25mm cannon using 15-round box magazines – fired at far too low a rate and were far too slow to reload to be at all effective against a supersonic jet fighter, while the heavier 80- and 127mm flak guns – were slow to traverse and even slower to reload. Without similar proximity-fused shells to those used by their equivalents in the US and Commonwealth armed forces – the one thing that might have made them nominally effective – they were little better than useless.
As he took the Lightning down to 2,000 feet and screamed on toward the Laha airfield from the north, Thorne was feeling very comfortable about the tasks he’d been given. With the first two completed in spectacular fashion, the last – the neutralisation of the airstrip – seemed almost an anti-climax by comparison. A handful of Zeros had taken off already by the time it came into view ahead, but there appeared to be several dozen more on the ground, warming their engines and preparing for take-off. His last duty was to make sure those fighters were not given the opportunity. Fixing his point of impact for the mid-point of the runway itself, he armed the two remaining weapons he carried beneath the outer pylons of each wing and counted off the remaining seconds.
Captain Yanagisawa’s unit had been moved across to the opposite side of the bay in the aftermath of the final assault on Laha, and had spent the time since mopping up what little resistance they’d encountered as fresher units had replaced them on the rather fluid and changing front line toward the very tip of the Latimor Peninsula, south of Eri, where most of the remaining Australian units were still making a valiant but ultimately doomed last stand.
Purely by chance, the captain had been inspecting newly-dug anti-aircraft emplacements at the southern end of the Laha airstrip as the air raid sirens had sounded, and Hiyō had been devastated by explosions just moments later. He’d stood with the others on that beach, watching in horrified awe as the single, small speck of a streaking aircraft – one of surely impossible speed – had also dealt Junyō a killing blow, then hurtled skyward and away, seemingly untouched by the masses of anti-aircraft fire that followed far behind in its wake.
Zeros were already starting their engines down at the far end of the runway, with a few straggling pilots bolting across from the cluster of makeshift tents near the beach that had been set up to accommodate them for the time being. Yanagisawa wasn’t sure how well any propeller-driven aircraft might fare against such a beast as he’d just seen, but he nevertheless understood that any defence was better than none at all.
More jets had followed soon after, sweeping in low across the bay and the airfield itself and sending them all scurrying for cover as bombs rained down to the north, quite close to where a major fuel and ammunition dump had been set up beyond Soewakoda Village. They too were fast, although clearly not as incredibly so as the first attacker, and as Yanagisawa looked on from the relative safety of a slit trench, he quickly realised that the conventional anti-aircraft weaponry they possessed on the island was most definitely not up to the task of taking on these strange, shrieking aircraft.
“Sergeant!” He bellowed loudly, feeling the need for some kind of drastic action. “Reposition all our Type 11 mortars to fire directly over the airfield! I want anything we have in storage set up also. Have your best men ready with the mine discharger shells: we’re going to give those pigs an honourable welcome if they come our way!”
His senior NCO, in similar cover just a few yards away, barked a single reply of acknowledgement and immediately took off toward the main buildings to the west of the airstrip itself, collecting a half-dozen men along the way to render assistance.
By the time the first of their defending fighters on the ground were lifting off and thundering past overhead, the unit had deployed half a dozen 70mm Type 11 mortars and a handful of specialised AA Mine Dischargers in a broad arc across the head of the airstrip’s southern end, loaders and gunners standing ready for an order to fire with crates of ammunition at their feet.
So great was the approach of the oncoming F-35 that they were almost alerted too late. First reports came from a patrol posted out at Hitu-Lama on the island’s north-western coast, indicating that an aircraft almost ‘too fast to see’ had overflown their position, heading south on what was determined to be a direct path toward the airfield. By the time the news had been radioed and passed on to Yanagisawa and the other local platoon commanders, the Lightning was already diving into its final approach, coming in fast and low above the jungle canopy to the north.
Almost in unison, ten mortars and launchers commenced their firing cycles as loaders dropped their tube-shaped shells down into the muzzles of the weapons at their side, only to have those same projectiles instantly fired upward again at several hundred feet per second. Without another thought to their passing, each man loaded another and another in turn, sending round after round high into the sky above until each ammo crate beside them was empty.
“Trooper calling Harbinger… Trooper calling Harbinger, come in please…” It was the soft, whispered desperation of those words as they burst from his headset that concerned Thorne the most, momentarily distracting him from the target that continued to grow in his windscreen ahead.
“Reading you, Mal – what’s up, mate…”
“Harbinger, we’ve rescued the captain but… well… I think she’s gonna let the Krauts go, sir…”
“Trooper, what… what the fuck…?” Thorne blurted eventually, ultimately finding it impossible to process what thought he’d just heard as the warning beep of his fire control alerted the imminent approach of weapon release.
“They’re trying to walk out right in front of us. I know you said she was in charge sir, but there’s no way you wanted this… no way…!”
“Sergeant Langdale, you will not allow those bastards to escape, do you hear me?” He snarled in return, deciding to deal with the issue at hand for the moment rather than to try and make sense of what the man was saying. “I don’t give a shit what it takes… you will… Holy Christ on a bike…!”
The F-35’s threat detection systems and the DAS passive infra-red sensors had both suddenly began blaring their warnings as huge sections of his main display screen lit up red over the unexpected appearance of dozens of small, cylindrical projectiles as they arced skyward a thousand yards or so ahead of his nose, leaving him just seconds to react.
He instinctively dumped his remaining ordnance, hauling the stick back and to starboard as he tried to take the Lightning into a gut-wrenching climb away over the jungle to relative safety. At almost transonic velocity however, even a fifth-generation stealth fighter wasn’t at its best with regard to manoeuvrability, and he lost precious, desperate secon
ds as the air rushing past around the F-35 fought against the sudden change of direction and the fighter began to rapidly shed airspeed.
Not a particularly common weapon in Japanese use, the AA mine discharger was little more than a 70mm steel tube loaded with a special shell containing seven quite small mines, each attached to its own individual, tiny parachute. These shells – also capable of being fired to greater range and altitude from the standard 70mm infantry mortar – would eject those mines at the zenith of its trajectory, leaving them to spread out and float slowly downward, ideally into the path of oncoming aircraft.
It was expected that an enemy aircraft would fly through these mines and drag them into contact with the fuselage or wings as it caught the parachute wires in passing. The Royal Navy had deployed, and soon after discarded, a similar weapon aboard its ships in the early stages of the Second World War, having found that aircraft had no real difficulty simply flying around the dangling parachutes and wires.
For a 21st Century jet fighter however, flying at least three times faster, there was nowhere near the reaction time, and Thorne simply hadn’t counted on an obscure threat of that nature. Even as the aircraft began to bank away, Thorne realised that it was all far too late. The Lightning shot straight through the middle of the slowly-sinking field of wire cables, missing all except one single, ridiculously-small mine that was instantly sucked into the voracious maw of the aircraft’s portside jet intake.
There was a small, almost insignificant ‘pop’ somewhere inside the aircraft behind him, rather unfortunately followed immediately by a far larger and far more worrying ‘boom’ that sent a shudder through the entire airframe, set off deafening alarms in his headset, and proceeded to fill the remainder of his main display panel with flashing red warnings of catastrophic engine failure.
The Dead Alone (Empires Lost Book 3) Page 105
