The Consummate Traitor (Trilogy of Treason)

by Bonnie Toews

  “You mean you’re not just going overnight?”

  “No, Wynne, I’m not.”

  His hands covered hers more tightly as the impact of what she was saying gripped him. “When?”

  Because she’d been physically near whenever he needed to see her, he hadn’t thought of her being alone, or lonely. Now it struck him. Emotion welled in his throat, choking him. “I mean how long do we…? Oh dear heart! How I’ll miss you!”

  He enclosed her inside the circle of his arms and embraced her with his whole being.

  “I know, I know. I’ll miss you too. I miss you now.”

  They clung together, aching, wanting, needing, and loving each other. “Will you be able to see me off? The train carrying the children is stopping at Kew Gardens Station to pick me up at 1330.”

  “That soon?”

  The pain of their parting wrenched his insides. “Of course, Alexa. Of course, I’ll see you off. This bloody war can do without me for awhile.”

  And then he crushed her to him again, holding her tightly, trying to infuse his love while drawing strength from her for the separation to come.

  FOURTEEN

  Wednesday, September 11th, 1940

  On this Wednesday, Captain Gunther von Koenig-Forster loaded up his Heinkel-111 with more than five thousand pounds of high explosive bombs. Once again, he wondered what part Erich von Lohren was playing in the invasion of England and how he felt about it. Did he feel gobbled up by a monster as Gunther did?

  During the intervening two years since he and Erich had spent their last furlough together at Erich’s estate in the Rhineland, he had not received any correspondence from his childhood friend. It was as if he had disappeared into the fog of night, and Gunther devoted a moment of every day remembering Erich, hoping he was safe but fearing the worst for him. He could make no sense of Erich joining the SS and agreeing to their ruthless tenements. Picturing him swearing blind allegiance to Hitler contradicted the freedom the two of them cherished most, yet here he was—preparing his plane and his crew to bomb London for the mad dictator. To disobey meant instant execution, and Gunther would not bring such dishonor upon his mother, whose noble roots tapped back to the great Prince Otto Edward Leopold von Bismarck, the original architect of a unified Germany from 1871 to 1890.

  At midday, he took off for London with his squadron from the Luftwaffe’s base near Lille, France. Over the whitecaps of the English Channel, Messerschmitt-110 fighter escorts joined them.

  The medium-range Heinkef’s twin engines throbbed incessantly, drilling and pressing the headache growing between Gunther’s temples. The aircrews were still being driven beyond normal endurance. He couldn’t remember the last time he had enjoyed a solid four hours’ sleep. He seemed to be running on an endless supply of adrenaline.

  As the wave of bombers and fighters approached Dover, he switched to his intercom and spoke to the crew.

  “I’m starting a zigzag course for the target now. Keep a sharp eye for British interceptors.”

  His whole forward area was enclosed in glass, from the Heinkel’s nose cone to its flight deck just back and above it. Like a globe, it provided him with marvelous visibility, but its vulnerability to attack was sometimes unnerving.

  The familiar mouth of the Thames River appeared below. Gunther followed the river’s twisted course inland to London, to the city’s commercial district. The voice of his navigator-bombardier crackled in his ear. “We’re on track. The target should be coming up soon.”

  “Fighters ten o’clock high!” His ears boomed with the waist gunner’s shout in his headset.

  Volleys of tracer bullets slashed the Heinkel’s left engine. A second heavy blow bobbled the bomber. Rapid fire burst from the swiveling turret guns. Confusion swarmed. Shots splintered the air left and right. Then a thin line of black smoke streamed past his cockpit.

  “I got it! I got it!” cheered the forward gunner.

  The hurricane attacker with its left wing sheared off tumbled earthward. Popping like a firecracker, it exploded into a red ball of flame. Amazingly, Gunther could see a small white parachute blossom gently above the plunging fireball.

  “I have him in my sights,” observed the forward gunner.

  “No,” he barked. “Save your ammunition for battle.”

  The idea of shooting down an unarmed pilot sickened him. Gunther feathered his damaged port engine, trying to keep the Heinkel on its heading.

  “Target coming up,” instructed the calm voice in Gunther’s ear. “Keep her steady, sir.”

  The navigator-bombardier pressed the release for the bomb bay doors. The red light didn’t blink. He pushed the button again. Still no response. “The bomb doors seem to be stuck, sir,” he reported.

  “Open them manually,” Gunther ordered. “We’re losing oil. I can’t maintain this altitude for long.”

  “Yes sir.”

  The navigator-bombardier scrambled down into the plane’s belly to the bomb bay’s hydraulic control and began yanking the lever. It wouldn’t budge. Sweat bubbled over his brow. He exerted all his strength. The chords of his neck strained. His veins bulged. The lever dropped a smidgen.

  “That last hit must have jammed the gears,” he muttered to himself while searching for something strong enough to force the handle down. All at once, the Heinkel lurched, pitching him off balance. As he fell, he banged his head on a metal strut supporting the bomb rack.

  A bright flash! Helplessly, he watched dense smoke fill the belly gunner’s cage and swallow up the gunner’s horrible scream. The bomber groaned, yawed and nose-dived. The navigator hurtled forward. Flailing against the force of gravity pinning him down in the hold, he felt invisible jaws crush his chest. A rush of icy wind whipped at him until he lost consciousness.

  Up top, Gunther battled the controls. The smell of hot oil filled his nostrils. The needle on the radio-temperature gauge swung right, just nudging the red-alert band, while his altimeter needle pivoted wildly around the dial, churning off the thousands of feet the Heinkel was falling. Balancing the drag of the dead engine with more power from the starboard engine and counteractive pressure of the right rudder pedal, he pushed the control column forward. It went against every instinct of survival to plunge the plane into a deeper dive, but he resisted the urge to pull back on the control to bring the nose up. His only chance to recover the spin was to create more air speed.

  The bomber shuddered and growled. At 600 feet it rounded out. Gunther whistled a tremendous sigh of relief as he eased back the control column for straight and level flight.

  “Brauchman!” he shouted into the mouthpiece. There was no answer.

  “Schulte! Gruber! Mueller!” he called the gunners. “Anybody?”

  Only the wind whipped in answer.

  It was then he noticed the windshield splattered with blood.

  The control column shook in his hand again. There was no time to think. He fought to keep the Heinkel steady. Through the clearer spaces of the blood-splotched glass canopy, Gunther could not make out the wide loop the Thames River took hugging the inverted teacup of land beneath him. His plane drifted far off course in a steady slip to the west. Though the Heinkel’s directional controls were damaged, it somehow lumbered on, moving in a wide aimless circle, hanging onto an altitude of one hundred feet.

  Gunther felt strangely calm and deliberate. He knew he was going to die. No one could survive a crash with 5,000 pounds of incendiaries on board. If he could just hold his height long enough to avoid plunging into the old stately homes weaving through the checkered tapestry below, he might be able to save them from the resulting inferno. Preserving their fine Victorian elegance gave him a sense of honor only another gentleman of noble birth could understand. A jumble of memories—of his home on the Rhineland, of his parents, of the happy years growing up with Erich—flashed to mind.

  “Hope you live to redeem the Germany we loved, Erich,” he cried aloud.

  The altimeter needle started to quiver, and th
e control column in his hand responded sluggishly. He gripped it with both hands and struggled to keep the plane’s nose level with the horizon. All at once, a windbreak of dense hawthorn trees, their twisted limbs furling like graceful gymnasts tumbling through the air, leapt up in front of him.

  The people standing in the train station took no notice of the sound of the low flying bomber. They were so accustomed to hearing every pitch and rumble of aircraft engines powering their winged warriors through the sky they were not alarmed. The areas being bombed were to the east of Kew Gardens, not here. They carried on talking.

  Princess Alexandra stood in front of her coach. Lord Radcliffe tenderly planted a kiss on her forehead and stepped back to gather in her loving smile. During twenty-five devoted years together, he had never imagined a moment when she would not be there, by his side, gliding smoothly through his life like a comforting wand. He choked and could not say good-bye. Their gaze clung to one another, not wanting to let go. She gently smiled then and turned to climb into the coach car.

  The Heinkel bomber shaved off the tops of the hawthorn tree line. Their dagger tips showered the trim lawn.

  From the windows of the train, the children, intrigued with the plane’s valiant wiggling and waggling to stay aloft, stared out bug-eyed amid their cheering the plane on, until they recognized the Nazi insignia. And then, with growing horror, they heard the bomber’s motor stutter and choke, and in the sudden quiet, their terrified screams pierced the calm.

  As with one mind, the people on the platform rushed forward to open the compartment doors. Lord Radcliffe reached in for Princess Alexandra and never saw the doomed bomber barreling towards them from the other side of the train.

  At the last possible moment, when Gunther saw it was hopeless, he stopped struggling with the controls in time to look up into the youngsters’ faces plastered against the train’s windows. Their soundless terror raced to greet him.

  FIFTEEN

  Wednesday, September 11th, 1940

  The sudden halt of the martin horn’s nasal seesaw was the Emergency Unit’s only warning. The double doors swung open. While the ambulance attendants scurried to unload the first stretchers, the leader of the rescue squad hustled over to the admitting station. His name was Mark Hayden, a plumber by trade.

  Most of his rescue team was composed of skilled tradesmen and engineers, who knew their way around every London construction and tunnel. They were a tough and persistent lot, digging through rubble hunting for people buried alive, sometimes for days at a time, refusing to abandon even the slimmest hope.

  “Kew Garden’s bin bombed!” Hayden hoarsely informed the senior nursing sister standing behind the desk. “A trainload of kids and most of the people standin’ on the platform got it! The worst cases have been assigned ’ere, Sister.”

  The whites of his eyes poked out of his blackened face like bomb flares spiking a charcoal sky.

  “Do you have their tag numbers?” she asked him unruffled.

  He wearily swept his grimy hand across his brow. “Sister, bin too busy diggin’ to look.”

  “How shall we identify the victims?”

  “Not my problem.”

  “It’s against hospital policy to …”

  “Hospital policy be hanged!” Hayden exploded at the starched nursing sister. “Don’t cha understand? We’re bringin’ kids who’ve bin bombed, Sister. And I mean FIREBOMBED,” he spat. “See ’ere.”

  He stepped aside, giving her full view of the stretchers being wheeled in. She stood mute.

  He wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “I’ve seen some ’orrible sights in this war, but nothin’ to equal the poor little mites we’re bringin’ in now?

  The nursing sister grimly appraised the hideous lumps of human cargo passing in front of her station.

  “Where do you want them, Sister?” asked one of the stretcher bearers steering a gurney laden with a dazed toddler mumbling, “Bad plane … bad plane …”

  She snapped commands. “Line them up along the east corridor outside the examination rooms? and turned to the other shocked nurses beside her. “Sister Mary, get Lady Grace to call in all off-duty staff. Sister Maureen, call the switchboard. Code Blue.”

  Seconds later the hospital PA system blared through the halls:

  All emergency personnel to the East Wing… REPEAT… All emergency personnel to the East Wing… Lady Grace report to Emergency Admissions… REPEAT…Lady Grace report to …

  Within minutes, the Emergency Department swarmed with white coats. Nurses and orderlies rushed to take over the ambulance attendants’ burdens. Three doctors positioned themselves at Admitting for quick scans of the critical cases and directed the incoming traffic to the medical teams forming up in the examination rooms along the east corridor.

  Grace, in Ward Seven, heard her name called and folded the letter she was writing for an injured airman.

  “Sorry, Collshaw, duty calls. We’ll finish this later.”

  The young man sitting up in the bed nodded. His eyes were swathed with gauze bandages. “Right, ma’am. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Grace patted his hand. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she assured him before stuffing the unfinished letter inside the writing pad she hastily deposited inside the RAF pilot’s night table. She yanked back his privacy curtain and hurried out of the ward.

  Although she had learned to steel herself for some of the gruesome sights admitted into Emergency, nothing could prepare her for the scene confronting her in the east corridor. Litters of grotesquely scorched and mangled children lined the walls.

  A searing pain stung her heart. Somehow her legs willed themselves down this hall of horrors as her body mechanically carried on, while her mind floated outside, watching her, observing her confused awe as, in one zap of a second, she switched from such awful revulsion to feeling absolutely nothing. She was even too numb to feel guilty about feeling nothing. Her mind’s eye sharpened. Colors became more intense. Shapes, looming larger than life, branded her memory with charred tangles and swollen bits of flesh… strips of fried skin hanging loosely from an arm here, a leg there … monstrous heads so bloated with edema it was a miracle they didn’t burst wide open… scorched thighs like raw meat roasted to medium rare… dismembered bodies …agonized moaning and frightened whimpering … a gaseous reek of gored stomachs, gouged bowels and burnt tissue, muscle and bone … staring, unseeing eyes …

  Sheathed in shock, Grace managed to reach the Administration Desk without vomiting. “Lady Grace reporting to Sister Mary.”

  She stood still in front of the desk clerk, trying to compose herself for the work she was expected to do. She could see a man wearing a rescue helmet talking to one of the doctors checking the incoming victims. In between giving directions to the attendants and examining the severity of wounds, she overheard them talking.

  “What happened?” the doctor asked Hayden.

  “Jerry crashed into the train standin’ in Kew Gardens. It was filled with orphan kids the Earl of Chadwick and his wife were sendin’to their country estate.”

  “Good heavens!” muttered the doctor. “How awful! No wonder these kids look like they entered Dante’s’ hell.”

  “My guess Jerry never dumped his incendiaries before he crashed.”

  “Ugh,” responded the doctor.

  The next stretcher wheeled in disrupted more talk. Grace couldn’t comprehend what she had heard. Kew Gardens bombed! Her mother and father? They would have been there! What of them? Grace rushed over to the rescue worker and tugged at his arm.

  “What about Lord Radcliffe … I mean the Earl of Chadwick … and Princess Alexandra?” she asked frantically. “What happened?”

  “Oh, they were killed in the crash, miss,” Hayden reported politely.

  Grace stared at him.

  “Did you know them?”

  Some automatic response within her took over. She nodded.

  “A terrible thing, miss. A terrible thing,” Hayden r
epeated, shaking his head. “I helped find lodgings for most of those East London kids when my team was called in to help. The wee waifs peppered me with questions ‘bout where they were goin’, who was gonna look after ‘em. They were so scared. To think they survived the bloody bombings and now this. I suppose I’ll have to help bury most of ‘em too.”

  Grace stood paralyzed. Anything else Hayden said didn’t register. A silent scream welled within her. NO! NO! NO! NO!

  “Lady Grace?” Sister Mary touched her arm. “Lady Grace!”

  Grace stared at her. Dumb with grief, she could not focus on the nurse.

  Mistaking Grace’s reaction, the nursing sister began again.

  “Lady Grace, I know these are horrible cases you’ve seen, but I need you to get on with calling the off-duty staff immediately. We’re seriously overloaded.”

  “You want me to call off-duty staff,” Grace repeated in her dazed state, unable to assimilate the news of her parents’ death with any other reality.

  “Yes.” Now annoyed, Sister Mary said crisply, “There’s a war on, you know. Snap to it,” she commanded.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Grace replied obediently. Listlessly she followed the nursing sister down the hall.

  “That one’s drivin’ in neutral with ’er brakes on,” Hayden commented to the doctor about Grace after observing her exchange with Sister Mary.

  “Who?”

  Hayden inclined his head toward Grace’s direction. The doctor glanced at her retreating figure and recognized her blonde plaited hair rolled in a figure eight at the nape of her neck.

  “You can’t mean Lady Grace,” he told him. “She’s one of the best volunteers we have.”

  “Lady Grace? Did you say Lady Grace?”

  “I did.” The doctor looked at Hayden more intently.

  “She’s a piano player of some sort, right? The one that Hitler saluted.”

  The doctor nodded.

  “Isn’t she the Earl’s daughter?”

  “Yes.”