by Nick Cook
He paused in the street for a moment and looked into her eyes. “You’re a remarkable woman, Mrs Fleming.”
“I believe guilt is a wasteful, destructive emotion. And if I’m right about your grandfather it’s a luxury he would never have allowed himself.”
“You seem to know him better than I do.”
“I want to get to know you” she said, urgency and frustration in her voice.
They rounded a corner and he saw the dim glow of the sign for the Underground station almost at the end of the street. The journey was almost ended and she didn’t even know when or whether she would see him again.
“You’ll be going back when this is all over, I suppose,” she said, turning the question away from the immediate future.
She thought it ironic that in under two days she had probably got behind his eyes as no one had in a long time, yet a moment before they parted, she didn’t know the answer to the one question that mattered most to her.
“This place, the air force, they’ve been home for five years. What’s there to go back for?”
She stopped him by the entrance to the station. “I’m surprised at you, Piet. The one way to assuage any remorse you may still have would be to go back and run that farm.”
He walked over to the window and bought two tickets, one for Waterloo, the other for Marylebone.
“I belong here, now,” he said, turning to face her.
“Is that what you really believe?”
They passed through the barrier and paused at the point where their paths divided.
“Don’t run away, Piet,” she whispered and kissed him lightly on the cheek.
She disappeared down the steps, the sound of her fading footsteps drowned by the sudden approach of her train.
* * * * * * * *
Dawn was breaking over Chrudim when Malenkoy’s platoon found the Freikorp’s last camp. One of the other patrols had stumbled across the clearing several hours before and had guided Malenkoy and his Siberian search party to the spot over the radio.
The young officer who had first come upon the scene had described the situation to Malenkoy, but he had not prepared the major of tanks for the carnage that surrounded the long-extinguished camp fire.
Malenkoy fought to control his heaving stomach as he surveyed the mutilated bodies of the SS terrorists. Two of the five corpses had lost limbs, a third had no head. The sight of it chilled his body beneath the thick sheepskin polaschubuk he wore over his uniform.
He strolled to the middle of the clearing and raised his head to the clear, ever-lightening sky, trying to suck in cool mountain air that was not polluted by the stench of death that already pervaded that lonely place.
SS shits. Whatever had happened, they deserved it.
His bitterness came not from his own brush with them the day before, but from the memory of what the SS had done to the people of his country, especially in the two years that it had taken to retreat from Stalingrad to the edges of Berlin. Malenkoy looked quickly down at the cadaver of the youngest. He looked like any one of his fellow graduates from the academy all those years ago.
Malenkoy glanced up at the sky once more and muttered an oath that went unremarked by a group of Siberians who were standing nearby, joking together in some unintelligible tongue. To what depths had the human race sunk over the last four years! It was obvious, even ten years ago at the academy, that war would come to Europe, but the totality of the conflict had not been imagined by anybody at the time. He had thought about it before, but now the feeling boiled in him so strongly that he wanted to shout it out. How could men do this to each other?
A lieutenant appeared and handed him a muddy, bloodstained piece of cloth, ripped from the tunic of one of the SS. Malenkoy wiped away the grime to see the faded, but unmistakable colours and pattern of the British flag. He let the badge fall, grinding it into the mud with his heel.
He had heard tales from comrades who had fought along the front about the exploits of the Britische Freikorps, but he had dismissed the reports as the exaggerations of men who had been too long fighting a tough and ruthless enemy. Now he could scarcely believe that the soldiers who had attacked him on the forest track were men whose brothers were fighting the common Nazi enemy less than seventy kilometres from where he now stood, according to the latest reports back at HQ. Total war. It had got to the point at times where he was uncertain who the enemy really was.
Malenkoy left his thoughts behind and returned to the present. A nagging feeling told him that it was not over, that there was something very wrong about the scene before his eyes. He turned to the officer who had escorted him to the clearing.
“Search these bodies for papers. Anything that gives further clues to their identity, I want to see it.”
The younger man screamed, waving his PPSh sub-machine-gun excitedly at his troops who immediately set about searching the pockets of the dead.
Was it possible that these were not the men who had attacked him yesterday? It had to be unlikely that there were other SS units operating in the vicinity, but where was the one who had stood unflinching in the road while he had fired off a whole magazine in blind terror? It had to be the headless one. Malenkoy walked over to the monstrous form and looked it over from the boots to the shoulders, trying not to let the Siberians see his revulsion. He thought hard for several minutes, before calling over the junior officer who had just barked the orders.
“How tall would you say this man was, Comrade Lieutenant, taking into account, of course, that he was once in possession of a head.” The junior officer flashed a glance at Malenkoy which showed he did not know how to handle his superior’s sarcasm.
The lieutenant looked at the body hesitantly, sensing a trick in Malenkoy’s question. He answered nervously and in a low voice, worried that Malenkoy would show him up in front of his troops.
“About one metre seventy-five, sir.”
“That’s what I was worried about. It means, then, that we have at least one man still on the loose.” Malenkoy once more saw the figure standing astride in the middle of the road. He had been tall and broad across the shoulders. This . . . thing by his feet had been a much smaller man. He winced at the thought of having to report the news to Nerchenko at HQ. A platoon was hard enough to locate in a densely forested area twenty times the size of Moscow, but one or two men would be next to impossible.
Malenkoy heard the rough cough beside him and saw the sergeant with the Order of the Red Star pinned on his quilted telogreika who had been standing there for the last few minutes, not daring to interrupt the thoughts of his senior officer. Malenkoy turned to face the lieutenant, who was holding some documents up to him.
“Yes, Comrade Starshina, what is it?” He had tried to hide the weariness in his voice.
“One of my men found these, Comrade Major. They were in a pocket on that man over there, sir.” He pointed to the broken body of Wood. “They’re the papers of a Red Army Rifles major.”
Malenkoy took the bundle of documents and began to leaf through them. The face in the photograph, slightly obscured by a large bloodstain, was someone he knew. It belonged to Paliev. So that was how Yuri Petrovich had met his end, poor son of a bitch, ambushed by this outfit. There had been much speculation among his comrades back at HQ as to what had happened to Paliev since his disappearance a few days ago.
At least this was one piece of positive news that he could bring back to Nerchenko. Rumour had it that the General had been very upset by the loss of his personal aide.
* * * * * * * *
Even though it was still about ten miles away, Fleming could see the column of smoke billowing up from the airfield and he braced himself for the reception they would receive when they came into Rostock.
Sitting on a jump-seat behind the co-pilot on the flight-deck, he craned his neck for a glimpse of their escort, eight heavily armed Hawker Typhoon fighter-bombers. Four of them hung slightly back on the York’s starboard beam, each aircraft lumbering under the w
eight of the sixteen air-to-ground rockets racked beneath the wings. Just behind the fighters, Fleming could see the second Avro York. It was an ungainly looking thing, but was the only aircraft the Allies possessed that could accommodate the principal parts of the 163C without a major dismantling operation on the rocket fighter. If they ever made it into Rostock, and provided the 163C was still there, both transport aircraft would be needed to ferry the German rocket fighter’s partly dismantled components back to Kettenfeld and on to Farnborough.
Fleming’s headset crackled.
“Jewell to Metal Bird, Jewell to Metal Bird. Believe we have you in visual contact. Do you receive? Over.” The voice was clear, the signal strong. Fleming prayed that the landing and the storming of the airfield had gone to plan.
He held his mask up to his mouth and shouted back over the roar of the two propellers whose tips cleared the cockpit wall by mere inches on either side of him.
“This is Metal Bird. Can confirm we are ten miles down range of Rostock. Do we have clearance to come in? Over.” This was the moment that would determine whether they went into the furnace whose smoke and flames now filled their field of vision through the York’s windscreen.
“Jewell to Metal Bird. Land on first thousand yards of runway. I repeat. Only use the first thousand yards of the runway. Enemy still has far side within range of mortar and small arms fire. Once you are down we will put up a smoke screen to shield you on taxiway to hangar.” The pilot gave a thumbs-up to show that he had understood the instruction. There was now only one more thing Fleming needed to know before he could authorize their descent. He dipped the transmit button, but Jewell came back before he could send the message.
“Metal Bird. Thought you would like to know we have found the 163C and it is intact. I repeat, 163 OK. But situation critical here. Get down as quickly as you can. Jewell out.”
Fleming had no time to praise the fact that the 163 was still there and in one piece. He tapped the pilot on the shoulder and stabbed his forefinger down in the direction of Rostock. The pilot nodded and pushed the control column forward and the plane’s nose dropped, momentarily exerting the effects of negative gravity upon his stomach.
It was time to start the diversion for their landing.
Fleming twisted in his seat. The Typhoons were level with the right-hand window of the cockpit.
“Metal Bird to A and B flights. You heard Jewell. The enemy is concentrated in the eastern end of the airfield. They’re all yours.”
The Typhoons peeled away in a shallow dive, heading for the far end of the runway at over 400 mph. Fleming watched the leader down to fifty feet, saw the flashes under the wings as the rocket motors ignited and the projectiles sped away from the rails towards an invisible enemy. Eight web-like threads of smoke stitched their way through the sky, pulling the Typhoon after them, until the aircraft disappeared into a pall of black cloud that belched from something burning brightly on the ground below.
The runway grew before their eyes until it filled the entire windshield. Several hundred yards to port, through the smoke, Fleming could just make out the white tops of the Baltic waves as they lapped at the wide, dune-filled beach bordering the airfield. Between the beach and the runway were two immense hangars and a group of outbuildings. Fleming refrained from pointing out their quarry to the pilot who was keeping one eye on the runway and one on the far perimeter fence where the enemy’s forces were concentrated. The co-pilot turned to Fleming and signalled that he knew where to head once they touched down and had slowed to a speed where they could turn the aircraft off the runway.
They were now down to fifty feet. The pilot wrestled to keep the aircraft steady in the strong crosswind before dropping the wheels down hard on the tarmac. The two crew stood on the brakes, which immediately transmitted a juddering protest through the whole airframe.
Fleming caught a needle of light out of the corner of his eye and watched in a trance as a line of tracer curled out from a group of trees to their right, but the gunner had not accounted for the deflection and the shots went wild. As he watched the source of the machine-gun fire, holding his breath for the second burst, the copse disintegrated in an enormous explosion. The shock-waves rocked the York and his earphones filled with the cries of the Typhoon pilots who had scored one more kill in their quest to keep the York’s approach to Rostock free from ground fire.
The York slewed left and right off the runway centreline as the crew fought to slow the aircraft enough for a violent turn down a slip-road that led to the two hangars. Fleming’s heart missed a beat as he saw smoke pouring from the hangar area, the thick clouds swirling and expanding as they were pushed across the airfield by the breeze coming off the Baltic. But the hangar complex which housed the 163 had not taken a hit. Fleming could make out Jewell’s paratroops as they activated smoke canisters during the most vulnerable part of the York’s journey, out of reach of the protection afforded by the buildings and clawing its way painfully slowly along the exposed taxiway.
Fifty yards ahead, a soldier leapt in front of the York and signalled for the pilot to head towards the second and larger of the buildings. Then the immense doors slid open and Fleming could make out the figure of Colonel Jewell within, his stocky frame dwarfed by the interior of the empty hangar. He was gesticulating wildly, beckoning for the York to taxi towards him. The co-pilot looked at his captain who shrugged before inching the throttles forward and coasting the transport aircraft inside. Switches were thrown and the propellers spluttered to a stop.
Fleming had already thrown off his straps and was scrambling out through the flight deck door, past two ashen-faced engineers who would shortly assist him in dismantling the 163 and crating it up for the return journey. As long as the paratroops could stave off whatever the Germans threw at them over the next few hours. Fleming jumped on to the concrete floor of the hangar and the crackle of machine-gun fire, punctuated intermittently by the dull crump of a mortar explosion, echoed around the immense building. It was the first time he had heard the enemy, but far from experiencing the nausea of fear that should have gripped him, he felt exhilarated and drawn to the action.
Jewell was striding over to him, his right hand extended as if he were a long-lost chum spotted at a cocktail party. But as the Colonel drew close, Fleming noticed that the eyes that had sparkled the day before looked tired, the face drawn. Jewell’s handshake told him that things were not under control. The initial bravado could not hide the anxiety.
“Morning Fleming. Glad you made it. I’m sorry we couldn’t get the whole airfield cleared for you as planned, but we judged it safe enough for you to make an approach and landing. It turns out that there’s a bigger garrison in Rostock town than we anticipated, but I think we can hold our position long enough for you to get your contraption out of here. Provided the Russians behave themselves, that is.”
“Russians? What do you mean, Russians?” Fleming had to shout to make himself heard over the second York which had safely arrived at the hangar and was being positioned just behind the first aircraft. He thought he might have misheard what Jewell had said.
“According to prisoners, the Russians broke through the German front lines last night and are now only about seven kilometres from here. The reason the Germans haven’t thrown the book at us is because they’re more preoccupied with stemming the Red Army’s advance westwards. It’s a bloody irony that we’re pinning the Germans down at the far end of the airfield, while I’m actually praying that their troops don’t throw in the towel and let the Red Army catch us on what the Russians see as their territory.”
“Christ, how long do you think that gives us?”
“Impossible to say. It could be a day, it could be two hours before they’re here. You’d better get your men to take that aircraft apart and loaded up on the Yorks as quickly as possible.”
Jewell led the way to a corner of the hangar that had been cordoned off by a large screen.
The sight of the 163C took Fleming’s breath
away. Up close, it did not seem to retain any of the qualities - the short, moth-like body and the stubby wings - that he had recognized in the reconnaissance photographs. It was beautiful in the way a racing car was and quite the opposite of its operational sibling, the squat and ugly 163B, even though the relationship between the two was obvious. Fleming found it hard to believe that this graceful machine was the same as the one that had almost destroyed the mind and body of the B-17 gunner in the hospital bed at Horsham St Faith.
Walking round the aircraft, he remembered the bomb and his fear and how he had almost called Staverton on the spot, so acute was his concern at the thought of a rocket-powered fighter-bomber going into production in Germany. The 163C was clean.
It was then he spotted the slight protuberance beneath each wing. He threw himself under the aircraft, like a mechanic at a garage, and saw the hardpoints, the mechanisms that held the ordnance in place until the pilot triggered the release of the weapon. A bomb had been there; it had simply been removed during the night.
He scribbled out a note on a piece of paper and handed it to Jewell.
“Colonel, I need this message transmitted to a man at Kettenfeld called Bowman. It’s very important. Could one of your men handle it?”
Jewell nodded. “Consider it done,” he said. “Just concentrate on getting that thing packed up and out of here.”
At least it was smaller than Fleming thought it would be. As long as they could get the wings off cleanly and the fuselage into two halves, front and back, the 163C would fit into the Yorks with room to spare. But dismantling the aircraft quickly, and without damaging it, would prove to be a bitch, of that Fleming was sure.
And there were only seven kilometres between them and the Red Army.
Fleming never thought he would find himself praying for the Wehrmacht to hold its ground.
Dismantling the 163 was taking far too long, so Jewell’s find was the answer to a prayer.
