Once there, they could drop to a thousand feet and pick up their bearings from known topographical markers and reference points.
His eyes darted over the reserve fuel gauge. They still had time and fuel, but most of their calculations were based on making a direct route. With the clouds blocking Kraus’s view of the stars, it would be impossible to take a sighting and calculate their position. Right now, he was using dead reckoning to navigate.
All he had to do was maintain the same heading and they would reach their target. The problem was aircraft, unlike a car, rarely maintained a specific course. Instead, the wind blew them one way or the other in a process called drifting.
Right now, Gutwein knew that the wind was approaching from north-east. He was certain that it was blowing him to the south and a little farther west, which was good. The problem was, how much was he drifting south? Ordinarily it wouldn’t matter. If they had enough fuel reserves, they would continue on a bearing heading west until they reached the coast, and then follow the coastline to their target.
Their fuel supply was going to be close.
He looked at Vogel, who was trying to calculate their fuel on a pad of paper next to him. “Go wake Krause up for me. I need to get a more accurate idea of our rate of drift.”
“Yes, sir.”
Vogel returned with Krause a minute later.
Gutwein said, “The cloud cover’s come in hard and we’re trying to maintain our original heading. I need to know our rate of drift.”
“Understood. I’ll organize it for you now, sir.”
Gutwein shook his head. “No. This is too important. I need to see it for myself. We all know what’s riding on this. We need to be certain. I’ll come with you.” He handed the controls over to Vogel. “You have the controls. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Take us lower until you have a visual on the sea and keep her there.”
“Understood, sir.”
Gutwein unclipped his seatbelt and followed Krause toward the tail stopping at the starboard wing. There, a hatch allowed them to climb inside the wing, crawling on their bellies – usually to provide maintenance on the engines while they were running. Midway along the wing, a trapdoor opened to the sea below.
Both men made their way to the trapdoor.
Krause held the unlit flare in his hand. “Are you ready, sir?”
“Yes. Go on.”
Krause lit the flare and dropped it.
Gutwein watched as the burning flare fell into the water far below. If it had stayed roughly in line with the tail of the plane, it meant they were maintaining a steady course. As he expected, that wasn’t the case.
The flare seemed to immediately move to the port side of the tail. The drift was strong. They would have to make a correction for it, but it would involve more guessing.
“Do you want me to drop another one, sir?”
Gutwein shook his head. “I’ve seen enough. We’re being heavily blown to the south. We’ll have to make a correction.”
He made his way out of the wing and took over the control of the aircraft again. Gutwein increased their altitude to a more efficient cruising height of eight thousand feet. He chose a bearing slightly more to the north in an attempt to correct for the suspected drift. There was no clear science for how much to correct, though. Instead it was more a case of pilot experience and gut instinct. The problem was, instincts had the possibility of being wrong.
Three hours later, Krause knelt on the bulkhead just behind Gutwein’s seat and handed him a notepad. “This is our current fuel reading.”
Gutwein glanced at the notepad. The numbers were much worse than he’d predicted. We can’t be that low, surely? He glanced back at Krause. “Are you certain?”
“I measured it twice.” His voice was firm.
His eyes glanced at Vogel and back to Krause. A proud smile formed on his thinned lips and his eyes narrowed with defiance. “All right. Moment of truth gentlemen. We’ve either played our cards just right and we’re now already over the coastline of America and close to our target – or we’ve failed our mission and our country.”
He lowered the Condor’s nose and made their descent. The cloud cover was still thick. He prayed that it would thin as they dropped their altitude.
They were in a complete whiteout.
Seven minutes later, and at a height of three thousand feet, the ground finally came into view. It was covered in thick snow and surrounded by jutting stones that formed the peak of a small mountain range.
His eyes narrowed. “Where are we, gentlemen?”
Krause opened the topographical map. His eyes swept the region of their target. It was impossible to see any identifiable navigation aids or markers. No signs of civilization, much less a city.
Gutwein brought them into a wide circular flight path, but the terrain below all seemed to place them in the middle of a low-level mountain range. On all the maps he’d studied, there weren’t any mountains near their target.
He looked at his two men. His voice was full of accusation, but it was for himself and not his men. “Well? Where are we?”
Krause spoke first. “I’ve no idea, sir.”
“Vogel?”
“No idea.”
“All right. Look to the south of our target. We were drifting in that direction, so that’s where we must be.” Gutwein sighed and forced himself to smile. It felt fake, but there was nothing else that could be done. “I’m going to head north. We might yet find our target. Let me know when one of you work out where we are. No complaints. This was no one’s fault. Let’s just fix it.”
“Yes, sir,” they both replied.
The snow clouds thickened and Gutwein found himself flying straight into the mouth of a full-blown blizzard. His visibility reduced to near zero. His instruments beeped, warning of a buildup of ice. This was a heavy additional weight, as well as a deadly, fuel-consuming problem. Through the falling snow, the sea of white, undulating ground below, seemed to disappear.
He lowered the nose and took the Condor to a thousand feet. It didn’t leave much room if they ran into trouble. Not that it mattered anymore, there weren’t any other solutions left. Gutwein simply had to work with what he had. The blizzard blew stronger, and he struggled to maintain control of his aircraft, let alone work out their position.
After fifteen frenzied minutes of searching the landscape for some point of reference, the inevitable happened.
The portside engine number two skipped a beat, coughed, and choked to a stop. Gutwein didn’t need to ask what had caused the sudden loss of power to his otherwise reliable German engine. They were out of fuel, and within minutes all four engines would cut out and his Condor would plummet to the earth.
His eyes searched the vile and inhospitable landscape below. He swallowed hard. “Okay, gentlemen. I’m going to need to find somewhere to put us down.”
Vogel searched the winter landscape. “I can’t see anything.”
Gutwein yelled over his shoulder to Krause. “Get back into the bomb bay and remove the arming plugs. The last thing we want is for the damned bomb to reach critical mass on impact!”
Krause unclipped his harness. “I’m on it!”
There was nothing more Gutwein could do. He would have to ditch. But could he protect his deadly cargo? He knew nothing about this bomb, really. Would it explode on impact? Even that would be better than it falling into enemy hands. If he did land, could he retrieve it? Even if he did retrieve it, what did he know about the foul weapon? It wasn’t like he could get it to the target by any other means, could he?
Gutwein forced himself to forget about secondary concerns. Right now, his job was to land the aircraft. If he could do that, he might just live long enough to overcome the other obstacles.
Engines number four, two and one sputtered to a stop, nearly simultaneously. He extended the flaps in an effort to reduce their touchdown speed. In doing so, it reduced their glide ratio. It didn’t matter, they’d be hitting ground well before they could
reach a suitable location to land.
“Anyone see anywhere to put us down?” Gutwein asked, his voice almost conversational in his acceptance of his fate, as he scanned the undulating sea of snow and filtered caps of fir trees.
“I’ve got nothing,” Vogel said.
“Pick a line through those trees. Any one of them. There’s nothing we can do.” There was no terror or fear in Kraus’s voice. He was merely stating the truth. Even if they survived the crash, the surrounding landscape would kill them long before they could ever escape the region.
Vogel pointed to the south and asked, “What about that valley?”
Gutwein’s head snapped to his right. His eyes swept the landscape where Vogel had pointed. Two shallow mountain peaks narrowed into a valley below. The slope was surprisingly gentle, and at the end of it, the area rose into a large saddle full of snow. If fortune favored them, they could land on it, their lethal momentum slowed by thick snow.
It was a lousy option, but it was the only one he’d seen since they’d come out of the cloud and spotted their mistake. Even the best gambler would eventually be left with only one option to play. This was his.
“All right. I’ll take it.” Gutwein smiled at both of his men. It was genuine and warm. “Your country may never know how much you sacrificed for her, but I do. It has been a privilege to fly with you over the past three years.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He banked to the left and set up for a final approach.
The Condor fell hard on a downdraft--for a moment he wasn’t even sure he was going to clear the first peak. He didn’t lower the landing gear, hoping that a smooth underbelly might slide along the snow-covered ground, like a ski.
Gutwein spoke gently. “Good luck and God bless.”
The tip of the taildragger narrowly avoided clipping the peak of the mountain by less than a foot. Gutwein pushed the yoke forward and dipped the nose. The condor dropped downward into the shallow valley below.
Just before the belly of his craft touched the soft snow, Gutwein pulled the yoke backward. The Condor reluctantly flared, then sank into the deep snow, lurching as it landed. Momentum kept the Condor sliding forward, almost as fast as their final approach.
Holding his breath, Gutwein held on through the flurry of movement, waiting for his final greeting with death.
Two thirds of the way down the mountain, the thick snow appeared to finally be having some effect on their inertia, and the aircraft began to noticeably slow.
An instant later, the starboard wing clipped a large stone, buried beneath the snow – ripping it off, rotating the cockpit and fuselage forward in a sideways direction. Gutwein’s harness dug tight into his waist as the cockpit spun round in an instant. The Condor struck a second boulder, ripping off the port wing.
Gutwein felt his head snap to the side, and his world became little more than a blur.
A second later, the cockpit and the Condor, no longer following the middle of the valley, ricocheted across the gorge, before plummeting into the side of the snow-covered mountain.
Everything went dark, as the Condor came to rest, apparently buried deep under thick snow.
Gutwein opened his eyes. A small trickle of blood ran across his forehead where he’d knocked it. He turned his head and brushed the blood off with his right forearm. He gently manipulated his hands and wiggled his toes. His head spun, but everything still worked.
I’m still here.
Was it chance when knowledge, experience, and preparation ran head-long into opportunity? Gutwein had lost his wife and children, drawn a suicide mission, been forced to take off during an air-raid, escaped a convoy's detection, run out of fuel, landed in the middle of nowhere, and ended with a couple of cuts and bruises, nothing more. With luck, they could complete their mission.
“Are you gentlemen all right?” he asked.
“I’m good,” Vogel said. “Any idea where we put down?”
“What about you, Krause?”
“I’m injured, but I’ll live. Any idea where we put down?”
Gutwein shook his head. “None whatsoever.”
Vogel unclipped his harness and stood up. “And we won’t know for some time. At least until this blizzard blows over. We’ll need to take shelter in the Condor, prepare our survival equipment, and then see if we can trek out of here.”
The lines around Gutwein’s eyes wrinkled with a smile as he studied their snow-covered surroundings. “But at least we’re on the ground.”
A moment later, his smile disappeared.
The ground beneath them rumbled. Gutwein’s gaze followed a giant rift in the ice, as it began to crack and ripple as if in an earthquake. Instinctively, he gripped the steering yoke and pulled up, as though he could avoid the giant opening in the ground below.
Gutwein, normally a calm man in any emergency, began to scream.
As did Vogel and Krause.
Their screams were drowned out by the ripping sound of their craft breaking up. The ground opened up in front of them. The nose of the Condor dipped forward--an enormous, vicious maw, preparing to swallow the Condor whole.
The majestic airliner once more started to move. It was slow at first – more like a skier tipping over the crest of a mountain – but it picked up speed quickly. Within the darkened nightmare, the Condor raced deeper into the bowels of the earth. Her occupants were thrown about like ragdolls as she slid ever deeper, colliding upon unseen walls like a toboggan in the night, until she finally came to rest in pitch darkness.
*
Gutwein opened his eyes, but there was nothing for him to see.
He inhaled slowly, held his breath for a moment, and exhaled. His ribs were sore, but he could breath. He grinned. There were tears in his eyes and he started laughing like a blubbering idiot. The insane guffaw of a madman narrowly defeating Death. Their mission had been a failure and they’d crashed into a mountain, but they’d somehow survived. He felt for the small flashlight in his right leg pocket of his flight suit and pulled it out.
He switched the light on and turned to face Vogel and Krause. “What a ride, hey?”
There was no response.
He stopped laughing and shined the flashlight at Vogel’s face. His copilot’s face appeared unharmed. There were no cuts or grazes. His eyes were wide open, as far as Gutwein could tell. Otherwise, the man might have been sleeping, except his face that was once full of life and expression, was now inanimate. His eyes stared vacantly into Death.
Gutwein unclipped his harness, climbing over broken detritus to go to him. His chest was still. Gutwein placed his hand on Vogel’s neck. He could still feel the cold sweat on his copilot’s skin. That was all he could feel. No matter how much he tried to find it, he couldn’t feel a pulse.
Carefully stepping out from what had once been the cockpit, he shined his flashlight across the rear-facing engineer’s seat. This time he didn’t need to check for life. The seat was positioned at the edge of the starboard wing’s bulkhead. When the Condor collided with a large buried stone, the fuselage had been pushed inside, directly where Krause had been sitting. The seat, along with what remained of his navigator’s body, had become intermingled in one horrific tangle of human flesh and warped metal.
Gutwein felt his world begin to spin. He took a couple steps backward toward the narrow end of the taildragger and vomited.
There wasn’t much in it. Other than black coffee and a bar of Swiss chocolate, he hadn’t eaten since leaving Stuttgart. He tried to open the hatch, but it wouldn’t budge. Shining his flashlight around the inside of the fuselage, he searched for a way out.
Panic slid through him, cold fingers of dread ran up his spine. He had to get away from possible suffocation, death, and his fear of being buried alive. He couldn’t look at his men, they were too horrific to confront. Why had his almighty chosen to keep him alive, while his men were killed?
He finally wrenched open the tail trapdoor and climbed into the narrow alcove where the tail whe
el could be manually released if the hydraulics failed. Gutwein dragged himself to the end, where a small maintenance hatch led to the outside world.
Gutwein fought with the latch. It was stuck, of course. He adjusted his position so that he could kick it hard. All his extreme built-up anger, passion and violence – from the loss of his family through to the more immediate loss of the men under his command. All of it came out on this one broken latch.
On his third vicious kick, the trapdoor broke free into an open void below.
Gutwein turned around again and shined his flashlight into the opening. The space appeared clear for a few feet, then it was covered in snow. He slid down into the ice-hardened snow. The space between the frozen ceiling and the snow-covered ground was a corridor a little higher than the top of the fuselage.
He crawled along it until he passed the end of the Condor’s tail.
Once there, it opened up to a more comfortable height of the fuselage. He cupped his flashlight with his hand, and his world became enveloped in complete darkness again.
Where the hell am I?
Gutwein uncapped the flashlight and began following the direction in which the Condor had obviously entered some sort of tunnel. He looked at the ground. The Condor had dug its way across the frozen surface. There was something metallic beneath his feet.
He kicked at it with his boots. The ice covering the metal came free and he stopped to examine it. There were two rusted pieces of iron, running parallel to each other. An old railway track? Very narrow. This was never made for a train line.
Ah. Tracks for a minecart.
Of all the places to crash, the Condor must have slid directly into an old mine shaft. With the exception of the small amounts of snow dragged in by the Condor, the tunnel was dry, and noticeably warmer than the subfreezing environment outside. Gutwein shined his flashlight upward, along the tunnel, following the trail of ice and rockfall where the Condor’s fuselage had ripped through the tunnel. He pulled the hood of his flight jacket tight and started to head for the surface.
It took more than an hour’s walk to reach the entrance.
The Heisenberg Legacy (Sam Reilly Book 11) Page 3
