The Black Gate

by Michael R. Hicks

  “We’re coming up on the Dutch coast, sir,” Bob said from beside him. “We’re taking a bit of a dogleg to the north of Amsterdam, or we’d be blowing the knickers off clotheslines.”

  “How high…or low…are we?”

  “About fifteen hundred feet.”

  Peter stared at him. “The Germans could hit us with rocks.”

  “Sure, if they could see a plane painted black at night and we weren’t moving at over two hundred miles per hour.” He put a hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, sir. We’ll get you there in one piece. Don’t you doubt it.”

  The flight seemed to go on forever. Peter stayed at the waist gun position the entire time, watching the darkness roll by.

  He was startled when the crew chief tapped him on the arm. “Okay, sir, it’s about that time.”

  Peter checked his watch to find that only a little more than an hour and a half had gone by.

  After the crew chief snapped on a light that filled the fuselage with dim red light, he and Bob began to strap on Peter’s parachute. Peter’s hands began to shake as a series of gory vignettes began to play out in his mind, each one ending with him splatting into the ground and bursting like a melon. His stomach began to churn, and he bit down on the urge to vomit.

  “Steady on, sir,” Bob said, as if reading his mind. “This’ll be so easy that my grandma could do it. You’ve even got snow down there to cushion your rump. You don’t have a thing to worry about, now.”

  “Your personal stuff is in this here suitcase, sir,” the crew chief said, pointing to a denim duffle bag. A rope was attached to the end of the bag, and the crew chief snapped the other end onto Peter’s parachute harness. “We’ll kick this out first, then send you out after it. After you land, just follow the line and you’ll be able to find it, even in the dark.”

  “Okay,” Peter managed as the crew chief set the duffle down beside the round hatch covering the hole in the plane’s belly where the original ball turret had been removed.

  “This is your static line,” the crew chief said, holding up a thick line with a metal snap on the end. With a practiced movement, he attached it to a strongpoint aft of the hatch. “This will take care of deploying your chute. Our pilot knows his stuff, and he’ll put you right on the bullseye so you don’t have to worry about getting caught in trees or anything else. All you have to worry about is landing. Okay?”

  “Right.” Peter’s teeth began to chatter, but it wasn’t from the cold. He had been sweating for the last half hour, and his uniform under the thick jump suit was soaked.

  The crew chief listened to something in his headphones for a moment. “We’re on our initial run. Let’s get the Joe Hole open.”

  He and Bob knelt down and swung open the door that covered the opening in the bomber’s belly, and a gust of frigid air blasted into the plane.

  Down below, Peter realized, was Hitler’s Germany. Without thinking, he stepped back from the hatch.

  The plane began to slow, and Peter heard the whine of the flaps being lowered.

  Bob grabbed the front of Peter’s jump suit and pulled him close to the hatch. Pointing to the ground below, he shouted over the roar of the wind stream, “There’s your drop zone!”

  A pattern of four red flares on the ground passed by, impossibly fast to Peter’s eyes.

  “The pilot’s going to swing around and line up on the DZ again,” Bob said. “We’ll drop you just a bit before we come over it, and you should float right down in the middle, graceful as a feather.”

  Peter just nodded his head. All the spit had dried up in his mouth and he didn’t trust himself to speak. His bladder felt like it was going to explode. He was kneeling beside Bob now, both hands on the hand rail that ran along the right side of the hatch, gripping it so tight that his hands began to cramp.

  Just as Bob had said, the bomber made a slow sweeping turn to the left, then flew back the way it had come for a few moments before completing another turn back toward the drop zone.

  ***

  “If you’re leading me on a wild goose chase, Heinrich, I’m going to have your head,” Hauptmann Manfred Baake growled at his radar operator, who sat behind him in the Luftwaffe Heinkel He-219 Uhu, or Owl, night fighter. “We don’t have fuel to waste on this nonsense.” At this stage in the war, fuel in Germany was as valuable as gold, and probably more so. Their sortie against an incoming RAF raid had already been a success, Baake having blasted two Lancasters from the night sky and getting at least a chunk of a Mosquito night fighter that had tried to chase them off. Of course, shooting down two planes out of what must have been five hundred or more could hardly be called a victory, but flying a mission and managing to survive was a victory all its own in these dark days.

  Baake had been flying back to their airfield at Münster-Handorf when his radar operator, who sat behind him, facing backward in the cramped cockpit, had called out another contact that had passed close by, heading south-southeast. The only reason Baake had chased after what had proven to be an illusive ghost was that the boy, despite his inexperience, seemed to have a natural gift for operating the balky radar.

  “I’m telling you, sir, the contact is real! I just can’t get a good fix. I think he’s flying at very low altitude.”

  “I’ll give you five more minutes, then we go home.” Baake flexed his shoulders, stretching muscles that were tired and cramped.

  “Can we descend to a thousand meters?”

  “A thousand meters?” Baake shook his head. “It’s a good thing we’re a long way from the Alps.” With a sigh, he eased back the throttles and pushed the U-shaped control stick forward, nosing the twin-engine, twin-tailed fighter closer to the ground. “One thousand meters,” Baake announced as he pulled up and brought the engines back to cruise power.

  “Come left ten degrees.” The excitement in Heinrich’s voice overshadowed his earlier frustration, and Baake felt his own pulse quicken. “A shade more…there! Hold steady…steady…I’ve got him! Solid contact dead ahead, range thirteen hundred meters! I’m not sure of his altitude with all this clutter so near the ground, but he’s lower than we are. It’s big, too, definitely not one of ours.”

  “Damn,” Baake whispered as he pushed the throttles forward, sending the ungainly looking Uhu after its elusive quarry. “I’m taking us down to five hundred meters.”

  As he leveled off, Heinrich began calling out the decreasing range in hundred meter increments. Even when the range was down to five hundred meters, Baake could see nothing ahead of them but landscape faintly lit by the moon.

  “…Three hundred meters…” Heinrich called out.

  Baake was beginning to think that the target was a radar ghost after all when the darkened landscape was occluded by an angular black shadow.

  ***

  “Okay, sir,” Bob told him as his hands checked Peter’s parachute and static line again. “Don’t be worried about a thing, now. You’ll be fine. Just…”

  The tail gunner shouted something Peter wasn’t able to make out just before he opened fire with the twin .50 caliber heavy machine guns.

  The crew chief turned to him. “It’s a German night fighter! You…”

  Whatever else he intended to say was lost as the fuselage was raked with cannon fire. The crew chief’s torso disappeared in a spray of blood, flesh, and bone that spattered across Peter’s jump suit. In the stroboscopic light of exploding shells that tore through the bomber’s thin aluminum skin, Peter watched in horror as the man’s head and lower body tumbled out the Joe Hole into the darkness below.

  Behind him, the tail gunner screamed as his turret was hit and his machine guns fell silent. Peter choked on the thick, acrid smoke that swept through the inside of the plane.

  Peter stared out the right waist gun window as red and orange fireworks danced over the wing. In unison, both engines on that side exploded and a long streamer of flame erupted from the ruptured fuel tanks.

  He crouched there, frozen, staring at his doom
.

  A hand gripped his arm.

  Peter looked down to see Bob lying on the deck, his face contorted in pain in the light of the flames. A dark wash of blood stained the front of his jump suit, but there was no way to tell how much was Bob’s and how much had belonged to the crew chief.

  “Get out, sir!” Bob cried.

  Peter shook his head. “I can’t! I won’t leave you here!”

  “Goddamn stubborn Kraut! I don’t have a chute!” Grimacing at the pain, Bob got to his knees and took Peter’s shoulders in his big hands. “Get the hell out before that fighter comes around again to finish us off!”

  “No!”

  The plane began to shudder and the right wing, which was now entirely wreathed in flame, began to dip toward the ground.

  “Bob…”

  “It’s Ryan Mallory, sir,” Bob said, managing a tight grin. “That’s my real name. Godspeed to you.”

  With a powerful heave, he wrenched loose Peter’s grip and shoved him through the Joe Hole.

  Peter screamed as he tumbled away from the dying Liberator, but the verbalization of his terror became a yelp of surprise as the static line yanked his parachute free. The great circle of black silk billowed open above him, slowing his descent with a teeth-clacking jerk.

  He was facing opposite the direction the plane had been going, and he craned his head to see it. Out of the corner of his eye he saw something slicing through the sky, but it wasn’t the stricken bomber. Black against the stars, the thing grew larger and larger, and the roar of powerful aircraft engines filled the air.

  An odd, almost insect-looking night fighter with two large engines and small twin rudders zoomed right over him as it pursued the dying B-24, close enough that the prop wash sent him spinning and oscillating like a pendulum. As he came back around to face the direction the planes had taken, another burst of cannon fire from the fighter hit the bomber. The B-24 nosed down over a hill and disappeared from view. A moment later a tremendous explosion lit up the night beyond the hill, silhouetting the German fighter as it flew over its victim, the low crump echoing through the valley.

  “Mein Gott,” Peter breathed. Warm tears rolled freely down his cheeks.

  That was when he remembered he was falling. He had been so caught up in the one-sided aerial battle that he had forgotten that, at most, fifteen hundred feet had separated him from the ground when Bob had pushed him from the plane. That meant…

  He looked down just in time to see the dark blob that was his suitcase splat onto the snow. A few brief seconds later, it was Peter’s turn. He tried to remember everything Bob had taught him during Peter’s abbreviated jump training, but in the end it didn’t matter. When he hit the ground he landed on both feet before half-rolling and half-collapsing to the left, toward his good knee, doing by sheer accident what Bob had tried so hard to teach him.

  He lay there for a few moments, reveling in the twin joys that he was alive and on the ground. An absence of any sharp pains gave him hope that he was uninjured.

  “We shoot spies,” a muffled voice said from the darkness.

  Peter struggled to his knees. The movement would have been comical under other circumstances, as he fought to right himself against the combined forces of his useless right leg, the snow, the parachute’s shroud lines that were now draped over him, and the bulky jump suit. He frantically scanned the dark snowbound landscape while he struggled to unzip the suit and get to his Luger.

  “I’m sure that in the days of Karl der Große, things would have been far worse for you,” the voice added softly.

  Peter stopped wrestling with the jump suit’s zipper. Karl der Große. It was the German name for Charlemagne. The contact’s code word.

  As he stared in the direction from which the voice had spoken, a dark gray shape separated from the equally gray landscape. It was a soldier dressed in a white winter combat uniform. Even his rifle, which was pointed at Peter’s chest, was white.

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t have fared very well under Bismarck, either,” Peter said in a shaking voice.

  The soldier’s weapon slowly lowered, then he stepped forward and extended a hand to help Peter to his feet.

  After pulling him up, the soldier peeled down the white scarf that covered most of his face.

  Except that it wasn’t a man. It was a woman. “Welcome to Germany, Hauptsturmführer Müller,” she said.

  SCHLOSS ARNSBERG

  “You’ll fit right in,” the woman said as Peter shucked off the jump suit to reveal his black SS uniform. Even in the darkness, it stood out so well against the snow that he may as well have been waving a flashing beacon for the benefit of anyone who might have been looking for him. “The Herr Professor does not allow any of the SS cadre to wear anything but dress uniforms while Inside.”

  He heard the “I” in her voice. “Inside?”

  “Yes. You will see.”

  Free of the bulky jump suit, Peter quickly retrieved his suitcase from the duffle, then buried all of the jump gear in the snow. He stood there a moment, looking back toward the hill that was still silhouetted by the flames of the burning B-24. He let out a slow breath, trying to calm the involuntary shivering of his body.

  The woman motioned with a nod of her head. “We must go. Quickly.”

  Dragging the suitcase, he followed her to a ramshackle barn nearby where a Kübelwagen, the German equivalent of the American Jeep, was hidden.

  Tossing his bag in the back seat, Peter clambered into the small vehicle and shut the door, thankful to be out of the open air. The cold had speared through his sweat-soaked clothing. Even with the thick wool overcoat, he was freezing.

  The woman got in the driver’s seat and started the engine. Making sure the nearby road was empty of traffic, she pulled out of the barn and carefully drove along a set of rutted tracks through empty fields until she reached the road. Turning south, she headed away from the drop zone.

  “Won’t you arouse a bit of suspicion if we’re stopped?” Peter said, gesturing to her SS winter combat uniform. Women under the Nazi regime were expected to stay home and bear children, not run about in military uniforms carrying rifles.

  She glanced at him, her face lit by the dull glow of the dash lights. Even in that paltry illumination, he could see she was beautiful, and stunningly so. Or would have been, save for the long scar that ran from the left corner of her mouth all the way to her ear. He could barely see the raised flesh of the scar tissue on her cheek, but there was no mistaking it. The only thing he couldn’t see was her hair, which was hidden by the soft uniform cap she wore.

  “No,” she said at last, turning her attention back to the road, which was clear of snow but slick with a thin layer of ice. “There are exceptions to every rule, even in Nazi Germany.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” he admitted, but the only public exception he could think of was Hanna Reitsch, who was perhaps the world’s most accomplished aviatrix short of Amelia Earhart and a longtime sweetheart of the Nazi propaganda machine. “By the way, you still haven’t told me your name.”

  “Mina Hass. You will address me only as Fräulein Hass. You must never call me by my first name, especially if the Herr Professor or Standartenführer Ulrich Baumann are present. You must not bring their attention upon yourself or me by appearing overly familiar.”

  Peter recalled that a Standartenführer was the equivalent rank of a colonel in the American military. “Who is Baumann? I thought von Falkenstein was in charge of the project.”

  “The Herr Professor oversees the technical aspects of the project, yes,” she told him, “but Baumann is in charge of the SS contingent at the facility and is your military superior.”

  “Did he give you that scar?”

  Mina shook her head. “No. That was the Herr Professor’s handiwork after I made a mistake,” she said softly. “That is not the only one.”

  Peter stared at her, aghast. He wasn’t sure what to say, so he kept his mouth shut.

  After a while,
Mina went on, “The Herr Professor will likely not take notice of you unless you are incompetent at whatever tasks he may assign to you. He looks upon the engineers and technicians as menials who are a necessity to achieve his goals. He is the brain, while people like you are his hands. Do what he says and only ask questions if you must, but that is all.”

  She turned left and took the vehicle over a small bridge into a town. There were enough landmarks for Peter to identify their location: Neheim, which lay about nine kilometers northwest of Arnsberg.

  They rode in silence for a time before Mina said, “You have never done this before, have you?”

  “What, parachuted from a burning plane into enemy territory to work undercover as an SS officer on a top secret project?” Peter snorted. “No, this is a new entry on my curriculum vitae.”

  “I meant field work,” she persisted. “You have no experience.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  Her hands tightened on the wheel. “You should never have accepted your orders to come here. This is not a mission for an amateur.”

  “I wasn’t ordered here,” Peter told her. “I volunteered for this mission.”

  She threw a disbelieving look at him. “You are a fool.”

  Peter shrugged. “I’ve been called worse. If it’s any consolation, I know my business as an engineer. If you can get me inside, I can probably bring the project to a screeching halt. And that brings me to the big question: just what the devil is The Black Gate?”

  “Better that you learn of it as you should, directly from the Herr Professor,” she said. “That way…you will react naturally. You could not possibly believe me, even if I told you. It is something you must witness for yourself. Even then, you will not believe. Not right away. But I hope you are half as good an engineer as you claim. Otherwise, you will be a dead man. Or worse.”

  Peter wasn’t sure what to make of those last words. They drove on in silence, the road taking them along the east bank of the Ruhr River, passing under the massive viaduct that carried the rail line into Ansberg.