“What a pretty little girl,” he said. “You should be very proud.”
Mary could not speak. The man’s accent strongly hinted of New England. She smelled something fragrant, shampoo, or maybe cologne. Deep creases in his face resembled knife scars and a large mole dominated his upper lip. She edged away, hoping he would not notice, but he pointed at her and shook his head.
“Everybody shut up and stand still!” he yelled.
He repeated it three times before the terrified tourists quieted, except for Emily, who kept crying. Mary whispered, “Don’t cry, sweetheart, Mommy’s here,” and stroked her forehead. Sliding sideways, she interposed herself between Emily and the gunman and buried the toddler’s face in her shoulder to hush her. At the first opportunity, she would run for the door and not stop; she would take her chances in the water. If she dove deep enough, maybe the bullets wouldn’t hit her.
Two young mothers clutching babies fell to their knees, begging for mercy. The leader motioned them to their feet and patted the air as if reassuring them all would be fine. He scanned the terrified crowd and examined each face, as if selecting a steak for dinner, and stopped when he spotted the slim blonde hugging a twenty-ish version of herself, the same mother and daughter who’d kept Mary from falling moments before.
“Those two.” He pointed with his gun again. “They’re the ones. Take care of them first.”
The biggest attacker grabbed the women by their arms and dragged them, kicking and biting, to the port side bulkhead, and jammed his machine pistol against the younger woman’s temple. Mary watched them with horror and relief, assuming those two had been the target of the attack, but shame kept her from looking at them.
Following a burst of gunfire, the leader pointed his machine gun at her. Mary froze.
“Sorry, lady,” he stage-whispered. “Allahu akbar,” he said, much louder. It came out as ‘Allayhu akbah.’ He squeezed the trigger. Mary saw the flash, then nothing more.
#
Also from Dingbat Publishing
late evening, Saturday, 24 August 1940
over the village of Patchbourne, England
Something soft and annoying whooshed past his face. Faust brushed at it, but it was already gone and he was too damn sleepy to care. He dropped his arm to the bed.
There was no bed.
There wasn’t anything. His arm was dangling out in space. So was the rest of him. Faust snapped his eyes open. A strong wind pummeled him, tumbled him arse over head. The ground was a long way down. He was falling and it was real, not some stupid nightmare.
Panic leapt like a predator through his veins. He twisted, fighting against gravity. An icicle of light from the distant ground stabbed at his eyes, swept past him, and far below, several red flashes popped in quick succession. A rumbling vibrated the air around him, something that sounded like an artillery round exploded nearby, and sharp chemical smoke scoured his nostrils.
Then tight cords wrapped about his body, between his legs, jerking him upright and throwing him higher, dangling him across the light-slashed night sky. The rumbling intensified. His head snapped back. Above him, a parachute canopy blazed white in the spotlight from below. Beyond it loomed a huge dark beast, moving past in impossible slow motion. It towered over him. The parachute danced closer, second by drawn-out second; then it bowed, canted, and slid away, laying Faust on his back as it hauled him aside.
He gripped the harness shroudlines, his chest and belly flinching. It was the bomber, the one he’d been riding in. The belly hatch framed Erhard’s laughing face, lit from below by a spotlight. With one hand, Erhard clutched the rubber coaming, cupping the other about his mouth. He yelled something — something short — that was overwhelmed by the racket and growing distance.
Maybe the plane was having mechanical problems — but Faust, Erhard, and the mechanics had tuned the Heinkel’s twin engines all afternoon. No one else was bailing out.
Erhard had thrown him overboard.
It didn’t matter how much schnapps he’d slugged nor how drunk he remained. When Faust hit the ground, Erhard was toast.
The spotlight’s cone slid from the front half of the bomber to the tail fin, the glare flashing across the metal and leaving a dark, mysterious line at the tailfin’s hinge. The line and the glare slid across the matte metal, twisting and writhing, finally falling off the back edge. The bomber was turning from the light. It pirouetted in a slow, graceful curtsy like a prancing war horse and plowed into the side of the neighboring plane. Metal screeched and crumpled. The two bombers hung motionless, pinned to the night sky by the fingers of light from below. Then Erhard’s plane rolled the other one over. Flames spiraled from the mass of cartwheeling metal.
From between the bombers fell a squirming, thrashing human. Another white canopy blossomed above it. But within moments the parachute silk convulsed in scarlet flames, melted to flaring sparks of gold and orange, and crumpled to nothingness. In a clear, bizarre second, Faust again glimpsed Erhard’s face, no longer laughing but mouth open in a scream not drowned by the clamor as he fell beyond the spotlight’s reach.
The entwined bombers exploded. Faust twisted, wrapping his elbows about his face, hands clutching the shroudlines. Something sharp and hot punched his right shoulder. Heat flared across his back. But when he twisted back around, the night sky was empty. The droning engines ebbed away and the searchlights vanished one by one. A final, embarrassingly late flak round exploded well behind the departing squadron and black smoke drifted through the lone remaining searchlight finger.
The light fastened onto him and his slaloming parachute, tracking his descent. He exhaled, one relieved whoosh. He’d been trained on parachutes before the invasion of Norway, months ago, but this was his first real jump. Okay, it wasn’t that bad. But he couldn’t wait for the ground crews to find him so he could scramble back to Paris, and if he never flew again, it would be too soon.
His breath caught. German groundfire had no reason to shoot at German planes.
Where the hell was he?
The spotlight vanished, leaving him blind upon his stage. He glanced down just as his feet slammed into something solid. His knees buckled, tumbling him backward into stubbly stalks. The scent of fresh-mown grass was overlaid with the acrid tang of burning metal. Clouds lowered the night sky almost within reach. Shoot, he didn’t want to deal with Erhard’s mess tonight, no matter where he was. Faust lay on his back and closed his eyes, letting the alcohol fuzz take over again. The klaxon of the air-raid alarm seemed to fade, not to silence but to an incomprehensible distance, like waves creaming over a remote Dover beach. Matthew Arnold wrote that one, about pebbles being drawn back then flung ashore by waves on the Sea of Faith. Ah, love, let us be true to one another…
But the unpoetical parachute harness tugged at his torso and groin, jerking him awake and dragging him prone across the field. The canopy billowed about. Sharp stubble poked his shoulders and back. He grunted, eyes jolting open.
There was a quick release snap somewhere. He fumbled with the harness, found something, and pressed it. It clicked and the pressure about his chest released, letting him twist from the harness. Any possibility of carefully gathering the miles of cloth into a manageable bundle was swept away when the rousing breeze yanked the ’chute right out of his hands. Crouched on his knees, he watched the white silk sail away, like some demented specter, toward a distant stand of dark waving trees, and tried to decide if it mattered a damn. Parachutes were reusable, weren’t they? Should he try to chase the thing down? He closed his eyes and rubbed his face. Nope, he was still drunk, worrying about a frigging parachute when he should be worrying about himself.
A quivering voice blew with the breeze across the dark void surrounding him. “Jake, you sure he came down out here? I thought he was heading nearer town.”
Faust’s eyes flew open. The wind gusting over his exposed skin, face and hands, was suddenly chill. He shivered and hugged himself. The twisting in the pit of his stomach
was more than just alcohol coming back to haunt him. Some deep part of his soul, something as primeval as the night itself, quaked beneath his skin. But his conscious mind hadn’t yet figured out why.
A second voice spoke, more quietly than the first, and steadier. “Be quiet, you daft bugger.”
Another gust of cold air splashed across his face, reaching through his skin into his heart and brain and being. Faust heard his breath rasping in the night’s quiet and tried to still it. But the beating of his heart was just as loud and would not be calmed.
They spoke in English.
He wanted to be still so his unseen visitors wouldn’t detect his presence, but he had to admit he froze because he was too scared to move. It took long moments before he could convince his body to curl over and duck his head down between his shoulders to hide his face. And no matter what he did, his lungs demanded oxygen and sounded like a bellows working it.
“Jake, there’s something moving over by the trees.”
He was beginning to sympathize with poor Jake: that daft bugger really wouldn’t shut up.
“Yeah, I see it. Let’s work our way over there, quietly, now.”
Faust tensed every muscle he possessed, ready to run or fight for it. But he wasn’t near any trees. His nerves quivered as the wind danced over his skin. It might be a small animal, shaking the branches at the far end of the field — then he remembered how his parachute had billowed about like a live thing and blown away toward those trees. He stuffed his hand into his mouth, stifling a giggle.
He held himself still, breathing more easily, until the discreet footfalls waned in the night. Then he scrambled up, balanced a moment to make certain he’d stay that way, and staggered in the opposite direction. A hedgerow bordered the field at the foot of a small hill, and a white-painted gate partway along glowed like a beacon. He scuttled toward it. There had to be somewhere he could hide.
#
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Table of Contents
Standing at the Edge
Cast of Characters
Author’s Foreword
Prologue
SECTION ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
SECTION TWO
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
SECTION THREE
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
SECTION FOUR
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
SECTION FIVE
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
SECTION SIX
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
SECTION SEVEN
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
SECTION EIGHT
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
SECTION NINE
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by William Alan Webb
Also from Dingbat Publishing
Standing at the Edge Page 44
