“Billy,” Michael said, “that’s wonderful to hear.”
“Thank you, sir. I think she’s pretty wonderful, myself.”
“I have no doubt. Your company’s heading east?” Michael saw some of the trucks around Bir Al Kabir’s pool, and he noted the direction they were facing. “Yes sir, we’re being pulled back. Last night we ran into some pretty stiff opposition. A few Jerry tanks out looking for trouble.”
Michael nodded. Whatever had happened, Billy’s story was an understatement. When he was on his recon runs, Michael never failed to see the flash of artillery on the horizon, and sometimes he heard gunfire and the hollow whump of grenades going off as close as two hundred meters. There might be a lull between official Army battle operations, but there was never a lull in the small battles that went on between companies and platoons out on the raw edge of reckoning.
The major and the corporal talked for a few minutes and then it was time for Billy to return to his men. “Goodbye, sir,” he said, and Michael wished Billy Bowers and his bride all the good fortune in the world. They saluted each other, and they went on.
At fifteen thousand feet above the desert, Michael had a dream of a wolf tumbling from the sky. He opened his eyes with a jolt. “Everything all right?” he asked the pilot, in a voice more reedy than he would have wished.
“Fine, sir. Just relax.”
Michael checked his watch. A grand total of nineteen minutes had passed since they’d left the airfield. He gave an inward groan and shifted again on the seat as much as the belt would allow.
“Oh, Keyrist!” whispered the pilot, and Michael’s heart jumped because he knew something had just gone terribly wrong.
One of the Spitfires veered away and dove to the right. Through the plexiglass canopy Michael saw the glint of metal rising from the earth. Two airplanes? They were coming up fast, from about twelve thousand feet. He made out the shapes of German aerial predators: Messerschmitt Bf 109s, painted in desert camouflage hues. The one in the lead had a solid black tail with the Nazi symbol painted in white upon it.
“Jesus! Jesus!” said the pilot, whose head was on a swivel searching for more enemy fighters. To the credit of his nerve, he kept the lumbering Lysander steady. Then the black-tailed 109 flashed past between the Lysander and the second Spit, on its way to a higher altitude. The Spitfire behind Michael’s plane took after it. “Steady!” the young man said suddenly, and very loudly; he was speaking to himself.
The second Bf 109 came up firing. Tracers zipped across the sky. The remaining Spitfire on point tipped its wings over and fell away. Michael saw it roll in order to get a position behind the 109 as it passed. The Spitfire’s wing guns sparkled, and again tracers reached out for their target but fell short. Michael looked out the canopy to his left and saw that the black-tailed 109 had gotten on the rear of the first Spitfire and was gaining on it. The Spit jinked to the right; the Messerschmitt followed. German tracers shot out in a pattern that might be called beautiful in any other situation, and as the Spit jinked to the left the bullets caught it and tore pieces of metal from the fuselage. The Spit dove and the black-tailed 109 dove after it, even as the third Spitfire got on the 109’s rear and hung there at incredible speed.
“That’s Rolfe Gantt’s 109,” the Cockney pilot said, his voice thick with both fear and awe. “We’re gettin’ out!” He throttled up, the engine screamed as much as a sand-scraped antique engine could, and the Lysander nosed down with an effect that lifted Michael off his seat and made the belt feel as if it were slicing him in two. He had no inclination to scream, but the desire was there.
They went down fast.
Suddenly something was coming down faster. The burning front half of a Spitfire, its wings and fuselage pierced by machine gun bullets and fist-sized twenty-millimeter cannon rounds. It fell past the Lysander, its control cables dangling from the torn-away rear half, and the black-tailed 109 turned away from the tumbling wreckage.
Michael watched the Messerschmitt evade tracers from the Spit on its tail. The aircraft was ascending again, and suddenly it cut its speed and rolled to the left and the Spit went past it just a little too far. As the Spitfire tried to correct its course, the black-tailed 109 made a complete roll and came up shooting at the Spit’s belly. Pieces of metal flew. A bright red flame rippled along the right wing. The Spitfire turned over on its back and the 109 raked it with a burst of cannon shells. Ebony smoke and crimson flames erupted from the Spit’s engine, the prop froze and the aircraft went down to the desert ten thousand feet below.
Michael craned his neck to see the third Spitfire fighting for its life in a battle with one German eagle, and then the black-tailed ace joined the fray. Tracers flew in every direction. The planes crisscrossed each other. But in a matter of seconds, the 109 with the camouflage-painted tail made a mistake of timing and ran into a line of slugs that floated sinuously across the sky. Black smoke bloomed from the engine. The prop spun off, one blade missing. As the 109 started to fall in a slow spiral, the canopy was pulled open and the pilot jumped with his parachute pack on his back. He disappeared from view.
“Down, baby, down!” the Cockney pilot shouted, about to tear the Lysander’s wings off. In the rear seat was a man who was bracing himself with hands, elbows, knees and feet and seeing his thirty years of life pass before his eyes.
The remaining Spitfire and the Messerschmitt came down twisting and turning around each other. Michael watched, transfixed, as their pilots battled for position. Tracers hit empty air that had not been empty the second before. A collision was narrowly missed. One plane zoomed upward and one shrieked down. Michael realized, with dry mouth and feverish brain, that the black-tailed 109 was turning toward them in an elegant curve, and it was going to get them in its gunsights.
The tracers reached out. Slowly, it seemed. With great, deadly and terrible grace.
The Cockney pilot abruptly chopped the throttle and turned the plane on its side to fall to the left, but the tracers were upon them and there was nowhere to hide.
The feeling, to Michael, was as if the aircraft had run over a cobblestoned road.
It was a rough shake. Amid the shake, the windshield popped and cracked as at least one slug passed through it. Holes punched through the bottom of the plane and then through the roof. The pilot gave a strangled cry. Michael smelled scorched metal and fresh blood. A red mist swirled in the air before it was sucked upward. Then the 109 streaked past and the Lysander rolled over in its wounded agony, its engine cylinders gasping for air.
Michael Gallatin was stretched up against the belt one second and the next he was smashed into the seat. The Lysander was tumbling down. The pilot was slumped forward. God save the King, Michael thought crazily as sky became earth became sky became earth. He clasped hold of two rubber handgrips on the back of the pilot’s seat and thought how utterly ridiculous it was trying to brace himself from an aircrash at roughly two hundred knots per hour.
Metal flashed alongside the Lysander. The Spit and the black-tailed 109 were fighting on their way down. The Spit had taken some damage and smoke was curling from the engine, probably blinding the pilot. Rolfe Gantt’s plane bore a dozen bullet holes along the fuselage. The two combatants went at each other again, head-to-head and guns blazing. In the middle of another roll Michael’s bloodshot eyes saw Gantt’s 109 lose a section of its right wing in a burst of flying metal, but an instant later the German’s bullets hit home. The entire front of the Spitfire exploded. The Spit seemed to collapse on itself, the wings folding, the fuselage crumpling like a tin can that had been stepped on. It simply fell apart, and what might have been a burning body dropped away with arms and legs outspread.
“Got it, sir! Got it, sir!” the Cockney pilot moaned, as he fought against unconsciousness and the violence of the spin to gain control of his aircraft.
Michael was near passing out himself. The blood swelled in his face and roared in his ears. He hung onto the handgrips with desperate and perhaps terrified st
rength.
“Got it, sir! Got it, sir!” the pilot kept repeating, over and over, in a voice that sounded mangled.
And then, quite suddenly, he did have it. The Lysander righted itself. They were still going down fast, onto a terrain of yellow sand and black rocks about a thousand feet below. The pilot pulled back on his yoke and the nose came up. “Got it, sir!” he said, with bloody triumph in his mouth.
Something huge and dark swept over them. An extended wheel hit the Lysander’s left wing and knocked the bulky airplane through the sky. Michael saw the belly of Gantt’s 109 pass overhead. Fire was licking around the motionless prop. The Messerschmitt headed down.
Again the young pilot fought for control. This time it was obvious he was almost done. When Michael dared to look to the left, he saw the wing on that side torn to tatters.
“Can you get out, sir?” the pilot asked, which demonstrated his state of mind since Michael wore no parachute.
“Put us down!” Michael told him.
The pilot nodded. He coughed from deep in his chest and blood spattered the cracked glass before his face.
“Yes sir,” he managed to say.
The Lysander slipped to the left. The pilot corrected. The Lysander slipped to the right. The pilot corrected. He cut all power and lowered whatever flap was still working. He moved with slow and maybe dying deliberation. The Lysander began to turn on the side of its disabled wing. The ground was rising to meet them; it was all sand-shiny and hard angles of rock. Michael judged a hundred feet to go. He braced, if bracing would do any good.
“We’re in for it, sir,” said the pilot, in a voice that now sounded distant and almost childlike, as if he were falling down through time itself.
Fifty feet, Michael thought. The beads of sweat on his face were sweating.
Thirty feet.
“Yes sir,” said the pilot, answering some unknown command.
They hit.
There was a bone-jarring crunch. Michael was thrown against the side of the plane so hard he heard his left shoulder either separate or break with a noise like the pop of a broomstick being snapped. His cap flew off. The left side of his face smashed into the canopy, which surprisingly did not shatter. Maybe his cheekbone and jaw had shattered, he didn’t know. Pain fogged his vision. His left arm had gone cold. He lost his handgrips. There came a sound of metal being ripped away, and the Lysander was skidding on its belly because its wheels were gone. It went on, banging into and over stones and across the slithering sand. In its progress the Lysander turned to face the way it had come, and when at last it ceased its motion Michael Gallatin sat facing westward, bleeding and groggy amid a symphony of metallic moans and creaks and ticks and muffled thumps like a dying heartbeat.
It came to him, sometime in the next few seconds, that he smelled the hot sweet friction of sheared-off metal and the bitter aroma of smoke.
He blinked. Was his jaw even still connected to his face?
Smoke was starting to fill the cockpit.
He had to move.
His left arm would not, and pain speared from shoulder to collarbone when he tried. He got his seatbelt unbuckled with his right hand. Blood was in his mouth. He spat it out. He unlocked the canopy and shoved the cracked plexiglass open. He flung his kitbag from the plane. Then he climbed up and tumbled over the side onto the stony ground, an effort that again sent vicious pain through his injured arm.
Small flames were starting to curl up around the engine from beneath the wrecked plane. “Get out!” he called to the pilot, but the young man didn’t move.
Michael pulled himself up and instantly fell to his knees again, his balance for the moment a matter of past history. He realized the fire was growing, and he had to get the pilot out. He stood up, stumbled and righted himself. The sun’s power beat down upon his skull and he was nearly blinded by the glare. Blood was trickling from both nostrils. His left eye was rapidly swelling shut. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and got hold of one of the metal reinforcement strips that ran along the pilot’s canopy to flip it up. His right arm strained, but the thing was locked tight from within. He banged on the blood-spattered plexiglass. The pilot stirred, turned his head to display the gore that had streamed in a torrent from his mouth, and stared numbly at Michael Gallatin. The front of the pilot’s shirt was red where at least one bullet had hit him in the chest.
“Unlock it!” Michael shouted. And then again, if the young Cockney hadn’t heard: “Unlock your canopy!”
The pilot just stared at Michael, his swollen eyes heavy-lidded.
With a flash and a low hollow whump the engine burst into flames.
“Unlock your canopy!” Michael urged, and began to beat against the plexiglass with his useable fist.
Fire rippled from the engine toward the cockpit. The heat staggered Michael back.
A gout of red flame jumped into the pilot’s cabin. The young man continued to stare without speaking at Michael Gallatin, and even as he caught fire and began to contort into a shape no longer human he made no sound. Before Michael’s eyes he became a blaze, and one crisped hand reached up to press feebly against the blackening canopy. Then it fell back into the flames, and what looked like a swarm of a thousand glowing red bees swept around and around at the center of ashes and smoke.
The Lysander was being consumed, sending up a black smoke column. Michael backed away from the heat. The canopy exploded with the noise of a shotgun going off.
At a distance away from the conflagration Michael sat down on the ground, like a boy before a summertime campfire. He felt himself let go, because he had nowhere to get to in a hurry. Then the darkness came upon him as suddenly as if the sun had gone out, and when he fell onto his injured shoulder he gave a small gasp of pain but his eyes were already closed and he was for the moment also extinguished.
Two
“Hey, Englisher!” said the voice, speaking English. “Are you dead?”
The toe of a boot prodded Michael’s side.
He heard the voice and felt the prod, but it took him a few more seconds to fight up from the dark. When he opened his single working eye, he was in a world of blinding white light and dry heat that baked the lungs with a breath. He sat up and saw the gun pointed in his face.
“Easy,” cautioned the man behind the Walther P38 pistol. “Do nothing fast. As if you could. Friend, you are in one hell of a condition.”
Michael looked up at his visitor.
The man wore a tan-colored short-sleeved shirt open to show his white undershirt and a pair of tan-colored trousers tucked into dusty black boots. On the pocket of his shirt was pinned his Iron Cross and his Luftwaffe airman’s badge. He was an example of the handsome Nordic breed, with the touselled blonde hair of a wild little boy and sardonic amber eyes that belonged to a worldly-wise man. He was of compact, powerful build with a chiselled face, a hooked nose and a firm jaw, and he stood about five feet ten. Across his right cheek the slash of a fencer’s scar showed pale against his desert tan. A second smaller scar divided the left blonde eyebrow into two halves. Michael thought that this man had definitely seen his share of action, and perhaps another man’s share as well. The way he held the gun said he knew how to use it and would use it at the slightest provocation. The amber eyes focused fully on Michael and the pistol was unwavering, yet the man had also today seen his share of injury. Blood from a gash at his hairline had coursed down his forehead and along the right side of his face. His lower lip was split open and blood had dried on his chin. A blue knot swelled over the left eye. He had been through some rough weather.
Behind the man, maybe two miles away, Michael could see the black smoke rising from another aircraft wreck. This pilot had not come down with his ship, however, for he still carried his parachute pack slung over one shoulder and folded up within it could be seen the white chute itself.
“Name?” the man asked.
“Gallatin,” Michael answered. His jaw felt dislocated, but so be it.
“
Gantt,” the pilot said. “This is yours?” He motioned quickly with a tilt of his head toward the open kitbag on the ground a few feet away. Michael figured the man must have carried it over from beside the still-burning Lysander, since it was scorched by flames.
Michael nodded.
It had been gone through. Michael noted his Colt automatic in Gantt’s waistband under the outer shirt. Michael’s change of clothes was scattered around, and the canteen with its black leather shoulder strap lay atop his second pair of shorts. He could not fail to see the three bullet holes in the kitbag’s canvas and the bullet hole about midway up the canteen. Gantt had pushed a knot of cloth into the hole. “Unfortunately most of the water was lost,” Gantt said, “but I did squeeze some back into the canteen from your clothes.” He frowned and glanced toward a third plume of black smoke many miles away. “The talented bastard who shot me down had a superb Immelman, but he was not quite so good at his snap roll. What was his name?”
“I don’t know. I’m not a flyer.”
“No, you’re a faller,” came the reply. “You should feel lucky you’re not dead. Most who tangle with me end up that way.”
“Do most who tangle with you,” Michael said carefully, “not have guns on their planes? What was the point of shooting down the Lysander?”
“You got between me and a Spit. The bullets go where they go.” Gantt quickly scanned the horizon. “Now it’s time for us to go. They’ll see the smoke and come looking. Stand up.”
“No,” Michael said.
“What did I hear, Englisher?”
“I said…no. Meaning I’m not standing up. You go where you please, but I’m staying here.”
“Are you?” Gantt stepped forward and placed the gun’s barrel against Michael’s injured shoulder. “I can hurt you a little more, you see.”