“I hope you never have to fly this,” Broyles said. “I wouldn’t wish that job on my worst bloody enemy. Gives me the willies just to work on it. And that’s without the warhead installed.”
Kruze sat down on a work-bench next to the Chief and sucked hard on the loosely packed end of the Lucky Strike. “What about the poor, dumb German who’s going to fly it for real?”
The Chief snorted, utter contempt on his face. ‘If a bloody Nazi is mad enough to get into this thing in the first place, then he deserves to be damned, damned to hell.”
Kruze cursed his stupidity.
“Sorry, Chief, I forgot.” He pulled again on the cigarette. “Maybe this is one job you should be taken off.”
Broyles ground the stub under his heel and wriggled his way back under the Fieseler. Kruze saw the pain and the anger ebb from the seasoned engineer’s face. The old Broyles, the professional, twenty-five years in the service, looked back at him.
“Pass us that wrench, would you, Mr Kruze?”
Kruze did as he was asked.
“To tell you the truth,” the older man said, “it’s just another job. And that’s what I live for now, you see. The service. That’s all the family I need now. Thanks.” He passed the tool back to Kruze. “Now, I just hate Nazis and bloody officers.” He grinned back at Kruze, exposing an intermittent row of nicotine-stained, unbrushed teeth. “English bloody officers, of course.”
Kruze smiled back. “Of course,” he said.
He watched Broyles remove the panelling, going about his work as if the Fieseler were a saloon car brought in for a routine oil change at a garage. He tried to imagine Broyles the family man, with a wife and two children living in the outskirts of London. Sending his wage packet to them once a week, until a faulty guidance system determined that a Vi should overfly its target in the centre of the capital and crash twenty miles off course in a suburb where Mrs Broyles and family went about their routine, ordinary lives.
“Better to have loved and lost, Mr Kruze.”
The panel, with the stark serial number on the inside face exposed, was discarded noisily on the concrete floor.
“I’ll be seeing you, Chief.” The words disappeared as the first cough of a 12-cylinder Daimler-Benz from the Me 110 ripped through the hangar.
Kruze headed for the sliding doors. His mind was full of thoughts about the Chief, first family man, then widower, now remarried to the service. For the rest of his life. He thought of himself — and he hadn’t done that for a long time — Piet Kruze… orphan. Not much to stay for. Nothing to return to, winding up a bitter old man after a lifetime’s dedication to the job, to flying. And nothing else to show for his life. What a bloody waste.
He emerged into the damp, cold air. The mist was still heavy; no chance of it lifting that day. He yearned for the warmth of the hangar again, then thought of the heat on his back from the open fire in the room of the small apartment in London where he had held her for the first time.
Penny Fleming. He loved her, didn’t he? She had made him feel good inside, good about himself — and he hadn’t felt that way since he had turned his back on the small homestead, and an old man who had loved him, hundreds of miles from nowhere in the African bush.
Penny. The future.
He quickened his step, moving now with purpose to rouse Marlowe, get him to cover for him for the day. Shouldn’t be too difficult, he persuaded himself. There wasn’t going to be any flying done. And Marlowe had the car that would transport him to the cottage in Buckinghamshire where he could once again glimpse the future and, this time, catch it in his hands.
Dietz was so close that he could smell Herries, even though he could not see him. The SS sergeant lay down by the dense trees beside the main highway and waited.
His shoulder hurt like hell, but at least the shrapnel wound had been clean. The metal had torn through the flesh leaving no chunks of the antipersonnel grenade inside to turn the wound gangrenous. In some respects, the injury had proved advantageous, as its painful throbbing had kept him from succumbing to the exhaustion that had racked his body during the march of the past two days.
He was going to find Herries and kill him, whatever it took. His hatred of the man over the past two years was now justified and it felt good. When he found his officer, he would put him to his death slowly and, furthermore, he’d get a medal for doing it once headquarters was informed that Herries had turned. He always knew that the man was a fucking traitor. He had always been the Englishman through and through. Some of his preciousness had been ironed out by the long Russian campaign, but unlike the other English who had joined the SS until death, Herries had been looking for the right moment to jump ship. And Dietz had merely been waiting for him to do it. Now that he had, he was going to pay.
It had been so easy picking up Herries’ scent. The man had left a trail through the forest as wide as Ludwig Strasse, the main street of his home city, Munich. The only reason he had not caught up with Herries sooner was because he had had to wait until light on the morning after the explosion to see enough to pick up his tracks. That had been dangerous, because Ivan had arrived at the camp just before dawn and Dietz had had to lie low until they went on their way, all the time hoping that they would not find and follow Herries’ trail themselves. The sergeant had seen the Siberians with the Russian officers and knew that they were more than capable of tracking down Herries in that forest. He did not want them to remove his pleasure of hunting the turncoat himself.
When the Russians left, it took Dietz a few minutes to find the path that Herries had cut through the trees. Thereafter, his only problem was maintaining the stamina to catch up, but he knew that Herries was partially incapacitated by his chronic diarrhoea, and that had spurred him on in his quest.
And now he was very close. The tracks were fresh, not more than a few hours old at the most. Now that he had reached the end of the forest, found the Strakonice-Pilzen highway, he would wait, listen and watch. Herries would show himself, sooner or later.
Dietz was grateful for the opportunity to rest up. He must have marched thirty kilometres in the past two days. From what Herries had said at the camp they must be approaching their own lines by now. It was another fifteen kilometres to the front, maybe less. Judging the points of the compass from the position of the sun, he calculated that Herries would be heading north and east, which would mean following the road that lay before him off to the right. He reckoned that it would pay to stick to the forest, on account of the occasional Russian convoy that used the road, but if Herries had any sense, he would keep the road in sight as a permanent navigational reference point.
Where was Herries?
Dietz resolved to wait for one more hour, before searching for Herries’ tracks on the other side of the road. But he was still convinced that Herries was on this side. It was a gut feeling, but his instinct had served him right when he had called on it before.
The sound of a vehicle approaching from the front caught his ear. He picked it up several hundred metres away on the long, straight highway. It was a jeep moving at speed, its bright red star clearly visible on the bonnet. Dietz hugged the ground a little closer and merged with the grass and the bushes.
The open-topped vehicle passed so close that Dietz was able to distinguish the lone occupant as a lieutenant from the silver flashes that twinkled on his epaulettes. His bored expression reflected the tedium of driving along the straight flat roads that crossed the great Czechoslovak plain that lay beneath the mountains. The German twitched at the opportunity he was missing; an officer riding alone in a jeep without escort was a rare sight that close to the front. But to expose his position now would be to alert Herries, and the Englishman came before all Russians.