He knew what it was and the reason for his stay of execution all in one cogent moment.
The Soviet offensive had been launched.
He looked into the periscopic sight and saw the Mustangs peeling away to the west. Had they crossed into Soviet airspace, some thirty miles in advance of where it had been the day before, they would have been fired upon by the Russians as surely as he would at any moment.
As the pain caused by the shard of metal from the instrument panel began working its way into his body, a sudden thought, a moment of raging doubt, held it in check.
The smoke and flames of battle that rolled towards him like a tidal wave. The first cries of Shaposhnikov’s baby? The birth of Archangel?
It was not too late, he had to tell himself. If the Marshal had launched his offensive against the West, there was even more reason now for ensuring that each of his bombs found their mark.
He pushed the throttles forward and caught the first whiff of battle-smoke on the slipstream that rushed through the broken Plexiglass on the left-hand side of the bomber’s nose.
The Yak 9s of Colonel Anatoly Putyatin, Military Pilot First Class, and his wingman, Lieutenant Mikhail Samsonov, swept the sky at three thousand metres a few kilometres behind the Red Army’s advance. It had been an uneventful patrol, but that had been the pattern of things over the last few months, with the Luftwaffe all but destroyed on the Eastern Front.
Putyatin glanced beyond his starboard wingtip at Samsonov, who was only six weeks out of the air academy at Tanyarsk. He caught his wingman looking admiringly at his own piston-engined Yakovlev 9 ‘Ulutshshennyi’, a masterpiece of Soviet engineering.
Putyatin jabbed his finger downwards, the signal that they were to return to Grafen, forward air base of the 13th Guards regiment, Soviet 5th Air Force, Frontal Aviation.
The colonel watched as Samsonov pointed his older Yak 9D towards their base. He soon spotted the airfield, clean and untouched by the war, beneath the first line of ridges that gave way gradually to the mountainous region beyond.
He followed Samsonov’s aircraft, White 15, as it slipped into the landing circuit, lowering its wheels about a kilometre downwind of the runway threshold.
He was just thinking how easy his first patrol of the new offensive had been, when he saw the German bomber pop up over the trees, its mottled camouflage momentarily stark and conspicuous against the blue dawn sky. He shouted a warning to Samsonov whose aircraft had slowed to a few kph above touchdown speed as it slid over the edge of the airfield, and banked his Yak 9U sharply on a course to intercept the intruder.
Kruze was wrestling to keep the Arado 234 on a low-level flight profile parallel with the ground, fighting the waves of pain from the injury to his arm, when he spotted the Yak beyond the next line of trees, its wheels lowered to land. It was too late to change course, or for remorse at his stupidity. Fleming’s words about the Soviet fighter base at Grafen were still echoing through his head as the Arado crossed the boundary fence of the airfield.
A row of pristine, single-engined fighters, their fuselages adorned with the red star and white identification numbers of Frontal Aviation, filled his vision. His first reaction was to bank the bomber so that it was lined up on the row of
Yaks, his second was to realize the futility of the manoeuvre because of the Arado’s lack of forward-firing armament.
With only a few seconds to think through the consequences of his impending action, but knowing that to do nothing would be to invite the Yak fighter unit to intercept his bomber on the return leg west, he punched the uppermost button on the left-hand horn of his control column. The Arado lifted a little as the 1000-lb bomb on the centreline dropped away from the aircraft.
Kruze was so low that the fusing mechanism could not compensate for his height, turning the bomb into a delayed-action device. It skipped once on the concrete in front of the line of fighters, ploughed through the first and second aircraft, missed the third, bounced thirty feet above the ground and then exploded in an air burst over the last five fighters.
The Rhodesian turned the Arado violently away from the destruction in front of him and found himself staring directly into the red propeller spinner of Samsonov’s Yak 9D as it wobbled in to land. Both aircraft veered sharply in opposite directions, Kruze narrowly missing a hangar, Samsonov unable to stop his wing tip catching the ground and sending the Yak into a violent cartwheel across the runway.
Putyatin watched helplessly from eight hundred metres as the German jet bomber, within the space of a few seconds, achieved the almost total destruction of his unit. Then his attention shifted to the wild acrobatics of his wingman’s fighter as it rolled, one wing tip after another across the ground, finally disintegrating in a fireball on the edge of the airfield.
The Colonel steepened his dive towards the Arado and watched his airspeed hit 640 kph. He uttered brief thanks that he had been allocated the new Ulutshshennyi — improved — variant of the Yak 9D, with its boosted 1875 hp engine, for otherwise he would have had no chance of catching the fascist bomber.
Kruze had no time in which to marvel at his lucky escape. Somehow he had veered off course and stumbled upon Grafen. Knowing his exact position now, he eased back on the stick, looking for the Vydra.
For a few long seconds, his airspeed dropped.
Immediately, a line of tracer rose to meet him from some unseen flak emplacement and he nosed the aircraft back down to earth, but not before he had glimpsed the last waypoint, or as good as earmarked it.
Ahead, in the distance, the twin peaks of Leek and Zalednik thrust their way skywards, towering above the other mountains in the range. Trickling between them, though unseen to him, was the Vydra River, winding its way up the valley all the way to Branodz.
Although flak burst around him intermittently, neither the anti-aircraft fire nor the fighter activity was as bad as he thought it would be. With mixed feelings, he realized he had been granted a reprieve from the full wrath of the Russians’ air defences because of the offensive. Frontal Aviation would be busy supporting ground operations with Yaks turned into fighter-bombers. Few Russian fighters would be given over to straight interception duties. Those that had, he had wiped off the map with his bomb run over their airfield.
Kruze winced and looked down at his arm, the blood caked thick around the ripped cloth of the shirt where the metal shard had entered.
“Not bad for a cripple,” he said to himself.
Except you’re one bomb shorter than you were before.
There was nothing else for it, but to make each shot count. The thought of missing the target now, when he had come so far, chilled him far more than the thin blast of icy slipstream that whistled through the cockpit.
With his eye on the peaks ahead and maintaining a steady altitude about a hundred feet above the trees, he leant forward and found the switch for the Lotfe.
Then he saw the shadow pass across the face of the sun off the right side of the Arado. Putyatin hurled his Yak round in a tight turn and came in with the light behind him, having taken full advantage of the drop in the Arado’s speed to press home his attack from Kruze’s front starboard quarter. Kruze never even saw the tracer from the Russian’s 20mm ShVAK cannon that tore through his fuselage, cutting a four-foot gash in the Arado just forward of the tail. The controls seemed to slacken in his hands, indicating immediately that his hydraulic pressure was down. A glance to the gauge told him that it had dropped significantly and the needle was still moving. He peered round, expecting to see a fiery trail pouring from his fuselage, but there was none. Suddenly, the rear tank low fuel warning light on the right side of the cockpit began flashing in red, angry pulses. One of the shells must have punctured the cell, miraculously failing to explode on its way through the fuselage, but now giving him a serious shortfall in fuel.