He looked over his shoulder and saw the Russian fighter coming in from the rear, half a mile behind, for another pass. With the bombs weighing him down and his controls at reduced effectiveness, there was little he could do to evade the Yak. He climbed, pulling as hard as he could on the stick with his good arm, suddenly banking the bomber away from the stream of fire that spewed out of the Yak’s propeller hub, the bright tracer racing past his cockpit and exploding in the trees five hundred yards in front of him.
Realizing that he could still outpace the piston-engined fighter, Kruze shoved the throttles forward and watched his speed creep up to 650 kph. He decoupled the Lotfe and peered into his periscope, watching with relief as the Yak began to slip away. In front of him, the mountains loomed, large and impenetrable, except for the gap between the two peaks, where he would point the Arado and fly it up the valley till he hit Branodz and punched the buttons that would release his bombs.
When he looked back to his instruments, the cockpit seemed on fire, so bright and so many were the warning lights illuminated on the right side of the control panel.
His starboard engine oil-pressure was dangerously low and his exhaust gas temperature gauge told him his right-hand turbojet was about to explode. A glance in the periscope. The Russian was still receding, leaving him with a choice: try and outrun it to the mountains and risk having his right engine ripped off, or shut it down and wait for the 20mm to knock him out of the sky.
The starboard jet unit fire-warning temperature gauge lit up, making the decision for him. He was a moment away from a catastrophic turbine failure. He willed his injured arm to make haste as it crept perilously slowly towards the throttle. At last he reached it, pulled it back and shut down the ailing engine.
He looked in the periscope and saw the Yak bound forward.
The Rhodesian reached out to his left, groaning with the stabs of pain to his arm, and hit the first of the three-position flap selector buttons and then pushed the undercarriage selector lever forward.
There was no reaction from the Arado.
Kruze’s eyes raced over his instruments. He lunged for the flap and undercarriage emergency hydraulic selector switch and then grabbed the large standby handpump by his right knee, pulling and pushing it furiously until he saw the needle on the hydraulic gauge creep back towards its true position in the centre of the dial.
The crippled jet bomber bucked as the flaps and wheels lowered into the airstream.
Putyatin was some way behind the 234 when he saw its wheels lower and the wings waggle. The Russian smiled. With holes that size in his fuselage, the German was finished, his tail looking as if it would fall off if the aircraft made any kind of violent manoeuvre. The Arado would make a glorious prize, a final testimony to his three years of fighting the fascists. It would also give Soviet scientists a long-awaited insight into the workings of the advanced German aircraft.
Kruze saw the Yak slide in behind his tail through the periscopic gunsight. He waited until the cross centred on its nose and he could see the form of the pilot in the cockpit, before hitting the button. Behind him the rearward-pointing Mauser MG 151 20mm cannons fired a controlled burst, striking Putyatin’s aircraft first in the engine, then in the fuel tanks as the Yak veered sharply upwards, exposing its soft, blue underbelly. There was a flash in the bowels of the Yak and then it plummeted earthwards, its rear fuselage lost in the surrounding fireball.
Kruze pulled the undercarriage up again and increased power gently on his good engine, keeping the aircraft lined up on the entrance to the valley. He prayed he could slip the crippled Arado unseen through the Russian defences as far as Branodz, now less than five minutes’ flight time away.
CHAPTER NINE
Malenkoy swung his kit into the back of the jeep, jumped into the driver’s seat and set off at top speed down the forest track, away from Chrudim, the maskirovka and Archangel. He couldn’t wait to get onto the train at Ostrava. Only then, away from the horror of the past few days, not to mention Shlemov’s NKVD, did he feel he could sleep.
Shlemov had been quite specific. When the NKVD had found him in his tent at Chrudim following his discharge from the hospital, his message was quite clear. He, Malenkoy, was a hero, but an embarrassing one. He was therefore being transferred, with immediate effect, from the front back to Moscow and the Academy. And if he wanted to talk about his wartime experiences too openly once he was safely ensconced in the heart of the Motherland, there was always the safety of his family to consider…
The early morning sun poured through the trees, the rays glinting on the Order of Lenin that bounced on his chest every time the jeep hit another pot-hole. Malenkoy sucked in the cool mountain air and the fragrance of the pines. This was how he wanted to remember Czechoslovakia.
Fleming patrolled the skies high above the vast forest that lay directly beneath the path that Kruze would have to take on his run-in to Branodz, his eyes scanning the horizon for a sign of the 234 and any inquisitive Yaks. Kruze was already overdue. Although he wanted to see the Rhodesian safe from the Russians’ guns, he realized that if the Arado was still airworthy, his Meteor was the last line of defence.
Flying high above the new Russian offensive, Fleming recognized that he owed his safe passage to the fact that Frontal Aviation was running too many missions in support of the Red Army to worry about a lone Meteor crossing into Soviet-designated airspace.
But the assault… was it Konev’s or Shaposhnikov’s?
He double-checked his position. Satisfied that he was maintaining a combat air patrol over the valley that led to Shaposhnikov’s HQ, he went back to searching the ground for a sign of Kruze.
He felt desperately alone. He questioned what he was doing there. He could not shoot Kruze down in cold blood. There had to be another way.
It was nothing more than a slight movement, caught out of the corner of his eye, that made him narrow his search to the quadrant on his forward starboard beam. At first he thought it was a Russian aircraft, limping home from a bombing sortie against German positions at the front. But then he noticed the stark black crosses on the upper surface of the wings as it drew closer, sticking close to the contours of the land, and he knew it was the Arado heading straight for Branodz. Although it was still some way off, he could see it was heavily battle-scarred, the great gash in the tail so big that daylight was visible through the hole.
The Arado was flying one wing down, the starboard wing tip was almost brushing the tops of the trees. It was slow, much too slow, he thought; and then he realized why. A thin trail of smoke snaked from the right-hand engine. Kruze had gone for an in-flight shut-down of a Jumo. Either that or it had been knocked out by gunfire.
He increased speed and dived the Meteor towards his quarry.
In the cockpit of the Arado, Kruze was too busy checking the instruments governing his good engine and keeping the damaged plane on a straight and level course to notice the descent of the Meteor. He had left the Lotfe sight switched on, the height and speed of the aircraft fed into the BZA1 bombing computer. Unless he released the two thousand-pounders soon, his aircraft would bury itself into the inhospitable hillside.
He had swept over Russian patrols and vehicles, knew that they would be trying to radio his progress to Branodz. But he also knew that there was more than an even chance that their transmissions would be blocked by the contours of the terrain through which he now manoeuvred his crippled aircraft. He gritted his teeth against the pain in his arm. Nothing would stop him from putting his two bombs through Shaposhnikov’s HQ now.