He felt himself elongate as he flew through the air, and as his leap carried him out of the gap between the two cars the slipstream hit him hard, sending his arms and legs flying wildly.
He seemed to hang in the darkness for an eternity, feeling the air beat him, hearing the roar of both the wind and the train, seeing nothing.
Then he hit. Stars exploded, suns collapsed, the universe split atomically, releasing a tidal wave of energy. He tasted dust, felt pain and a searing jab in his back, then high-speed abrasion of his whole body, a piercing blow to his left hand, had the illusion of rolling, sliding, falling, hurting all at once, and then he lay quiet.
Am I dead?
He seemed not to be.
The train was gone now. He was alone in the track bed, amid a miasma of dust and blood. At that point the pain clamped him like a vise and he felt himself wounded, though how badly was yet unknown. Could he move? Was he paralyzed? Had he broken any bones?
He sucked in oxygen, hoping for restoration. It came, marginally.
He checked his hip pocket to see if his Browning .380 was still there, and there indeed it was. He reached next for his shin, hoping and praying that the Minox had survived the descent and landfall.
It wasn’t there! The prospect of losing it was so tragically immense that he could not face it and exiled the possibility from his brain as he found the tape, still tight, followed it around, and in one second touched the aluminum skin of the instrument. Somehow the impact of the fall had moved it around his leg but had not sundered, only loosened, the tape. He pried it out, slipped it into his hip pocket. He slipped the Browning into his belt in the small of his back, then counted to three and stood.
His clothes were badly tattered, and his left arm so severely ripped he could not straighten it. His right knee had punched through the cheap pinstriped serge, and it too had been shredded by abrasions. But the real damage was done to his back, where he’d evidently encountered a rock or a branch as he decelerated in the dust, and it hurt immensely. He could almost feel it bruising, and he knew it would pain him for weeks. When he twisted he felt shards of glass in his side and assumed he’d broken or cracked several ribs. All in all, he was a mess.
But he was not dead, and he was more or less ambulatory.
He recalled the idiot Luftwaffe colonel on the ride down.
“Yes, our squadron is about a mile east of the tracks, just out of town. It’s amazing how the boys have dressed it up. You should come and visit us soon, monsieur. I’ll take you on a tour. Why, they’ve turned a rude military installation in the middle of nothing into a comfortable small German town, with sewers and sidewalks and streets, even a gazebo for summertime concerts. My boys are the best, and our wing does more than its share against the Tommy bombers.”
That put the airfield a mile or so ahead, given that the tracks had to run north — south. He walked, sliding between trees and gentle undergrowth, through a rather civilized little forest, actually, and his night vision soon arrived through his headache and the pain in his back, which turned his walk into Frankenstein’s lumber, but he was confident he was headed in the right direction. And very shortly he heard the approaching buzz of a small plane and knew absolutely that he was on track.
The Storch glided through the air, its tiny engine buzzing away smoothly like a hummingbird’s heart. Spindly from its overengineered landing gear and graceless on the ground, it was a princess in the air. Macht held it at 450 meters, compass heading almost due south. He’d already landed at the big Luftwaffe base at Caen for a refueling, just in case Bricquebec proved outside the Storch’s 300- kilometer range. He’d follow the same route back, taking the same fuel precautions. He knew: in the air, take nothing for granted. The western heading would bring him to the home of NJG-9 very soon, as he was flying throttle open, close to 175 km per hour. It was a beautiful little thing, light and reliable; you could feel that it wanted to fly, unlike the planes of the Great War, which had mostly been underpowered and overengineered, so close to the maximum they seemed to want to crash. You had to fight them to keep them in the air, while the Storch would fly all night if it could.
A little cool air rushed in, as the Perspex window was cranked half down. It kept the men cool; it also kept them from chatting, which was fine with Macht. It let him concentrate and enjoy, and he still loved the joy of being airborne.
Below, rural France slipped by, far from absolutely dark but too dark to make out details.
That was fine. Macht, a good flier, trusted his compass and his watch and knew that neither would let him down, and when he checked the time, he saw that he was entering NJG-9’s airspace. He picked up his radio phone, clicked it a few times, and said, “Anton, Anton, this is Bertha 9–9, do you read?”
The headset crackled and snapped, and he thought perhaps he was on the wrong frequency, but then he heard, “Bertha 9–9, this is Anton — I have you; I can hear you. You’re bearing a little to the southwest. I’d bear a few degrees to the north.”
“Excellent, and thanks, Anton.”
“When I have you overhead, I’ll light a runway.”
“Excellent, excellent. Thanks again, Anton.”
Macht made the slight correction and was rewarded a minute later with the sudden flash to illumination of a long horizontal V. It took seconds to find the line into the darkness between the arms of the V which signified the landing strip. He eased back on the throttle, hearing the engine rpm’s drop, watched his airspeed indicator fall to seventy-five, then sixty-five, eased the stick forward into a gentle incline, came into the cone of lights, and saw grass on either side of a wide tarmac built for the much larger twin-engine Me110 night fighters, throttled down some more, and alit with just the slightest of bumps.
When the plane’s weight overcame its decreasing power, it almost came to a halt, but he revved back to taxi speed, saw the curved roofs of hangers ahead, and taxied toward them. A broad staging area before the four arched buildings, where the fighters paused and made a last check before deploying, was before him. He took the plane to it, pivoted it to face outward-bound down the same runway, and hit the kill switch. He could hear the vibrations stop, and the plane went silent.
Basil watched the little plane taxi to the hangers, pause, then helpfully turn itself back to the runway. Perfect. Whoever was flying was counting on a quick trip back and didn’t want to waste time on the ground.
He crouched well inside the wire, about 300 meters from the airplane, which put him 350 meters from the four hangars. He knew, because Oberst Scholl had told him, that recent manpower levies had stripped the place of guards and security people, all of whom were now in transit to Russia, where their bodies were needed urgently to feed into the fire. As for the patrol dogs, one had died of food poisoning and the other was so old he could hardly move, again information provided by Scholl. The security of NJG-9’s night fighter base was purely an illusion; all nonessential personnel had been stripped away for something big in Russia.
In each hangar Basil could see the prominent outlines of the big night fighters, each cockpit slid open, resting at the nose-up, tail-down, fifteen-degree angle on the buttress of the two sturdy landing gears that descended from the huge bulge of engine on the broad wings. They were not small airplanes, and these birds wore complex nests of prongs on the nose, radar antennae meant to guide them to the bomber stream 7,600 meters above. The planes were all marked by the stark black Luftwaffe cross insignia, and their metallic snouts gleamed slightly in the lights, until the tower turned them off when the Storch had come to a safe stop.