He watched carefully. Two men. One wore a pilot’s leather helmet but not a uniform, just a tent of a trench coat that hadn’t seen cleaning or pressing in years. He was the pilot, and he tossed the helmet into the plane, along with an unplugged set of headphones. At the same time he pulled out a battered fedora, which looked like it had been crushed in the pocket of the coat for all the years it hadn’t been pressed or cleaned.
No. 2 was more interesting. He was SS, totally, completely, avatar of dark style and darker menace. The uniform — jodhpurs and boots under a smart tunic, tight at the neck, black cap with death’s head rampant in silver above the bill at a rakish angle — was more dramatic than the man, who appeared porky and graceless. He was shakier than the pilot, taking a few awkward steps to get his land legs back and drive the dizziness from his mind.
In time a Mercedes staff car emerged from somewhere in the darkness, driven by a Luftwaffer, who leaped out and offered a snappy salute. He did not shake hands with either, signifying his enlisted status as against their commissions, but obsequiously retreated to the car, where he opened the rear door.
The two officers slid in. The driver resumed his place behind the wheel, and the car sped away into the night.
“Yes, that’s very good, Sergeant,” said Macht as the car drove in darkness between the tower and administration complex on the left and the officers’ mess on the right. The gate was a few hundred meters ahead. “Now, very quickly, let us out and continue on your way, outside the gate, along the road, and back to the station at Bricquebec, where your commanding officer waits.”
“Ah, sir, my instructions are—”
“Do as I say, Sergeant, unless you care to join the other bad boys of the Wehrmacht on an infantry salient on some frozen hill of dog shit in Russia.”
“Obviously, sir, I will obey.”
“I thought you might.”
The car slipped between two buildings, slowed, and Macht eased out, followed by Boch. Then the car rolled away, speeded up, and loudly issued the pretense that it was headed to town with two important passengers.
“Macht,” hissed Boch, “what in the devil’s name are you up to?”
“Use your head, Herr Hauptsturmführer. Our friend is not going to be caught like a fish in a bucket. He’s too clever. He presumes the shortest possible time between his escape from Paris and our ability to figure it out and know what name he travels under. He knows he cannot make it all the way to Cherbourg and steal or hire a boat. No indeed, and since that idiot Scholl has conveniently plied him with information about the layout and operational protocols of NJG-9, as well as, I’m certain, a precise location, he has identified it as his best opportunity for an escape. He means, I suppose, to fly to England in a 110 like the madman Hess, but we have provided him with a much more tempting conveyance — the low, slow, gentle Storch. He cannot turn it down, do you see? It is absolutely his best — his only — chance to bring off his crazed mission, whatever it is. But we will stop him. Is that pistol loaded?”
Boch slapped the Luger under the flap of his holster on his ceremonial belt.
“Of course. One never knows.”
“Well, then, we shall get as close as possible and wait for him to make his move. I doubt he’s a quarter kilometer from us now. He’ll wait until he’s certain the car is gone and the lazy Luftwaffe tower personnel are paying no attention, and then he’ll dash to the airplane, and off he goes.”
“We will be there,” said Boch, pulling his Luger.
“Put that thing away, please, Herr Hauptsturmführer. It makes me nervous.”
Basil began his crawl. The grass wasn’t high enough to cover him, but without lights, no tower observer could possibly pick him out flat against the ground. His plan was to approach on the oblique, locating himself on such a line that the plane was between himself and the watchers in the tower. It wouldn’t obscure him, but it would be more data in a crowded binocular view into an already dark zone, and he hoped that the lazy officer up there was not really paying that much attention, instead simply nodding off on a meaningless night of duty far from any war zone and happy that he wasn’t out in the godforsaken French night on some kind of insane catch-the-spy mission two kilometers away at the train station.
It hurt, of course. His back throbbed, a bruise on his hip ached, a pain between his eyes would not go away, and the burns on knee and arm from his abrasions seemed to mount in intensity. He pulled himself through the grass like a swimmer, his fear giving him energy that he should not have had, the roughness of his breath drowning out the night noise. He seemed to crawl for a century, but he didn’t look up, because, as if he were swimming the English Channel, if he saw how far he had to go, the blow to his morale would be stunning.
Odd filaments of his life came up from nowhere, viewed from strange angles so that they made only a bit of sense and maybe not even that. He hardly knew his mother, he had hated his father, his brothers were all older than he was and had formed their friendships and allegiances already. Women that he had been intimate with arrived to mind, but they did not bring pride and triumph, only memories of human fallibility and disappointment, theirs and his; and his congenital inability to remain faithful to any of them, love or not, always revealed its ugliness. Really, he had had a useless life until he signed with the crown and went on his adventures — it was a perfect match for his adventurer’s temperament, his casual cruelty, his cleverness, his ruthlessness. He had no problem with any of it: the deceit, the swindles, the extortion, the cruel manipulation of the innocent, even the murder. He had killed his first man, a corrupt Malaysian police inspector, in 1935, and he remembered the jump of the big Webley, the smell of cordite, the man’s odd deflation as he surrendered to gravity. He thought it would have been so much more; it was, really, nothing, nothing at all, and he supposed that his own death, in a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, a few weeks, or next year or the year after, would mean as little to the man who killed him, probably some Hanoverian conscript with a machine pistol firing blindly into the trees that held him.
So it would go. That is the way of the wickedness called war. It eats us all. In the end, it and it alone is the victor, no matter what the lie called history says. The god of war, Mars the Magnificent and Tragic, always wins.
And then he was there.
He was out of grass. He had come to the hardpacked earth of the runway. He allowed himself to look up. The little plane was less than fifty meters away, tilted skyward on its absurdly high landinggear struts. He had but to jump to the cockpit, turn it on, let the rpm’s mount, then take off the brakes, and it would pull itself forward and up, due north, straight on till morning.
Fifty meters, he thought. All that’s between myself and Blighty.
He gathered himself for the crouched run to it. He checked: Pistol still with me, camera in my pocket, all nice and tidy. He had one last thing to do. He reached into his breast pocket and shoved his fingers down, probing, touching, searching. Then he had it. He pulled the L-pill out, fifty ccs of pure strychnine under a candy shell, and slid it into his mouth, back behind his teeth, far in the crevice between lip and jawbone. One crunch and he got to Neverland instantly.
“There,” whispered Boch. “It’s him, there, do you see, crouching just off the runway.” They knelt in the darkness of the hangar closest to the Storch.
Macht saw him. The Englishman seemed to be gathering himself. The poor bastard is probably exhausted. He’s been on the run in occupied territory over four days, bluffed or brazened his way out of a dozen near misses. Macht could see a dark doublebreasted suit that even from this distance looked disheveled.