His ears drank in the quiet. You didn’t realize how badly war abused them till you got away from the racket of gunfire and explosions for a while. He suspected he’d be deaf as a stump when he got older. The prospect bothered him less than it might have. The way things were going, living long enough to grow old and deaf didn’t seem half bad.
A farmer out in the middle of an emerald field of new-sprouted barley waved to Walsh as he pedaled past. Cautiously-he hadn’t been on a bicycle in a while, and the road was bumpy-the sergeant lifted a hand from the handlebars and waved back.
He rode on. Another farmer came up the road perched on a wagon pulled by two mismatched horses. Did he have a motorcar he couldn’t drive because he couldn’t get fuel for it? Walsh wouldn’t have been surprised. You made do with what you had. He’d seen as much on the Continent. He wasn’t surprised to see it in Britain, too. This time, he waved first. The farmer gravely returned the courtesy.
When Walsh first heard the buzz of airplane engines, he thought his ears were ringing because they weren’t used to so much silence all around. Before long, though, he decided the sound was real. Then, for a few seconds, he believed it was coming from an RAF plane. But that wasn’t right, either. The engines sounded a different note, one that made the short hair at the nape of his neck prickle up.
“Bugger me blind if that’s not a German,” he muttered as he pulled to a stop on the grass at the edge of the road. He peered up at the sky, shielding his eyes against the sun. “What the bleeding hell is Fritz doing here?”
A bombing raid on Dundee from Norway? A daylight bombing raid? Was Fritz that stupid? Walsh didn’t think so. And the noise in the sky didn’t sound like squadron after squadron of bombers. One plane was up there, no more. Walsh’s ears had been abused, but he was sure of that.
Then he spotted it. He recognized it right away. German planes mostly had sharper angles than their RAF counterparts. This one was… “A 110!” Walsh had no doubt. He’d been strafed several times by the two-engined fighters roaring along at just above treetop height. This Bf-110 flew quite a bit higher, but its shape was unmistakable.
He scratched his head. He wasn’t lousy any more-that was something. But why on earth would a lone 110 fly over Scotland? Had some Nazi pilot poured down too much schnapps and taken off on a bet, or full of drunken bravado? That was madness, but so was everything else Walsh could think of.
Then the madness got even crazier. A parachute popped open. Whoever’d been flying that plane was coming to earth apart from it. Why, in the name of heaven? Walsh didn’t think anything was wrong with the airplane. Even after the fellow inside bailed out, the 110 flew on as if nothing had happened. The engine note never changed. It hadn’t changed before the flyer hit the silk, either.
Walsh got a crick in his neck. The descending ’chute was almost overhead. Walsh started to duck, imagining himself getting clopped by the German’s boots. But the breeze carried the fellow a few hundred yards into the field through which the road ran.
Walsh trotted toward him. He’d closed about half the gap before he wondered how smart he was. German pilots commonly carried pistols, while he was unarmed. But he was in his own country, for Christ’s sake. The German would have to be daft to plug him. Of course, the German had to be daft to come here like this in the first place, so what did that prove?
“Hands up!” Walsh yelled. “Hande hoch!” He spoke little German, but most British soldiers learned that one.
The flyer had a knife. He used it to cut himself free of the parachute shrouds. The canopy tumbled off across the field. The man slowly got to his feet. He favored one ankle a little. Walsh shouted at him again. With a smile, he let the knife drop to the ground and raised his hands. He was in his mid-forties-very old for a pilot-with bushy black eyebrows and a chin that stuck out. He looked oddly familiar.
“Do not fear me,” he said in good English. “I come in peace.”
“In a Messerschmitt-110? Sure you do, mate,” Walsh retorted.
“I am Rudolf Hess,” the man said.
And damned if he wasn’t. No wonder he looked familiar. In how many photographs had Walsh seen him at Hitler’s elbow? Half the time, his hand would be upraised in the stupid Nazi salute. To save his hide, Walsh couldn’t remember exactly what Hess’ title was. He was one of the biggest of the Party big shots, though. So what the bleeding hell was he doing in the middle of a Scottish field, still wearing a parachute harness? Walsh asked him, in lieu of standing there with his mouth hanging open like a stupid clot.
“I am come to confer with your government,” Hess answered, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Maybe he saw that Walsh wondered whether he was out of his skull, because he added, “Unofficially, of course.”
“Oh, of course,” Walsh said. “Confer about what?”
He guessed Hess would tell him it was none of his damned business. But Hess didn’t. “Why, about ways to end this unfortunate war between Germany and England and France, naturlich. ”
“Naturlich,” Walsh echoed in a hollow voice. “You could start by telling your soldiers to quit trying to kill me.”
“This I wish to do. We waste our time fighting one another,” Hess said seriously. “Better we should all fight the Russians together. So I feel. So feels the Fuhrer also.”
All of a sudden, Walsh stopped wondering if Hess was a nutter. The staff sergeant had no idea whether Neville Chamberlain’s government would make a deal like that, or whether France would go along if it did. But the government might. It might. The breeze felt chillier-or did the cold come from inside him? He had to force words out one by one: “I’d better take you back into Dundee.”
“ Danke schon. This would be good,” Hess said.
Back they went. It was several miles. They took turns walking and riding slowly on the bicycle. Hess spewed out a million reasons why England and France should turn on the Bolsheviks. At last, Walsh got sick of listening. He said, “Look, pal, I’m only a bloody sergeant. I can’t do anything about it one way or the other.” The German subsided into wounded silence.
When they got into Dundee, Walsh had a devil of a time convincing his superiors that Rudolf Hess was Rudolf Hess. They were even more certain than he had been that Hess wasn’t about to arrive in Scotland by jumping out of a Bf-110. Then they did believe him, and that might have been worse, because they started having kittens right before his eyes. They whisked Hess away in a swarm of military policemen.
“You will forget about this,” a captain barked at Walsh. “It never happened. You have no knowledge of it. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.” Walsh judged that was the only possible answer that would keep him out of a military jail. The bloke who said a little knowledge was a dangerous thing knew what he was talking about. To show he understood what the captain meant, Walsh added, “I won’t tell a soul.”
“You’d better not.” The captain sent Walsh a hard look, as if wondering whether to jug him like a hare on general principles. Walsh tried to exude innocence: not easy for a man of his age and experience. After a long, long pause, the captain jerked a thumb toward the door. “Get out.” Walsh had never been so happy to obey an order in his life.
Julius Lemp was used to getting strange orders from his superiors, and even to attracting them. He was still paying for sinking the Athenia. Chances were he’d go on paying for the rest of his career, unless he did something wonderful enough to cancel out the screwup. Offhand, he couldn’t think what that might be. Finding Jesus walking barefoot across the swells of the North Sea might do it. Anything short of that, no.