In less than two minutes he was out of the deserted village end running hard along an open road. As he ran he caught the drone of an aircraft engine and knew that it must be a Pathfinder coming in to mark the targets. A siren wailed, then a score of anti-aircraft batteries opened up. Streams of tracer bullets streaked the night sky and shells began to burst overhead.
By then Gregory had covered a mile. The road dipped slightly and in a depression ahead a dark group of trees stood out. The fact that by now Kuporovitch would realize' his danger and do his best to save himself did not enter Gregory's head. His one desperate thought was that before the friend who meant so much to him reached the camp he must manage to catch him up.
A dull droning was now audible from seaward. The mighty bomber fleet was coming in. In the distance, to either side of the group of trees towards which the road led, the darkness was stabbed by spurts of flame. The flashes lit up long lines of hutments and humps like giant golf-bunkers that must be the assembly shops protected by thick walls of sandbags. The Pathfinder had located his target and was dropping his markers.
Gasping for breath, but still running hard, Gregory reached the group of trees. His chest pained him terribly and he knew that his strength was flagging, yet he forced his aching legs to obey his will and thrust him on. When he was halfway through the trees the bombs began to fall.
From the sky there came a roar like continuous thunder. It was punctuated by terrific detonations. Searchlights streaked the sky in all directions. Anti-aircraft shells were now bursting up aloft at the rate of six a second. It seemed impossible that anything could live up there through such a barrage. Pieces of shell came whistling downward. An aircraft was caught like a tiny gnat in the beam of a searchlight. It was hit, burst into flames and came spiraling earthwards. In front of him, through the fringe of trees on either side of the road, Gregory could now see the camp clearly. Scores of brilliant flashes made it as bright as daylight. A dozen of the long huts were already on fire. Incendiaries were showering down and others were igniting every minute. The explosions of bombs and guns merged into a deafening drumfire.
Gregory was nearly through the cluster of trees. At the side of the road, less than a hundred yards away, he suddenly saw a figure that had previously been hidden by them. Against the glare of the blazing camp there could be no mistaking the solitary, broad-shouldered man who was standing quite still watching its destruction. With infinite relief, Gregory staggered o a stop. Then, with all the remaining strength of his lungs, to yelled:
'Stefan! Stefan! For God's sake take cover.'
Kuporovitch did not turn and through the roar of the explosions it seemed unlikely that he could have heard. Starting to run again, Gregory gave another shout.
At that moment there came a blinding flash, another and another, as a stick of bombs straddled the coppice. The trees to either side of the road swayed and crumpled. Gregory glimpsed one as, uprooted by the blast, it toppled and fell. There was no escape. It crashed directly on to him. One moment he had been running, the next he was pinned to the ground in the middle of the road. An intolerable pain shot through his body. His eyes seemed to burst out of their sockets. A terrible weight on his left leg held him captive. Even as he strove to lift his hands they flopped back slack and useless. Everything about him had gone black. The crashing of bombs and roar of guns now sounded distant, as though his ears had suddenly been plugged with cotton wool.
Through a mist of pain a thought flashed into his. brain. It was the 17th of August. An 8 day in the 8th month. Malacou had warned him that any such day, in conjunction with his birth number 4 would prove highly dangerous to him, and particularly so in his association with Kuporovitch. Yet he had ignored that warning and been brought to the fatal date on account of the Russian's having to be a day late in coming on his fortnightly forty-eight-hour leave. Malacou lad also told Gregory that he might die in the hour of his triumph.
This, then, was it! He had had a good run for his money and Peenemьnde was being destroyed. But he had come to the end of the road. His agony then seeped away as he slipped into total unconsciousness.
8
Sentenced for Life
WHEN Gregory came to he was at first conscious only of the agony that racked his body. Vaguely he realized that he was being carried and that at every step his bearer took an intolerable spasm of pain shot from the region of his hip up towards his heart. He began to whimper and, indistinctly, he heard a voice speaking to him. But he had been temporarily deafened by the nearby explosion of the bomb that had brought the tree down upon him. He wanted to implore the man who was carrying him to stop and put him down, but he could not formulate the words. The stabbing pain increased with every step and again he fainted.
The next time he became semi-conscious it slowly penetrated his thoughts that he was lying in a shallow ditch and that someone was heaping earth upon him. He felt certain then that he really must be dead and that whoever had found him was giving him a perfunctory burial. Knowing that anyone might lose a limb yet still feel an ache in it, he told himself that agony from wounds that a body received before death must continue for a time in the consciousness of the spirit that had departed from it. Resigning himself to that conclusion, he lay still and prayed that it might not be very long before he was relieved of the ghastly throbbing that racked him. After a while the pain subsided as his mind again blacked out.
When, once again, his brain began to stir, his eyes flickered open and he saw that it was full daylight. His still pain-racked body had a weight upon it, as though he were lying beneath a dozen blankets, but his face was not covered and, as with lackluster eyes he lay gazing upwards, he saw the branches and tops of trees.
Suddenly his mind cleared. He recalled that it was a tree that had felled him. The events of the previous night flooded pack: his desperate race to stop Kuporovitch from entering the camp, the Experimental Station going up in flames. He no longer supposed himself to be dead, and the sight of the trees about him led him to assume that he was still in the coppice where he had been struck down. It seemed that someone must have found his unconscious body, carried it to a ditch and cast a light covering of earth over it. Yet why had they not; covered his face? That puzzled him; but the gnawing pain n his thigh prevented him from concentrating on the question.
For a long while he lay comatose. Then he roused again. the thought entered his mind that, although hundreds of people must have been killed in the raid, sooner or later the soldiers of the guard who had chased and found him would return to bury him properly. He must not fall into their hands. Somehow he must get away from the coppice before they came back to it.
Gritting his teeth he tried to sit up. But the pain became too agonizing and he fell back. After a time he succeeded in turning over. His arms and right leg were still sound; his left leg a dead weight, red-hot and throbbing madly. Clutching a tree root, he levered himself up on his good knee, hauling his body out from under the heap of leaves and top soil. Foot by foot, and fainting twice on the way, he managed to drag himself some twenty feet, to the side of the coppice nearest which the trees ended.
After lying there a long while he recovered sufficiently from his efforts to raise himself on his elbows and look about him. In the near distance he saw a village from the middle of which rose a church spire. To his amazement he recognized the spire as that of the church in Krцslin.