A Thousand Suns (31 page)

He thought there would have been more.

One of the American soldiers stood up from behind the sandbags and walked slowly across the grass towards Schöln, his rifle raised warily. From the uniform and rank insignia Schöln could see he was a captain. The American came to a halt a few feet away and studied him silently for a full minute, his jaw working hard behind sealed lips on a piece of gum. He shook his head and tutted like an adult admonishing a child.

‘I mean . . . what is it with you guys? The war’s over, and yet you people still insist on giving us a hard time here.’

He shook his head once more, ‘Jeeeezz . . .’

Chapter 46

Getting Wallace

Mark brought the Cherokee to a halt. Devenster Street was empty save for a man walking his dog, and, across the way, three kids dressed in jeans and hooded tracksuits, doing their best to look urban. Other than that, it was deserted.

Chris scanned the road for anyone else, perhaps hiding in a shop doorway, or in the opening of some side street, or watching patiently from one of the many pools of darkness between the sparsely spread streetlights.

‘It looks clear, I guess,’ Chris uttered quietly, not entirely sure that it was.

‘So where’s this Wallace guy staying?’ asked Mark.

Chris pointed towards a small, traditional-looking wooden house, halfway up the street, with a colonial-style porch in front of it. All it needed was a dinky front lawn surrounded by a white picket fence, he mused, to fit the
olde
New England cliché. ‘That place over there. At least, I think that’s the one.’

‘Okay, how are we going to do this?’

Chris wondered whether he should just have Mark race up the street, stop and drop him outside. With the engine still running he could race inside and hopefully, by knocking on one or two doors, find and rouse the old boy quickly and then hop back into the car and speed out of town. Screw doing this carefully, he thought, just be in and out again in the bat of an eyelid.

But then, on the other hand, it might be wiser to take a more cautious approach. If those men had tracked down Wallace they could be, probably would be, watching from a distance now. They might even be using Wallace as bait, anticipating Chris would come back for him.

‘Shit, I don’t know, Mark. They could be waiting for us,’ Chris mumbled unhappily.

Mark sat upright in his seat, and nodded towards the bed and breakfast. ‘Hang on! Somebody’s coming out of that place,’ said Mark quickly.

A door on the porch swung slowly open. Muted amber light from inside spilled out across the whitewashed woodwork momentarily. Chris could see someone coming out, the silhouetted form stooped, tired.

‘I think that’s him! Wallace.’

The old man shuffled out onto the porch, looking up and down the street warily. Then, he moved away from the single lamp above the door into the darkness of one corner of the porch and settled down on a seat. A moment later, Chris saw the momentary flicker of a cigarette lighter, and, a few seconds later, a cloud of pale blue smoke emerged from the darkness, caught in the amber glow of the porch light.

Having a hard time getting to sleep
.

It was not surprising at all, given how jumpy he had been earlier that night in Lenny’s. Even if he hadn’t been jumped by those two goons in his room, Chris wondered if he would have been able to get much sleep tonight. His mind had begun going to work on the story as he had headed back from Lenny’s - which pictures he would use, whether to take the story to any larger publication or dutifully deliver it to
News Fortnite
first.

Wallace was probably just as wound up and twitchy as he was. And right now, Chris could happily have joined him indulging in some nerve-settling cigarette therapy. The nicotine gum his jaws were industriously working on was doing no bloody good at all.

Why’s he sitting outside for a fag?
Probably some stringent ‘no smoking’ policy inside the bed and breakfast, he decided, answering his own question. Then again, maybe the old boy felt a whole lot safer watching the road outside. After this evening’s run-in, Chris could empathise with that. Right now there was no way he could see himself curling up in a nice warm quilt somewhere and nodding off, not with some armed psychotic nuts out there roaming the town looking for him.

‘Well, that makes our job a whole bunch easier, then. You ready to do this?’ said Mark, his hands firmly gripping the steering wheel.

‘Okay, mate, nice and easy. Let’s not tear up the street and burn rubber in front of him. We’d probably kill him with the shock.’

Mark nodded and had begun to slowly ease the vehicle forward. It was then that Chris spotted something reflective glinting in the darkness towards the other end of the street. ‘Hold the phone, what’s that?’

‘What?’ replied Mark.

‘I saw something,’ said Chris, ‘up the other end.’

It emerged out of the darkness, the light from the streetlamp above flickering across the windscreen. A dark, unmarked van approached them from the opposite end of Devenster Street. Like them, it was rolling forward slowly, with the headlights off.

‘That doesn’t look good,’ said Mark.

‘Fuck it then, just go!’ snapped Chris. ‘I’ll jump out and grab him.’

Mark pushed the pedal down hard, and with a squeal of rubber that robbed the quiet town of its silence, the Cherokee lurched forward down the narrow road towards the old man. The van, still several hundred yards up the street, further away than them, all of a sudden turned on its headlights and accelerated, the driver obviously aware that he had been spotted and casting caution aside.

Mark slammed the brakes on outside the bed and breakfast, the vehicle slewing to a halt. Chris leaped out of the passenger side and up the steps to the porch, taking the gun with him.

‘Wallace! Get up!’ he shouted as he approached the old man. Wallace’s eyes widened with fear when he saw the handgun. ‘What’s going -?’ he managed to splutter before Chris grabbed him roughly by the arm and pulled him up out of the chair.

The van came to a noisy halt on the opposite side of the street. Chris saw the driver-side and passenger-side doors swing open and the dark shapes of two men emerge. From their profiles, and the way one of them moved, he guessed they were the same two men he had encountered a little earlier. That wasn’t so good, since the older guy with the crewcut hadn’t seemed too worried last time about using his gun indiscriminately.

‘Quick!’ he heard Mark shout from the Cherokee.

Chris started down the steps of the porch dragging Wallace after him, half expecting shots from across the road to already be coming at him.

‘Stop!’ he heard one of the men call out. Both men had their arms raised, and legs spread, both aiming handguns.

Trained firing stance
.

The posture was a learned one, Chris noted fleetingly, not the Tarantino posture you see gangsters adopt in the movies. These guys were definitely agency or ex-agency.

Wallace was panicking, struggling, tugging against Chris as best he could. He realised he must have scared the old boy waving the Heckler and Koch in his face.

‘Don’t piss around. Keep moving!’ Chris shouted at him as they hit the pavement. He pulled the back door of the Cherokee open, and then all but hurled the old man across the back seat.

And that was when both men across the road decided to start firing.

This time neither of their guns were fitted with sound suppressors, and the crack of gunfire bounced off the wooden walls down the still street.

Two bullets whistled over the roof of the car as Chris ducked down.

‘
Shitshitshit
,’ he muttered.

The kids up the street started yelling in panic and dropped to the ground. The man walking his dog dived into a shop doorway.

Mark ducked down in his seat, as best his big frame could, at the same time reaching into the back to push Wallace’s head down. ‘Just stay low!’ he shouted, as Wallace, still it seemed bewildered by the sudden and rapid sequence of events, tried to sit up.

Chris stuck his gun over the roof of the car, not aiming, and fired the entire clip of twelve rounds towards the van. Both of the men dropped down behind their open doors as several of the bullets thudded noisily into the side of the van, dislodging a shower of paint flecks.

Chris used the mere seconds of time that he had bought himself as both men cautiously waited for any more follow-up shots to come their way before they stuck their heads back up. Chris raced around the back of the Cherokee and pulled open the passenger-side door.

‘Go GO GO!’ he yelled as he hurled himself in.

Mark once more floored the accelerator and the vehicle rode the pavement before swinging back onto the road and down the street. Chris twisted round in his seat and looked back through the rear window to see one of the men aiming his gun at the retreating vehicle, the other one climbing back into the van.

Wallace looked up at Chris, seeing the gun in his hand. ‘What . . . what’re you going to -?’

‘Just shut up a sec,’ he muttered as he watched the van shrink into the distance. It was beginning to turn round, but its size, and the relatively narrow width of the street, meant that it had to do a two-point turn, buying them a few more seconds.

‘Mark, get us onto the interstate and then we’ll take the next turning off. I really don’t give a toss where that takes us!’

‘You got it,’ replied Mark, his trademark demeanour of calm once more returning. Chris was glad that Mark had a cool head in a tight situation, and that it was him behind the wheel right now. If Chris had been driving, they undoubtedly would have hit every street lamp and post box on the way out of town.

He continued to watch the van through the rear window until, turning the corner at the end of Devenster, he lost sight of it. Then he looked down at the old man, still lying prone across the back seat. ‘We ran into those bastards a little earlier. I think they were looking for you.’

Wallace said nothing. Chris couldn’t tell if it was unmitigated relief or abject fear that had rendered the old boy speechless.

Chapter 47

Mission Time: 6 Hours, 22 Minutes Elapsed

150 miles across the Atlantic

Max heaved a sigh of relief. The coast of France had been left behind them. The only hint of its presence being a thin, grey line on the horizon, the thick cloudbank that had seemed to end where the Atlantic started. The heavy skies seemed to be for Europe only, blue skies for the rest of the world.

They had been flying on a steady course of two-seventy degrees, due west, at an altitude of 4500 feet, just low enough that they’d been able to do without the oxygen system.

Max was certain that the Americans would have scrambled several squadrons of fighters to deal with them. They surely had to have some stationed near enough to the airfield they’d just left to easily intercept them before they flew beyond fighter range. All of them had kept a silent vigil, scanning the skies behind them intently for the first signs of an avenging Vee-formation.

‘That was bloody hairy,’ said Pieter over the interphone.

Hans was the first to reply. ‘Whose piece-of-shit idea was that?’

‘Well it’s not like we had a lot of choice,’ Max replied wearily. ‘Given the way things turned out, it was lucky we did.’

‘I’m sure there must’ve been an easier way,’ grunted Hans.

Stef’s voice piped up. ‘Sir, I’ve been doing -’

‘For Christ’s sake, Stef, you can call me Max now.’

‘Yeah,’ added Pieter, ‘I reckon you’ve earned that by now, Baby Bear.’

‘Ahh, shit, Pieter, can you stop calling me that!’ answered Stef, his boyish voice rising angrily.

Max nodded. ‘Cut him some slack, eh?’

‘Thanks, sir . . . Max.’

Pieter cast a sideways glance at him. ‘Aha . . . the boy’s finally learning.’

‘He’s old enough to fiddle with his balls and scratch his arse now,’ Hans added helpfully.

‘Hans, you’d know, wouldn’t you?’ said Stef.

‘What’re you talking about?’

‘You’re always scratching and rubbing your arse.’

‘Not all the time!’

‘Errr . . . you do, Hans; we’ve all seen you at it. You can never leave your arse alone,’ contributed Pieter.

‘It wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t sniff your fingers afterwards.’

‘Yeah? Well, you little red-haired weasel-boy, when we’re done today I’m going to ram my fist down your throat, then you can taste it for yourself and see.’

The rest of his crew laughed lightly. Max smiled; it was good to hear the banter pass to and fro between them once more. It had been a while since he’d heard them fool around like that. He looked out of his side window to see Schröder’s fighter out to one side maintaining a steady position a hundred yards out from their port wing-tip.

He switched to radio. ‘How’re things with you, Schröder?’

‘Fine . . . fine.’ His voice sounded flat, neutral. He knew Schröder was dwelling on those of his men he had lost back on the ground. Certainly they had not long been acquainted, and in no way was it the pilot’s fault that they had been caught in that explosion. But as the leader of a group of men it was his burden to feel responsible for them.

‘That was a close-run thing,’ said Max.

‘Yes, very hectic.’

‘I’m sorry. You lost a lot of good men, Schröder.’

‘Yes . . . the best.’

‘That’s never easy.’

‘No.’

Schröder didn’t elaborate, but Max knew he was replaying the appalling scene in his mind. The churning sea of flames, those men flailing slowly in agony . . . unpleasantly slowly. When he replayed that image in his mind, it struck him that some of those poor bastards had been struggling for thirty seconds before they’d succumbed. It had probably been one of the worst things he’d ever witnessed during this war. And that was saying a lot.

‘We needed to make that stop, it was necessary, Schröder.’

‘You think so?’

‘If it hadn’t been for that airfield, this mission would be over. That would have been an end to it. We’d never have made it across on the fuel we had.’

‘Well, maybe, we’ll see if it’s all been worth it when you’ve dropped your bomb,’ Schröder replied tersely.

Right now it sounded like he wanted to be left to himself.

Max couldn’t blame him. In the sky, one on one with a squadron of American fighter pilots flying their superior P51s, Schröder and his men had magnificently displayed their skill, their experience and courage, taking only one casualty while inflicting nine. On the ground, amidst the confusion, he had lost nearly all of his men to a single well-aimed bullet.

‘What’s your fuel situation?’

‘Not bad . . . let me talk with Günter and Will.’

Just three of the fighters had managed to make it off the ground, bursting through the wall of flames above the fuel truck, only seconds behind them. Just three. If they came across another squadron, Max didn’t fancy their chances.

‘We all have about the same amount of fuel, approximately a quarter of a tank each . . . we didn’t have time on the ground to fill up properly.’

‘That gives you about two hundred miles before you need to go back. I’ll have Stef call out a warning at one hundred, one-fifty and final warning at one-seventy-five.’

Schröder was some time responding, but he eventually came back just as Max was about to repeat his last message. ‘Fine.’

Max had suspected the landing was going to be risky. They all had. But none of them suspected it would be that bad. Rall, starved of good local intelligence, had been forced to make an assumption that there would not be troops stationed close enough to respond so quickly to the airstrip being taken.

It had been bad luck. Koch’s men had done well to keep the Americans at bay for so long. He hoped the young captain had managed to bail out of that fuel truck before it went up.

‘Max!’ Hans shouted over the interphone. ‘We’ve got some coming in on our four o’clock!’ Pieter leaned forward and looked out of his window, craning his neck to look backwards.

‘He’s right, looks like about six or seven of them, fighters . . . I can’t see what type.’

‘Okay, Pieter, this time you better take the bombardier’s gun. Stef?’

‘Yes, sir!’

‘I want you on the waist-gun. Hans, you’re on the tail-gun. ’

Hans had trained himself to use the tail-gun, which was the only gun that had not been replaced with MG-81s, and remained duel Brownings. ‘Training’ had been little more than reading the tail-gunner section of the B-17 Flight Crew Manual and firing off a few dozen rounds of the limited supply of 0.5 inch ammo the plane carried. But he was ready to use it in anger now.

It was sensible for Stef to be in the comparatively safer waist-gun position, with fuel and range now the most crucial variable of the mission; he needed their navigator alive and well to ensure the most efficient route across. They could scarcely afford to lose him and drift valuable miles off course.

Or maybe he was just trying to keep the young lad out of harm’s way.

Both Hans and Stef confirmed their orders and began to scramble to their positions.

‘Schröder, bandits, four high.’

‘We’ve seen them. Listen, we will have to engage them close to you, so that you can bring your guns to bear on them. My men and I are low on ammunition.’

Schröder was right. They stood a better chance if the dogfighting went on within range of the B-17’s gun positions - the bomber’s guns had plenty of ammo to burn, and the additional firepower would go at least some way towards levelling the playing field.

Max debated whether to lock the plane with the autopilot and man the forward-gun position. He had fired an MG-81 several times, but was, by no stretch of the imagination, a good shot. He might not hit anything, but the additional firepower couldn’t hurt. But then, if the plane took damage to any of the engines or flaps, there would need to be someone in control to react immediately.

He decided he would be better remaining in his seat.

‘Schröder, we jettisoned our belly gun and our starboard waist-gun, you need to lead them in on our port side, or to the rear of the plane, to get the benefit of our guns. Have you got that?’ he called to Schröder.

‘Uh-huh. I’ll try. Good luck.’

Max switched back to the interphone. ‘This one’s going to be nasty. We’ve only three of our little friends looking after us, and six of them coming in. Schröder and his men are bringing the fight close to us so that we can back them up with our guns. Hans? You in position yet?’

‘Yeah, just about,’ he grunted as he squeezed his large frame into the cramped confines of the tail-gunner’s position.

‘Hans,’ called Pieter, ‘any tips for me and Stef?’

‘Yeah . . . yeah, just make sure you draw a good lead. Ten yards in front of the target for every two hundred yards target range. Fire in bursts no longer than two seconds, the heat causes the guns to lock.’

‘Thanks, you big ape. Make sure you save some for me and Stef.’

Max decided to quieten them down. ‘Let’s keep the comm. clear. I want to hear sightings and confirmed kills, nothing else until we’re out of this.’

His crew murmured assent.

A moment later, Hans’s voice came across loudly. ‘I can see ’em now. Spitfires! Goddamn Spitfires! Three of them are engaging our boys, three splitting off and coming for us!’

Oh shit . . . here we go again
.