Agent of Death (38 page)

The Mem Tav team stared. Some reached for their pistols but Huth tore out his empty magazine, inserted another, cocked the gun, and covered them all. He wouldn’t have fired, but – WHOOOOSH! – came from the fore-casing, and Huth saw the Mem Tav team leader sneering, holding the control box; he’d done something with it and Huth guessed what, and, in his anger and fury and despair, he emptied his fresh magazine into the black-clad technicians, then reloaded and fired until all his ammunition was gone.

He killed every man of the Mem Tav team and raked their bodies afterwards.

But he was too late to stop the Fieseler.

It was on its way to New York.

*

Me
262
Schwalbe
4
,

Formerly
of
11
Staffel
,
Jagdgeshwager
III
,

At
1
,
000
feet
over
the
North
Atlantic.

Friday
9
June
,
12
.
16
hours
Eastern
Standard
Time
.

I saw it!
I
saw
it
! The day was clear, visibility excellent, the sub was right where it was supposed to be: a fat, wide, wallowing black mass with hardly any bow wake, and heading across my line of flight, going westward. I saw it in the distance and could just make out the ramp in front of the conning tower and the Mem Tav doodlebug ready to go; I shoved forward the stick to take the jet down, and flipped forward the safety catch that cleared the button on top of the control column. The plane’s guns were in the nose, and the top button fired the two upper cannon, and – when thrown forward – the safety catch became the trigger for the two lower cannon. That was a total of four thirty millimetre cannon, with two hundred and sixty rounds altogether: one of the heaviest armaments of any fighter that ever flew.

I steadied the aircraft, eased throttle to slow down and avoid overshoot. It was a fine machine. Best I ever flew, good aileron control, speed maintained beautifully in turns, auto-slats opening on leading wing edges, when speed dropped – as it did now – in a shallow dive. The sub got bigger. I could really see it now, I held down speed, lined up on target, gunsight squarely on the doodlebug, trying not to notice the gun turrets fore and aft the conning tower. I tried not to notice them, not to focus on them, not to fear them coming alive and shooting me down as they had the four Avengers, and I trimmed fine adjustment; the target swelled in the gunsight and the plane dived so smooth and beautiful and nothing shot back at me. I saw men on the casing and it was all too easy, and then it all went wrong. Oh God, oh bloody hell!

The doodlebug spurted fire, there was a cloud of smoke or steam, and it shot up the ramp, soaring and climbing at terrific speed off to my right. I flipped back the safety catch over the firing buttons, and banked and turned after the missile; flashing over the sub, up and round, the g-force sickening as my blood carried on with forward momentum, while the rest of me hauled round sideways, and then there were two or three more such horrible, skidding turns. I did my best in a machine I didn’t know; the great speed of the turns was nauseous and I tried to catch sight of the speeding missile. I couldn’t see it at all and I turned and turned again, trying to guess where it had gone, and couldn’t find it; easy enough in a dogfight with planes going three hundred miles per hour, let alone chasing a doodlebug at four hundred and me at five hundred.

Where was it? Where was it? The nausea grew as I turned, and I shivered and retched and my vision went red and I was passing out. Where was the doodlebug? Where was the horizon and the sky? What was up? What was down?

CHAPTER 43

Fieseler
Fi
103
,
SSA
MT
,

800
Metres
Over
the
North
Atlantic
,
Heading
West.

Friday
9
June
,
12
.
17
hours
Eastern
Standard
Time
.

The robot answered the orders of its autopilot, gyrocompass, and altimeter. Pneumatic controls trimmed rudder and elevators. Speed and direction settled down after brief corrections … up … down … left … right … steady! The Argus motor roared while a tiny propeller spun, driven by the slipstream at the nose, connected to an electro-mechanical clock, counting distance travelled at known speed, ready to circle the missile over its target when the time came, to give maximum spread of the payload.

The Fieseler 103 flying bomb was a cheap-built, mass-produced, disposable weapon, designed for a single flight, and was a triumph of cost-effective engineering. Normally it delivered 850 kilograms of Amatol 39 high explosive, capable of destroying a street of houses in London. But this Fieseler – SSA MT-2, the second delivery device for Abimilech Svart’s Mem Tav – was about to make history by the enormously greater, and infamous horror of what it could do.

*

Me
262
,
Schwalbe
4
,

At
3
,
000
Feet
over
the
North
Atlantic.

Friday
9
June
,
12
.
20
hours
Eastern
Standard
Time
.

A trick. Another trick. Just before I passed out completely I had the sense to stop turning the aircraft and making myself ill. I held it straight and steady for long enough to get my senses back, which must have been some minutes, I don’t know, and then I did the trick; I looked at the compass and turned due west because that was where the doodlebug was going. It was going to New York, and, even if it had got well ahead of me, I had a 150 mile per hour speed advantage and would catch it if I could see it, except that it and I might be going due west in parallel, with miles and miles between us. But that was the best I could do, and I take credit for the trick, but none at all for the enormous piece of luck that God gave me – perhaps He is Jewish after all – because, as I turned on to my new heading, there was the bloody sub right under me! There it was, ploughing on at a speed of dead-in-the-water mph, and the big ramp
pointing
out
the
line
of
flight
of
the
doodlebug
! So I turned slowly over the sub, lined up on the ramp, opened the throttle, and belted after the doodlebug as fast as two Jumo engines could drive me.

Again, I don’t know how long it took, and the doodlebug would be just a speck over the vastness below me, and I looked and looked, and hoped and hoped, and began to wonder if I’d overshot, and then praise to heaven and thank you, thank you, thank God again! Because there it was! There it was, the little monster. The little black, fire-burning cross of a machine, forging along ahead and below me and lining itself up in my gunsight without me having to try. I flipped off the safety catch again and got my fingers on the firing buttons and it was bang on, with the Me 262 catching up like a racehorse after a donkey. I closed throttle to match speed, because if I overshot and turned back for another pass, what with it going one way and me the opposite, then combining its speed and mine we’d be parting at nearly one thousand miles per hour, with never the slightest hope of meeting again, so the job had to be done in one go. I slowed and slowed, getting it right because the little swine was steady in my sights and I wasn’t overshooting; I squeezed on the triggers.

The guns hammered, the 262 jolted and shuddered, and four thirty millimetre cannon synchronised to converge fire at 560 metres ahead of the aircraft. Streams of tracer reached out and missed completely because I had no idea how to get the best out of the guns, and the target seemed to slide out of the sights as the 262 trembled, and I fired again and missed, and fired again and missed… and then the most enormous whomping bang came out of the port engine, and things clattered about the aircraft. I saw holes in the wing above the duff engine, and the plane screamed violently round to port as the thrust of the starboard engine drove me round; I hauled on the controls to straighten up and just glimpsed the doodlebug forging away on its steady flight towards New York.

And it was gone, gone, gone!

Oh hell! Oh bloody hell! The port engine had done just what Helga warned. She’d said the Jumo engine wasn’t reliable and had been rushed into action with crap materials, and one of them had blown up on me. Or maybe it was the shock of the guns firing? Or maybe it was me over-revving to get off the carrier? But whatever, whatever, whatever it was, just like the Arado bomber over Ulvid, my 262 was dropped out of the air by a failed motor.

But not quite out of the air. I managed to steady it, get it flying level, constantly looking out at the dud engine, which was trailing smoke but didn’t look like dropping off and taking the wing with it; the other engine was still good and my mind was desperate to know what to do. I’d lost the doodlebug. No chance to catch it. Could I hold the plane in the air? Could I survive? What if it went down? Really went down?

And then I remembered what I’d said, so bold and brave aboard the carrier: what I’d said to Captain Fenner and his chaps. I’d said that I’d be like the baby aviators. I’d ram the sub, smash the ramp, and sink the boat. Well, I’d let one doodlebug get past me, and maybe there were more of the filthy things? Maybe they were getting ready to fire again? So I thought I’d stop that at least, and I turned back the way I’d come, nursing the machine, correcting heavily for its fixed will to turn to port. The funny thing was that I was so busy flying the aircraft that I didn’t realize I’d just decided to kill myself in a Kamikaze mission.

*

Fieseler
Fi
103
,
SSA
MT
-
2
,

800
Metres
over
the
North
Atlantic
,
Heading
due
West.

Friday
9
June
,
12
.
25
hours
Eastern
Standard
Time
.

Being non-sentient, the robot neither noticed nor feared the thirty millimetre cannon shells flashing past and around it before curving down into the ocean below. Nor did it notice the aircraft that was closing up behind and shooting at it, then falling away behind.

The nearest it had to awareness lay within the pre-programmed mechanism inside its fuselage, which kept the robot to a steady speed to conserve fuel for an extended flight, which would conclude with complex manoeuvres over the target.

The machine would therefore proceed steadily on course, making such small adjustments as might be needed in response to variations in wind, in temperature and in humidity, and would arrive over its intended destination – New York City – in precisely thirty-five minutes and forty seconds as timed by its exceedingly accurate clock.

*

The
Führerboat
,

The
North
Atlantic.

Friday
9
June
,
12
.
15
hours
Eastern
Standard
Time
.

Gavriel Landau looked up as Huth came back down the ladder into the control room. Everyone looked. They’d heard the engine noise from the Fieseler, and the launch, and gunfire. From the conning tower, watch keepers had been yelling down the voice pipes, so everyone in the control room knew what had happened, including the fact that an unidentified aircraft had gone over at great speed, and seemed to be chasing the Fieseler, though nobody took much notice of that. Far more importantly, Landau grabbed at Huth’s arm and asked the inevitable question.

‘Did they launch it?’ Huth nodded. He just nodded. His face was wild, he was blinking. He’d just shot eleven men. He’d killed them. He’d seen them fall. And he couldn’t believe what he’d done; there was a united groan from the men in the control room, and a hammering on the fore-hatch, as the locked-out SSA guards tried to get in.

‘What do we do now?’ said Huth.

‘Did it really fly?’ said Landau. ‘Did it really, properly launch and fly?’

Huth nodded. ‘What do we do?’ said Huth.

‘Can you stop it?’ said Landau. ‘Can anything be done?’ Huth sighed. He tried to think.

‘Let’s call the captain,’ he said, and went to the intercom phones, by the periscope standards. The hammering on the hatches grew louder. The SSA men were getting angry. ‘Watch those hatches!’ said Huth, and fumbled with his machine pistol, taking out the useless, empty magazine.

‘Here!’ said Landau, offering the two magazines he’d kept.

‘Ah!’ said Huth, who reloaded, and passed the weapon to the petty officer navigator. ‘Take it!’ he said. ‘And if any of those black bastards gets in, use it!’

‘Sir!’ said the petty officer.

Huth pressed the buzzer for the sick bay. A rating answered.

‘Get the captain,’ said Huth.

‘What’s happened?’ said Sohler’s voice. Huth told him: told him everything.

‘Oh, Jesus!’ said Sohler; he thought a moment. ‘We’ve got to get control of the boat,’ he said. ‘Von Bloch can’t be moved but if you can put my voice over the tannoys I’ll get Weber’s sergeant to come here and von Bloch can order him, and the other blackshirts, to behave.’

‘Captain!’ said Landau, coming close to the receiver.

‘Who’s that?’ said Sohler’s voice.

‘It’s one of the slavies,’ said Huth.

‘Is it Landau?’ said Sohler.

‘Captain,’ said Landau, ‘can anything be done to stop the Fieseler once launched?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Sohler, ‘I’ll ask von Bloch.’ But there wasn’t time. A series of heavy, deliberate blows were being struck on the other side of the fore-hatch. Someone had got a hammer and was trying to break in.

*

Schwalbe
4
,
Me262
,

At
3
,
000
Feet
over
the
North
Atlantic.

Friday
9
June
,
12
.
20
hours
Eastern
Standard
Time
.

I found the sub again. It wasn’t easy but I did it. It helped that the 262 was jigging all over the sky and my vision kept sweeping the horizon from side to side whether I wanted it to or not. So I found the sub and tried to aim at it, even though I couldn’t hold a straight course. It was all I could do to zig-zag in the general direction, because now the starboard engine was starting to complain. Power went up and down, and the plane weaved violently, and slowed and slowed.

Was it damage from the explosion of the port engine? Or was German manufacture so consistent that two engines failed almost together? I didn’t know, but the starboard engine was giving up, which was just as well because it didn’t give me time to think or I might have flinched anyway. I just aimed at the sub, and pushed the stick forward, throttled back hard to give me time to aim, back to near stalling speed, for a final dive under full power, if I had any, to hit hard, somewhere just ahead of the conning tower where the ramp was.

I didn’t even worry about how I was going to get out, or if I
was
going to get out, and the 262 bucked and jumped and skidded and threw me all over the place, and the sub got bigger and bigger and I could see men on the conning tower: just two of them in a sort of cockpit at the top of a streamlined, closed-up structure, nothing like a proper sub conning tower; there was something on the sub’s deck behind the tower, something dark, and
bloody
hell
it
was
men’s
bodies
and then WHOMP! BOOM! The other engine blew out completely, and I was thrown forward violently against my straps. The plane slowed as if it had hit a wall, and it pleased itself after that, because the controls had gone, and my pulling and pushing did nothing; the sea came up and the plane stalled and dropped nearly flat, and I hauled mightily on the stick anyway, and for some God-knew-what reason the plane answered and threw up its nose, or maybe it chose to do it anyway, and we hit the water with a smack, dead slow, tail first, wings next, and skidded and slewed, because dead slow for an Me 262 is still nearly a hundred miles per hour, and the plane went round and round … and slowed … and stopped.