Angel, Archangel (12 page)

Sitting on a jump-seat behind the co-pilot on the flight-deck, he craned his neck for a glimpse of their escort, eight heavily armed Hawker Typhoon fighter-bombers.
Four of them hung slightly back on the York’s starboard beam, each aircraft lumbering under the weight of the sixteen air-to-ground rockets racked beneath the wings.
Just behind the fighters, Fleming could see the second Avro York.
It was an ungainly looking thing, but was the only aircraft the Allies possessed that could accommodate the principal parts of the 163C without a major dismantling operation on the rocket fighter.
If they ever made it into Rostock, and provided the 163C was still there, both transport aircraft would be needed to ferry the German rocket fighter’s partly dismantled components back to Kettenfeld and on to Farnborough.

Fleming’s headset crackled.

“Jewell to Metal Bird, Jewell to Metal Bird.
Believe we have you in visual contact.
Do you receive?
Over.”
The voice was clear, the signal strong.
Fleming prayed that the landing and the storming of the airfield had gone to plan.

He held his mask up to his mouth and shouted back over the roar of the two propellers whose tips cleared the cockpit wall by mere inches on either side of him.

“This is Metal Bird.
Can confirm we are ten miles down range of Rostock.
Do we have clearance to come in?
Over.”
This was the moment that would determine whether they went into the furnace whose smoke and flames now filled their field of vision through the York’s windscreen.

“Jewell to Metal Bird.
Land on first thousand yards of runway.
I repeat.
Only use the first thousand yards of the runway.
Enemy still has far side within range of mortar and small arms fire.
Once you are down we will put up a smoke screen to shield you on taxiway to hangar.”
The pilot gave a thumbs-up to show that he had understood the instruction.
There was now only one more thing Fleming needed to know before he could authorize their descent.
He dipped the transmit button, but Jewell came back before he could send the message.

“Metal Bird.
Thought you would like to know we have found the 163C and it is intact.
I repeat, 163 OK.
But situation critical here.
Get down as quickly as you can.
Jewell out.”

Fleming had no time to praise the fact that the 163 was still there and in one piece.
He tapped the pilot on the shoulder and stabbed his forefinger down in the direction of Rostock.
The pilot nodded and pushed the control column forward and the plane’s nose dropped, momentarily exerting the effects of negative gravity upon his stomach.

It was time to start the diversion for their landing.

Fleming twisted in his seat.
The Typhoons were level with the right-hand window of the cockpit.

“Metal Bird to A and B flights.
You heard Jewell.
The enemy is concentrated in the eastern end of the airfield.
They’re all yours.”

The Typhoons peeled away in a shallow dive, heading for the far end of the runway at over 400 mph.
Fleming watched the leader down to fifty feet, saw the flashes under the wings as the rocket motors ignited and the projectiles sped away from the rails towards an invisible enemy.
Eight web-like threads of smoke stitched their way through the sky, pulling the Typhoon after them, until the aircraft disappeared into a pall of black cloud that belched from something burning brightly on the ground below.

The runway grew before their eyes until it filled the entire windshield.
Several hundred yards to port, through the smoke, Fleming could just make out the white tops of the Baltic waves as they lapped at the wide, dune-filled beach bordering the airfield.
Between the beach and the runway were two immense hangars and a group of outbuildings.
Fleming refrained from pointing out their quarry to the pilot who was keeping one eye on the runway and one on the far perimeter fence where the enemy’s forces were concentrated.
The co-pilot turned to Fleming and signalled that he knew where to head once they touched down and had slowed to a speed where they could turn the aircraft off the runway.

They were now down to fifty feet.
The pilot wrestled to keep the aircraft steady in the strong crosswind before dropping the wheels down hard on the tarmac.
The two crew stood on the brakes, which immediately transmitted a juddering protest through the whole airframe.

Fleming caught a needle of light out of the corner of his eye and watched in a trance as a line of tracer curled out from a group of trees to their right, but the gunner had not accounted for the deflection and the shots went wild.
As he watched the source of the machine-gun fire, holding his breath for the second burst, the copse disintegrated in an enormous explosion.
The shock-waves rocked the York and his earphones filled with the cries of the Typhoon pilots who had scored one more kill in their quest to keep the York’s approach to Rostock free from ground fire.

The York slewed left and right off the runway centreline as the crew fought to slow the aircraft enough for a violent turn down a slip-road that led to the two hangars.
Fleming’s heart missed a beat as he saw smoke pouring from the hangar area, the thick clouds swirling and expanding as they were pushed across the airfield by the breeze coming off the Baltic.
But the hangar complex which housed the 163 had not taken a hit.
Fleming could make out Jewell’s paratroops as they activated smoke canisters during the most vulnerable part of the York’s journey, out of reach of the protection afforded by the buildings and clawing its way painfully slowly along the exposed taxiway.

Fifty yards ahead, a soldier leapt in front of the York and signalled for the pilot to head towards the second and larger of the buildings.
Then the immense doors slid open and Fleming could make out the figure of Colonel Jewell within, his stocky frame dwarfed by the interior of the empty hangar.
He was gesticulating wildly, beckoning for the York to taxi towards him.
The co-pilot looked at his captain who shrugged before inching the throttles forward and coasting the transport aircraft inside.
Switches were thrown and the propellers spluttered to a stop.

Fleming had already thrown off his straps and was scrambling out through the flight deck door, past two ashen-faced engineers who would shortly assist him in dismantling the 163 and crating it up for the return journey.
As long as the paratroops could stave off whatever the Germans threw at them over the next few hours.
Fleming jumped on to the concrete floor of the hangar and the crackle of machine-gun fire, punctuated intermittently by the dull crump of a mortar explosion, echoed around the immense building.
It was the first time he had heard the enemy, but far from experiencing the nausea of fear that should have gripped him, he felt exhilarated and drawn to the action.

Jewell was striding over to him, his right hand extended as if he were a long-lost chum spotted at a cocktail party.
But as the Colonel drew close, Fleming noticed that the eyes that had sparkled the day before looked tired, the face drawn.
Jewell’s handshake told him that things were not under control.
The initial bravado could not hide the anxiety.

“Morning Fleming.
Glad you made it.
I’m sorry we couldn’t get the whole airfield cleared for you as planned, but we judged it safe enough for you to make an approach and landing.
It turns out that there’s a bigger garrison in Rostock town than we anticipated, but I think we can hold our position long enough for you to get your contraption out of here.
Provided the Russians behave themselves, that is.”

“Russians?
What do you mean, Russians?”
Fleming had to shout to make himself heard over the second York which had safely arrived at the hangar and was being positioned just behind the first aircraft.
He thought he might have misheard what Jewell had said.

“According to prisoners, the Russians broke through the German front lines last night and are now only about seven kilometres from here.
The reason the Germans haven’t thrown the book at us is because they’re more preoccupied with stemming the Red Army’s advance westwards.
It’s a bloody irony that we’re pinning the Germans down at the far end of the airfield, while I’m actually praying that their troops don’t throw in the towel and let the Red Army catch us on what the Russians see as their territory.”

“Christ, how long do you think that gives us?”

“Impossible to say.
It could be a day, it could be two hours before they’re here.
You’d better get your men to take that aircraft apart and loaded up on the Yorks as quickly as possible.”

Jewell led the way to a corner of the hangar that had been cordoned off by a large screen.

The sight of the 163C took Fleming’s breath away.
Up close, it did not seem to retain any of the qualities - the short, moth-like body and the stubby wings - that he had recognized in the reconnaissance photographs.
It was beautiful in the way a racing car was and quite the opposite of its operational sibling, the squat and ugly 163B, even though the relationship between the two was obvious.
Fleming found it hard to believe that this graceful machine was the same as the one that had almost destroyed the mind and body of the B-17 gunner in the hospital bed at Horsham St Faith.

Walking round the aircraft, he remembered the bomb and his fear and how he had almost called Staverton on the spot, so acute was his concern at the thought of a rocket-powered fighter-bomber going into production in Germany.
The 163C was clean.

It was then he spotted the slight protuberance beneath each wing.
He threw himself under the aircraft, like a mechanic at a garage, and saw the hardpoints, the mechanisms that held the ordnance in place until the pilot triggered the release of the weapon.
A bomb had been there; it had simply been removed during the night.

He scribbled out a note on a piece of paper and handed it to Jewell.

“Colonel, I need this message transmitted to a man at Kettenfeld called Bowman.
It’s very important.
Could one of your men handle it?”

Jewell nodded.
“Consider it done,” he said.
“Just concentrate on getting that thing packed up and out of here.”

At least it was smaller than Fleming thought it would be.
As long as they could get the wings off cleanly and the fuselage into two halves, front and back, the 163C would fit into the Yorks with room to spare.
But dismantling the aircraft quickly, and without damaging it, would prove to be a bitch, of that Fleming was sure.

And there were only seven kilometres between them and the Red Army.

Fleming never thought he would find himself praying for the Wehrmacht to hold its ground.

Dismantling the 163 was taking far too long, so Jewell’s find was the answer to a prayer.

Fleming looked up from his work on the aircraft’s wing root as the colonel came towards him, a motley selection of individuals in tow.
Several paratroopers walked behind holding guns to their backs, but the prisoners did not look like soldiers to Fleming.
There were five altogether.
Two of them were no more than twenty-five years old, while two more were in middle age, the last in his late sixties.
They looked confused and frightened.

“They’re scientists,” Jewell said to Fleming.
“My men caught them skulking in one of the outbuildings behind the hangar.”

Fleming wiped some hydraulic fluid off his hands onto his trousers.
The Komet was a mechanical nightmare.
The fuselage was made of metal, the wings of wood.
Without carefully removing the skin covering the aerofoil sections first of all, it was impossible to find the main pins that held the wings in place onto the fuselage.
And tearing the wing panels off too suddenly could ^cause untold damage.
It was slow, backbreaking work.

“They’re the engineers and scientists who were working on the Komet when we landed here this morning.
I thought you might need a little advice on how this thing should be taken apart.”

Fleming laughed.

“Colonel, what makes you think these men are going to assist us in taking away their latest secret weapon?
Just how politely do we have to ask them?”

“We don’t have to ask them anything.
They’ll do it.
They know that the Russians are about five kilometres from here and I gave them a choice.
Either they help us dismantle this thing so that we can all get away before Joe shows up, or we leave on our own and tie them up for the Russians to find.
I think you’ll find they’re actually quite eager to help.”
A thin smile spread under Jewell’s well clipped, greying moustache.