Angel, Archangel (14 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Kruze lay in the darkness, his eyes open, trying not to think of anything in particular, but his thoughts always returned to her.
It bothered him that he could not shake her from his mind.
His two days in London had been intoxicating - pulling the boy from the picture house, the rush of feeling for Penny.
But now he was back at Farnborough, the EAEU, and the two worlds could not go together.

That she was still technically married to Fleming bothered him less than the fact that because of her he was now just like all the others.
Unfaithful wives, families that had been evacuated to the far reaches of the countryside to escape the flying bombs.
All the uncertainties, the problems of domestic life.
The confusion and the fear that always returned after a pilot had had one too many beers in the mess.

His detachment from that world had so far kept all his faculties razor sharp.
Until now he had lived on that edge, so fine between life and death, which kept him the best up there, invulnerable.
And now Penny had entered his life and he loved her and cursed her for it at the same time.

He swung himself off the bed and groped his way to his trousers, slung casually over the back of the chair the night before.
He walked over to the window, wiped the chilled condensation off the pane and stared out.
The predawn mist still hung thick over the airfield and it looked the sort that wasn’t going to clear when daylight came.
Part of him wished he had stayed away.

He shook his head, switched on the light and pulled on the rest of his clothes.
He moved to the basin, ran the tap and splashed the freezing water onto his face.
He felt old, much older than his twenty-nine years, but the features under the mop of fair hair that came back to him from the mirror were still brown from the years of working under the hot African sun.
The eyes were still a deep, shining blue.
There were lines on his forehead that he hadn’t previously noticed, but then perhaps he had not really cared before.

He pulled on his cap and strolled outside, glad to get away from the confines of his room.
There was an air of expectancy about the station.
He had been dimly aware of it when greeted by Mulvaney, the station commander, the previous evening.
He was chirpier than usual, smug almost.
It was infectious, the others had caught it.
There was definitely something in the air.

The crackle of cutting equipment interrupted his thoughts.
Even though there was some light, he still could not see the huge sheds for the mist.
He knew that shifts of mechanics had been toiling through the night to try to unmask the secrets of aircraft that still patrolled the skies above the disintegrating Reich.

Kruze reached the great sliding doors of the hangar and found the small access hatch.

The brightness of the place almost blinded him.
On his left, fitters scrambled over a four-engined Halifax bomber, making it ready for its next flight to test the new radar jamming equipment contained in the black box in the belly of the aircraft.

Next to the great bomber lay the Me 110 he had seen there a few days before, its crosses and swastikas in the process of being removed for a set of Royal Air Force roundels.
Stencils were taped to the wings, the fin, the fuselage.
The smell of oil-based paint and thinners was heavy.
Two great heaters at each end of the hangar blasted out warm air, which remained trapped beneath the roof, despite the numerous cracks in the corrugated iron panelling.

Moving down the line, Kruze came to the Junkers he had flown against Fleming during his last dissimilar combat test.
The memory brought a momentary crease to the furrows by his eyes.
Then the feeling was gone, leaving only the professional interest in what was being done to the armed reconnaissance aeroplane.

The wing skin had been removed, the panels lying on the ground beside him, buckled in parts where the stress from his over-zealous aerobatics had acted on the airframe.
Two aircraftmen shone torches over the main spar that ran the length of the wings, checking for signs of fatigue.
Others stripped the Jumos down, laying the intricate pieces of the cylinders carefully into boxes, numbering them for easy reassembly.
Unlike aircraft at other RAF stations, the aeroplanes with the EAEU at Farnborough did not come with manuals.

Kruze found Broyles at the far end of the hangar lying on his back under the jacked-up frame of the Fieseler 103 that Bowman’s team had discovered on a small satellite airfield in Denmark a few weeks before.
The Chief swore as a nut slipped from his greasy thumb and forefinger.
Kruze retrieved it from the floor and handed it back to him.

“Morning, Chief.
You ever sleep?”

Broyles squinted against the glare of the arc lights.
“Sleeping’s for pilots and officers, Mr Kruze.
I’ve got to keep these bloody things in the air.”

Kruze laughed.
“Cigarette?”

Broyles slid out from under the tiny wing of the Fi 103.

“Thank you, sir,” he said, wiping his hands on his boiler suit before pulling out a Lucky Strike from the proffered pack.

“Up a bit early yourself, aren’t you Mr Kruze?”
Broyles’ oil-streaked watch told him it was a little before five o’clock.

“Couldn’t sleep, Chief.
You know how it is.”
Concerned that Broyles might ask him why, and suddenly bereft of any easy answer, Kruze looked down at the Fieseler.

Bowman’s outfit had been attached to a Canadian infantry regiment in the forefront of the drive into German-occupied Denmark.
Of special interest to the EAEU was a satellite airfield at Grove where, according to resistance reports, a newly formed unit of KG 200 was being trained on a specially adapted, piloted version of the Fi 103, better known outside the Reich as the Vi doodlebug.
What the EAEU found at Grove chilled them.
The Germans were close to declaring the Fi 103 Reichenberg IV operational.
Instead of fielding a flying bomb with an often unreliable guidance system against the Allies, the Nazis’ refined system would permit the destruction of high priority targets thanks to the specially trained pilot staying with the missile right to the end.
Staverton wanted to know how it worked, down to the last nut and bolt.

“I hope you never have to fly this,” Broyles said.
“I wouldn’t wish that job on my worst bloody enemy.
Gives me the willies just to work on it.
And that’s without the warhead installed.”

Kruze sat down on a work-bench next to the Chief and sucked hard on the loosely packed end of the Lucky Strike.
“What about the poor, dumb German who’s going to fly it for real?”

The Chief snorted, utter contempt on his face.
‘If a bloody Nazi is mad enough to get into this thing in the first place, then he deserves to be damned, damned to hell.”

Kruze cursed his stupidity.

“Sorry, Chief, I forgot.”
He pulled again on the cigarette.
“Maybe this is one job you should be taken off.”

Broyles ground the stub under his heel and wriggled his way back under the Fieseler.
Kruze saw the pain and the anger ebb from the seasoned engineer’s face.
The old Broyles, the professional, twenty-five years in the service, looked back at him.

“Pass us that wrench, would you, Mr Kruze?”

Kruze did as he was asked.

“To tell you the truth,” the older man said, “it’s just another job.
And that’s what I live for now, you see.
The service.
That’s all the family I need now.
Thanks.”
He passed the tool back to Kruze.
“Now, I just hate Nazis and bloody officers.”
He grinned back at Kruze, exposing an intermittent row of nicotine-stained, unbrushed teeth.
“English bloody officers, of course.”

Kruze smiled back.
“Of course,” he said.

He watched Broyles remove the panelling, going about his work as if the Fieseler were a saloon car brought in for a routine oil change at a garage.
He tried to imagine Broyles the family man, with a wife and two children living in the outskirts of London.
Sending his wage packet to them once a week, until a faulty guidance system determined that a Vi should overfly its target in the centre of the capital and crash twenty miles off course in a suburb where Mrs Broyles and family went about their routine, ordinary lives.

“Better to have loved and lost, Mr Kruze.”

The panel, with the stark serial number on the inside face exposed, was discarded noisily on the concrete floor.

“I’ll be seeing you, Chief.”
The words disappeared as the first cough of a 12-cylinder Daimler-Benz from the Me 110 ripped through the hangar.

Kruze headed for the sliding doors.
His mind was full of thoughts about the Chief, first family man, then widower, now remarried to the service.
For the rest of his life.
He thought of himself - and he hadn’t done that for a long time - Piet Kruze .
.
.
orphan.
Not much to stay for.
Nothing to return to, winding up a bitter old man after a lifetime’s dedication to the job, to flying.
And nothing else to show for his life.
What a bloody waste.

He emerged into the damp, cold air.
The mist was still heavy; no chance of it lifting that day.
He yearned for the warmth of the hangar again, then thought of the heat on his back from the open fire in the room of the small apartment in London where he had held her for the first time.

Penny Fleming.
He loved her, didn’t he?
She had made him feel good inside, good about himself - and he hadn’t felt that way since he had turned his back on the small homestead, and an old man who had loved him, hundreds of miles from nowhere in the African bush.

Penny.
The future.

He quickened his step, moving now with purpose to rouse Marlowe, get him to cover for him for the day.
Shouldn’t be too difficult, he persuaded himself.
There wasn’t going to be any flying done.
And Marlowe had the car that would transport him to the cottage in Buckinghamshire where he could once again glimpse the future and, this time, catch it in his hands.

* * * * * * * *

Dietz was so close that he could smell Herries, even though he could not see him.
The SS sergeant lay down by the dense trees beside the main highway and waited.

His shoulder hurt like hell, but at least the shrapnel wound had been clean.
The metal had torn through the flesh leaving no chunks of the antipersonnel grenade inside to turn the wound gangrenous.
In some respects, the injury had proved advantageous, as its painful throbbing had kept him from succumbing to the exhaustion that had racked his body during the march of the past two days.

He was going to find Herries and kill him, whatever it took.
His hatred of the man over the past two years was now justified and it felt good.
When he found his officer, he would put him to his death slowly and, furthermore, he’d get a medal for doing it once headquarters was informed that Herries had turned.
He always knew that the man was a fucking traitor.
He had always been the Englishman through and through.
Some of his preciousness had been ironed out by the long Russian campaign, but unlike the other English who had joined the SS until death, Herries had been looking for the right moment to jump ship.
And Dietz had merely been waiting for him to do it.
Now that he had, he was going to pay.

It had been so easy picking up Herries’ scent.
The man had left a trail through the forest as wide as Ludwig Strasse, the main street of his home city, Munich.
The only reason he had not caught up with Herries sooner was because he had had to wait until light on the morning after the explosion to see enough to pick up his tracks.
That had been dangerous, because Ivan had arrived at the camp just before dawn and Dietz had had to lie low until they went on their way, all the time hoping that they would not find and follow Herries’ trail themselves.
The sergeant had seen the Siberians with the Russian officers and knew that they were more than capable of tracking down Herries in that forest.
He did not want them to remove his pleasure of hunting the turncoat himself.

When the Russians left, it took Dietz a few minutes to find the path that Herries had cut through the trees.
Thereafter, his only problem was maintaining the stamina to catch up, but he knew that Herries was partially incapacitated by his chronic diarrhoea, and that had spurred him on in his quest.

And now he was very close.
The tracks were fresh, not more than a few hours old at the most.
Now that he had reached the end of the forest, found the Strakonice-Pilzen highway, he would wait, listen and watch.
Herries would show himself, sooner or later.