Angel, Archangel (42 page)

Kruze pulled the aircraft up to one thousand feet, nosed it towards a patch of clear sky and set the autopilot.
He slid forward into the smooth, glazed nose and switched on the Lotfe 7H tachometric bombsight and the BZA1 bombing computer.

In other, more conventional Luftwaffe aircraft, the Lotfe was operated by the bomb-aimer while the pilot flew the aircraft.
In the single-crew Arado, the pilot performed both duties.
At altitude, he could keep the autopilot engaged, go forward into the nose, look into the sighting mechanism and drop the bombs under guidance from the sight and computer.
At low altitude, though, that was impossible.
Kruze would need to employ all his skills as a pilot just to negotiate the terrain around Branodz, aside from the Soviet air defences.

So how did the Lotfe work under single-crew conditions at low altitude?
He looked around the cockpit, his eyes eventually falling on the strange device protruding from the roof above his seat.
The periscope; it had to be aligned with the periscope.

He pulled himself back into his seat, decoupled the auto-pilot and strapped himself in.
Then he placed one eye against the periscope sighting system for the rearward firing cannon and found himself looking not aft, but forward.
He reached down and flicked off the Lotfe and an image of mountains and clouds slipping away from him filled the viewfinder.
He thought of Staverton’s reaction to his find.
A combined periscopic gun/bombsight and rear mirror.

He looked at the clock mounted in the centre of the steering horns on the control column.
He had been airborne about twenty minutes.
The Russian lines would be coming up soon, very soon.

His right hand reached down to the large dial situated below the main electrical switch panel.
He twisted the dial through two positions and armed the three bombs.

Beyond the nose of the bomber, a river caught his eye, then another, their paths converging until he spotted the small village nestling in the bowl where their waters met.
Altenmarkt.
The confluence of the two streams produced a wide, choppy river, but already he could see calmer water ahead where the Alz began its journey across the lowlands of the Nieder Bayern.
He pushed the column forward and increased power, hardly noticing the thumps that rocked the aircraft as it slid out of the last patches of light cloud and turbulence that marked the invisible demarcation line between plain and upland.

Something made him shift his gaze beyond the river and into the haze above the horizon.
An almost imperceptible movement to anyone whose senses were not on full alert for the slightest sign of danger.
With the sun rising off the right-hand side of his aircraft, Kruze easily saw the glint of silver off the last of the five Mustangs as they swept in finger formation across the countryside about three miles in front of him.

He slid the Arado down lower, ever lower, conscious of the mountain backdrop which would shield him from the scrutiny of the American fighters as they swept from right to left across his nose.
Sanctuary, he realized, lay between the banks of the River Alz itself.
The chances were that this was not the only Allied fighter patrol in the district.

The Mustangs ploughed on towards the west, as Kruze watched them carefully out of the corner of his eye, as if even a slight movement of the head would be enough to give his position away.

Kruze brought the Arado down to tree-top height.
He looked left and right and noted with some satisfaction that he was actually below the tops of the tall, leafless trees that lined the river.
Beyond his rudder pedals, through the clear nose, he could see the dark, muddy waters flashing by fifty feet below.
He was careful not to look at the boiling water directly.
It would be easy to become disorientated, hypnotized, and plough in, he and his aircraft vaporized with the water as his 3000 lbs of bombs exploded on contact with the river’s surface.

He flew the Arado down the Alz’s invisible centre line at 560 kph, exhilarated by the speed and the agility of the fighter-bomber.
As he twisted and weaved through the gradual meanderings of the Alz, he was overcome by a strange feeling of tranquillity.

He saw a group of people rushing crazily towards him on the left-side bank.
It was ironic that he found serenity there of all places, in a juddering, hurtling piece of machinery, flashing through inhospitable countryside at almost 350 mph.
He caught a momentary impression of the young peasant girl’s face in the midst of the party on the bank, little more than forty feet below his wing-tip, her features frozen as the menacing shape of the Arado headed for her.
He thought back to Penny, tried to picture her face, her hair, recall how she felt to his touch.
But he could see or smell nothing, save the leather of his seat, the oil lubricating the moving controls and the paint primer in the cockpit.
She seemed a lifetime away from him now.
Try as he would to visualize her, he saw only the terrified face of the peasant girl on the banks of the Alz.

Penny’s place was with Fleming now.

Rapids ahead of him.
Angry water whipped white by the rocks below the surface.
Plumes of water rising into the air, lashing the Arado as he flew through them.
A curious, bending motion in the pattern of the white water, reminiscent of.
.
.

Not rapids, but bullets, machine-gun fire snaking across the surface of the water.

He put his eye to the periscope, swearing at his lapse in concentration, knowing exactly what he would see through the optic sight.

Mustangs.
One on his tail and two on either side of the river, hemming him in, waiting for the Arado to pop up so that they too could get their guns to bear on him.

.50 calibre bullets punched into the wings.
He fought the inclination to take evasive action, for short of pulling up, away from the river and the danger of the trees and into the gunsights of the American’s wingmen, there was nothing he could do.
If he increased speed he would fly into the ground or the river.

Another snatched glance in the periscope.
The lead Mustang was right on his tail, two hundred feet behind.
He saw the flickering lights along its wing leading edges and felt the Arado buck once more as bullets hit the fuselage behind him.
The American was getting closer.

He pulled the 234 round a bend and immediately saw it, the height and length of a hangar, its two lanes crammed with vehicles, arches spanning the river in front of him.
For a moment, he froze, thinking that it was too late, that the Arado would be shredded by the great steel girders of the bridge, to fall and plummet through the two columns of retreating Wehrmacht armour before hitting the river in a sea of spray and fire.
But with an animal roar he pulled back on the yolk, his whole body sensing the reluctance of the Arado, weighed down by bombs and drop tanks under the wings, to come up.

The pilot of the Mustang that was locked on to Kruze’s tail never even saw the bridge.
In almost one moment, the fighter’s wings were pulled off at the roots by the girders and its 1380-hp engine buried itself into the armour-plated turret of a King Tiger tank, the metals almost fusing as one in the explosion.
Kruze saw the orange ball of flame in the eyepiece of the periscope and was up to five hundred feet before he even realized he had missed the bridge.

A bullet pierced a Plexiglass panel above his head, narrowly missing the Lotfe sight as it exited somewhere between his feet.
Kruze pushed the aircraft back down, knowing that the Mustangs would be queuing up for a chance to pull into the narrow river valley and avenge their comrade who had died hugging his tail.
A check in the periscope confirmed his worst fears, a second Mustang sticking like glue.
He recalled Staverton’s words, the ones about the 234 being able to outrun anything.
What the bastard should have said was the 234 could only go into its greased lightning routine at altitudes approaching its service ceiling, halfway to the stratosphere.
At tree-top height and with 3000 lbs of bombs below, a Mustang could still pace him.

The left-hand side of his instrument panel, housing the artificial horizon and rate of climb indicator, exploded with a crash, the tumbling .50 calibre bullet tearing a hole the size of his fist through the Plexiglass.
A sharp pain in his arm pulled his left hand off the control horn.

He stared in rage at the periscope sighting system for the rearward firing 20mm cannon.
Useless, bloody useless at this altitude, with trees and water rushing around his aircraft.
To take his eye off the galloping scenery in front of him would spell the end in a fraction of a second.

Kruze held his breath, waiting for the stream of fire that would end it all.
In front of him, the river narrowed, then dwindled into little more than a brook as the hard bedrock split the water of the Alz into small tributaries.
He was running out of protection.
He started to pull back on the control column as a line of trees rushed to meet him.
The nose of the bomber came up, exposing it to the combined guns of the fighters behind; and he realized bitterly that he had never even made the Russian lines.

At two hundred and fifty feet he could see the smoke and flames stretch the length of the horizon and it made him gasp.
If he hadn’t been facing the last moment of his existence, it could have been awe-inspiring, magical almost.

He knew what it was and the reason for his stay of execution all in one cogent moment.

The Soviet offensive had been launched.

He looked into the periscopic sight and saw the Mustangs peeling away to the west.
Had they crossed into Soviet airspace, some thirty miles in advance of where it had been the day before, they would have been fired upon by the Russians as surely as he would at any moment.

As the pain caused by the shard of metal from the instrument panel began working its way into his body, a sudden thought, a moment of raging doubt, held it in check.

The smoke and flames of battle that rolled towards him like a tidal wave.
The first cries of Shaposhnikov’s baby?
The birth of Archangel?

It was not too late, he had to tell himself.
If the Marshal had launched his offensive against the West, there was even more reason now for ensuring that each of his bombs found their mark.

He pushed the throttles forward and caught the first whiff of battle-smoke on the slipstream that rushed through the broken Plexiglass on the left-hand side of the bomber’s nose.

* * * * * * * *

The Yak 9s of Colonel Anatoly Putyatin, Military Pilot First Class, and his wingman, Lieutenant Mikhail Samsonov, swept the sky at three thousand metres a few kilometres behind the Red Army’s advance.
It had been an uneventful patrol, but that had been the pattern of things over the last few months, with the Luftwaffe all but destroyed on the Eastern Front.

Putyatin glanced beyond his starboard wingtip at Samsonov, who was only six weeks out of the air academy at Tanyarsk.
He caught his wingman looking admiringly at his own piston-engined Yakovlev 9 ‘Ulutshshennyi’, a masterpiece of Soviet engineering.

Putyatin jabbed his finger downwards, the signal that they were to return to Grafen, forward air base of the 13th Guards regiment, Soviet 5th Air Force, Frontal Aviation.

The colonel watched as Samsonov pointed his older Yak 9D towards their base.
He soon spotted the airfield, clean and untouched by the war, beneath the first line of ridges that gave way gradually to the mountainous region beyond.

He followed Samsonov’s aircraft, White 15, as it slipped into the landing circuit, lowering its wheels about a kilometre downwind of the runway threshold.

He was just thinking how easy his first patrol of the new offensive had been, when he saw the German bomber pop up over the trees, its mottled camouflage momentarily stark and conspicuous against the blue dawn sky.
He shouted a warning to Samsonov whose aircraft had slowed to a few kph above touchdown speed as it slid over the edge of the airfield, and banked his Yak 9U sharply on a course to intercept the intruder.

* * * * * * * *

Kruze was wrestling to keep the Arado 234 on a low-level flight profile parallel with the ground, fighting the waves of pain from the injury to his arm, when he spotted the Yak beyond the next line of trees, its wheels lowered to land.
It was too late to change course, or for remorse at his stupidity.
Fleming’s words about the Soviet fighter base at Grafen were still echoing through his head as the Arado crossed the boundary fence of the airfield.

A row of pristine, single-engined fighters, their fuselages adorned with the red star and white identification numbers of Frontal Aviation, filled his vision.
His first reaction was to bank the bomber so that it was lined up on the row of