Angel, Archangel (5 page)

A pair of hands pulled Billy away from the smoke and the flames.
Kruze dropped the beam and ran, jumping over his fallen coat which had now become prey to the creeping flames from the curtain.
He followed the figure running awkwardly with the boy through the smog-filled ruins in front of him, before losing them in a crowd of people who rushed forward to take the injured child to the nearest ambulance.
As the white truck tore away, its bell clanging, the crowd parted to expose the anonymous rescuer.

Penny Fleming turned to face Kruze.

“I was just behind you when the explosion happened,” she said.
“I saw you dart into the building and knew you’d seen something.”

“You could have been killed.”

“So could you.”
She smiled.
“I’m sorry I took my time, but it’s hard to climb over rubble in high heels.”
She held up a battered shoe.

Away to the west the bell of an ambulance sounded above the din of the rescue workers.

“That poor little boy,” she said looking down the street, “will he be all right?”

“His legs were badly broken, but he seemed like a brave kid.
I think he’ll pull through.
Where are they taking him?”

“I heard one of the drivers say Charing Cross hospital.”
She turned to the burning ruins of the cinema.
“Do you think he had family in there?”

“He asked for his father once, but I don’t know.”

“Shouldn’t we go with him?
He’ll be terrified, the miserable little thing.”

“Penny, there’s nothing we can do.
He’ll be unconscious by now and in next to no time they’ll be operating on his legs.
He won’t even wake up till tomorrow.”

“Then I must go and see him.
Tomorrow.”
She paused.
“What about you?”

He looked up at the scudding grey clouds, so different from the sky over the New Forest where yesterday he had almost flown her husband into the ground.

“Why not?
I didn’t really want to see Errol Flynn anyway.”

She looked puzzled.

“He was playing here at the Rialto.”

“Oh, I see.”
She laughed.
She studied him for a moment, unsure what he intended.
He held her gaze.
“What happened?”
she asked, suddenly feeling conspicuous amidst the rescuers picking their way through the rubble.
“I heard someone say it was gas.”

Kruze beat the dust from his cap.
“The V2 is faster than sound, so there’s no sign, no way of spotting it.
Just an explosion, followed by that rushing sound.
Once you’ve heard it you’ll never forget it.”
He looked back into the smoke.
“Gas explosions are convenient explanations, not so bad for morale.
Ordinary people don’t like hearing about weapons that kill hundreds at a time with no warning.”

She shivered.
“I’ve never been so .
.
.
close before.”

The rain had soaked her hair, causing several strands to fall down over her face.
The defiance that had been etched there when she had turned on him outside the Ministry had disappeared, revealing soft, fair features instead.
There

was a look about her, he thought, which bordered on elation.

“It doesn’t do to think about it,” he said.

She shook her head and smiled.
“Not death, my God, I hadn’t really thought about that.
I meant the war.
It’s happened, here, and I finally did something about it.
I actually saved a life, instead of shuffling pieces of paper around for the RAF.”

The Rhodesian remembered his dinner at their cottage, so English with its little gravel path, the wild roses over the porch and inside, glimpses and snatches of an alien life.
Photographs of Robert at his pukka public school, studio portraits of her parents staring from their frames in that way only the British aristocracy could.
Talk of racing, parties, picnics, large country estates and the antics of eccentric friends.
She was, and was not, a part of all that.

They stood watching each other, while a short distance away the firemen battled to keep the blaze under control.
Kruze was suddenly struck by the absurdity of their surroundings.

“Look, we’re going to freeze if we don’t get moving.”

“What do you suggest?”

“We could get a drink.
I reckon I owe you one.”

She looked at her watch.
It was past closing time.
“A drink?
At this time of day?
My dear Piet, this is London, not some Rhodesian country club.”

He smiled.
“Come on, I know just the place.”

* * * * * * * *

At that moment Robert Fleming was a hundred miles away, heading for the burns ward in the military hospital attached to the United States 8th Army Air Force base at Horsham St Faith in Norfolk, and on some wild bloody goose chase.
A B-17 gunner, pumped to the eyeballs with morphine, had ranted about being attacked by a rocket fighter.
Not that there was anything unusual in that.
The stubby little Me 163B Komets had been knocking B-17S and Liberators out of the sky every day of the week for the past four months.
They were highly effective quick reaction fighters, but their flaw was they were short on range.
Their
modus operandi
was simple: wait for the bomber waves to come over, light the rocket, pop up to forty thousand feet, knock down a Fortress, or two, or three, and glide back to base.

The remedy had been fairly simple, too.
Plot the 163 bases and stay well clear of them.

Now this gunner had gone and said that a 163 had pounced on his straggling B-17 over the North Sea - almost two hundred miles from the German coast.
So the Americans, in their wisdom, thought the EAEU should hear about it.
Hallucinations from a dying man.
But someone had to check it out.

Fleming flipped the report shut.
Poor sod.
Probably just as well he’d lost his marbles.
All the way to Regensburg and back only to have his Fortress blow up over the field.
Must have pulled his rip-cord somehow.
But the nine others were all gone.

Horsham, one of the largest bases of the “occupying” US forces, who had been present in Britain since 1942, took some of the worst casualties amongst the Fortress and Liberator crews during the course of the “Mighty 8th’s” daylight raids over Germany.

He had been apprehensive on the train journey from London to Norwich, and the feeling did not disappear during the early part of the ride in the staff car that took him the few miles from the railway station.
He had made a supreme effort to quell the pain that was welling up inside him at the thought of the visit ahead.
From what he had seen of Marello’s medical dossier, it read even worse than his own.

Fleming had relaxed the closer he got to the base.
He had been raised in East Anglia and had spent a happy childhood in Wymondham, a market town close by.
Many people hated the flatness of the countryside, but for Fleming it was an exhilarating place.
Apart from a few remote cottages by the roadside, the scenery was devoid of habitation and the wild pine trees, separated by the rough, grassy heathland, had a strange, primeval quality which he had always liked.

It was all infinitely preferable to the Bunker, which he shared with Staverton when the Old Man wasn’t down at Farnborough.
His office was situated twenty feet below ground and he hardly ever got to see the light of day.
Trips like this were rare.
Most of the data analysis that came with the job was carried out in the Bunker, as it was irreverently referred to by those who worked there, at the Ministry.

Fleming had no idea what Kruze had said to Staverton during his debrief after the Junkers fiasco at Farnborough, but the AVM had been strangely conciliatory when he had eventually reported in, suggesting he should go to Horsham St Faith to get out of London, enjoy the journey, get some fresh air.
But Staverton couldn’t seriously have placed any credence in the gunner’s story.
At the back of his mind he had the nagging feeling that this was another of Staverton’s tests of his mental and physical condition.

His thoughts were interrupted as he caught a glimpse of a B-17 lumbering over the perimeter about a hundred yards away, its flaps fully extended and four 1200 hp Wright Cyclone engines straining as it came into land.

Through the double doors and the smell of aviation fuel would be replaced by the antiseptic odour of the burns ward.
He hesitated for a moment at the threshold.
To go back into a hospital was the one thing he’d never wanted to do in his life.
He felt his stomach contract and thought for a moment he’d have to turn back.
He fought the compulsion to retch.
He breathed in hard and willed the panic to subside.

Fleming reported to a duty nurse and asked where he could find Sergeant Antonio Marello.
As he followed her to the wounded airman’s bed, he forced himself to turn from his own past.

One glimpse of Marello was enough to confirm the seriousness of his injuries.
Dear God, Fleming thought, thank you for not letting me burn.

The man before Fleming had no hair.
The flames that had seared his head had also taken lumps of his scalp.
The combined effect of the wounds it left and the zinc anti-burn ointment made Fleming feel sick.

“That’s the last goddamned time I ever wear a baseball hat on ops, sir.”

Fleming was quite unprepared for the man’s reaction to his stare.
The nurse had told him not to be deceived by the patient’s apparent well-being - morphine had that effect.
The gunner, she said, was dying.
Although she was angry at Fleming’s intrusion, the base commander had been insistent that she should allow Marello to answer his questions.

“I’m sorry?”
He looked fixedly into Marello’s eyes.

“I’m never going to wear a baseball hat on ops again.”
Marello’s accent, very slow from the drugging, betrayed his New York City upbringing, but not the slightest trace of pain.

Then he understood.
The American had been wearing a cotton baseball cap, a common practice amongst US crews, when the B-17 exploded.
His goggles and oxygen mask had protected him from the worst of the flames, but his flimsy hat had disintegrated and his hair with it.

“I don’t like having to do this,” Fleming began, realizing how phoney he sounded, “but if it helps you at all while we talk, I’ve been through some of what you’ve just come through.”
Christ, he didn’t mean to sound that patronizing.

“You in bombers too?”
The American was searching for a further bond between them.
Fleming wished he could have said yes.
He already felt a kinship for this man, but he didn’t know how to express it.

“No.
I was with a fighter squadron, until an FW 190 pushed me into early retirement.”

“Fighters?”
Marello queried with a sneer.
“If the P-51S had been doing their job, Gypsy Mae would still be around today.”
He referred to his B-17 as if it had been alive.

The gunner had strayed onto the subject of Fleming’s quest.
He decided to capitalize on it.

“It’s really your brush with the enemy aircraft that brought you down that I’ve come here to talk about.
Tell me about it.”
Fleming suddenly realized he was being too brusque.
His surroundings, the state of the crewman, had made him edgy.
“I heard what happened to your crew.
I’m very sorry.”
It sounded like the afterthought that it was.

Marello’s brow furrowed and his eyes glazed over for a second.
He shook his head, as if to clear some horrific image from his mind.
His voice sounded shakier than it had before.

“Well, sir, I didn’t realize what I had seen at first, but I caught a sight of it at about twelve o’clock and high above us.
How high, I couldn’t say, but shit, was it moving.”

“You say ‘it’.
What was it?”

“It was a long way away and I ignored it at first.
I thought it must have been one of them inbound buzz-bombs.
I didn’t even bother to tell the others.
The skipper had his hands full as it was.
We’d been shot up pretty bad over the target.”
He flinched uncontrollably at the memory.
The reflex almost tore out the needle which fed the plasma drip into his arm.