The Deadly Embrace (33 page)

Taggart had been driving the truck. Now he stood at the edge of the makeshift runway, watching the small plane careening wildly toward him. When he saw the rapidly narrowing distance between the plane and truck, he knew it had no chance to clear the obstacle. Taggart was mouthing a silent prayer of gratitude that he had had gotten there in time when the realization struck him that Liza might well be aboard the doomed plane.

Nicholas felt the deadening shock of a rifle bullet graze his right arm as the airplane jounced once, and then again, before finally beginning to lift off the ground. The huge truck was less than twenty feet ahead. If he kept his wings level, he knew that the fixed landing gear below the fuselage would never clear it. The Tiger Moth would become a flaming fireball.

With the resolute calm and athletic finesse that had made him the finest stroke in Oxford crew history, he expertly banked the plane slightly to the left. Giving another instinctive nudge to the joystick, he watched through the cockpit window as the tip of the left wing lightly kissed the meadow grass at the far edge of the flight path.

A moment later, the canted nose of the airplane cleared the front end of the truck by an inch or two. He felt a loud thump, and the plane shuddered momentarily as the right wheel carriage sheered off after striking the cab. With the Moth’s engine screaming in torment, Nicholas banked right again to level the wings, and the plane soared up into the darkness.

A white dagger of lightning lit the sky for several seconds, and Taggart watched the tiny plane become a speck over the black sea in the distance. He was standing with his men near the troop carrier when Helen Bellayne caught up to him. From behind the stone fence at the edge of the field, a handful of weekend visitors in soggy nightclothes stood gaping at them.

“Whoever is flying that plane is the best goddamn pilot I’ve ever seen,” said Taggart.

“What can you do now?” asked Helen.

“The RAF will try to intercept it using radar,” he said, “but in this weather who knows. The navy will send out fast torpedo boats, in case our bullets might have damaged his engine or hit a fuel line. One of them is meeting me down in the cove.”

Helen took his hand in hers.

“When you ordered them to open fire, Sam, did you know that Liza is probably on that plane?” she asked, staring hard at him.

“It wouldn’t have mattered if the King of England was on it,” he said. “I had no choice but to try to bring it down.”

“The King is the one standing over there in the royal-purple night-dress,” she said, pointing at the bedraggled group behind the stone fence.

CHAPTER 31

S
oaking a handkerchief with cold water from the bullet-shattered bottle, Liza carefully cleaned the dried blood away from the wound on Charlie’s head. He had a deep gash along his right temple, just above the hairline.

In the dim light of the one small bulb fixed to the bulkhead, she removed the surgical pouch from her uniform coat and unfolded its two leather halves. Opening a tube of sulfa, she sprinkled powder into the gash and fitted a small surgical dressing over the wound with a strip of adhesive. As Charlie slowly regained consciousness, his upturned head was cradled in Liza’s lap.

“Am I in heaven?” he asked, gazing up at her with his familiar grin.

“No, Charlie,” she said harshly.

“This place reeks of petrol,” he said woozily.

“That’s because we’re in an airplane on our way to Switzerland.”

“The last thing I remember was Des Sullivan employing his unique form of Gaelic charm on my head,” he said.

“He’s lying over there,” said Liza, using her scalpel to cut the ropes binding the carpet that enclosed his body.

“Did you … do it?” he asked.

“He was shot as we were taking off,” she said. “I just had a look at him. His wound isn’t fatal. It went through his shoulder and broke the collarbone. He’s still out cold.”

Pulling back the edges of the rug, she helped Charlie crawl out of it.

“Why Switzerland?” he asked, his eyes focusing for the first time.

“Nicholas is turning you over to the German Abwehr.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Believe it,” she said. “It’s true. He told me so himself.”

“
But why...”

“This is not the time to explain it all, Charlie,” she said furiously.

“Where are we now?” he asked.

“We took off a few minutes ago from Rawcliff,” she said. “I assume we are out over the English Channel.”

“Without trying to sound lurid, Liza, I’ll have to kill myself before I’m turned over to the Germans,” said Charlie. “I simply know too much.”

Staring down at his big homely face, she shuddered involuntarily, knowing he was right.

“I’ll try not to make a mess of it,” he said, eyeing the scalpel.

“As Dr. Abramowicz used to say at medical school,” she said, “let’s keep that one in our back pocket for now.”

Charlie sat up on the deck and glanced around the tiny cabin. The engine had settled into an even pitch, but the plane continued to buck and leap in the turbulence of the storm. Looking through the side port, he saw only the black night.

“I’m sorry to say that Nicholas also has your briefcase with the ULTRA cables,” said Liza.

“Then I’m afraid both our lives must be forfeit,” he said. “We have to do whatever is required to stop him.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

They felt the plane bank to the right, on a new course setting. “We have to bring the plane down before he reaches the continent,” she said.

He nodded and said, “The English Channel is only about twenty miles wide here. We’ll be over German-occupied France in less than ten minutes.”

“Do you know anything about airplanes?” she asked.

“Only what I’ve read, which isn’t much, I’m afraid. This bulkhead separates us from the cockpit, so there is no way for us to reach the joystick. His hand and foot controls are connected to the rudder and elevator flaps with wire cables … like those over there,” he said pointing to several braided strands of wire that ran back along the wall of the fuselage toward the rear of the plane.

Charlie leaned across to examine them more closely. They were about the same diameter as a drinking straw, and formed of many interconnected wire strands.

“It would take a file or a wire cutter to sever these things,” he said, “and we would have to know which one to cut. If I severed the elevator cable, he would immediately lose control. The rudder is less crucial, but I have no idea which one it is.”

“Could we make the engine fail?” she asked.

“Wizard idea if I had some way to disable it,” he said. “We’re sealed off from the engine compartment, and I can’t reach the fuel lines.”

“What else?” she demanded, her voice rising for the first time. “We need to do it now.”

Charlie glanced at his watch and shrugged.

“As much as I hate to say it, I think we need a fire,” he said, touching the fabric skin of the fuselage. “These things are made of wood and canvas. The canvas fabric is sealed with dope to make it impervious to water. If I put a flame to it, the plane will become a bloody blowtorch in less than a minute. He’ll have to put it down then … if he can.”

Reaching into the surgical kit, she pulled out a small foil packet of waterproof matches that could be used to sterilize the instruments.

“I was afraid you might have some of those,” he said, grinning, as he tore the packet open.

“Where will you start it?” she asked.

“Toward the rear—as far away from the gas tanks as possible,” he said. “That will give us the best chance. The slipstream will carry the flames away from the tanks. Nicholas will see that the fuselage is on fire, and will hopefully have time to put us down safely before the tail burns off.”

He glanced out the side port again.

“I hope we’re not higher than one or two thousand feet,” he said as the plane bucked wildly in the unstable air. “Any higher than that and we won’t make it. The plane will burn up before he can ditch it in the water.”

“Do it,” she demanded. “Don’t wait any longer.”

Ripping a cloth strip off one of the pillow covers, Charlie dropped to the deck on his stomach and started inching headfirst down the narrow fuselage toward the tail.

“There’s one more thing,” he said, stopping a last time to look back at her. “This plane has a fixed landing gear. The wheels don’t retract. Chances are when we hit the sea she’ll flip right over. Be sure to brace yourself against the bulkhead before we go in.”

“Don’t you have anything positive to say?” she asked him with a nervous grin.

“It’s my own stupidity that put us in this predicament,” he said, his eyes becoming liquid. “I just pray that you survive this, Liza.”

He started his slow crawl back to the tail. Liza watched him until she could no longer see the soles of his feet. A moment later, she suddenly felt a painful pressure on her left shoulder. Turning, she saw Des Sullivan behind her, his pain-wracked face outlined in the murky light. His left arm hung by his side, blood-soaked and useless.

“Where is Wainwright, you bitch?” he shouted, breaking his hold on her shoulder to pick up the top section of the broken water bottle from the cabin deck. Grasping its neck in his fist, he extended the jagged edge toward her.

Liza scrambled back, extending her legs at him as she came up against the bulkhead wall a few feet away from him. As he started crawling toward her, she saw a tiny gout of flame erupt at the tail of the fuselage.

As the fire quickly grew, she could see Charlie desperately trying to back away from the flames in the constricted tunnel. His huge shoulders filled the space on both sides, and he could only edge back an inch or two at a time.

Liza struck out violently with her legs at Sullivan, temporarily keeping him at bay.

Above them in the cockpit, Nicholas saw the sudden glare in the sky behind him. Loosening the brackets that held the cockpit cover in place, he shoved upward on it. A deafening gale of wind ripped the cockpit cover away from the brackets, and it disappeared into the darkness. Looking back, he saw the fire spreading along the canvas-covered ribs of the fuselage.

He had less than a minute before the fire burned away the elevator. Pulling the throttle to idle, he pushed the nose over into a steep descent. According to the altimeter, they were just under two thousand feet above sea level. It would be a race for time as he headed down to find a place to ditch.

He lowered the left wing and nudged the stick to the right, causing the plane to slip left, and keeping the flames away from the tailplane. Staring into the blackness below, he grabbed the radio mike.

“
Achtung
…
Achtung,
” Liza heard him shouting through the Gosport tube as he transmitted his estimated position in German over the radio. Still braced against the bulkhead, she heard him report that he was about eight miles west of the French coast, and fourteen miles south-west of Manseur.

One of her violent kicks found Sullivan’s wounded left shoulder and he fell backward again. A moment later, Charlie began screaming in mortal agony. Seeing the soles of his shoes finally appear, Liza grabbed his ankles and began pulling him toward her. The screams abruptly stopped.

Wiping the lashing rain from his eyes, Nicholas could just make out the foamy lather of a cresting wave fifty feet below him. When he glanced back, he saw that the rear half of the fuselage was raging with fire.

He had to come down on top of one of the swells, so that the air-ship would slide down the back side of it and come to rest in the trough before the next wave flipped them over. He wouldn’t have a second chance.

Liza was still trying to pull Charlie toward her when Nicholas hit the swell perfectly, the following wave snuffing out the flames behind him as if blowing out a match. When the Tiger Moth hit the water, its fire-weakened airframe broke in two at the wing struts. As the plane came to a stop, both sections began to wallow in the trough of the wave.

Climbing out of the cockpit onto the wing, Nicholas could see a narrow breach in the cabin compartment just below him. Liza and Des were already through the opening. Charlie still had to be inside.

The weight of the engine was dragging the front section of the plane under the surging waves. As he watched, the narrow breach was rapidly disappearing as the compartment overflowed with seawater. While Liza was still desperately trying to haul Charlie out by his feet, Des headed for the other piece of floating wreckage, awkwardly using his right arm to propel himself forward.

Liza could feel Charlie’s body slipping away as the front section went under. Suddenly Nicholas was in the water beside her. Together, they dragged Charlie through the breach as the front end of the aircraft disappeared under the surface.

Struggling to keep Charlie’s head above the heaving sea, Liza smelled the appalling odor of his badly charred flesh. Fortunately, he was still unconscious as Nicholas helped her convey him over to the remaining section of floating wreckage.

It consisted only of the denuded skeleton of the fuselage along with one of the tail stabilizers, but the wood-ribbed frame was riding higher than the teeming waves around it. Des was holding on to the far edge with his right hand as Nicholas reached the near side and pulled Charlie toward it.

“We’ve got to get him out of the water,” cried Liza.

Together, they worked to hoist his shoulders over the top strut of the fuselage, but as soon as his bulk was added to the skeletal framework, it dipped below the surface, pulling them all under. When they came up again, Sullivan screamed, “It can’t hold all of us.”

Abandoning the wreckage, Liza attempted to tread water in the turbulent sea while still helping to hold Charlie’s head up. Again and again she found herself being dragged under, gagging as she took saltwater into her lungs. She felt herself weakening with each desperate scissor kick back to the surface.

As her face emerged once more from the sea, Liza felt a stinging blow to the side of her head. She opened her eyes to see Des Sullivan, his face contorted with terror. With another well-delivered blow, he drove her under again. Her strength almost gone, she let go of Charlie and fought her way up through the black turbulence.