Citadel (14 page)

His clothes were badly tattered, and his left arm
so severely ripped he could not straighten it. His
right knee had punched through the cheap pinstriped
serge, and it too had been shredded by
abrasions. But the real damage was done to his
back, where he'd evidently encountered a rock or
a branch as he decelerated in the dust, and it hurt
immensely. He could almost feel it bruising, and
he knew it would pain him for weeks. When he
twisted he felt shards of glass in his side and assumed
he'd broken or cracked several ribs. All in
all, he was a mess.

But he was not dead, and he was more or less
ambulatory.

He recalled the idiot Luftwaffe colonel on the
ride down.

“Yes, our squadron is about a mile east of the
tracks, just out of town. It's amazing how the boys
have dressed it up. You should come and visit us
soon,
monsieur
. I'll take you on a tour. Why, they've
turned a rude military installation in the middle
of nothing into a comfortable small German town,
with sewers and sidewalks and streets, even a gazebo for summertime concerts. My boys are the
best, and our wing does more than its share against
the Tommy bombers.”

That put the airfield a mile or so ahead, given
that the tracks had to run north–south. He
walked, sliding between trees and gentle undergrowth,
through a rather civilized little forest, actually,
and his night vision soon arrived through
his headache and the pain in his back, which
turned his walk into Frankenstein's lumber, but
he was confident he was headed in the right direction.
And very shortly he heard the approaching
buzz of a small plane and knew absolutely
that he was on track.

The Storch glided through the air, its tiny engine
buzzing away smoothly like a hummingbird's
heart. Spindly from its overengineered landing
gear and graceless on the ground, it was a princess
in the air. Macht held it at 450 meters, compass
heading almost due south. He'd already landed at
the big Luftwaffe base at Caen for a refueling, just
in case Bricquebec proved outside the Storch's 300-
kilometer range. He'd follow the same route back,
taking the same fuel precautions. He knew: in the
air, take nothing for granted. The western heading
would bring him to the home of NJG-9 very soon,
as he was flying throttle open, close to 175 km per
hour. It was a beautiful little thing, light and reliable;
you could feel that it wanted to fly, unlike the
planes of the Great War, which had mostly been
underpowered and overengineered, so close to the
maximum they seemed to want to crash. You had
to fight them to keep them in the air, while the
Storch would fly all night if it could.

A little cool air rushed in, as the Perspex window
was cranked half down. It kept the men cool;
it also kept them from chatting, which was fine
with Macht. It let him concentrate and enjoy, and
he still loved the joy of being airborne.

Below, rural France slipped by, far from absolutely
dark but too dark to make out details.

That was fine. Macht, a good flier, trusted his
compass and his watch and knew that neither
would let him down, and when he checked the
time, he saw that he was entering NJG-9's airspace.
He picked up his radio phone, clicked it a few
times, and said, “Anton, Anton, this is Bertha 9-9,
do you read?”

The headset crackled and snapped, and he
thought perhaps he was on the wrong frequency,
but then he heard, “Bertha 9-9, this is Anton—I
have you; I can hear you. You're bearing a little to
the southwest. I'd bear a few degrees to the north.”

“Excellent, and thanks, Anton.”

“When I have you overhead, I'll light a runway.”

“Excellent, excellent. Thanks again, Anton.”

Macht made the slight correction and was rewarded
a minute later with the sudden flash to illumination
of a long horizontal
V
. It took seconds
to find the line into the darkness between the
arms of the
V
which signified the landing strip.
He eased back on the throttle, hearing the engine
rpm's drop, watched his airspeed indicator fall to
seventy-five, then sixty-five, eased the stick forward
into a gentle incline, came into the cone of
lights, and saw grass on either side of a wide tarmac
built for the much larger twin-engine Me110
night fighters, throttled down some more, and alit
with just the slightest of bumps.

When the plane's weight overcame its decreasing
power, it almost came to a halt, but he revved
back to taxi speed, saw the curved roofs of hangers
ahead, and taxied toward them. A broad staging
area before the four arched buildings, where the
fighters paused and made a last check before deploying,
was before him. He took the plane to it,
pivoted it to face outward-bound down the same
runway, and hit the kill switch. He could hear the
vibrations stop, and the plane went silent.

Basil watched the little plane taxi to the hangers,
pause, then helpfully turn itself back to the runway.
Perfect. Whoever was flying was counting on a
quick trip back and didn't want to waste time on
the ground.

He crouched well inside the wire, about 300
meters from the airplane, which put him 350 meters
from the four hangars. He knew, because
Oberst Scholl had told him, that recent manpower
levies had stripped the place of guards and security
people, all of whom were now in transit to
Russia, where their bodies were needed urgently
to feed into the fire. As for the patrol dogs, one
had died of food poisoning and the other was so
old he could hardly move, again information provided by Scholl. The security of NJG-9's night
fighter base was purely an illusion; all nonessential
personnel had been stripped away for something
big in Russia.

In each hangar Basil could see the prominent
outlines of the big night fighters, each cockpit slid
open, resting at the nose-up, tail-down, fifteen-degree
angle on the buttress of the two sturdy landing
gears that descended from the huge bulge of
engine on the broad wings. They were not small
airplanes, and these birds wore complex nests of
prongs on the nose, radar antennae meant to guide
them to the bomber stream 7,600 meters above.
The planes were all marked by the stark black Luftwaffe
cross insignia, and their metallic snouts
gleamed slightly in the lights, until the tower
turned them off when the Storch had come to a
safe stop.

He watched carefully. Two men. One wore a
pilot's leather helmet but not a uniform, just a tent
of a trench coat that hadn't seen cleaning or pressing
in years. He was the pilot, and he tossed the
helmet into the plane, along with an unplugged set
of headphones. At the same time he pulled out a
battered fedora, which looked like it had been
crushed in the pocket of the coat for all the years
it hadn't been pressed or cleaned.

No. 2 was more interesting. He was SS, totally,
completely, avatar of dark style and darker menace.
The uniform—jodhpurs and boots under a
smart tunic, tight at the neck, black cap with
death's head rampant in silver above the bill at a
rakish angle—was more dramatic than the man,
who appeared porky and graceless. He was shakier
than the pilot, taking a few awkward steps to get
his land legs back and drive the dizziness from his
mind.

In time a Mercedes staff car emerged from
somewhere in the darkness, driven by a Luftwaffer,
who leaped out and offered a snappy salute. He did
not shake hands with either, signifying his enlisted
status as against their commissions, but obsequiously
retreated to the car, where he opened the
rear door.

The two officers slid in. The driver resumed his
place behind the wheel, and the car sped away into
the night.

“Yes, that's very good, Sergeant,” said Macht as the
car drove in darkness between the tower and administration
complex on the left and the officers'
mess on the right. The gate was a few hundred meters
ahead. “Now, very quickly, let us out and continue
on your way, outside the gate, along the road,
and back to the station at Bricquebec, where your
commanding officer waits.”

“Ah, sir, my instructions are—”

“Do as I say, Sergeant, unless you care to join
the other bad boys of the Wehrmacht on an infantry
salient on some frozen hill of dog shit in
Russia.”

“Obviously, sir, I will obey.”

“I thought you might.”

The car slipped between two buildings, slowed,
and Macht eased out, followed by Boch. Then the
car rolled away, speeded up, and loudly issued the
pretense that it was headed to town with two important
passengers.

“Macht,” hissed Boch, “what in the devil's name
are you up to?”

“Use your head, Herr Hauptsturmführer. Our
friend is not going to be caught like a fish in a
bucket. He's too clever. He presumes the shortest
possible time between his escape from Paris and
our ability to figure it out and know what name he
travels under. He knows he cannot make it all the
way to Cherbourg and steal or hire a boat. No indeed,
and since that idiot Scholl has conveniently
plied him with information about the layout and
operational protocols of NJG-9, as well as, I'm certain,
a precise location, he has identified it as his
best opportunity for an escape. He means, I suppose,
to fly to England in a 110 like the madman
Hess, but we have provided him with a much more
tempting conveyance—the low, slow, gentle
Storch. He cannot turn it down, do you see? It is
absolutely his best—his only—chance to bring off
his crazed mission, whatever it is. But we will stop
him. Is that pistol loaded?”

Boch slapped the Luger under the flap of his
holster on his ceremonial belt.

“Of course. One never knows.”

“Well, then, we shall get as close as possible and
wait for him to make his move. I doubt he's a quarter
kilometer from us now. He'll wait until he's certain
the car is gone and the lazy Luftwaffe tower
personnel are paying no attention, and then he'll
dash to the airplane, and off he goes.”

“We will be there,” said Boch, pulling his Luger.

“Put that thing away, please, Herr Hauptsturmführer.
It makes me nervous.”

Basil began his crawl. The grass wasn't high
enough to cover him, but without lights, no tower
observer could possibly pick him out flat against
the ground. His plan was to approach on the
oblique, locating himself on such a line that the
plane was between himself and the watchers in the
tower. It wouldn't obscure him, but it would be
more data in a crowded binocular view into an already
dark zone, and he hoped that the lazy officer
up there was not really paying that much attention,
instead simply nodding off on a meaningless night
of duty far from any war zone and happy that he
wasn't out in the godforsaken French night on
some kind of insane catch-the-spy mission two
kilometers away at the train station.

It hurt, of course. His back throbbed, a bruise
on his hip ached, a pain between his eyes would
not go away, and the burns on knee and arm from
his abrasions seemed to mount in intensity. He
pulled himself through the grass like a swimmer,
his fear giving him energy that he should not have
had, the roughness of his breath drowning out the
night noise. He seemed to crawl for a century, but
he didn't look up, because, as if he were swimming
the English Channel, if he saw how far he had to
go, the blow to his morale would be stunning.

Odd filaments of his life came up from
nowhere, viewed from strange angles so that they
made only a bit of sense and maybe not even that.
He hardly knew his mother, he had hated his father,
his brothers were all older than he was and
had formed their friendships and allegiances already.
Women that he had been intimate with arrived
to mind, but they did not bring pride and
triumph, only memories of human fallibility and
disappointment, theirs and his; and his congenital
inability to remain faithful to any of them, love or
not, always revealed its ugliness. Really, he had had
a useless life until he signed with the crown and
went on his adventures—it was a perfect match for
his adventurer's temperament, his casual cruelty,
his cleverness, his ruthlessness. He had no problem
with any of it: the deceit, the swindles, the extortion,
the cruel manipulation of the innocent, even
the murder. He had killed his first man, a corrupt
Malaysian police inspector, in 1935, and he remembered
the jump of the big Webley, the smell
of cordite, the man's odd deflation as he surrendered
to gravity. He thought it would have been so
much more; it was, really, nothing, nothing at all,
and he supposed that his own death, in a few minutes,
a few hours, a few days, a few weeks, or next
year or the year after, would mean as little to the
man who killed him, probably some Hanoverian
conscript with a machine pistol firing blindly into
the trees that held him.

So it would go. That is the way of the wickedness
called war. It eats us all. In the end, it and it
alone is the victor, no matter what the lie called
history says. The god of war, Mars the Magnificent
and Tragic, always wins.

And then he was there.

He was out of grass. He had come to the hardpacked
earth of the runway. He allowed himself to
look up. The little plane was less than fifty meters
away, tilted skyward on its absurdly high landinggear
struts. He had but to jump to the cockpit, turn
it on, let the rpm's mount, then take off the brakes,
and it would pull itself forward and up, due north,
straight on till morning.

Fifty meters
, he thought.
All that's between myself
and Blighty.

He gathered himself for the crouched run to it.
He checked:
Pistol still with me, camera in my
pocket, all nice and tidy.
He had one last thing to
do. He reached into his breast pocket and shoved
his fingers down, probing, touching, searching.
Then he had it. He pulled the L-pill out, fifty ccs
of pure strychnine under a candy shell, and slid it
into his mouth, back behind his teeth, far in the
crevice between lip and jawbone. One crunch and
he got to Neverland instantly.