Crucified (15 page)

Sweaty paused.

"So?" said Wyatt.

"So it'll cost you a beer if you want the rest of the story."

"Liz?"

"One's my limit."

"Lenny?"

"I'll pass." He'd only sipped the first one.

Sweaty shook his head. "What gives with you young squirts? You can't drink, won't fight, and don't chase dames like the old days. Where has the hell-raising gone?"

Wyatt held two fingers up to the waitress.

"Son, she's
German
," scolded Sweaty.

"Huh?" said Rook.

"You just gave her Churchill's V-is-for-victory sign."

"Sweaty," said Liz, "you left us—and poor Flight Sergeant Smith—hanging."

"No one knew Smith was dangling under the bomber," he resumed. "If the hooks gave way, he'd be kaput. If the crew bailed out, he'd get the chop. But as luck would have it, he hung on all the way back to England—that's two and a half hours—getting buffeted numb by the wind. As the plane descended to land, however, a new fear hit him. If he hung lower than the wheels, he realized, they'd be wiping him off the runway." Sweaty paused for effect. "Fortunately, he cleared the ground by inches. As they carted him off to the hospital, he slipped into a coma. His last words, through frostbitten lips, were for the pilot: 'Good show, Skip.'"

"Does that count as a bail-out?" Lenny asked.

"Incoming!" Sweaty warned. "Guard your eyes, buddy."

The waitress plunked down two more mugs, and foam frothed over the rims.

"Sergeant Sweaty," Liz said, "the WAAFs are right. You are an inveterate womanizer."

"If we had to rely on these two"—he nodded at Lenny and Wyatt—"the species would die out."

The old warrior chugged half a mug.

"The best tale of all is Flight Sergeant Nick Alkemade's," he continued.

"Tell us," said Liz.

"Nick Alkemade was the rear gunner in a Lane. In 1944, his crew flew an op to Berlin. On the trip back, they fell prey to a Junkers 88. The night fighter's cannons tore open a wing.

Fuel exploded, setting the fuselage ablaze. The skipper ordered his crew to bail out, so the gunner swiveled his turret to face aft and twisted around to open the back doors. His parachute was stowed in the fuselage tunnel of the bomber.

"Instantly, his face and wrists were scorched by flames. The mask over his mouth began to melt. Wind howling in through the wing holes drove the fire at him with blowtorch intensity.

Nick's chute was blazing, so he pulled the doors shut. He faced a terrible choice: fry alive in gas and oil, or open his turret doors and freefall three miles to earth."

"Phew," said Liz. "That thought makes me shiver. Like that photo of the man falling from one of the towers on September 11."

"What would you do?"

"Jump, I guess," she said.

"That's what he did. Nick took the plunge. With only a parachute harness, he fell eighteen thousand feet through the dark sky and hit the ground."

"Splat!"
said Lenny.

"Uh-uh." Sweaty shook his head. "Three hours later, Nick opened his eyes and saw stars."

"No way!" Liz exclaimed.

"How?" Wyatt asked. The historian knew the answer, but he played along.

"Alkemade found himself lying on his back in snow in a thicket of trees. Though cut, bruised, and burned, he was still in one piece. A fluke of fate had plunged him into the tops of some highly sprung pines. The trees had bounced him branch to branch, breaking his fall. Beyond the thicket, the earth was bare, but in the shadow of the pines, the ground had snow."

"Unbelievable," said Liz.

"That's what the Gestapo thought. Nick's leg was twisted, so there was no escape. The Nazis thought he'd hidden his chute somewhere. But the web lifts on his harness weren't extended, as they would have been if he'd pulled the ripcord.

And when the wreck was found, lo and behold, there were the charred remains of his chute.

"By then, the gunner was a POW in a Stalag Luft camp.

At a prisoner parade, the Gestapo presented Alkemade with signed proof that he had fallen from three miles up."

"Amazing," said Liz. "Life's roulette wheel. One gunner hobbled away from certain death, while poor Ack-Ack never got out of his turret."

"At least we know what happened," Sweaty replied. "The Junkers shot him through the chest."

"No," Wyatt said. "He wasn't shot. Ack-Ack was the victim of an impossible crime."

"I thought you said Ack-Ack had three holes punched through the back of his flying suit?"

"I did," Wyatt agreed.

Sweaty frowned. "So when that Junkers 88 shot our tail to shreds, three bullets entered through the gap in the turret and struck Ack-Ack in the chest?"

"No," Wyatt said.

"Why not?"

"If the Junkers got him, wouldn't there be three holes in the
front
of his suit too?"

"So Ack-Ack was shot in the back when he turned around to get his chute."

"No," said Wyatt. "Ack-Ack wasn't shot at all. He was stabbed in the back with a knife."

"Stabbed!" Sweaty exclaimed.

"Yes. Three times. The third stab was so hard that it snapped the blade off the knife."

"That's impossible."

Wyatt shrugged. "So it's an impossible crime."

He'd snapped a slew of digital photographs in the
Ace,
and now he used the camera to put on a slide show for Sweaty, Lenny, and Liz. Some of the shots showed the blade he'd withdrawn from the skeleton.

"It seems to me," Wyatt said, "that what we have here is proof that Judas was behind the last flight of the
Ace.
Let's assume the
Ace
was going to be the means by which to insert a secret agent into the Reich. What better way to do it than to shoot the plane down in a manner that allows the crew to bail out? If I were in charge of the operation, I would separate the
Ace
from the bomber stream."

"Why?" asked Liz.

"So other British planes wouldn't be around to open up with their guns when the
Ace
got attacked."

"That fits," Sweaty said. "Our secret mission. Splintering the
Ace
off to bomb the village."

"Why
that
target?" Lenny asked.

"No particular reason," Wyatt replied. "Any lonesome village would have done. The village wasn't the target.

The target was the Ace."

"Christ!" cursed Sweaty. "You should have seen the brew-up. We hit it with incendiaries punctuated with bombs.

All those civilians killed for
nothing!"

"Not for nothing," Wyatt said. "They were sacrificed to down the
Ace.
That was sneaky. The operation was masked by the tactics of Bomber Command."

"I don't understand," said Lenny.

"The war over Germany was a cat-and-mouse game.

The British swamped Nazi defenses by funneling as many aircraft as possible over each target in the shortest possible time. The Germans reacted with their night-fighter system.

They allocated levels of artillery altitude above their cities to searchlights and flak guns. Above that,
Wilde Sau
—'wild boar'—fighters were free to roam at will. They used the lights to pick off bombers below. Even more lethal were the
Zahme
 
Sau—
'tame boar'—fighters. They infiltrated the bomber stream and tracked the RAF with onboard radars. But because Nazi controllers didn't have enough interceptors, they had to guess
which
cities would be targets that night, then dispatch enough planes to meet the threat."

"We were cunning," Sweaty said, taking over. "To trick the Huns, Group HQ launched 'spoof' raids at targets faraway from the real ones, and ordered diversionary attacks of a size the Nazis couldn't ignore at secondary objectives.

Meanwhile, the main bomber stream flew a complicated dogleg course over Germany, only veering toward the primary target at the last minute. To maximize confusion, we wireless operators jammed their ground-to-air radios, then
our
German-speaking controllers issued phony countermands."

"What did you think you were doing that night, Sweaty?"

Wyatt asked.

"Flying a top-secret mission."

"And the main bomber stream attacking Berlin?"

"We thought that was a big diversionary raid to mask us."

"Now, consider the
Ace
from the Nazis' point of view. After you were shot down, how would those
not
party to the Judas conspiracy see your op?"

"As a spoof raid for the main attack."

"And the Junkers?"

"It got lucky. The lone wolf fighter was on its way to save Berlin when it chanced upon us."

"So," said Wyatt, "if I controlled the British end of the conspiracy, I'd hide the secret agent among the crewmen of the
Ace,
send the plane on a solitary op, over the Reich, and tell my German counterpart the name of the target village.

And if I controlled the other end of the plot, I'd send a night fighter to shoot down the
Ace
without killing the agent. I'd have the Junkers 88 destroy the tail. The only crewman in harm's way would be the rear gunner, but he could ruin the whole plot if he fired back. The only surefire protection would be to have the secret agent stab Ack-Ack to death
before
the night fighter attacked. With the
Ace
crippled, the six forward crewmen would bail out through the front hatch.

When he landed, the secret agent would surrender to the Gestapo. Imprisoned in a Stalag Luft camp, the airman would be where Judas could find him."

Sweaty shook his head. "Your theory doesn't fit the facts, Wyatt. Ack-Ack was alive when the Junkers attacked.
He
was the one who raised the alarm. We'd been mates since training.

I
know
it was him."

"Couldn't the agent have stabbed him
after
that?" asked Lenny.

"Impossible. We were all in our battle stations every second of the way on our lonely run. Our only hope of survival was one hundred percent teamwork by every man. Our only defense against enemy fighters was coordination between Jonesy, our mid-upper gunner, and Ack-Ack, far back in the rear turret. Between them, they commanded a wide field of fire. Just as we relied on our navigator to guide us to the target, we relied on our gunners to warn us of incoming fighters and advise on the evasive maneuvers to take.

"From where I was stationed, I could see every combat position in the bomber. Wrath, the pilot, and Ox, the engineer, were above me in the cockpit. Balls, the navigator, was with me, and Nelson, the bomb-aimer, was up front in the nose.

Jonesy, the mid-upper gunner, was in the dorsal turret. The lower half of his body was visible in the fuselage tunnel.

 I could see the passage back to the tail, so I
know
none of us went back to the rear turret from the moment we strapped in for the bombing run until the moment we bailed out."

"You're sure?" pressed Lenny.

"Cross my heart. The moment Ack-Ack shouted 'Fighter!

Fighter! Corkscrew starboard, Skipper!' through the intercom, every man reacted. A moment's delay invited disaster. A split second later, the night fighter raked our tail, Wrath plunged the
Ace
into an evasive dive, and our mid-upper guns returned fire. But the plane was crippled, and we were going down.

There wasn't a minute to lose if we hoped to bail out.

Glancing back along the tunnel, I saw the mid-upper gunner descending from the dorsal turret. He—like everyone except the rear gunner—would escape by the front hatch. There was no sign of Ack-Ack, and now we know why."

"That doesn't make sense," said Liz. "How was Ack-Ack stabbed three times in the back when he was
the only airman
in the rear turret?"

"What we have here," Wyatt declared, "is a 'locked room'

puzzle. If we solve the /zmvdunit, we'll solve the whodunit."

"We unmask the secret agent?"

"How
equals
who."

"But how do we solve it?" Lenny asked.

"We seek help."

"Help from whom?"

"From John Dickson Carr."

+ + +

Some brains do crossword puzzles. Some play chess. Some calculate the odds of Texas hold 'em poker. It matters not what you do to exercise the 'little gray cells'—as Hercule Poirot put it—as long as you do something to keep your mind from atrophying.

Wyatt solved mysteries.

Historical and detective puzzles.

"Carr?" said Lenny. "You mean the mystery writer?"

"Read him?"

"No, but I've heard of him. Before we moved to Wales, I worked as a librarian."

"Carr," Wyatt explained for the others, "was a grand master in the golden age of detective fiction. He's still the undisputed king of the locked-room puzzle. The setup in a locked-room puzzle is this: A body is found,
by itself\
in a room with no secret escape. The cause of death is such that seemingly the murderer must still be in the room. But he or she isn't, so how was the 'impossible crime' committed?"

"Poe?" said Sweaty. '"The Murders in the Rue Morgue'?"

"A telling example. Most consider it to be the first detective story ever written. Murder by razor in an apparently inaccessible fourth-floor room."