Escape From Paris (5 page)

“Reggie . . . Oh Jesus . . .” Jimmy Kinkaid's Hurricane wavered, turned toward the molten fiery tangle of wreckage as the wreckage plummeted mindlessly down. Then the sky was empty of battle, the Messerschmitts pulling away over the gray-blue waters of the Channel, the Hurricanes swinging homeward.

That was the first scramble.

The second sounded at eleven. Kendrick had to ditch in the Channel but he was picked up by a motor launch. Freeman and Croft were killed.

Now they waited again, sprawled in the sun around the dispersal tent. Jonathan finished his tea. He didn't want any bread and jam. Instead, he looked worriedly at Jimmy Kinkaid. Jimmy's mug sat beside him, ignored. Jimmy lay on the ground staring upward, his young face slack and puddly like an old man's.

Jonathan reached into his tunic pocket and pulled out a packet of Players. He fumbled for a minute in his trouser pocket then walked over to Jimmy. “Got a light, Jimmy?”

Jimmy looked up blankly. For a long moment his eyes were unfocussed, then he reached into his jacket, found a lighter and held it out to Jonathan.

Jonathan lit the cigarette. “Thanks.”

Jimmy put the lighter back in his pocket.

“What are you doing tonight?” Jonathan asked.

“Tonight?” Jimmy repeated it like a word in a foreign language.

“Porter's taking a car up to London. There's a new band at the Bag O'Nails. It should be quite a bit of fun.”

Jimmy Kinkaid looked beyond Jonathan, looked back up into the shimmering blue sky. “Reggie always sat across from me in the mess. Freeman sat on my left.”

A prickle of cold moved down Jonathan's back.

Jimmy Kinkaid looked at him now, his eyes wild. “Croft sat on my right. What does that tell you?”

“Not a bloody thing except you're talking like a fool. Like an old woman looking at tea leaves. That's bloody stupid for a man who has to take a plane up any . . .”

The ring of the field telephone turned every face. Squadron Leader Mitchell answered, listened for an instant, shouted to the tense waiting flyers, “Scramble. Seventy-plus, angels one-six,” and they were running, all of them, toward the waiting ranks of Hurricanes.

Jonathan reached his ship, the Mad Monk. Right foot into the stirrup step, left foot on the port wing, a short step, then right foot on the step inset in the fuselage and into the cockpit. His rigger, Alfie, passed the parachute straps across his shoulders, then the Sutton harness straps. Jonathan clipped on his mask, slid shut the canopy, gave the thumbs up signal to the ground crew and they pulled away the chocks. Jonathan's was the fourth plane to lift off from Hawkinge Field and turn up and out over the blue-gray waters of the Channel. Up, up, up. As they climbed he scanned his horizon, his eyes flickering back and forth and up, always up. He had learned that. Every flyer still alive had learned that. They hadn't known at first, hadn't realized what an advantage height and sun could be. It didn't take long to learn. They lost six planes on one day in July when the ME's came down out of the sun. They learned, too, that their tight wingtip to wingtip formation was suicidal. They were so busy watching their mates, keeping five feet apart in an air show V, that loosely bunched Messerschmitts ticked them off like ducks in a shooting gallery. Now they fanned out in fours like fingers on an outstretched hand.

The cockpit was hot and stuffy. Jonathan slid the canopy open and welcomed the cool rush of air. The sun hung in the Western sky. If they climbed high enough, fast enough, the sun would be behind the squadron. Then, out of the East, he saw the Germans. Fine black specks came clearer and closer. Now they hurtled through the sky beneath him, coming to be killed, oh hell, yes. Come on now, come on, you bastards. The sky filled with planes, lumbering Heinkels with their bombloads ticketed for the coastal airfields and, above, guarding them, black and dangerous, ME109s.

He saw, out of the corner of his eyes, a flight of Spitfires. Good enough. The Hurricanes would go after the Heinkels, easy meat, while the faster, more maneuverable Spitfires took on the quick and lethal ME's.

Jonathan curved down toward the spreading mass of Heinkels, choosing his prey. Suddenly planes began to climb, fall or twist. There was no form or order left as each pilot fought to survive. Jonathan swerved left, dipping nearer and nearer, then he pressed the firing button and watched bullets stitch across the belly of the Heinkel. The plane flew on for a moment longer then slowly rolled on its side, and, lazily, as if it didn't matter very much, the bomber turned over and slipped sideways down toward the water.

The sharply blue sky was marked with ragged trails of white, curves and curls and swirls of contrails, a ghostly fast fading imprint of the battle, still existing when some of the men who made those trails were already dead.

One Heinkel down, two down. Jonathan talked to himself, shouted when he saw Brewster make a hit. As he climbed up again, searching for another Heinkel, the thick nose of a Messerschmitt sliced by him. Jonathan craned his head to the left. There was no time to radio, no time to shout a warning, scarcely time to see as the ME109 bore down on a Hurricane, machine guns rattling. Jonathan saw, above the Hurricane's wing, the cavorting mouse, Miss Minnie, and knew it for Jimmy Kinkaid's plane even as the ME109's cannon shell struck the cockpit and the Hurricane disintegrated.

Jonathan swung around behind the ME109, dropping just beneath the German's altitude as the plane turned toward France. He hung there grimly, stubbornly, knowing the Messerschmitt was faster, that ultimately he would fall farther and farther behind. But still he pursued. If he could get just a little closer, he would blow him out of the sky. Fritz didn't know anyone was behind him as Jonathan flew in the blind pocket formed by the Messerschmitt's tail unit. If the Kraut slowed down a little bit . . . Then, grimly, Jonathan smiled. A dark slow sludge of oil moved along the belly of the plane. Yes, Fritz was going to slow down. It wouldn't be long. The stain of oil widened, spread, and the Messerschmitt's engine began to smoke.

Jonathan had no thought for anything in the world but the sleek black plane ahead of him. He was gaining on his prey, slowly, ever so slowly. Two hundred yards. One hundred and fifty yards. One hundred yards. His thumb cupped over the firing button. Not yet. Not quite yet.

One instant they flew, pursued and pursuer, almost level, the sturdy Hurricane just below the Messerschmitt, drawing nearer and nearer. The next, the ME109 abruptly slipped sideways. Jonathan, startled, did not follow quite soon enough. The 109 jinked back toward him. He had been spotted. He didn't hear the sound of the Messerschmitt's machine guns but he heard metallic pings against his engine plating. He dropped sideways, trying desperately to regain the offensive. The next few seconds were a whirling buffeting blur, then, straight ahead, he saw the profile of the Messerschmitt. His thumb pressed the firing button.

The Messerschmitt bucked upward, for an instant pointed straight at the sky, almost standing on its tail, before the plane fell backward, streaking flame and smoke.

Jonathan tried to level out. His altimeter wasn't registering. Coils of icy gray smoke swirled from the engine. The white fog thickened. He couldn't see. He released his harness, pushed back the canopy and rolled the Hurricane on her back. He gave himself a shove. As he fell free of the smoking directionless plane, he realized there was something wrong with his left leg. Tumbling backward, he gave a hard yank at the ripcord. It was slack in his hand.

“No. No.” He heard his own voice, shouting angrily through the rush of air, then painfully, gloriously, the chute snapped open, jerking him to a swaying rhythmic descent. His leg felt heavy and immovable. Blood was seeping through his trousers. He started at the dark red splotch, puzzled. He hadn't felt a thing, but he was hurt. At least it was a slow ooze of blood, not the swift deadly gush of a severed artery. Gingerly, he tried to move the leg. Pain, for the first time, flamed the length of it. Well, if he didn't bleed to death, he should be all right—if he could inflate his Mae West. He looked down. For an instant, what he saw made no sense at all.

He had begun pursuing the ME109 over the Channel. From that moment on, he had concentrated totally on staying in the invisible pocket just below his prey. Abruptly, Jonathan understood. The 109 had turned for its home base, Jonathan following. Now, instead of the cold blue-gray choppy waters of the Channel below him, Jonathan saw, rushing up, faster and faster, the rolling hilly farmland of Northern France, Nazi-Occupied Northern France.

Maj. Erich Krause ignored the middle-aged man standing tensely in front of his desk. Instead, Krause finished reading the last few paragraphs of the report, initialed it, sat back in his chair. He looked with satisfaction around the high-ceilinged room though his face didn't change at all. His skin tended to a grayish hue, emphasizing his sharply green eyes. His eyes had a peculiar penetrating quality. Sgt. Schmidt once told his wife, “Maj. Krause's eyes gleam like a cat's. I think,” he had added with a rush, “they would have killed him for a witch if he'd lived two hundred years ago.” Now those pale ice-green eyes studied the rich red of the velvet drapes and the elaborate wheat frond pattern of the molding and the exquisite grace of the crystal drops on the massive chandelier. His office had once served a wealthy Parisian. His nostrils flared just a little, the only change in that grayish still face. He had come a long way from Hamburg and the bitterly cold, filthy cellar. He remembered again, as he had remembered so many times, his shock, the unbelieving shock and horror, when he'd straggled back to Germany, wounded and sick after the War's end in 1918, and found his mother in that cellar, found her only in time to see her die, swept away by pneumonia, her strength gone because she had been too long hungry and cold. He often recalled that cellar, remembered deliberately. The cellar in its chill and filth represented all those lean and miserable and angry years when Germans starved, when a wheelbarrow load of money was not enough to buy a meal, when there was no work, no future, no hope.

He first heard Adolph Hitler speak in Brandenburg on a hot July day in 1931 and he had been caught up by the Fuehrer's magnetism. Krause had followed him, believed in him, first as a hanger on, then as an accepted follower, then as a neophyte in Himmler's SS. And now, not quite ten years later, he sat in warmth and comfort in a Paris office, a sub-section chief in the Geheime Staats Polizei

The Gestapo.

He pulled a stack of folders to him. He was getting quite a good ring of informers together. He had authorized the release yesterday of fifteen more petty criminals from the Cherche-Midi jail. In exchange for their freedom, they would be the eyes and ears of the Gestapo against those foolhardy Frenchmen who dared oppose the New Order.

Like the miserable specimen standing in front of him.

Krause looked up now and enjoyed the quick, involuntary gasp of his prisoner. Krause's pale green eyes stared into the man's brown eyes until they shifted and slipped away. Still Krause stared until finally, reluctantly, fearfully, the Frenchman again met his gaze. Krause felt a quick surge of warmth in his entrails. What a frightened little rabbit. How long would it take to make the rabbit squeal?

Krause picked up a folder from his polished desk, fine walnut from the Louis XV period, opened it and began to read in an almost gentle soothing voice. “Name: Louis Robards. Home address: 7 Rue de Douai. Profession : railroad worker. Born June 6, 1895 in the 13
th
Arrondissement, Paris. You have worked in the yards at Gare de L'Est for twenty-three years.”

Robards listened, his shoulders hunched. He twisted a railroad cap in big work-toughened hands.

Slowly, almost sadly, Krause shook his head. “It is a shame to see a man throw away all those years of good work. Who put you up to it, Robards?”

Robards looked down at his cap.

“Come now, Robards. You didn't do it on your own.”

“I didn't do anything.”

“No? Then you shouldn't have been so quick to tell your mates that some trains might leave the yards with their brakes filed down.”

Robards hunched one shoulder higher than the other. He felt a little prickle of confidence. They couldn't hang a man for big talk. Not even the Gestapo. “I didn't do anything.”

“But we know of a train that did leave for Berlin . . . with its brakes sabotaged.”

Robards shrugged. “It didn't have anything to do with me.”

Krause's eyes flickered almost imperceptibly to the thick-set blond man in a grayish rumpled suit who stood just behind and a little to the left of the prisoner.

With no change of expression, efficiently, almost casually, the man closed his fist, swung.

The totally unexpected blow caught Robards low in his back, just above the kidney. The hard solid sound mingled with his scream of pain. Thrown forward, he slammed into Krause's desk then collapsed on the floor, his breath coming in high sharp whimpers. He was still bleary and sick when his tormentor reached down and hauled him to his feet, gripping Robards's arm viciously.