No Dawn for Men (21 page)

A movement to Fleming’s left caught his eye. Looking that way he saw Jonas leap over the wall and run full out to a tree about twenty yards away on the lawn that bordered the courtyard. When he got there, he crouched and raised his right arm. At this signal Hans stood and began firing his machine gun up at the turret window. Under this covering fire, Jonas stepped out and flung a hand grenade up at the turret. It hit the wall beneath the window and blasted away a ragged chunk of it. Hans was still firing non-stop. Jonas pulled another grenade off of his shoulder clip and flung it, this time directly into the turret window, where it exploded, sending rock and glass and the German gunner’s body flying through the air.

“He must not have been hungry,” said Fleming.

“Look,” Dowling said. “The priest.”

They peered through the clearing smoke and saw Father Wilfrid staggering toward them, a huge bloody gash where his face should have been. He took one last step, reached his hand out, and slumped to the ground.

“Hans,” Fleming said. “Cut the telephone lines.”

46.

The Bavarian Forest

October 8, 1938, 8:30 p.m.

“We’re
here,
” said Dowling.

The group was huddled in a grove of tall fir trees about a mile east of the abbey. Dowling’s flashlight shone on a map he had unfolded and placed on the needle-covered forest floor.

“We have ninety minutes,” said Fleming.

“Will we make it?” Billie said.

Dowling ran the end of the narrow beam of the flashlight along the course they would take to get to the landing field, which he had marked in red before leaving the mill. “It’s four-plus miles,” he said. “It’ll be close.”

Knowing that the firefight would surely draw the German patrol back to the monastery, Fleming and Dowling had decided that the best thing to do was to head posthaste to the landing field. They knew that when the patrol arrived at the abbey, the lives of all of the monks would be in grave danger. The machine gunner dead from a grenade attack, the rest of the troops either dead or deadly sick. Whoever was in charge would have to improvise. Hopefully the first thing he did was to get rid of the leftover poisoned food and spirit away the cook whose work it was. The cook and Father Schneider were dead men if they were discovered, but there was no help for that now. Fleming and the American had agreed that the less they knew at the abbey, the better, especially when it came to their numbers and the direction they were heading.

“We need to push on,” said Fleming. “Single file, as quietly as possible. I don’t think the patrol will set out for us. There are only eight of them and they don’t know where to begin to look. But we can’t be sure, so it’s quiet, deliberate speed.”

“Surely they’ll do something,” said Billie.

“They’ll radio for help,” said Dowling, but as far as I know the nearest army base is outside Stuttgart, that’s about two hundred miles. My estimate is that we have about four hours to collect your father and his party, bring them to the magic canyon and get us all to safety.”

“What’s the plan for that?” Billie asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I,” said Fleming, “but it’s early, we’ll figure something out.”

47.

Above The Bavarian Forest

October 9, 1938, 10:15 p.m.

The field was much bigger than either Vaclav or the pilot thought it would be from looking at the map. Marked out, as requested, by bonfires at either end, it was perhaps a quarter mile in length and looked as if someone had tried to grow crops in it at one time. The light from the half moon was so good that the bonfires were not really needed. But that chance could not be taken. In the pilot’s experience, clouds flew around the night sky on schedules only they knew for sure.

On their first descent they had seen a much smaller cleared area and the outline of a dilapidated farmhouse. The pilot now descended again and circled the field. He was, Vaclav knew, ready to drop his human cargo.

“All ready, my king?” the pilot said to Vaclav.

“Yes.”

“I will come in from the east, the wind will blow you back a bit.”

“Fine.”

“By the way, I can land here.”

“You can? Then land for God’s sake. Do the dwarfs and the two professors a favor.”

“I can’t now, fuel.” The young flier pointed to the fuel gauge on the instrument panel. It read empty. “I think it’s wrong, but you’re safer to jump.”

“Fuck.”

“It’s this plane. It’s a prototype, one of a kind. Rejected by the air force for many reasons.”

“Leaky fuel tanks among them.”

“I hope not. I have a hot date tonight. Hate to let her down.”

“If you make it back to Prague, can you come back to pick us up?”

“Of course. What time?”

“What about your date?”

“War is hell.”

“Say o-one hundred.”

“Fine.”

“I don’t know about the bonfires.”

“I’ll find it.”

Vaclav nodded. Where did these kids come from? God knows we’ll need them when the Germans invade.

* * *

The pilot banked and leveled off at a thousand feet, heading due east. The forest below, dense and black, whizzed by for a few seconds and then, about a quarter mile from the edge of the field, he raised his thumb to Vaclav. The English professor was sitting on the edge of the jump door. Vaclav nodded to him and raised his thumb and the professor jumped. In a line facing Vaclav the others waited their turn. The German professor was next. His long white hair blew wildly in the wind from the open door. He crouched and sat for a second on the door’s rim, then slipped away into the night.

The pilot turned to check his instruments. The fuel gauge still read empty. He was certain that he had not miscalculated his flight time or rate of consumption. Fairly certain. A moment later he heard Vaclav say, “hold on tight, we’re off.” The pilot kept his heading but began to climb, happily, into the cloud cover that was beginning to amass. He would have to cross the rest of Germany and then the German-occupied Sudetenland before he could breathe easily. Before entering the clouds, he banked slightly to the left, turned and looked down, and saw a line of five parachutes in perfect formation drifting down toward the field.

48.

The Bavarian Forest

October 9, 1938, Midnight

A checkerboard pattern of clouds drifted by above the heads of the six people sitting near Metten Abbey’s orchard wall. The moonlight that broke through at eerily regular intervals cast its silver light on their faces at the same intervals—the grim, tired faces of one woman and five men. The ground floor lights in the abbey were on, but they neither saw nor heard any movement. Guided by Trygg Korumak, who seemed to know the area intimately, they had made their way from the drop area through a deep pine forest, made deeper by the failure of any moonlight to penetrate the dense canopy that loomed overhead, as if, they all felt, they were hiking through a living, breathing tunnel.

The other five members of the fellowship, as Professor Tolkien had come to describe it to himself, were off on missions: the Kaufman brothers to scout the Roman wall, and the three dwarfs to steal lamp oil from the abbey.  

What else but a fellowship? Tolkien said to himself. A fellowship whose oath had been sworn not with words, but with deeds: the escape from Carinhall, the slaying of the German soldiers hunting them, the leap from an airplane into the abyss of the night, the trek through forest, after the firefight at the abbey, by virtual strangers to collect other virtual strangers in a godforsaken farm field. Who needs to swear an oath after doing such things?

 The English professor was sitting off to the side, perhaps twenty feet from the others. He did not expect to survive the night, which was too bad. He had been feeling low of late for reasons he could not fathom, unable to write, at odds with his publisher, tired of lecturing to teenage boys who were passionate about all the wrong things, detached from life. Now all was clear, especially the confusion that had been dogging him about the novel he was writing.
Good-evil, honor-desecration, base-noble
—if he lived he would write about these things, with no fear or reservation, no self-doubt. Not after what he had seen in the last two days.

“Hello, professor,” someone said. “Are you with us?”

“Yes, Fleming,” Tolkien replied, “I’m with you.”

“Good, you were drifting, exhausted I’m sure.”

“No, exhilarated, actually.”

“Exhilarated, well . . .”

“Did you want to speak to me?”

“Yes, before it’s too late.”

“You want me to lend you my years.”

“Pardon?”

“Sorry, it’s something I tell students who come to me.”

“The letter,” Fleming said, haltingly, “my father . . . Can you tell me now how and when you met him? Do you mind?”

Tolkien smiled. “You realize where we are, Fleming?” he said. “A distraction would be quite welcome.”

Fleming looked discomfited, and Tolkien regretted his sarcasm. Mild though it was, it had plainly pierced his young countryman’s emotional armor. Did this brash young fellow actually
have
a sensitive heart? And then Tolkien realized that brash and young, though often going nicely together in the same sentence, did not mean
immune to pain
. “Of course, my dear fellow,” he said. The professor paused to gaze with new eyes on Fleming and then began.

“We landed in the same muddy shell crater one night during an assault. Your father’s horse was badly injured, he was sprawled across your father’s legs.”

“When was this?”

“The Somme.”

“Ah, he died the following May.”

“Yes, I read about it and posted the letter.”

“What did he talk about?”

“He berated me for sparseness of speech.”

“Berated you . . . ?”

“Yes, but it was . . .” Here Tolkien paused again, remembering that night in 1916. “It was said from one soldier to another. A sort of . . . I was going to say camaraderie, but that’s not what it was. It was more like older to younger brother, or father to son. Utterly respectful, mischievous actually, old Etonians and all that. I must say, if you will pardon my sentimentality, even
loving
. Of course in the most obscure of English ways. I offered to shoot the horse, but he did it himself.”

“He loved horses, could never understand why I didn’t,” said Fleming.

“He was the bravest soldier I met in the war,” Tolkien said, “and I met many brave ones, and many broken by cowardice as well.”

Then Tolkien said what he thought he would never say to anyone. “I thought he was going to die. He ordered me to get back to the assault, not to come looking for him, an order that to this day I regret obeying.”

“Why?”

“I was afraid, you see. No man’s land . . . Had I gone back, his life might have been different. He might not have died in that farmhouse in Picardy.”

“Nonsense.”

“Before I left him I gave him my Benedict medal. I should have gone back, but . . . but . . .”

“
What
did you say?
What
did you give him?”

“The St. Benedict medal my wife gave me when I shipped out.”

Fleming reached into his leather jacket, pulled out his wallet and carefully extracted from its secret pocket a St. Benedict’s medal. “Is this it?” he said to Tolkien, handing the medal to him.

Tolkien took the medal, turned it over and ran his fingers over its smooth surfaces. “Where did you get this?” he said.

“It was in a leather pouch in my father’s tunic. They sent it with the packet of his personal things. There was a note in the pouch as well.”

“What did it say?”

“For Johnnie.”

“You.”

“Yes.”

Through his blouse front Fleming fingered the replacement
Vedo
medal he had worn around his neck the past twenty-two years.

“Is it yours?” Fleming asked again.

“Of course,” Tolkien replied. “Your father said his family was rather free-form when it came to religion, but the medal, well, it was the best I could do, knowing I wasn’t going back to save him.”

“You shall have it back.”

“Nonsense,” Tolkien replied, surprising himself by raising his voice and speaking sharply. “I have a replacement, given me by Edith. This medal is yours.” He handed the
Vedo
back to Fleming, who took it without hesitation. “It was always meant to be for Johnnie,” Tolkien said. “Indeed, perhaps for use this very night.”

“Use? I’m not sure what you mean.”

“It’s not just the German army we’ll be facing tonight, surely you understand that.”