Night Soldiers

link, across her palm until it was free of the door handle, then laid it silently on the floor, kneeling slowly. Retrieved the gun and held it in her right hand, then put the lock inside one of the shoes hanging around her neck. Took a breath, and pushed gently against the door with her left hand.

The door made one small squeak as it opened. The humming stopped. Faye took a step onto the roof.

She was wound tight as a spring, but not frightened. She didn’t think it through, but some part of her mind was trying to let her know that when a door is chained and padlocked on one side, there is rarely anybody on the other side. At least not anybody who wants to be there.

The roof was deserted.

On one wall stood a blue lantern. A device used, perhaps, on a ship or in a railroad yard. She could see the shape of the flame burning behind the blue glass. She went up to it. Opened the little door. And blew it out.

Squinting against the darkness, she peered out over the intervening rooftops but could not make out her own building. Then, close to where she thought it might be, a match flared. The flame lingered for an instant, then disappeared.

Renata!

No signal had been arranged, but she knew absolutely that Renata had been watching the blue light, had seen it go out, and had contrived to make a visible acknowledgment.

Now she flew.

Lantern swinging from her left hand, gun clutched in her right, shoes banging against her breasts, she ran down the stairs and out into the street. Her socks got wet and her feet hurt but she wasn’t going to stop for anything. Pumping her arms, hair flying, she tore down the side street, past Calle de Plata, into Calle de Victoria, almost slipping as she went around the corner, into the building past her bomb shelter alcove, up the stairs, up the ladder, onto the roof, rushing into Renata’s arms and yelling at the top of her lungs, yelling with triumph.

In Seville, it was the custom of Hauptmann Bernhard Luders, of the Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion, always to have a woman the night before he flew a mission. Such sport maintained the traditions of that city, where Don Juan had been born and raised and where, as a young man, he had observed with horror that the corpse in a funeral procession was his own, and resolved to fight death with lust from that day forth.

It cooled him, Luders said. Left him calm and level-headed for work the following day. It gave him, also, a reputation, and that he enjoyed immensely. He was twenty-one years old, with a small angry face and a small transparent mustache. At his direction, Feldwebel Kunkel, his batman, would sit in a gilded, red plush chair outside the room at the Hotel Alfonso XIII, an apparent guardian of lovers’ privacy but in fact an advertisement for the heated Wurstverstecken (hide-the-wiener) games being played on the other side of the door.

After midnight, when the officers came upstairs from drinking in the hotel bar, they would nod to Kunkel. He would rise and salute. “He is in tonight?” someone would always ask. “Yes sir,” Kunkel would answer, “but he flies tomorrow.” Ahh, they would nod approvingly, aware of his custom, then add the obligatory joke: “We shoot by night that bomb by day.”

In response to the joke, Kunkel, a man who understood loyalty at its root, would offer the obligatory response: a slow raising of the hands and eyes to heaven. What lovers these pilots!

Luders’s latest was sixteen.

Evangelina. Evangelina. To Luders, even her name reeked of Spain, of Catholicism, of darkness, ignorance, superstition as black and wild as the unruly bush between her marble legs.

She drove him insane.

He had frolicked a bit at university in Heidelberg, among the properly raised dough-maidens of the city’s aristocracy, but nothing had prepared him for what he took to be the true Spanish passion. The Mediterranean Suden, the South, tickled his Northern European fantasies to begin with-it was so hot and filthy and poor, one could do anything. Anything. The little witch would crawl about the hotel carpet wearing nothing at all, catch hold of his boot and plead with him. It was Spanish, the pleading, but somehow the meaning worked its way through. She was defiled, worthless. He had led her into the Temple of Sin and now she was lost in its vast recesses, a maddened novitiate. She could think of nothing else. Nothing. All day long, devils whispered in her ear, of practices so demonic she dared not speak them aloud. For such thoughts he must punish her. Now. For if he did not staunch this frightful thirst she would tear her hair in frenzy. She sobbed and moaned and wriggled like an eel and begged him to put out the fire that burned her alive.

Poor Kunkel.

He had to sit there and listen to it night after night-and privately wondered how the man ever got any rest. Also, it fell to him to ferry a constant stream of gifts to Evangelina’s family, who lived in a neighborhood that frightened him, in a house that made him ill. He had not joined the air force with such adventures in mind, but what was one to do. Hauptmann Luders wasn’t a bad sort, a smart Rhenish lad with a rigid back and a taste for a fight who liked his stinky little cigars. Yet he had plunged into the Spanish mysteries up to his very neck. Ah well, these Condor Legion pilots believed themselves to be of a higher order. Perhaps they were.

At 1:30 A.M., Kunkel knocked discreetly at the door. It was time. Luders disentangled himself from the girl, washed quickly, and arrived at the airfield, a little north and west of the city, a half hour later. There was excellent coffee in the briefing hut, and Von Emel went through the usual drill: weather, situation on the ground-little enough happening, although someone had blown up an armory in the Guadarrama-and mission. But some things were not as usual. There were two SD types in attendance, from the Nazi party’s foreign intelligence service. Small men in expensive suits, sharp-eyed and silent. Luders did not mind the Abwehr-they were military and had kinship with the airmen-but these two made him nervous. They stared at him. The other variation concerned the mission itself. Von Emel handed him a circled street map of Madrid and explained at length.

He rather hurried the takeoff, because he had to reach Madrid while it was still dark. That would require some fast flying, but Luders was an excellent pilot and his Messerschmitt had airspeed tucked here and there that only he knew about. Willy Messerschmitt himself had come to Spain in August, to tour behind Nationalist lines and visit the places where his planes would be tested, and proven. In fact, the 109 was well suited to what Luders would ask of it. The five-hundred-pound bomb slung beneath the belly of the plane didn’t slow him down, though it did drink a little extra gas.

Just before sunrise, the dawn no more than a faint blur behind him, he came skimming in over the city from the east. He could not hear the rattle above the engine noise, but a few yellow pinpricks of anti-aircraft fire were evident as he flew over the Paseo del Prado; however, he was really too low, and going too fast, for the Spanish gunners to have any patience with him. He steadied his foot on the bomb-release pedal and kept a light thumb atop the joystick where the machine-gun button was located. You never knew what was waiting on the rooftops-it was wiser to sweep up as you went.

He moved closer to the window, body tensed for action. He had been born with the eyesight of a hawk, and now scanned the dark blocks below until he found what he was looking for. A pinpoint of blue light. From there it was all instinct. He banked hard, came sideways through the turn, the aeroplane slicing neatly through the bumpy air above the city, wound up in a shallow dive with the nose of the plane in perfect line with the beacon.

Then several things happened very quickly. A red flickering that seemed almost to come from the beacon itself. He drove his thumb down hard, but the joypoint, the angle where his tracer bullets came together, was high. He corrected. The red flickers got much larger. There were three figures on the roof-one of them perhaps a woman? Shoved his foot to the floor, felt the plane kick free of its dead weight, then banked hard to the south, laying all the juice he had into the engine.

It took quite some time before he realized that he had a problem. Nothing like a six-second bombing run to ice over the nervous system. But, as he flew over a small forest of pine and cork oak, he discovered that his right foot was throbbing like a giant clock. He looked down, moved the foot, saw a pfennig-size half moon of rushing treetops flanked by two bright red droplets. As sweat stood suddenly on his brow, he clutched frantically, testicles first, at his body. Even as the throbbing became hammering, he breathed a sigh of relief. Thank God, an honorable wound and no more. He climbed to make sure the 109’s innards were not damaged, waggled the wings, and headed for Seville.

Something else had gone wrong, but that he did not notice for some time, and by then the Nationalist airfield at Almodovar was out of the question. He tapped the gasoline gauge, but it refused to change its mind. Actually, he’d been extremely lucky. A bullet had ruptured his gasoline tank, and by rights he should have been blown all over Madrid. As it was, he’d simply showered the rooftops with aviation gas.