She looked at the watch. Where was he? “Come on,” she whispered. “Please come on.”
Within fifteen minutes, over the continuing noises of destruction, she heard someone running. She flattened down on the concrete, her Luger ready for a shot. And then his voice came to her: “Don’t shoot! It’s me!”
“Thank God!” She stood up. “What blew?”
“The armory.” His cap was gone, his shirt almost torn off by the concussion’s winds that had caught him just as he’d flung himself into an alley. “Lazaris! How much longer?”
“Three minutes! I want to run the tanks over!”
In three minutes it was finished. Michael sent the fuel truck on a collision course into the Messerschmitt Bf- 109, wrecking a wing, then he and Chesna got into the Dornier while Lazaris buckled himself into the pilot’s seat. “All right!” Lazaris said as he cracked his knuckles. “Now we’ll find out what a Russian can do with a German fighter plane!”
The props roared, and the Dornier left the ground in a burst of speed.
Lazaris circled the plane over Skarpa’s fiery center. “Hold on!” he shouted. “We’re going to finish the job!” He pressed a switch that started the machine guns charging, and then he dropped them into a shrieking dive that jammed them back in their seats.
He went for the huge fuel tanks. The third strafing pass sparked a red cinder that suddenly bloomed into a white-orange fireball. Turbulence bucked the Dornier as Lazaris zoomed for altitude. “Ah!” he said with a broad grin. “Now I’m home again!”
Lazaris circled one last time over the island, like a vulture over a bed of coals, and then he turned the plane toward Holland.
10
Jerek Blok had always assumed that on the day it finally happened, he would be so cool, ice wouldn’t melt in his hands. But now, at seven-forty-eight on the morning of June 6, both his hands were trembling.
The radio operator in the airfield’s gray concrete control building was slowly dialing through the frequencies. Voices drifted in and out through a storm of static; not all of them were German, evidence that British and American troops had already seized some radio transmitters.
Through the pre-dawn hours, there’d been scattered reports of parachutes descending over Normandy. Several airfields reported being bombed and strafed by Allied planes, and just before five o’clock in the morning, two fighter planes had screamed out of a rain shower and marched bullets through the building where Blok now stood, bursting out every window and killing a signals officer. Dried blood streaked the wall behind him. One of the three Messerschmitts on the field had been shot up beyond repair, and another had a riddled fuselage. The nearby storage warehouse, where Theo von Frankewitz had been confined, had also been badly damaged. But, thank the fates, the hangar had been unscathed.
As the sun rose in a cloud-plated sky and a strong salt breeze blew inland from the English Channel, the fragmented radio reports told the tale: the Allied invasion of Europe had begun.
“I want a drink,” Blok said to Boots, and the hulking aide opened a thermos of brandy and gave it to him. Blok uptilted it, the harsh liquor making his eyes water. Then he listened, his heart pounding, as the radio operator found more voices in the cyclone of war. The Allies were swarming ashore, it appeared, in a dozen places. Off the Normandy beaches lay a truly fearsome armada: hundreds of troop transports, destroyers, cruisers, and battleships, all flying either Stars and Stripes or Union Jacks. The sky was claimed by hundreds of Allied Mustang, Thunderbolt, Lightning, and Spitfire fighter planes, strafing German strongholds while the big Lancaster and Plying Fortress bombers flew deeper into the heart of the Reich.
Blok took another drink.
The day of his destiny, and that of Nazi Germany, had arrived.
He looked at the other six men in the room, among them Captain van Hoven and Lieutenant Schrader, who had been trained to serve as the B-17’s pilot and copilot. Blok said, “We go.”
Van Hoven, his craggy face resolute, walked on shattered glass to a lever on the wall and without hesitation pulled it downward. From atop the building a shrill bell began to ring. Van Hoven and Schrader, along with their bombardier and navigator, ran toward the large reinforced concrete hangar about fifty yards away as other men-the ground crew and the B-17’s gunners-came out of a barracks behind the hangar.
Blok put the thermos aside, and he and Boots left the building and strode across the pavement. Since leaving Skarpa Island, Blok had lived in a Dutch mansion about four miles from the airfield, where he could oversee the loading of the carnagene bombs and the final training of the crew. Then there had been drills at all hours of the night and day; he would find out now if the drills had been worthwhile.
The crewmen had entered the hangar through a side door, and now, as Blok and Boots approached, the hangar’s main doors were winched open. When they were halfway open, a low muttering echoed out across the pavement. The noise rapidly grew, through a snarl to a roar. The hangar doors continued to part, and as they opened the uncaged monster began to emerge.
The glass dome of the bombardier’s position was marred with cracks that looked real even within a distance of a few feet. Painted bullet holes, the edges grayish blue to simulate bare metal, punctured the olive-green skin beneath the drawing of Hitler squeezed in an iron-mailed fist. The words “Iron Fist,” in English, completed the B- 17’s nose art. The huge aircraft slid from the hangar, its four propellers whirling. The glass of the belly turret gun and the top turret were painted to look as if they had been almost completely shattered. False bullet holes pocked the sides of the plane in random patterns, and had been painted on the looming tall fin. All the pieces had been put together, using the cannibalized parts of several crashed B-17’s, after Frankewitz had done the artwork. United States Army Air Force insignia completed the deception.
Of all the B-17’s gun positions, only two-the waist’s swivel machine guns-were manned and loaded. But no firing would be necessary, because this was in essence a suicide flight. The Allied planes would let Iron Fist pass to its target, but coming home again was a different question. Van Hoven and Schrader both understood the honor of piloting this mission, and their families would be well provided for. But the waist positions, with their wide rectangular openings through which the machine guns were swiveled to follow targets, would look more convincing if…
Well, that was a task yet to be completed.
Once free of the hangar, Van Hoven braked Iron Fist to a halt. Blok and Boots, holding their caps down in the windstorm of the props, walked toward the main entry door on the plane’s right side.
A movement caught Blok’s eye. He looked up. An aircraft was circling the field. He had a few seconds of horror, expecting another strafing attack, until he saw it was a Dornier night fighter. What was the fool doing? He didn’t have permission to land here!
One of the waist gunners unlatched the door for them, and they entered the plane. As Boots crouched forward, along a narrow walkway through the aircraft’s waist, Jerek Blok drew his Luger and fired two shots into the head of the starboard waist gunner, then blew the port-side gunner’s brains out as well. He went about the task of positioning the bodies in the rectangular openings so their blood would stream down the sides of the plane and they would be in full view.
An authentic touch, he thought.
In the cockpit Van Hoven released the brakes and started them rolling once more along the runway to their takeoff point. There they stopped again, while pilot and copilot checked their gauges and instruments. In the bomb bay behind them, Boots was performing his own function: removing the rubber safety caps from the nose fuses of the twenty-four dark green bombs, and carefully giving each fuse a quarter twist with a wrench to arm them.
His final work done, Blok left Iron Fist and went out to wait for Boots by the side of the runway. The magnificently camouflaged aircraft trembled, like an arrow about to be shot into flight. When the carnagene exploded in the streets of London, the messages of disaster would go to the commanders of that armada off the Normandy shore, and then trickle down to the soldiers. By nightfall there would be mass panic and retreat. Oh, what glory for the Reich! The Fuhrer himself would dance with-
Blok’s throat clutched. The Dornier was landing.
And, worse, the stupid fool of a pilot was speeding along the runway right for Iron Fist!
Blok ran in front of the B-17, waving his arms wildly. The Dornier, burning rubber as its brakes locked, cut its
