A Thousand Suns (23 page)

Chapter 34

Mission Time: 30 Minutes Elapsed

2.35 a.m., 29 April 1945, outside Nantes

The landing had been a bastard. They had paddled towards the sound of waves breaking only to find the bloody things were breaking on a rocky outcrop. All three dinghies had been punctured in quick succession and Koch and his men had had to swim the last few dozen yards and scramble hastily up the razor-sharp rocks to avoid being punished for their reckless landing by the waves. One of his men had drowned during this mad dash, dragged under by the weight of his thick clothes, and two others had received bad gashes clambering ashore; one of them had a broken shinbone. The wounds were bandaged for now, and the broken leg in a makeshift splint, but the men would require medical treatment soon.

That left him twenty-seven effectives.

Koch was cold, wet from the sea and the spattering of rain, chilled by the sporadically gusting wind blowing in from the Atlantic. He stared at the farmhouse from the cover of an apple orchard less than a hundred yards away. It backed onto the airfield; he suspected it would be warm and dry and there was the possibility of some food inside. It looked like it might offer a few hours of relative comfort for his men before the morning’s fun and games.

He unslung his MP-40 and turned round to face Feldwebel Büller. ‘That looks good for tonight, what do you think?’

The man nodded eagerly. The previous week aboard the U-boat had been a damp and cold hell. A night of dryness and relative comfort sounded like the smartest command decision he’d heard in a long time.

‘Okay, let’s go.’

Büller passed the word on, and moments later the men jogged across the open ground and scrambled over a low stone wall towards the isolated building.

Remi Boulliard enjoyed the sound of an excited sea tumbling onto the rocky shoreline below. There was something quite delightful about savouring the snug warmth of a plump wife under the comforting spread of a goose-feather quilt while outside the elements did their best to beat their way noisily in; although this smug pleasure was lessened somewhat by the clatter of rotten wood on plaster. The wind tonight was playing mischief with the wooden shutters of their bedroom window. It had worked one of them loose, and every few seconds the damn thing was banging irritatingly against the wall outside. The shutters needed replacing, and the fresh sea breeze was gleefully reminding him of that.

Another job to do.

He shrugged, it was a job for the summer, like whitewashing the old plaster walls of the building; it could wait a couple of months.

He listened to the regular, heavy breathing of his wife; it would take a marching brass band to wake her up. He often found the rhythmic ebb and flow of her deep breathing punctuated by the metronome regularity of her nasal click soporific when he was close to sleep. But on a night like this, when sleep seemed such a remote prospect for him, it was irritating. He slid his bony carpenter’s hand under her left shoulder and gently lifted. She obliged automatically in her sleep and rolled onto her side, the nasal clicking stopped.

Remi sighed.

He heard the brittle crash of breaking glass. It sounded as if it had come from the kitchen or the pantry downstairs.

He sat upright in bed, straining to filter the noises from outside the house, to hear only those from inside. He heard the tinkle and scrapes of glass fragments being gently brushed aside, the sound of a footfall on the hard ceramic floor of their kitchen.

‘Yvonne! Somebody’s in our house,’ he whispered hoarsely. She slept on. He shook her shoulder once, and she moaned noisily. He decided it would make too much noise to wake her up and then explain why he’d done so.

Another noise from downstairs!

It sounded like the scraping sound of one of their heavy wooden chairs being nudged an inch across the floor, as a stranger might do accidentally, unfamiliar with the lay of the furniture. It was followed unmistakably by the faintest, barely audible sound of someone ‘shushing’.

My God there is someone down there!

Remi climbed out of bed and donned his housecoat. He carefully pulled open the bottom drawer of the bureau he shared with his wife, and from beneath a layer of knitted jumpers he pulled out the only recognisable weapon the Boulliards had in their house. It was an antique blunderbuss, a weapon lethal at short range. He grinned in the darkness, the old pitted metal felt reassuring in his hands and he knew there was a small sachet of gunpowder and shot somewhere . . . downstairs.

Shit!

Another bump from below galvanised him to action. He decided the sight of the weapon alone should be enough to frighten off the intruder (
or intruders . . . who shushes themselves?
) downstairs. It was probably only some kids from the town, perhaps a couple of those gypsies that had migrated north, encouraged by the withdrawal of the Germans. He knew there was a caravan of them nearby, camping just outside Nantes.

Emboldened by the weighty unloaded gun in his hands he began to descend the stairs. Even if the damn thing couldn’t fire it would make a fine club if things got a little nasty. He made his way down carefully taking each step close to the wall, where the wood rarely creaked. His bare feet made little noise on each wooden step and as he neared the bottom Remi prepared himself to bellow a loud and terrifying challenge.

As he reached the bottom of the stairs he took the three steps across the hallway to the kitchen. Steadying himself, he extended a hand inside the room and hit the light switch.

The single bulb above the sink lit the kitchen well. Remi’s gasp of horror at the sight before him was all but drowned out by the rattling of a dozen or more safety catches being slipped off.

Koch reached a gloved hand out and gently relieved the old man of his antique.

‘I think I’d better have that, thank you,’ he said in passable French.

Chapter 35

Mission Time: 3 Hours, 10 Minutes Elapsed

5.15 a.m., over France

Outside, above the dark blue bed of clouds, the sky was beginning to lighten. To the east the pale grey sky gave away the approaching dawn with the slightest stain of amber on the horizon. They were at 25,000 feet, high enough to be discreet, but it meant they were now using the oxygen system. The rubber face-piece of his mask was rubbing irritatingly against the bridge of Max’s nose. He pulled the mask away from his face, rubbed his nose and placed it back.

‘Bad fit,’ he muttered.

The oxygen masks they were all wearing were the personal issue of the American crew that had flown this plane and had been adjusted to fit
their
faces when first issued. Max and his crew had had to make do with the masks as best they could. They’d had ten to juggle between the four of them to find the best fits all round. Even so, they each had their own minor irritation to deal with.

Max checked his watch, it was 5.15 a.m. Just over three hours airborne.

They had flown south out of Germany, passing over Swiss airspace, to ensure they were well away from any Allied sorties during the night. Then they’d changed course, heading west into France, just north of Lyon. The detour had added another 300 miles to the journey to Nantes. The bomber had been heavy lifting off, the installed internal tanks just beyond the belly gun had slowed her down, and they’d travelled through the early morning hours at a sluggish 220 miles per hour, to conserve fuel.

‘Stef, how’re we doing?’ he called into the interphone.

‘There’s a waypoint coming twenty minutes further along this course.’

‘Heading north-west?’

‘Yes sir, two hundred and ninety-five degrees.’

The course would take them in a straight line up to Nantes, south of Paris and the dense Allied air traffic north of the city.

Stef’s voice on the interphone again. ‘I’ll be taking another reading in five minutes, sir.’

‘Good, give me a shout when you’re about to do it.’

Flying by night and above cloud cover, Stef could only navigate by dead reckoning, backed up with periodic attempts at celestial navigation using a sextant. While he was taking a reading, the plane would need to be as steady as possible. Even the most carefully taken readings could only give them an approximate position and could only be used to confirm Stef’s calculation of where he thought they were based on the track, speed of the aircraft and time passed, offset against drift and any head or tail winds. A good navigator working and communicating constantly with the pilot could, in theory, navigate blind from any point to any other point. In reality, minor inaccuracies, as a result of slight calibration errors in the equipment or human error, could inevitably accumulate to throw the dead reckoning calculation off.

But Stef was good. He had a young and alert mind, and was constantly rechecking his work and confirming speed and drift values with Max over the interphone.

By contrast, Schröder and his squadron had only visual contact with the bomber and Max’s periodic announcements of direction changes and speed to ensure they remained on course. During the dark hours of the night, they had flown much closer to the B-17 and had been able to maintain a visual by moonlight. The Me-109s had flown slightly higher than the bomber and had been able to see it fairly easily silhouetted against the blue tinged snow-like cloud carpet below. But it was getting lighter now, and they had pulled further away.

Which had been fortunate.

At 4.30 a.m. they had passed within a few miles of a squadron of fighter planes. From that distance they had been unable to work out whether they were American or British. It was most likely they were American. If they had seen them, then undoubtedly the Americans had seen them too. The squadron of fighter planes had not changed course, nor had they attempted to raise them on the radio.

The Allies now owned the sky; no one was expecting to see any German planes in the air. So no one was looking particularly hard, nor would any Allied pilot be particularly suspicious about coming across unexpected planes in the sky.

The flight so far had been uneventful, to the point even that Max had allowed his mind to wander, if only for a few moments at a time.

Pieter took off his flying gloves and rubbed his hands furiously. ‘It’s bloody freezing! As cold as Bolsch pussy.’

Over the comm. he heard Hans chuckle.

Max pulled the mask away from his mouth and exhaled a cloud of vapour. ‘It is. Lads,’ he announced to the others, ‘make sure you keep squeezing your masks.’

At freezing point the exhaled vapour quickly produced ice crystals within the mask, which could block the oxygen supply pipe.

He watched Pieter trying to warm himself up.

‘Go and see how the other two are, Pieter, that should get some blood flowing.’

Pieter nodded. ‘Yeah, good idea.’ He unplugged himself from the interphone, plugged his regulator into his ‘walkaround’ oxygen cylinder, pulled himself out of the copilot’s seat and clambered back through the bulkhead towards the bomb bay, carrying his oxygen cylinder under one arm like a rolled-up newspaper.

Max decided it was time to check in with Schröder and his men. He switched to radio. ‘Mother Goose calling, how are my little goslings?’

Max heard the speakers of his earphones crackle as Schröder answered. ‘Good morning, Max, we’re still here.’

‘How’s your fuel reading?’

‘We’re all about the same, just about empty on the drop tanks. What’s our position?’

‘North-west of Lyon, another four hundred miles or so.’

There was no immediate response from Schröder, the man was obviously doing some quick mental arithmetic or perhaps consulting with his men on another frequency.

The earphones crackled again. ‘It looks like it’s going to be a bit on the tight side.’

That was no big surprise, they’d all known even with the drop tanks giving them added range that crossing half of Germany, and some of Switzerland and all of France was going to take them to the very limit.

‘I can drop altitude a little; not much though,’ said Max. It would help marginally.

‘No, best to stay up high, we’ll do fine, Max. Don’t worry about us. It’ll be close, but we’ll have enough to get us there.’

‘Okay. Listen, we have a waypoint coming up in quarter of an hour, the one that takes us north-west for a little while, heading two-nine-five. I’ll call in when we’re due for that.’

‘Good.’

Max studied the horizon again. The amber stain towards the east had grown to colour half the sky, and the first rays of the sun were appearing above the cloud carpet. The cover of night was fast fading.

Now it gets a little trickier.

Pieter ducked through the bomb bay’s bulkhead. He stopped to look down at the bomb. It was suspended within a metal cradle just above the bomb hatch. It wobbled slightly as the plane negotiated a brief moment of turbulence. He shook his head in wonder at it.

‘So, little man, you’re a giant dressed as a midget, eh?’ he muttered to himself.

He pulled the glove off one of his hands and reached out towards the rack to touch it. The cold metal was like that of any other bomb, but he sensed inside it immense power, sleeping for now, biding its time.

Something like this should have a name, a big, powerful name, and full of meaning.

Pieter struggled for a moment to think of one . . . his mind focused around the biblical story of David and Goliath, a small being killing a much larger one. The metaphor felt appropriate, but then he reminded himself that David was a Jewish hero. He sighed at his own stupidity, and not for the first time felt a sneaking envy for the kind of education that Max had. He would know what to call it; Max would conjure up an appropriate name, probably something in Latin, something far more fitting without any effort at all.

He pulled his glove back on and ducked through the bulkhead on the other side of the bomb bay to enter the navigator’s compartment. Stef was sitting at the radio operator’s desk attempting to control several large maps on its tiny surface. He had the sextant out and was preparing to take another reading before the light of dawn totally obliterated the faint light of the stars.

‘Morning, Baby Bear,’ he shouted through his mask.

Stef frowned angrily at him. ‘Ahh, come on, when are you going to stop calling me that, Pieter? I’m nineteen.’

‘When you can grow a proper beard, son, then I’ll take you to the best whorehouse I know. My treat.’

The young lad lifted his mask to show off the meagre ginger tuft on his chin and attempted to muster a deeper voice. ‘You don’t think I’d touch anything after your little man’s been near it, do you?’

‘You think it’s a “little” man do you? I’ve put fully grown horses to shame.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘Anyway,’ said Pieter, bending his little finger, ‘it’s got to be bigger than your fanny tickler.’

Stefan’s mask was still plugged into the interphone, and over his earphones he heard Hans laughing coarsely. Max’s voice added to the exchange.

‘Tell Pieter to knock it off for me, will you?’

Stef obliged. ‘Max says stop arsing around.’

‘All right, all right,’ said Pieter. He patted Stef on the shoulder to show the kid he was just messing with him and carried on towards the aft bulkhead, leaving Stef and the navigator’s compartment behind him. He ducked as he passed through the bulkhead and entered the waist section.

Just ahead on the floor was the bulge of the ball turret, beyond that on either side the openings for both of the waist-guns. It was noticeably colder and noisier in this section of the fuselage, as the wind angrily whistled past the open gun ports. The floor between the two machine guns, which were offset by a few feet to allow two waist-gunners to operate simultaneously without bumping into each other, was overlaid with wooden planks. It was the only floor space of the plane to have planking to ensure neither gun operator would trip over one of the ribs that ringed the fuselage. Hans was sitting on the wooden floor hugging his knees.

Pieter shouted, ‘Hans, what the fuck are you doing down there?’

‘Fucking freezing up by the gun. I’m just having a break.’

Pieter wasn’t entirely without sympathy for Hans. He was feeling the bitter cold too. They were all used to the sealed comfort of their Heinkel 111.

Pieter pointed at one of the MG-81s that had been installed in place of the Brownings. ‘Is it okay to -?’

Hans nodded. ‘Sure, you’ll freeze your bloody balls off after a few seconds though.’

Pieter climbed onto the planked floor and stood behind the gun. He held it in his hands and stared out through the waist-gun porthole. The wind battered his face as he looked out upon the grey-blue world outside and he struggled to keep his eyes open as streams of tears quickly emerged and were blown horizontally across his cheeks. He remembered to pull down his goggles and was able to look out again more comfortably.

He hunkered down behind the gun and, with one eye closed, aimed along the sight and down the barrels. He squeezed the trigger momentarily and let a dozen rounds off. Most of the shells dropped outside and were instantly whisked away by the wind. Three or four rattled down inside onto the wooden floor.

Hans reached out for them and eagerly scooped them up, placing them in the pocket of his flying jacket to savour the fading warmth of the casings through the thick leather.

He placed a hand to his ear and then nodded, Max was on the interphone saying something. ‘He’s test firing the portside gun, Max,’ Hans replied. He nodded and then pulled his mask from his face and shouted out to Pieter. ‘He says stop messing around with the guns.’

Pieter nodded back at him and reluctantly let go of the waist-gun.

The curse of the co-pilot . . . fuck all to do.

It angered and frustrated him that he’d been trained as well as any pilot, but rarely had a chance to put those skills into practice. To be fair, Max was better than a lot of pilots who tended to hog the flying time and rarely allowed their co-pilots to refresh their skills. However, on this mission the flying time was too long for one pilot; once they were clear of France, Max would hand over to Pieter to cross the Atlantic, and once they approached America, Max would take over again.

Nonetheless, he resented the hours ahead of them during which he’d have nothing to do but worry, and wait.