Day of Vengeance

by Johnny O'Brien

  Gottschalk addressed them, “Radioactive poisoning – it is not a nice way to die, as you have seen from our little test. Now, we have made an interesting discovery. It appears that two of the ringleaders are this young girl’s parents. Quite extraordinary – a whole family of troublemakers.” He glanced at Sophie, then at his watch. “They should have been here to witness our demonstration, but they seem to have been delayed. No matter, they will be here soon and this gives us some interesting possibilities for adding a little more… pressure. Eventually, one of you will talk.”

  Sophie’s heart jumped – it was confirmation that her parents were alive. She tried to contain her joy. Gottschalk turned to Altenberg who was now standing next to him. “In the meantime I have one or two things to attend to, but my good friend, Professor Altenberg here, has asked for a quiet word with you. He has more patience than I and claims he can persuade you so there is no need for any more nonsense. Professor?”

  “I will do my best Brigadeführer,” Altenberg said through gritted teeth. “Give us a few minutes alone.”

  “Agreed,” Gottschalk said, looking at his watch. “You have precisely five.”

  Gottschalk turned to the SS guards and said something in German. It sounded like an order. Gottschalk swivelled round and marched off with the guards, leaving Altenberg alone with them.

  Altenberg spoke in a low, conspiratorial voice. “I thought we would have more time than this. But Gottschalk is worried that the British know about the German plans and things are now moving much faster than I expected. He is right to be worried,” Altenberg looked over his shoulder, “I am working with British Intelligence. You have only one chance to escape. It is a slim chance. I’m afraid it’s all I can do in the time. In a few minutes, there will be a little accident inside the hangar, but the distraction should be enough to give you a clear run to the gates. Take the jeep outside… on the backseat I have left a bag. It should contain all you need. There is a map which tells you one of my usual rendezvous points for the British agent. If no one is there, wait. Someone will come.”

  “But how…?”

  “No time for questions, I’m afraid this is our only chance… Gottschalk means what he says.”

  Sophie pleaded, “But what about the others – my mother and father?”

  Altenberg looked pained. “I believe they are being brought here under separate guard. They should have been here already. But if we wait it may be too late.”

  Sophie was desperate, “But…”

  “I’m sorry… I will do my best for them, my dear. But please; save yourselves at least…”

  Again, Altenberg glanced over his shoulder. Gottschalk was already on his way back to them.

  “Well?” he demanded.

  Altenberg pleaded with Gottschalk, “We are not barbarians, Gottschalk, this is not necessary… the girl… she is a child…”

  But Gottschalk’s mind was made up. “I see that despite your remonstrations, you have made as little progress with these fools as I have.” He looked at his watch. “Fine. Let us make preparations.”

  But just as Gottschalk turned back to the concrete bunker, a loud explosion ripped through the back of the hanger. Then, all hell broke loose.

  Angus was the first to react, “Come on!”

  In the confusion, they sprinted through the hangar entrance and onto the concrete apron outside. The open-topped jeep was parked only a few metres away from the hangar – just where they had seen it when they had come in. Angus jumped into the driver’s seat and Jack tumbled into the back.

  “Have you driven one of these before?” Sophie shouted.

  “No, but…”

  “It’s a Kübelwagen. I’ll drive. It’s not easy…”

  “But…”

  “Move over!” Sophie shouted.

  Angus was taken aback, but obediently slid over to the passenger’s side as Sophie plonked herself in the driver’s seat. She fired the engine and slammed it into first gear. The jeep lurched towards the hangar and Sophie hauled hard on the steering wheel to avoid a collision. It spun round and there was a metallic crunch as Sophie thumped the gear lever into second.

  “I thought you said you could drive one of these,” Angus shouted.

  “Did I?”

  As Altenberg had promised, the surprise blast had given them the moment’s distraction that they needed, but a couple of soldiers had already spotted them and were pointing and shouting at the jeep as it raced across the airfield. Then the firing started.

  “They’re shooting at us!” Jack shouted.

  Just as the words left his mouth the windscreen of the Kübelwagen disintegrated and they were sprayed with shards of splintering glass. Sophie and Angus ducked down and for a moment Sophie drove blind as they powered on towards the wide gates of the airfield. Jack crouched low in the backseat, knowing that at any minute he was going to be peppered by the automatic rifle fire coming from the troops behind. Then, on the floor of the jeep, he spotted a canvas bag and a couple of metal objects. Impulsively, he reached down.

  “Angus – I’ve got something here. Some sort of gun – there’s a couple of them.”

  “Machine guns – is there any ammo?”

  Jack opened the canvas bag.

  “These? There’s a few of them.”

  “Give one here.” Angus manipulated a long magazine into the gun. “You put the magazine in there, I think. It’s got a folding stock – see?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t be an idiot.” The jeep bumped across the airfield, topping forty miles an hour. Undeterred, Angus stood up on the front seat and rested the machine gun on the top edge of the windscreen’s metal frame. He shouted back to Jack, “You fire from the back, I’ll take the front. Go!”

  Jack tried to copy Angus’s instructions. He peered over the folded canvas roof which lay over the back of the Kübelwagen, and felt a bullet whip through the air millimetres from his face. He ducked down again, terrified, and scrunched himself into a ball in the back of the jeep.

  Angus screamed back at him, “Come on Jack, get up! Fight back!”

  At last something inside Jack snapped and he was suddenly bursting with energy. He climbed up from his foetal position and stood with one leg resting on the back of the jeep and the other on the back seat. The whole airfield unfolded before him, the hangar fading into the distance. A second Kübelwagen was now on their tail, followed by a lumbering armoured car and an army truck. The soldiers behind them kept up their fire but they were now over four hundred metres away and their shots were increasingly speculative. Jack didn’t care – he squeezed the trigger and let rip with the machine gun. In less than five seconds, the thirty-two round magazine was empty.

  “Reload!” Angus shouted.

  Jack pawed in the bag to locate a second magazine. They had nearly reached the main gate of the aerodrome. It was flanked by a guard post and a machine-gun emplacement protected by sandbags. Soldiers were running to man the emplacement and to pull the gate shut. Angus fired randomly from the front of the jeep as they powered towards the gate. As if in a trance, Jack squeezed the trigger again, and he felt the weapon shudder in his hands. His mouth opened and he knew that he was shouting, but he could not hear himself. It was as if he was in a dream, in slow motion, keeping his finger on the trigger, he moved the machine gun, slung at waist level, in an arc from side to side. He was vaguely conscious of people, soldiers, running and diving for cover, as the jeep raced onwards.

  “Get down and hold on!” Sophie shouted.

  Jack snapped out of his trance. The gate was still half open and it was only two metres away. He dropped back into the seat and clung on. It didn’t look like the gap was big enough, but Sophie kept her foot flat on the accelerator. There was a screech of metal as the jeep burst through the closing gate and onto the woodland track beyond.

  “You can drive any time you want,” Angus bawled out joyfully, putting a friendly arm around Sophie.

  Jack snatched a look behind. “The
y’re still tailing us!”

  Angus swivelled round in time to see the second Kübelwagen pass through the gates, right on their tail. Behind that, the army truck lumbered and swayed through the checkpoint, belching black diesel smoke and straining to keep up.

  “Not good. Do we have any more clips?”

  “What’s a clip?” Jack asked.

  Angus groaned, “Magazine clips – the long black things with all the bullets in them.”

  “There are two more.” Jack pulled them out, handed one to Angus and hooked the canvas bag over his shoulder.

  “Right, I’m coming over to join you.” With that Angus clambered over his seat and stood next to Jack in the back.

  “What do I do – just keep going?” Sophie asked.

  Jack looked ahead. The road was quite good – a rough gritted track. But it was not clear how far the woodland extended or where the road led. Up ahead, Jack spied a fork in the road. A second, much rougher track led directly into the woodland.

  “Take the right-hand track. The big truck won’t be able to follow us and we’ll have a better chance of escaping into the woodland. If we join up onto a main road or something, we’ll be sitting ducks…”

  “They’re closing…!” Angus shouted. He had already replaced his magazine with a fresh one and was crouching down low on the back seat of the Kübelwagen, resting his gun on the back edge and pointing it at the other jeep which was now only fifty metres behind.

  “There are four of them… what do we do?”

  Angus replied in his best Rambo, “Spray ’em,” and the muzzle of his gun flamed.

  “You missed.”

  Suddenly Sophie turned sharply into the right-hand road and the track became bumpier – dust spewed up behind the rear tyres and Sophie grappled with the steering wheel to keep them on the track. She gunned the engine, maintaining full revs and, inside, they bounced around like toddlers on a trampoline. The jeep behind was having similar problems with the rough terrain – they could see it lurching from side to side as the driver wrestled it along the badly pitted track.

  Suddenly, they reached the edge of the woodland and emerged onto a broad, low ridge that looked out over a flattish valley. In the far distance, Jack saw the spire of a church in the middle of a village. The track wound its way down the ridge and then over a small hump-backed bridge set at an angle over some sort of depression at the bottom of the valley. At first, it was not clear why the bridge was there. Sophie slowed down, taking stock of the landscape stretching before them. The engine of the jeep idled.

  “What are you doing, Sophie?” Angus shouted. “Keep going or they’ll catch up.” They could hear the other jeep approaching from the woodland behind. In a few seconds it would be there. But Sophie wasn’t listening. Instead, she was staring off into the middle distance, her face set in deep concentration. She moved her head slowly to the right to look at the bridge below them. It was about three hundred metres away and the track followed a single broad bend up to the bridge and then over and on to the village in the distance. She turned her head back to the left and Jack followed her gaze until he realised what she was looking at.

  In the distance, a plume of steam and smoke was pumping into the sky, forming a thick cloud that spread in a continuous streak across the landscape. Partially hidden from view in a shallow cutting, a goods train was rattling its way across the valley.

  “Come on, Sophie, what are you waiting for?” Angus pressed. He looked round, anxiously gauging the progress of their pursuers.

  The enemy jeep emerged from the woodland. Sophie turned round to Angus and Jack in the backseat. She had a strangely calm expression on her face, but her eyes twinkled mischievously.

  “Boys – it is time to use the last of those bullets… and then I want you to hold on. I want you to hold on very tightly indeed.”

  Jack had no idea what she meant. But no sooner had she spoken, than she was revving the engine of the Kübelwagen one last time and dropping the clutch so the vehicle shot forward. Angus didn’t need to be told twice and once again he let rip with the machine gun from the rear of the jeep. Jack crouched down copying him and the approaching German jeep slewed sideways to avoid the maelstrom. Sophie accelerated as they belted down the escarpment. The track curved before the bridge and rose at a slight angle over the railway. Sophie rounded the bend and careered up to the bridge just as the lumbering black mass of the goods train thundered beneath. It was at this point, with the wagons flashing past that Jack realised, with horror, what Sophie was about to do. She hauled down on the steering wheel and the jeep veered dangerously onto a new trajectory, which launched it from the edge of the road, through a low side wall and into the air. The jeep’s engine, free of the friction of its wheels on the road, screamed as if making a wild bid for freedom. Jack felt himself becoming airborne as they flew off the track. Two seconds later the jeep landed with an eviscerating crunch on top of the penultimate wagon of the train as it emerged from under the bridge. The jeep bounced once, then again, and then slid along the top of the train until it ground to a halt.

  For a moment Jack sat in the back seat, on top of the train, in stunned silence. They were in a German army jeep perched high up on a goods train rattling through the French countryside at forty miles an hour. And somehow they were alive. But ahead, Jack spotted a new danger. They train was heading for a tunnel. He was the first to react.

  “Get out!” he cried.

  The three of them clambered over the back of the Kübelwagen and onto the roof of the train. Jack looked back – they were bearing down on the tunnel at a dizzying pace. They ran to the end of the wagon and from there Jack peered down at the railway sleepers below as they flashed by at a frightening speed.

  There was a narrow ladder at the back of the wagon. “We can use that to climb down!” Sophie went first, quickly followed by Angus. Jack turned, put his foot on the ladder and paused. From this position he had a clear view of the approaching tunnel and the jeep perched up high on top of the train. First the engine entered and the smoke and steam blew back out of the tunnel. The wagons followed and suddenly the jeep slammed into the arced brickwork above the tunnel entrance and vaporised. Jack felt Angus haul him down, just as various components of the disintegrating Kübelwagen flew towards him like shrapnel from an exploding shell. Suddenly, it was pitch dark and they were gasping for breath in the smoke and steam of the tunnel. When they emerged, seconds later, there was no trace of the jeep at all.

  They clung on to the ladder for dear life as the train rattled on through the countryside.

  “What do we do now?” Jack shouted.

  “We jump,” Angus replied.

  Jack rolled over five times before coming to halt, wedged in a large gorse bush. He was scratched and shaken, but otherwise OK. He looked back down the track as the train shrank into the distance. Then, hearing a groan behind him, he turned round. Angus was upside down in a second gorse bush, struggling to free himself. “Get me out of this stupid thing.”

  Jack manoeuvred himself over to Angus and tried to support his friend as he disentangled himself from the bush. Without warning, the bush released him and Jack tumbled back with Angus on top of him.

  Sophie appeared, looking down at them. “Enjoying yourselves, boys?”

  They scrambled to their feet.

  “We can’t stay here – they will send a search party down the railway line soon.”

  “OK then, how about we scramble up there?”

  Jack nodded up at the steep bank of the railway cutting and they started to climb. From the top, they could just see the train wending its way onwards, puffing white clouds into the clear blue summer sky. In front of them lay rolling farmland.

  “There!”

  Sophie pointed to a dilapidated barn next to a copse at the other side of a broad field. Keeping their eyes peeled, they picked their way across the field towards the timber-framed building. Angus heaved open the heavy door and looked inside.

  “No one. We ca
n hide here for a while.”

  One end of the barn was stacked with old hay and the other with rusty farm equipment. Angus pulled out two of the hay bales and they plonked themselves down.

  “Anything else in that?” Angus asked. He pointed at the bag from the Kübelwagen that had miraculously remained strapped to Jack’s shoulders.

  “Our friend Altenberg has thought of everything.”

  Jack pulled out an apple, then some bread and sausage and finally a bar of chocolate. German chocolate.

  “Someone’s lunch. And there’s water.”

  They divided the contents of the bag between the three of them. The prospect of food had a remarkably energising effect and soon Jack felt his spirits lift.

  “Have to tell you, Sophie,” Angus spoke as he chomped through the sausage, “what you just did was amazing… that jump…”

  But Sophie had wrapped her arms around herself and was staring at the straw and dust on the bottom of the barn, brooding. It was as if she had not even heard Angus.

  Jack reached out tentatively and touched her hand, “You all right?”

  She flinched. Her brown eyes were moist and her face was set in a grim expression. After a while, she said quietly through clenched teeth, “I keep seeing it in my head… your friend in the bunker, Pendelshape. I keep thinking they’re going to do the same thing to Mum and Dad.”

  It had taken all their energy just to stay alive in the last twenty-four hours and Jack had blanked out the dreadful scene of the men being machine-gunned at the chateau… only to be followed by the gruesome spectacle of Pendelshape’s death from radioactive poisoning. Now it all came back to him, as it had to Sophie. He wanted to reach out to her, to somehow share her pain, words came and went through his head, but they all seemed trivial and inadequate.

  “We need to try and rescue Mum and Dad…” she said. “Before they kill them.”

  Jack wanted to give Sophie hope. She had saved their lives and he wanted to do something for her in return. He put his arm round Sophie’s shoulders. “Sophie, Altenberg said he’d do what he could. He helped us. Maybe he can help them. But for now we need to get to the rendezvous point where Altenberg meets with British Intelligence. It’s our best chance, and the best chance to save your parents too. It’s only a matter of time before the SS rip the countryside apart looking for us.” Jack peered into the bag again. “Altenberg said that he left a map in here…” He rummaged about. “Got it!”