by Tricia Goyer
“I know this is a blow.” She spoke in German. “There’s not much we can do. How are you feeling?”
“I’m okay.”
Gabi’s eyes met Joseph’s. “Really? I would think that you’re scared out of your wits, just like me.”
“Well . . . I must confess to a certain amount of unease.”
“I do, too, but the Lord knows exactly where we are, even up here in a black sky.”
Joseph shifted his feet as the Junkers swayed to the left. “You mentioned religion. Are you a spiritual person?”
Gabi thought how she should answer that question. “I’m a follower of Christ, if that’s what you mean. I believe that we can have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I’m the daughter of a pastor, you know.”
“Maybe that explains a few things.”
“What do you mean?”
“After being rescued by Pastor Leo and his friends, and seeing how they’ve been protected from the Gestapo all these years, I’m realizing that God is orchestrating something, even in the midst of this madness.”
Gabi glanced over at the American pilot, who was concentrating on the instrument panel. “God is at work in our lives and deeply cares about what happens to us.” She patted Joseph’s arm. “He knows us so well . . . right down to how many hairs we have on our heads.”
Joseph folded his hands. “So what do you think is going to happen?”
“I think our friend here hasn’t been very forthcoming on our predicament. Even a novice like me knows that when the fuel gauge needle sits next to zero, we’re about to run out of fuel. I pray that we can get close enough to Switzerland for our radio to work. Maybe they’ll have some ideas if we have to land in some German cornfield. But whatever happens, I trust we’ll somehow make it to safety.”
Gabi pointed to the gathering tangerine hue outside Bill’s port window. “Look—the sun’s coming up.”
Bill glanced at his watch—5:30 a.m. The sunrise was probably fifteen minutes away, but the faintest hint of orange-pink on the horizon presented another good news/bad news situation. “If we have to ditch, I certainly prefer landing this Junkers in the daylight,” he said. “I don’t like flying in German airspace in broad daylight, however.”
He turned to Gabi. “You want to try to reach Mr. Dulles again on the radio? We should be getting close to the border.”
“I see it—the Rhine!”
Bill looked for a sliver of river . . . and found the mighty Rhine. “Great eyes, Gabi!” All the excitement in the cockpit stirred Joseph out of his passenger seat.
Bill figured they were twenty-five kilometers north of the border, heading straight for Dübendorf. “At our slower speed, all we need is ten more minutes.”
Gabi dragged the emergency radio to her side and fitted the Bakelite headphones over her ears. For the third time in the last half hour, she put the portable antenna in the window. “Maybe the third time is the—”
The Junkers’s No. 1 engine coughed and sputtered twice before resuming its normal RPM cadence. The same instant, the center engine coughed twice but continued spinning. Bill wasted no time. He immediately reached for the tank selector and switched to L—the left tank. The fuel boost energized the remaining engines, but a sinking feeling in his stomach told them that they were flying on borrowed time—no more than five or ten minutes.
“If you can raise anyone on that radio, tell them it doesn’t look like we’ll make it into Swiss airspace.” For Bill, the glass was suddenly half empty, and even though pilots were supposed to be supremely positive, he needed to square up with reality.
Gabi hadn’t given up.
“I’m giving it another try.” She flipped the switch on the emergency radio and was greeted by static. “Come on, come on.” She gave the tan box a good whack with the flattened palm of her right hand.
“Hello, Red Riding Hood?” The reassuring voice of her father carried through the headphones. Gabi’s heart leapt.
“Big Bad Wolf, is that you?” Prior to leaving Dübendorf, she and her father had exchanged code names. There was a good chance that any radio transmissions would be picked up by German ears, which she assumed was the case at this moment.
“Yes—we’ve been up all night waiting to hear about your collection of Edelweiss. Did you find the big patch?”
Mr. Dulles must have heard from the Swiss Air Force escort to the border. “We found all the Edelweiss we were looking for, and now we’re coming home.”
She could almost hear her father’s sigh of relief. “Excellent. Big Cheese is here too. I’ll pass the news to him.”
Gabi sucked in her breath. “Tell him we have a serious problem.”
“What’s that, Red Riding Hood?”
“We may not be home in time for breakfast.”
“Where are you?”
“Wait a minute.” She let off her microphone’s transmit button and asked Bill for their location.
He looked at the Army Air Force map balanced on his knees. “We’re on a direct approach to Zurich. Closest border town on the German side is . . . I hope I’m pronouncing this correctly . . . Waldshut.”
She smiled. “Waldshoot, as in what owls do,” she said, using the proper pronunciation on the second syllable. “Close enough.”
She thought about how she could tell her father over the radio where they were—without uttering Waldshut. “Remember when the twins needed a cobbler who could make special shoes for their flat feet?”
There was a moment of silence. “Yes, and I know where you mean,” her father said. “Let me speak with the Big Cheese.”
Twenty seconds later, her father’s voice interrupted the staticky transmission. “Do you still have that sheet of instructions with the chart Big Cheese gave you?”
“Yes, but wait a second while I grab it.”
Gabi reached into her khaki jacket and unfolded the sheet of paper. “Got it, Big Bad Wolf.” The single-sheet of paper contained ten lines of typed-out words that were gibberish.
“Look in the third line.”
Gabi shined a flashlight on the string of words.
perdis xxos luthdaws ermnine annca cawth nosom dendser etors dumrat impleser muhelt . . .
“Copy down every third word, four words in total.”
Gabi peered at her list again and wrote these four words in the margin:
luthdaws
cawth
etors
muhelt
“Done.”
“Good. Unscramble those words and visit our mutual acquaintance there. You already know the first one.”
Gabi wrote the word Waldshut next to luthdaws and double-checked that the letters matched. They did.
“Got the first one.”
She began playing with cawth. With one vowel, that should be easy. Tawch . . . hawct . . . wacht . . . watch! The next one was even easier: store.
Now for the last, muhelt. Two vowels. Tehmul . . . no, that won’t work. She feverishly wrote three-letter combinations to give her a running start . . . leh, lut, meh, met, hum, hel . . . Wait, a strike. Hel . . . helm . . . Helmut!
“Solved, Big Bad Wolf!” They were to go to a watch store in Waldshut and ask for Helmut.
“Excellent. When you get there, ask our friend to put you in touch with Jean-Pierre or Pas—”
Accordion-driven French music blotted out the words, cutting off the transmission. “Wait! I didn’t catch all that!” Gabi slammed the side of the emergency radio, but now the chanteuse Édith Piaf was in her earphones. She gave up and committed the names Jean-Pierre and Pas to memory.
The first rays of sunlight peeked through gaps in the saber-toothed Alps, bathing the Ju-52 in a soft orange glow.
“We’ll stay up here until we run dry,” Bill told Gabi. “Keep on the lookout for a field we can land in.” The fuel gauge indicator was too depressing to look at since the needle was stuck on 0 like someone had nailed it there.
They had to be flying on fumes . . . then the two engines coughed
again. Bill shut down No. 1; they would go as far as they could on the center engine. The Junkers shed altitude as the center engine labored to shoulder the load.
He hoped Lady Luck was sitting in A1 next to Joseph Engel. Just three minutes ago, they had left the Schwarzwald foothills and flown into an open valley that drained right into Waldshut and the Rhine River. Three, four more minutes in the air, under some sort of power, and they could glide over this border town and land somewhere in Switzerland.
Then Bill’s ears detected a subtle lowering in the RPMs. Any second, the Ju-52 would become the heaviest glider in Southern Germany. A sinking feeling rose in his throat. They weren’t going to make it to Switzerland. It was time to set her down now.
“Tell your friend to strap himself in,” Bill directed. “Make sure you’ve got your harness on too.”
On cue, the center engine sputtered and stopped spinning, and now the only sound was the wind. Bill pushed the rudder right away to counter any yaw that would send the Junkers into a death spin. While maintaining firm control of the craft, he trimmed the gliding speed to 100 kilometers per hour. Gabi, he noticed, gripped the armrests for all they were worth.
The Junkers’ steering column felt as heavy as a dumbbell. Bill watched the altimeter drop steadily—1,000 meters . . . 900 meters . . . 800 meters. The ground, he knew from the map, was around 300 meters above sea level. He wound the flap lever down to slow their descent.
From his cockpit aerie, Bill saw a checkerboard of farmlands and pockets of ground fog. “There!” He spotted an open field that looked long enough to land on. Their altitude had fallen to 500 meters.
“We’re going in!” Bill lined up the Junkers for the open field next to a beige farmhouse. Traces of wispy fog clouded his view, then a copse of firs lurched up at them, close enough to reach out and touch. The Junkers shook as Bill fought to maintain a level heading.
But they were coming in too high, too fast!
He extended the flaps fully and hurtled past the perimeter fencing. The front wheels slammed onto the grassy meadow with a savage groan, bounced heavily, then bounced a second time before gripping the ground surely.
Bill stood on the brake pedals, but the Ju-52 skidded like a rock skipping across a frozen pond. Without its power assist, the heavy transport plane barely slowed as the brakes shrieked.
“The trees!” Gabi’s hands flew to her mouth as she screamed.
“We’re not going to stop in time. Brace yourself!”
Bill aimed the ship for an opening—and the Junkers careened through a gap at the forest’s edge. Solid tree trunks sheared off both wingtips, causing the Junkers to pancake into the soft forest ground and crumple like a cheap accordion. Amazingly, the steel fuselage remained intact.
Their seatbelts had saved them.
Bill sprang into action, figuring that he and his passengers had only moments before shock set in. “Let’s go!” he shouted at Gabi. He wrestled with her seatbelt and sprang her loose. Together, they freed Joseph, woozy from the rough landing. Bill put one arm over Joseph’s shoulder and dragged him toward the rear passenger door.
The exit door balked at opening. “You’ve been giving us trouble the entire trip.” Bill raised his right foot and kicked the doorknob. The door sprang open. He jumped out first and helped Gabi and Joseph—who was now alert—jump out of the damaged aircraft.
“I’d say we have a minute or two before someone comes running out of that farmhouse with a shotgun,” Bill said.
“Ein Moment, bitte!” Joseph called, then rambled on to Gabi in German.
“What’s he saying?” Bill’s eyes focused on the trees closest to them, expecting armed men to emerge any moment. “We don’t have any time—”
“He forgot his rucksack in the plane, and it’s very important.” Gabi froze. “The radio! We need it.”
“Then get going!”
Gabi and Joseph rushed back into the passenger cabin. Bill followed and watched the German quickly retrieve his backpack. Unfortunately, the crash landing had thrown the emergency radio against the cabin bulkhead and smashed it to smithereens.
Gabi’s face fell. “We can’t call for help now.”
“Doesn’t matter! Let’s go!” Bill led the way back out the door.
Within a matter of seconds, the three ran deep into the forest.
Waldshut Polizei
3:15 p.m.
The local kommandant of the Waldshut Polizei reread the Teletype from Berlin because he thought his eyes betrayed him the first time he scanned it. Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, no less, was loaded for bear; that much he could tell.
His message related to the phone call the Waldshut Polizei had received shortly after 9 a.m. that morning from a local farmer who said he’d walked an hour to the nearest phone. His report was startling: a Swiss Junkers had crash-landed on his property. Not so surprising was his report that the occupants were nowhere to be found.
The Waldshut police chief thought it was only a matter of time before a Swiss aircraft strayed off course into Germany— but this was a tortoise-slow transport plane, not a lightning-fast Swiss fighter. Interestingly, the Junkers hadn’t burned, and a lieutenant he dispatched to the scene confirmed that the aircraft had run out of fuel. So why were the Swiss flying planes around with no gas? And where were the pilots and passengers?
A riddle wrapped inside a mystery. He immediately reported the incident to his superiors at the Freiburg regional office. They must have tossed this hot potato to the Gestapo, who kicked it all the way to Berlin and the Reichsführer.
Himmler’s message stated that underground partisans had stashed an enemy of the Reich onto a Ju-52 belonging to the Swiss Air Force very early this morning at a farm outside of Heidelberg. Apparently, some farmers in the Leimen area had been awakened by the racket of a Junkers roaring off a makeshift landing strip, and they looked out from the bedroom window in time to see a transport plane—the Swiss markings clearly visible in the moonlight—flying due south for Switzerland. Several farmers called the Leimen Polizei, and a detail was sent out to investigate a farm belonging to religious fanatics, the communiqué said. A Gestapo regional commander was found dead, and an aide and several soldiers were missing in action, probably kidnapped by the partisans. The farmhouse was deserted.
The Waldshut police chief thought whoever was in the Junkers that crash-landed was long gone—and probably racing for the border.
The police chief called in a pair of lieutenants and described what had fallen into their district that afternoon. A pep talk was in order. This was their chance to be heroes. A chance to get back in the good graces of Berlin.
Even though a week had passed, he still felt the shame of the recent ambush that resulted in a half-dozen prisoners making their escape. He had lost a couple of good men when partisans—one of them Swiss, according to a bystander who spoke with the man—overtook a truck loaded with traitors destined for the Gestapo firing squad. His only comfort was his men had killed one of the traitors—a woman dressed in a traffic cop uniform.
Finding the Junkers occupants would be one step closer to atoning for what happened last week. If this group of outlaws believed they could pass through on his watch, they had another thing coming.
32
Waldshut, Germany
5:50 p.m.
The rhythmic clacking of hooves on cobblestones echoed off the frescoed three-story buildings that fronted Kirchstrasse, a commercial street around the corner from Waldshut’s courtyard plaza. A doddering farmer, driving a horse-drawn hitch wagon with a faded olive-green tarp stretched over the back, tugged on the bridle reins. A pair of powerfully muscled Fresian horses with thick, black manes whinnied and came to a stop just before the mercantile district locked its doors for the evening.
Wearing a tattered straw hat and denim bib overalls with one strap hanging down the front, the seasoned plowman climbed off the hitch wagon and stretched his back and arms while making a slow turn to surreptitiously study the neighbor
hood. He spit a stem of green hay into the street and yanked the free ends of several hitch-knots, releasing the ropes that crisscrossed the deteriorating tarp. The farmer then strolled to the wagon’s rear corner and whispered to the three individuals balled up beneath the canvas covering, “You can go now, and may God be with you.”
Gabi’s heart raced when Herr Beyer reined in the horses to a stop. Once the geriatric farmer lifted the tarp, she scooted to the back of the hitch wagon, where she looked in both directions to make sure no one was watching. The farmer gingerly took her left arm and helped her jump to the quiet cobblestone street around the corner from Waldshut’s main square. Then Gabi helped Herr Beyer assist Bill and Joseph from their shared hiding place just as a couple of passersby crossed the street at the corner, but neither looked in their direction.
Even though her heart pounded with urgency, she knew that acting too hastily would draw attention to them. She plucked a stray piece of hay from her hair and told herself to act like any other girl on a visit to town—just in case anyone noticed their arrival.
“Where’s the watch store?” she asked in German. Before they left the farmer’s house, she had stipulated that no English would be spoken in public, meaning that Bill would remain mute.
“Helmut’s is right behind us.” The farmer pointed his thumb over his shoulder.
Gabi’s eyes darted to the gold lettering of “Helmut’s Watch Sales & Service” painted on the storefront window. Underneath the gilded sign, a minimal window display featured gold and silver timepieces with leather bands and a dozen cuckoo clocks. A handwritten sign noted that cuckoo clocks were invented in nearby Schönwald in 1737.
“We have to get going.” Gabi leaned over, and the old farmer lifted his straw hat to receive her grateful kiss on his leathery cheek. “Herr Beyer, I don’t know how we can ever thank you.”
The old farmer blushed. “Please, God brought you to my front door.”
“No argument there. The tall wooden cross in the middle of your vegetable garden certainly seemed like we were led to your doorstep. You were so gracious to take us in.”