He approached closely now to wreckage that was little more than a charred ruin of metal framework and unidentifiable debris. What little was left recognisable, mostly the very rear of tail section, projected from the shallow, blackened impact crater at a raked angle like a burned, shattered cross marking a gravesite that it indeed was – both men were mightily grateful the remains of the aircraft’s crew had already been removed for burial.
Meier dropped the duffel bag to the ground and pulled a pair of flying gloves from his trouser pocket. He slipped them on and began to poke about the wreckage, pulling back pieces of airframe and melted aluminium as he craned his head this way and that to obtain a view of what might lay behind each piece.
“I was in the mess two days ago with the radar officer on watch that night...” he continued finally, only partially paying attention as he rummaged about and tossed a few loose pieces aside in the process, “...and he was adamant there was no gunnery.”
“‘No gunfire’...?” Rudel repeated as a dubious question. “If there was no shooting, what was it shot down with... foul language...?”
“Take a look around the area, Hans,” Meier pointed out, straightening his back for a moment and casting a sweeping arm around in a 180-degree arc. Do you see any evidence of gunfire? The information we do have clearly states this aircraft dropped like a stone: destruction was instantaneous – it had no chance to travel any distance after it was hit. If the Tommis were using proximity-fused shells, where are the ground impacts from the ones that didn’t go off? I’m sure British gunners are well trained, but do you think they hit these poor bastards with just one shot?”
With a sound that was equal parts a victory cry and a growl of frustration, Meier pulled away one last piece of airframe and jammed his hand into the wreckage as far as he could reach, obviously reaching for something he’d spotted within.
“That fellow at the Officer’s Mess swore blind that all he saw on their screens that night was a fleeting signal of something moving lightning-fast on an intercept course from the other side of the lines that was gone again in an instant... the same instant this aircraft was destroyed. He also said he’d been told by Fliegerkorps to shut up about it, although he was pretty drunk by that stage and seemed not to have appreciated being told so... there we have it...!” He said finally, having been stretching for something within the wreck the whole time he’d been speaking. He drew out a triangular piece of red-painted metal perhaps thirty or forty centimetres tall. Blackened by fire and flat at one end, it was jagged and torn at the other – the ‘triangle’ was missing its ‘point’ – but appeared as if it might have been at least double that in length had it still been complete.
“What is that, Mein Herr...?”
“What indeed?” Meier agreed, his expression quite dark as he handed the piece across to his XO for him to examine. “It’s clearly the fin of some kind of rocket, but does that look like anything we use?” He knew the answer to that without waiting for a reply. “There’s a hinge at the base: this isn’t fixed for stability... it was used for guidance...!” He met Rudel’s incredulous stare with one of his own that was cold, hard and deadly serious. “When I was with ZG26, back before the 1940 Invasion, I took part in that last mission that almost wiped the unit out. Most of our aircraft were blasted from the skies by guided rockets much like our Dreizack anti-ship missiles... only much smaller and faster.” He pointed to the piece of metal in Rudel’s hands as if he were a prosecutor tabling the final, damning piece of evidence in a murder trial. “I think it’s from one of the same missiles I encountered over Scapa Flow two years ago, and that fellow at the mess was very sure it was fired from somewhere close to where those two new bloody tanks are supposed to be. Our boys will be going in over Agruda during the assault and if I’m right, they’ll be torn to pieces!”
“What are we going to do about that, Mein Herr...?”
“Our official mission is that of ‘panzer-cracking’ of course, but I think perhaps you and I should take one of the gruppen to look for the battery that fired this bastard instead – we must take it out before it can do too much damage.”
“Safer to batter it into oblivion with artillery,” Rudel mused, knowing the answer already but throwing up alternatives anyway.
“Have to know where it is to drop a shell on it,” Meier observed, picking up the duffel bag, opening it and dropping the piece of debris inside, “but if we go in at ground level beneath the first massed air waves, maybe we can flush it out and deal with it before it does too much harm.”
“Seems like a fine plan to me, Mein Herr,” Rudel grinned in anticipation of the hunt. “I suspect it best we keep this to ourselves for the time being?”
“Sound advice, Hans...” Meier smiled back, looking forward to avenging some of his fallen comrades as he clapped a hand on his XO’s shoulder “...sound advice indeed...”
October 2, 1942
Friday
“Get out... get out...!” She screamed hysterically, beating at his chest and shoulders with her fists and slender arms as he made no more than a half-hearted attempt to defend himself. “Get away from me... leave me alone...!”
She’d slammed the door behind him hard enough to make the frame crack somewhere along one side and then threw herself down onto his bed, pausing only to sweep away the pistol lying there in disgust with no care as to whether or not it might be loaded. It clattered to the floor, already forgotten, and the grief rolled through her again, assailing her with its full force as wails of despair rose again above desperate, hysterical sobbing. At that moment, Briony didn’t care that Brandis had told her the complete truth. She didn’t care that he’d held nothing back; that he’d shown her a tiny glimpse of a very different world, the existence of which she could never have imagined.
The man she spent her entire life calling ‘Uncle James’ – the man who now called himself Phillip Brandis and carried identification papers to match – had told her too many terrible things. That he’d known about her mother’s impending death. That he knew it was no accident: that in reality she’d been brutally murdered at the hands of Eddie Leonski. That her step-father – the only real father she’d ever known – would in the next few days also be killed in action in North Africa. And then, as if all that wasn’t terrible enough, Brandis had also revealed that he was about to disappear forever, leaving her completely and utterly alone.
There was anger too: some toward Brandis for being the bearer of such terrible news (and for not seeming to have done anything to stop it) but most over what Leonski had done to her mother. And then another thought occurred to her in that moment; one that instantly diluted her rage with a very healthy dose of Catholic guilt.
“Why, Lord…?” She asked softly, her sobs abating as she rolled over on the bed and stared at the ceiling, tears trickling away around her ears on each side of her face. “All of this is your will… why are you taking my family from me…?” She knew better than to expect an answer – to expect a direct answer at least – but it helped to put her feelings of doubt and betrayal into words nevertheless. “Is this all part of some great plan, God? Please…! Help me to understand.”
Raised by two deeply religious parents, Briony had similarly grown up a firm believer and devout Catholic. She’d always accepted that The Lord had a plan for each and every human being on Earth and that knowledge of that grand design was His alone. The belief in a powerful and living God had been a steadying influence for her throughout her life – much as it had for her mother before her – and it had helped Briony many times to stand strong against the multitude of injustices she’d suffered as an illigitimate half-caste growing up in 1930s Rural Australia.
A sudden, fleeting recollection of the words she herself had spoken on that computer screen rose unbidden in her mind.
‘Uncle James is going to tell you some awful things tonight... don’t be too hard on him... listen to what he has to say with an open mind and think hard before you make any decisions...’
>
“‘Don’t be too hard on him’…” she repeated softly, thinking more about what she’d seen and heard. “Here I am asking God if there’s some great plan for me, and Uncle James has already told me there was a plan… a plan he was helping to carry out.” She swallowed heavily and tried to wipe at her tears, the heaving of her sobs almost completely subsided. “Is this it, Lord?” The good Catholic began to guide her logic now. “You gave your only son to save all of us... what right do I have to complain if you ask as much of me?”
To say she had accepted the idea would’ve been quite a stretch, but the thought that there might indeed be a reason for the loss of her parents and her own suffering as a result at least went some way toward mitigating the pain.
“Mum wouldn’t be like this,” she added as she sat up suddenly, diverting a little of that anger she felt toward what she now perceived as her own weakness. “Mum never knew her mum or dad at all, and she got treated bad by that Bolton fella, but she never complained.” Some of Eliza’s more down-to-earth, less well-spoken speech patterns crept unconsciously into her own words for a moment as she thought of her mother’s strength and almost managed a faint smile of pride. “Mum ‘n dad would want me to be strong too!” She told herself finally with conviction, turning to swing her legs off the bed and onto the floor.
Looking across at the table, her eyes came to rest on the laptop once more. It had switched over to stand-by mode and its screen was dark, but a single, faint light on its console suggested there was still power running through it. She stood and moved toward it, seating herself in one of the chairs and gingerly reaching her fingers out toward the touchpad the same way she’d seen Brandis do it as he’d opened files earlier.
The screen flared back to life at the first touch of her fingertips and she initially jerked them away in fright as if the contraption might actually bite her. But as she began to read the titles of some of the sub-folders still displayed there her curiosity quickly overcame her apprehension and she began to make a few experimental attempts at using the touchpad to move the mouse cursor about the screen.
Brandis had told her that all the sub-folders in that section were listed by date, yet as she scanned the lists she wondered if he might indeed by completely mad. On a whim she hovered the cursor over the first of those folders – one marked ‘0000 - 0100’ – and double-tapped the left key below the touchpad just as she’d watched him do earlier, the folder instantly opening up to reveal a hundred or so individual MS Word documents within.
She again selected the first in the list, this one titled simply as ‘6BC’and maximised the document on screen. Without another moment’s hesitation, she began reading softly out loud to herself:
“January 1
“It’s been about an hour and I’ve finished vomiting for the moment – I think – but I’ll keep close to the rail just in case. The ship’s systems appear to be fine and I’ve set course southward for The Cape – will stay well off shore as much as possible to avoid any unwanted attention. This vessel’s disguise might work from a distance but it’ll almost certainly look dodgy from close up.
“So here I am… Not sure how the Julian calendar equates to what’s on my systems but I’ve been assured the conversion calculator is accurate. It’s telling me there might be a variance of about two or three days, but that’s no big deal either way.
“Gives me the better part of a year to make it to Palestine at least – assuming it’s this year...wouldn’t want to miss the ‘Big One’, after all. If I’m early then I’m early, I guess, and I can find something else to fill my interest until the time comes… will know more once I get a better understanding of the lie of the land.
I have everything I need for the moment right here on board, but I’ll need to make contact with the ‘natives’ at some stage: I’ll leave that for when I’m close to my destination – should be able to trade a bit of the booty I’ve brought with me for some local clothing that won’t leave me standing out like a sore thumb.”
Completely engrossed, she continued to read.
Brandis slumped down onto a chair beside the kitchen table. His head wound was bleeding again, the bandage having become dislodged slightly during the scuffle with Briony, and a thin, wayward trickle of crimson was now working its way slowly from beneath the dressing and makings its way down the side of his face behind his eye. Looking down at his hands, he realised one of them held the discarded white T-shirt he’d worn during the fight. He had no idea when or why he’d picked it up before he’d been pushed out of the room, and such facts seemed to matter very little now to him in any case. It was filthy with dirt and grass stains around its lower sections but Brandis gave that no mind as he dabbed at the bleeding in a distinctly desultory manner.
“Do you want to talk about it, James…?” O’Donnell asked with quiet concern from the doorway to his left that led into the lounge room. “Lord knows I’ve my share of questions…”
Patrick O’Donnell, small-framed and white-haired, was in his late sixties and although he’d been born and raised in Dublin, he’d spend almost his entire adult life in Australia, most of that time as a servant of God. He’d never been a strong man, his hair was thinning now with his advancing years, and he himself knew that he smoked far too much when he wasn’t going about The Lord’s work, but his pale, Celtic blue eyes were as clear and sharp as they’d ever been and he knew full well that the man they’d seen in action earlier that night was nothing like the James Brandis he’d known for over a decade.
“You’ve been trying to con me into one of those bloody confessionals for ten bloody years, Pat,” he replied drily, almost managing a grin as he turned to face a man he considered a good friend. The words were honest, but to O’Donnell they sounded strange and out of place spoken in an accent that for Brandis was completely and utterly alien. “You think this is your chance now?”
“I think this is a time for answers, Jimmy,” O’Donnell added, a sharp tone creeping into his words as he leaned against the doorway and folded his arms across his chest. “It’s not just the girl you’ve been keepin’ secrets from, it appears.” In his black, priestly robes he seemed an imposing figure despite his diminutive stature, and the seriousness of his features made it look as if he were standing at the church pulpit, about to deliver one of his well-known ‘fire-and-brimstone’ sermons.
“No offence, Pat, but I’ve no mood for answers… not for anyone but Briony anyway…” Brandis replied with little emotion, something that O’Donnell incorrectly perceived to be disinterest.
“That poor girl’s been through enough,” the priest countered with a warning tone. “The last thing she needs right now around her is people who aren’t lookin’ after her best interests...”
“I’ve spent a lifetime looking after her interests!” Brandis snarled angrily in return, the growing pain in his head shortening his temper as he thumped his fist against the table top. “My bloody head’s half off and I’ve got a friggin’ migraine building right now the size of Tasmania, Pat,” he added quickly, allowing some venom to creep into his words as he fixed O’Donnell with a dark glare and unleashed the intensity of feeling that smouldered behind it. “Come back to me tomorrow and I’ll answer any bloody question you want to throw at me, but right now can you just bugger off, for Christ’s sake…!”
It wasn’t the words that left O’Donnell feeling drained and a little weak. It wasn’t the blasphemy, the insults or the profanity that made him almost stagger backward from the doorway as if he’d been physically struck. Something in that single terrible, almost psychotic stare had suddenly gripped him with fear, as if the man before him could somehow look straight into his very soul and burn it to a cinder. With fear in his eyes, Father Patrick O’Donnell backed away without another word, closing the door behind him and leaving Brandis alone in that cold, silent kitchen.
His head was thumping now but he didn’t allow the pain to faze him greatly: he felt completely and utterly exhausted but he nevertheless m
ade a conscious decision not to allow the wound to affect him as he raised a pair of sunken, bloodshot eyes and stared sullenly at his own reflected image in the windows above the kitchen sink. Dirt and blood streaked his face, and he found that – as he’d suspected – he really did look just about as bad as he felt.
“Nothing to say...?” He asked his reflection softly, raising an accusatory eyebrow. “No smartarse remarks? No quick quips or subtle ironies to lighten the mood?” He continued to speak in the same voice that had once been his own so long ago rather than the amalgamated accent he’d used now for so many years since.
It surprised him that no reply whatsoever rose in his mind... surprised him and at the same time suddenly left him feeling alone and completely lost as the entire weight of what was happening came crashing down on him in that moment.
“What... all buggered off now, have you...?” He rose from his chair and stood in the centre of the room, the bloodied T-shirt still gripped in one hand as he assumed a belligerent stance and stared down his own reflection with fists clenched at his side. “Don’t want to talk to me…?”
He hunched his body and fought against his own natural instincts, trying in that moment to reassume the disguise – to once more take up the mantle of James/Phillip Brandis – but he now found it to be as difficult as shrugging on an old jacket that was too small to fit across the shoulders. He gave a mirthless, bitter laugh as his lip curled into a sneer.
“Couldn’t get enough of me once… but now... now, when I really need you all...” The sentence began with his normal, mixed accent but wouldn’t ‘stick’ and quickly reverted back again. “Is this my Golgotha, is it? Eli, Eli lama sabachthani...? Is this where all of you forsake me now..?”
Winds of Change (Empires Lost Book 2) Page 49