‘Keep going, keep going,’ Dawson yelled, swivelling round to check the scene behind them, his Schmeisser covering the area.
There was no sign of any of the German soldiers, no shots, so the grenades had done their work as bloodily and efficiently as ever. But just coming around the final bend, beyond the blazing motorcycles, was the German army truck that had chased them all the way from Kesslingen that afternoon.
He dropped back into his seat just as the truck roared up the gentle slope that led to the main road directly in front of them.
There were vehicles moving in both directions along it. He could see two lorries and a staff car heading south-west, towards the French border, and several lorries – perhaps eight or ten in all – were driving along in a well-spaced convoy, crossing in front of them from left to right. Somehow, they had to get through and find the road they needed.
As they reached the junction, one of the convoy lorries started to slow down and pulled across. Dawson could see the driver and passenger looking in shocked horror at the blazing motorcycles and scattered bodies beside the road-block. They were obviously going to stop and help.
Watson powered the truck onto the tarmac surface, swerved around the front of the slowing vehicle and swung left, cutting directly in front of the staff car with four soldiers sitting in it – two officers in the rear seats and a driver and escort in the front. The driver sounded his horn angrily, and the escort stood up, bringing his machine-pistol to bear.
Dawson stood up and spun round. He was in no mood to mess about. Before the German could fire his weapon, a stream of nine-millimetre bullets from Dawson’s Schmeisser smashed into his chest, throwing him backwards and sideways out of the vehicle. He fired another burst at the front of the staff car, rupturing both front tyres and blasting holes through the radiator.
Watson stood up in his seat as well, clutching his Schmeisser and looking for a minor road away to the north-west, towards the border with Luxembourg.
Another soldier stepped from behind the now stationary convoy lorry and lobbed a stick grenade towards the truck, but Watson saw him immediately, dropped back into his seat and accelerated hard.
Dawson swung round and fired at the soldier with his machine-pistol, but after a second or so it jammed and his bullets all missed.
‘Fucking German junk,’ he muttered, dropped it and grabbed another one.
The grenade exploded some thirty yards behind them, and they felt the blast, but the steel body of the truck protected them from its effects.
‘Up there,’ Dawson snapped, pointing at a junction about 100 yards in front of them.
Ahead of them, another of the lorries in the north-east-bound convoy had obviously seen what had happened and decided to do something about it. The driver swung his heavy vehicle across the road, barely twenty yards away, clearly aiming to ram them.
Dawson aimed the Schmeisser and fired a long burst. The windscreen of the oncoming lorry shattered, but the vehicle still hurtled towards them.
‘Go left,’ Dawson yelled. ‘Go around it.’
He fired another two bursts at the lorry, aiming lower, at the engine and tyres, trying to do some serious damage, but the vehicle didn’t stop.
Watson braked hard and wrenched on the steering wheel. The truck swung left, just missing the wing of the approaching lorry, which rumbled past them without stopping. Dawson’s shots had obviously hit the driver, because the vehicle careered off the road and crashed in the ditch that ran alongside it.
Watson turned the steering wheel back again to the right-hand lane and pressed the accelerator, crunching his way through the gearbox once more. Another lorry in the convoy was heading towards them, but the driver showed no inclination to swing over from his side of the road. But Dawson could see the muzzle of a weapon poking out of the window beside him. He fired another couple of bursts as the two vehicles closed on each other. Bullets peppered the steel of the cab and engine compartment, and with a sudden bang the lorry stopped dead, clouds of steam pouring from under the bonnet.
They were clear. In a few seconds they reached the junction, and Watson swung the wheel to the right, sending the truck surging off the main highway and down the narrower road that curved away to the north-west, scattering stones and debris behind them.
Dawson looked back again as the truck bounced over the uneven surface. The other lorries in the convoy had slowed, several had already stopped. Grey-clad figures ran down towards the road-block, but three others headed towards the north side of the road. And they all carried rifles.
‘Keep your head down,’ Dawson ordered, ‘get the speed up and start weaving. There are three riflemen behind us.’
As he said the words, a bullet smacked into the rear of the truck somewhere, and another ploughed through the right-hand side front wing.
‘If they hit one of the front tyres, we’re buggered,’ Watson shouted.
‘Just keep going. They’re on foot. We’ll be out of range soon.’
Other shots rang out. Several bullets hit the rear of the vehicle, and one smashed through the windscreen, but neither man was hit. The truck kept going, and that was all that mattered.
‘I think we’re clear now,’ Dawson said, risking another glance behind them, back towards the road.
‘I bloody hope so.’
There was massive bang from the right-hand side of the truck.
‘Oh, fuck,’ Watson said. ‘That’s one of the bloody tyres.’
Dawson leant out of the cab, over the side of the vehicle, and looked down. ‘It’s the middle axle,’ he said. ‘Keep your foot down.’
The truck had three axles and six wheels. Dawson couldn’t see any reason why it shouldn’t keep running as long as at least four of the tyres remained intact.
‘Was it a bullet?’ Watson asked, raising his voice over the increased noise level. Bits of tyre were flapping and banging against the wheel arches as the truck rushed on.
‘Probably, or the punishment we’ve inflicted on it. Either way, we’ve still got five fucking tyres, so there are a good few miles left in it yet.’
Dawson looked back again. What he saw on the main road, about half a mile behind them, wasn’t entirely unexpected, but it still caused him to curse.
A German army lorry was just making the turn to follow them. It was too far away for him to identify it positively, but he had no doubt, no doubt at all, it was the one that had been chasing them all afternoon.
Watson heard his companion’s expletive and glanced behind them. ‘It’s that fucking SS officer and his men, isn’t it?’ he demanded, as he spotted the lorry turning to follow them.
‘You can bet your life it is. At least we’ve got a bit more of a lead over them now and we must be getting close to the border.’ Dawson bent forward to study the map. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If we’re where I think we are, we’ve got about another four miles to go, that’s all.’
Watson leant forward and patted the dashboard of the truck. ‘Keep going, old girl,’ he said. ‘We’re nearly there.’
Dawson again checked behind them. Some 700 yards distant, the German army lorry showed no signs of giving up the pursuit.
Chapter 33
14 September 1939
The banging from the wheel with the blown tyre was getting worse, and the truck was clearly travelling much more slowly.
‘Sorry, mate,’ Watson said, wrestling with the steering wheel, ‘this is as fast as we can go.’
‘Somehow, we’ve got to stop that lorry, or at least slow it down,’ Dawson said. ‘If they catch up with us, we’ll be outnumbered and outgunned, and there’s only one way that will end.’
‘Any ideas?’ Watson asked.
‘I’m working on it.’
‘What about blocking the road? Drop a tree across it or something? Maybe use the grenades?’
‘That’s not a bad idea, but we’d have to pick the spot carefully. In open country, they’d just drive around the obstacle. We’d need to do it in a forest or
valley, somewhere like that, where they’d have no option but to shift it.’
Watson pointed ahead. ‘Looks like we’re heading into a sort of forest right now,’ he said.
In front of them, the road curved gently to the right and disappeared behind a clump of trees, and the land beyond was quite heavily wooded.
Dawson nodded. ‘I suppose we could use a grenade or two to fell a tree.’
‘You’re supposed to be the bloody explosives expert, Eddie. You tell me.’
‘The problem is the direction of the explosion. Trees are pretty bloody tough. It might take three or four to do the job. Even then the tree might not fall the way we want. We’d just be wasting the grenades and we’ve only got six left.’
‘There’s a steel cable in the back,’ Watson said. ‘We could attach it to a tree and pull it over.’
‘Any tree small enough for us to pull out of the ground with this truck,’ Dawson replied, ‘is also easy to shift with that three-tonner. They could probably just drive straight over it – slowly, of course – and then they’d be right behind us. No, we need something else, some other way of getting them off our backs.’
Dawson reckoned that the lorry was now only about 500 yards back, and gaining on them steadily. Their slender lead was being steadily eroded and, unless they did something bloody quickly, the Germans would be on them in minutes.
The truck swept round the corner and into the shelter of the trees, the shade from the leaves and branches immediately cutting out the daylight. Dawson glanced round at the trees that edged the road. It would take more than a couple of grenades to bring one of them down. They were massive, maybe three feet in diameter.
Watson accelerated as the road straightened out in front of them, the banging and crashing from the blown tyre now louder and more pronounced. Dawson leant out of the cab and peered back. Most of the ruptured tyre had vanished, but the shreds of the carcass that were still attached to the wheel were slamming into the mudguard as the wheel turned, and the steel wheel itself was crashing into the ground, digging furrows in the track.
‘Just keep going,’ he said. ‘We don’t have any option.’
Dawson checked the map, looking for inspiration, then sat back. The road they were on went through the forest for another couple of miles, as far as he could see, then emerged into open ground again. If they were going to slow down their pursuers, they really had to do something while they were still surrounded by the trees. Or, he suddenly thought, looking back at the map, perhaps there might be another way.
‘Slow down a bit,’ he instructed Watson.
‘Slow down? What the hell for?’
‘Look, we can’t out-run that fucking lorry and we can’t bring down one of these trees in time.’
‘So?’
‘We need that lorry to go away, right? Let’s allow it get ahead of us. If we can hide and the Jerries still think we’re in front of them, they’ll just keep on driving. They won’t know we’re not ahead until they come out of this wood.’
‘So we drive up some track and wait until they’ve gone past?’
‘Exactly,’ Dawson said, and pointed at the map he was holding. ‘There are tracks and paths marked on this, but I can’t tell how wide. We’ll just have to pick one that looks big enough. So slow down a bit.’
Watson slowed down more, and they both started looking at the undergrowth on either side of the road. They passed several narrow tracks that seemed to be more like footpaths, then a succession of wide pathways.
‘Take that one,’ Dawson said, pointing to one on the left-hand side of the road that led away into the wood at an oblique angle.
Watson braked, dropped down two gears and turned the steering wheel to the left. The moment the truck left the tarmac, it started bouncing, the suspension crashing and banging over the rutted surface.
The track ran fairly straight for perhaps twenty yards, then swung right around a stand of large trees, before bending back to the left. After another thirty yards or so it ended in a small clearing, occupied by a tiny wooden hut, the door hanging open and the building obviously empty. Watson braked the vehicle to a halt and switched off the engine.
Both men jumped out, grabbed their machine-pistols and ran back down the track, then cut through the forest itself until they reached a point where they could see the road. Then they ducked down into cover, though they knew there was almost no chance they could possibly be seen by anybody in the speeding lorry.
A few seconds later, they heard the sound of a diesel engine running at full power and, moments after that, the German army lorry swept past, heading west.
Both men watched it carefully as it passed them.
‘Three in the cab, maybe ten or twelve in the back,’ Dawson said. ‘If we get involved in a shoot-out with that many Jerry soldiers, we’re dead.’
‘So what now? Do we head back the way we’ve come, or what?’
Dawson considered for a few moments. ‘We still have to head west: if we head back we’ll just meet the main road and the German convoy again. Let’s try and change that bloody blown tyre first. There’s a spare wheel bolted on the side of the truck just behind the cab.’
‘We’ll have to be quick. There’s a chance that, as soon as they clear the forest, they’ll see we aren’t in front, and then they’ll double back and start looking for us. We’ve got to hope that there’s some way to get off this road before that happens.’
The two men ran back up the track to the clearing. Watson grabbed a jack and wheel-brace from the toolkit in the back of the truck while Dawson checked inside the wooden hut, which was deserted and derelict. But he wasn’t looking for German woodcutters, only for wood. There were a couple of short planks inside that had been used as a pair of simple shelves. He ripped them both off the wall and went back outside with them.
‘Here,’ he said, handing them to Watson, who was kneeling beside the truck and starting to raise the jack under the axle.
‘Thanks,’ Watson said, positioning them under the jack. Without some kind of support, the jack would simply sink into the earth under the weight of the vehicle.
Dawson looked at the back and sides of the truck and shook his head. The steel was punctured by dozens of holes where rifle bullets had smashed through it. It was a miracle that they hadn’t lost a tyre before, and the only reason they weren’t dead was because there was so much metal behind them that none of the bullets had penetrated as far as the cab.
The moment they’d finished, Dawson glanced at his watch. The whole operation had taken them under six minutes. ‘Right, let’s go,’ he said.
Watson started the engine and reversed the truck, then swung it round and drove back down the track to the road, their progress much smoother and quieter, even over the rough ground, now they had all six wheels and tyres again.
‘So which way do we go?’ Watson asked, slowing down as the truck approached the road.
‘West,’ Dawson decided, again studying the map. ‘We’ve got to get across the border into Luxembourg, and this is the only road marked in this area that’s going in the right direction.’
‘Then let’s hope we don’t meet those fucking Jerries coming back this way,’ Watson said, swinging the wheel left and powering the truck off the track and back up onto the tarmac.
He accelerated down the road, going up through the gears, but kept the speed moderate, just in case the German army lorry was heading straight for them and he had to stop or drive off the road.
Beside him, Dawson made sure a couple of the remaining stick grenades were close to hand, checked that two of the Schmeisser MP 40s were fully loaded and ready to fire, then picked up one of the Mauser K98k rifles, checked that the magazine was loaded and chambered a round. Then he held the weapon in front of him, ready to aim and fire it if he had to.
Watson steered the truck around the first bend, the tension evident in his knuckles, which were white as he clutched the wheel. But the straight stretch of road that came into view was e
mpty of any signs of life, and he relaxed a little.
‘They must know by now that we’re not in front of them,’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ Dawson replied. ‘It all depends on what the visibility’s like where the road leaves this forest. If it’s clear for a mile or more, they’ll know because the truck will have vanished, but if there are more trees or lots of bends it’s possible they could still be driving away from us, hoping to catch up.’
But as they rounded the next corner, it was obvious that the lorry wasn’t still heading west, because it was right in front of them, perhaps 200 yards away and parked in the middle of the road facing them. German soldiers were fanning out on both sides of the road, obviously looking for any sign of the truck in the forest.
Chapter 34
14 September 1939
‘Oh, fuck,’ Watson said, slamming on the brakes and immediately swinging over to one side of the road to do a U-turn.
‘That SS bastard is fucking clever,’ Dawson muttered, aiming his rifle towards the oncoming soldiers. But he didn’t fire because he knew that at that range, from a moving vehicle, he’d hit nothing.
‘You said that before, but you’re right.’ Watson swung the truck round to face the other way, the tyres bumping over the grassy verge, then pressed down on the accelerator pedal. ‘He’s bloody well one step ahead of us again.’
The truck started to head back the way it had come. Then a volley of shots cracked out as some of the German soldiers spotted it and opened fire with their Mausers. But within seconds Watson had driven the vehicle around the bend and they were shielded from view by the trees and were safe – at least for a couple of minutes.
‘So now where the hell do we go?’ Watson demanded. ‘Those fucking Jerries will have mounted up by now and that lorry will be coming after us.’
Dawson was desperately studying the map, looking for a way – any way – out. They couldn’t go too far east, because that would take them back to the main road. Taking one of the tracks through the forest would be a risk, because he didn’t know exactly where they were, and most of them only seemed to penetrate a short distance into the woods, according to the map. The worst possible outcome would be to leave the road, get stuck up some path that ended only yards from the road and be sitting ducks when the lorry-load of German soldiers appeared.
To Do or Die Page 21