Eagles at War

by Boyne, Walter J.

  "Not here. There are too many guns trained on us. No wonder they can't keep the Russians out, half of the German troops are guarding their own people! And we certainly won't be able to do anything if we wait until we reach Dachau. But on the train, perhaps. How were you guarded in the past?"

  "Two guards per carriage, one at each end."

  "If all of us cannot overcome two guards, we deserve to die. The trip won't be nonstop—there are sure to be air raids. We could kill the guards and make a break for it at the first stop afterward. Who else can we count on?"

  Countess von Heeren appeared stricken at the thought of violence.

  "How would we kill them? We don't have even a spoon to fight with."

  "There's sure to be fifty or sixty of us in the car, perhaps more. We'll kill them with our bare hands if we have to. But let me try another way first."

  After hours of waiting they'd been walked to the station to be loaded into a wreck of a third-class car. The windows had long since been blown out, replaced by rough wire netting and pieces of asphalted cardboard that deflected some of the wind. A dim lamp burned at the center and at each end of the car. More than ninety people were jammed inside. Lyra had been able to recruit six of them, three men and three women, who had agreed to escape or die trying. She'd volunteered to get a weapon from one of the guards.

  The train moved out slowly in a fitful series of stop-and-gos, grumbling along the bomb-battered railway. It was shunted aside for every passing troop train and stopped repeatedly to avoid the Allied Jabos, the fighter bombers. After six hours they were just past Berlin's outskirts.

  Lyra edged toward the rear of the carriage. With her fingertips she washed her face with saliva, trying somehow to smooth away the grime, wondering how cats managed the process. She pulled off her scarf and patted her hair into place. Positioning herself near the guard, she waited to catch his eye. He was one of the new Volksturm recruits, a stupid Oldenburger by the sound of his cackling voice, at least sixty, his once rugged shoulders bent and his pockmarked face a canvas of years of want and deprivation. He sat on an upended trunk, eating greedily, taunting the prisoners, clearly enjoying life. Whatever he had been—a street sweeper, a farm laborer—now he was an armed official of the state, guarding people to whom he would have doffed his cap in civilian life.

  The guard placed his rifle to the side and slid his pistol around so that he could sit more comfortably on the battered trunk near the end of the aisle. Holding a dark brown Army loaf in the crook of his arm, he sawed a thick slice off with a serrated butcher's knife. Balancing the bread on his knee, he pulled out a fat sausage—it was obviously real meat and not one of the synthetic vegetable rolls—and cut off a chunk. Smiling, he alternated bites, bread and sausage, bread and sausage, chewing slowly. He swallowed noisily, smacking his lips. Taking a canteen from the clip on his belt, he shook and sniffed it to let them know it was not just water, then drank deeply.

  The prisoners had not been fed for two days and, as genteel as they might once have been, those nearby followed his motions like so many Oliver Twists, each person salivating, stomach growling, jaws moving involuntarily.

  When the guard looked around, munching, Lyra sent him a broad smile. His glance passed her by, then switched swiftly back. Years of repression stifling him, he put his head down and cut another piece of sausage. As he cut he raised his eyes again to her, then looked away quickly.

  Take your time, she thought. Don't frighten him. She forced herself to relax, knowing that she must not fail. This was their only chance. She hoped he wasn't too old or too frightened to be interested.

  The air within the car was foul with the odors of ninety dirty bodies, but she forced herself to breathe deeply, summoning her strength and resolve. She edged directly in front of him. He looked at her, flushed, then cut a slice of sausage and passed it under her nose before biting into it.

  Lyra ran her tongue over her lips. He glanced around nervously, then lowered his hands so that they were pressed to his stomach. Oblivious to the crowd of people watching, he made a circle of his finger and thumb, and thrust a grime-blackened finger into it in the age-old symbol. She nodded and he stood up, busily putting the sausage and bread into his pack and fastening the canteen to his belt. Wiping the knife on his trousers before thrusting it into a loose scabbard at his side, he shoved his way to the very end of the carriage where a crude storage closet had been fashioned out of boards salvaged from burned-out buildings. As he moved the crowd separated, allowing first him, then her, to pass. From those who were unaware of Lyra's plan there came a disapproving mumble—she was obviously going to do what "wasn't done," and for a slice of sausage!

  There was just room inside the closet for the two of them to stand. He pressed himself on her, greasy lips slobbering on her face, his carrion breath foul. He pawed at her breasts through her clothing, then reached down to grope beneath her skirt. She pretended to respond, placing her right hand around his waist and pulling him to her, nuzzling her face in his neck to avoid his mouth as she slipped her left hand to his groin. Moaning, he began undoing his belt. As he did the scabbard holding his knife became free.

  Lyra, her heart pounding, reached inside his baggy trousers and began manipulating his penis. There was a quick response. As his breath came faster, she squeezed against him and with her right hand slipped the knife from its scabbard. He squirmed to kiss her again, full on the mouth. She cringed, revulsion at the filth against her face and thrusting in her hand raising bile in her throat.

  This is Germany I'm killing. This is all Germans, all Nazis, this evil. The thought gave her strength. Still manipulating him swiftly with her left hand, she slowly brought the knife down. His back moving convulsively, he pressed against her, oblivious to the jolting train or her shift of position. Summoning all of her courage, she brought her hand up in a single swift motion, driving the long blade up under his rib cage directly into his heart, thrusting with all her strength just as he ejaculated. His eyes rolled back and he sagged against her, spurting blood against her chest, semen on her hand.

  Quivering with disgust, she let him fall back. Then, deliberately, she washed her left hand in the blood streaming from his wound before wiping it on his shabby uniform.

  He was slumped against the wall like a half-empty sack of wheat, his trunk folded forward. Lyra removed his belt and put it around her. Attached to it was the scabbard, the canteen, and an automatic pistol. She searched his pockets, stuffing the bread and sausage inside her blouse, taking the few marks he had kept in a draw-string bag. She discarded his passbook—she didn't want to know his name or think of him as an ordinary human being. He was Germany, and she had killed him. That was enough.

  When she emerged, Lyra put her finger to her lips and began to move through the crowd to the other end of the car, the pistol in her right hand, the knife, dripping blood, in the left. It felt as if she had stopped breathing, as if every drop of blood in her body was pounding in her head. Wide-eyed, the others followed her, their mouths dropping open, the babble of their conversation falling with her passage, then rising as she went on. I must look like Lady Macbeth, she thought. She moved effortlessly, everyone now aware of what had happened, quickly stepping aside as she approached, then closing ranks again behind her.

  The other guard, a younger man with a deformed leg in a brace, was dozing with his back against the wall, his rifle held between his knees.

  Lyra watched him for a moment, feeling a trace of pity for this last scraping from the bottom of Germany's manpower barrel. He was probably a poor farmer pulled from some little village to do a job for which he wasn't fit. She shook off the feeling and shifted the still dripping knife into her right hand. Countess von Heeren stood directly between her and the guard. Lyra nudged her with the pistol and she stepped aside.

  It was easier to do the second time. Lyra moved forward, stabbing through the guard's throat with such force that the blade stuck in the wooden wall behind him. He jerked upward, pulling the kni
fe from the wall. She twisted it, dragging him face forward to the floor. There was a single agonized groan of pain as, voiding, he collapsed into a heap, gurgling, legs drumming, a gush of blood spewing from his neck.

  The wail of protest from the group surprised her.

  An officious middle-aged man, his clothes slack on his once sleek body, yelled, "Look here, young woman, you are going to get us killed!"

  Lyra shrugged him off, and as she stripped the guard of his keys and weapons, spoke to her six allies.

  "Open the locks now—we may have to jump from a moving train. But if we stop, let's leap out with our guns, ready to shoot. Everybody else will jump out and run. Be sure to scatter—don't bunch up."

  The officious man protested, "Don't tell me what to do. I'm not going to cause any trouble."

  Lyra looked at him, unable to believe his bovine protest. "Do what you wish. But some of us are going to try to live through this war."

  Only twenty minutes had passed when they heard the shrill scream of brakes being applied as the train shuddered to a halt. Before it had stopped the doors were open and the prisoners were streaming out into a driving snowstorm. Lyra stood in the center of the car, alternately urging and shoving as the people leapt out.

  There were some shouts and a spatter of rifle fire from guards in the other cars. Then four American fighter planes burst through the low clouds, silver shadows against the gray, red dots winking from their wings. Streams of bullets kicked up lines in the snow before blasting splinters from the wooden cars. Ahead an enormous column of steam roared to merge with the clouds, as the engine blew up. The fighter planes pulled around in a tight treetop-height turn for another run at the train.

  Lyra ran through the storm of machine-gun fire, oblivious to the screams around her, plunging forward into the forest, away from the train, away from Dachau.

  She blundered straight ahead for almost half an hour, hurtling through the brush, leaping over bushes, branches whipping her face, keeping the pistol in her grasp as she somehow summoned the energy to press on, to fight the overwhelming exhaustion that pulled at her limbs and her lungs. She slipped as she raced down the side of a stream, twisting her knee, and pain swept through her. Bruised and shaken, she was up again, bounding on as if there were no end to her energy, as if she could run forever. A wall of rocks loomed ahead and she turned abruptly to her right to pitch forward down a steep slope, rolling and tumbling. She arose slowly, light-headed and weak. Gasping for breath, she stumbled toward the sanctuary of a huge spruce tree, its lower branches immersed in the snow. Scared and bleeding, she dove like a fox into its burrow, digging under the outstretched branches to the dark shelter of the tree.

  Heart thudding, she let her breath subside as she pondered her chances. It was growing dark and it was snowing even more heavily now. Unless they had dogs, it would be difficult to find her. Many people had run away—there would be lots of trails. Most of them were infirm, weaker than she—they'd be found first. And the guards wouldn't be looking for her specifically, not unless some of the fainter hearts tried to shift the blame to her.

  If she could stay alive in the forest for a day or two, then find a village, she might be able to hide out until the end of the war. In the meantime, she was free.

  Her entire body was stinging from the brambles she had burst through, and her knee was swelling. It pained her even to reach out to gather handfuls of snow. Alternately licking it for moisture and pressing it against her face, she drew comfort from it. When her thirst was somewhat slaked she took a sip from the canteen. It was a raw red wine, rough and sour—and absolutely the most delicious drink she'd ever had.

  The spruce tree hung over her like a brooding tent, insulating her from the outside world. She burrowed down gratefully into the many years' accumulation of needles, nesting in their thick bed, lying perfectly still to preserve body heat, trying to ignore the myriad signals of pain being sent from torn muscles and scratched flesh.

  She went through the last hour in her mind. Now she understood Helmut's fascination with combat. She had killed and killed with pleasure. If she had to, she would kill again.

  Lyra fell into an exhausted sleep; she awoke aching in every muscle but sensed that her strength was returning. Lyra drove the still bloody knife into the bed of pine needles again and again, scouring it until it felt smooth and smelled clean. Then she cut a slice of the sausage off, chewing slowly to let the rich fat pour energy into her. As she chewed she thought, I will survive. No matter what happens, I will survive. I will go to Ulrich, and we will be happy.

  *

  En route to Tokyo/March 10, 1945

  Colonel James Lee directed the red-lensed instrument light at his wristwatch. It was exactly twelve midnight. A little over an hour to go. The long flights over water in the B-29 were tedious but worrisome. The airplane was a dangerously flawed masterpiece, marred by immature systems brought together too fast and too soon. He ran a constant eye over the engine instruments, watching for any telltale creep-up in temperature or drop in pressure. The flight engineer, Vito Apollonio, was a good man, but with the B-29 you always had to be careful. It was a long way back to the Marianas, a very long way on three engines, and an impossible distance on two. Iwo Jima was available now as an emergency strip, but it wasn't a pleasant alternative.

  "Nav, how are we doing?"

  "We're right on the button, on time and on course . . . Colonel."

  "Colonel," with that period of hesitation, the insufferable skip that said, "I'm being courteous to the rank, not to you." On previous missions the navigator had always used the friendlier "Skipper." It confirmed what he had already sensed—his own crew was freezing up on him, distancing themselves. The rumor mill was running—LeMay was supposed to be ready to fire him. They'd already pulled his squadron from him, booting him up to a make-believe job of "Deputy for Radar Photos."

  Lee could still laugh at himself. It was all being done for the wrong reasons. He had been an advocate of low-level bombing for months, taking his ideas to whoever would listen, even though it made him persona non grata with the previous XXI Bomber Command leader, Brigadier General Possum Hansel.

  Lee never had a chance to discuss the matter with the new commander, Major General Curtis LeMay, whose gruff style and no-nonsense manner made him virtually unapproachable. LeMay had decided to risk everything on low-level bombing—and he'd arrived at the idea independently. No doubt some "helpful" assistant on LeMay's staff had hinted that Lee felt himself to be the author of the new strategy.

  With characteristic bluntness, LeMay had called him in and chewed him out, leaving no doubt in Lee's mind or anyone else's who was responsible for the new technique. He hadn't asked Lee for an explanation—he simply told him explicitly what the situation was.

  The darkness hovered in the cavernous cockpit of the B-29 Virgin Effort, both a blessing and a curse. It concealed them from the enemy, but reemphasized that each plane was an island, a self-contained entity, isolated in a bomber stream headed for enemy skies. Lee glanced at his copilot, Captain Mauru Nunes, a lawyer in civilian life, cupping his hand over his flashlight as he busied himself over the flight manual, committing the emergency procedures to memory. How nice it would be to be like that, to have only this mission on his mind.

  The broad band of instruments on the panels in front of them danced in the phosphorescent reflections of the ultra-violet lamps. Lee sensed a telltale buzzing, a minor disharmony in the propeller synchronization, and he dropped his hand to the controls to adjust them.

  They were flying at only three thousand feet, taking advantage of a sixty-knot wind following them from 150 degrees. If they'd had to climb to the old bombing altitudes the winds would have been one hundred knots faster and even more directly a tail wind—great for ground speed but ruinous to accurate bombing. Worse, the tail wind became a head wind on the way home, disastrous if you were damaged or short on fuel.

  Unseen ahead of them, eighty-knot winds were racing across the Kanto
Plain, knocking down radar antennae and disrupting surface communications. The Japanese picket ships that plotted each passing of the widely spaced B-29 fleet sent back message after message to the waiting Navy shore receivers. But because the Army was responsible for the air defense of Japan, the Navy didn't pass on the news of the coming danger to them.

  Virgin Effort droned forward on autopilot, the crew silent at their stations. Lee saw the irony in his situation. He had been dead wrong to line up with McNaughton against Caldwell—but he hadn't been called on that yet. Instead he was in disrepute for something he hadn't done. Although his crew's bombing record was the best in the 73d, they hadn't been selected to be among the pathfinders, to be first over the target and to lay down the strings of napalm-filled incendiaries that would light up a yellow cross in the heart of Tokyo. Instead they were far back in the bomb stream, the fifty-fifth plane to take off on the late afternoon of March 9th. From the Marianas airfields on Guam, Saipan, and Tinian, so dearly bought from the Japanese, the greatest force of B-29s ever launched had grumbled off the ground. Three hundred thirty-four of the very heavy bombers formed a three-hour stream of imminent fiery death pointed at Tokyo. Many had already turned back, most with problems in their temperamental Wright Cyclone R-3350 engines.

  He leaned forward and reset his directional gyro. Well, the hell with it. He knew better than anyone that LeMay arrived at his own ideas independently and had never said otherwise. But his swift rise to the rank of colonel had made more than one man jealous. The back-biting was probably just jealousy. If the business with McNaughton would only blow over, he could afford to wait out the war. He'd seen enough combat—they could send him back to the States to be an instructor pilot if they wanted.

  There was simply no way to get next to LeMay. The man was a machine. Short, stocky, with a pugnacious jaw that began to bristle with a coarse black beard by mid-afternoon, he was first of all terrifyingly demanding. He had taken command on January 20th. The first few raids he ran were conventional, repetitions of those of the past even as to the results: few bombs on target. Then weather had almost shut the effort down in February. Visual bombing was impossible, and the B-29s' radar sets were incapable of precision bombing on anything but a coastal target.