‘Sir!’ the forward gunner yelled. ‘They’re manning guns!’
White froze. He stared at the sub, now less than a thousand metres ahead. He tried to remember the Type XXI specs. There would be two turrets on the conning tower with twin 2cm flak guns. This sub also had a forward deck mounting, probably the standard 10.5cm gun. A single hit from that could blow the Liberator apart. And there would by machine guns, MG-42s, mounted on the conning tower railing. He squinted against the sun. The barrels of the deck gun and the turrets on the conning tower should have been clearly visible, but were not. In an instant he realized why. They were aimed directly at them. He saw flashes like a Morse code signalling lamp, and then red streaks of tracer that zipped past the cockpit.
‘Sir! They’re shooting!’
They would be over the sub in seconds. He could take evasive action, try to corkscrew away, or he could go in for the attack.
‘Open fire!’ he yelled. ‘Bomb-aimer, on my mark!’
‘Drop to one hundred and fifty feet!’ the bomb-aimer yelled.
The twin Brownings in the nose turret opened up in a deafening cacophony as the plane plummeted, sending tracer rounds hosing towards the submarine in a great undulating wave. The plane lurched sideways, and he heard the ripping and drumming sounds of bullets from the submarine impacting somewhere on the port wing. He fought to bring the aircraft back to level, using the forward gunner’s tracer rounds like guiding lights to keep the plane on target. He saw where the Brownings had found their mark, splattering against the hull casing of the submarine and then into figures around the deck gun, who crumpled and were blown backwards into the sea. Three hundred yards now.
‘Steady, skip, steady,’ the bomb-aimer said. ‘Bombs gone!’
The plane lurched upwards three times as the depth charges dropped at one-second intervals, spinning away to hit the sea and bounce towards the submarine. White wrestled to maintain pitch as the centre of gravity in the aircraft went haywire. Seconds later they were over the submarine, and the tail gunner opened up with his quadruple Brownings. White struggled to keep the aircraft from pitching and yawing, regaining the nose-heavy pitch but failing to stop the sideways slippage. Something was badly wrong. Then he remembered the ripping sounds from the wing. He glanced to port, and at that moment a succession of three enormous concussions pulsed through the aircraft, forcing him to look back to the controls. ‘Bull’s-eye, skipper!’ the rear gunner yelled. ‘She’s still firing her deck gun, but the third charge blew off the bow and she’s going down into that blue hole. I could swear she fired a torpedo. The other two charges detonated against the side of the hole, and it’s collapsing around the sub.’
White barely registered what he had heard. With the Brownings silent, he could hear the engines properly now, a discordant vibration that throbbed and grated in his ears, echoing off the water. He looked to confirm what he had seen a moment ago. The port wing beyond the outer engine was shredded and the propeller was a mess, windmilling and breaking up. The engine was on fire. He knew what that terrible noise was. Other pilots who had survived bailing out from a stricken bomber had tried to describe it to him.
It was the aircraft’s death rattle.
He quickly shut down the engine and pressed the fire extinguisher, but it was still burning. He gunned the inner port engine to compensate and banked the aircraft with the dead engine high, but the plane began to slew round. The sea was terrifyingly close now, the whitecaps less than a hundred feet below. They were losing altitude, and there was nothing he could do about it. He dared not open the throttles of the other engines to try to climb, as that would only increase the yaw and they would end up cartwheeling into the sea. He had no choice but to ditch. He switched off the turbo superchargers and throttled down the other three engines. He looked at the airspeed. A hundred and thirty knots. That much was good: safe landing speed. At the last moment he would heave on the control column to pull the front of the aircraft upwards, trimming it backwards to avoid the fragile nose and cockpit impacting with the sea and disintegrating.
‘The port wing fuel tank is on fire!’ It was the rear gunner, screaming. White watched a large round from the submarine’s deck gun fly by, nearly spent at this range and clearly visible. Then he turned and saw the huge eruption of black smoke and flame now spewing out of the port outer engine cowling. With sickening certainty he knew that it must be licking round the rear fuselage, engulfing the tail. He remembered his vow to do everything he could to save the rear gunner. If he pitched the plane backwards into the sea, he might douse the turret in time. There was still a chance. He needed as much weight as possible aft. ‘Prepare for ditching!’ he yelled. ‘Everyone clear the nose, move aft!’ He remembered what the training officer at Nassau had told him about ditching in the sea, to repeat the co-ordinates on the intercom so that crew who survived could use the radio in the life rafts to relay their position. He switched the intercom to emergency call. He had been repeating the numbers under his breath since the navigator had told him, and now he did so loudly, insistently, over and over again: 242446 north, 742799 west. 242446 north, 742799 west.
Suddenly he felt a violent hammer blow, saw a red flash and then heard nothing at all, just a ringing in his ears. He looked to the right. The co-pilot was still strapped in his seat, but there was a mangled mess where his head and upper body had been. A gaping hole in the side of the cockpit extended below. White looked down, only able to move in slow motion, as if time itself had slowed down. The waves flashed by beneath the co-pilot’s feet. He reached out his hand slowly to touch the flecks of foam, to feel the warmth of the sea. He would go swimming when they got back, would strip off his battledress and life jacket and swim down, far into the depths, exuberant at having survived. He knew now he could let go, at last. The war was over.
He stared down in front of his own seat, and saw his legs hanging over the open hole, ragged bloody stumps with shattered white bone sticking out. He pursed his lips. It was another design glitch of the Liberator. It needed armour plating under the pedals. He would talk to them about that too when he got back.
He felt himself falling forward. The plane was pitching down. He would need to do something about that, pretty damn soon. His head felt terribly heavy now, but he looked up and saw the place below the compass where he had kept the little metal butterfly in his Lancaster. He saw the butterfly again, and he smiled. His angels would look after him. He would be safe.
Then blackness.
20
The Adirondack Mountains, New York State, present day
J ack switched the headlamps of the rented SUV to high beam as he turned off the paved road into the gravel lane that led to the farm.
He had driven out of Syracuse airport in upstate New York a little over two hours before, having flown there overnight from Vancouver with Costas in the IMU Embraer. The aircraft had gone on from Syracuse to Bermuda to take Costas to Seaquest II, which was standing off the island ready to sail south towards the Caribbean. It was scheduled to return to Syracuse for Jack later that day, and meanwhile all of Jack’s attention was on the text message Mikhail had sent him the evening before about his research into U-boat sightings in the Caribbean in the weeks following the Nazi surrender in May 1945. Everything they had found out so far, from Frau Hoffman, from the Ahnenerbe man Schoenberg in British Columbia, had pointed them to the Caribbean, to a place where Himmler’s men had apparently built a secret installation at the site of an extraordinary landfall dating to more than seven thousand years before. But that still left thousands of square miles of ocean to explore, with numerous uncharted islets and reefs. Jack hoped against hope that Mikhail would provide a lead, something that would allow them to pinpoint a location. All the time Saumerre’s men would be closing in, watching and waiting, their patience wearing thin. Jack knew that the gamble he had taken to keep Saumerre from ordering his men to attack would only succeed if he and Costas arrived at the site very soon. What he found out here today from Mikhail migh
t prove decisive.
He stopped the vehicle at the top of the lane and switched off the engine, then opened the door and stepped out to enjoy a moment of silence. The first light of dawn revealed wisps of mist that hung between the dense line of cedars on either side of the lane. The forest extended off in all directions, rising up the foothills of the Adirondacks, which formed dark ridges on either side. He remembered the preternatural quiet of this place, more than twenty miles from the nearest town and separated from other farms by dense tracts of forest. Somewhere in the distance he heard the yipping and howling of a pack of eastern coyotes, an eerie sound that sent a shiver up his spine. During the week he had spent here six months ago, he had hiked with Mikhail and Petra all over the surrounding Adirondack hills, the three of them struggling to keep up with Rebecca. He took a deep breath, savouring the chill morning air. Rebecca. She was here too, with Jeremy. She knew he was coming, but he had hoped to arrive before she was up. He got back into the SUV and switched on the engine, looking through the tunnel of light created by the headlamps down the lane. The house lay in a clearing more than a quarter of a mile ahead, surrounded by irregular fields hacked out of the forest by pioneer settlers more than two centuries before, when this had been Iroquois territory.
He edged the vehicle forward, hearing the tyres crunch on the gravel. After about two hundred metres he passed over a small creek with swampy ponds on either side, and saw the dark shadow of the barn ahead. Any hope of a quiet arrival was shattered by the raucous barking of the pair of German shepherds that Mikhail kept in a fenced compound beside the house; then a cluster of motion-sensor halogen lights lit him up. He accelerated to the end of the lane between the barn and the house and switched off the engine, taking his fleece and getting out just as a figure appeared out of the gloom holding a rifle muzzle-down, like a soldier. Jack extended his hand. ‘Mikhail. Good to see you.’
‘Jack.’ Mikhail took his hand from the rifle grip and shook Jack’s, smiling warmly at him. He was about Jack’s age, a few inches shorter, with cropped grey hair, a Russian whose features were more Viking than Slavic, and he spoke English with a slight accent.
Jack pointed at the rifle, a British Lee-Enfield. 303 that he knew Mikhail used for deer hunting. ‘Have you had any trouble?’
Mikhail shook his head. ‘Nothing yet. But we treat every arrival as suspicious. Your security chief Ben Kershaw and the British secret service guy, John, have both been here for the past two nights, ever since Rebecca and Jeremy arrived. One of them is always on the perimeter near the road. John does the day shift, Ben the night. Ben was probably within sniffing distance of you at the head of the lane, but I know he wouldn’t reveal himself even to you.’
‘When he was in the SAS in the 1980s, that’s what they got good at,’ Jack said. ‘Squatting in hedgerows in South Armagh in Northern Ireland for hours and days on end, waiting for IRA terrorists.’
‘Jeremy’s making breakfast. I expect you’ll need some. I’ve got some really exciting stuff to show you, Jack. It could be just what you want.’ They walked past the dogs, both quiet now, and then up the path to the house, where Mikhail opened the screen door and ushered Jack in, closing it and locking the main door behind them. They went through a room that had once been the pioneer log cabin and then into a spacious modern extension, up a wide staircase to a large open-concept pentagonal room that served as a living area as well as Mikhail’s study. On every side above bookcases were wide windows that gave an unimpeded view over the farm up to the edge of the field clearings, now visible in the light of dawn. Mikhail walked a few steps down to a sunken sitting area in the centre of the room, with easy chairs surrounding a rustic table made from sections of hardwood trunk. He opened the bolt of the rifle, extracted the round that had been in the chamber and pressed it back into the magazine, then closed the bolt over the rounds, placing the rifle on the table beside several other guns. He and Jack sat down opposite each other as another figure appeared up the stairway. Jeremy looked half asleep, with dishevelled hair, and he wore a sweater and jeans that looked as if they had just been thrown on, but he was carrying a tray of coffee mugs and croissants.
‘Grub’s up,’ he said, putting the tray on the table and grinning at Jack. ‘Isn’t that what your old seadog grandfather used to say?’
Jack took a coffee and smiled. ‘Hello, Jeremy. Is Rebecca awake?’
‘I’ll knock on her door if you want.’
‘No,’ Jack said. ‘It’s only just dawn, and she is still a teenager.’
Jeremy grinned again. ‘As you keep reminding me. She can’t wait to see you.’
‘Let’s see what Mikhail has to say first.’ Jack leaned forward, took a gulp of coffee and put the mug down on the table. He pointed to where the Lee-Enfield lay beside three other weapons, a Ruger 10/22 semi-automatic rifle, a Beretta side-by-side 12-gauge shotgun and a revolver, alongside a cardboard box filled with ammunition. ‘That’s quite an arsenal.’
‘Ben and John are both carrying Glocks,’ Mikhail said. ‘These are just my farm guns, for hunting and personal defence. I know how good you are with the Lee-Enfield, from shooting with you here last year, but I’ve only just sighted it in for new ammunition I’ve reloaded myself so I’ll take that. If the need arises, Rebecca has the shotgun and Jeremy the Ruger.’
Jack looked questioningly at Jeremy. ‘Have you done much shooting?’
‘I grew up in rural Vermont, where just about every boy I knew had a 10/22. You just have to know the limitations of the. 22, even the hyper-velocity rounds. For anything bigger than a squirrel, that means less than fifty yards and always a head shot. But with the right shot placement, that rifle could kill a man instantly.’
There was a rustle from a corner of the room and Rebecca appeared bleary-eyed around a door, her long dark hair hanging over an oversized T-shirt. She gave a small wave, then shut the door again. Jeremy turned back to Jack. ‘I know what you’re asking. I haven’t pulled a gun on a man before, but I’ll do what it takes. We’ve got assets to protect.’
Jack reached over and picked up the revolver, a heavy break-top Webley. ‘So it looks as if this is mine.’
‘It’s an old British service revolver,’ Mikhail said. ‘A lot of Webleys were sold as surplus into the States in the fifties and sixties. It’s a man-stopper,. 455 calibre, designed to put down fanatical tribesmen on the Afghan frontier. It’s my home defence weapon.’
Jack spun the cylinder, then cupped his hands around the grip and aimed the pistol. ‘Scott Macalister has one of these, and I’ve practised with it from the ship.’ He pressed the lever on the receiver with his right thumb and broke the pistol open, pivoting the barrel and cylinder forward and letting the ejector snap out and fall back again. He reached over to the cardboard box and took out a container of. 455 ammunition, opened it and loaded six cartridges into the cylinder, leaving the pistol broken open and laying it back on the table. ‘If Saumerre’s men do try to attack, what’s the drill?’
Mikhail sprang up from his chair and went up to the window on the opposite side of the house from the barn, gesturing for Jack and Jeremy to follow. Jack mounted the stairs and stood beside him, looking over the lush green winter wheat that carpeted the field towards the pine and maple trees bordering the forest beyond. Mikhail opened the mosquito screen on the window, took a compact laser rangefinder from the ledge below and peered through it, finding a target and holding the rangefinder steady with both hands while he pressed the activator on the top. ‘That large dead pine at the end of the field is three hundred and twelve metres away,’ he murmured. ‘That’s the furthest line-of-sight distance in any direction from the house.’ He took down the rangefinder and pointed to a large aerial photograph of the farm pinned to the wall beside the window, showing the three main fields extending off from the buildings like fingers penetrating the forest. ‘It’s all near enough for me to shoot using the battle sights on the Lee-Enfield without any need for range adjustment.’ He looked back, scanning the f
ar edge of the field for a moment, and then pulled shut the mosquito screen. ‘It’s been done before,’ he said, looking at Jack. ‘During the war of 1812, the place withstood a combined British and Iroquois attack. The farmer and his boys only had flintlock longrifles, but it did the trick.’
‘Should one of us be standing lookout?’ Jeremy said.
Mikhail shook his head. ‘No need until we’re certain there’s a threat. Best to rest and keep alert. At the moment Ben is the first line of defence, and the dogs provide an early-warning system. I built the pen so they have a full run around the house. They’re very territorial and want to attack anything that intrudes on this place. They’ll let us know.’
Jack gestured at a spotting scope on a tripod beside the window. ‘It looks as if you designed this room as a defensive outpost.’
Mikhail gave a wry smile. ‘I’m a pretty serious birder. Rebecca’s probably told you all about it. I used to drag her along to all kinds of places to spend hours sitting beside some swamp at migration time. When we bought this farm, the house was derelict and I had this room built as part of an extension, custom-designed as an observatory.’
‘And a place to write your books. I envy you that.’
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