Operation Afterlight, page 31
Bolting the hatch shut, Stahl slipped the first cartridge into the flare gun and raised it to the sky.
Chapter Forty-Four
Above Pillau, 16 April
“Flare!”
Durban heard the excitement in Barton’s voice, the single syllable drenched in the exuberance that only puppies and Aussies seemed capable of. They were heading away from the city over the Baltic, the order to abort given barely a minute earlier, already forgotten as Durban flung the aircraft back into a maximum rate turn, the wooden airframe straining as he peered up through the Perspex at smoke shrouded Pillau. “Johnny, do you see it?”
“Not yet, boss.”
“Bravo One, what about you?”
“I’m not sure, sir,” Kittinger said. “There’s so much smoke.”
“East end of the docks,” Barton said confidently. “Close to that bloody submarine. Want me to come down and show you?”
“Negative, Alpha One. Stay up there and provide cover. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of those fighters. I’m going in for a closer look. Kittinger, keep an eye out in case I miss anything.”
Or get shot down.
Levelling out at one hundred feet, Durban pushed the throttles fully open and raced back towards the city. The Siegfried, given an unexpected second chance against the Mosquitoes that had hung maddeningly out of range, opened fire with everything it had. Around them, the air turned an ominous shade of oily grey. The Mosquito shook, buffeted by fifty localised changes in air pressure. Then they were through, passing low over the navigation channel between the old Prussian forts that guarded the approaches, zipping through the belching smoke of two freighters below the height of their funnels. Ahead, he saw the U-78, their secondary target but hardly worth the risk of attacking if the primary wasn’t already destroyed.
“See anything, Johnny?”
He didn’t need an answer.
Arcing raggedly up, ahead and above their nose, a second flare dispelled smoke and gloom with equal ease.
“Got him!” Grant’s triumphant yell almost deafened him. “Third warehouse from the end. There’s a man on the roof.”
“Stahl,” Durban said, turning the nose towards the warehouse, climbing and reducing power. The Mosquito slowed, and Durban stood it on his wingtip, hanging against his straps. He waved as he passed barely two hundred feet above the lone figure on the rooftop. Dressed in ragged civilian clothing, his face a mass of blood, the man was almost unrecognisable as the cold, ascetic German that Durban had known in England.
It made no difference, though. It was Stahl. Right there. Waving one hand only. That same hand then dropping to point urgently at the floor below his feet.
Showing them the target.
“TRIGGER ONE,” he said calmly into the radio, then switched back to the squadron communications net. “All Bravo callsigns, maintain your position and prepare to attack on my signal. Bravo One, form up on me.”
“Roger, Colt Leader.”
The flak intensified as Durban swung out over the Vistula Lagoon again. The gunners didn’t need an invitation, and Durban’s return made it abundantly clear this wasn’t merely some drawn out photo-reconnaissance run. Grant muttered a curse as a line of 20mm tracers tore through the sky ahead of them.
“Bravo One to Colt Leader.”
“What is it, Kittinger?”
“Permission to send Bravo Two and Six against that flak ship?”
Durban looked at Grant. He knew what the young man would say. The Siegfried had almost got them twice already, and it would make any south to north bombing run against the target an extremely dangerous affair. But… “Bravo Two and Six both carry HE,” he told Grant. “If they use them on the Siegfried, that will leave only two more attempts at that building if you miss.”
“Sir,” Grant said, grinning, “I will not miss.”
Durban nodded. “Roger, Kittinger. Send them. I’m going back in for another look at the warehouse. Your boys should have a clear run while we draw the flak ship’s attention.”
Grant’s grin vanished when he heard that.
Trying to ignore the myriad flashes from the deck of the Siegfried, Durban opened the throttles and raced across the harbour from the south, getting the line of his target run right even as he kept the aircraft far too low for bomb release. He had to count the warehouses from the right to be sure of his target, but in navigational terms it was an easy run to the target. The only thing that made it difficult was the lethal flak pouring up from all angles.
“Alpha One to Colt Leader, bandits.”
And the fighters.
“Roger, Don. How many?”
“At least a dozen. Permission to ditch our bombloads to increase air-to-air performance?”
“Not until the target is destroyed.”
“Roger, Colt Leader,” Barton said. “Get on with it, will you?”
Ahead, the details of the warehouse became clearer. The vehicles parked out front, swarming with soldiers. Its long, corrugated sides. The single man on the rooftop.
He yanked back on the throttles and put out the air brakes. The Mosquito groaned as it slowed, sending the nose lurching up in outrage.
“Stahl is still there,” Grant said. “Why is he still there?”
“Because he’s a bloody fool.” Frantically gesturing him away, Durban passed overhead. Saw the man point at something.
Still, Stahl didn’t move.
What was he waiting for?
Chapter Forty-Five
Pillau, 16 April
Stahl watched as the Mosquito came around for a second run. The flak ship in the harbour looked almost ablaze, every gun flashing and leaving a haze of smoke in the air as it turned its full attention on the incoming aircraft. Tracers reached up towards it, a storm of lead and high explosive so intense that Stahl could see no plausible end to it but for the Mosquito fragmenting to fall into the cold harbour below. He wondered how Andrew Durban could stand it. The man had to see the explosions and tracers around him, and yet he kept on coming. Stahl couldn’t help but admire the man as he waited for the Mosquito’s bomb doors to open.
They didn’t.
Beyond the onrushing aircraft, he saw a line of familiar figures in white running along the stone wharf towards the distant U-78. One stumbled and fell, reaching out to his colleagues for help, only to be ignored. No soldiers accompanied the scientists, nor tried to stop them. Stahl could tell from the yells and the steady banging of an unseen rifle butt on the locked roof hatch that the soldiers were all busy elsewhere.
Willing Durban to understand his meaning, Stahl stabbed his one functional hand towards the fleeing scientists.
The Mosquito’s engine note changed, with a reduction in volume so sudden that Stahl thought for a moment flak must have struck it at last. The nose lifted, and once again Durban tilted the aircraft so that their eyes met for a fleeting moment. Now the British pilot was gesturing too – a frantic pushing motion, away from the rooftop and the harbour, towards the city.
Then the aircraft was over him and climbing away again, turning back towards the Vistula Lagoon, beneath the dark spots of distant fighters moving slowly across the sky.
Durban wanted him to clear the target.
To escape.
Stahl almost smiled. The thought had not even occurred to him. Certainly not since the soldiers had arrived to surround the building. Probably not since he had shot the scientist and turned the laboratory below into a charnel house.
Earlier, he thought. He had known so much earlier than that.
He had known when he saw Canaris at Flossenbürg.
Known this could end in only one way.
Durban surely had to realise it, too. Even if Stahl could somehow evade the soldiers below, slide off the roof into the alleyways behind them, he could never escape the blast radius of the bombs and the napalm. Not on foot, wounded. Not in time.
The Mosquito was completing its turn now. He could barely make out the figures in the cockpit, the roar of the engines already fading with distance. He had no radio. No more flares. No way to signal them. Except one.
Carefully, grunting with the pain, he sat down.
The roof was cold, but so was he, warmth and sensation fleeing his body together. The stone felt damp beneath him. He realised it lay drenched in the blood running down his left arm and dripping from nerveless fingers.
He closed his eyes.
Out across the bay, something exploded with a dull crump. It didn’t seem to matter.
The breeze off the sea stank of smoke and cordite. He ignored those odours and concentrated on its feel on his face. The way it had felt rolling down off the Alps and across the clear waters of the Forggensee. He heard his sister’s voice, calling him the way she would when they were children. Persistent, almost plaintive, yet resonating with her love for him.
He thought of Sarah Lane, watching as he left the barn at RAF Tempsford, and of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, showing him the truth. Canaris, who had died first, and who now waited for him with his sister and her children.
Stahl heard the Mosquito’s engine note grow louder again, and was at peace.
Chapter Forty-Six
Above Pillau, 16 April
A tremendous flash lit up the sky to their west, and someone gave a triumphant yell into the radio. Around them, Grant felt the air settle. No more tracers. No more explosions.
“Well played, Bravo Two,” Durban said.
“Great shot, Desveaux.” Kittinger’s voice betrayed his pride in his men.
The Siegfried was gone, at least as a coherent piece of military machinery. Where it had once floated were two shattered pieces of metal, their angles all wrong as they sank inexorably beneath a flame-tinged cloud of greasy smoke. Bravo Two and Bravo Six climbed away, no longer worried about any threat of defensive fire from their victim. With its back broken by direct hits from one or more five hundred-pound bombs, and with its crew scurrying to abandon their posts, it was no longer a threat to anyone.
The shore gunners saw it too and redoubled their efforts. The sky around the two climbing Bravo callsigns became a suffocating mass of flak bursts.
“Bravo Six is hit,” an Australian voice said calmly. Johnson, Grant thought as small pieces of wing tumbled from the climbing Mosquito. The venomous fast bowler who had turned out to be a nice guy in the pub after the game.
Durban thumbed his R/T. “Is it bad?”
“No,” Johnson said. “I think I can hold her together.”
The damaged wing came apart with sudden fury. The Mosquito tipped on its axis and plunged into the harbour. Gone.
Johnson hadn’t said another word.
“All Bravo callsigns,” Durban said, “attack. Form up in my trail and prepare to attack in a single column, three thousand foot spacing, speed three-fifty, three hundred feet. Bravo One, you’ll be straight after me. Drop your napalm on my impact point.”
“Wilco, Colt Leader,” Kittens said.
Grant felt bile in his throat. Both men had spoken without emotion, like they were safely in an office discussing some trivial matter and hadn’t just witnessed the sudden, brutal death of two friends and colleagues. A death that could come as easily for all of them. He looked out across the harbour. The sea had already settled, no trace left of Johnson and Gillespie except a few fragments of wood bobbing on the surface. Beyond it, the bow of the Siegfried was sliding down from sight. The stern had already disappeared. Leaking diesel from the flak ship’s ruptured tanks had coated the surface. Now it burned fiercely. A single crewman clung desperately to the metal of the bow as it sank, at least until his flailing legs met the rising flames. Grant knew it was impossible for him to hear the man’s screams over the roar of the Merlins. That didn’t stop them echoing in his ears.
“Alpha One to Colt Leader.” Barton’s voice. Grant looked up through the Perspex towards the clouds above. Something flared like a comet as it fell through the clouds.
“I read you, Alpha One.”
“We’ve got quite the party going on up here, boss. There are Soviet and German fighters now. We’ve shot down three so far, but there are more coming.”
JAEGER.
Durban circled wide out over the bay, other Mosquitoes dropping into line behind them at intervals. “Roger, Alpha One. Casualties?”
“Alpha Seven is gone.”
Craig and Keane, Grant thought. A likeable crew, an Englishman and their only Irishman. His eyes fell on the smoke trail left by the falling wreck. That could have been theirs, but so could several others. Columns of smoke dotted the Vistula Lagoon, each a funeral marker for its crew. No way to tell if they were British or Australian, German or Russian.
“Keep them busy for a few more minutes, Don. We’re attacking now.” He switched to his intercom. “Johnny, open the bomb doors.”
“Sir?”
“What?”
More bile. Grant swallowed. It burned on the way down. “Stahl is still on the target.”
Durban kept his eyes straight ahead. “The bomb doors, Johnny.”
Grant realised his hand was already reaching for the bomb door lever below the central instrument panel. His mind hesitated but his fingers didn’t. Training kicked in as he lifted the safety cover, moved the weapon switch to the lower position, and opened the curved Perspex that shielded the bomb selector panel. A quick check of the fuse settings, then he dropped the bomb door lever down. The Mosquito shuddered as the doors fell into the slipstream, protesting their high speed.
An orange light blinked on. Bomb doors fully open and ready.
His eyes went back to the distant target, still too far away to see if Stahl had gone. He knew he hadn’t.
“You saw him sit down,” Durban said.
“Yes, sir.”
“You know why.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll drop them. Just tell me when.” A pause. “You’re better at this than me, Johnny. I need you.”
For a moment only, Grant was tempted to stay silent, as if that might somehow wash his hands clean of what they were about to do. But the training had already taken over. He wouldn’t fight it anymore. “Yes, sir.”
Durban nodded and brought the Mosquito’s nose around, head on to the target, throttling forward to compensate for the drag of the bomb doors. “Three hundred feet,” he confirmed. “Airspeed three fifty.”
“Three-fifty,” Grant intoned. He was already calculating. Three hundred and fifty miles per hour of airspeed meant five hundred feet of ground passing beneath them every second. The arithmetic was simple enough. Knowing the altitude and the type of bomb he planned to drop allowed him to calculate the time that bomb would take to reach the ground. Multiplying that by the airspeed produced the range. Some bomber variants of the Mosquito carried the Mark III bombsight to do the angular velocity calculation for the crew. Grant felt oddly pleased that their aircraft did not have it. The calculations consumed his mind. They left no room for Stahl.
At first, the building ahead didn’t seem to get any closer. An optical illusion, Grant knew. Soon it would race towards them, faster and faster, until it vanished beneath them. When it did, it would already be too late to release. The aircraft’s momentum would transfer to the bombs and take them sailing over the target. No good. The time to drop was before that, when the target still seemed to move slowly and yet was speeding up.
He’d done all this in training. Topped his class in medium level bombing. All that had changed was the altitude. And the speed. And the margin of error.
“Five seconds,” he murmured.
Flak burst around them. Grant ignored it. Ignored the way his stomach roiled, the bubbling of vomit in his throat, the sharp metallic ring as a piece of shrapnel struck the armour at the back of his seat. Ignored everything, except the maths. To hit within fifty feet of the centre of the building? Accurate enough to be sure that the bomb would punch through the roof, the fuse delay settings holding back the explosion until it was within the walls, where the overpressure could crack it open and expose the insides to the napalm of the rest of the squadron? The margin of error was next to nothing. One-tenth of a second. No room for hesitation.
“Three seconds.”
The building filled the windscreen ahead. Grant saw the long roof looming over the horrified faces of soldiers on the quayside as they fired their rifles towards the onrushing aircraft. He saw the man sitting on the rooftop, eyes closed, one hand still outstretched and pointing.
“Now!”
Durban pressed the bomb release.
No hesitation.
Freed in an instant of a thousand pounds of weight, the Mosquito bounced up as it roared over the city beyond. Half a second later, it shook as a wave of violent air overtook it, but Durban’s grip remained tight on the controls. Grant pulled the bomb door lever again and felt them slam shut beneath him.
Only when the dull thud of the explosion caught up with them did Grant allow his eyes to close.
He felt his body loll back in the seat. His straps struggled to contain his sideways slide as Durban threw them into a climbing turn.
“Direct hit, boss,” Kittinger yelled. “Bombs gone.”
Even through the protective shade of his closed lids, the flare of the napalm stung.
“Bravo Three, dropping.”
“Bravo Five, bombs away.”
He opened his eyes.
The ground beneath them was already a mass of incandescent light, so hot that it seemed to draw in smoke as it sucked the air in from all around it. One by one, Mosquitoes passed over the dockside and added their napalm canisters to the inferno. At the very heart of the fiery maelstrom, nothing remained of the building. It was simply gone.
Stahl was gone.
Grant felt the vomit come again, hot and urgent, and this time it didn’t stop.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Above Pillau, 16 April
“AFTERLIGHT,” Durban said. “I say again, AFTERLIGHT.”
He kept his voice calm. There was no doubt in his mind. An eighteen-hundred Fahrenheit inferno of gasoline, magnesium and sodium nitrate consumed everything in its path. The building. The unfortunate soldiers outside. Götterdämmerung.
