Tarzan Trilogy by Thomas Zachek, page 32
part #3 of The Wild Adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs Series
Little did Fuhrmann know that a great deal more trouble lay in store for him that day.
Chapter 17
T H E A I R F I E L D
Nyumba’s airstrip was situated on the northeastern section of the town, where the jungle thinned into a broad plain consisting mainly of grasses and scrub trees. The landing strip had been graded a few years earlier when air travel had become available and increasingly convenient for well-to-do visitors with more money than time. Since then, several hangars and a control tower had been built on the edge of town bordering the airfield.
The afternoon sky was cloudless. There had been no air traffic at all that day, and the airfield had been quiet.
In the cramped space of the small control tower, Fuhrmann’s agent, Lieutenant Volkmann, trained his binoculars on a tiny speck that had appeared in the sky from the northeast. He strained for a moment to see what it was. As it grew larger, he realized that it was approaching the airstrip. In another moment, he could discern a second speck following the first.
“Do you see that?” he said to the African controller manning the console.
The controller looked through his set of binoculars and confirmed, “Yes. I see it.”
“Do we have contact with it?”
“No, sir. No identification, no request for landing.”
Volkmann continued to look, waiting for the specks to grow larger…and soon the first speck became recognizable as the figure of an approaching Armstrong Whitworth AW 27 Ensign British military cargo plane.
Volkmann was not the only one who studied the specks in the sky. At that same moment, Tarzan of the Apes, perched in a tree near the jungle outskirts of Nyumba, peered through a pair of captured binoculars and saw them, too, and turned to M’Bala to say, “They are coming.”
Lieutenant Volkmann picked up his phone and called Colonel Fuhrmann. “Colonel,” he said. “We have spotted two approaching planes. We have received no notice about them, and they don’t respond to our hails. They seem to be coming in for a landing.”
“What are they?”
“They appear to be British transports.”
“Try to contact them and ask them what they want. Keep me informed.”
Fuhrmann pressed down on the receiver hook and ordered his aide to connect him to the office of Harold Wellington at the British consulate. “Wellington!” he barked when the consul answered. “What is going on?”
“What do you mean?” he heard on the other end of the line.
“There are two British transport planes approaching the airstrip as we speak. What are they carrying?”
“Well, uh… I’m not sure…I’ve received no word…,” Wellington stammered.
Fuhrmann slammed down the receiver. “Bumbling idiot! He doesn’t know anything!” he declared, and then ordered, “Send a platoon out there. Fully armed. Get a machine gun crew on top of a hangar. If British troops get off those planes and fire one shot, stop them in their tracks!”
Fuhrmann’s lieutenants rounded up most of the Nazi troops on duty in the town, rousted out the ones who were off duty, and ordered them all out to the airfield. Within minutes, coats were hastily donned, gun-belts were buckled, weapons were grabbed, and dozens of pairs of boots hit the streets at a run amid puzzled queries and shouts of fevered urgency.
The Africans in the town took notice of the sudden activity. When they saw armed Nazi soldiers running through the streets or staff cars full of soldiers careening past, they promptly made way. Most took shelter in their homes. Dozens of street vendors hastily closed up their stalls. Some natives looked to the sky and pointed as the approaching aircraft became visible.
Soldiers arriving at the airfield scrambled to take up defensive positions behind and around the hangars. A two-man team climbed to the roof of the main hangar and set up a machine gun nest, in addition to the two that were already in place and manned elsewhere. Magazines were loaded, safety catches were clicked off, and weapons were cradled in position. The soldiers listened to the rumbling sounds of the approaching aircraft and waited.
Thus occupied watching the skies, and loudly inquiring of each other what was going on, the usual Nazi patrols in the town were not in a position to notice that at the same time, from the deep jungle to the west and south, over a hundred African warriors stealthily advanced upon the town. Fully armed with knives, spears and bows in addition to a great many machine guns, rifles and pistols, this ebony army grouped themselves in clusters of at least six and cautiously worked their way from the bordering jungle paths and the wharf out onto the side streets, toward the center of town or the airfield.
Among them, Tarzan and five Waziri warriors crawled nearly on their bellies along the rocky outcroppings lining the shore of the river, toward the higher ground of the wharf area. They kept low, concealed in the shadows cast by the abundant foliage, even in the mid-afternoon sun.
Up the slope of the bank and several yards ahead they could see the rear of one of the rickety storage buildings on the outskirts of the airfield. From the street beyond it, they heard footsteps approaching. In another moment there arrived seven or eight Nazi soldiers to begin fortifying a position at the side of the building.
The one in charge was Lieutenant Wilhelm Stammler.
Tarzan and the Waziri men looked at each other, their expressions indicating surprise that any soldiers arrived so quickly. They hunkered down in the underbrush to avoid being detected by the detachment that worked mere yards ahead of them. In the effort, one of the Waziri snapped a branch.
“Was ist das?” Stammler said.
A burst from Tarzan’s submachine gun would have alerted other soldiers to their presence prematurely. And they had to act too quickly even to nock their arrows.
Pulling out his hunting knife, Tarzan bolted forward and thrust the blade full and hard underhanded into Stammler’s stomach. Upon seeing this, the soldier a few steps to his left came at him, but the ape man turned swiftly and plunged his knife piston-like into the oncoming man’s midsection. As he withdrew his knife hand, another soldier caught him from behind by surprise, grabbing his wrist, and wrested the knife out of his hand. The ape man wheeled around to catch him with a left cross followed by a solid knee into the abdomen. As the assailant doubled over, Tarzan firmly seized his chin and the back of his head and wrenched his head sideways, snapping his neck.
Tarzan bent to retrieve his knife and spotted another soldier coming at him. He whirled, and in one smooth, rapid motion he plunged the blade into the man’s stomach and using his forward momentum, hoisted him upward and flung him into two other soldiers, knocking them down.
At the same time, the five Waziri attacked and made short work of dispatching the remaining soldiers.
One of the warriors said, “Close. Do you think they heard us?”
“I hope not,” the ape man said. “Gather your weapons. The planes are landing.”
The first of the two great gray aircraft, RAF tri-color circle insignia emblazoned on its side, touched down at the far end of the runway and rumbled toward the cluster of hangars and the control tower, its wheels kicking up clouds of dust and gravel from the crudely-paved runway as it bounced along. In a few minutes, it rolled to a stop about a hundred yards from the hangars. Even before its engines shut off, its rear cargo hatch popped open and swung outward on its bottom hinges until the top arced down and rested on the ground to form a ramp. From the bowels of the cargo bay, a dozen British soldiers hustled down the ramp. Holding rifles and machine guns at the ready, they looked swiftly around in the African sun to get their bearings and assess their situation before moving aside for the remaining two dozen men in the platoon to exit the plane.
“Soldaten!” someone shouted.
The sharp crack of a rifle split the air.
An instant later, tongues of flame and puffs of smoke spat from gun barrels on both sides of the airfield.
The British soldiers already out of the plane hit the dirt to assume the prone position and expertly commenced to fire. The remainder of the unit followed suit.
The second plane rumbled down the runway under a hail of bullets and taxied to a stop a short distance from the first and slightly behind it. It, too, opened its cargo hatch and spilled out almost forty men, who hit the ground, rifles blazing.
Bullets flew across the hundred yards of airfield between the hangars and the two planes, turning the airfield into a deadly no man’s land.
From the roof of the hangar, the machine gun clattered. The nest had been set up on the roof at such an angle that the British troops could not get clear shots at it from their positions, and thus were not able to take it out. Moreover, the machine gun’s position, high and off to the side of the airfield a considerable distance from where the two cargo planes had stopped, was too far away for it to hit its targets with deadly accuracy. But the Nazis manning it pumped a continuous spray of bullets, churning up dirt along the airstrip so that the British soldiers were prevented from advancing. For the moment, the British were pinned down.
But only for the moment.
Suddenly the machine gun nest on the roof exploded, propelling the gunner and loader nearly aloft and sending shrapnel flying. The British soldiers gaped, puzzled as to who blew it up, since none of them had. A moment later, several Waziri warriors emerged from around the rear of the hangar, cheering. It became clear that they had pitched a hand grenade onto the roof.
The soldiers in the other two nests, surprised at the sudden explosion, hastily looked around. One of them saw running warriors emerging from the edge of the jungle. Before he could say anything or swing his machine gun around, two more grenades were lobbed at his nest. The explosion rocked the area, spewing smoke and fragments into the morning air. The third nest went up a moment later. Smoke began to cloud the sky over the airfield.
The emboldened British troops began to spread out and work their way toward the town.
The rest of the Nazi soldiers in the area were taken aback, not expecting forces from the rear. From their building corners and other places of concealment, they turned to face their new African enemy.
But they now found themselves in a crossfire. British troops fired at them from the runway. African resistance fighters emerged spraying arrows, spears, and rifle fire at them from the hangars and surrounding outbuildings and from the jungle foliage that rimmed the airfield. Pandemonium reigned.
A great many of the Nazi soldiers in the vicinity of the hangars were cut down in the first volleys. Those who were not, scattered. Some ran across the graveled airfield yard toward the town, only to be picked off by British fire. Some turned and headed toward the river, where they ran into African forces. Those who chanced to be spared and managed to escape from the embattled airfield ran for the streets of the town. Some tried to make a stand, thinking they could resist. They were wrong.
*
Twenty miles away to the southeast, a party of African warriors raided and liberated—for the second time— a Nazi concentration camp named Schwarzenstadt.
Spies had reported for some time on the operation of this camp, and thus the raiders knew, among many other things, where the fuel tanks were located and how thick their metal walls were and when they were last filled. Tarzan had also given them detailed information about the camp’s layout.
From the outskirts of the fence beyond the camp’s perimeter, warriors drew back their taut bowstrings nocked with special arrows, while a tribesman touched a lighted torch to them one by one. The first flaming arrow whizzed through the squares of the chain-link fence toward the fuel tank, but bonked harmlessly against it and fell to the ground. The second and the third arrows, however, penetrated the metal of the tank and set off one and then another thunderous fireball, rattling the foundations of the camp with a prodigious roar.
Panic ensued as the flames spread upward and across to nearby buildings. Prisoners screamed. Soldiers broke ranks and ran to see what had happened, only to be met by a deadly barrage of arrows and blowgun darts.
In another moment, a mortar fired its deadly missile toward one guard tower, and while the guards of the second tower at the entrance gaped and took a moment to overcome their shock and gather their wits to retaliate, a second grenade blasted apart their tower, too.
While this was going on, a contingent attacking from the opposite side of the camp tossed a hand grenade at the single guard tower and the rear gate, the one Tarzan had escaped from, while another blasted a hole in the fence.
The guard towers thus demolished and the gates rent open, the liberating force of natives from four tribes rushed in shouting battle cries and brandishing weapons. It was a rout.
For the second time, flames from a Schwarzenstadt concentration camp blazed upward and filled the African sky, their roar drowned out, once again, by jubilant cries of freedom.
*
Some twenty-five miles in the opposite direction. the drums had already spread the news of the attacks upon Nyumba and Schwarzenstadt. Detainees toiling in Dunkelberg, the newer, smaller camp, heard the drums and quickly passed word that a rescue party was coming. The Nazi guards, oblivious to the drums’ import, paid little heed to the guttural chatting of the inmates and just ordered them to shut up from time to time.
When the raiding party arrived, the first arrow landed in the back of a Nazi guard supervising a work detail just inside the perimeter fence. The half dozen prisoners who saw the guard fall shouted “Rescue!” in their dialect and immediately turned on three other guards in the work area and struck them down. A fourth guard turned to stop one of them, but was cut down by an arrow.
In a moment, the remaining population of detainees rose up and seized every guard in the camp, knocking them down, beating their heads, sometimes cutting their throats.
Guards manning the machine guns in the towers managed to fire off a few bursts at the melee below them before they met swift death in a hail of arrows.
The camp was already nearly overtaken when the rescue party crashed through the gate and invaded, shouting and waving spears and bows and captured Nazi rifles. The guards and officers who tried to resist and make a fight of it were either cut down by their own prisoners or by the advancing rescuers. Some guards who chose to turn tail and run for their lives never made it, either.
The commanding officer of the camp was rousted from his tent office and impaled upon a spear, to the giddy cheers of the inmates.
The entire operation took less than fifteen minutes.
Chapter 18
F E R T I G
In his office, Colonel Dieter Fuhrmann heard the noise and the gunfire from the window. His first response was to try to raise the airport from the phone in Schmidt’s outer office.
“Volkmann!” he shouted into the receiver. “What is going on there? Volkmann!?” He cursed the silence.
A moment later, a young blonde radio dispatcher interrupted nim, “Colonel! A radio report just came in from Dunkelberg. It seems, sir…” he hesitated, not wanting to infuriate the Colonel.
“Well…what!?” Fuhrmann said, impatiently.
“Well, sir, they said that there has been a riot. A camp revolt. They’re asking for reinforcements, sir.”
“A revolt? What happened?”
“They were attacked…by Africans, apparently…an invading force. And then the prisoners rose up and turned on the guards.”
“And then what!?”
“And then they asked for more troops…and then the radio went dead, sir.”
Fuhrmann cursed loudly.
“Post six guards at the front. Don’t let them get in!”
The African warriors who descended upon Nyumba fought with a ferocity that intimidated even the Nazi battle troops. Nearly every tribesman knew a friend or family member enslaved or killed by the aggressors, and thus for most of them, this mission meant nothing less than personal vengeance.
The Nazi soldiers, often raw recruits, were new to this land and unnerved by the surprise appearance of fierce African warriors. Most of these Germans were familiar only with the downtrodden prisoners in the camps or the grinning, obsequious merchants or compliant servants in the town. The sight of great numbers of tall, muscled warriors in battle regalia bearing down on them was fearsome indeed.
Some Nazis turned tail and ran, but were chased down by warriors who could run faster and farther. Even the burliest of the German soldiers were little match for the hardy blacks, who were bred by years of jungle survival, not sixteen weeks of boot camp.
Skirmishes with gunfire, and sometimes even hand-to-hand, broke out along the streets and alleyways of the town. One group of four soldiers running from the airfield toward the barracks rounded a corner to come up face to face with six warriors. One soldier discharged his weapon directly at the oncoming blacks, and felled one, but before the rest could muster an attack, the Africans furiously leaped upon them and made short, bloody work of them.
At the airfield, Tarzan saw that the situation was well in hand. He believed his assistance was not particularly needed, so that he felt free to turn his attention to another priority—Fuhrmann. No one had seen the arrogant commander at the field or in the town. Tarzan ran around to the back of the now-secure hangar complex and dashed across the open spaces between utility buildings until he reached the cluster of buildings that began the town proper. He nimbly scaled the wall of the first building until he reached the roof. The roofs of a long row of buildings were connected or closely adjoined, so that he could move easily and quickly across them to progress toward the center of town.
