Читать книгу Bloody Good - Georgia Evans - Страница 7

September 1940

Over SE England

By Fritz Lantz’s reckoning they were twenty minutes from the first drop.

They’d been lucky so far: visibility clear and, miraculously, no ack-ack or searchlights looking their way. Not long now and he’d be unloading his odd passengers and heading back to France and breakfast in the verwirrung.

“How are our cargo?” Fritz asked Dieter, his radio operator.

“A rum lot!”

That point they agreed on. “I’ll be glad when we turf them out and get back home. They give me the willies.”

Come to that the whole mission seemed off a bit. Dropping spies and saboteurs was nothing unusual and Fritz hoped every single one of them gave the Tommies a run for their money. It would be a long time before Fritz Lantz forgot the bombs the damned Brits rained down on Berlin. But these four he was carrying over the channel put the wind up him so much he almost felt sorry for the enemy. He was still puzzling over his orders: No observing when they jumped. Dieter was to open the doors and return to the cockpit and give the signal from there. He was to close the jump doors ten minutes after the last one had left and not before. Then they were to head right home. That last bit wouldn’t be hard to follow.

“Never had a drop like this in my life,” Dieter said, shaking his head. “As good as snapped my head off when I tried to explain how to put on the parachutes. Serve them damn well right if they don’t open for them.”

“Almost there,” Fritz replied. “Better go back and latch open the cargo door and let’s unload them.”

The drop orders were straightforward enough: four drop points five-ten kilometers apart in a rough circle. Some town was getting a foretaste of the invasion. It was war after all.

“Want to know something?” Dieter asked a while later as he returned from latching the cargo door after the drop. “They dumped their parachutes on the floor. Never took them!”

“Don’t talk rot! They switched with the spares.”

Dieter shook his head. “No, they didn’t. Our scary boys jumped without.”

He had to be kidding, or hadn’t counted the parachutes properly.

“They won’t give the Tommies much trouble, will they?” Dieter did have a screw loose if he believed that, but hell, it would make a good story over a pilsner when they get back.

Five miles beyond Beachy Head the engine sputtered and died. Fritz stared horrified at the fuel gauge. He’d left with more than enough to get back now it was empty.

“Bail out!” he called to Dieter as he unbuckled his own harness.

They both made it out seconds before the plane plummeted down toward the Channel but, according to special arrangements by the German High Command, their parachutes failed to open. Dieter and Fritz followed their Focke-Wulf to a watery grave.

After jumping, the four vampires glided down toward their designated landings. Well briefed and with land support waiting, they were more than ready to do their share preparing the way for the coming invasion.

Gerhardt Eiche, Wilhelm Bloch, and Hans Weiss landed safely and each headed for their appointed rendezvous. Paul Schmidt was less fortunate—by mischance, unexpected wind, or inaccurate coordinates, he missed the clear acreage around a dairy fairm, with the potential for restorative warm blood of both humans and animals, and crashed into the ancient cluster of oaks on Fletcher’s Hill, impaling himself on the uppermost branches of a tree, hitting his head on the trunk of another, and mercifully cutting off sense and pain before crashing to Earth.

He recovered not long before the dawn. Weak from the wood poison in his system, he struggled to free his flesh of the splinters and bark. As dawn rose, his remaining strength waned. Without blood he would expire before nightfall, his mission unfulfilled. Despair washed over him at the prospect of failing his blood oath. His country needed him. Needed all of them, and he had failed. He would die on this cursed English soil.

Hours later, he heard an engine approach and stop. A car meant a mortal driver, maybe even passengers. He was saved. He’d have his first feeding of English blood and strike a blow to the enemy.