The battle had moved away from the East Hall. It was ending in the sh.e.l.l-torn field with the SS troops being ma.s.sacred by the greater number of Czechoslovak patriots. The engineers, including Schriever and Miethe, were still running, much farther away, toward Prague.

Let Schriever talk about his flying saucer, Ernst thought, sitting upright and shaking his head from side to side to clear it. It will become just another red herring. Another aid to confusion. It will suit us just fine.

He glanced carefully around him, looking for other resistance fighters, but saw only a clearing filled with the bodies of dead Czechs and Germans. After climbing to his feet, he checked himself for broken bones, found nothing to worry about, so clambered up into the troop truck, which, he was pleased to note, still had the key in the ignition. Turning the engine on, he drove across the gra.s.sy field to get away from the factory, which by now was almost certainly overrun. He managed to get to the road without being stopped.

From there he drove to the nearest Luftwaffe airfield, which luckily was still held by Germans. He pulled rank in order to commandeer a light plane, then ordered the reluctant pilot to fly him to the SS airport near Kiel.

When the plane had ascended, he looked down through the clouds at the pall of smoke hanging over Prague. Moving in on the city, like ants advancing in numerous lines toward their anthill, were long columns of Soviet tanks and men.

It was something to see.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE Bradley was scared. He had been well trained for this by the OSS, had rehea.r.s.ed it so many times, even making the G.o.dd.a.m.ned jumps, but now that it was real and he was doing it with the professionals worse, in pitch darkness and in the middle of a war zone he was not as confident as he had been during his training.

He glanced at his watch. Five minutes to go. His heart missed a beat and he looked along the aircraft, through that dim light, and saw the men of the 82nd Airborne Division facing one another in the belly of the plane, looking bulky with their parachutes and helmets, not frightened at all.

Well, certainly not showing it, as he was convinced he was doing. His heart was racing and he was sweating, though his hands felt too cold, and he knew that the urge to have a p.i.s.s was also due to his fear.

He was fifty years old, for Chrissakes, and shouldn't be doing such things!

He tried to forget what was going to happen by thinking instead of Gladys, who had continued to write her wonderful, witty letters from her sickbed in a hospital in London. Apparently she had been shipped back to London from Paris, was making a good recovery, and would soon be walking again, but she badly missed having him in bed beside her. She had also informed him, by letter, that she had scribbled his name about fifty or sixty times on the plaster cast on her broken leg and all the nurses, doctors, and visitors now knew who he was.

G.o.ddammit, he loved her. She certainly made him feel good. Thinking about her made his heart race. It raced even more when he looked again at his wrist.w.a.tch and realized that the jump would soon be starting.

Closing his eyes, he breathed deeply, trying to steady his racing heart, and saw, as he had so often since that one visit, the gallows and crematoria of Buchenwald, the priest's gaunt, haunted face.

He had gone back to the priest, feeling trapped in a web of horror, and had learned a lot more from him about life in the concentration camps and underground factories. The priest had told him about the beatings, about the all-too-public hangings, about the shots to the back of the neck and the daily ga.s.sings and burnings. He had also told him about worse things, most notably the medical and surgical experiments, performed on men, women, and children, often without aesthetics.

Apparently the n.a.z.i doctors had been trying to learn what could not be gleaned from experiments on animals the limits of human suffering; the effects of extreme heat and cold, of starvation and sleeplessness; the possibility of survival without certain vital organs; artificial insemination; the swopping of healthy limbs; the potential for extending the human life span by medical, biological, and mental mutation all of which meant unimaginable pain and horror for the unfortunates used... And Wilson, whether or not he had been involved directly, had not only shown an interest in the dreadful experiments, but had willingly used the people in the camps as part of his work force.

The man was a monster.

Or, as Major General McArthur had said, some kind of mutant.

Bradley shivered in his harness, then checked his wrist.w.a.tch again. When he saw that he had one minute left, his stomach almost turned over.

What the h.e.l.l was he doing here, with the 82nd Airborne Division, about to parachute into the darkness?

He was searching for Wilson.

He had left Nordhausen with the US 1st Army, with which he had travelled so far and seen so much action. He had gone as far as Paderborn with them, but there they had parted company, because he was intent on reaching Kiel before the Soviets took it. He had commandeered a jeep and driven himself through a landscape of appalling destruction, along roads filled with advancing Allied troops and fleeing refugees, past enormous open-air prison camps that stretched as far as the eye could see, to the town of Minden on the Weser, which had recently been occupied by the US 9th Army. There Bradley had attached himself to the British 2nd Army, which, reinforced by the US 82nd Airborne Division, was about to launch itself on the drive toward Lbeck, the doorway to Kiel.

Just before the attack was launched, Bradley had learned that a British SOE headquarters had been set up in Weser. When he paid them a visit, he found himself face to face with his old friend Lieutenant Colonel Mark Wentworth-King.

'Kiel?' Wentworth-King said in reply to Bradley's query. 'Difficult to say who'll get there first, old chap: General Montgomery's 2nd Army, now closing in on Hamburg, the 1st Canadian Army, now closing in on Oldenburg, or the b.l.o.o.d.y 2nd White Russian Army, now spreading right along the Baltic Coast. If the Russians get there first, you won't get your man, so you'd better move sharpish. I suggest, dear boy, if you have the heart for it, joining a contingent of your very own 82nd Airborne Division, which, to avoid our own guns, is about to parachute down just beyond Neumnster, near Kiel's ship ca.n.a.l. From there, they're hoping to fight their way into Kiel. What age did you say you are?'

Now here he was, fifty years old, preparing to jump out of this plane and parachute down into Germany... Maybe because WentworthKing had goaded him into it, the smart son of a b.i.t.c.h.

G.o.dd.a.m.ned Brits! he thought.

'Hitch up!' someone bawled. 'Hitch up!'

The door was pulled open and an angry wind howled in. The paratroopers connected their ripcords along the length of the plane. Bradley did the same, standing up like all the rest of them, feeling shaky and not sure if he could make it, but trying to hide that fact.

With the hatch open, the noise was dreadful, a combination of rushing wind and the roaring engines and whipping canvas flaps, but the men shuffled inexorably toward the opening, taking Bradley there with them. The flight sergeant was bellowing instructions laced with obscenities and Bradley thought he heard other noises outside, though he couldn't be sure. The plane was shaking badly, as if about to fall apart, and he fought the urge to sit down again. Then the flight sergeant bellowed again, a man ahead shouted, the queue moved, and Bradley realized that the first man had jumped out and the others were following,

'Jesus Christ! he whispered.

The men went out one by one, some bellowing just like the flight sergeant. Bradley swallowed, licked his lips, and wanted to be sick and was shocked at just how loud the noise was three men away from that open hatch.

Two men.

One man.

The man disappeared through the hatchway, leaving Bradley exposed. The wind almost floored him, roaring at him, beating around him, but he stepped forward, was jerked forward yes, the flight sergeant had grabbed him by the shoulder and he saw his open mouth, the glint of fillings, heard him bellowing. 'f.u.c.king jump!' were the words he heard as the roaring wind sucked him out.

He was swept back and up, his stomach somewhere in his throat, and saw spinning lights, maybe stars, perhaps the moon, and heard the roaring of engines and the magnified rush of wind and then plunged down. He was falling! His parachute hadn't opened! Then he was jerked up violently, a puppet on a string, and suddenly fell down a black well of silence and saw darkness around him.

Darkness? No. He was falling through clouds. He saw other figures falling all around him on the end of their parachutes. They looked ghostly in the clouds, silhouetted in a gray mist, above and below and all around him as if in a dream.