Alex Scarrow - A thousand suns

‘We’re going to fly through that!’ cried Pieter.

‘Over it, if we’re lucky,’ answered Max through clenched teeth. He checked their speed; they were running at seventy miles per hour, not fast enough yet. She would lift only over one hundred miles per hour, and they were rapidly running out of strip to achieve that speed.

‘We’re going to hit that bloody thing!’ Pieter shouted.

There was nowhere for him to go with the throttle, and all four engines were screaming at full capacity, the ailerons were fully extended in the vertical position, there was nothing he could do but watch the fireball race towards them and hope to God that the plane lifted off before they smashed into the remains of the fuel truck.

Fifty yards to go.

Some of the Americans had been caught by the blast and had suffered the same agonising end as Schroder’s men earlier. The majority, it seemed, had been far enough away to escape that, but nonetheless had been thrown off their feet by the blast. Max watched as some of them had their wits about them to scramble to their feet and grab their weapons in a last-ditch attempt to shoot out the canopy glass and prevent the plane from taking off.

He felt his face contort in anticipation of the bullets that awaited them as they approached the raging wall of fire.

Twenty yards left.

Max checked their speed, ninety-two miles per hour. He sensed the plane beginning to pull upwards, her giant wings grabbing hungrily at the air and forcing it under them.

‘Hold on!’ he heard himself shout as the burning chassis of the fuel truck raced towards them and disappeared from view beneath the nose of the plane. For the briefest moment the cockpit of the plane was immersed in the churning column of oily flames below.

Max felt the landing gear smash into something below, and the plane shuddered violently as it cleared the smoke.

‘Shit!’ Pieter shouted once more.

The plane was now at one hundred miles per hour; the lift beneath her wings and the hot air of the inferno below pushed the plane upwards. He felt the lift and pulled back on the yoke. The bomber’s nose rose and they were off the ground and climbing steeply.

Scholn watched the B-17 recede to the west, tailed closely by three of the Messerschmitts. The sporadic fire from the Americans had ceased. It seemed everyone, through unconscious collaboration, had agreed to momentarily suspend the fight in order to watch what happened to the bomber as it had charged down towards the flaming truck. Now it was away, it appeared that normal business was ready to be resumed.

Koch’s order had been to surrender once the planes were up. The few men that were left were probably ready to do that now; he knew he was. They’d given a good account of themselves, and more importantly the job was done. The planes had made it away.

The gunfire hadn’t started up yet; it was silent save for the gentle hiss of drizzling rain, and to his right, the crackling fire amidst the burned carcasses of the 109s. He decided to take advantage of this lull.

‘Okay, lads, put your weapons down,’ he shouted, his voice echoed loudly across the airfield.

The men huddling behind the crates nearby did as they were ordered, clearly relieved that this particular skirmish was over. He raised his hands above his head and slowly raised his head above the crates.

A single shot rang out, thudding mercifully into the ground nearby and he immediately heard the sharp voice of an officer calling a ceasefire.

Scholn slowly got to his feet and shouted loudly in heavily accented English, ‘We surrender!’

There were no further shots, and one by one the men near him rose from behind their crates, hands raised unequivocally. He saw movement from the canteen and movement from the hangar doorway. Only a single man emerged from the canteen, and three others from the hangar. Scholn totalled up the survivors. There were twelve of them left. Twelve out of the original thirty.

He thought there would have been more.

One of the American soldiers stood up from behind the sandbags and walked slowly across the grass towards Scholn, his rifle raised warily. From the uniform and rank insignia Scholn could see he was a captain. The American came to a halt a few feet away and studied him silently for a full minute, his jaw working hard behind sealed lips on a piece of gum. He shook his head and tutted like an adult admonishing a child.

‘I mean… what is it with you guys? The war’s over, and yet you people still insist on giving us a hard time here.’

He shook his head once more, ‘Jeeeezz…’

Mark brought the Cherokee to a halt. Devenster Street was empty save for a man walking his dog, and, across the way, three kids dressed in jeans and hooded tracksuits, doing their best to look urban. Other than that, it was deserted.

Chris scanned the road for anyone else, perhaps hiding in a shop doorway, or in the opening of some side street, or watching patiently from one of the many pools of darkness between the sparsely spread streetlights.

‘It looks clear, I guess,’ Chris uttered quietly, not entirely sure that it was.

‘So where’s this Wallace guy staying?’ asked Mark.

Chris pointed towards a small, traditional-looking wooden house, halfway up the street, with a colonial-style porch in front of it. All it needed was a dinky front lawn surrounded by a white picket fence, he mused, to fit the olde New England cliche. ‘That place over there. At least, I think that’s the one.’

‘Okay, how are we going to do this?’

Chris wondered whether he should just have Mark race up the street, stop and drop him outside. With the engine still running he could race inside and hopefully, by knocking on one or two doors, find and rouse the old boy quickly and then hop back into the car and speed out of town. Screw doing this carefully, he thought, just be in and out again in the bat of an eyelid.

But then, on the other hand, it might be wiser to take a more cautious approach. If those men had tracked down Wallace they could be, probably would be, watching from a distance now. They might even be using Wallace as bait, anticipating Chris would come back for him.

‘Shit, I don’t know, Mark. They could be waiting for us,’ Chris mumbled unhappily.

Mark sat upright in his seat, and nodded towards the bed and breakfast. ‘Hang on! Somebody’s coming out of that place,’ said Mark quickly.

A door on the porch swung slowly open. Muted amber light from inside spilled out across the whitewashed woodwork momentarily. Chris could see someone coming out, the silhouetted form stooped, tired.

‘I think that’s him! Wallace.’

The old man shuffled out onto the porch, looking up and down the street warily. Then, he moved away from the single lamp above the door into the darkness of one corner of the porch and settled down on a seat. A moment later, Chris saw the momentary flicker of a cigarette lighter, and, a few seconds later, a cloud of pale blue smoke emerged from the darkness, caught in the amber glow of the porch light.

Having a hard time getting to sleep.

It was not surprising at all, given how jumpy he had been earlier that night in Lenny’s. Even if he hadn’t been jumped by those two goons in his room, Chris wondered if he would have been able to get much sleep tonight. His mind had begun going to work on the story as he had headed back from Lenny’s — which pictures he would use, whether to take the story to any larger publication or dutifully deliver it to News Fortnite first.

Wallace was probably just as wound up and twitchy as he was. And right now, Chris could happily have joined him indulging in some nerve-settling cigarette therapy. The nicotine gum his jaws were industriously working on was doing no bloody good at all.