THE KILLER OF THE DARKNESS

EPISODE THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-THREE

Oberstleutnant Jan Bomken, his head once again poked through the side-screen, did not think it was a good night for man nor beast. Five seconds exposure to that arctic wind and driving blizzard and your face would be full of porcupine quills.

Fifteen seconds and the totally numbed skin conveyed no sensation at all, only when he withdrew his head and waited for the exquisite pain of returning circulation that the fun really started.

Bomken appeared determined not withdraw his head until he had complete justification for doing so. The only validation would be the sighting of Onehouse Island.

In a mechanic and industrious manner, he rubbed the chamois leather across his goggles, stared unblinking into the grey swirling gloom hoping for a glimpse of Onehouse Island.

Inside, Wenger's eyes continued their rhythmic, unvarying pattern of movement, the compass, the altimeter, Bomken. But now his gaze rested fractionally longer on Bomken each time, waiting for the sudden signal that would galvanize him into throwing the Junker into a violent bank to port, the only avoiding action he could take.

Bomken's left hand moved, but he was not giving any signal, the fingers of his left hand were drumming gently on his knee.

This Wenger realized to his incredulity, would be probably the highest state of excitement that Bomken could be capable of achieving.

Ten seconds passed. Five. And another five. Wenger was conscious that, even in that ice-cold cabin, the sweat poured down his face.

The urge to pull the Junker away to the left, to avoid the shattering, annihilating collision that could only be seconds away now, was almost overpowering. Aware of the fear, the fear bordering on a reason-abdicating panic, such as he never previously guesses at, let alone experienced. He became aware that Bomken's left fingers had stopped thrumming.

Bomken had it now. More imagined than real, more guessed than seen, but he had it now.

With a gradual, almost imperceptible emotion, that ahead and little to the right of the direction of flight, did he be aware of something more tangible, solid, rather than wishful thinking materializing out of nothingness.

Solid, and unmistakable, the smooth unbroken side of an almost vertical and towering cliff, soaring up at a dizzy 80° loomed out of the darkness until it vanished into the grey darkness above.

Bomken withdrew his head, leaving the screen open this time, and pressed his overhead-switch.

"Air-gunner Friedel?"

The words came out stiffly, mechanically, not because of any crisis of emotion that Bomken experienced, but because his entire face, lips included, were so frozen that he found it almost impossible to articulate.

"Yes, Oberstleutnant?"

Friedel's voice over the intercom sounded disembodied, empty, but even the metallic impersonality of those two words did not disguise the bow taut tension behind it.

"Get the men ready."

"Yes, Oberstleutnant."

Bomken switched off, took a quick look through the side-screen, reached up and touched the overhead switch.

Above the starboard door in the fuselage, a red light came on. Friedel laid his hand on the door.

"One minute!"

He jerked the door wide open, securing safely on its standing latch, and a miniature blizzard howled into the belly of the Junker.

"When the red light turns green..."

He left the sentence unfinished, because those few words were crystal clear in themselves, because he had to shout so loudly over the combined roar of wind and engines which any superfluity of words became just a wasted effort.

No one else said anything. In any event, the parachutists' exchanged glances in silence conveyed more eloquence than words the obvious thought being in the minds of all of them: if the temperature seemed cold enough inside, what the hell was it like on the island.

The air-gunner fired a marker-flare testing for wind speed and direction and once satisfied gestured to the waiting men. They moved up in line to the open door, Gesetze in the lead. The expression on his face, carried the expression of a Christian martyr meeting his first and last lion.

The Junker, like some great pterodactyl from out of the primeval past, roared on through the driving snow alongside the smooth, precipitous side of the cliffs of Onehouse Island.

That sheer wall of ice-encrusted rock appeared to be awfully close indeed. Wenger convinced himself it was too close. He stared through the still open screen by Bomken's head and would have sworn that the starboard wingtip must be brushing the side of the cliff.

Wenger could still feel the sweat that bathed his face but his lips as dry as ashes. He licked them, so that Bomken would not comment on them, but it did not do any good at all: as dry as ashes they remained.

Gesetze's lips were not dry, but this happened to be because his face took the full brunt of the horizontal driving snowstorm which lashed along the Junker's fuselage. Otherwise, he shared Wenger's sentiments and apprehensions to a marked degree.

He stood in the doorway, gripping the fuselage on each side to hold him in position against the gale of the wind, his storm-lashed face showed no fear, just a peculiarly resigned expression.

His eyes focused on the left, looking forward with an almost hypnotized preoccupation at a point in space where any second now the star-board wingtip must strike the cliff.

Inside the fuselage the red light still burned. The air-gunner's hand fell on Gesetze's shoulder in an encouraging gesture. It took Gesetze all of three seconds to free himself from his thrall-like fixation with that starboard wingtip and take a half step back inside. He reached and firmly removed Friedel's hand.

"Don't push, Heini."

Gesetze had to shout to make himself heard.

"I can commit suicide on my own!"

He again took up position by the open door.

At the same distant Bomken took a last quick look through the side-screen and made the gesture that Wenger had been waiting for, a slight turning motion of the left hand. Wenger banked the Junker, then straightened up again.

The cliff-face fell away. The cliff-face-brushing episode had been no mere bravado or folly, Bomken had been deliberate in his lining up for their pre-determined course across the island.

Once again, and for the last time, he had his head outside, while his left hand moved with interminable slowness, reached up for the button on the bulkhead above the screen, located it, paused, and pressed it.

Gesetze, head craned back at a neck-straining angle, saw the red light turn to green, brought his head down, screwed his eyes shut and, with a convulsive jerk of his arms, launched himself out into the snow and the darkness.

Not an expert launching, for instead of jumping out he had stepped out and was already twisting in mid-air as the parachute opened.

Dänzer, the next to go, jumped out in a smooth and clean motion, feet, and knees together, then. Klaus Hergershimer, Max Von Ribbenstein, Friel followed by Mũller.

Mũller glanced down below him, and his lips tightened. He could just about make out, Gesetze in the dim greyness beneath, a very erratic pendulum swinging wildly across the sky. The parachute cords were twisted and his clumsy desperate attempts to untwist them only resulted in their becoming more entangled than ever.

His left-hand cords were pulled too far down, air spilling from the parachute, and swaying like a mad thing, sideslipping to this left faster than any man Mũller had ever seen sideslip a parachute before. Mũller stared after the disappearing figure and hoped to God that he did not sideslip his way into the forbidding North Sea below.

Grim-faced, he stared through the snow to see how the others were faring. Thank God, no worry there. Dänzer, Klaus Hergershimer, and Max Von Ribbenstein were all there, so close as to be almost touching, all making perfectly normal descents.

*

"What the hell are they up to?"

Roome could not keep the fear from his voice.

"Maybe they're on their way to somewhere else?"

Allum had joined us.

The Junker completed a turn, the engine whine settling down to a steady rate.

"They're coming back."

Breaking out of the cloud, the Junker flew just beneath the ceiling, wispy clouds whipping past the fuselage, its tail fin obscured.

It passed right over us again, the navigation light on its belly flashing in an alternate cycle to the one on its tail, showing only as a red glow in the cloud.

At that moment, a black fleck fell clear, and then burst into a bright yellow flame which slowed down as a little parachute opened.

"It's a flare. Why the f**k they are they dropping flares?"

Roome sounded bewildered and frustrated.

The burning phosphorous, smoke streaming in the breeze, drifted lazily down. The Junker, two miles down range, started a slow turn.

"That's a marker."

"What do you mean?"

The Junker passed over the town, still on its long flat turn.

"It's too test for wind speed and direction for the drop."

"Drop?"

"Yes. Looks like they're going to use parachutes."

"What?"

Roome sounded nervous.

"We'll be ready for them. No German is going to take my island."

I felt troubled.

"Hold up there, Rambo. These will be elite German troops, not the Home Guard. These men will be highly trained and prepared for whatever you have got to throw at them. And do not forget you have U-Boats circling the island. They can call for back-up. We can't!"

"We'll see about that. And by the way. Who is Rambo?"

I shook my head smiling at my slip-up.

"Doesn't matter."

As the phosphorous touched the ground and continued to burn, the smoke drifting across the yellow-lit snow, the Junker completed its turned and aimed back at us, only to disappear into the clouds.

We stood in silence as it whined overhead still out of sight, only the engine noise marking its progress. It died away in the direction of the North Sea, leaving only the sounds of the wind in our ears.

Nothing happened for over a minute.

I stared at the cloud with my eyes fixed at the cloud base upwind, playing tricks on me with black squiggly dots. When, it finally happened it still took me unawares.

Like invisible ink appearing, a cluster of white spots materialized without seeming to form.

Ghost-like, the parachutes drilled in and out of the wispy base, and then hung beneath the now, very dark, swollen clouds.

In awe, the parachutists came through the clouds like dandelion seeds dropping from the sky.

A sudden chill ran through my body.