The Dog Who Could Fly (15 page)

He was the biggest and burliest of them. He charged at the door, shoulder down, and tore it from its hinges, landing in a heap outside. By now the bomber was coming in on his second run. The airfield’s guns were in full cry and the searchlights had swung into action, but on the ground there was scant relief or shelter.

In the brilliant glare of the searchlights Robert spotted the Dornier in silhouette, racing toward them. The last he saw of Antis he was one hundred yards in front, tearing toward the shelter. But then he halted and began searching all around in confusion, seeking his master.

“Get in the shelter, boy!” Robert yelled at him. “The shelter!”

The pilot of the Dornier was clearly a highly experienced combatant. He’d flown in for a second attack knowing the base’s defenders would be ready and waiting, but with his aircraft down to no more than fifty feet. At that altitude the aircraft would be over the airfield and gone almost before the gunners on the ground had time to open fire. The bomber skimmed the very treetops as it roared in, the dark night lit up by the aircraft’s 7.92mm machine guns spitting fire.

Robert, Stetka, Jicha, and Mirek urged their legs to move faster as
the bullets tore up the ground all around them, but it was clear they weren’t going to make the shelter before the Dornier unleashed its bombs. With six dropped already, it would have up to fourteen more fifty-kilogram high-explosive bombs to deliver. If they were caught in the open as blasted shrapnel tore across the airbase, the Czechs were dead men.

“SHELTER, ANTIS!” Robert roared, trying to make his voice heard above the cacophony.

He gesticulated wildly at the gaping mouth of the underground shelter, which lay one hundred yards away. The dog was right next to the entrance. If only he would stop staring at his master and look to his side, he’d see safety. He could be in there in a flash.

The Dornier’s nose dipped a fraction and for an instant Robert thought the pilot had miscalculated: it looked as if he was going to crash into them. Robert hurled himself flat, fearing that he was about to be smashed apart by the body of the warplane, or sucked into the vortex of fire that would result if it plunged into the ground. He dug his fingers into the juddering earth as the Dornier went howling over his head, bracing himself for the blasts he knew were coming.

As the Dornier powered away, the stick of bombs it had dumped in its wake hit. For a second or so nothing happened. The delay fuses had been triggered, but not yet detonated. Then the first blast erupted from the direction of the hut they’d only just vacated, forcing Robert to try to dig his body deeper into the earth.

The second explosion was closer still, and with each the danger seemed to be drawing nearer. He tried to calm his mind with the image of a bushy tail vanishing down the shelter’s steps and out of sight. But the force of the final bomb blast was so intense that he felt as if giant needles were being driven into his eardrums, and as if his eyeballs were being crushed in their sockets.

Moments later there came a flash so brilliant that even though his eyes were screwed shut, the light bled through and half blinded
him. He was plucked into the air, as if by a giant hand, flipped over, and flung back to earth. A nearby fuel dump had gone up. The sensation of flames roaring overhead faded as Robert sensed himself slipping into a dark abyss.

•  •  •

“Robert! Robert! Are you all right?” It was the voice of Jicha, who hailed from a neighboring village back home in Czechoslovakia.

There was a terrible ringing in Robert’s ears and a painful throbbing in his temples. He felt horribly confused. If that was Jicha’s voice, was he in his native Czechoslovakia? Were the Germans bombing his village? If so, where was his mother? As he opened his eyes and the confusion began to clear, he realized where he was. He had only one thought burning through his mind now.

“Has anyone seen Antis?” he blurted out.

“Never mind your dog, how the devil are you?” Jicha replied. “You were tossed into the air like a rag doll . . .”

Robert was so deafened that he could see Jicha’s lips moving, but he couldn’t hear the words.

“Have you seen Antis?” Robert repeated. “Is he okay?”

“He’ll be fine,” Jicha answered. “That one’s a real survivor.” He spat out some more of the soil he’d been forced to swallow as the blast washed over him. “I’m sure Antis is okay. I think I saw him dashing into the shelter.”

“No wonder he left us to it,” said Stetka, holding a blood-soaked handkerchief to his forehead. “Serves us right for refusing to listen to him in the first place!”

“He didn’t leave us,” Mirek remarked gravely. “He wouldn’t do that. I was watching him. He got to the shelter entrance and then he came running back toward us, like he was trying to show us the way. He couldn’t have been more than ten yards away when the last bomb went off.”

The airmen stared at one another in a worried silence. Robert
rolled onto his side and hauled himself painfully to his feet. He’d understood the gist of what Mirek had said and he felt overcome by a heavy sense of apprehension. He and his friends had suffered nothing more than sprains, bruises, and cuts as a result of the attack. But their hut had been reduced to a pile of smoking matchwood. And as for Antis—the hero dog who had warned them to save themselves—there was no sign of him.

Robert staggered across to the nearest shelter, dreading that at any moment he might stumble over a deadweight of mangled flesh and fur.

He leaned into the entrance. “Has anyone seen my German shepherd?” he called.

A face appeared. “Sorry, mate, hardly anyone down here. I’d definitely know if we had a dog.”

Robert felt real fear—icy and raw—tearing at his guts. Mirek was right about one thing: Antis hadn’t made it into the shelter. If Mirek had been right about that, maybe he had seen what he said he’d seen. Maybe Antis had been caught in the Dornier’s blast as he was running back to join them.

With the adrenaline surging through him, Robert ran toward a second shelter a little farther on. Antis was a regular visitor there, for this was the shelter most frequented by the women of the base. He loved their company not only for the fuss they made over him, but also for the American sweet cookies they kept as doggie treats. If there was one place he would have felt safe, it was here.

But even as he hammered on the thick steel door, Robert sensed that his efforts were going to be in vain. If Antis had reached this shelter, his scratching and barking would have been drowned out by the roaring of the Dornier’s engines and the barking of the guns, not to mention the explosions. Finally the door swung wide. Robert was mystified to see that the lady who’d opened it didn’t seem to recognize him.

“Excuse me, have you seen Antis?”

“Robert? Is that you?” she gasped. “My goodness, your face is cut to shreds.”

It was the first he knew of it. “Antis,” he repeated, not bothering with an explanation. “Have you got him?”

“He hasn’t been here tonight. The last I saw of him was earlier this evening. But come inside and let me clean up your poor face.”

Robert raised his fingertips to his chin, which was scraped raw. He felt blood trickle down from his nose, which was bleeding profusely. But as long as his injuries weren’t life threatening, he didn’t really give a damn. He refused the offer of first aid, turned away, and went back to the search.

It was well after midnight by the time the last of the German raiders had been chased from the skies above Liverpool and the all clear was sounded. A thick veil of smoke lay across the airbase, but the extent of the devastation was revealed here and there by the light of a pale moon. Full of grim forebodings, the four comrades continued the search by picking through what was left of their hut. Perhaps Antis had ended up there, searching for his master and his friends in the place where they’d last been together?

But in among the mangled wreckage there was no sign of their dog.

The ruins of neighboring buildings were searched next. The airmen picked their way through twisted door and window frames, shattered masonry and brick, and splintered wooden planking, but not so much as a clump of hair was to be found. They were about to move on to their third mound of wreckage—all that remained of another of the huts—when a cry went up.

“Bomb! Unexploded bomb! Move right away!”

Before they knew it, they had been ordered to abandon their search, and the area had been cordoned off.

“Don’t worry, he’ll turn up,” said Mirek, trying to comfort a distraught Robert. “He always does, doesn’t he?”

“Perhaps the explosions frightened him off,” Jicha added soothingly.
He swept his arm across the fields on the outskirts of the base. “He’s probably out there somewhere hiding in the countryside. He’ll calm down and come back, you’ll see.”

Robert knew that they meant well but he didn’t share their sense of optimism. Air raids were nothing new to Antis and he had never deserted his master before. Robert allowed himself to be led away to some emergency accommodation, but all the while he couldn’t help wondering whether Antis was lying somewhere amid all the destruction, alone and wounded and unable to move.

The thought was unbearable.

Once Robert had been patched up he ignored the nurse’s advice to rest and began to jog around the fields, calling and whistling. He was dying to hear that familiar hearty bark that he knew so well, without really expecting to. He felt a dark foreboding that his dog was in real trouble—the worst that he had ever been in, including being abandoned in no-man’s-land as a tiny puppy.

After fruitless hours of searching he ended up outside the NAAFI building (the base’s Navy, Army, and Air Force Institute’s shop and bar), cold, exhausted, and close to despair. He was certain that Antis had to be somewhere within the cordoned-off area of rubble and debris, for it was the only part of the base that he hadn’t checked. He was growing more and more frustrated that the white ropes meant that he couldn’t look, and he was tempted to go in anyway—unexploded bombs and all.

The shadows deepened and the dank autumn air chilled him to the core, but still Robert rejected his friends’ pleas to go inside for something to eat and to get warm. The thought of both food and comfort turned his stomach, when his dog was out there somewhere cold and hungry, and possibly dying.

“Suppose Antis does reappear,” he told them. “What then? The hut’s been flattened and he won’t know where we are. I’m going to wait for him.”

He was still at it at first light, quizzing the bomb-disposal team and anyone else who came near whether they had seen his dog. At long last the unexploded bomb was removed. In spite of the torrential rain that had begun to fall, a party of volunteer airmen descended on the area, working systematically and searching it from end to end. No sign of Antis could be found. Filthy, sodden, and exhausted, they tried to comfort Robert, but he was inconsolable.

Antis seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth and it tortured Robert to have lost him. How could it be possible? he wondered. He was a big, strapping German shepherd, and approaching fully grown now. Even after a direct hit there was still much of a human body that would remain. People—and dogs—didn’t just get vaporized.

Robert managed no more than two hours of fitful sleep that second night. He kept reaching out to the blanket that lay beside his bed—Antis’s blanket, which he’d retrieved from the wreckage of their hut—hoping beyond hope to discover a warm and furry body lying there. But of course there was none.

At first light the following morning he sat in the dining hall with breakfast uneaten, trying to come to terms with the fact that he would very likely never see his dog again. To make matters worse, he would likely never know what had happened to him, or even be able to give him a proper burial. He had rescued the dog from no-man’s-land, but ultimately he had failed to save him from enemy action.

He would never be able to forgive himself, no matter how long he might survive this terrible war.

Ten

B
ozdech!” a voice shouted from the doorway of the mess. It was one of the squadron sergeants, and Robert feared he was wanted for some inane duty or other. “Bozdech!” the voice cried again. “There you bloody are! Why didn’t you answer?”

Robert sighed. He’d been spotted. There was no escape now.

“You’re wanted outside, Bozdech,” the sergeant added. “Look lively.”

Leaden-footed, Robert reached for his gas mask and cap and shuffled toward the door. If he hadn’t been so downcast, he might have noticed the excitement in some of the faces around him. The sergeant walked ahead of Robert so that he would not miss the scene that was about to unfold.

The first thing Robert saw when he emerged from the hall was a large group of men and women, standing around in a circle, smiling. When he looked down, he gave a strangled shout. There, sprawled on a mat, sodden, mud-caked, and so weak that he could barely raise his head, was Antis, whimpering at him.

Where were you, Dad, where were you?
his eyes seemed to say.
I waited and waited and waited . . .

Robert fell to his knees before his dog. Oblivious to those around him, he clutched Antis to his chest, murmuring choked words of reassurance in the dog’s ear.

“I couldn’t find you, Antis . . . I looked everywhere.” He was fighting to keep his emotions in check in front of so many people, but it was no good. Throwing his arms around his dog’s neck, he buried his face in his sodden hair and felt his tears flow.

As word of Antis’s miraculous return spread, the mess hall emptied so all could cheer the reunion. But when they saw the outpouring of emotion from the Czech airman, and the pitiful state of the dog, they fell respectfully silent. One by one they paid their respects and drifted away, the toughest warriors among them profoundly touched.

Robert ran his hands over every inch of Antis’s body to check for broken bones. He received a perfunctory lick for his trouble. It was all Antis could manage. Relieved that there was no obvious sign of injury apart from the many cuts to his legs and head, Robert gathered his dog in his arms and took him to the sick bay. Only as he carried him across the airfield did he notice the tears in the sensitive pads of his paws.