The Hunter From the Woods (19 page)

It was a rough shake. Amid the shake, the windshield popped and cracked as at least one slug passed through it. Holes punched through the bottom of the plane and then through the roof. The pilot gave a strangled cry. Michael smelled scorched metal and fresh blood. A red mist swirled in the air before it was sucked upward. Then the 109 streaked past and the Lysander rolled over in its wounded agony, its engine cylinders gasping for air.

Michael Gallatin was stretched up against the belt one second and the next he was smashed into the seat. The Lysander was tumbling down. The pilot was slumped forward.
God save the King
, Michael thought crazily as sky became earth became sky became earth. He clasped hold of two rubber handgrips on the back of the pilot’s seat and thought how utterly ridiculous it was trying to brace himself from an aircrash at roughly two hundred knots per hour.

Metal flashed alongside the Lysander. The Spit and the black-tailed 109 were fighting on their way down. The Spit had taken some damage and smoke was curling from the engine, probably blinding the pilot. Rolfe Gantt’s plane bore a dozen bullet holes along the fuselage. The two combatants went at each other again, head-to-head and guns blazing. In the middle of another roll Michael’s bloodshot eyes saw Gantt’s 109 lose a section of its right wing in a burst of flying metal, but an instant later the German’s bullets hit home. The entire front of the Spitfire exploded. The Spit seemed to collapse on itself, the wings folding, the fuselage crumpling like a tin can that had been stepped on. It simply fell apart, and what might have been a burning body dropped away with arms and legs outspread.

“Got it, sir! Got it, sir!” the Cockney pilot moaned, as he fought against unconsciousness and the violence of the spin to gain control of his aircraft.

Michael was near passing out himself. The blood swelled in his face and roared in his ears. He hung onto the handgrips with desperate and perhaps terrified strength.

“Got it, sir! Got it, sir!” the pilot kept repeating, over and over, in a voice that sounded mangled.

And then, quite suddenly, he did have it. The Lysander righted itself. They were still going down fast, onto a terrain of yellow sand and black rocks about a thousand feet below. The pilot pulled back on his yoke and the nose came up. “Got it, sir!” he said, with bloody triumph in his mouth.

Something huge and dark swept over them. An extended wheel hit the Lysander’s left wing and knocked the bulky airplane through the sky. Michael saw the belly of Gantt’s 109 pass overhead. Fire was licking around the motionless prop. The Messerschmitt headed down.

Again the young pilot fought for control. This time it was obvious he was almost done. When Michael dared to look to the left, he saw the wing on that side torn to tatters.

“Can you get out, sir?” the pilot asked, which demonstrated his state of mind since Michael wore no parachute.

“Put us down!” Michael told him.

The pilot nodded. He coughed from deep in his chest and blood spattered the cracked glass before his face.

“Yes sir,” he managed to say.

The Lysander slipped to the left. The pilot corrected. The Lysander slipped to the right. The pilot corrected. He cut all power and lowered whatever flap was still working. He moved with slow and maybe dying deliberation. The Lysander began to turn on the side of its disabled wing. The ground was rising to meet them; it was all sand-shiny and hard angles of rock. Michael judged a hundred feet to go. He braced, if bracing would do any good.

“We’re in for it, sir,” said the pilot, in a voice that now sounded distant and almost childlike, as if he were falling down through time itself.

Fifty feet, Michael thought. The beads of sweat on his face were sweating.

Thirty feet.

“Yes sir,” said the pilot, answering some unknown command.

They hit.

There was a bone-jarring
crunch
. Michael was thrown against the side of the plane so hard he heard his left shoulder either separate or break with a noise like the pop of a broomstick being snapped. His cap flew off. The left side of his face smashed into the canopy, which surprisingly did not shatter. Maybe his cheekbone and jaw had shattered, he didn’t know. Pain fogged his vision. His left arm had gone cold. He lost his handgrips. There came a sound of metal being ripped away, and the Lysander was skidding on its belly because its wheels were gone. It went on, banging into and over stones and across the slithering sand. In its progress the Lysander turned to face the way it had come, and when at last it ceased its motion Michael Gallatin sat facing westward, bleeding and groggy amid a symphony of metallic moans and creaks and ticks and muffled thumps like a dying heartbeat.

It came to him, sometime in the next few seconds, that he smelled the hot sweet friction of sheared-off metal and the bitter aroma of smoke.

He blinked. Was his jaw even still connected to his face?

Smoke was starting to fill the cockpit.

He had to move.

His left arm would not, and pain speared from shoulder to collarbone when he tried. He got his seatbelt unbuckled with his right hand. Blood was in his mouth. He spat it out. He unlocked the canopy and shoved the cracked plexiglass open. He flung his kitbag from the plane. Then he climbed up and tumbled over the side onto the stony ground, an effort that again sent vicious pain through his injured arm.

Small flames were starting to curl up around the engine from beneath the wrecked plane. “Get out!” he called to the pilot, but the young man didn’t move.

Michael pulled himself up and instantly fell to his knees again, his balance for the moment a matter of past history. He realized the fire was growing, and he had to get the pilot out. He stood up, stumbled and righted himself. The sun’s power beat down upon his skull and he was nearly blinded by the glare. Blood was trickling from both nostrils. His left eye was rapidly swelling shut. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and got hold of one of the metal reinforcement strips that ran along the pilot’s canopy to flip it up. His right arm strained, but the thing was locked tight from within. He banged on the blood-spattered plexiglass. The pilot stirred, turned his head to display the gore that had streamed in a torrent from his mouth, and stared numbly at Michael Gallatin. The front of the pilot’s shirt was red where at least one bullet had hit him in the chest.

“Unlock it!” Michael shouted. And then again, if the young Cockney hadn’t heard: “Unlock your canopy!”

The pilot just stared at Michael, his swollen eyes heavy-lidded.

With a flash and a low hollow
whump
the engine burst into flames.

“Unlock your canopy!” Michael urged, and began to beat against the plexiglass with his useable fist.

Fire rippled from the engine toward the cockpit. The heat staggered Michael back.

A gout of red flame jumped into the pilot’s cabin. The young man continued to stare without speaking at Michael Gallatin, and even as he caught fire and began to contort into a shape no longer human he made no sound. Before Michael’s eyes he became a blaze, and one crisped hand reached up to press feebly against the blackening canopy. Then it fell back into the flames, and what looked like a swarm of a thousand glowing red bees swept around and around at the center of ashes and smoke.

The Lysander was being consumed, sending up a black smoke column. Michael backed away from the heat. The canopy exploded with the noise of a shotgun going off.

At a distance away from the conflagration Michael sat down on the ground, like a boy before a summertime campfire. He felt himself let go, because he had nowhere to get to in a hurry. Then the darkness came upon him as suddenly as if the sun had gone out, and when he fell onto his injured shoulder he gave a small gasp of pain but his eyes were already closed and he was for the moment also extinguished.

Two

“Hey, Englisher!” said the voice, speaking English. “Are you dead?”

The toe of a boot prodded Michael’s side.

He heard the voice and felt the prod, but it took him a few more seconds to fight up from the dark. When he opened his single working eye, he was in a world of blinding white light and dry heat that baked the lungs with a breath. He sat up and saw the gun pointed in his face.

“Easy,” cautioned the man behind the Walther P38 pistol. “Do nothing fast. As if you
could
. Friend, you are in one hell of a condition.”

Michael looked up at his visitor.

The man wore a tan-colored short-sleeved shirt open to show his white undershirt and a pair of tan-colored trousers tucked into dusty black boots. On the pocket of his shirt was pinned his Iron Cross and his Luftwaffe airman’s badge. He was an example of the handsome Nordic breed, with the touselled blonde hair of a wild little boy and sardonic amber eyes that belonged to a worldly-wise man. He was of compact, powerful build with a chiselled face, a hooked nose and a firm jaw, and he stood about five feet ten. Across his right cheek the slash of a fencer’s scar showed pale against his desert tan. A second smaller scar divided the left blonde eyebrow into two halves. Michael thought that this man had definitely seen his share of action, and perhaps another man’s share as well. The way he held the gun said he knew how to use it and
would
use it at the slightest provocation. The amber eyes focused fully on Michael and the pistol was unwavering, yet the man had also today seen his share of injury. Blood from a gash at his hairline had coursed down his forehead and along the right side of his face. His lower lip was split open and blood had dried on his chin. A blue knot swelled over the left eye. He had been through some rough weather.

Behind the man, maybe two miles away, Michael could see the black smoke rising from another aircraft wreck. This pilot had not come down with his ship, however, for he still carried his parachute pack slung over one shoulder and folded up within it could be seen the white chute itself.

“Name?” the man asked.

“Gallatin,” Michael answered. His jaw felt dislocated, but so be it.

“Gantt,” the pilot said. “This is yours?” He motioned quickly with a tilt of his head toward the open kitbag on the ground a few feet away. Michael figured the man must have carried it over from beside the still-burning Lysander, since it was scorched by flames.

Michael nodded.

It had been gone through. Michael noted his Colt automatic in Gantt’s waistband under the outer shirt. Michael’s change of clothes was scattered around, and the canteen with its black leather shoulder strap lay atop his second pair of shorts. He could not fail to see the three bullet holes in the kitbag’s canvas and the bullet hole about midway up the canteen. Gantt had pushed a knot of cloth into the hole. “Unfortunately most of the water was lost,” Gantt said, “but I did squeeze some back into the canteen from your clothes.” He frowned and glanced toward a third plume of black smoke many miles away. “The talented bastard who shot me down had a superb Immelman, but he was not quite so good at his snap roll. What was his name?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a flyer.”

“No, you’re a
faller
,” came the reply. “You should feel lucky you’re not dead. Most who tangle with me end up that way.”

“Do most who tangle with you,” Michael said carefully, “not have guns on their planes? What was the point of shooting down the Lysander?”

“You got between me and a Spit. The bullets go where they go.” Gantt quickly scanned the horizon. “Now it’s time for
us
to go. They’ll see the smoke and come looking. Stand up.”

“No,” Michael said.

“What did I hear, Englisher?”

“I said…
no
. Meaning I’m not standing up. You go where you please, but I’m staying here.”

“Are you?” Gantt stepped forward and placed the gun’s barrel against Michael’s injured shoulder. “I can hurt you a little more, you see.”

“Go ahead. I’ll just bleed some and wait for the RAF to arrive. As you say, they’ll see the smoke and come looking.”

“I didn’t mean your
air force
will come looking,” Gantt said. “You’re too far from your base and you’re off the regular patrol route. I’m talking about the Dahlasiffa. The Death Stalkers. You
have
heard of them, yes?”

Michael had heard rumors. Supposedly the Dahlasiffa was a warlike tribe of scavengers who stripped corpses of anything valuable after a battle. They knocked out gold and silver teeth, took money, watches, medals, helmets, boots, and it was speculated they were likely stockpiling rifles, pistols and grenades to use against enemy tribes. Michael had never seen a Dahlasiffa or met anyone who’d seen one, but the word at HQ in Cairo was that the Dahlasiffa not only stripped corpses but also made short work of the wounded.

“They’re real enough,” Gantt said. “They usually travel in packs of six or seven. We’re in their territory. They’ll see the smoke and they’ll come looking to strip corpses. And they won’t care who’s wearing what uniform, either, or how close to being a corpse you are. They’ll finish that job. What’s the brand of your watch?”