The Time Pirate (16 page)

The Germans seemed to be targeting the trucks lining the quay. Why murder defenseless farmers and their families? She saw fighters strafing poor men in lifeboats. She watched one truck after another explode in flames, heard the cries of the dying and the injured until she could bear it no longer.

The Germans clearly intended to reduce her little town to a heap of rubble, and if she was to survive, she had to get out to the countryside and home.

By some miracle, her old Raleigh had survived to fight another day. Fleur gathered what strength she had left and worked her way slowly back up the hill toward the bicycle, one hand on the wall for support. The Raleigh was covered with dust but clearly usable. She bent down and pulled up her socks, which were sagging about her ankles, and climbed onto the stalwart Raleigh.

She walked her bicycle along the cliff walk by Fermain Bay. It was a lovely walk with a rugged path that wandered up and around the headlands. At a fork in the pathway, where a gently winding lane led eventually up the wooded hills to Ford-wych Manor, she stopped her bicycle in the lane and stood quietly, watching the endless line of German soldiers in gray-green uniforms go goose-stepping by. They seemed to be coming from the airfield where Junkers aircraft were landing, unloading troops, and returning for more.

Column after column, marching in tight formation, rifles slung over their shoulders, knives and grenades stuck in their boot-tops, exuding strength and an almost demonic determination. They marched toward the little town of Saint Peter Port like some unstoppable force of nature.

Gleaming from head to toe, their buttons and boots and coal-scuttle helmets, these Nazi storm troopers seemed empowered with machinelike precision. It was unlike anything she'd ever seen in all of her eighty years. Eyes straight ahead, never wavering, blond youth at the very peak of fitness and training, they paid scant attention to the old woman with the bloodied bandage wound round her head, using her bicycle for support.

They were exactly what they looked like. A conquering army marching through enemy territory, completely unopposed.

She mounted her bicycle and headed up the lane and home, Jean-Paul's four baguettes still in her basket.

She would ring Lord Hawke immediately upon returning and tell him about everything she'd seen. There was no time now for secret meetings in dark coves with fishermen. This was war.

“Hawke, here,” Lord Hawke said, picking up the receiver.

“It's me.”

“Fleur,” he said, “Hobbes and I are up in the castle tower. We've been looking across to Guernsey through extremely high-powered telescopic lenses. I can see Fordwych Manor still standing up on Saint George's cliff, but I also see flames and black smoke rising over Saint Peter Port. Are you quite all right, my dear woman?”

“Yes, yes, I'm fine, never mind me. But they've blown up our harbor. Not the ships at anchor, mind you, but the trucks lining the quay. I counted at least forty dead. Farmers with their families! With truckloads of tomatoes, for heaven's sake? Can you imagine the barbarity? It's ungodly!”

The conquering army

“Probably thought they were troop transports, full of our soldiers. Apparently, the Reich doesn't yet know that our military has abandoned us.”

“I saw endless columns of German troops marching toward town. Shocking. I must say, they looked discouragingly effective.”

“I will want to talk to you at dinner this evening about possibly evacuating, my dear Fleur.”

“I'm not going anywhere. But I'm positively delighted you're still coming over to my little dinner! You and Hobbes, both?”

“Of course we're coming. Life does go on, you know, even under enemy occupation.”

“But aren't the Germans looking for you? You and Hobbes are both known spies in Berlin. Your pictures are probably plastered on every wall in the Reichstag building. You should be very, very careful, my Lord Hawke. This island is literally crawling with Nazis.”

“Don't worry your pretty head, my dear Baroness. Hobbes will come up with suitable disguises and false passports and identifcation. And it's the Gestapo in Berlin who want our heads—not infantry troops sent to occupy the islands. But I promise we shall be careful nonetheless. Now. Tell me everything you saw. Speak slowly so I can take notes, and I'll relay your information immediately to Whitehall. Ready?”

“Ready. It was just after two o'clock. Masses of heavy bombers over the town. Heinkel He 111s, if I'm not mistaken, the ones with those greenhouse-like cockpits. The first bomb fell into the street. A few hundred yards from the harbor. It was devastating and—? Are you still there? Can you hear me? It's Fleur calling, dear fellow, hullo?”

She stared at the receiver in disgust. The line had gone dead.
The Germans have cut the bloody telephone lines between the islands, she thought. And of course, she was right.

It was the first night of a thousand or more nights to come that Fleur de Villiers would experience a life lived under the merciless hobnailed boots of Hitler's Third Reich.

· Greybeard Island ·

A
wing and a prayer. Nick was saying his prayers all right, no end of them. That wasn't the problem. It was his tattered right wing that he could do nothing about. Large sections of the fabric covering the upper wing had ripped away during his mad, twisting, and turning dash across the sea to Greybeard Island. Every few minutes he'd hear the loud twang of one of his support wires snapping, and the plane would veer out of control. He was amazed he still had a wing at all.

After what had seemed a nightmarish eternity, just trying to keep the Camel from going into a death spiral and nose-diving into the channel, he finally had Lord Hawke's airstrip in sight. It gave his heart a desperately needed lift, that narrow strip of green meadow that represented home and safety.

He saw Gunner emerge from the barn at the sound of his approach and sprint down the strip to the seaward edge to cheer him on, leaping up and down, waving him onward.

Cheering and waving wouldn't help much now.

He was losing a bit of altitude with every passing second. Nick didn't see how he could possibly keep her airborne long enough to clear Hawke Castle and reach land. During the flight, he'd continually lost a lot of altitude and had not been able to regain it. He was now fighting the plane for every inch, straining to keep her at least fifty feet above sea level. The Sop-with seemed determined to dive to the right, and there didn't seem to be much Nick could do about it.

And, somehow, he knew, he had to gain enough altitude to clear the tower at Hawke Castle. He had one trick left in his bag, and he'd have only one chance to use it.

As his father had taught him early on, because of the engine's tremendous torque, any hard turn to the left would cause the aircraft to climb instantly and automatically. But he had to time it perfectly. He would have to wait until the very last second, when a collision with the tower seemed all but unavoidable, to put her over hard left and hope the sudden climb was enough to get him over the top.

The tower was looming up dead ahead.

At his current altitude a crash was unavoidable. He couldn't fly around either side of the tower because cliffs rose up on either side of the airstrip and he'd crash headlong into them. He'd need at least twenty more feet of altitude to clear the top. And he'd need it at the last possible moment.

It's indescribably mentally difficult to steer an aeroplane deliberately on a collision course that will mean instant death. Every instinct in Nick was screaming at him to turn away. But he had no choice. The seconds stretched into hours as he flew on toward the tower.

He was perhaps less than twenty yards from dying when
he put the stick hard over to the left and felt the Sopwith jerk her nose up steeply into an almost vertical climb. He was flying by sheer instinct now—no one had taught him how to do this maneuver.

Sometimes you'll have to fly by the seat of your pants, son, his father had told him. He never knew what his dad meant until this very moment.

But at the very last instant, he would never know how, Nick was somehow able to get the plane's nose up and barely scrape over the top of Lord Hawke's tower.

He'd done it.

Gunner was elated, but the boy wasn't safely on the ground yet. He stood there, gesticulating wildly, as if he could somehow
will
the boy to land safely.

“That's it, that's the way to do it, lad. Now straighten her out, boy, get her level and keep yer nose in the air. A few more feet . . . come along now . . . almost home . . . almost . . .”

Nick cleared the rocky promontory by inches, hit the ground hard, bounced once or twice into the air, and then finally he was down on the airstrip at last.

Thanking whoever in heaven had been there in the cockpit with him, he found himself taxiing toward the barn, and a plainly relieved Gunner, who was running alongside him down the field gesticulating wildly, a huge grin on his pink-cheeked face.

“Now that's what I call flying, Cap!” Gunner said, as he helped Nick down from the cockpit. Nick pulled off his leather flying helmet and goggles and stared at his friend, stamping his feet, thrilled to have them back on solid ground.

“If that's flying, I might go back to sailing,” Nick said as Gunner embraced him and lifted him off his feet.

Gunner put him down and walked around the nose to inspect the damaged wing. “Whatever happened to yer starboard wing, laddie? Did'ye run into something solid?”

“Something solid ran into me. Bullets. I came across a German minesweeper laying naval mines. I guess they don't like having their picture taken while they're going about their nefarious business.”

Gunner continued his meticulous inspection of the damage. “Bullet holes everywhere. Yer plain lucky there ain't none in you.”

“That shield Hobbes made. He saved my life.”

“Did you shoot back at those blasted Jerries?”