Page 32 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
He was an American civilian. Flying a British aircraft. Over German-held territory. He was the very definition of a spy and as soon as he landed he’d be fitted for a blindfold and offered a last cigarette. He considered his alternative. The Bristol was flying like a limp noodle and the best fighter pilot in the world was ready to blow him from the sky if he didn’t comply.
His choice was clear.
Bell threw von Richthofen a nod, not in defeat, but in the belief that for as long as he remained alive he could find a way out of this mess.
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The German ace made handgestures indicating Bell should follow him, presumably to whatever airfieldJasta11 had been assigned, as it was now clear to Bell that the elite squadron had been moved into the sector because of the Allied spring offensive. It was why Captain Crabbe’s boys hadn’t encountered any enemy patrols. The Germans had cleared their airspace so Baron von Richthofen and his men could familiarize themselves with the area with minimal Allied intervention.
Bell waved back that he understood, and just as the scarlet D.II winged over to head back to base, Bell killed his motor by working the magneto. He refired it almost immediately and then blipped it once more. Von Richthofen came back to fly parallel to Bell’s Bristol again. Bell did an exaggerated shrug and then killed the motor a third time by holding the stick with his knees and using his right hand while his left was clearly in the German’s line of sight.
Bell then pointed down with an urgent finger as if to say heneeded to land immediately. Von Richthofen nodded in understanding and threw Bell a good-luck salute. He remained at altitude while Bell dropped low.
The landscape scrolling by under the Bristol F.2 was mostly open fields divided by hedgerows or lines of trees. Some farmland was rutted with frozen furrows left over from the fall, while others had become overgrown in the absence of their owners. Bell had to find one that appeared smooth and was large enough for the plane’s rollout, a distance he didn’t know.
He saw a two-lane road, paved and engineered into long straight stretches rather than meandering along with the terrain like so many French country lanes. It would have made a perfect landing strip except it was clogged with German trucks heading to the front with men and matériel. Towed behind many of the trucks were long-barreled cannons on heavy-duty solid rubber tires. They were meant to be easily transported and looked like the guns Bell had seen amassed around the observation balloon he and Whiddle had destroyed.
It was going to be nearly impossible for Crabbe and his squadron of novices to hit the balloons the Germans were surely going to loft in the upcoming battle if they had to contend not only with antiaircraft fire but also the deadly precision of the Red Baron and his handpicked band of aerial hunters.
Bell put those thoughts aside, as his own situation was equally dire. He could see faces of troops in the convoy turned toward the two planes, one a distinctive red that brought waves of hero worship and the other with bull’s-eye roundels painted on its wings signifying it as a British aircraft. German soldiers started cheering when it became clear that the Red Baron was about to capture an enemy fighter intact.
Bell spotted an appropriate field, one far enough from the road to give him time to act out the real reason for his charade about a dying engine. The controls remained loose in his hand as he shed both altitude and speed on final approach. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a pair of Mercedes-Knight staff cars turn off the road at a farm tract and head his way.
Closer to the ground, the plane’s nose refused to flare, and so the Bristol stayed stubbornly in the air, buoyed by a cushion of air caught beneath its lower wings.
With a hedge growing ever closer over the engine cowl and the Germans making good time in pursuit, Bell cut the motor entirely. The Bristol stayed aloft for a few more seconds before its wheels kissed the winter-hardened ground. Moments later, the rear skid touched down and dug into the soil enough to stop the plane with a snap that threw Bell into the control panel and bloodied his nose.
The open-topped staff cars were seventy yards away, kicking up dust as they raced to be the first to claim their prize. Von Richthofen buzzed the downed F.2 at less than fifty feet in a blatant display of his dominance.
Bell ignored him. He stood and turned so that he could swivel the Lewis gun in the rear cockpit close enough to pull its locking pin to the Scarff mount. With the heavy gun cradled in his arms, he leapt awkwardly to the ground and ran from the plane as fast as his bulky flight suit would allow. He ran in the opposite direction of the approaching German soldiers, but he heard their angry shouts when they saw him grab the machine gun.
When he deemed he was at a safe distance, Bell turned and opened fire with the Lewis, pouring a steady stream of rounds into a spot just behind the Rolls-Royce Falcon engine. The burst of .303 caliber shredded one of the Bristol’s two gas tanks and splashed fuelover the hot manifold. The heat ignited the gas fumes, which ignited the liquid pouring from the ruptured tank. In seconds the brand-new, never-seen-in-combat, and oh-so-prized by Baron Manfred von Richthofen airplane was engulfed in a towering wall of flame that consumed her canvas skin in the first few seconds of combustion and then devoured the wooden airframe.
Bell knew the Red Baron had recognized the F.2 as a new aircraft type and that’s why he hadn’t shot him down. Capturing the plane in order to study it was a far greater prize than another tick mark on an already long list of kills. Had Bell landed at the German airfield, he wouldn’t have had the time to destroy the plane before being swarmed by pilots and mechanics eager to see their commander’s prize. He didn’t particularly owe the Brits the courtesy of preventing their latest airplane from being captured, but he felt it was the right thing to do.
Until the Germans in the staff car started firing at him as soon as they came around from the far side of the burning plane. Bell tossed aside the Lewis gun, raised his hands, and dropped to his knees all in about a half second’s time.
“I surrender,” he said as clearly as he could, and added in halting French because he wasn’t sure if he was right, “I, ah,j’abandonne.”
One of the Germans raced up to him and tried to club him on the back of the head with the butt of his Mauser 98. He managed to hit Bell’s shoulder with a glancing blow, but Bell went down like he’d taken a haymaker from a prizefighter. Lying on the ground with his bloody nose leaking into the soil, Bell fought the throb of pain with the happy thought that von Richthofen had been denied his trophy. He guessed that had he not been surrounded by German soldiers, the Red Baron would have gunned him down with an aerial strafing attack.
A moment later an officer took charge of the scene. The plane was obviously destroyed and rounds in the drum magazines were starting to ignite with a staccato. He ordered two men to drag the “unconscious” flyer back to their vehicles, all three keeping low in case a stray round somehow found them.
Bell was loaded into the back of one of the cars. He kept his eyes open to slits so he could get a sense of what was happening. The officer sat in the front seat next to the driver, a Luger 9-millimeter pistol in his hand and trained on his prisoner, while the soldier who’d clobbered him sat next to Bell with his rifle propped between his legs. The other staff car rejoined the convoy heading toward the front, while Bell and his escorts drove in the opposite direction, even deeper into German-held territory.
He didn’t maintain his ruse of being knocked out for very long. Bell needed to see their route on the off chance he’d get the opportunity to retrace it during an escape. He moaned theatrically and massaged the back of his head as if feeling an egg-sized knot. The officer tightened his grip on the Luger, while the private straightened in his seat, his eyes trying to show some dominance, but ended up looking rather petulant.
They continued to pass trucks and other vehicles heading for the front, but the convoys weren’t nearly so dense as before. The road had changed as well. It was no longer straight and level, but twisted along the bank of a small river that had carved a broad bed across the landscape. Stands of trees and thick bushes grew in the rich soil of each river bend.
The driver pulled the car onto a verge overlooking a small section of cataracts that turned the placid river into a stretch of white eddies and back currents. At the head of the cataract was a low dam made of stone and a waterwheel shed that had been blasted to rubble atsome point during the war. The waterwheel itself lay broken on its side and partially submerged in the river, its upstream side a mass of tangled branches that had washed down and become enmeshed with its rotting paddles.
The men got out to stretch their legs and share a loaf of black bread and some hard sausage cut into manageable pieces with a trench knife. Bell was pleasantly surprised that he was given an almost equal share and allowed to drink a half canteen’s worth of tepid, gritty water. The adrenaline that had sustained him during the dogfight had left him hungry and thirsty.
Three hours after they had started off once again, the driver turned from the road and the staff car started up a series of switchbacks hidden by a dense forest that had so far escaped destruction. Dominating the top of the hill, and thus the valley below, sat an enormous castle. It wasn’t one of those Baroque fantasies that the French nobility built for themselves in the Loire Valley and in the process bankrupted prerevolution France. This was a medieval defensive fortification on a massive scale, almost large enough to be called a walled village. Approaching across a stone bridge that had been built over the broad moat, Bell estimated the stone walls were twenty feet high and the two visible corner towers, with their conical roofs, were another fifteen feet taller still. The car passed through the main gate under a portcullis that looked like it could drop at a moment’s notice.
The inner courtyard was huge, like a military parade ground. Buildings, both ancient and modern, had been built against the castle’s exterior walls, some with dark thatch roofs and others slate shingles, while the newer structures had sheets of metal as their roofs. Through its many open doors, Bell saw the largest of the outbuildings had been the stables and was now converted into a vehiclerepair facility. A newer structure was a hospital judging by the bandaged men smoking near its entrance. Everywhere soldiers moved with purpose, some unloading trucks, while others drilled on an open field under the shouts and shrill whistle of a veteran sergeant.
The central keep was as large as a New York City office block, its crenellated parapet soaring twenty-five feet above the ground. Its closed doors were sized for a grand cathedral, though a human-scale door had been cut into one leaf for personnel to gain entry. A massive double-eagled Imperial German flag hung from the parapet.
