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Brandt thought about it for a moment and then shrugged. “I’ve survived so far. I don’t know if that makes me a good pilot or just a lucky one.”
The remark was flirting dangerously close to disaster, for to speak ill of the war was tantamount to treason in the eyes of many Party officials, but Brandt found that he just didn’t care anymore. The Führer asked him a question; he gave a truthful answer. If that was a treasonous response, so be it.
Hitler watched him closely for several seconds and then laughed quietly. “Skilled or lucky, either one will do, I suppose.”
He stood and leaned over the map. “We are here,” he said, pointing.
Brandt stepped closer so that he could see.
“Your destination is here,” Hitler continued, moving his finger to the southeast. “You will refuel here, here and here. Crews are already in place, ready to service the aircraft in case you run into difficulty along the way.”
Difficulty. An interesting way to describe running headlong into a hornet’s nest of Allied aircraft. But then again, according to headquarters, we are actually winning this war, Brandt thought.
His feelings aside, he had to admit that the route had been well planned; the refueling stops were close to the range of his aircraft but not dangerously so and as a result he would have some extra fuel to maneuver with. Given that the Allies were pushing north out of Italy and Greece, he had no doubt that he was going to need it. It would have been safer to go northwest across territory controlled by the Soviets, given the state of their air force at present, but that would have meant refueling in enemy territory, which was clearly out of the question. No, southwest it would have to be, over the Alps and through Romania, then into Greece and Turkey. Once he was past the Turks, it would be smooth sailing from that point forward.
You can do this, he told himself. A little skill, a little luck, and you’ll be free of this place, this war, once and for all.
“Any cargo?”
“Fifteen hundred pounds of supplies and this,” Hitler said, passing him a leather satchel as he spoke. “You are to deliver both to General Giesler upon your arrival at your destination, is that understood?”
“Yes, my Führer.”
The fifteen hundred pounds would bring the weight of his loaded aircraft to just over thirty thousand pounds, but that was still a few thousand pounds below his maximum takeoff weight. It was no different from carrying a full complement of 500-pound bombs, really. It would cost him some speed and maneuverability in the air, but he was going to have to live with that.
“Will there be any fighter escorts to help me break the Allied lines?” Brandt asked.
“No,” Hitler told him. “I believe a single aircraft has a greater chance of breaking through undetected than a full squadron. Crews are loading your plane now, and you will leave as soon as possible.”
He came around the table to stand in front of Brandt, eye to eye.
“I cannot stress enough the importance of your mission, Major. It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of the Reich is in your hands. You must not fail or all we have worked for will be lost!”
For just a split second Brandt was tempted to speak the truth, that everyone but the madman in front of him already knew that they had lost, that it had all been in vain, but he squashed that notion before he could give voice to it and commit suicide by doing so. Instead, he simply clamped his heels together and threw out another salute.
“Heil Hitler!”
That seemed to satisfy the other man, who grunted an acknowledgment and turned away to study the map once more.
Brandt took that as a dismissal and headed for the door, where he was met once again by his SS escorts, who walked him back to his quarters.
* * *
BRANDT STOOD AT the edge of the makeshift runway and watched with satisfaction as the mechanics swarmed over his aircraft, preparing it for the flight to come. With parts being in such scarce supply over the past few months, he was normally concerned about letting men unfamiliar to him near the plane, but given that he was on a mission for Hitler himself, he was confident that his beloved Junkers was getting the best care possible.
He and that aircraft had been together for the past four years, and he had begun to think of it more as a companion than a vehicle. They had seen each other through some hairy moments and even hairier missions, and the Junkers had become a talisman to him; as long as he was behind the controls of that aircraft, he’d live to fight another day. If he was going to survive the flight to come, he was going to need her to be in top shape.
The sound of an approaching train drew his attention, and he turned to watch a locomotive pull into the station a hundred yards away. No sooner had it stopped than a work team slipped out of one of the cars and quickly began unloading large wooden crates onto a waiting truck. The crates were heavy; it took four men to carry one of them. Brandt could see more of the same stacked in the car they were unloading, and he wondered just what they contained.
Looks like you are going to find out, he thought, as the truck pulled away from the train and headed directly for the crew waiting by the bomb-bay doors underneath each wing.
Intrigued, Brandt wandered over.
As he drew closer, he could see black lettering stamped on the side of each box.
Magyar Nemzeti Bank.
He knew enough Hungarian to be able to translate.
Hungarian National Bank.
Hitler’s words came back to him. “The future of the Reich is in your hands.”
Now he understood. The fifteen hundred extra pounds of weight he would be carrying was most likely gold and silver bullion looted from the Hungarian national treasury and was no doubt designed to fund whatever operation General Giesler was putting together halfway around the world.
If it is, you could buy your way to freedom with it, a voice spoke up in the back of his mind. Just fly right over Allied lines and deliver yourself, the plane and its cargo into their hands in exchange for your freedom.
It wasn’t a bad idea, provided the crates actually did contain treasure looted from the bank.
There was only one way to find out.
As Brandt approached, he called out to the crew chief. “Bring me a pry bar. I want to know what’s in those crates before they’re put aboard my aircraft.”
The crew chief turned to comply, but a voice from inside the aircraft stopped him.
“I’m afraid that’s not possible, Major.”
Brandt looked up into the interior of his aircraft to find the same SS officer he’d dealt with earlier, Major Adler, looking down at him from inside the bay.
“The crates are to remain sealed. Orders.” The officer smiled as he said it, as if he knew it was going to cause issues for Brandt and he was waiting for the inevitable confrontation.
Brandt wasn’t going to give him one. He knew that he could always open one of the crates at the first refueling stop if need be, far from Major Adler’s prying eyes, and if he discovered it to be the treasure he suspected it was, he could decide what to do with it from there. A fortune in gold and silver could set him up very nicely for the rest of his life in quite a few countries. He gave a smile of his own, trying to look reassuring in the process. “Of course, Major. Orders. Now the crew and I have a lot to do to get ready for takeoff, so if you wouldn’t mind, please get out of my aircraft.”
Another smile.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Brandt paused, a sudden suspicion forming. “And why not, Major?”
“Because I’m going with you, of course,” Adler said.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_06b34a5f-6998-506a-87f3-a0d456d544cd)
Honestly, he should have seen it coming; he knew that. With a plane full of treasure and Hitler’s personal papers in hand, he shouldn’t have expected to make the trip alone. It would have been too easy to do exactly what he’d been thinking of doing, turning over the plane and its cargo to the Allies. An ordinary soldier wouldn’t have worked as a guard, for he might have been convinced to abandon his post given the failing war effort, Brandt knew.
But an officer of the Waffen SS, the most fanatical of all Nazi units? That was the perfect choice. Brandt had no doubt that Adler would carry out his orders to the letter no matter what was happening on the home front, and nothing Brandt could say to him was going to change that. Especially since their orders had been hand delivered by Hitler.
Best make the most of it, he’d thought to himself and set out to do just that.
He spent the next half hour giving Adler a lecture on how to operate the rear-facing 13 mm machine guns in the rear cockpit. They didn’t have ammunition to spare, so Adler was going to have to forego any practice, but it really wasn’t all that difficult, just point and shoot. They had a much higher chance of survival with someone manning the guns if they were jumped by an Allied patrol, for the attack would most likely come from behind and any attempt Brandt made to outrun it would make his forward-facing 20 mm cannon next to useless.
While he was doing that, the crew loaded the crates into the aircraft and secured them so that they wouldn’t slide around in the event he was forced to make any sudden maneuvers. He double-, then triple-checked their work once they were done; given their weight, even a single loose crate could be potentially disastrous if it came free in the midst of combat.
By the time the cargo was loaded, it was close to noon. Brandt would have been perfectly happy to wait to take off under the cover of darkness, but the higher-ups had other plans. As soon as they were loaded, the order came for them to get underway.
Brandt sighed. Even with the future of the Reich at stake, high command still wasn’t thinking straight.
He climbed into the cockpit, stashing the satchel Hitler had given him under his seat, which was the only place big enough in the cockpit to hold it. He strapped himself in and began going through the preflight check, making sure that all of the instruments were working and the controls were responding properly before they left the mechanics behind for good. Behind him he could hear Adler testing the movement of the guns.
They took off moments later, with Brandt in the front of the cockpit in the pilot’s seat and Adler in the rear manning the 13 mm machine guns, leaving the nose gunner–bombardier position empty. Brandt hoped they weren’t going to regret that decision later.
The men’s seats were literally back-to-back, so they could pass instructions and information to each other simply by shouting over their shoulders, but there was an internal intercom system available, as well. As Brandt took the plane into a vertical climb to give them some altitude, he heard Adler shout, “For the glory of the Reich!” but chose not to reply. He wasn’t doing this for the Reich, after all. He just wanted to get out of Germany alive.
Once in the air, he turned the aircraft to the south and began to follow the route Hitler had shown him on the map, flying from Potsdam to Nuremberg before turning east to cross the Swiss Alps near Salzburg. Once over the Alps they would make their way through Austria and into Hungary, continuing from there down to Romania and then out over the Black Sea.
The extra weight from the cargo made the aircraft sluggish and slow to respond to Brandt’s commands, just as he’d suspected it would. He made a few preliminary maneuvers, getting a feel for the way the aircraft responded so that he would know what he could and couldn’t do in an emergency. The plane moved about the sky with all the finesse of a brick, which was going to make matters rather difficult if they encountered enemy aircraft, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it at this point.
It is what it is, he thought stoically.
They had been in the air for just over an hour and had started crossing the Austrian Alps when things went south.
Brandt glanced at the topographical map in his lap, making certain that he knew exactly where he was in relation to the peaks below him, and when he looked up again a pair of American P51 Mustang attack fighters were diving out of the sun to his right. He never would have seen them if the second aircraft hadn’t made the mistake of changing its angle of attack too early, allowing the sun to glint off the steel edge of the wings.
It wasn’t much, but Brandt was a veteran pilot who had survived more than a hundred missions over the past few years, and that was more than most. Without hesitation he shoved the yoke forward and threw the Junkers into a desperate dive.
The Mustangs were faster and more maneuverable than his aircraft on a good day, never mind when it was loaded with crates of gold. His only hope of survival was to get down amid the mountain peaks and hope that the American pilots didn’t have the nerve to follow.
Given what he’d heard about Mustang pilots, he didn’t think that was very likely, but he wasn’t about to sit back and let them blow him out of the sky either.
“Hang on!” he shouted to Adler as the plane turned over and headed toward the earth in a screaming dive.
Brandt had his hands full keeping control of the aircraft, so didn’t dare look over his shoulder in an effort to locate the enemy planes. As it turned out, he didn’t need to; the thunder of the guns from behind him as Adler opened up let him know that the Mustangs were following them down.
Bullets began stitching their way across the port wing in response, leaving half-dollar-sized holes in their wake, but thankfully they didn’t appear to have damaged anything important as the plane kept flying. Brandt threw the aircraft into evasive maneuvers, twisting about the sky as he sought to escape his attackers. A narrow mountain pass loomed ahead of him and he aimed directly for it, pulling up out of the dive at the last second and soaring between the two peaks at dangerous speed.
Behind him, the Mustangs followed.
The next few moments were some of the most hair-raising he’d ever experienced in his career as a fighter pilot. He tossed his aircraft all over the sky, despite its heavy load, doing everything he could to throw the Americans off his tail. He clung to the mountains where and when he could, trying to get his pursuers to make a mistake as they twisted through the air, hoping against hope that one if not both of them would slam into the nearby peaks and leave him and his charge in peace to continue their mission.
It was wishful thinking and, like most wishes, didn’t come true. The Mustangs stayed behind him the whole way, firing at his aircraft when the opportunity presented itself and content to stick with him when it didn’t. Bit by bit their machine-gun fire began to whittle away at the frame of his aircraft.
At some point one of them was going to get lucky, hit the fuel tanks or aileron controls or even the ammunition that was stored aboard for the forward and aft machine guns, and it would be all over. There would be nothing left of him and Major Adler but a smear on the landscape.
He had to do something, but what?
The solution, when it came to him, was surprisingly simple and, dare he say it, rather elegant.
He’d spent all this time and fuel trying to get away from the Mustangs. What if he got in close instead? The only shots that had been fired had come from the rear of his aircraft, and he would bet that the pilots of the American aircraft were convinced by now that the forward weapons were inoperable. Add to that the fact that all he’d done was run, and it was a good bet that the Americans thought him little more than a sitting duck. They wouldn’t expect him to suddenly turn and bring the battle to them. If he could catch even one of them napping, he could even up the odds a little.
It was worth a try.
He quickly explained to Adler what he was going to do.
“Are you insane?” the major cried on hearing the plan, to which Brandt replied that he might very well be. It didn’t matter, though, because they were going to try it whether Adler liked it or not.
He kept running, waiting for the right moment.
It came sooner than he expected.
Ahead of him loomed another cluster of rising peaks, with a narrow pass between two of them. It was just the kind of terrain he’d been using for the past several minutes to try to shake his pursuers. If the American pilots were as good as he thought they were, they would be expecting him to make for that pass like a rabbit for its warren.
Brandt intended to disappoint them.
Instead of diving for the space between the peaks, Brandt pulled back on the stick, sending the Junkers into a steep climb as if he intended to loop the plane in a big circle to try to get behind the mountains. The maneuver might have been worthwhile if he’d been flying one of the newer fighters such as a Focke-Wulf or a Messerschmitt, but in an overloaded night bomber like the Junkers he might as well have been standing still.
Behind him, the faster and more agile Mustangs moved to intercept.
This was the crucial moment. If the Americans caught him before he managed to roll out again, he would be moving perpendicular to their line of travel and would present nearly the entire surface of his aircraft to their guns. He didn’t want that to happen.
“Hold on!” he shouted as the plane reached the apex of its climb. He completed the classic Immelman Turn maneuver by rolling out at the top and rushing back in the direction he’d just come from.
One of the Mustangs was caught rushing toward him, trying to get into the very position he’d been worried about, and made the mistake of hesitating for a split second as he realized the two planes were now flying directly toward each other at impressive speeds.
Brandt didn’t make the same error. He began firing as soon as the Junkers rolled out of its turn, slamming the Mustang with a barrage of fire from the Junkers’s forward-facing 20 mm cannons. Tracers whipped between the two aircraft as the American sought to respond, but Brandt had been just a hair quicker off the mark and drilled the other aircraft with gunfire even as it began to take evasive action.
One second the Mustang was racing toward him, the next he was doing everything he could to get up and over the exploding cloud of debris that had once been an American aircraft.
Brandt let out a shout of triumph.
His exultation was premature, however. In focusing on the lead aircraft he’d lost sight of the second, and that came back to bite him as the American roared up from below. The pilot had anticipated Brandt’s roll-out, diving and then swooping back up to come at the Junkers and its unprotected belly. Bullets ripped through the port engine, the wing and the cockpit as the Mustang flashed past. One of the bullets took a chunk out of Brandt’s calf, and he gasped in pain; he could feel blood course down his leg and into his boot.
The enemy gunfire shredded the controls for the wing flaps and set the engine alight, causing the plane to yaw heavily to the left. Fortunately Adler’s guns roared to life in that moment, catching the Mustang as it raced past and sending it spiraling out of control to crash into the nearest mountainside.
“I’m hit, I’m hit,” Adler called, but Brandt couldn’t do anything to help him because not only was he hit himself, but he had his hands full just trying to keep the plane aloft. He fought the controls, hands straining on the yoke, feet pumping the foot pedals in an effort to force the damaged hydraulics to work long enough to get the ailerons and flaps trimmed the way he needed them. At the same time, he maneuvered through the maze of snow-covered peaks, desperately trying to avoid ending up like their recently departed foes. He could hear Adler thrashing around in pain but had no choice but to block it out as he concentrated on keeping them both alive.
By the time he managed to get the aircraft level again, Adler had gone quiet and still. Brandt knew what that meant; Adler was either dead or, at the very least, too wounded to be of any help. For the first time Brandt noticed the freezing air flowing in through the holes in the cockpit floor and canopy, chilling him to the bone but helping to keep him from slipping into shock from his own injury. Shock was probably the least of his worries, for the plane was losing altitude fast and the rushing winds were fanning the flames in the port engine into a veritable bonfire. Brandt didn’t know which would be worse, slamming into the side of a mountain or being blown to bits when the engine exploded. Right then, both seemed like a possibility.
He racked his brain for a solution to the problem facing him and came up with…nothing. All he could do was fight to keep the plane in the air and pray for a miracle.
Then he saw it.
A few miles ahead of him was the frozen surface of a long, narrow glacier.
If he could get to it, he could attempt a landing. He knew his chances weren’t good. With a fully operational aircraft it would be a difficult feat. With the mangled wreck that he was flying it was going to be nearly impossible, but what other options did he have?
None.
You can do this, he told himself.
