Too Bad to Die (13 page)

Ian could not have said at that moment, with the wind whistling through the wings and the Sow suddenly diving and bucking, what model plane the Germans were flying. He merely recognized a silhouette familiar from a hundred glimpses of aerial combat in the Battle of Britain a few years before. The Bf 110s were terrifying planes, equipped to locate and kill anything in darkness, heavy and indefatigable as sharks. The Sow looked like a child's kite in contrast.

To his shock, there was answering fire from behind his back. He craned to look over his shoulder and saw the boy in the gunner's seat crouched over his weapon, wheeling and turning with the Messerschmitts like a falconer. Tracers from all three planes lit up the sky around him like festival lights on Guy Fawkes Night. The Germans strafed the Sow again and Ian instinctively ducked as bullets raked the left-hand wing. He cried out. The night was full of noise: the machine-gun bursts from the Sow's tail, strafing fire from the Messerschmitt on Ian's right, a high-pitched scream from their tail gunner (was he hit?), and a continuous stream of Polish profanity from Dutch in the cockpit.

Dutch dove steeply and the ground spiraled toward them. Ian felt his gorge rise and squeezed his eyes shut against the torque of gravity. Tracer bullets were streaming by his head like firecrackers, one every three seconds. He braced himself, hands gripping the edge of the cockpit, against the slamming impact of earth and metal. Another burst of fire from the tail. So the gunner wasn't dead, at least.

The Sow pulled out of the dive and immediately flipped back on herself. Now they were diving upside down. Ian opened his mouth in a guttural yell. Their gunner, impossibly, was still firing toward the belly of the Bf 110 above them. A spatter of German bullets grazed Ian's right shoulder, tearing away shreds of Dutch's blanket.

A compression wave shuddered the Sow violently to the left, and then Ian heard the
crump!
as one of the Messerschmitts burst into flames. The Sow's gunner had hit an engine.

Dutch righted the plane and flung it sharply down to the left, away from the disintegrating Messerschmitt. Ian peered out of the right side of his cockpit and watched the enemy plane drop in pieces to the indistinct terrain of Trans-Jordan below. Ian's teeth rattled with gunfire. Bullets pinged across the Sow's nose, and for a heart-stopping number of seconds the propeller cut out.

They were falling.

Gently, it is true—falling without spiraling, Dutch fighting to keep his nose up—but the sensation of slipping out of their proper realm in the sudden silence of the dead engine was horrifying. Ian thought far too late of such things as parachutes. Was Dutch wearing one?

The remaining Messerschmitt whined vilely over them. Dutch could no longer maneuver. They were going to die, in a fireball in midair or in a heap of flattened metal on the ground.

And in a few hours or days Winston Churchill would be murdered. Shot to death in a Tehran street or blown to bits as he reached for Stalin's hand. Hitler would win the war. Because Ian Fleming was no hero. Just a useless desk jockey in a make-believe war.

The machine-gun burst, when it came, was shockingly loud in his ears. It came from the gun in the Sow's tail, and the Messerschmitt answered almost immediately.

Dutch's gunner cried out again; shrapnel, Ian thought. Was the gunner dead? He craned upward at the looming bulk of the Bf 110 nearly upon them. It seemed to check in midair, hesitate, and then slip sideways into a stall. A column of smoke, and it was gone.

Dutch was fighting the Sow for control now. The stream of Polish invective was more urgent, more pleading. He was trying to keep the nose up, keep lift under the wings, so that when they crashed it was in the semblance of a landing. Ian was breathing heavily, his heart pounding. His brother Peter would have a parachute in this situation. If Dutch had one—and if he had any brains at all—he'd bail out and leave his passenger to the Sow's fate. But as Ian was thinking this, the propeller coughed to life. It sputtered. Died again.

“Come
on!
” Ian yelled.

He thought the gunner echoed him.

The propeller caught.

Dutch lifted one arm silently in triumph and turned his plane toward Iraq.

—

“W
HERE DO YOU
think those Germans came from?” Ian asked him hours later. Rommel's Afrika Korps had surrendered in May, under Italian command. Most of the men who'd served in it were killing time in a POW camp in Mississippi.

“Greece,” Dutch said flatly. “More likely, Crete. They still run the show there, and sometimes they throw a few fellows up on fishing expeditions over British territory.”

Dutch's luck had held out that night. He'd found a tailwind sweeping across North Africa that carried him over the Iraq border. It was exactly one twenty-seven a.m. by Ian's watch when the Sow began to lose altitude again and the faint lights of Habbaniya airbase floated up on the horizon. Ian's feet were blocks of ice in his thin leather shoes, and his ears were ringing. He had dozed fitfully, unable to entirely trust the dodgy propeller, certain they would crash before much more time was out. His limbs had stiffened with cold, but there would be coffee in Habbaniya.

When Dutch had bucketed to a stop on the fine British runway, Ian could not unbend from his seat. He almost told the pilot to leave him—he would wait out the refueling—but without asking his permission, Dutch lifted him under the armpits and hauled him to a crouching position. “Swing your leg onto the wing,” he said. “Do it now, you motherfucking bastard, or I swear I'll drop you on your head.”

Ian half crawled, half fell from the cockpit to the ground. After a few seconds, he forced his aching body upright.

“That bandage has soaked through your jacket,” Dutch said casually. “Blood's frozen. You might want to give it a look in the canteen.”

Habbaniya was an extensive new British base, the pride of the RAF Iraq Command. It was a principal link in the air route chain among the Allies, a transfer point for war matériel and basic supplies from the U.S. through North Africa to the Soviet Union. The RAF ran maintenance units here for much of the Middle East. There was an aircraft depot, a hospital, some barracks for Iraqi recruits, and bomb stores. There were even swimming pools, movie screens, sporting fields, tennis courts, and riding stables. Habbaniya had its own water purification plant and power station. It drew water from the Euphrates to sprinkle the very British lawns.

Ian cared nothing for all this in the early-morning dark, moving instead like an automaton to the warmth and light of the airmen's lounge. He was aware, suddenly, of Dutch's gunner following a few paces behind him, diffident and solitary, as boy soldiers had learned to be in this war. Ian stopped short and turned. He held out his hand.

“That was some rare shooting,” he said. “Thank you for saving all our lives tonight.”

The gunner came to a halt and simply stared at him. Under the harsh and episodic airstrip lights, his face was a composition of shadow and bone, hollows and bleached places, punctuated by the goggles that deflected any attempt to meet his eyes. As Ian watched, the gunner raised his right arm. Ian saw that it was spattered with blood; the leather sleeve was gaping and torn.

“Good God, you
were
hit,” he muttered, reaching for the boy.

With his left hand, the gunner unstrapped his helmet and whipped off his goggles. A cascade of platinum hair slid over one cheek.

Ian's eyes narrowed. He stepped closer.

The gangly kid who'd downed two Messerschmitts was the girl he'd last glimpsed on the ramparts of the Citadel, in a saffron-colored scarf. Nazir's granddaughter.

Fatima.

—

“I
HAVE SUMMONED YOU
,” Molotov told the two men waiting on his pleasure in the salon of the Soviet Embassy, “to inform you that under no circumstances will Premier Stalin leave the safety of this compound tomorrow, or indeed at any time prior to the end of this
conference
.
”

He stared ponderously at Averell Harriman and Archibald Clark Kerr, as though daring them to object. Harriman glanced at Clark Kerr—he was the British ambassador in Moscow, and, like Ave, he'd flown in on the plane with Stalin yesterday. Clark Kerr looked resigned; he'd had a year longer to get used to Stalin's caprice than Ave had.

“It's the American location that's at fault, I gather,” Clark Kerr said. “The Premier can have no objection to walking next door to our embassy?”

“None whatsoever. But you must know, my dear ambassadors, that our security forces have learned there is to be a violent public demonstration—whether tomorrow or the next day, I cannot say—instigated by Hitler's agents in this city. Iranian peasants screaming for Russian and Western blood. Screaming to expel the Occupiers. The Marshal will not expose his precious person to such Nazi . . . indignities.”

Clark Kerr smiled faintly, as though such a fantasy was no more than he had expected. “Prime Minister Churchill has been living with Nazi indignities for more than four years. He goes to bed with them, Mr. Molotov, and wakes up with them again in the morning. It's hardly a reason to stay inside.”

“It is not for himself that Stalin fears, but for the people of Tehran, you understand. Possibly these ignorant peasants are of no consideration to the British. You have long sacrificed the many to preserve the few. But if innocent blood is spilled because of Stalin's presence, the Premier will not be able to live with himself.”

“Then it'll be the first time in his life,” Clark Kerr muttered.

Harriman kept his gaze trained on Molotov. He was trying to decide whether the man believed what he said or he was deliberately bullshitting them. “I will inform my President that Premier Stalin declines to meet with him after lunch tomorrow.”

“But no. It is the
location
of the next meeting that is inconvenient, not the meeting itself. If the President likes to come
here,
of course . . .”

“I will convey your message.” Harriman bowed. “And now, as it is very late, I will take my leave, Mr. Secretary.”

“Not yet,” Molotov retorted. “Clark Kerr may go, it is obvious, he has only to walk three paces and he is on his own ground. But you, Mr. Harriman—you must see the rooms we have prepared for Mr. Roosevelt.
Then
you may tell him what a fool he is to remain in that American hovel!”

T
hey had waited out the snowstorm until late the previous afternoon, when the clouds breaking up over the mountains revealed a sun so close to setting that movement was pointless and they'd agreed to stay put for the night. All five of Skorzeny's men, from the nineteen-year-old Fuchs to the veteran Braun, had grown leaner over the past few weeks of survival training. He'd kept them busy with reconnaissance exercises and hunting and hand-to-hand combat tests that sharpened the wits. If they were snowbound much longer, Skorzeny thought, boredom would set in.
Quarrels.
They had learned one another's stories by heart now, and knew every dream or vanity the others nursed in secret. With inactivity came a sense of being trapped, and the men would begin to voice their fears. The crimes they'd committed. The nightmares that threatened to drive them mad. None of them had reached that nadir yet; he intended that none of them would.

New orders helped. The transmission Fuchs had received in the early hours of the previous morning—the message from their Control in Cairo—had been short and to the point.
Infiltrate.
The training phase of their operation was over; it was time to move into action.

Skorzeny had roused them at first light that morning and broken camp. They'd eaten the last of the roasted ibex scraps and washed their mouths out with snow. He'd sent them in pairs—keeping himself for last, with Fuchs and the radio—through the ironwood trees and the suddenly monochromatic landscape. In a few short weeks they had internalized all he'd taught them. Richter no longer tramped like a prizefighter through the underbrush; Lange's eyes were constantly roving to record the slightest movement ahead. They fanned out, separated by hundreds of yards, so that if one pair encountered a hostile force, the rest would not be taken. They serpentined noiselessly through the leafless trees. The snow was slick and their progress incremental; it was important to set each foot carefully before the other, testing the ground underfoot for loose stones. In their field grays, they must be indistinguishable, Skorzeny thought, from a herd of Persian gazelle.

He intended to shepherd them to the base of the mountains and then rest. Two of the men—Hoffman and Braun, he thought—he'd send to reconnoiter. He was supposed to contact the Nazi agents in Tehran who ran a safe house in the southern part of the city, but after the NKVD reception party at the drop zone and the loss of thirty of his men, he'd decided to improvise for a while. Somebody—Berlin or Tehran—had blown his boys, and he would not deliver himself into their power so quickly again.

He needed a modest place on the very edge of Tehran's outskirts. A lonely place, more mountain than town. He needed food and shelter. And surprise.

Ahead, the trees were thinning. Light increased. Skorzeny knew this place. They were coming to the headwaters of the Jajrood River.

There was a muffled curse behind him—the single word,
Scheisse
—and then the tumbling sound of a body pitched headfirst and out of control.

Skorzeny pulled his gun and turned.

Fuchs was rolling down the hillside, the unwieldy radio pitching him over and over, unable to slow his momentum with his scrabbling hands. As Skorzeny watched, the compact body slammed heavily into a tree trunk, one leg headed downhill, the other trailing behind. There was a crack and groan. Fuchs came to rest.

He was lying on the radio pack like a beetle turned on its shell, blinking dazedly at the sky. All around them, the silence of the forest renewed—but it was a listening silence now, Skorzeny thought.

He imagined the other men halted halfway down the hillside. Staring wordlessly at one another. Wondering whether to turn back or bolt.

“Your leg is broken,” he told Fuchs.

Then he lifted his gun matter-of-factly and shot the boy in the head.