Estocada Page 2

  The squadron tracked north, closing into a tight formation, fighting for altitude. The mountains lay ahead, a familiar line of granite-grey peaks, forbidding in the pale sunshine. There were valleys through these mountains and one of them led to Durango.

  Dieter spotted the town a quarter of an hour later, a carpet of ochre roofs on the valley floor. The sunlight glinted on the broadness of the river and the big church at the city’s heart threw a long shadow over the adjacent plaza. Up here at three thousand metres the blast of the air was icy but Dieter was still looking down as Lutzow led the squadron in a long shallow turn. Everything was toylike. The tiny trams on the broader avenues. The arches of the old stone bridge that spanned the river. And the black specks in the market square that had to be people. Were they aware of the distant clatter of aero engines? Were they looking up, their eyes shaded against the sun, wondering what to make of these silver fish swimming in the blueness of the sky? Had they any idea – any premonition – of what awaited them once Mola’s offensive began to roll?

  Not for the first time, gazing down, Dieter felt godlike, all-powerful. Flying had always set him free. He’d known that sense of liberation from the start, as a young cadet, barely seconds into his first two-minute flight in a training glider in the valley of the Upper Danube. It was a feeling he’d always struggled to put into words, all the more addictive because it grew and grew. To defy gravity, to have all three dimensions at your fingertips, to be free of any earthbound restraints, was an intoxication. It spoke of unlimited possibilities. There was nowhere he couldn’t go, nothing he couldn’t do. Flying offered a freedom so pure, so addictive, it had taken over his entire life.

  Since that first moment of release in the tough little glider he must have spent thousands of hours in the air and every time he pulled back on the joystick and felt the aircraft come alive he’d known that nothing in the world could match this feeling. Except, perhaps, now: peering down at a town of ten thousand souls, the way a doctor might assess a patient before a major operation, armed with the power of life and death. Dieter half-closed his eyes, blurring the image below, wondering who might die, who might survive. War, as he was fast discovering, was a lottery. You could do your best to stack the odds in your favour but in the end there was no telling – no knowing – where and how you might die. Fighter pilots always dismissed this prickle of helplessness because they had to. Fighter pilots, after all, were immortal. There was nothing that could take you by surprise, no odds you couldn’t overcome. That was the first law of aerial combat. Otherwise you were half-dead already.

  Lutzow had begun to climb again, keen to examine the town from every angle. Dieter withdrew his head from the slipstream and pushed the throttle forward, easing the nose up. Then, from nowhere, came a blur of movement barely metres away, a momentary glimpse of a red star against a silver wing, and a lurch in the pit of Dieter’s belly as the He-51 bucked in the slipstream of a Russian fighter. Ratas always hunted in packs. Where were the rest?

  He couldn’t see them. Time stopped. The biplanes around him were breaking away, minnows fleeing for the shelter of the reeds. Ahead, Georg had thrown his aircraft into a steep dive. Dieter followed, his body fighting the turn, his neck twisting left and right, his eyes everywhere, quartering the sky, desperate to anticipate the next attack. He found the ratas seconds later. There were three of them, line abreast, arrowing in for the kill. They were in good hands, and they had 100 kph on the He-51s. This was the Ivans’ turn to play God.

  Dieter tightened his harness. He lived for these moments, for the raw adrenaline rush, for the sweetness of teasing survival from the near-certain prospect of disaster. Three ratas was the minimum he could expect. There would doubtless be more.

  Georg was pulling out of his dive, turning to meet the attack head-on. It was a brave move and the ratas split as they streaked past. Then came the chatter of machine-gun fire as they turned to close on another target. For a brief moment Dieter was alone in the sky, still plunging earthwards, the needle on the air-speed gauge pushing towards 470 kph. Any faster and the aircraft might break up. Any slower and he’d be easy meat for the marauding Ivans.

  At two hundred metres, Durango had become all too real. Dieter hauled back on the joystick, levelling out. At this altitude he was nearly part of the traffic. A truck overladen with building materials, trailing smoke. A sea of white faces and pointing fingers in front of a roadside café. Two cars pulling in to the kerbside for a closer look. Then came the chatter of machine guns again, much closer. The aircraft shuddered under the impact but the engine churned on. Dieter killed the throttle and pulled back on the stick. Moments later, on the edge of a stall, he dropped the flaps. The ratas flashed past, pulling a tight turn for a second attack. Dieter kicked the full left rudder and pushed the throttle forward. By the time he emerged from the turn he was down to forty metres with nowhere left to go. Swooping even lower he sought the shelter of the river. Then came the machine guns again, the bullets pocking the water, before the stubby shadow of the Russian fighter swept over him, the pilot climbing away towards the mountains. Dieter eased up to clear the oncoming bridge, aware for the first time of the presence of another aircraft, barely feet from his starboard wing. He glanced sideways, blinked, then acknowledged the raised glove.

  Georg.

  *

  On the Staffel’s return to Vitoria, it was Oberleutnant Lutzow’s idea to settle 2.J/88’s accounts with the Ivans. The squadron had lost two He-51s over Durango, and a third pilot was now in hospital with a bullet lodged in his thigh. He’d made it back to the airfield, but only just.

  Dieter and Georg were sitting in the big tent that served as Staffel headquarters. Lutzow was bent over a map he’d spread on the table. The Russians flew from an airfield on the coast west of Bilbao. Lutzow estimated the flying time at fifteen minutes.

  Dieter frowned. San Juan de Somorrostro was sixty kilometres away. It was well defended. At low level, the He-51s would be sitting ducks for ground fire.

  ‘You’ll be taking the 109s. Hans thinks he’s found the answer to the engine problem.’

  ‘Thinks?’ This from Georg.

  ‘He assures me it’s solved.’ Lutzow was still gazing at the map. ‘You’ll be taking off tomorrow morning at first light. The Ivans will all be in bed. Shoot their planes up and make sure they see you. We need to spread the word.’

  ‘We’ve finished with the Heinkels?’ Dieter this time.

  ‘We’ll see. Some kind of ground support role? Maybe. It depends.’

  Georg wanted to know when more of the 109s would be arriving.

  ‘Soon. A dozen of the “B” variant are shipping down. We fight fire with fire. No more easy pickings for the Ivans.’ Lutzow at last glanced up. He was looking at Dieter. ‘Someone told me Georg saved your life this afternoon. Is that true?’

  Dieter didn’t answer. Instead he wanted to know whether the new 109s would have radios. That way, next time, they might avoid getting bounced. Relying on hand signals from an open cockpit was no way to fight a war.

  Lutzow held his gaze. He wasn’t smiling. At last he folded up the map and nodded towards the open tent flap. He appeared to have no interest in radios.

  ‘First light, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘This time we do the bouncing.’

  *

  Dieter and Georg played chess that night, three games straight, all victories for Georg. This had never happened before and it seemed to trouble Georg more than Dieter.

  ‘Maybe you need a woman,’ Georg said. ‘Maybe that’s it.’

  ‘You think I could have done better over Durango?’

  ‘I think you were crazy to dive like that. You were inviting him down. You were flying like a novice.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the way I wanted it to look. People make mistakes when they think it’s easy.’

  ‘Of course. But not that easy.’

  ‘You’re saying he shot me down? Something like that, I would have noticed.’

  ‘I’m sayin
g he got very, very close.’

  ‘And then you saved my life?’

  ‘The bastard broke off. It might be the same thing.’

  Dieter was gazing at the chess board. Earlier, at dusk, he’d been for a run, two laps of the airfield in the gathering darkness. He did this every night, along with a set of exercises he’d gradually developed during his time in Spain. That way he slept better and gave himself a fighting chance with the Ivans.

  Tonight, though, was different. There was a rumble of heavy artillery from the north where Mola’s troops had opened their bombardment and from time to time he caught the scarlet shell bursts reflected on the belly of the clouds. In truth, Georg was right. He should never have found himself at twenty metres with nowhere to go.

  ‘You think a woman might do it?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s a possibility. Maybe your gypsy friend?’

  Dieter shrugged. A couple of months back, he’d struck up a liaison with a local woman twice his age whom the squadron quartermaster employed to keep the mess quarters clean. She appeared in the evenings as well, and ghosted into Dieter’s tent under cover of darkness. She had the chest of a diva and a fierce temper, and a pilot in a nearby tent, who knew a little Spanish, reported that after vigorous sex she’d scold Der Kleine over the state of his laundry.

  Georg had always been amused by the story. Dieter’s smile had melted a thousand hearts and even here, in the depths of the Basque Country, he could have any woman he wanted yet he’d clung to this strange relationship through the long winter nights, picking up enough Spanish to conduct a modest conversation.

  One night, Georg had stooped into the tent to find Dieter cross-legged in front of this woman of his, replaying the day’s flying for her benefit, knitting passes, and loops, and sudden reverses with his beautiful hands, laying his trophies at her feet. Was it praise he was after? Or reassurance? Or the kind of simple comfort he might have found from his mother?

  Georg had no idea, but when the woman abruptly transferred her attentions to a good-looking braggart called Wolfgang, Dieter was broken-hearted. A week later she was barred from the airfield after rumours circulated that she was a Republican spy. This had all the makings of a scandal, with potential consequences for her two lovers, yet it was Dieter who ignored the advice of others and traced her to a dusty barrio on the edges of Vitoria, teeming with dogs and kids.

  There, by his own account, he found the tumbledown but spotless shack she called home, knocked on the door and presented a bunch of wild roses. The man who accepted the flowers turned out to be her husband, a fact that didn’t appear to trouble Dieter in the least. In this, as in many other areas of his life, Der Kleine remained an enigma.

  ‘You want another game?’ Georg nodded down at the board.

  ‘No.’

  ‘That woman still on your mind?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tomorrow, then? First light?’

  Dieter held his gaze. Then reached out.

  ‘Thanks.’ He touched Georg lightly on the cheek. ‘For this afternoon.’

  *

  Dieter was at the controls of the Bf-109 before dawn, listening to Hans’s quiet explanation of what was going wrong with the engine. The radiator, it seemed, was malfunctioning towards the higher end of the rev counter. Hans had experimented with various replacement thermostats and finally settled on one that seemed to do the trick. Whatever else happened, Dieter was to keep monitoring the temperature gauge. Anything over the red line, abort the mission at once. Dieter nodded, guessing that dead-stick landings in an aircraft this powerful, and this heavy, would mean lashing himself to a brick.

  ‘Any more good news for me, Hans?’

  ‘Ja,’ the engineer nodded at the firing button on the control column. ‘At least you won’t have to hand-load the bloody machine guns.’

  Dieter and Georg took off at dawn, the first fingers of light creeping over the eastern horizon. The cockpit felt cramped, even to Dieter, and the rearward visibility was Scheisse, but it was an enormous relief to feel the surge of raw power as they climbed away on the compass direction that would take them to the airfield at San Juan.

  In three short years, while the the rest of the world looked the other way, the engineers at the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke factory at Augsberg had conjured an aircraft that promised to match anything else in the sky. It wasn’t perfect, far from it, but once you’d sorted out the prop torque and the narrowness of the undercarriage on take-off, it felt to Dieter like an eager yearling destined for glory. After the dowager embrace of the trusty He-51, this was an aircraft you’d be proud to showcase in any company. Better still, the needle on the temperature gauge was remaining comfortably below the red line.

  Pre-take-off, Dieter had agreed to take the lead once the Ivans’ airfield was in sight. Now, in the spill of yellow from the east, he dropped a wing as the airfield came into view. From three hundred metres it looked as primitive as everything else in Spain. A village of brown tents had sprung up beside a long line of ratas parked in a shallow semi-circle. Even at low altitude, as he roared in over the dusty track that marked the airfield’s perimeter, the snub-nosed aircraft looked too small to be real. To the north lay the coast and the broad inlet that led to Bilbao. Mercifully the gun pits that dotted the airfield were empty.

  Dieter’s thumb found the firing button. He slipped off the safety catch, dropped even lower and waited until the line of aircraft filled his gunsight before firing a long burst. A mechanic working an early shift on one of the planes ran for his life. Another, a little more brave, reached for what looked like a carbine. Before he could even raise the weapon, Dieter was gone, climbing into a steep turn before making another pass.

  Dimly, amongst the long shadows, he recognised Georg stitching more bullets through the line of ratas, then it was his turn again. With one of the ratas in flames, he concentrated this time on the tented encampment. Men from the tents were running for cover. Some of them were naked. One of them stood and shook his fist. Dieter grinned. He could taste the sourness of cordite in the back of his throat. Another long burst from the machine guns. Tents collapsing. Bodies everywhere. One of these men nearly killed me, Dieter told himself. Thank God for Georg. Thank God for Willy Messerschmitt. Thank God for the chance to give these crazy Ivans a proper wake-up call.

  After a third pass, back with the ratas this time, Dieter was out of ammunition. He climbed away from the airfield, watching another aircraft burn, and flew a long left-hand circuit until Georg climbed out of the drifting smoke below to join him. By the time they were back at Vitoria, there was real warmth in the sun.

  Lutzow was waiting outside his tent for a full report. Georg, who liked to handle situations such as these, described rich pickings. Two aircraft certainly destroyed. Untold damage to many others. Dozens of men killed or badly wounded. Not a good day if you happened to be Russian.

  ‘But they saw you? They saw what you could do?’

  ‘They certainly did, sir. The ones who survived.’

  ‘Excellent. The word will spread. That’s all I ask.’

  Dieter wanted to know what might happen next. It was nearly eight o’clock. The first wave of bombers would be minutes away from Durango. What now for the 109s?

  ‘You’ve talked to Hans?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what does he say?’

  ‘He says they’re fine. He says the change of thermostat’s done the trick. He’s rearming and refuelling now. You want us to fly with the Heinkels?’

  ‘Of course.’ Lutzow offered a thin smile. ‘Just in case the Ivans want some more.’

  *

  Flying with the Heinkels, Dieter and Georg agreed later, was no match for their expedition to San Juan. Throttling back, they weaved patterns in the sky overhead as the loose formation of biplanes droned north. Durango was visible forty kilometres away, a towering column of billowing smoke where the bombers had done their work. An hors d’oeuvre of high explosive, followed by a main course of thermite
bombs to incinerate the wreckage. A tasty new offering for a totally new kind of war.

  Closer, it seemed to Dieter that the church had been hit, and closer still – as the Heinkels prepared for their own attacks – he could make out streets full of rubble around the marketplace. Rescue parties were everywhere, running out hoses, fetching water in buckets from the riverbank, doing their best to control dozens of fires. None of them spared a cautionary glance at the skies above.

  The lead Heinkels plunged towards the city centre, adding their own bombs to the chaos below, then breaking off at low level to machine-gun the rescuers as they ran for cover. Men and women fell. Kids, too. One man, a priest, had dropped to his knees in prayer. Dieter watched from a hundred and fifty metres as a line of bullets stitched towards him through the dust and then, as if by some miracle, stopped. Everywhere, farm animals from the market were running blindly in panic and as the smoke thinned beyond the outskirts of the city, Dieter spotted a lone cow, bellowing in the wilderness.

  Then, quite suddenly, it was over. Half a dozen of the Heinkels had expended the last of their ammunition on refugees fleeing into the countryside. The rest of the aircraft were already heading south again, returning to Vitoria. Dieter and Georg caught them up. Of the Ivans, Dieter was glad to note, there had been no sign.

  After landing, Dieter taxied back to the row of Bf-109s still awaiting modification. Hans helped him from the cockpit and then removed the engine casing to check on the ammunition bays. Puzzled, his eyes met Dieter’s.

  ‘Did you fire at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘May I ask why not? Lutzow’s bound to check.’

  ‘I was waiting for the Ivans,’ Dieter said. ‘But they never turned up.’

  *

  Four days later, Lutzow summoned the squadron to a meeting in the mess hut. The bombing of Durango had opened a new chapter in the war. The destruction of the church had killed fourteen nuns, the officiating priest and most of the congregation. Hundreds of other civilians had fallen to the Ju-52s and the strafing Heinkels. With the Führer’s birthday only weeks away, the success of the Legion had sparked celebrations in certain quarters in Berlin yet the Nationalist generals, once again, had called a sudden halt to the offensive. The resilience of the Basque forces in the mountains, it was said, had surprised them. The Reds were bleeding heavily but refused to give in.