Tense minutes trickled by. Young Kessler resisted the urge to ask the pilot about their situation. He knew Lichtermann would tell him something as soon as he could. Kessler jumped and hit his head on an internal strut when he heard a new sound, a whooshing gush that came from directly behind him. The Plexiglas canopy protecting his position was suddenly doused with droplets of some liquid. It took him a moment to realize Lichtermann must have calculated the Kondor’s fuel load and the distance back to their base at Narvik. He was dumping excess gasoline in order to lighten the aircraft as much as possible. The fuel-dump tube was located behind his ventral gun position.
“How are you doing down there, Kessler?” Lichtermann asked after cutting off the flow.
“Um, fine, sir,” Kessler stammered. “Where did those planes come from?”
“I didn’t even see them,” the pilot confessed.
“They were biplanes. Well, at least the one I shot down was.”
“Must be Swordfish,” Lichtermann said. “It appears the Allies have a new trick up their sleeve. Those didn’t come off a CAM. The rocket-assisted motors would tear the wings clean off. The British must have a new aircraft carrier.”
“But we didn’t see any planes taking off.”
“They could have seen us coming on radar and launched before we spotted the convoy.”
“Can we radio this information to base?”
“Josef ’s working on it now. The radio’s still picking up nothing but static. We’ll be over the coast in a half hour. Reception should clear by then.”
“What do you want me to do, sir?”
“Stay at your station, and keep an eye out for any more Swordfish. We’re making less than a hundred knots, and one could sneak up on us.”
“What about Lieutenant Ebelhardt and Corporal Dietz?”
“Didn’t I hear that your father’s a minister or something?”
“Grandfather, sir. At the Lutheran church in our village.”
“Next letter home to him, have him say a prayer. Ebelhardt and Dietz are both dead.”
There was no more talk after that. Kessler continued to stare into the darkness, hoping to spot an enemy plane but praying he didn’t. He tried not to think about how he had just killed two men. It was war, and they had ambushed the Kondor without warning, so he shouldn’t feel the creeping sense of guilt tingling along his nerves. His hands shouldn’t be trembling and his stomach shouldn’t be so knotted. He wished Lichtermann hadn’t mentioned his grandfather. He could imagine what the stern minister would say. He hated the government and this foolish war they had started, and now it had turned his youngest grandchild into a killer.
Kessler knew he’d never be able to look his grandfather in the eye again.
“I can see the coast,” Lichtermann announced after forty minutes. “We’ll make Narvik yet.”
The Kondor was down to three thousand feet when it flashed over Norway’s north coast. It was a barren, ugly land of foaming surf crashing against featureless cliffs and islands. Only a few fishing villages clung to the crags and inlets, where natives eked a meager living from the sea.
Ernst Kessler
felt a small lift in his spirits. Somehow, being over land made him feel safer. Not that a crash into the rocky terrain below would be survivable, but dying on the ground, where the wreckage could be located and his body given a proper burial, seemed so much better than the anonymity of dying at sea, like the British pilots he’d shot down.
Fate chose that instant to deal her final card. The outboard port engine, which had been humming along at half power and keeping the big reconnaissance plane in trim, gave no warning. It simply seized so hard that the propeller went from a whirling disc providing stability to a stationary sculpture of burnished metal that added a tremendous amount of drag.
On the flight deck, Lichtermann slammed the rudder hard over in an attempt to keep the Kondor from spiraling. The thrust from the starboard wing and the drag from the port made the aircraft all but impossible to fly. It kept wanting to nose over to the left and dive.
Kessler was thrown violently against his gun mount, and a loop of ammunition whipped around him like a snake. It cracked against his face, so that his vision went dim and blood jetted from both nostrils. It came at him again and would have slammed the side of his head had he not ducked and pinned the shining brass belt against a bulkhead.
Lichtermann held the plane steady for a few seconds longer but knew it was a losing battle. The Kondor was too unbalanced. If he had any hope of landing it, he had to equalize thrust and drag. He reached out a gloved hand and hit the kill switches for the starboard engines. They wound down quickly. The stationary propeller continued to cause extra drag on the port side, but Lichtermann could compensate, as his aircraft became an oversized glider.
“Kessler, get up here and strap in,” Lichtermann shouted over the intercom. “We’re going to crash.”
The plane shot over a mountain guarding a fjord with a small glacier at its head, the ice dazzlingly white against the jagged black rock.
Ernst had his shoulder straps off and was bending to crawl out of the gun position when something far below caught his eye. Deep in the cleft of the fjord was a building constructed partially on the glacier. Or perhaps something so ancient that the glacier had started to bury it. It was difficult to judge scale in his brief glimpse, but it looked large, like some kind of old Viking storehouse.
“Captain,” Kessler cried. “Behind us. In that fjord. There is a building. I think we can land on the ice.”