“Through the door, Sir. There’s an officer inside who wants to see you.”
Peter pushed open the door, went down a flight of stairs, and then pushed open another door.
The hangar was larger than he had imagined. And it held four aircraft of a type he had never seen before. Peter walked toward the closest one, oblivious to everything else in the hangar.
It looks like something from the future!
It has to be a fighter! It’s larger than a Focke-Wulf or a Messerschmitt, but it’s too small to be a bomber!
And it’s sleek! My God, is it sleek!
There were four heavy barrels protruding from the nose of the machine.
Those aren’t machine guns, they’re machine cannons!
Twenty-millimeter machine cannons.
No! Thirty-millimeter cannons!
Where the hell is the engine, the propeller?
He looked around the hangar at the other three aircraft. He could see one of them more clearly than the others. It was bathed in the glare of work lights, as mechanics crawled over it. A man wearing a sheepskin high-altitude flight jacket and trousers—obviously a pilot—was standing with his hands on hips talking to a mechanic standing on a wing.
There’s no engine or propeller on that, either!
What is this, a pusher? He knew that experimental aircraft, called “pushers,” because their propellers were mounted at the rear, had been tested without much success by all the belligerent powers. The idea was to lessen aerodynamic drag at the nose.
He walked to the side of the aircraft and looked toward the rear. And for the first time took a closer look at what he had assumed were droppable fuel tanks suspended beneath the wing.
Those aren’t fuel tanks!
What the hell are they?
Peter bent and looked into the forward opening of whatever the hell this thing that looked like a fuel tank was. He had no idea what he was looking at. He walked around the wing tip and looked in the rear opening of whatever the hell this tubular-shaped object was. There was a pointed, round object projecting three inches or so out of the opening. It disappeared inside the body of the object.
“Major von Wachtstein,” a pleasant voice inquired courteously. “Do you suppose you could spare me a moment or two of your valuable time?”
Peter stood up and looked over the wing at the pilot he had seen a moment before. He knew the neatly mustachioed, smiling face beneath the pilot’s cap perched irreverently—fighter pilot’s style—atop his head.
A Pavlovian reflex took over. He popped to attention. His heels clicked as he snapped his hand crisply to the brim of his uniform cap.
“I beg the Herr General’s pardon,” he said. “I did not see the Herr General.”
“Hansel,” Generalmajor Adolf Galland, the youngest general officer in the military service of Germany, said, returning the salute with a casual gesture in the general direction of his brimmed cap, “you were always a lousy soldier. Not too bad a pilot, but a lousy officer.”
And then Galland held his arms wide. This exposed at Galland’s neck the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Swords and Diamonds, Germany’s highest award for valor.
Peter understood that he was now expected to approach the General, who had every obvious intention of embracing him.
He did so.
“It’s good to see you, Hansel,” Galland said, and then put his arms around him.
“It’s very good to see you, Sir,” Peter said.
“Normally, when I send for someone, t
hey come on the run,” Galland said. “Not stopping to take in the sights.”