Untersturmfuhrer Gelder was beginning to wish that he was still playing wet nurse to that broken-down cot case of an engineer. Brasch was quite unpleasant company at the best of times, with his mood swings and a dangerous habit of speaking his mind. But shadowing the engineer around Demidenko to ensure that he was never exposed to the attentions of the NKVD was an altogether more agreeable experience than bouncing across the English Channel in the cramped hold of a Schnellboot while all hell raged around him.
They had to be making well over forty knots. The torpedo boat's three diesel engines howled like Valkyrie gone mad, not so much driving them through the rough swell and cross-chop as flinging the one-hundred-ton vessel from the crest of one wave to the next. Each leap ended with a terrifying boom as the hull slammed into the water, the impact compressing Gelder's spine, and once causing him to bite down painfully on his tongue. He was wretched with seasickness and tried to climb up, out into the fresh air.
The passage of the boat was so violent, he wrenched his shoulder and nearly broke an arm just getting up the stairwell. When he finally made the wheelhouse, he cursed himself for having been so stupid. The sea was not his natural realm. Just as the fuhrer once admitted of himself, Gelder was a lion on land, but not so much on water. The sight that greeted him as he hauled himself into the tiny enclosed bridge space was enough to rob any man of his courage.
The Channel was nearly dammed up with shipping, all of it charging about at top speed, either making for the English coast like his boat, or dashing into the body of the German invasion fleet. Like the two British destroyers he could see bearing down on them. The thunder of battle was beyond deafening. It did not just hurt his ears. It pressed in hard upon his mind with such a crushing weight that he thought his sanity might just give out under the barrage. The sea was a maelstrom, seemingly whipped into a storm-tossed frenzy not by the weather, which was only mildly gray and unsettled, but by the violent action of so many men and ships locked in bloody contention.
Not two hundred yards away, a shell or a torpedo or perhaps even a rocket struck a barge, packed with soldiers. It suddenly leapt out of the water, flying apart as the warhead detonated, sending men flying everywhere like the flaming fragments of a Chinese firecracker.
"God help us," Gelder cried as one torn-up, smoking corpse twisted through the air and onto the deck of their boat, where the dead man-surely he must be dead-slammed into the metal vent that scooped clean air down into their lower decks. Despite the awful roar and pandemonium, Gelder distinctly heard the dull thud of impact, which all but crushed the vent. The body, which was missing a leg and most of everything else above the shoulders rolled to the deck-and then mercifully disappeared over the side as they pitched into a turn and slewed down the side of a rogue wave.
The skipper swore and smacked the helmsman on the back as two shells crashed into the wave top they had just vacated, raising evil green eruptions of seawater. Gelder's stomach knotted, and he dry-heaved repeatedly, bracing himself into a corner of the wheelhouse.
"Don't worry, Herr Untersturmfuhrer, we shall get you there alive, yes. Maybe nobody else will survive this fucking crossing, but you're with the best fucking crew in the Kriegsmarine." The man sounded genuinely crazy.
How could anyone survive this? Another barge was destroyed, this time a hundred yards in front of them. It didn't go up in a spectacular detonation like the last one. A diving Spitfire poured hundreds of rounds of tracer into the luckless men trapped in the slow-moving, bucket. Iron splinters and hot flakes of metal erupted from stem to stern, but they were mostly lost in a storm of body parts and bloody ruin that had been an infantry company a few seconds earlier.
Gelder squeezed his eyes shut and tried to focus on his own purpose in being here. He mechanically ran through the mission brief.
He would set down on the coast of Kent. He would make contact with the agent Blair. Blair would take him to a safe house, where he would meet with others sympathetic to the National Socialist cause. Gelder would liaise between them and the SS Sonderaktiontruppen to liberate the leadership cadre of the British Union of Fascists from Holloway Prison.
Falling shells bracketed the speeding Schnellboot, slamming Gelder into a bulkhead and then throwing him to the floor.
He would set down on the coast of Kent. He would make contact…
A flash.
A roar.
And then.
…
…
…
Nothing.