Chapter Twenty-One

“I can’t do that,” Ellenor said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know anything about bombs.”

“I’ll teach you.”

“Teach Roby. He looks rugged enough. He was probably a soldier before he was injured. I’m sure he’s far better suited to the task than I am.”

Alec shook his head. “For one thing, Roby has likely never been off the ground in his life, and he’ll puke out his guts as soon as we’re at elevation. We can’t afford a practice run to test his constitution, and I can’t take the chance he’s fit for the job. Secondly, and far more importantly, I don’t want him up there with me. I want you.”

Ellenor had no rebuttal for that. No flippant word. No bit of banter to deflect his gaze. His words moved her. She and Alec were in this together, however it turned out. Ellenor’s trust in him was disproportionate to the amount of time she’d known him. The day she’d met him, he’d said one simple thing as he lay bleeding: I have to find her. Yet now that he’d reached Sarah, his motivations had changed, and Ellenor’s had changed along with them.

“You shouldn’t say things like that,” she told him.

“In wartime, one speaks only the truth.”

“And what if we weren’t at war?”

“Oh, I suppose I’d skirt the subject indefinitely, knowing me.”

Ellenor imagined herself up there with him, taking to the skies under the cover of a new moon, banking hard to the left and tipping the release lever, listening to a bomb whistle as it fell…

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“What will we do after this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s say we convince Sarah to go forward with this plan of yours tonight and by some miracle we succeed in not dying. What happens next?”

“Find a bottle of champagne and celebrate?”

“While we’re flying away? We won’t be able to land here again. The military at all the nearby posts will rush in to see who was responsible. Once we’re in the air, win or lose, we’ll have to keep going.”

“Hmmm. I suppose you’re right. We’ll make sure to take on plenty of petrol.”

“But where will we go?” she pressed, knowing he hadn’t considered it. He might have had a life back home in Derby, but did he expect her to get on a steamship and sail back to America? Nothing was waiting for her there. Everything she had was in front of her.

After a while he said, “I wish I had an answer for you. I had imagined that Sarah and I would land safely back in France, then make our way to a port somewhere, perhaps Calais, and use some of Sarah’s money to pay for passage to England. I’d report to an RFC base and confess my story so as not to be branded a deserter for the rest of my life, and then I’d face whatever punishment they gave me. They’d never let me near an airplane again, but it would’ve been worth it. Now none of that is happening. I’ll talk to Sarah, see what she wants to do. All I know for certain is that I’m not going anywhere without you, if you don’t mind.”

She kept her hands folded safely in her lap. “I don’t mind at all.”

When they heard Klaus stirring downstairs, they washed and joined him for breakfast. He was a man whose son had died of smallpox and daughter-in-law was presumed dead, and he wore those burdens. Ellenor saw it in the way he moved, like a man carrying a yoke across his shoulders. Sarah was cruel to let him live like this. Ellenor intended to confront her about it when next they met.

Uli prepared a simple breakfast of Müesli and milk. Alec—freshly scrubbed—assisted with the tea, while Klaus read a newspaper that was six days old; the plain cereal was due to a lack of fresh fruit, and the outdated paper to a shortage of newsprint. Delivery trucks came less frequently by the week. Ellenor found herself making an effort to talk to Klaus about anything that seemed to interest him. He enjoyed visiting the local Kientopp, a storefront cinema, though he complained that most films were preceded by at least one reel of war propaganda. Ellenor ached for him, as half of his sorrow could be alleviated if Uli would just tell him the truth. She developed a grudge against Sarah that she vowed to resolve before noon.

Klaus Weller put on his hat and left for the factory, telling Ellenor they could stay as long as they liked. He enjoyed their company, even if his taciturn demeanor indicated otherwise.

Watching through the drapes as he made his way down the walk, Ellenor suspected she would never see him again. Her life had become a series of interludes.

When they were ready, Uli led them out again, taking a different route to the hulking stable building and avoiding contact with those they passed along the way. The morning was clear and vibrant; when the afternoon arrived, it would be hot. A church steeple with brass trim reflected the sun like a lighthouse.

A lookout was now posted outside the stable. He was a cripple, nonchalant, reading a disintegrating copy of The Metamorphosis with a jar half full of pfennig coins beside him. Uli dropped in a handful of change, and the man did not even glance up. Ellenor noticed the string mostly covered in straw a few inches from where he sat. She knew the other end of that line was connected to a bell downstairs.

A few minutes later, they were underground again, where Roby field-stripped an Enfield rifle and Jules waited with his arms crossed near Sarah, like a court bodyguard within reach of his queen.

“Good morning,” Sarah said. “I hope you were able to get a couple of hours of sleep. Let’s have a seat. We need to work this out. If you’re right about the timing of the raid, we have a little over sixteen hours to find a solution.”

They gathered in wooden chairs.

Ellenor didn’t want to miss her chance. She spoke first, looking at Sarah. “Why do you let Klaus go on thinking you’re dead? Do you not trust him to keep your secret?”

Sarah seemed as if she’d been expecting the question. “I hear what you’re saying. It’s on my mind almost every day. But it’s not Klaus so much as the people he knows. He’s a successful businessman. He has friends who are bankers, barristers, politicians, generals. I can’t risk telling him the truth, because he might choose to confide in the wrong person.”

“So you let him live in misery?”

“If they know I’m alive, I’m a danger to him. This is the only way I can keep him safe.”

“I don’t think anyone is safe anymore,” Ellenor said. “We just have to hope for luck, or for a hand to hold. It’s all too precarious to let him go on living like that. You need to tell him.”

“Or what? You’ll tell him yourself?”

The thought had occurred to her. Sarah must have seen that in her face.

Sarah acquiesced with a nod. “Let’s concentrate on the problem at hand. If we make it through the night, I’ll find a way to speak with Klaus. I promise.”

Alec said, “Better take her up on that promise, old girl. My dear sister may have her faults, but I’ve never known her to break a vow.”

“I believe you.” Ellenor didn’t know what prompted her, but she stood up and held out her hand. Maybe shaking would make it permanent and real.

Sarah rose and clasped her hand in return and then did something that surprised everyone in the room: she pulled Ellenor into a close embrace.

As Ellenor returned the hug, Sarah whispered in her ear: “My brother is smitten.”

Before Ellenor could process this, Sarah withdrew to her seat and said with authority, “So let’s find some way of sticking it to these Boche bastards, shall we?”

****

With fifteen hours remaining, Alec studied the map they’d drawn on a long length of butcher’s paper. The nests of the big ninety-millimeter weapons were marked with circles drawn by Jules with an architect’s precision. The guns were positioned far enough from the city that streetlamps would not illuminate them at night, so they could remain mostly invisible in the dark. This also meant, however, no risk of civilian casualties when Alec and Ellenor dropped their bombs. The command center—a half-buried block of reinforced cement—hunched in the shadow of the Cathedral of Saint Stephen as if embarrassed to be there.

“I hear the Frenchies are on the verge of mutiny,” Roby said.

“The infantry’s in bad shape,” Alec confirmed, studying the schematic. “They’re sick of being ordered to go over the top and be shredded by happy Huns with machine guns. Can’t say I blame them.”

“And the air service?”

“A different story. Morale’s a bit stronger at the aerodromes.”

“Why is that?” Sarah asked.

“I suppose we have a dissimilar view of the conflict.”

“You’re fighting against the same enemy as the infantry, aren’t you?”

Alec’s smile contained no mirth. It felt like a cold, almost bitter thing on his face. “We flyers don’t know the real war, because we don’t know the smell.”

“What does that mean?” Sarah asked. “What smell?”

Alec wondered how much he should say. “It’s like this. Boys and horses have been dying in the same trenches for three years. There are layers of them stuffed into the muck by now, their skulls and skin the same color as the mud. They died to take fifty yards of territory that some other platoon had lost the week before. They can’t be buried properly. It’s all slime and shit out there. So they sink into the mire. A month later, when an entrenching team is sent to dig a new communications tunnel in knee-high water, they find the bodies, chaps that look just like them, their chests full of happy little medals and their entrails swimming with worms. The constant smell can drive a man mad.” He ran a hand through his blond hair. “Flyers know about dying. But we don’t know about war.”

Ellenor shuddered visibly at this description. Roby nodded and said simply, “Aye.”

“Back to the matter at hand,” Sarah said, attempting to keep them on task. She touched the map. “The French squadron arrives over the city early tomorrow morning, before sunup. To clear the way for them, we’re facing two different threats that require two different solutions.”

“The ack-ack and the bunker,” Alec said.

“Correct. For the sake of argument, let’s say the two of you are a smashing success and manage to take out most of the guns. The command center is sunk halfway in the ground. It’s made of concrete and steel. You can’t count on destroying it from the air, and there’s no way that Roby and Jules and I can force our way inside. And that means the wireless radio will alert every German soldier within a hundred-kilometer radius as soon as your first bomb hits the ground. They’ll get planes in the air from all directions. If the radio operators remain in that bunker, it will take a miracle to keep you in one piece.”

“You don’t think a bomb can penetrate that place?”

“For one thing, you don’t have a bomb to spare. It will take all four if you hope to eliminate enough of the anti-aircraft weapons to make a difference, simply because they’re positioned too far apart from one another. But aside from that, no, I don’t think you can blast your way through even if you had spare munitions.”

“Then what’s the point of all this, sis?”

“The point is to save the French planes so they can destroy the factory, which you can still accomplish.”

“Sure, at the expense of our own lives. There are probably half a dozen Jastas within a short flight of this city, and if the radio men are allowed to transmit, half the Luftstreitkräfte will be on top of Ellenor and me before we get five miles away. Don’t you have some local rabble you can rouse to assault the bunker?”

“Look around. This is what we have.”

“Well, I’m not quite sure how I feel about a suicide mission.”

“We’ll call it off, find another way.”

“There is no other way.”

Sarah threw up her hands. “What would you have us do, Alec? Do you want those French pilots to fly into a deathtrap? And if E.I. keeps mass-producing shells, how many other deaths will be on our hands?” She sighed, the frustration causing her shoulders to sag. “At the same time, I don’t want you hurt, either of you, so as long as that bunker is occupied, I won’t support this mission.”

No one seemed to know what to say after that. Roby had carved a scale model of one of the German guns, and he turned it over in his hands. Jules swished coffee in his mug. Alec stared at his sister, wishing she’d never met Stefan Weller and moved to this wretched place.

“Can I tell you about the bees?” Ellenor said into the silence.

They all looked at her.

“I don’t belong here,” she began. “In fact, the very idea that I’m sitting here in this basement, discussing ways to blow things up and save lives, is so far removed from who I am that it’s like I’m back in the children’s room again at Father’s farm, reading them a story of a woman from another world. So all I can do is talk about what I know best.” She gathered her thoughts and continued. “When you’re a beekeeper, you regularly find yourself facing fifty thousand armed warriors who are willing to die for their queen. The only way to stay safe when you’re working the hive is to confuse them all with smoke. So the men in that bunker…we smoke them out.”