Clem Leone sat in the cold, damp dark remembering the day before. He hadn’t known right away that Wacky Donald had exploded under him. One minute he was hugging machine guns in a 160-mile-per-hour slipstream, and the next he awakened free-falling from 14,000 feet, unable to breathe. He had been here last December 29; he knew the sensation of his dead weight falling to earth, except this time he was tumbling to earth. How long had he been out? He didn’t know. How close was the earth? No idea. But he did know where the ripcord was on his chest chute, and he grabbed it and yanked with all his might. The silks spilled out and reached up above him and caught the air. Physics yanked him up so that he no longer tumbled. He hung there on the lines, his head clearing so he could figure out what likely had happened. The swirling fire inside the fuselage must have found the wing tanks, putting Wacky Donald out of her misery once and for all. Then he was out in the air like somebody’s laundry, the future uncertain under him. His face was wet; from what, he couldn’t imagine.
From 10,000 feet, he saw below an expanse of snow-covered ground, some roads, woodlands, and the sharp angles of farm fields. He saw a sizable lake, and he was sinking toward it. Despite being an Inner Harbor boy, he had never learned to swim, so this lake was a problem. He grabbed a handful of lines and gave them a pull. Yes, by pulling with all his weight on one side or the other he could steer the parachute. Good, because he didn’t want to survive a bailout only to drown in some German lake.
He drifted earthward for many minutes under that giant white canopy, long enough to signal the entire German army. As the ground approached, he thought of his last parachute landing that hadn’t gone so well. He wondered if his leg, still mending, could withstand what was about to happen. He raised himself into a ball and hugged his knees to prepare for impact.
He hit the earth with a thud, tail first. Pain ripped through his core. Above him was clear sky with some blue. There was no sense of an air armada now except for some contrails in various stages of decomposition. There were no other parachutes and no enemy aircraft. Just empty sky.
He couldn’t move without pain in his chest. He couldn’t draw a decent breath. He sensed movement about him and struggled to find his feet and shed himself of the lines and silk that now impeded his reactions. As he scrambled up he saw smears of blood in the snow, his own blood, which accounted for his wet face.
Instead of soldiers, he saw civilians, four or five of them, then others, running toward him. He had heard the briefings, that German civilians were capturing and executing “American gangsters” from the sky. He unhooked his chute and tossed it aside, pulled his .45, and waited. In his cloudy mind he believed this was the end. It had to be.
The civilians didn’t attack him. They kept their distance, wary of his sidearm. “Hollander! Hollander!” said a man, gesturing to himself. Gesturing to all of them. Again, slowly: “Hollander.”
Clem realized: Oh, my God, they’re Dutch. It hit him that Blomberg had managed to keep the ship airborne heading west long enough to get them over Holland for bailout. They must be dead: Blomberg, McCormick, and Cooper. He had no idea what had become of McKee and Varga. Maybe they all were dead.
Leone’s back hurt like someone had stabbed him there. It hurt like hell, and hot blood still dripped off his chin. He had landed so hard that his just-healed leg pained him, and he wondered if he had rebroken it.
“Bless?” asked the man, pointing at Clem’s chest, which he was holding with his arm. Clem didn’t understand; he said so with a shake of his head. The stranger said again, “Bless?” And then pointed to Leone’s bloody face.
Leone remembered his translation card. Blessed. All he could think to say was, “Protestant.”
The man said, “Kom met ons.” He motioned toward himself, and he turned and pointed at farm fields and at a hill crowned by a farm house. “Kom.” The group shepherded Clem through the fields as fast as he was able. In a few minutes they arrived at the farm on the hill, and Leone was ushered inside to the kitchen, where he sat at a table. A jam sandwich appeared before him with a glass of milk. Then a basin of water and a towel were brought so he could wash his face and hands.
As he consumed the sandwich and drank the milk, he was aware of eyes watching him, a stranger who had participated in the air battle high above and then fell from the sky. He must have made one battle-scorched sight. They didn’t know him from Adam, but they wanted to like him, that much was clear.
As he finished his food and toweled off his face and hands, he became aware of commotion outside. Voices were raised in argument, and a man was pushing his way through, rifle in hand. A German soldier entered the kitchen. The barrel of a Mauser stared at Leone. He raised his hands as best he could with the stabbing pains in his body. The soldier reached forward and snatched Clem’s Colt from his shoulder holster. There had been briefings about the soldiers that downed fliers could expect to meet. This one didn’t look like regular German army. The uniform was nearly right—some sort of militia maybe. He motioned Clem to his feet and outside, down the steps of the house, and then back down the long hill.
By the position of the sun Clem figured he was heading north, past other houses, then onto a road and toward a town. They walked what seemed a long way. He turned to look behind him, and there he saw twenty or more Dutch people trailing behind the soldier.
Clem kept walking along the road. “Stoppen!” Clem obeyed automatically. No need for a translator on that one. Ahead and to the right was a field, and some sort of camp strung with wire.
“Komen! Komen! Op deze wilze!” The soldier motioned with his rifle for Leone to pass through the gate of the camp. “Inside! Inside!”
Instinct made Leone hesitate. He stood there in a stupor, knowing he could be shot at any second. “Inside!”
A young man in the group of civilians reached out and pulled Leone close. “Run,” he said. The young man nodded in encouragement, and smiled. “Run!” And the youth started running toward some trees.
At that instant the crowd descended upon the soldier and tackled him to the ground, almost taking Clem down too. He stood there for a second, stunned at this crazy gesture by people he didn’t even know. They were clubbing the soldier with their fists, kicking him; one moment peaceful farmers and the next a mob. He didn’t hesitate; he ran.
Through fields and woods he followed the boy to a deep thicket, where he pulled aside some brush. He saw a wooden door flat on the earth. The youth lifted it. “In!” he said and motioned. “In!” Clem did as he was told. Down he went and plopped to the floor of some enclosure, pain shooting through him. He looked up to see a wooden ladder beside him in this frozen gopher hole dug out of the earth. The wooden door closed over him, and he could hear brush being replaced to camouflage the spot.
That was how he had come to be alone in the dark, in the middle of wherever. He kept thinking of Tibenham, that sickly, mud-soaked base now hundreds of miles away. He thought of his dead crew, and of his mother and the telegram she would get, and the grief she would feel. And there was no way he could say, here I am, Mother, in a secret, frozen hole in rural Holland, just west of the German border.