Blood of the Reich

20

Flying to Lhasa, Tibet

September 10, 1938

O n the third day of Hood’s flight from Hankow, China began to rise like a lumpy loaf of bread. Hills became a universe of forested mountains, cut by deep, shadowy valleys that were seamed by rivers. He and Calloway crossed the upper reaches of the Yangtze and the Mekong. The little biplane jounced as it cleared each ridge crest, land falling dizzyingly away and carrying Hood’s stomach with it.

If Ben couldn’t catch Raeder in Lhasa, it was going to be hard to track him in the vastness that was Asia.

The trees thinned and then largely disappeared. Clouds scattered, and the sky became a vast bowl of blue. Snowy ranges occupied the horizon in all directions, like distant whitecaps. Their plane was an insect buzzing across eternity.

Ben was jostled from a doze when Beth pounded him on the shoulder. “Check the gas!”

The fuel tank was in the upper wing and fed the engine by a tube strapped to a strut. Next to it was a glass gauge that gave a simple eyesight reading of how much gasoline was left.

“We’re almost empty!”

“See why we needed those cans?” She glanced around. “There’s pasture in that valley. Maybe flat enough to land.” The biplane began to descend.

It was like entering a room, the mountains rising around them as they sank, narrowing the sky. Hood could see a few tents at the upper end of the valley and was uneasy about landing where there were people. Farther on, animals grazed. Calloway swept down over the herdsmen and sped down the length of the valley, dropping until the plane was skimming only twenty feet off the ground. She leaned out, studying. Rocks and bushes flashed by. To Hood, it looked like the kind of place where once you landed, you didn’t leave.

“Looks risky!” he shouted.

She pulled on the stick, climbed, and banked. Empty mountainside flashed by the wingtips. They’d stirred the herdsmen’s camp and people were running, pointing, and fetching horses. A final tight turn at the valley’s head and Beth was aimed down the valley again, her touchdown picked.

“I saw a red flag back there!” she warned.

“So?”

“Those aren’t just herdsmen. They’re Communist mercenaries!”

“So?”

“Drafted bandits. Hang on!”

They drifted down the last few feet as the plane felt for safe purchase. Hood could hear grass whickering at the spinning wheels. They touched, bounced, touched, and bounced again, and then they were roughly down. A boulder loomed ahead but the plane slewed to miss it, coming around to point back toward the tents at the head of the valley. The engine coughed and stopped, the propeller jerking to a halt.

“We’ll take off into the wind,” she said. The breeze blew exhaust smoke back into their faces. “Get out and pass up those petrol canisters.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Ben opened the compartment behind the pilot and boosted the five-gallon cans up to where Calloway balanced by the upper wing. She used a funnel to pour the precious fuel, its color a whiskey peat. Periodically she glanced up-valley like a wary bird.

“Company,” she finally said, pointing.

A party of men on tough little ponies was galloping toward them.

“What do you think they want?” Hood asked.

“Whatever they can take, I imagine. Or to arrest us and steal the plane, if a commissar is looking over their shoulder.”

“Then let’s get the hell out.”

“Not until we’re refueled.” She sounded grim. “You’d better figure out a way to slow them down.”

Hood took his rifle out of the cockpit. He’d shot at animals a thousand times, but China was his first war. His gun had a German Zeiss scope. He rested it on the fuselage and sighted. The horsemen were carrying their own rifles.

“Should I try scaring them?”

“If you just want to make them angry.”

“Maybe we can negotiate.”

“With what? Me?” They were bandits impressed as guerrilla soldiers, she explained, and their idea of mission and discipline devolved from the Mongol hordes.

“Big target to start,” he muttered. Hood aimed at the breast of the lead horse, held his breath, and squeezed. The rifle bucked. The horse jerked out of his scope’s view and he looked up. The animal had fallen, its rider tumbling. The others reined up in momentary confusion. Dust swirled. He could hear surprised, angry shouts.

“Are you done?” he called impatiently.

“Still pouring. We don’t want to have to do this again.”

“Christ.” Now there was the sizzle of bullets whipping by, the bandit rifles thankfully inaccurate at five hundred yards. Then pops as the sound of the shots reached them. Puffs of smoke hazed their attackers. The Communist cavalry was fanning out into a semicircle.

“I told you you’d just make them mad. They’ll rape me and bugger you before they kill us. The killing part will take a day or more.”

“Great airport you picked.” He aimed again. They were riding hard now, an arc converging on their plane.

“I was told you were a great shot.” Her voice was cool, but there was just a tremble.

He fired, worked the bolt to feed another cartridge, swung his muzzle, and fired again. And again. And again. One, two went flying from their mounts. Just three hundred yards now. He could hear the whap of bandit bullets hitting their airplane and he unconsciously tensed, waiting for one to strike his own flesh.

Beth pulled a pistol and rattled off several shots from her wing perch while a funnel finished draining, not really trying to hit anything. Then she leaped down, ramming the empty cans back into the fuselage. She vaulted into the cockpit and set the ignition. “Now, now! Crank the prop!”

Hood shot and a pony went tumbling. He threw the Winchester into his own cockpit and ran to the propeller, giving it a heave. The engine roared. The plane was already moving when he sprang onto a lower wing and hauled himself aboard. They bounced over the lumpy field, aiming at their assailants. Yips heightened. Still at least a dozen of them.

He climbed into his own seat. “I can’t aim with all this bouncing.”

“Neither can they, I hope.” But then a bullet shattered part of the windshield above her instruments, fragments bright as they flew. “Dammit, that stung! Throw off their aim, Ben!”

Hood scooped up his shotgun, an over-and-under with two barrels. The plane was slowly gaining speed as it skipped across the ground, but each second brought them closer to their wildly firing assailants.

One horseman set his course directly for their propeller, as if determined to drive his horse directly into it. Maybe he would, leaping off his steed at the last minute.

Hood stood, hauled himself onto the top biplane wing where Calloway had been, and aimed the shotgun above the arc of the spinning propeller. He dare not fire through it, lest he chew off their propulsion.

The gunman spotted him and aimed his rifle. They were just yards apart. The rifle fired and the shotgun bucked and the pony tumbled, the rider’s rifle flying. Lead sizzled past the curator’s head. The aircraft vaulted, the undercarriage bouncing as they clawed over the careening horse, wheels given a quick spin. They were past, bounced, and jumped up in the air again, engine howling. Another horseman came galloping alongside, taking aim at Beth. Hood pivoted, fired, and the bandit threw up his hands and pitched backward.

“Yee-hah!” Calloway shouted. Her cheek was bleeding.

Hood allowed the wind to push him down into his cockpit again. The horseman had tumbled into the dust, to his immense satisfaction.

This was more exciting than museum meetings in New York!

The others hadn’t given up. They were riding hard behind, bullets peppering the wings. Hood stood, bracing with his knees, and broke the shotgun open to reload. When it snapped shut he aimed backward over Calloway’s head and fired. Bam, bam! Buckshot sprayed. Three more swerved, leaning like drunken men, and then the ground was falling away as the Curtis strained, reaching for the sky. They swept over the tents, men still shooting, red flag snapping in the wind.

A cliff loomed.

“Bank!”

They cleared it by inches.

Finally they had enough altitude to pivot back toward the west. Far below, horsemen milled in frustration. Hood could see the specks of bodies he’d dropped.

He didn’t feel guilt; he felt relief.

“Nice shooting!” She pounded him on the back. He turned. She was grinning beneath her goggles.

“Couldn’t you have picked a quieter place to land?”

“I’m not that lucky. But you are, maybe.”

“Are you hit?”

“Scratched, but they didn’t get our gas, or our engine, either. We’re going to make it to Lhasa, Ben.”

He put a finger to her cheek, wiping blood away. The wound had coagulated. “I wish we had that bottle of scotch.”

She laughed. “Me, too! It could stretch our fuel!”

T hat dusk they came down on little more than fumes into the valley of the Kyi-Chu. The sun had sunk behind the encircling mountains, the golden glow of the roofs of the Potala winking out. A few lamps burned but Lhasa was still unelectrified, dark and remote. There was an airstrip, however, and the Curtis touched and taxied to rest next to two other derelict biplanes, a British aluminum transport with no wings or engines, and a stone corral of yaks.

Was Raeder still here? And what would Hood do if he was?

How many men had he killed today?

Hood and Beth dropped to the ground, shaken, exultant, exhausted. There were bullet holes all over Calloway’s biplane, and shell casings littered his cockpit floor. Thwarting death makes you feel alive. Besting men makes you feel strong. And her wire-and-chewing-gum crate was a tough little bastard after all.

He smiled. It was primitive. Elemental.

Beth watched him as he walked around the airplane. Her hair was a ragged mess after being crushed by the flying helmet, her face smudged with soot and blood, and her fingers still smelled of fuel. But her eyes were very, very bright.

He came to stand close. The barrels of his guns still jutted from the cockpit. No one had come out to the grass strip to greet them. They could hear the river running in the distance.

“Now you’ll see this Tibetan woman you left?” she asked.

“Maybe. I’m dreading it, actually. What am I going to say? I think I’ll ask the British what they know and decide how to approach Raeder.” He stared toward the river. “Now that I’m here, I’m not exactly certain what I’m supposed to do.”

“Save the world, right?”

“Yes. Or didn’t we agree you can only save yourself?” He put his finger in one of the bullet holes. It was a miracle they hadn’t been disabled. “And you, Miss Calloway, have gotten me this far. You’re a good pilot.”

“You’re a good shot.”

And then, because she’d finally tired of waiting for him to initiate things, she kissed him.

It took him by surprise, but then women were sometimes inexplicable. So he kissed back, enjoying the taste of her, and suddenly restless for release after the trauma of the last few days. She broke with a little gasp, her eyes wide as if surprised by herself, and he leaned in to kiss her neck.

“You smell like gasoline,” he whispered.

“You smell like gunpowder.”

He laughed, kissing her ear, her nape, the hollow under her neck in front. He opened a button on her shirt and nuzzled part of her shoulder. Her hands were pulling on him and he let his own roam over her rough clothes. She was the opposite of the society princesses and glamour models he grazed through, and a hundred times more desirable because of it. She was real. He lifted his face and she kissed him fiercely, cupping his head with her hands, eyes moist and urgent.

Then the two of them were down on the grass as the moon rose over the mountains, fighting out of their clothes. He tarried while peeling hers off, enjoying how she allowed his hands and mouth to explore. She made little sounds, not the tough aviatrix but only a woman hungry for connection. And then they fused.

This one meant something.

They kissed more tenderly, still locked together. In fact, he was so busy kissing that he didn’t notice the dozen Tibetan soldiers who materialized out of the dusk and surrounded them and their plane, peering down at their pale bodies in the moonlight.

“Benjamin Hood?” one finally interrupted in British-accented English.

Ben started and jerked around. Beth shouted and snatched at clothes to cover herself.

“What the hell?”

“Apologies, Doctor. But you are under palace arrest.”