Red Sniper: A World War II Thriller

CHAPTER 36

It was a universal fact of military hierarchy that nobody paid any attention to maintenance personnel on a base. It didn’t matter if you were in the American, British, Russian, or German military, it was a given that these personnel were anonymous. The guy fixing the trucks and planes never got the glory. He didn’t even carry a weapon. You didn't have to salute him. Officers you had to watch out for. Maintenance guys, on the other hand, could be safely ignored.

Perfect camouflage, to Cole’s way of thinking.

Cole was leading the way, rolling his tire through the slush toward the airfield. Inna, Vaccaro, and Dmitri followed, carrying their boxes. Then came Whitlock, rolling his tire.

All around them, soldiers ran by, scrambling toward the trucks. The whole damn base was mobilizing. Most of the Russian troops looked no older than Dmitri and they wore new uniforms. New recruits. They were too confused to even give Cole a second look. Like a typical officer, the Russian who had met them on the road seemed to have decided that there was no point in making do with one truckload of reinforcements, not when he could round up several truckloads of troops and make the whole operation seem more important. The entire base now resembled an ant nest that someone had poked a stick into.

They might have made it without any trouble if it hadn’t been for Dmitri’s long johns.

An officer went by and Cole kept his head down. At first, the officer didn't seem to notice Cole or the others. Then he slowed his pace and gave Cole a hard look, like the boss man on a road gang, before moving on. Cole tilted his head so that he could watch the officer out of the corner of his eye.

The officer stopped. Turned. Stared hard at the soldier wearing only long johns.

Setting his mouth in a grim line, he started toward Dmitri. He clearly seemed to be thinking that discipline had gotten too lax, even for the maintenance crew. He put his hand on the holster flap.

"Keep going," Cole muttered to Inna behind him.

He rolled his tire to one side, staying bent over it, still keeping his head down.

The officer approached, shouting something in Russian. He didn't sound happy. His hand was on his pistol, but he hadn't drawn it yet, which was a good thing — the Russians seemed to have a penchant for shooting soldiers over the smallest infraction.

Cole didn't let him get that far. He straightened up and turned into the officer to block his path. Dropped the box and got up close and personal. Now the officer seemed to sense that something was going on out of the ordinary. This time, he did start to draw the pistol.

Cole used his left hand to grab the Russian's wrist, preventing the gun from leaving the holster. With his right hand, he drew his hunting knife and plunged the blade into the Russian's throat. He hit him as hard as he had ever hit anything ever before. The blade was sharpened on both sides at the tip so that it speared through the gristle and muscle. Cole put all his weight behind it, and the blade stopped only when the tip struck the vertebrae in the back of the Russian's neck. It was a horrible sensation, and Cole felt sickened as he wrenched the knife free.

The Russian wanted to shout, but couldn't. His voice box was destroyed. He sank to his knees, his hands at his throat, making wet gargling noises, dying.

"Go!" Cole shouted.

They dropped their tires and boxes, and ran the rest of the way to the airfield. In the confusion, none of the Soviet troops had noticed the attack on the officer. Not yet, anyhow. Cole figured they had a minute or two at most to catch a plane.

At that moment, Cole realized he hadn't thought something through, which was the fact that they would need a plane large enough to carry them all. There wasn't much to choose from. Cole saw a couple of smaller reconnaissance planes that appeared to be two-seaters, and three sleek fighters.

"This one!" Whitlock had anticipated the same problem, and was pointing at the largest plane on the airfield.

None of the other planes was big enough for them all, except for this airplane, which appeared to be some sort of cargo hauler. It probably flew in medical supplies, mail, and the commandant's weekly vodka ration.

On closer inspection of the plane, Cole’s heart sank.

The plane looked flimsy, like it had been made out of old beer cans hammered flat and riveted together by the guy who’d been drinking the beer. Some of the finer work might have been done when the guy was hung over on Monday morning.

"I've never seen a plane that looked like it already crashed before it took off," Vaccaro said. "You sure about this?"

"It's this or back to the Gulag," Cole said. "Whitlock, you reckon you can fly this crate?"

“I can fly it,” he said. “The question is, will it fly?” He ran to pull away the wheel chocks.

Cole cast a quick glance toward where the officer’s body lay, leaking a pool of blood into the trampled snow. They didn’t have long. “You all had best get in.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll be right back.”

The others piled into the plane. When a cargo plane like this was on the ground, sitting on the third wheel in the tail, the floor was sharply sloped. Whitlock climbed toward the cockpit and the others scrambled to the rough seats that pulled down from the sides. The only windows were in the cockpit. The bare interior was cold and dark, and smelled heavily of oil and gasoline, with an underlying funk of spoiled potatoes.

It did indeed feel like being inside a beer can, with aluminum walls exactly that thin. A burst from a machine gun would cut the metal skin and everyone inside to shreds. The cargo plane didn't have any sort of guns itself. Totally defenseless.

Cole was running across the airstrip, his knife in one hand. The blade was still red with the Russian officer’s blood. He reached the nearest fighter plane and jabbed the blade into the tires. Then he ran to the next plane. And the next. He didn’t bother with the spotter planes. He was out of time.

Still, no one had taken any notice of what was going on at the airfield. He raced back toward their own plane and climbed in, pulling the hatch shut after him.

“Go!” he shouted.

Whitlock was flicking toggle switches and adjusting levers. “There's no time to do any kind of flight check, so we'll just have to pray that this crate flies," he shouted from the cockpit. "I hope to hell this thing is fueled up. I'll need to figure out what the fuel gauge even looks like."

Cole said, “Just get this thing in the air. There’s no time to get fancy.”

“I wouldn’t call making sure that there’s gas in the tank being fancy,” Whitlock snapped. “It would be helpful if these goddamn instruments were in English. Or German, for that matter."

Cole raised an eyebrow. It was the first time he had heard Harry Whitlock swear.

"I reckon that's where Miss Inna can help us out."

They called Inna into the cramped cockpit, and she walked Harry through the instrumentation and controls. What wasn't labeled, Harry guessed at. The entire procedure took about two minutes, which was thirty seconds more than they had. Looking out the cockpit window, Cole saw soldiers grouped around the officer’s body. More soldiers moved toward the airfield, weapons at the ready. One tall fellow wearing a furry ushanka looked right at the plane and must have seen movement in the cockpit. He pointed.

Soldiers started running toward the airfield.

"Got to go," Cole said.

"Keep your fingers crossed."

Whitlock hit some switches, and the engines cranked to life. As soon as they were roaring, Whitlock taxied toward the runway. The soldiers in front of them scattered. So far, nobody was shooting at them. The Russians hadn’t figured out what was going on.

"So far, so good," Cole said.

"You'd better go strap yourself in," Whitlock said. "You too, Inna. Things could get bumpy."

Cole and Inna didn’t have to be told twice. They scrambled back and buckled themselves into the uncomfortable seats. Although he couldn't see out, the thin airplane walls made him feel like a sitting duck.

The plane gathered speed, bumping down the rough runway. The plane began to lift off.

That’s when a burst of fire stitched holes in the aluminum skin. Cole guess it was what the Russians nicknamed a Pe-pe-sha, or PPSh-41 submachine gun. Ugly and deadly. He had spotted a few on the base. The plane was too loud to hear the chatter of the gun, but the new whistle of cold air through the holes was clear enough.

Then they were airborne, climbing into the Russian sky. Cole's ears ached and he tried to swallow to relieve the pressure, but his mouth was too dry. It took him another couple of tries before his ears popped. Whitlock climbed at a steep angle, trying to put a lot of air between the plane and the ground fire. The cargo plane was no sprinter, but it still managed to climb to ten thousand feet within half a minute.

When the plane finally leveled off, Cole unbuckled and made his way to the cockpit. The ground below was a glittering expanse of white, punctuated by hills and forests.

Cole wasn't normally a backslapper, but he clapped Whitlock on the shoulder. He shouted in Whitlock’s ear to be heard over the engines.

"That is some damn fine flying."

"I probably shouldn't tell you this, but I'm surprised that we managed to get off the ground."

"You're right, you shouldn't tell me that. What's our plan?"

"To put this crate down somewhere in Finland, as soon as I spot an airfield.” He tapped a gauge. “The good news is that we’ve got plenty of fuel."

There were nervous grins all around, everybody feeling good. They were finally getting the hell out of the Soviet Union.

Their relief was short lived.

“Oh, hell,” Whitlock said, cursing for the second time in a span of ten minutes.

“What is it?”

“It looks like we’ve got company.”

Tracers from a burst of gunfire raked the sky.

“We’re sitting ducks up here,” Whitlock shouted, sounding near panic. He craned his neck to look out the windows. “What the hell should I do?”

Cole pieced it together. They had disabled the planes on the ground, but he knew that one Russian fighter had already been in the air. They had seen it flying over the area, searching for whoever had fled the firefight that had got the Russians' attention. Someone on the ground must have radioed that plane. Now it was on their tail.

There was another burst of fire. Tracers ripped the sky again, but no bullets hit the plane.

"I don't understand it," Whitlock said. "They could blow us out of the sky."

"That was like a shot across the bow. They want us to land. They probably think they’ve got themselves a planeload of spies. Capturing us alive ought to get somebody promoted.”

Cole thought about that. It was an option. They could turn around and head back to the airfield like the Russians wanted. There could be some kind of diplomatic wrangle. They might get home someday before the end of the century.

But not Inna. Not Dmitri. It would be the Gulag for them. Or a bullet.

Cole didn't plan on spending the next few years digging holes on some Gulag work crew for another version of Barkov.

The plane rocked as it hit a pocket of turbulent air. He gripped Whitlock's shoulder, steadying them both. "Got any ideas?" he asked.

"No. We sure as hell can't outrun a fighter," Whitlock said.

"Can't you do some fancy flying?"

"In this beat up old bird? Cole, it's like a goose trying to out-maneuver a hawk. We don't have a prayer against that other plane. It’s a lot faster than we are, and we aren’t even armed.”

"Gotta try something."

Whitlock did. He forced the stick down, moving the plane into a steep dive. Wind whistled at the wings, threatening to rip them off. The whole plane bucked and shook. The Russian fighter raced past overhead and swung around in an arc to come at them again. Effortlessly. It was easy enough to imagine the Russian pilot with his gunsights on them, finger on the trigger, waiting for a radio message with orders to put another shot across the bow or just let loose with a killing burst through the fuselage so that he could get home in time for borscht and vodka.

The fighter pilot fired. The flurry of rounds punched holes the size of golf balls through the skin. Inna screamed. Vaccaro had been pale before; now he was the grayish color of dishwater.

The Russian pilot had not finished them off — yet. He was just showing them that he meant business. He wanted them to land the plane. He was making it clear that they were going down — one way or another.

Cole decided that he’d had enough. He wasn't going to wait around for them all to be shot out of the sky. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to become a prisoner. That just wasn’t his style.

He got down close to Whitlock's ear. "Listen up, Whitlock. You hold this plane real steady. I'm gonna try something."

He left the cockpit and made his way back to the cargo area. He reached for his rifle. Vaccaro, Inna, and Dmitri eyed him with a look that seemed to ask, What’s that crazy hillbilly up to now? It was too loud to even attempt an explanation. Each breath turned to icy vapor. The plane rocked as frigid winds buffeted the fuselage. The wind coming through the bullet holes whistled like an angry teapot.

Truth be told, he wasn't sure that this was going to work. It was only a half-baked plan, but he had to try something.

He was glad that he hadn’t wasted any more bullets than necessary on Barkov. He was down to his last two shells.

The question was, would it be enough?

Cole made his way as far back in the cargo area as he could. There wasn't any sort of bulkhead at the rear of the plane, just a seam where the two sides of the plane joined. It reminded Cole of how the stern of an aluminum canoe was riveted together.

He took out his knife and punched a hole through the skin, then sawed the knife blade in a rough circle. He soon had a hole the size of a dinner plate, about ten inches off the floor of the plane. Looking out the hole at the ground far below made his head swim. Nothing out there but air. He tried not to think about it.

Behind them, riding in the cargo plane's slipstream, was the Russian fighter. Head on, the fighter resembled something predatory, like maybe an oncoming falcon. Meanwhile, Cole and the others were riding in the pigeon. The fighter had a single propeller. Above the propeller was a windshield. Behind the glass, Cole could make out the silhouette of the pilot. If the pilot even noticed what Cole was up to, he must have been left scratching his head.

He lay down and rested his elbows on the floor of the plane. It was not comfortable, but he ignored the feel of the metal jarring up through the bone. Never mind that it was goddamn cold with the arctic air sucking at the hole in the airplane. He put the muzzle through the hole he had cut. Through the scope, the enemy fighter sprang much closer. The pilot's head went from being the size of a dime to being the size of a baseball.

The crosshairs settled on the target, then bounced away. Cole struggled to hold the rifle steady. The plane hit another pocket of rough air and shook all around him like a dog that had just come out of the rain.

All he needed was a patch of smooth air. He let the crosshairs drift over the target, finger taking up pressure on the trigger. At just the precise moment, the pad of his finger would take up the last bit of tension in the trigger.

Wait, he told himself. Steady.

The thing about this kind of shooting was he you didn't want to think about it too much, at least not with the front part of his mind. He let his mind go kind of fuzzy. The crosshairs drifted while the finger stayed on the trigger. The back part of his mind would know when everything was lined up. His eyeballs and his trigger finger were connected in that back part of his mind.

Behind him, the Russian pilot fired another burst. The guns flared and crackled. A few rounds hit the fuselage and Inna screamed again. Vaccaro swore. Fortunately, most of the burst passed overhead.

The Russian was sending a message that he wanted them to put the plane down. Now. All he had to do was keep his finger on the trigger for a couple seconds longer, and they would be blown out of the sky.

Through the scope, he could practically see the pilot lining up the next burst. His crosshairs drifted to the pilot’s head, just visible through the windshield.

Around him, the cargo plane quit bouncing.

Cole fired.

He wasn’t sure just what he expected to happen next, which was why it came as a surprise.

The pilot opened up on them, firing nonstop. The burst clawed at the cargo plane until Whitlock, up in the cockpit, veered to the right so suddenly that Cole lost his grip on the rifle and slammed painfully against the fuselage. He crawled back to the hole he had made and acquired the target again. He couldn't believe that he had missed. Had he somehow miscalculated about firing on a moving plane, from a moving plane?

He had one bullet left.

By now the Russian pilot had stopped firing. The fighter simply flew on in a perfectly straight path, not bothering to follow the cargo plane on its new course. Cole worked the bolt, got lined up for another shot. The fighter flew blindly past them, headed to nowhere. As it went by, Cole caught a glimpse of a starburst of broken glass where his bullet had punched into the cockpit.

He hadn’t missed. He realized that the final burst must have been the death reflex of the pilot's finger on the trigger.

Then the plane started to drift even farther to the left, off course. Soon after that, the nose dipped. The fighter plane started a long, steady slide toward the earth below.

All around them, the blue sky now stretched empty and limitless.

And he still had one bullet chambered in the Springfield rifle, so the possibilities were endless.