“Let him get to the plane,” said Macht. “He will be consumed by it, and under that frenzy we approach, keeping the tail and fuselage between ourselves and him.”
“Yes, I see.”
“You stand off and hold him with the Luger. I will jump him and get this”—he reached into his pocket and retrieved a pipe—“into his mouth, to keep him from swallowing his suicide capsule. Then I will handcuff him and we’ll be done.”
They watched as the man broke from the edge of the grass, running like an athlete, with surprising power to his strides, bent double as if to evade tacklers, and in a very little time got himself to the door of the Storch’s cockpit, pulled it open, and hoisted himself into the seat.
“Now,” said Macht, and the two of them emerged from their hiding place and walked swiftly to the airplane.
His Luger out, Boch circled to the left to face the cockpit squarely from the left side while Macht slid along the right side of the tail boom, reached the landing struts, and slipped under them.
“Halt!” yelled Boch, and at precisely that moment Macht rose, grabbed the astonished Englishman by the lapels of his suit, and yanked him free of the plane. They crashed together, Macht pivoting cleverly so that his quarry bounced off his hip and went into space. He landed hard, far harder than Macht, who simply rode him down, got a knee on his chest, bent, and stuffed his pipe in the man’s throat. The agent coughed and heaved, searching for leverage, but Macht had wrestled many a criminal into captivity and knew exactly how to apply leverage.
“Spit it out!” he cried in English. “Damn you, spit it out!” He rolled the man as he shook him, then slapped him with a hard palm between the shoulder blades, and in a second the pill was ejected like a piece of half-chewed, throat-obstructing meat, riding a propulsive if involuntary spurt of breath, and arched to earth, where Macht quickly put a heavy shoe on it, crushing it.
“Hands up, Englishman, goddamn you,” he yelled as Boch neared, pointing the Luger directly into the face of the captive to make the argument more persuasively.
There was no fight left in him, or so it seemed. He put up his hands.
“Search him, Macht,” said Boch.
Macht swooped back onto the man, ran his hands around his waist, under his armpits, down his legs.
“Only this,” he said, holding aloft a small camera. “This’ll tell us some things.”
“I think you’ll be disappointed, old man,” said the Englishman. “I am thinking of spiritual enlightenment, and my photographs merely propose a path.”
“Shut up,” bellowed Boch.
“Now,” said Macht, “we’ll—”
“Not so fast,” said Boch.
The pistol covered both of them.
It happened so fast. He knew it would happen fast, but not this fast. Halt! came the cry, utterly stunning him with its loudness and closeness, and then this demon rose from nowhere, pulled him — the strength was enormous — from the plane, and slammed him to the ground. In seconds the L-pill had been beaten from him. Whoever this chap was, he knew a thing or two.
Now Basil stood next to him. Breathing hard, quite fluttery from exhaustion, and trying not to face the enormity of what had just happened, he tried to make sense, even as one thing, his capture, turned into another — some weird German command drama.
The SS officer had the Luger on both of them.
“Boch, what do you think you are doing?” said the German in the trench coat.
“Taking care of a certain problem,” said the SS man. “Do you think I care to have an Abwehr bastard file a report that will end my career and get me shipped to Russia? Did you think I could permit that?”
“My friends,” said Basil in German, “can’t we sit down over a nice bottle of schnapps and talk it out? I’m sure you two can settle your differences amicably.”
The SS officer struck him across the jaw with his Luger, driving him to the ground. He felt blood run down his face as the cheek began to puff grotesquely.
“Shut your mouth, you bastard,” the officer said. Then he turned back to the police officer in the trench coat.
“You see how perfectly you have set it up for me, Macht? No witnesses, total privacy, your own master plan to capture this spy. Now I kill the two of you. But the story is, he shot you, I shot him. I’m the hero. Moreover, whatever treasure of intelligence that little camera holds, it comes to me. I will weep pious tears at your funeral, which I’m sure will be held under the highest honors, and I will express my profound regrets to your unit as it ships out to Russia.”
“You lunatic,” said Macht. “You disgrace.”
“Sieg Heil,” said the SS officer as he fired. He missed.
This was because his left ventricle was interrupted mid-beat by a .380 bullet fired a split second earlier by Basil’s .380 Browning in the Abwehr agent’s right hand. Thus Boch jerked and his shot plunged off into the darkness.
The SS officer seemed to melt. His knees hit first — not that it mattered, because he was already quite dead, and he toppled to the left, smashing his nose, teeth, and pince-nez.
“Excellent shot, old man,” said Basil. “I didn’t even feel you remove my pistol.”
“I knew he would be up to something. He was too cooperative. Now, sir, tell me what I should do with you. Should I arrest you and earn the Iron Cross, or should I give you back your pistol and camera and watch you fly away?”
“Even as a philosophic exercise, I doubt I could argue the first proposition with much force,” said Basil.
“Give me an argument, then. You saved my life, or rather your pistol did, and you saved the lives of the men in my unit. But I need a justification. I’m German, you know, with that heavy, irony-free, ploddingly logical mind.”
“All right, then. I did not come here to kill Germans. I have killed no Germans. Actually the only one who has killed Germans, may I point out, sir, is you. Germans will die, more and more, and Englishmen and Russians and even the odd Frog or two. Possibly an American. That can’t be stopped. But I am told that the message on the film, which is completely without military value, by the way, has a possibility of ending the war by as much as two years sooner than expected. I don’t know about you, sir, but I am sick to death of war.”
“Fair enough. I am, too. Here, take this, and your camera, and get out of here. There’s the plane.”
“Ah, one question, if I may?”
“Yes?”
“How do you turn it on?”
“You don’t fly, do you?”
“Not really, no. At least, not technically. I mean I’ve watched it, I’ve flown in them, I know from the cinema that one pulls the stick up to climb, down to descend, right and left, with pedals—”
“God, you are something, I must say.”
And so the German told him where the ignition was, where the brakes were, what groundspeed he had to achieve to go airborne, and where the compass was for his due north heading.
“Don’t go over 150 meters. Don’t go over 150 kilometers per hour. Don’t try anything fancy. When you get to England, find a nice soft meadow, put her down, and just before you touch down, switch off the magnetos and let the plane land itself.”
“I will.”
“And remember one thing, Englishman. You were good — you were the best I ever went after. But in the end I caught you.”
“Gentlemen,” said Sir Colin Gubbins, “I do hope you’ll forgive Captain St. Florian his appearance. He is just back from abroad, and he parked his airplane in a tree.”