Farley nodded and got to his feet. “I better talk to him,” he said. “We have to move out in a minute.”
“I’ll come with you.”
He helped her up and they headed toward Yone, who was fanning himself with the flaps of his partly unzipped coverall. Farley remembered Grobe telling Yone I was right about you. Who could blame the poor guy for wanting to come back with them? He would always be an outcast among strangers here.
Wennda stopped walking just as Farley heard it: Faint whistling high above that quickly grew louder.
“Mortar!” Farley yelled. “Take cover! Everybody move!”
He and Wennda were already running toward the big sausage-shaped rock. Halfway there an explosion shook the ground behind them like a drumhead. Farley felt heat on his back and was pushed forward. Beside him Wennda stumbled and rolled and came up running. They stayed low and ran like apes to the cover of the long rock while fragments of canyon floor pattered down around them.
Crouched behind the long rock Farley glanced at Wennda as he drew his sidearm. She already had her nerve gun ready and was leaning up against the rock’s smooth curve. Farley risked a quick look at the crater floor and was relieved to see none of their party lying out in the open. Broben waved to him from where he lay prone behind a low flat rock fifty feet away. Martin lay beside Broben, peering south with Wennda’s binoculars. Garrett and Everett were partway up the rockfall by the fissure entrance, already setting up the Browning.
A thin red thread of light appeared from the south and swung toward Broben. The Browning spoke up, chump chump chump. Tracer rounds streaked toward the origin of the red light. The beam swung wildly, then disappeared.
Farley glanced at the darker fissure opening. It was an uncomfortably long hundred yards away, with little cover. He cursed himself for not calling the break after they had entered the fissure and posting a rear guard.
“It’s gonna be a firefight if we don’t get out of here soon,” he told Wennda.
“If we can draw the mortar fire toward a heat source, we can run for the fissure,” she said. “We could try—”
The rock she was leaning against bent in with a faint clunk. She jumped back and brought her rifle up. Farley dropped low and backed away from the rock and looked at its long, cylindrical shape in the canyon twilight.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “It’s an Me-109.”
“It’s a what?”
“Me-109.” He looked at her, astonished. “A German fighter plane.”
The shape had not been readily apparent because the fuselage lay on its side and the front third looked partly embedded in the ground. Either the crater floor was soft here, or the Messerschmitt had broken through to some hollow space, maybe the top of one of those hardened air bubbles, when it impacted. The fuselage was crumpled and burned, the canopy had torn away, and both wings had broken off and were nowhere in sight. As if the plane had angled down into the crater floor and then tumbled when it hit.
There was no body in the shattered cockpit. The pilot had probably been thrown out when the fighter tumbled across the crater floor. Or he had bailed, but what would the poor bastard have done after that? His body was probably out there somewhere, dead of wounds or dehydration. Whatever the case, the Messerschmitt had augered down onto the crater floor. Maybe the pilot hadn’t been able to power back up or deadstick in. Or maybe he had dueled the Typhon and lost.
“Someone’s coming,” Wennda said. She nodded toward the western cliff.
Farley peered past the crumpled fuselage to see someone jogging toward them across the open crater floor. Martin? No, Martin was still beside Broben.
“It’s Yone,” said Wennda.
“What the hell?” said Farley.
“He’s going to get killed.”
“He’s gonna get us killed.” Farley waved the approaching man away, but Yone kept coming. “Take cover!” Farley called. “They can see you!”
A knifecut line of red appeared from the south and immediately swept right. An inch-wide dot found Yone and bobbled on his torso as he ran toward them.
“Go back, god damn it!” Farley yelled.
The Browning fired briefly from the rockfall. Two tracer rounds sped in the direction the red light was coming from. The targeting laser stayed on Yone. Farley clearly heard a distant, hollow sound, like a palm slapping the mouth of a Coke bottle.
“Son of a bitch,” he said, and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Mortar!” he yelled. “Get down!” Now Wennda was yelling for Yone to go back. Yone kept coming and Farley looked around. There was nowhere else to go.
Faint whistling now from high above.
Farley pulled Wennda down alongside the embedded fuselage and prayed the plane’s remains would shield them from the blast. He lay prone in the dirt with an arm across her and one hand absurdly clutching his crush hat. Not now not now not now.
The whistle grew. The round hit. The ground opened up and the world went dark and silent.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Farley lay in darkness. His head throbbed and his ears rang. He heard faint steady pattering, like rain on dead leaves, punctuated by irregular thumps and metallic squeaks. He felt sick.
He lay quietly and took stock. Sharp pains along his arms and back. Left upper ribs bruised where the shoulder holster mashed against him. His right ankle throbbed. The back of his head felt hot, and he thought he probably had a good-sized goose egg growing there. He didn’t think anything was broken, though. Yippee.
He blinked and waited for his eyes to adjust. Faint light showed that he lay head-down on a steep slope amid rubble. More than that was difficult to make out because pulsing metallic afterimages trailed when he turned his head.
He eased himself up to his elbows and felt dizzy. He waited for it to clear, and when it did he was glad that he’d stopped moving.
A dozen feet upslope the buckled Messerschmitt fuselage lay on its side. It had fallen with them when the mortar round had blown a hole in the crater floor on top of what was clearly a narrow crack beneath the surface.
The ruined fuselage was covered with enormous bugs. Black, yard-wide hemispheres on six multijointed legs that picked their way along the foundered wreck or worked delicately at its burned metal skin, pulling out parts and taking apart the hull. They looked like ants swarming the corpse of some dead insect, an image reinforced by the line of creatures crawling to and from the aircraft. The slanting crevice was loud with taps and bangs and little shrieks of wrenching metal, and through it all a constant rustle of hundreds of dainty spider legs negotiating the fuselage and the rock-strewn passage.
The bugs were stripping the ME pretty fast. Sections of metal framework were already exposed. One bug had climbed to the top blade of the mangled propeller like some determined flagpole sitter. Another bug pulled off the cowling, and several others went to work on the now-exposed engine. The one with the cowling carried it away, even though the cowling was bigger than it was, and joined the line of bugs that crawled downslope like orderly looters.
On the other side of the bug line were Wennda and Yone. They sat upright against the crevice wall, a little downslope. In the dim light Farley couldn’t tell if they were injured, or even conscious. Wennda’s nerve gun lay by her feet. Two bugs stood in front of it.
Farley ignored the grinding pain in his upper ribs as he propped himself straighter. He eased his right hand to his holster and covered the strap with his palm as he pinched it open. The sound was just a tiny tik but it still made him wince. He slid the pistol free and held it against his chest. He thumbed the safety and squeezed the grip, then worked the slide.