A short flight: less than half an hour, even cruising. Rudel watched his instruments. Everything was green. The maintenance men did a hell of a job. His thoughts leaped ahead to what needed doing when he reached the target.
He could see Ramsgate not far ahead. The airstrips the Stukas were supposed to hit lay a little west and south of the town. The German air fleet would swing in that direction, and…
And British fighters jumped them. Hurricanes with red-white-and-blue roundels mixed it up with the Messerschmitts. The Luftwaffe had already seen that Hurricanes were at least as good as anything the French flew. Were they as good as 109s? If they weren't, they came unpleasantly close.
While some of them engaged the German fighters, others bored in on the Ju-87s. One dive-bomber after another fell out of the sky. Hoarse shouts of fear and alarm dinned in Hans-Ulrich's earphones. So did the shrieks of the dying. "Mother!" someone wailed. "I'm burning, Mother!" Rudel switched frequencies in a hurry. It didn't help much.
Sergeant Dieselhorst fired at something. A couple of bullets had hit Hans-Ulrich's Stuka, but only a couple. He feared that was nothing but luck.
He also feared the Germans had made a mistake with this attack. On the Continent, bombing targets close to their own lines, they could generally count on an advantage in numbers. Damaged planes didn't have far to go to get back to friendly territory. Here, the deep blue sea lay between the raiders and friends. Only it wasn't blue. It was grayish green, and looked cold.
"Drop your bombs anywhere!" The squadron commander's voice cut through the din on the radio. "Drop them and get away! This is too hot for us!"
Hans-Ulrich wouldn't have argued with that. He pulled the bomb-release lever. Ramsgate lay below. If hundreds of kilos of explosives came down on civilians' heads instead of on the airstrip for which they were intended-well, too bad. Wasn't it the RAF's fault for interfering with the planned operation?
A British fighter flew right in front of him: a biplane, a Gloster Gladiator. It looked outdated, but the Czech Avias had proved even planes like that could be dangerous. He fired at it. The Gladiator, far more agile than his Stuka, spun away when the pilot saw his tracers.
Even though Rudel mashed the throttle against the instrument panel, he knew he wasn't home free-nowhere near. A Hurricane could still catch him from behind. For that matter, so could a Gladiator. The Ju-87 was built for muscle, not for speed. He'd never felt the lack so much before.
"Anything on our tail, Albert?" he called through the speaking tube.
"Not right now, thank God," Dieselhorst answered, which also summed up the way Hans-Ulrich felt.
He looked around for more Stukas and for Messerschmitts. Of course they wouldn't go back in the neat formation they'd used to approach England. They'd be all over the sky. All the same, he saw far fewer German planes than he should have. When fighters came after them in swarms, Ju-87s were alarmingly vulnerable.
The 109s had held their own against the Hurricanes. He was sure they'd more than held their own against the Gladiators. Even that came with a price, though. If a Hurricane fighter bailed out of a shot-up fighter, he landed among friends. He could fly again as soon as he got another plane. A Messerschmitt pilot who bailed out over England was out of the war for good even if he came down unhurt.
There was the Belgian coast ahead. The RAF seemed content to have broken things up on their own ground. They weren't pursuing hard. Hans-Ulrich eased back on the throttle. He'd never dreamt he could be so proud of nothing more than making it home from a mission in one piece. AIR-RAID SIRENS WOKE SARAH GOLDMAN out of a sound sleep. She needed a moment, or more than a moment, to realize what they were. Munster had tested them a few times before the war started, and a few more afterwards. But the luminous hands on the clock by her bed said it was two in the morning. Only a maniac would test the sirens at a time like this.
Sarah didn't doubt that a lot of the Nazis running Munster were maniacs. But they weren't the kind of maniacs who'd do something like this. Which meant…
Ice ran through her when she realized what it meant. This wasn't a drill. This was a real air raid!
She threw off the covers, which made her realize how cold it was inside the house. Throwing a robe over her flannel nightgown, she ran for the stairs.
She bumped into somebody in the dark. The grunt made her realize it was her brother. "Where do we go, Saul? What do we do?"
"Find someplace low, I guess," he answered. "What else can we do? We're Jews. We can't go to any of the regular shelters-they won't let us in."
Somehow, Sarah had forgotten that. She couldn't imagine why. It wasn't as if regulations didn't spell it out. The Aryans in charge of things in the Reich made no bones about how they felt. If they saved their own kind and watched Jews get blown to ground round, they would go out and have a beer afterwards to celebrate.
Sarah didn't think all the goyim in Munster felt that way. Life would have been impossible in that case. It wasn't now-it was just difficult. As she hurried down the stairs, she realized she might have to change her mind about that. If a bomb hit them and they weren't in a proper shelter, life would be impossible.
"Come on!" Saul said. "Under the dining-room table!"
"Will it hold up if the house comes down on it?" Sarah asked doubtfully.
"No, but it's the best chance we've got," he said. She decided he was right.
Their mother and father crowded under there with them. Samuel and Hanna Goldman took the outside places. When Saul tried to protest, his father spoke two harsh words: "Shut up!" The gentle classical scholar never talked like that. The front-line soldier of half a lifetime ago might have, though. And Saul did shut up, which would do for a miracle till a bigger one came along.
Airplane engines droned overhead. Antiaircraft guns began to thunder. "Will they shoot them down?" Sarah said.
"They'll try," her father answered: not a vote of confidence.
Through the roar of the guns, Sarah heard other noises-high, shrill, swelling whistles. The flat, harsh crump!s that followed made the guns seem whispers beside them. The windows rattled. The whole house shook. Is this what an earthquake feels like? she wondered. But how could she tell? She'd never been in an earthquake.
"We need to put masking-tape squares on our windows," Samuel Goldman said, his voice eerily calm.
"Will that keep them from breaking?" Hanna asked.
"No. But it will help keep them from spraying glass all over the inside of the house if something comes down close to us-I hope," he said.
After what might have been twenty minutes or twenty years, the bombs stopped falling. The airplane engines went away. The guns kept banging for several minutes more. Shrapnel pattered down on the roof like hail. At last, silence fell.
"Well, that wasn't too bad," Sarah said. She was so glad to be alive, so glad it was over, she straightened up too fast and banged her head on the bottom of the table. That was the only hurt any of the Goldmans took.
"It wasn't too good, either," her father said. "I don't remember any raids that bad in the last war."
"Neither do I," her mother said.
A siren screamed-that was a fire engine, heading somewhere. The Goldmans made their slow, careful way to the front door and looked out. Munster was black as a tomb…except for two or three orange glows on the skyline, one of them only a few blocks away. By the sound, the fire engine was going there. It couldn't go very fast, not unless it wanted to plow into something.
"This is terrible," Sarah said. "The enemy never did anything like this before. Why would they start now?"
Saul nudged her. "The enemy is running Germany," he whispered.
"So why did you try to join the Wehrmacht, then?" she whispered back. He turned away without answering. She knew what the answer was: her brother and her father still wanted to be Germans, but the Nazis wouldn't let them.