He looked at his two men. His voice was full of accusation, but it was for himself and not his men. “Well? Where are we?”
Krause spoke first. “I’ve no idea, sir.”
“Vogel?”
“No idea.”
“All right. Look to the south of our target. We were drifting in that direction, so that’s where we must be.” Gutwein sighed and forced himself to smile. It felt fake, but there was nothing else that could be done. “I’m going to head north. We might yet find our target. Let me know when one of you work out where we are. No complaints. This was no one’s fault. Let’s just fix it.”
“Yes, sir,” they both replied.
The snow clouds thickened and Gutwein found himself flying straight into the mouth of a full-blown blizzard. His visibility reduced to near zero. His instruments beeped, warning of a buildup of ice. This was a heavy additional weight, as well as a deadly, fuel-consuming problem. Through the falling snow, the sea of white, undulating ground below, seemed to disappear.
He lowered the nose and took the Condor to a thousand feet. It didn’t leave much room if they ran into trouble. Not that it mattered anymore, there weren’t any other solutions left. Gutwein simply had to work with what he had. The blizzard blew stronger, and he struggled to maintain control of his aircraft, let alone work out their position.
After fifteen frenzied minutes of searching the landscape for some point of reference, the inevitable happened.
The portside engine number two skipped a beat, coughed, and choked to a stop. Gutwein didn’t need to ask what had caused the sudden loss of power to his otherwise reliable German engine. They were out of fuel, and within minutes all four engines would cut out and his Condor would plummet to the earth.
His eyes searched the vile and inhospitable landscape below. He swallowed hard. “Okay, gentlemen. I’m going to need to find somewhere to put us down.”
Vogel searched the winter landscape. “I can’t see anything.”
Gutwein yelled over his shoulder to Krause. “Get back into the bomb bay and remove the arming plugs. The last thing we want is for the damned bomb to reach critical mass on impact!”
Krause unclipped his harness. “I’m on it!”
There was nothing more Gutwein could do. He would have to ditch. But could he protect his deadly cargo? He knew nothing about this bomb, really. Would it explode on impact? Even that would be better than it falling into enemy hands. If he did land, could he retrieve it? Even if he did retrieve it, what did he know about the foul weapon? It wasn’t like he could get it to the target by any other means, could he?
Gutwein forced himself to forget about secondary concerns. Right now, his job was to land the aircraft. If he could do that, he might just live long enough to overcome the other obstacles.
Engines number four, two and one sputtered to a stop, nearly simultaneously. He extended the flaps in an effort to reduce their touchdown speed. In doing so, it reduced their glide ratio. It didn’t matter, they’d be hitting ground well before they could reach a suitable location to land.
“Anyone see anywhere to put us down?” Gutwein asked, his voice almost conversational in his acceptance of his fate, as he scanned the undulating sea of snow and filtered caps of fir trees.
“I’ve got nothing,” Vogel said.
“Pick a line through those trees. Any one of them. There’s nothing we can do.” There was no terror or fear in Kraus’s voice. He was merely stating the truth. Even if they survived the crash, the surrounding landscape would kill them long before they could ever escape the region.
Vogel pointed to the south and asked, “What about that valley?”
Gutwein’s head snapped to his right. His eyes swept the landscape where Vogel had pointed. Two shallow mountain peaks narrowed into a valley below. The slope was surprisingly gentle, and at the end of it, the area rose into a large saddle full of snow. If fortune favored them, they could land on it, their lethal momentum slowed by thick snow.
It was a lousy option, but it was the only one he’d seen since they’d come out of the cloud and spotted their mistake. Even the best gambler would eventually be left with only one option to play. This was his.
“All right. I’ll take it.” Gutwein smiled at both of his men. It was genuine and warm. “Your country may never know how much you sacrificed for her, but I do. It has been a privilege to fly with you over the past three years.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He banked to the left and set up for a final approach.
The Condor fell hard on a downdraft-for a moment he wasn’t even sure he was going to clear the first peak. He didn’t lower the landing gear, hoping that a smooth underbelly might slide along the snow-covered ground, like a ski.
Gutwein spoke gently. “Good luck and God bless.”
The tip of the taildragger narrowly avoided clipping the peak of the mountain by less than a foot. Gutwein pushed the yoke forward and dipped the nose. The condor dropped downward into the shallow valley below.
Just before the belly of his craft touched the soft snow, Gutwein pulled the yoke backward. The Condor reluctantly flared, then sank into the deep snow, lurching as it landed. Momentum kept the Condor sliding forward, almost as fast as their final approach.
Holding his breath, Gutwein held on through the flurry of movement, waiting for his final greeting with death.
Two thirds of the way down the mountain, the thick snow appeared to finally be having some effect on their inertia, and the aircraft began to noticeably slow.
An instant later, the starboard wing clipped a large stone, buried beneath the snow — ripping it off, rotating the cockpit and fuselage forward in a sideways direction. Gutwein’s harness dug tight into his waist as the cockpit spun round in an instant. The Condor struck a second boulder, ripping off the port wing.
Gutwein felt his head snap to the side, and his world became little more than a blur.
A second later, the cockpit and the Condor, no longer following the middle of the valley, ricocheted across the gorge, before plummeting into the side of the snow-covered mountain.
Everything went dark, as the Condor came to rest, apparently buried deep under thick snow.
Gutwein opened his eyes. A small trickle of blood ran across his forehead where he’d knocked it. He turned his head and brushed the blood off with his right forearm. He gently manipulated his hands and wiggled his toes. His head spun, but everything still worked.
I’m still here.
Was it chance when knowledge, experience, and preparation ran head-long into opportunity? Gutwein had lost his wife and children, drawn a suicide mission, been forced to take off during an air-raid, escaped a convoy's detection, run out of fuel, landed in the middle of nowhere, and ended with a couple of cuts and bruises, nothing more. With luck, they could complete their mission.
“Are you gentlemen all right?” he asked.
“I’m good,” Vogel said. “Any idea where we put down?”
“What about you, Krause?”
“I’m injured, but I’ll live. Any idea where we put down?”
Gutwein shook his head. “None whatsoever.”
Vogel unclipped his harness and stood up. “And we won’t know for some time. At least until this blizzard blows over. We’ll need to take shelter in the Condor, prepare our survival equipment, and then see if we can trek out of here.”
The lines around Gutwein’s eyes wrinkled with a smile as he studied their snow-covered surroundings. “But at least we’re on the ground.”
A moment later, his smile disappeared.
The ground beneath them rumbled. Gutwein’s gaze followed a giant rift in the ice, as it began to crack and ripple as if in an earthquake. Instinctively, he gripped the steering yoke and pulled up, as though he could avoid the giant opening in the ground below.