Gutwein, normally a calm man in any emergency, began to scream.
As did Vogel and Krause.
Their screams were drowned out by the ripping sound of their craft breaking up. The ground opened up in front of them. The nose of the Condor dipped forward-an enormous, vicious maw, preparing to swallow the Condor whole.
The majestic airliner once more started to move. It was slow at first — more like a skier tipping over the crest of a mountain — but it picked up speed quickly. Within the darkened nightmare, the Condor raced deeper into the bowels of the earth. Her occupants were thrown about like ragdolls as she slid ever deeper, colliding upon unseen walls like a toboggan in the night, until she finally came to rest in pitch darkness.
Gutwein opened his eyes, but there was nothing for him to see.
He inhaled slowly, held his breath for a moment, and exhaled. His ribs were sore, but he could breath. He grinned. There were tears in his eyes and he started laughing like a blubbering idiot. The insane guffaw of a madman narrowly defeating Death. Their mission had been a failure and they’d crashed into a mountain, but they’d somehow survived. He felt for the small flashlight in his right leg pocket of his flight suit and pulled it out.
He switched the light on and turned to face Vogel and Krause. “What a ride, hey?”
There was no response.
He stopped laughing and shined the flashlight at Vogel’s face. His copilot’s face appeared unharmed. There were no cuts or grazes. His eyes were wide open, as far as Gutwein could tell. Otherwise, the man might have been sleeping, except his face that was once full of life and expression, was now inanimate. His eyes stared vacantly into Death.
Gutwein unclipped his harness, climbing over broken detritus to go to him. His chest was still. Gutwein placed his hand on Vogel’s neck. He could still feel the cold sweat on his copilot’s skin. That was all he could feel. No matter how much he tried to find it, he couldn’t feel a pulse.
Carefully stepping out from what had once been the cockpit, he shined his flashlight across the rear-facing engineer’s seat. This time he didn’t need to check for life. The seat was positioned at the edge of the starboard wing’s bulkhead. When the Condor collided with a large buried stone, the fuselage had been pushed inside, directly where Krause had been sitting. The seat, along with what remained of his navigator’s body, had become intermingled in one horrific tangle of human flesh and warped metal.
Gutwein felt his world begin to spin. He took a couple steps backward toward the narrow end of the taildragger and vomited.
There wasn’t much in it. Other than black coffee and a bar of Swiss chocolate, he hadn’t eaten since leaving Stuttgart. He tried to open the hatch, but it wouldn’t budge. Shining his flashlight around the inside of the fuselage, he searched for a way out.
Panic slid through him, cold fingers of dread ran up his spine. He had to get away from possible suffocation, death, and his fear of being buried alive. He couldn’t look at his men, they were too horrific to confront. Why had his almighty chosen to keep him alive, while his men were killed?
He finally wrenched open the tail trapdoor and climbed into the narrow alcove where the tail wheel could be manually released if the hydraulics failed. Gutwein dragged himself to the end, where a small maintenance hatch led to the outside world.
Gutwein fought with the latch. It was stuck, of course. He adjusted his position so that he could kick it hard. All his extreme built-up anger, passion and violence — from the loss of his family through to the more immediate loss of the men under his command. All of it came out on this one broken latch.
On his third vicious kick, the trapdoor broke free into an open void below.
Gutwein turned around again and shined his flashlight into the opening. The space appeared clear for a few feet, then it was covered in snow. He slid down into the ice-hardened snow. The space between the frozen ceiling and the snow-covered ground was a corridor a little higher than the top of the fuselage.
He crawled along it until he passed the end of the Condor’s tail.
Once there, it opened up to a more comfortable height of the fuselage. He cupped his flashlight with his hand, and his world became enveloped in complete darkness again.
Where the hell am I?
Gutwein uncapped the flashlight and began following the direction in which the Condor had obviously entered some sort of tunnel. He looked at the ground. The Condor had dug its way across the frozen surface. There was something metallic beneath his feet.
He kicked at it with his boots. The ice covering the metal came free and he stopped to examine it. There were two rusted pieces of iron, running parallel to each other. An old railway track? Very narrow. This was never made for a train line.
Ah. Tracks for a minecart.
Of all the places to crash, the Condor must have slid directly into an old mine shaft. With the exception of the small amounts of snow dragged in by the Condor, the tunnel was dry, and noticeably warmer than the subfreezing environment outside. Gutwein shined his flashlight upward, along the tunnel, following the trail of ice and rockfall where the Condor’s fuselage had ripped through the tunnel. He pulled the hood of his flight jacket tight and started to head for the surface.
It took more than an hour’s walk to reach the entrance.
A wall of soft snow reached the ceiling of the tunnel. A series of splintered pine boards, the remnants of an old wall of rough sawn softwood, two by fours, littered the entrance, where the Condor had crashed through.
His eyes rolled across the carnage, settling on the remains of a single board with words written in red upon one side.
Gutwein picked up the old placard, wiped off the snow. The notice read: MARYLAND MINE COMPANY — CLOSED. NOT SAFE TO ENTER.
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
He recalled several private and government owned gold mines in Germany had been closed at the start of the war, because of fears it would distract the number of abled bodied young men from their war efforts.
Had the same thinking occurred in the United States?
If that was the case, and the mine had indeed been closed, there might just be a chance that the Condor wouldn’t be spotted for some time. It could possibly be off limits until the next summer had passed, by which time, he could have removed the nuclear components of the bomb. He could still ready it for delivery to its intended target.
Gutwein’s mind raced to the wings that had been stripped upon landing. They would be out there in the valley somewhere. He would need to take them apart and bury them within the mine shaft. After that, he would need to board up the entrance once more. If he could do all that, perhaps there was still a chance he could complete his mission.
Gutwein placed his gloved hands into the wall of snow and pulled. A small heap of snow fell on him. As expected, the recently broken snow was soft. He tried again, and more fell. There was still no sign of light, which meant he’d been buried deeply. How deeply, only time would tell. There was no reason to believe the crash hadn’t caused an avalanche that had now covered the outside of the tunnel.
Either way, he wouldn’t be able to dig through it with bare hands.
Gutwein returned to the Condor. Inside he searched the cargo hold for maintenance and survival equipment. He withdrew tool after tool, throwing each one aside as their apparent use failed to help him escape. At the bottom of the small hold were a few maintenance tools, including a hammer, which he might use to dig his way out through the ice.