'You all right?' said Jenny, shaking her.
'What?' Billie came awake, wondered where she was, saw the girl looking at her with concern. She quickly sat up in the bed, the blanket wrapped round her.
'Are you all right?' repeated Jenny.
Billie nodded. Maybe she’d been dreaming. But the wetness was still there, all over her.
'You're too hot,' continued Jenny, lifting the coat Billie had placed for extra warmth on her bed. 'You don't need this. It may be cold outside, but these people know how to keep warm inside.'
'What's the time?' Billie was fanning herself with the blanket to cool the sweat that was running down her body. She'd damn well been dreaming.
'Just gone eleven.'
'You're back soon.'
Jenny laughed. 'He wanted to talk about flying. I offered him my body and he just wanted to talk about flying. Funny bloke. Nice, but weird. You all right now?'
Billie smiled. 'I'm fine.’ She wondered again if it had been a dream or if they had fucked each other. ‘Come on, you'd better get to bed if you're going to take us to England tomorrow. You need your beauty sleep.'
'What for? It's bloody wasted here, isn't it?'
Ch. 56
The riot had started from nothing; nobody had expected any trouble.
It had been a march for the jobless, organised by the socialist opposition parties. The police, notified about the demonstration, sent fifteen uniformed men and two vans to marshal the crowd. It was to be a small rally, starting at the Olympic Stadium and ending outside the rebuilt Reichstag building at the Platz de Republik in the Tiergarten. There was to be an estimated crowd of one thousand.
The organisers, loudhailers in hand, were corralling the crowd into marching formation when the first crowd of skinheads appeared. There were some forty of them, moving in from all directions, in groups of no more than three or four.
The police, still clustered by their vans, weren't watching out for trouble. Some of them sat on the grass, smoked cigarettes and watched the organisers' bumbling attempts to set the rally in progress. The buses and coaches which had brought the marchers were parked opposite the entrance in a long line down the road. Behind the police stood the vast, ninety thousand seater, Olympic Stadium. Built in 1934 for the infamous 1936 Hitler Olympics, when the black hero of America, Jesse Owens, smashed the formidable sprint opposition of Germany, the Stadium had withstood the Allied bombings during the War and became a symbol of a new Germany when Berlin was split in half by the Wall.
The skinheads and punk rockers, sensing easy meat, mixed with the crowd, their red communist-starred sweatshirts hidden under their coats. There were five pack leaders, whose responsibility was to incite violence from those who were always prepared to join in. The others, the storm troopers or Stermabeitalung, would spread through the crowds, wielding clubs, baseball bats and sometimes knives. It was to be an ugly demonstration; damage limitation was not on the agenda. Do what you want, boys, but make sure the television cameras get great pictures.
When the leader, a young man in his early twenties, saw that his Stermabeitalung were in place, he walked towards the steps that lead up to the grand entrance. He stood there, red shirted, on the steps, his coat wrapped around his waist. He would need it when he made his escape.
'Workers unite,' he shouted through the loudhailer he had hidden under his coat. 'Communists, friends of the people, unite with us to drive out those who are profiting from your hard toil, those who steal the food from your tables and live off the sweat of ordinary people. Workers unite. Don't let these people, these pawns of the capitalists…'
As he shrieked through his loudspeaker, the Stermabeitalung started to stream through the crowd, their red shirts now on view, hitting out at all who stood before them.
The police were slow to realise that there was trouble, but now they moved into the crowd, attempting to find the troublemakers. But the crush of those fleeing was too much and the officers were swamped.
On the steps of the Stadium someone had erected a red hammer and sickle flag and was waving it towards the crowd and the few media people present.
A woman with a child fell and the child was trampled in the rush and killed. A few feet away, a baseball bat crushed a school-teacher's head, smashed his skull into a pulpy mess. It was carnage.
Two policemen, near the coach line, saw the waving flag and decided to try to arrest the two men on the steps. But as they approached, the men broke and ran into the stadium, vaulting the entrance turnstiles as they did.
A pack leader saw the police in hot pursuit, he called six Stermabeitalung to him and led them into the stadium. The two policemen hadn't expected to be followed; they were concentrating on their efforts to find the men who were now hiding in the covered area amongst the seats that were tilted upright in their stored position.
The pack leader grabbed the first policeman from behind and wrestled him to the ground, knocking his revolver from his grip.
The second policeman managed to get a shot off in panic, but before he could take aim, one of the skinheads smashed his shoulder with a baseball bat and knocked him down the aisle steps. Before he could rise to defend himself, four of them were on him with their clubs, battering his life from his body. He was dead within ten seconds. A coroner would later record that his body was hit over sixty times. Only his card allowed him to be identified.
The other policeman struggled uselessly. Then he saw one of the men pull out a machete from his deep lined overcoat pocket. He was grabbed by the shoulders and forced to his knees. He screamed, fought back, but it was futile. Their grip was too strong.
The Stermabeitalung with the machete sliced the top of his skull off. The blood gushed out and he was thrown to the ground. The man with the machete continued to hack at the body right down to the bone and intestines.
They threw the red communist flag over the policeman, draped it over his cut and bleeding body, then they left the stadium by a side entrance.
The riot had now spread. More police were called, and the troublemakers of Berlin, always looking for new violence, joined in the fray. It was to last for nine hours, spreading from the Olympic Stadium into the streets, houses and offices of Charlottenburg, to shops which were looted and their windows smashed, to fires started with petrol bombs, to cars burnt to bare metal twisted shells, before the riot police, with their armoured vehicles and water canons, brought the whole thing under control.
Fourteen people were killed in the demonstration for the unemployed.
Three of them were policemen.
There were over six hundred arrests, most of them youths who had joined in the riots but were not Stermabeitalung.
The white Mercedes bus that had waited at the end of the line for the red shirted storm troopers left an hour after the attacks started. The young man with the curly hair and the scar on his left cheek was nowhere to be seen.
By the time the riot was brought under control, the white bus was already back in Dresden.
Ch. 57
She let him fly.
Adam's natural ability impressed Jenny. He instinctively held the aircraft on course without being intimidated by its power or his lack of experience. He was a natural in a world where most pilots are made, not born.
After Goose Bay, where she had controlled the plane as it climbed through thick ice laden cloud to eleven thousand feet, they had flown direct to Narssarssuaq on the southern tip of Greenland. Once clear of the cloud, she had handed the controls over to him and taught him how to use the power and propeller pitch levers, how to bank the plane sharply, how to descend and climb with power and nose attitude. She enjoyed it. It took away the normal drudgery of long flights with little radio contact and constant headings.