We had been in the cave for two days and were starting to develop a routine. My ankle had swollen massively and I couldn't move around very much so I handled the chores in the cave. Buffy went on foraging expeditions in the early morning and at dusk, other than that we mostly stayed in the cave where there wasn't any chance of being spotted. We didn't light a fire during the day, the possibility of the smoke from the fire attracting attention too much of a concern. Buffy's evening foraging expedition was as much to verify that nobody was near us as it was to find anything. Buffy's wounds were healing nicely; I thought I'd be able to take out the stitches the next day.
During the afternoon of the first day Buffy spotted a German patrol searching along the tree line, she'd stayed undercover in the rocks near our cave but they never came above the tree line. By late afternoon they were headed back down the mountain. That evening after they'd left the area Buffy spent some time going through the rocks at the back of the cave. She finally found a rock that satisfied her, it was a little bigger than the entrance to our cave and she positioned it near the entrance.
We could roll it in front of the entrance and it blocked enough of it that no one could come through. Using a stout wooden pole I could move it into position or lever it back out, Buffy could just move it of course. She found another rock, small enough that I could lift it, but it would wedge between the big rock and a rock protruding from the floor. With the wedge in place no one from the outside would ever be able to move the rock closing off the entrance. Unless they were clairvoyant they would just think it was just part of the jumble of rock. So unless the Germans actually knew we were there and figured out there had to be a cave they would never be able to find us.
It was mid-morning the first time I heard the strange whistling roar, it was so loud and unusual it immediately demanded my attention, "What the hell is that?!"
"Jets!" Buffy called as she headed for the cave entrance. She was part way through when she stopped and rolled onto her back; then she slowly eased her way out the entrance. I had made my way over to the entrance but heard her call back softly, "Barb, hang on while I check it out."
Her feet disappeared and she was gone for nearly ten minutes. The strange sound had faded away after a couple of minutes and I hadn't heard it again. I was sitting by the entrance when Buffy stuck her head partway in, "Barb, want to come out for a little?"
"What's up, Buffy?"
"I think you'll find it interesting."
I got down and started crawling through the entrance; soon I was on the ground next to Buffy, "Follow me!"
She crawled up the path toward our little stream but she'd only gone about halfway when she veered to the downslope slide. I followed behind her, we had to lift ourselves over a couple of rocks but we finally came to a flat slab of rock that angled upward at about a ten degree angle. It was between two other rocks, one about four feet high and the other about two. It was about three feet wide at the back edge where we first got on it but narrowed to about two feet at the far end. Buffy had already crawled to the end and was lying on her stomach looking out. I crawled up next to her; there was barely enough room for both of us lying side by side, we were squeezed tightly together and wouldn't have fit if we wearing many clothes but we only had on our long underwear. We'd been living in our long underwear since the first night, saving our uniforms for the future.
As I came up next to Buffy the valley below our mountain opened out below us. We were on a rocky promontory that jutted out of the rock slide our cave was in. The rocks on either side of us kept us concealed so unless someone was looking directly up at us, or down from a plane, we would be very hard to spot. This was the first time I'd gotten a really good view of the valley, it was a long way below us, over 5000 feet by my guess. The valley was pretty wide and the mountains on the far side were more like big hills rather than the mountains we were on.
The floor of the valley was a patchwork quilt of farm fields and patches of forest. The surrounding hills and mountainsides were almost solid forest. I could see a small river meandering its way down the valley, with what looked like a paved road roughly following it until it petered out in a patch of forest on our side of the river. We were near the high end of the valley and there was a small town about halfway down the valley straddling both sides of the river. Farmhouses were scattered throughout the valley except the area near our end.
I realized with a shock that an airfield took up a good portion of our end of the valley on our side of the river. There were a couple of buildings that might be small hangers or maintenance buildings but I couldn't see any aircraft. The runway looked like it was paved but it was by itself, there were no taxi ways visible, just a grass fringe about fifty yards wide surrounding the runway and then a band of forest around the entire field. It looked like it was abandoned; I thought it had probably been a gliding center before the war. The Germans had been big into gliding, it was one of the ways they had developed a large pool of pilots without violating the Treaty of Versailles.
I'd been on the rock beside Buffy for about fifteen minutes, examining the valley below us when I heard the whistling roar again. I looked down the valley where the noise was coming from and then saw an unfamiliar aircraft descending toward the airfield below us.
From our vantage point we were above the plane when I first spotted it. The plane had a long fuselage tapering to a rounded point at either end. The tail looked pretty standard although the elevator was positioned almost halfway up the tail fin. The cockpit was in the middle of the fuselage directly over the wing. The wing itself was slanted backward slightly and tapered toward the tips. The only thing really strange about the plane was the two large pods under the wings. One pod hung below each wing about a third of the way out from the fuselage and they extended several feet in front of the wing, it looked like a long slim bomb. As the plane got closer I realized that the pods were faired into the wing, actually part of its structure and they extended past the trailing edge of the wing for a foot or so.
I could see a long streak of dirty brown and black smoke trailing behind each pod. The plane was painted a dark green with grey splotches on the top surfaces and an almost completely grey tail fin; it looked like the grey extended under the plane to cover its belly. The plane continued its approach and then landed on the runway below us slowing almost to a stop before turning off the runway. I saw a couple men come out of the trees and start waving at it, directing it into the trees and soon it disappeared under the green canopy. As the noise from the plane on the ground died away I could hear another one further down the valley, I searched the sky and soon spotted another of the planes coming in for a landing.
Buffy and I spent the rest of the day on the ledge, for the first couple of hours another pair of planes would come in for a landing every half hour or so. Looking closely around the airfield I started to make out well camouflaged facilities. As more planes arrived I could see them in the edge of the forest when they were parked on the far side of the runway from us. We had just enough of an angle to see into the trees a little way and if you knew what to look for you could see them crouching under the pines.
As I watched the planes fly through the air and make their landings I realized they were a really beautiful plane, not quite as pretty as the early Spitfires but almost. Late in the afternoon we got a new treat. Two of the planes were rolled out from under the trees, ground crewmen swarmed over them and then got clear, soon the whistling roar of their engines reached us. They taxied out onto the runway and then started accelerating down it, they seemed to accelerate fairly slowly but their speed kept increasing until they finally lifted off after a long takeoff run. They continued to accelerate as they went down the valley and then they curved around in a long bank, they were really moving now. They completely reversed their course and were coming back up the valley toward us; by the time they reached us they were a thousand feet above us and about a half mile away. They flashed by us so fast that all I got was the impression of a flash of dark green and the grey of their bellies.
"Jesus, Buffy!" I turned my head to look at her and she was gazing hungrily after the departing planes.
She shook her head, "They are going to be a real bitch to handle if they start showing up in any numbers."
I looked after the departing planes but they were out of sight, only the slowly dissipating smoke trails marking their passage. Forty-five minutes later and what was becoming the familiar whine of jet engines marked the return of the two planes; at least I thought they were the same planes. We watched as they settled onto the runway and then disappeared into the trees. It was late in the afternoon and whatever activity was going on at the airfield disappeared from our view as it faded into the shadows filling the valley. When I couldn't see any more I started to inch my way back from the edge, stiff from lying still for so many hours.
The sky was rapidly darkening, "Buffy, I'll go and get the fire started and get dinner cooking."
"Thanks, I'll go foraging and see if I can find anything else. Stick the canteen and cup out and I'll get some water before I come in."
The next day was a repeat of that day; we went out to our lookout when we heard the first sounds of the jet engines. We watched as the planes took off and landed, it appeared more planes were arriving and by our best guess there were about twenty of the planes around the field by the end of the day. It looked like a squadron was taking up residence at the airfield. We started making a list of the planes, identifying them by the markings on the sides of their fuselages. We had definitely spotted thirteen different planes when the darkening sky shut down their activity and we retreated to our cave.
I woke in the early hours of the morning to the whistling shriek of the wind blowing outside, by morning we were completely socked in, our mountain buried in cloud. For the next week we huddled in our cave, an almost constant stream of storms pounding us with wind and blowing snow. With the bad weather outside we didn't worry about having a fire during the day so we were reasonably comfortable.
After six days we woke to a break in the weather. The day started out with our mountain retreat buried in cloud but by noon it had burned off and there was clear sky all around. By then my ankle was pretty much healed and Buffy's wounds had completely healed. My ankle was still a little swollen but I could get my boot on and lace it up loosely and I could walk on it without too much discomfort. The landscape outside was covered in a couple feet of snow except on our rock slide; the wind had blown the snow clear of most of it except where it filled crevices between the rocks.
We stayed inside during the day, trying to stay warm without the fire since we couldn't risk it when someone might spot the smoke. In the late afternoon, about an hour or so before dusk, Buffy started putting on her clothes. She noticed me watching her, "I'm going to go out and scout the area, maybe see if I can find something else to eat besides venison."
I nodded in agreement; I didn't trust my ankle enough to risk traipsing around in the rough terrain and poor light. "Take care, I'll get the fire going as soon as it gets a little darker so it will be warmer when you get back."
Forty-five minutes later I was about to start the fire when I heard Buffy's voice from outside, "Barb!"
"Yo."
"I'm going to need your help!"
"Out in a minute, got to get some clothes on!"
I got my pants and shirt and pulled them on over my long underwear, then put on my boots and laced them up. I grabbed my jacket and called out, "Anything we'll need?"
"Bring your knife and some extra rope would probably be a good idea."
I got the requested gear and crawled out of the cave. Buffy was sitting on the ground by the entrance, her breathing labored, "What the hell did you do, Buffy?"
She waved her hand down the hill as she struggled to her feet, "Damn thing was a lot heavier than I thought!"
She started down the slope without any further explanation, leading me toward where we'd butchered the deer the day we were shot down. As we got closer I saw a lump lying on the ground, we came up to the carcass of a deer at least twice the size of the one she'd killed earlier. She had removed the head and field dressed it but it was still huge, what was lying there had to weigh over three hundred pounds. I stared at it in amazement and then at Buffy, "You killed that bare handed?"
"Yeah, son of a bitch nearly got me before I got it."
"Jesus, Buffy, it could have kicked you and really hurt you!"
"I was more worried about getting gored!" She lifted up the rear leg causing the abdominal cavity to gap open, inside was a pair of large antlers, "I didn't know if you knew of any use for them so I brought them along, they didn't add that much to the weight."
I couldn't think of anything to use them for right off the top of my head but something might come to mind, if nothing else they'd make interesting clothes hangers. "How far did you drag that thing?"
"I didn't, I carried the fu… damn overweight bastard over a mile, most of it uphill! I didn't think I should risk leaving a trail."
"What about the head and guts?"
"I put them behind some rocks, but even if the Germans find them they'll just figure it's one of the farmers getting some extra meat for the winter."
I thought about it for a moment, "Yeah, it should be safe enough. They aren't very likely to think it's a couple of American pilots hiding out on their mountain."
"Can we get it butchered and stowed before we lose all the light?"
I looked at the sky, the sun was almost set and there were banks of clouds starting to move in from the northwest, "We better, I think another storm is coming in."
Despite the cold we both stripped out of our clothes before we started butchering the deer. Half an hour later we had finished the job, Buffy was coming back from her last trip of taking the deer meet up to our freezer and burying it in the snow. I cleaned my hands as well as I could, wiping them with pine needles until most of the blood was gone. I piled our clothes onto the two deer antlers and we carried the back to the entrance of the cave.
Buffy gingerly dug through our clothes until she got out her jacket and both of our sets of long underwear. I saw she'd gotten some blood on her jacket carrying the deer. "I'm going to go get these cleaned and wash up; you get a fire going and then come join me."
"Yes, masta!"
She stuck her tongue out at me and blew a raspberry at me, "Okay, don't, but then you get to sleep on the floor by the fire, you're not going to come to bed like that."
I looked down at my body; I was streaked with blood and dirt. I shivered at the thought of that cold water but at the same time thought it might be nice to get clean. Other than wiping down with a damp cloth a couple of times I hadn't bathed since we had been shot down. "Yeah, I'll be up to join you in just a bit."
I crawled into the cave and hung our clothes up on the branches in the corner, shaking them out and brushing them off as best I could. I lit the fire I had set and then added extra wood to it so it would be good and warm by the time we got back, maybe even heat up the place a little and make it bearable.
I went back out and up to the pool where Buffy was, I saw our long underwear piled on a rock, all of it sopping wet. She was just finishing getting her leather jacket clean, "I'm not sure how much more it's going to take getting washed like this," she said as I came up.
I nodded in agreement, "We need some leather treatment or something."
Buffy stood up and kicked off her shoes, "Let's finish the wash first."
She pulled off her heavy wool socks and the lighter silk ones underneath, then she stood up and stripped off her panties and bra. She looked over at me, "Come on, Barb."
I removed my shoes and then the last of the clothing I was wearing. We knelt side by side and scrubbed out our underwear and the socks, then put them on top of the pile of long underwear.
My hands were already numb from the cold of the water and I looked skeptically at the pool of water, then Buffy smiled at me, "Come on - let's get this over with."
She gingerly walked out into the pool until she was in water up to her mid-thigh, it was a lot deeper than I'd thought - the crystal clear water was deceiving. She squatted down in the water until it came up to her neck and started rubbing herself, roiling the water around her. I followed her out into the water, gasping in shock as the freezing water came up over my knees. I copied her and the water chilled my skin to the point where after a minute I didn't feel the cold, I was just shivering. I'd scrubbed myself as best I could when I felt another pair of hands on my back, "Hold on for minute longer," Buffy said.
I held still as she washed off my back, after a few moments she patted my butt, "There you go."
I turned around, "Now it's your turn."
Buffy flashed me a grin and turned her back to me. I ran my hands over her back rubbing harder where I saw something on her skin. I was moving as quickly as I could but made sure I got all the dirt and grime that I could see. A minute later I slapped her butt, or tried to, it was more of a pat since I couldn't move my hand with any real velocity underwater, "You're done!"
"Thanks," then she ducked her head under water and started rubbing her face and hair, a minute later she stood up and started to shake, "Jesus that's cold!"
I ducked under the water and washed my face and hair as well as I could without any soap or shampoo. After a minute I decided I'd done as much as I could stand and stood up and shook off as much water as I could. We got out of the pool and I grabbed all of our wet clothing while Buffy got her jacket and our boots.
"Well, we're going to be nice and clean but what the hell are we going to wear tonight?"
"Nothing, so I hope you've got a good fire going."
I followed Buffy back to the cave, once inside I piled more wood on the fire and then started hanging up the wet clothes. Buffy stood by the fire slowly turning, getting herself dry and warm. I joined her as soon as I finished hanging the clothes up, "What do you want for dinner?" I asked.
"Steak, it will be faster! Okay with you?"
I nodded in agreement and Buffy headed for the back of the cave where we had the hunk of meat we were working on. We had only just started on the second haunch of the first deer she had killed, with all the meat we had gotten from the stag I figured we would have enough to last the winter if we were careful. She was back a minute later with three good sized steaks.
I took my cleaning stick and brushed the coals off the flat rock that was in the edge of the fire. Buffy laid the steaks out on it as soon as it was clear and they immediately started to sizzle. It wasn't the best broiler in the world, the meat came out more like it was pan fried than broiled, but it worked and it cooked the meat reasonably fast.
While the meat was cooking I dug around in our stash of food and got out a packet of K-ration crackers and a dozen malted balls for desert. We had decided to supplement our diet with the K-rations to give us a little variety and some added vitamins. Buffy set our seat cushions, the old parachute packs, as close to the fire as she dared and then sat cross legged on one of them. I joined her as soon as I finished collecting the other stuff we'd need.
We only had the one mess tin so as soon as the first steak was done she got it out of the fire and put it on the tin between us. We shared the steak, slicing of pieces with our knives and then skewering the piece with the tip of the knife to eat it. We split the food from the K-ration fifty-fifty, because of Buffy's insistence, but she ate two of the steaks to my one, her Slayer metabolism needed the extra fuel.
We were careful to drink our fill of water as we ate, we didn't want to get dehydrated. After dinner I used the little water left in the canteen to clean the dishes and our knives. Then Buffy went and filled both the canteen and the cup up with water from the stream. I decided to make tonight a celebration and I got the packet of hot chocolate powder from the K-ration and when Buffy got back with the water I put the cup on the fire to heat. We sat next to the fire and shared the hot chocolate and ate our malted balls. When we finished I got up and checked the wet clothes, they were still real wet - they were going to take a long time to dry.
"Come on, Barb, let's go to bed."
I looked at her and nodded agreement, she went over to the bed area and crawled under the silk parachute we used as a blanket. I threw some more wood on the fire and then went and crawled into the bed beside her. We lay there, side by side, our bare skin only inches from touching. We talked quietly for a while, about growing up, she was starting to open up and tell me about her life as a Slayer and the world she had grown up in. I found it fascinating and amazing, both the things she had done and how the world had changed in sixty years. She tended to brush over a lot of the changes but I insisted she tell me about them, those changes made the background of the world she grew up in.
After a while I got up and threw another batch of wood on the fire and then crawled back into bed and we went to sleep. At dawn I woke, the howling wind whistled by the gaps above us and occasionally a couple snowflakes worked their way through the gaps above the high wall and drifted silently down. I woke with a naked Slayer wrapped around me, her head resting on my shoulder and one of her hands cupping my breast. One of her legs was thrown over mine and I could feel the soft curls of her bush against my thigh. I felt her move a little, snuggling even closer to me and trying to work her leg between mine, "Uh, Buffy?"
She wiggled again and then froze, she jerked away from me releasing my breast and pulling her leg off of me, "Oh Jesus! Barb… I'm so sorry…"
I still had my arm around her, "Shush," I started to pull her back against me; she resisted for a moment and then relaxed into me. "Just let me hold you."
"Holding is good," she replied, I felt her cheek move against my skin and realized she was smiling.
"Buffy, this isn't an offer to go any further…"
"I know, but it does feel good to hold you and for you to hold me."
We lay there together, the cave slowly lightening as the sun rose. The howling wind and the fact that the light had a pearly, indistinctness about it made me sure we were in the middle of another storm. I thought about the fact that I was snuggling with another woman, that both of us were completely nude, and that I was comfortable with it. The later was the most amazing part. Buffy had already told me, many times, both seriously and jokingly, that she wanted a sexual relationship with me. I was struggling with it, my intellect, my upbringing; and my world all said it was wrong.
But then I heard her stories about her world, about the sexual revolution that had occurred and brought sex out in the open, at least to some extent. The calm acceptance she had of her best friend, her best girlfriend, having a female lover, although she admitted that she hadn't handled it well when she first found out. But she blamed herself for her reaction; her friend and her lover were not doing anything wrong in her view.
"Barb, what are you thinking about?"
"Why I'm lying in bed with a naked girl."
"Necessity? Practicality?"
"Okay, that may be… but why am I snuggling with her and enjoying the feel of her against me so much?"
"Maybe because it is nice, because it does feel good?"
"But it's wrong!"
I felt her shake her head against me, "No, Barb, it is not wrong."
"Maybe in your world…"
"No, there are people in my world that think it is wrong. But they are wrong, it's not!"
"Buffy, it's a sin!"
"Going all religious on me now?"
I shook my head, "No… but that is how society views it."
"Barb, society views a lot of things wrong. Not just in your time but in my time. I learned a long time ago that you just can't take society's view. Do you want to hear my philosophy?"
"Buffy, I'm always interested in your thoughts."
"Okay, here goes. There are two levels, or kinds, of right and wrong. There is the absolute right and wrong, murder, robbery, assault, rape… most things people would consider a major crime are absolute wrongs. In the end you can identify all of those kinds of right and wrong by testing them against a basic rule: are you violating another person's right to live their life as they desire? As I heard someone express it one time, 'your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose'. I don't think there is a whole lot of disagreement about those kinds of rights and wrongs across society… any society."
I nodded my head in agreement, "Yeah, although even those can get some debate."
"I know, can killing ever be justified? Is what we do murder? I've sort of come down on the side of 'if you didn't stop the swing of your fist at the tip of my nose then you are willing to suffer the consequences'. I've run into it my entire life, in my old life I'd go out and kill vampires without a second thought, I just assumed they were evil and needed destroying. But I don't know that they all deserved to be killed, just like I don't know that all the men I've killed in this war deserved to die. In all probability I've killed innocents, those planes I've shot down, the bombs I've dropped, not everyone that got killed or hurt deserved it. But I can't control everything, I do the best I can and live with the results. I didn't choose to be the Slayer; sometimes you just can't control everything. The world isn't perfect but we have to live in it and deal with whatever it throws at us."
I hugged Buffy to me, feeling the warmth of her skin against mine, "Buffy, you do an amazing job."
She chuckled softly, "And sometimes it is amazingly bad."
"No it isn't… I can't think of any decision you've made since I've known you that wasn't the best you could make… well maybe other than that time you decided to get that extra bottle of Scotch…"
"Hey! I thought we agreed never to bring that up again!"
"Sorry…"
Buffy was silent for a while, I felt her shift and snuggle a little closer to me, her hand slid up my chest and she started to cup my breast, I could feel myself start to tense and she must have felt it to, she pulled it away and wrapped it around my side, "Sorry…"
I reached up and took her hand and put it on my breast, "No playing!" She snorted but didn't do anything but cup it gently, "You were saying? About your philosophy?"
"Oh, okay, well the other kind of right and wrongs are those that you decide are right or wrong for yourself. Those are the kinds of right and wrong that a lot of groups, especially religions, try to force on other people. But that is a violation of the first principle, they are not right or wrong because they hurt someone but because someone doesn't like them. When you have groups, or society as a whole, determine those kinds of rights and wrongs for everyone then you have lost your freedom."
"On the personal level if you determine that something is wrong for you then that is fine, don't do it. You can even try to convince me not to do it. But if you force me not to do it then you are violating my rights, you are committing an absolute wrong against me. To get to us, lying here together, naked, is not in and of itself right or wrong. It is only wrong if one of us doesn't want it, if you don't want it then I have no right to force it on you and I'll get up and leave if you want. Two women making love, two men making love, a man and a woman making love, none of those actions are inherently right or wrong. That can only be determined in the context, are all of the people freely choosing to do it."
I thought for a few moments, "Buffy, that's awfully simplistic."
"Yeah, it is. And I know there are huge grey areas, when does persuasion become coercion? When do your actions really and truly affect me even though you maintain they should not affect me? Who decides when we cannot agree… You can debate the specifics for years, probably centuries. But that doesn't mean that the basic truths are not valid. Come up with any other set of rules, any other codes of conduct, that doesn't meet those basic rules and really look at it and you'll see that the first thing you have to throw out is the independence of the individual. You have to give someone, god, congress, or the local witch doctor - someone the power to dictate to another person. I believe that is wrong!"
I thought about it, the more I thought the more I realized it actually fit with what I believed although I'd never taken it to such extremes. I was very much a product of my environment and I accepted a lot of things without question. The extreme example that Buffy was throwing in societies face every day was how women were expected to behave, we'd both blown that one completely out of the water. "Barb, did my ranting put you to sleep?"
"No, it's making me think."
"And how's that going?"
"Well, for now I'll accept that I can snuggle with you and it's not wrong, in the big sense or in my sense."
She squirmed against me, rubbing her body against mine and sending chills through me, "Sounds like a plan."
"Buffy, that doesn't mean you get to start making love to me, I said we could snuggle."
She stopped her movement and just lay there, "Like this?"
"Yes, like that." I held the little dynamo against me, feeling the warmth of her skin and the contours of her body pressing against me while I stared at the ceiling and contemplated what she had said.
The second batch of storms lasted even longer than the first; it was ten days before the weather finally broke. We woke to bright blue skies and frigid temperatures. We huddled in the cave; wearing all the clothes we had, trying to stay warm without the benefit of a fire.
It was mid-morning when we started to hear the distinctive whistling roar of jet engines, the first we'd heard in over two weeks. We went out onto the ledge; I was surprised to see that it was completely packed with snow. Then Buffy started digging at the entrance and soon there was a cave like opening, she started crawling in and then called back, "Come on."
I followed her and saw the ledge itself was almost clear of snow; branches had been spread across the boulders forming a roof that was now completely covered with snow. Buffy was up near the edge and suddenly a lot more light came in as she pushed the snow blocking the other end out. We spent most of the day on the ledge; it was quite comfortable screened from the wind by the rocks and the roof. We could watch out over the valley without any danger of being seen. "When did you put the roof on?" I asked.
"During one of the breaks during that first series of storms, I was afraid this was going to fill up with snow and it would be too noticeable if we tried to clear it out. I never got a chance to check it but it seems to have worked pretty well."
"It's worked beautifully."
When the valley darkened we headed back to our cave. Once inside I took off my clothes down to the long underwear, we were still living in them, trying to save our other clothes for when we continued our escape. Buffy began to go through her gear and didn't get out of her cloths, "Buffy have you got some plan?"
"Yeah, I'm going to do a reconnaissance patrol, I probably won't be back until morning."
I started to put my cloths back on, "Okay, but let's get a good dinner before we head out."
She looked up at me and took my arm as she shook her head, "No, Barb. I'm going on my own."
"Buffy, my ankle has healed! I can get around just fine!"
"Barb, it's not completely healed. Besides, I can move a lot faster on my own."
I looked at her for a moment and I couldn't really argue her point, reluctantly I nodded in agreement, "Buffy, hold on until I can get a good dinner fixed, you'll need your energy."
She thought for a moment and glanced at the darkening sky visible through the gap high up on the right wall, it was dark blue and it would be black in another ten or fifteen minutes, "Sounds like a good idea."
I started building the fire and after a last check to insure it was dark enough that no one would be able to see any smoke I lit it. I went to the haunch of deer meat hanging in the corner, it was so cold it was almost frozen but I could still slice it. I cut off three nice sized steaks, one for me and two for buffy, and then thought better and added a third one. While the steaks were cooking I scrounged through my E&E kit and got out one of the K-rations and added it to our meal, the food in it wasn't very good but it did give some variety and all we'd been eating for the last week had been venison.
After dinner Buffy bundled up in all of her clothes. She took both of her knives but left the .45 hanging in the cave, "Are you sure you don't want your gun?"
She shook her head, "I'd never use it; I can't risk making that much noise. If I have to deal with some German it will be with a knife or my hands."
"Be real careful, Buffy."
She grinned at me, "Don't worry, I'm not going to take any risks. I'm planning on coming back - you don't think I'd miss the chance to spend the whole winter with you, just the two of us, do you?"
I shook my head, "Yeah, but your notion of not taking any risks leaves a lot to be desired." She walked over to me and held out her arms, I drew her in a tight hug, "Be safe, you damned Slayer."
I felt her head nod against my chest and then we let go of each other, "I will, see you in the morning."
I watched as she disappeared through the entry way and then started cleaning up and putting things away. It was a long, lonely night. Colder than any other night in the cave, but I figured that had more to do with not having Buffy in bed with me than the actual temperature. Finally dawn came and the cave began to lighten, I smothered the remaining flames but let the coals continue to burn, they didn't give off any smoke and they warmed the cave a little.
It was an hour past dawn and I was starting to worry, well starting to worry more than I had been, when I heard Buffy's voice from outside, "Barb?"
"Hey, Buffy," I called back.
"Got some stuff to pass in."
I went over to the entrance to the cave and crouched down, "Go ahead."
A large, coarse bag started to come through the entrance; I grabbed a corner and pulled on it and slowly drug it into the cave. Once in I picked it up and staggered at the weight, it had to weigh sixty or seventy pounds. There was some German printing on the bag and I struggled to make it out, 'waterless peas' I came up with, and then realized what it must be - dried peas!
I was looking at the huge bag in bemusement, I bet we were going to be sick of dried peas before the winter was over, but at least it would give us some vegetables to eat. Then I heard Buffy again, "Hey, Barb!"
I looked back at the entrance and another bag was filling it, I ran over and grabbed it and hauled it inside. This bag was even heavier and I didn't have any trouble reading the printing, potatoes! I dragged it over to the other bag and went back to the entrance. There was some scraping and clanging and then a large, dark blue enameled pot was sliding through the gap, it had to be at least a five gallon pot. I grabbed one of the handles and pulled it into the cave, I looked in the pot and there was a wad of heavy material filling it. I pulled it out and a blanket unrolled, a bunch of metal plates, silver wear, and cups clanged onto the floor. Buffy's voice came from the entrance, "Hey! Don't just dump everything out after I carried it all the way up this damn mountain!"
I looked at her as she finished wiggling through the entrance, a tight fit with all the cloths she had on, "What the hell Buffy!? Did you rob a German commissary?"
She grinned sheepishly, "Uh… well they really didn't have much of a guard…"
I looked at her, worried about what she might have done, "Did you…?"
"No one saw me, no one heard me, and I didn't touch a single German. And I didn't leave any trail they could follow. They'll just figure some soldiers ripped them off, or they lost it, or there was a screw up in supply. There were at least twenty bags of both the peas and the potatoes, they won't miss one anytime soon."
"And the other stuff?"
"You know how stuff goes missing around base… I don't imagine it's any different in the Luftwaffe."
I looked over the stuff, "Well, I sure don't think we'll have any trouble surviving the winter."
"I was hoping it would be enough."
I grinned at her, "Between the venison and this stuff we won't have a problem, even with your appetite. It may get a little monotonous but we'll survive." I noticed a field grey backpack on her back, I pointed at it, "What else did you steal?"
She grinned at me and slipped the backpack off her shoulders, it was bulging with whatever it contained. She set it on the ledge and then opened it up and started pulling things out of it. First she pulled out a small red apple and handed it to me. I looked at it in amazement and only barely kept myself from biting into it. Then she pulled out more apples until she had a small pile on the ledge next to her, then she pulled out a bottle of wine and set it down carefully on the ledge. More apples followed and another bottle of wine. Finally she stopped, there had to be fifty or sixty apples and the two bottles of wine but I could see the pack wasn't quite empty.
"What else is in there?"
She grinned at me, "How's your German, Barb?"
"You know perfectly well I can speak a little, but I'll never pass as a German."
"No, how are you at reading it?" she asked as she pulled out two large books; one was about an inch and a half thick and had a paper cover of some sort.
"Better than I can speak it." I said as I stared at the books in her hands. I'd studied German for two years in high school and all the time I was at Stanford and could usually make myself understood and understand German speakers if they spoke slowly enough. My reading was even better, one of the reasons I'd taken German was because a lot of the advanced aeronautical engineering papers, until Hitler cut them off in the late 30s, came from Germany and I wanted to read them without having to find translations.
"I thought we should have something to help us pass the time, it might be a long winter," she said as she handed it the thick book to me.
I looked at the title printed on the cover, the first line I could read easily, 'Messerschmitt 262A/B'. The rest of the title I had to work on for a little before I translated it roughly to 'Operations and Maintenance Manual'. I looked back at her, "What the hell, Buffy?"
"I think it's the maintenance manual for those planes; at least that's what it looked like to me." I started leafing through the book, a couple pages in was a sheet with three line drawings of the airplane we had been watching, top, front and side view with the overall dimensions of the aircraft. I flipped some more pages and saw pictures with labels and captions and more engineering drawings. "Well, I might find it interesting but I think you might find it a little dry."
"I figured as much but there wasn't a big selection," she held up the second book. It wasn't really a book; it was a loose leaf notebook about half an inch thick; there was no title or any other printing on it. I opened the cover and was looking at a type written title sheet. It took me a moment to work out the title but I finally came up with something I thought was close 'Messerschmitt 262 Pilot's Transition Workbook'. I started leafing through the pages and saw detailed photographs of the cockpit of an airplane with labels to various instruments and controls in the pictures interspersed among the text. I noticed hand written notes in the margins and in most of the available white space.
"Do you know what this is?"
"It looks like it's some kind of training guide."
"I think it's to transition pilots to that plane we've been seeing flying around."
"Yes! That should be interesting."
"Buffy, we need to get these back to our people, they'd be invaluable to our engineering types!"
"Yeah, I thought of that, I hope we can do it. But we have to be careful, if the Germans catch us with them they could shoot us as spies, and it wouldn't be a lie."
I nodded in agreement, we had every right to try to escape but if we tried to steal German secrets then they had the right to consider us spies of some sort. And it wasn't as if the books were inconsequential military handbooks, both were stamped at the top and bottom of every page with 'Geheimnis' (secret) in red ink, they were secret German military manuals.
"Buffy, where the hell did you get these?"
"They were in a maintenance shed, there was a whole shelf of the work books and I saw half a dozen of the bigger manuals; that one was in a corner under a pile of other papers. I don't think they'll miss them anytime soon."
I just shook my head in amazement, "We'll have to think real hard about trying to get out with these. But we've got all winter to learn them - that would still be a good thing."
She nodded in agreement, "But they can wait, let's celebrate!"
The next week passed quickly as we studied the books Buffy had stolen. My German, rusty after several years of disuse, came back quickly. The work book was easiest to figure out, we knew the kinds of things that had to be covered and the context and all the pictures helped to clarify things. Buffy and I would lie side by side under the covers, now supplemented with the blanket she had stolen, and go over the book deciphering the meaning, sometimes arguing until we were satisfied we understood what it meant. In some ways it reminded me of our early days in the 'Squadron Combat Training Group' when we were learning a new aircraft. We'd pour over the dash 1s and quiz each other about their contents, sometimes arguing over the meaning of some ambiguous writing. Now we were doing the same thing, like we were preparing ourselves to fly the Me-262.
I used the operation and training manual to try to clarify questions we had. When Buffy got bored, she could only stand so much 'research' as she termed it, she would often go out on the ledge to watch the valley below, especially if we could hear the jets. When she was gone I would spend my time trying to read the operations manual. It was much more difficult, it was much more technically oriented and there were significantly fewer pictures and diagrams. A lot of the technical terminology was difficult to decipher, although the German's proclivity for creating long technical terms simply by stringing together simpler words helped to some degree. I figured I probably understood about 80 percent of the operations information and 60 to 70 percent of the maintenance information. I had more questions about the maintenance information because I couldn't always tell if I was wrong in my base assumptions. I thought I could usually spot when my assumptions were wrong in interpreting the operational information and I could fix them.
I woke about dawn to find myself alone in bed, looking around the dimly lit cave Buffy was nowhere to be seen. Outside I could hear the roar of a couple of jets; the sound was fading so they must have just taken off. Buffy was undoubtedly outside watching them; she was absolutely fascinated by the German's air operations.
I got up and stoked the fire; I figured I had about fifteen minutes before I would have to douse it for the day. I put on just enough wood to last about ten minutes, if it was down to just coals we could let it burn until it went out on its own, the coals emitted almost no smoke, certainly not enough for us to worry about.
I put the big pot Buffy had gotten on the rock in the fireplace to heat; it was two thirds full of water. We didn't have anything to flavor it with like coffee or tea but the warm water was nice to drink during the long cold day. I took the leftover potatoes from last night's dinner and cut them into small cubes and then sliced a couple pieces of fat from the leftover roast and put them all in a fry pan and started heating them, making my version of home fries. I put the remainder of the roast on the heating rock to warm it up a little.
Breakfast was just about ready when I heard scraping at the entrance and Buffy appeared through the entry, she smiled in greeting and added, "Smells good, Barb!"
"Up early, I see."
"Yeah, you know my Slayer sleeping habits."
"You seem to do just fine lots of mornings."
"Well, sometimes there are added benefits," she said as she looked at me in my long underwear, and then at herself similarly clad.
"Is that why you're such a clean freak? Washing these things every three or four days so we have to sleep practically nude and freeze?"
"We don't freeze!"
"Yeah, tough to freeze wrapped with a Buffy blanket – unfortunately she doesn't do a good job with my feet."
"Your feet are always cold – it wouldn't matter if we were on a tropical island they would still be cold!"
I stuck my tongue out at her, and then relented, I couldn't really complain too much about her washing habits since I preferred the nights when we slept without the long underwear also. I just couldn't bring myself to admit it to her, or to not wear them if I didn't have an excuse. "Come on, breakfast is ready."
Buffy came over and got a couple plates and held them out to me as I split the home fries between the two plates. I speared the roast with a fork and put it on the fry pan to slice up, we each took a couple of slices and then sat side by side on the ledge and ate our breakfast. With the supplies Buffy had gotten our eating arrangements had gotten much more civilized, we didn't have to share a single plate any longer.
We spent the day studying the manuals and talking about what we had learned about the German's jet fighter. The more I learned the more impressed I was with the plane. From what we'd been able to deduce from the training manual and the maintenance information I'd learned so far its biggest weakness seemed to be its engines. They didn't seem to last very long, the maintenance seemed to call for engine change outs after forty to fifty hours depending on use, even shorter if they saw lots of combat. That was very little time compared to what we got out of our piston engines, we did engine overhauls at 400 hours for combat aircraft and that was conservative. Even with the short maintenance cycle they seemed to have a lot of premature engine failures, at least that's what it seemed like considering all the warning, cautions and procedures for engine failures detailed in the training manual. In addition, it seemed that you couldn't throttle up or down too quickly or the engine would 'flame out', most of the time with catastrophic results for the engine.
The next couple of days were a repeat of that day, Buffy up and out before dawn. On the third day I thought she seemed distracted as we were studying together and she spent even more time than usual out on the ledge. While we were having dinner I caught her staring off into space several times, the third time I decided to find out what was bothering her, "Buffy, what's going on?"
She started a little and turned to me, "Huh, what?"
"I asked, 'what is going on'."
"Oh… nothing…"
"Nothing?!" She looked down, embarrassed almost, then looked up at me, her steady gaze almost unnerving after a long ten seconds, "Nothing?"
Finally she shrugged to herself, "I think… no I know I need to make another reconnaissance patrol."
"Did you see something? Anyone heading up here?"
"No, nothing like that - I just need to check some things out."
"Buffy, the last time you did that you stole half the German commissary. You do that too often and someone is going to get suspicious."
"I'm not going to steal anything, promise. I just need to check something."
I looked at her for several moments and she returned my gaze, "When are you heading out?"
"Later, about midnight I think. But I'll be late getting back, mid-morning at the earliest and maybe not until tomorrow night."
"Buffy, promise me you'll be real careful."
"I will, Barb."
I nodded, "Okay, finish your dinner."
