From his manacled spot in the Lieutenant's office closet, Eagle Squadron Flight Commander Thomas Carter had felt himself begin to sweat in dread and anticipation of what was to come next, as Gisbonnhoffer seemed (by all audible sounds) to have cornered Anya Grigorovna in his office yet again.
And yet, something about this encounter was different. Carter listened more closely. It was not Anya at all, but another woman, at whose unexpected appearance the Lieutenant was quite overcome.
He asked after her health, her father's health. Damn him if he wasn't actually cordial, actually courtly in his attentions to her. Such deferential behavior on his part made his vile conduct toward Anya all that more of an affront.
"Happy birthday," this new woman had said, her greeting followed in short order by the familiar sounds of the desk being primed once more for ill-use in accommodation of Gisbonnhoffer's twisted rutting.
All it took was his tormentor's moan of, "Ah, Marion," for Carter to know that this was his moment, this was his one, best chance. To take hostage the obvious object (clearly complicit, she had even come so far as to break into a prison camp to see Gisbonnhoffer) of his enemy's consuming obsession.
And so he had done, taking a German officer out with him: one shot, one kill. One car, no written requisition needed.
And here he was, Thomas Carter, sharing a getaway car with this woman, the Lieutenant's 'Marion'. Even in her now-disheveled state-her dress ink-stained, her hair slightly awry, her cheeks and face distorted by the gag he had employed on her-he was not so absent of his own body not to note that the German's fascination with her (at least insofar as her looks) was not mis-placed.
A pretty girl. An islander. The kind of person he was meant to be defending, to be fighting for. A pretty girl, a local islander, a non-combatant: collaborating with his enemy. Becoming his enemy. Marion. How he despised the sound of that name and all that it represented to his tormentor, the Lieutenant. Could this girl driving this car know what her consensual relationship with Gisbonnhoffer had done to Anya Grigorovna? What it had forced his already brought-low countrywoman to become? To endure? Were he to live long enough to find the time, he could not wait to inform her, most eloquently.
After a long stretch of very rural and undisturbed dirt-packed road, they were coming up nearly within sight of the docks. He made it clear that he wanted her to pull off into a gravelly side-road, and from there into the underbrush. The rough road surface and scrub would do well to camouflage their tire tracks.
Once the engine was turned off, he did not think twice-pretty face and great pair of stems meaningless in that moment-about bringing the pistol grip to the base of her skull and knocking her out cold before tightly binding her hands and feet.
He needed to leave her here while he sneaked to the harbor and quietly managed to appropriate (in record time, for sure) a uniform.
He didn't like the idea of leaving her alone, his only true currency in this escape scenario. He could not afford to risk her so only to lose her.
But the universe has a way, sometimes, when you least expect it, of producing exactly what you need when you need it, and as he turned away from the concealed car and began to head toward the harbor, he heard a knocking about sound coming from the trunk. He made certain to hold one of his pistols defensively as he lifted the lid with his other hand, and found quite quickly that he could lower the handgun without further worry.
It was the Gypsy boy, an unexpected stowaway. It would seem he had locked himself in the trunk, gambling on (it would seem) his own successful escape.
"Molodoy chelovyek," Carter addressed him, speaking to the Gypsy in their common language of Russian, and not knowing his name, "stay. Mind the lady. Shoot Germans." Carter surrendered his second pistol, hopeful the teenager knew how to use it if necessary.
The Gypsy boy accepted the weapon, and looked over to the bound, gagged and unconscious 'Marion' still inside the car with no particular curiosity. He gave a sharp nod in reply to Carter's Russian, and pointed the gun back to indicate the contents of the trunk. Which proved, beyond fortuitously, to hold several just-laundered officer's uniforms, and a large duffel sack of dirty laundry clearly destined for cleaning.
Carter had the uniform on in a flash, the dirty laundry dumped out into the trunk, the duffel now empty and ready to be of service to him.
"Kak vaz zavoot?" he demanded the boy's name as he holed the coat's last brass button.
The boy stared at him for a hard minute (a hard minute they did not really have to waste), as though he had not quite understood the Russian of the request. Finally, he spit out a one-syllable name, "Djak. Meenya zavoot Djak."
Carter did not bother to mouth any of the usual social (or Courtly) Russian pleasantries in response to learning the boy's name, his own mind already racing toward the riddle of the harbor and what small snip of a plan he had fabricated with what tools he had found: escaped prisoner, uniform, hand weapons, laundry bag.
He pulled the blessedly-long-enough duffle over the unconscious woman, obscuring her within it entirely, and directed the boy. "Carry her," he said, raising his pistol to the kid's becoming-ever-more-perceptive, familiar dark eyes. "You are my prisoner." And he set out to march them toward the harbor.
The terrain was ridiculous. The landscape gave one the erroneous feeling of a summer holiday: dunes, scrubby woods bordering on beaches, and pretty-enough-for-a-postcard views, vivid with blues and greens even in October.
It was October, right? his mind questioned him. He had bailed out of his Spitfire in late August, trying to time himself (though his plane was aflame and falling fast) to land on Burhou, one of the uninhabited islands, only a little large than a mile. But it had not proven a night for precision. He and his plane, and the bombs onboard, had never gotten to France, their true destination. The mile-worth of water between Alderney and Burhou known locally as the Swinge could see tides up to seven knots, impressive overfalls and strong winds. And the other men (and himself) had fallen into the sea, where the others, less expert jumpers, less proficient swimmers, more unlucky in their flotation gear, more unlucky when the Germans arrived to retrieve them from the waves (they shot most on sight), perished. The Jerries had chosen to keep him, a trophy to interrogate, the highest-ranking officer among the doomed flight crew.
"Keep him," the shorter, rounder Nazi (later he knew to be the Kommandant) had ordered back on land, at the review of him. "He is...the prettiest of the lot."
At this declaration shots had rang out one either side of Carter, what was left of his flight crew felled like stones all about him.
They were nearly past the jetty, within sight of the docked boats.
"Twenty-two;" Carter thought, reciting from rote in his mind to calm himself, "one card too many, dealer wins. Six-five-four; countdown to escape. Eight thirty-two; the New Jersey house number to which he sent no letters. Thirty-six; his age when he had stopped counting the men he had personally killed. And Zed, for Zara...Zed, for Zara." By the time he had finished the familiar, grounding litany in his head he had picked the boat best suited to his (their, now, he supposed) need and their urgency.
He marched (still behind the Gypsy masquerading as his prisoner, and shouldering the dead-weight of the Lieutenant's woman) up to a smaller boat, seeming to be a fishing craft that was one of the first vessels to present itself at the dock. (As they were coming up the beach toward the harbor and not using the main access of the inland road, this boat proved to be the most-distantly docked vessel from the harbormaster's office.)
"I require your boat," Carter told the young man at the wheel, affecting his best German accented English and arrogant mien. In the distance he thought he began to hear the arrival and bustle of automobiles and men being assembled to search.
The young skipper's eyes were the size of dinner plates in reaction to the activity further up the dock. "Sir, I-I am meant to wait here, most urgently."
In response to this statement of noncompliance with his direct demand, Carter lightly inclined his head, narrowing one eye in a gesture that telegraphed dangerous displeasure.
"You may see my papers, if you like," the callow boatman reached into his oilskin coat. The early afternoon light showed the lightest of shadows along the young man's jaw, a beard barely-there enough to need be shaved.
The sound of dogs being mustered traveled over to them on the now-rising wind.
Before the young man's hand could pull back out of his coat, Carter's finger squeezed the trigger on his handgun. One shot. One kill. No further impediment to escape. "My boat," he said aloud, still employing the German accent to his speech, stepping over the body, messy on the decking, his pistol-free hand instructing the Gypsy boy to deposit his own heavy load nearby.
Once at the wheel (sheltered under a small four-foot by four-foot wheelhouse), Carter strove, with all his available mental concentration, to recall the exact geography of this place, Alderney, in relation to the other nearby islands. He engaged the boat's engine and set their course due East, as though he hoped to make landfall along the French coast, some ten or so miles away. But he knew, to outwit this enemy he would have to do the unthinkable (for a man bent on escape and freedom). Once out on the open water he would have to re-direct them, piloting them some degrees west and south to one of the smaller islands nestled between the two larger governing powers of Guernsey and Jersey, the very belly of the Occupation beast, and try to lose the Germans among their own terrain. Any other option was certain death (after more torture and interrogation).
He did not bother to share his plan with Djak the Gypsy boy. The kid had put his faith in him so far. He would clearly do as he was told, asking few questions. Good qualities in such a situation. It was unlikely he had anything of significance to contribute in regard to a working knowledge of the topography surrounding them.
He could tag along, Carter supposed. As long as he didn't slow them down or handicap him in any way. As long as there might be a chance that he could prove useful.
It would not take the Germans left behind long to realize that the flier and the Lieutenant's woman had either gotten away under their very noses, or that they were still free on the island. He hoped, sincerely for his own sake, that the people of these islands were more as they had been presented in his debrief before that last flight: patriotic, willing and stalwart supporters of Britain, rather than as the two he had already met that day: the Nazi's whore, and this corpse on the deck-plainly a German lackey.
He would most likely at some point need the support and goodwill of these islanders if he wanted to live, if he wanted to breathe freedom again. If he ever wanted again (and yes, oh, yes, he wanted) to fly.
...TBC...
