Last Citadel - [World War II 03] by David L. Robbins Read Free Book Online Page B

Vera had brought them here, but she was the pilot and bombardier.
     
    The night split apart, rent by white swords of swinging light. With
whomps
of surging energy, the powerful searchlights of the German camp switched on one by one. The target was still twenty seconds off. Katya kept her course true.
     
    The beams reached left and right, up and down, crisscrossing arms of light that would embrace the U-2 and not let go until the plane and its crew were shot to the ground. Katya’s heart pounded in her ears, it took all of her strength - as it always did, it was this way for every pilot in the night bomber regiment - to hold the stick firm, keeping the plane on its beeline to the target. She wanted to dodge the shafts of light, cut and carve the nimble U-2 around them like pylons. But she was here to blow up an ammunition dump, and there it was.
     
    In that instant, a beam flashed across her windshield, making her wince. It vanished, slipping off the U-2 as Katya sped through it, but then another had caught her shape and swung in from the left. This search beam snagged her plane and gripped it. Another raced to its side and Katya was snared in the crossfire of light. She was blinded.
     
    An eruption rocked the air behind her. The flak batteries had opened up. Katya jammed the stick forward. Behind her, Vera knew what she was doing and screamed, ‘
Go
!’
     
    In the last ten seconds toward the target, Katya shed altitude. Another flak shell roared in her wake. The U-2 rattled, shaken by the blasts and the gushing wind. The plane dove to fifteen hundred feet, almost straight down at the ammunition dump. The propeller, even without the engine powering it, whirled with the mounting speed. Katya swooped out of the spotlights, she left them swishing behind her confused, wondering where she’d gone. But her vision was stung by the powerful beams. She could not fix on her gauges or the ground.
     
    ‘Vera, can you see?’ she shouted into the intercom.
     
    ‘Yes!’
     
    ‘Tell me when!’
     
    Letting the plane plunge, Katya put her left hand on the wire release for the four impact bombs. Another light crossed her path; she tore through it like a paper wall. She guessed she was at one thousand feet now, low enough to strike the ammo dump right in the heart and die in the ensuing detonation. In her earphones, she heard Vera mutter, ‘Katya…’
     
    Katya gritted her teeth.
     
    She hissed only, ‘When?’
     
    ‘Jesus, mother of God.’
     
    ‘When?’
     
    A second, and another, a pounding in her temples, and in her hands gripping the stick and the wire…
     
    ‘Now!’
     
    Katya pulled hard on the wire to release the bombs. The plane bounded, freed of the weight. Katya pushed the throttle in a quarter of the way. She fumbled for the magneto toggle, found it and flipped it down. The propeller, already spinning, caught fast. She rammed the throttle full in and wrapped both hands on the stick, laying all her strength and weight into it, pulling the knob back between her legs.
     
    The U-2s engine, reawakened and fueled, howled. The plane leveled quickly but in two more heartbeats this was not going to be enough. She braced herself, waiting for the bombs to ignite the ammunition and wash a pillar of concussion and flame right over them. She shut her eyes and pulled back on the stick. She could feel Vera pulling, too.
     
    The nose of the plane lifted. Katya opened her eyes. Her vision began to clear. Above, searchlights continued to scan, crossing each other like fencing lances. Katya had no prayer to say that would be fast enough.
     
    The bombs struck. She felt the first kick in her tail from the explosion. The U-2 increased its angle of climb, the engine’s bellow was lost in the roar of the ammunition dump below.
     
    The next moment, the world became furious red and black. A fireball engulfed the plane. Katya gaped out into a swarming hell in the air around her. Flames lashed her cockpit, heat beat against her