Blood of Vipers Read online

  When fighter pilot Cal Jameson is shot down in enemy territory at the end of the war, his only desire is to find his way back to American lines. But as Cal hides from a Waffen-SS death squad, he stumbles into a family of German refugees fleeing Soviet shock troops. Soon, he finds himself in an uncertain role as the family’s protector. Together, they must stay alive while under attack from partisans, Russian soldiers, and the last, dying struggles of the Nazi regime, which is determined to throw back the enemy, even if it means the final destruction of the German people.

  Blood of Vipers

  by Michael Wallace

  © Michael Wallace, 2012. All rights reserved.

  Cover Art by Glendon Haddix at www.streetlightgraphics.com

  1.

  Cal Jameson was deep over enemy territory, fuel running low, ammo almost spent, when he came upon another fighter plane. They were flying through a designated kill box of the United States Army Air Forces, and a week or two earlier Cal would have radioed base, figured it was Luftwaffe, and tried to shoot it down.

  But the German air force was absent from the battlefield—it was only a matter of days, now—and he grew suspicious. He took the Mustang down from the clouds to get a better look and saw red and blue roundels on the wings and recognized it as a British Spitfire moments later.

  It flew low to the ground, strafing a train that was traveling west, huffing into a village. Chances were, the train was stuffed with the same refugees who clogged every road from here to the Soviet lines, thirty, forty miles to the east, but it might hold troops or artillery shells, for all that Cal knew. He banked around to follow the Spitfire on its run.

  It wouldn’t take long. A few more bursts and he’d call it a day. Ammo depleted, nothing but a safe flight back to the airfield east of the Rhine.

  But as he came up behind the British fighter he recoiled in horror. The rooftops of the individual cars were painted white with red crosses.

  Bullets sprayed from the Spitfire’s twin machine guns. The roof of the train peeled open and as Cal followed, he watched in horror as dozens of arms came out of the windows, frantically waving white shirts. Scores of people clung to the exterior of the cars—men, women, children—and they threw themselves from the moving train to escape the gunfire.

  Good Lord, the British pilot didn’t know. He hadn’t seen.

  The Spitfire squeezed a final burst at the locomotive, and then peeled away and circled to do another strafing run.

  “Son of a bitch,” Cal said.

  He pulled back on the stick and pulled a loop to follow the RAF pilot around. The Spitfire made a tighter turn than the Mustang, and he struggled to keep on its tail.

  He radioed base, gave his call sign.

  The answer came at once. “Goofy Two, return to base. Repeat, return to base.”

  “Did you hear me? The bastard is shooting up a hospital train.”

  “We’ll worry about that. Get your butt back to base. That’s an order.”

  That morning at briefing, which amounted to a general call to circle northern Germany and shoot at anything that moved, Cal muttered under his breath that he was tired of seeing school children dive into ditches when he flew over. A few of the new guys looked alarmed at his insubordination, but Cal had eleven kills, and had flown eighty-two missions. He no longer cared.

  Major Potts glared at him. “And how would you end the war, Lieutenant?”

  “It’s over already.”

  “It’s over when Hitler swings from a rope and the Germans put down their guns.”

  “I didn’t get shot at once yesterday. Just buzzed around the country, turning cows to hamburger and mowing down columns of refugees. Aren’t there any legitimate targets left?”

  “Dammit, Jameson, I don’t care if you shoot every last grannie in the country, they’re probably Nazis anyway. Got it?”

  Now, pulling around behind the British pilot, who apparently felt the same way as Major Potts, something twitched. Maybe it was seeing all those arms waving white shirts. Maybe it was Potts’s dismissal.

  The voice on the radio insisted. “You receive that, Goofy Two? Return to base.”

  Cal flipped off the radio. “The devil you say.”

  The Spitfire finally spotted him. The pilot veered, then, seeing it was a Mustang, straightened out again and continued its turn. Cal followed as if he were going to come in behind the British pilot, but he brought it in low and tight until he sat just off the other man’s wing. He glanced over to the British pilot, flying so close Cal could see the man’s eyes, glaring back from beneath his leather aviator cap. Cal waggled his wings. The man waggled his wings back and continued forward. The rear of the train approached in a hurry.

  Cal pushed the throttle. He nosed past the other pilot and leaned in to cut him off. The Spitfire peeled away with what Cal imagined was a flurry of curses from the pilot. Cal laughed and gave the departing British pilot the middle finger as the other plane abandoned the hunt and turned north.

  “Yeah, I hope you report me, you sonofabitch.”

  He glanced down as he roared over the top of the train. A seam opened down the center of one car and he caught a glimpse of a face, a young man, staring up at him. There was a bandage around the man’s head and he held a hand to his eyes to shield them against the sun.

  A bullet pinged against the wing. Cal looked up from the train. A church spire rose from the village ahead, which was no more than a cluster of a few dozen houses. Refugees clogged the train platform—men with crutches, women and children, and a few soldiers trying to organize the crowd.

  The gunfire didn’t come from the soldiers on the platform. Instead, he saw flashes of light to the right and left, small arms fire from twenty or thirty men ducking behind stone walls and crouched next to the outermost house in the village. One man held an antitank gun. Another was mounting a machine gun behind a shield of sandbags, and two more had been unloading crates of ammo from a truck. The terrain was flat, the road ahead of them undefended, but Cal guessed they’d been setting up to defend this tiny village against the Soviet forces penetrating from the southeast.

  Now here was a legitimate target. He glanced at the fuel gauge. Enough for a run or two. And he hadn’t wasted his bullets shooting up the hospital train.

  This is why, he’d tell Potts. This is why I waggled my wingtips at the Brit. I was trying to warn him there was an enemy battery ahead.

  He roared over the village and made a wide turn to come at the soldiers from the north. His hand tightened on the trigger as he came in. Air whistled through a hole in the canopy from an earlier gunshot and a distant part of his mind realized that if the bullet had come in at a slightly different angle it would have taken off the top of his head. After missions, lying in his bunk, these things ran through his mind again and again. But he had no time for that now. No time for fear.

  He brought the Mustang in low and fast. One pass and he’d cut them to pieces. He engaged the guns.

  Something flashed to his right. The Mustang shuddered. Gunfire came at him from the buildings and he saw more trucks, more soldiers in the back street leading into the village. Too late he realized that this wasn’t a single squad of Germans, but an entire company. It wouldn’t be a holding skirmish against the Soviets, when they came, but an outright battle.

  Cal pulled hard on the throttle. Bullets pounded a ferocious drumroll against his wings and undercarriage. He roared over the train station, so low he almost clipped the top of the locomotive. People scattered, threw themselves to the ground.

  He outran the gunfire, and for a moment dared to hope that he’d broken free in time. And then the stick pulled hard to the right. Smoke streamed from the engine. He turned the trim set knob, but it spun under his hand, disconnected f
rom the rudder.

  “Dammit.”

  He managed to keep the plane in the air as it passed over the village, past the train platform, where he took more fire, and across the fields and farmhouses that surrounded the village. He was losing altitude, and as he fiddled with the controls, he saw the flaps were damaged. Meanwhile, the fuel gauge sank, and the engine sputtered and died.

  The plane cleared a copse of trees into sheep pasture that stretched for several acres before a second, larger stretch of forest. When the plane dropped below 150 knots, he put down the landing gear, cranked a turn to bleed off as much speed as he could, and tried to get the flaps to forty degrees, but the ground was coming up too hard and fast. He braced himself for impact.

  The plane slammed into the ground.

  2.

  Cal wasn’t out for long. It couldn’t have been more than a split second, in fact, because dirt came pinging onto the canopy, cast up from the propeller as it churned up the ground before breaking apart. Nevertheless, he couldn’t remember the actual moment of impact.

  Miraculously, the plane was right side up as it shuddered to its final resting place. There was no fire, and although smoke poured out of the engine, he knew it wasn’t likely to catch, not with the fuel he’d shed before impact.

  He worked open the canopy, but it took a moment to realize he was still strapped into the cockpit. When he’d unstrapped himself, he peeled off the pinup card of Lana Turner and the photos of Mom, his kid brother, and his retriever, Rex, from the dash, and tucked them into one of the pockets of his C-1 survival vest. He squirmed out of the cockpit, crawled onto the wing, and dropped to the ground.

  The right wing lay thirty yards back, at the beginning of a long trough gouged in the dirt. Bullet holes perforated the other wing by the dozen, and the canopy too. The propeller lay in pieces around him, and the undercarriage had buried itself in the soil.

  His ankle hurt, but it didn’t seem broken. Similarly, his ribs ached, but when he probed them with a finger, he felt nothing but tenderness. Again, good luck. Except for the minor detail that he was behind enemy lines, and at least thirty miles closer to Soviet forces than to his own side.

  Sheep stood a few dozen yards away, watching him curiously. No movement from the farmhouse, perhaps a quarter mile distant. Maybe they’d evacuated. Or maybe some old fellow with a waxed mustache and lederhosen had spotted him and was even now loading his shotgun. That was, if outraged villagers and survivors from the hospital train didn’t find him first and bludgeon him to death. Cal glanced at the painted nose of his Mustang. The Germans may not know a thing about the 352nd Fighter Group, but they knew all about the “Blue Noses.”

  How many hours until dusk? Three? Four? He had to get out of here.

  Cal gave a final, reluctant look at his P-51 Mustang, the finest machine ever made. Even dying, it hadn’t let him down, had brought him in for a controlled crash.

  It felt like entering another world as he limped into the forest. The leaves had budded and birds chirped from the branches, busy with their springtime activities. The trees were beech and maple, and the vegetation lush and green, very different from the dry hills where he’d grown up out West, but his heart rate slowed. He knew the outdoors, knew how to cover his tracks, how to stay warm at night.

  He followed a deer trail as the ground sloped upward. As he climbed, a sound like distant thunder built in the air. It was the same sound he’d heard at the airfield in Belgium last Christmas, when the Germans drove a bulge into American lines before Patton’s Third Army threw them back. He thought it was probably the Russians, but the American advance had been thrusting into Germany for week after week on a line from Hamburg to Munich, and they might have broken through again.

  The forest led him on for nearly a half hour, and Cal began to hope he could go deeper and deeper, thinking he could bypass the battlefield. He stopped twice, once to wrap his sprained ankle in a bandage from the first aid kit in his survival vest, and the second time to check the compass.

  Northwest. He would go for American lines. Travel all night and hide during the day. With any luck he could slip through and be back in friendly territory by the day after tomorrow. He had a little food, he had a pistol, and he was barely injured. The Third Reich was in its death throes; they wouldn’t be searching for a single downed American pilot.

  But as he rose to his feet, the distant bark of a dog reached his ears. A moment later, a second barking dog, and then a third. Cal broke into a limping trot. A moment later and all doubt was gone. The dogs barked constantly now, and he caught the shout of one man calling to another. They had found his trail.

  Cal wasn’t going to make it easy. He reached a stream and stripped off his boots and socks. Icy water rushed over his feet and ankles as he stumbled up the streambed, trying not to cut his feet on sharp stones. He continued upstream for maybe a hundred yards before he scrambled out of the water where a series of cascades spilled over rocky ledges on the hillside. He entered the water again about ten minutes later.

  In spite of these efforts, the barking dogs continued their pursuit. The shouting grew louder, and soon Cal could pick out individual words. One man—presumably the officer in charge of the pursuit—had a strident, ringing tone. Angry, aggressive. Cal didn’t speak a word of German, but he had no problems picturing the man, a striding, strutting Führer type.

  The hill kept climbing and Cal was getting tired. His ankle throbbed and the brush crackled and snapped alarmingly as he fought his way up. A shout at his back as he regained the trees.

  Still an hour to go until nightfall. If he could only hold out.

  He reached the top of the hill. To his surprise, the woods thinned, and what he’d taken for piles of rocks turned out to be a ruined castle, its main tower and keep still overlooking the plains below. What Cal saw when he looked down from the hill was like a vision of the end of the world.

  The sun was falling in the west, a brilliant golden red sunset, like the entire horizon was on fire. The moon was up in the sky, already glowing orange and wreathed in smoke rings. Columns of smoke rose to the east, and the distant roll of thunder continued unabated. How far was that? Twenty miles? Even closer—perhaps five miles away—a village lay covered in smoke, only the church steeple poking above the pall. Several farmhouses in the fields beyond the village were burning as well. People and carts and horses crowded the road leading from the village.

  One of the dogs started howling and Cal looked over his shoulder to see the brush rustling. What possessed these men to pursue him into the woods and up the hill while the Third Reich lay thrashing and dying below them? Didn’t these idiots have a last stand to make somewhere?

  Cal made a run for the castle. A low wall stretched in front of him, crumbling, hundred-year-old trees sprouting from the ruins. As he launched himself to hurdle the wall, his bad ankle gave way. He fell over the top of the wall instead and only a well-placed branch kept him from smashing face down into the rubble. He grabbed the branch as he fell. His sprained ankle burned when he struggled to his feet a moment later, and refused to hold his weight.

  The castle wall stood a good fifty feet away still. He’d never make it. A glance into the tree that had kept him from falling gave him another idea. Cal hoisted himself onto the same branch that had caught his fall. He climbed until he was at least twenty feet off the ground, then took out his Colt .45 from the canvas holster on the left side of his vest, and froze.

  Seconds later, the first two dogs came out, German shepherds on the end of leashes, snarling and barking. Two soldiers emerged on the other end of the leashes. They took one glance at the castle, and then held back the dogs, which were going nuts. Five more soldiers joined them moments later, these ones armed with submachine guns. Another soldier with a dog, and then an officer. Even before he opened his mouth to snap a command, Cal knew this was the one he’d heard earlier. He wore a brush-like mustache in emulation of his leader, and carried himself with a casual arrogance.

&nbs
p; Cal’s hand tightened on the pistol. Come on, Little Hitler. I’ve got one specially for you.

  One shot for Little Hitler, then the barrel to his own temple. They’d only kill him anyway. He could see it in their postures, in the rage on their faces. They couldn’t hold back the Russians, couldn’t stop the four American divisions assaulting Munich, but they’d be happy to take out their frustrations on one downed American pilot.

  The officer gave a command, and the dog handlers dropped the German shepherds to their haunches. Instantly, they turned from snarling, drooling hunters to simple dogs. Cal thought about his own dog, Rex, and felt a twinge of pain at the thought he’d never see the dog again. Silly beast. Not much of a retriever. Oh, he’d leap into the pond joyfully enough, but he never brought back a duck without giving it a good chew-over first. The old man called him the Fleabag, said that Cal’s sister had ruined him as a hunting dog by feeding him from the table.

  Cal didn’t care. All he wanted right now was to see the tongue flying as Rex raced through the cattails and took a joyous leap into the water to chew up another duck. Rex would be older now, almost seven, but Cal bet he still had a bit of yee-haw left in him.

  The German soldiers moved to flank the castle. If only they were alone, they might pass directly below him without ever looking up. Dark would fall. He would get away.

  But the dogs were straining, whining now. They knew. They smelled him, and one was even looking up into the trees. The handlers brought them forward, slowly and cautiously. Only moments now and they wouldn’t be able to hold back. They’d bark around his tree and the Germans would find him.

  3.

  The German shepherds pulled at their leashes, and as the first one reached the base of Cal’s tree it couldn’t hold back any longer. It let out a howl and then all three of the dogs flew into a frenzy of barking.

  The officer turned from where he was using another tree to shield himself from the castle. His head leaned out, a suspicious look crossing his face. He lifted his eyes to the tree, even as Cal pointed his pistol at the man’s head. Their eyes met and Cal permitted himself a smile.