Projekt 1065 Read online

  “Michael! Come on!” Fritz called from the truck.

  I took Fritz’s outstretched hand and climbed into the truck just as it rumbled off, leaving behind the bonfire of books. There wasn’t time to get word to my parents. I was just going to have to save the British pilot myself.

  The truck bumped over a bridge on the way out of Berlin, and Fritz rocked into me. I pushed him away with my shoulder. I had already stuck my neck out too far for this kid. I didn’t need everybody thinking we were friends.

  “Thanks for helping me,” Fritz said.

  “I didn’t help you at all,” I said. “Horst says all of us have to learn to take a beating. So I guess I interrupted the lesson.”

  “I already know how to take a beating,” Fritz said. I glanced at his bruises and his cut lip, and I figured he was right. “What I need to learn to do is fight back, like you,” Fritz said. “Especially if I’m going to join the SRD and be in the SS one day.”

  I was stunned. This little guy wanted to be in the SS? And here I thought he hadn’t thrown those books into the fire because he was maybe a halfway sane person. Everybody called the SS the Death’s Head Squad because of the skull and crossbones on their caps. They wore all black, and they ran the concentration camps and were the people who sent you there. Fritz was crazy if he wanted to join the SS, but then, most German kids were crazy. It was hardly their fault. The Nazis had taken over Germany when they were all just toddlers. Fritz didn’t remember any kind of life before Hitler. I had at least had seven years of sanity in Dublin and London before coming to this nutty place. I was the only one who could see how two-faced everything was.

  “So, you’re English?” Fritz asked.

  I bristled at the insult. “No. Not English. Irish. I hate the English,” I told him.

  “What’s the difference?” Fritz asked.

  “Well, for one, the Irish are neutral,” I said over the grinding of the truck’s gears. “Like Spain, or Sweden, or Switzerland. We’re not at war with Germany.” People tended to forget that Ireland wasn’t part of the United Kingdom anymore—or that we’d only been a part of it in the first place because England had conquered us. For centuries the English had done all they could to take our land, quash our language, and put us in chains, and it took a bloody war for independence to set us free of them.

  There were plenty of other ways the Irish were different from the English, chief among them that we weren’t a bleeding pox upon the face of the planet. But I didn’t want to get into all that with Fritz. I didn’t want to be talking to him at all. I had a job to do. I had to get my head back in the game. This was my first chance to do real spy work on my own. Fritz seemed to take the hint, and we rode in silence for the rest of the drive.

  The truck pulled to a stop along a dirt road half an hour outside the city. All around us was farmland, and down a narrow lane sat a farmhouse, barn, and a few small work buildings and sheds. Perfect—and perfectly obvious—places for someone to hide. Off in a field full of haystacks to the west, under the watchful protection of three milk cows, was a flat wrinkly gray thing that must have been the pilot’s parachute. You could feel the boys’ excitement in the air like the crackle of electric wires in a fog. Everybody wanted to be the one who found the British airman, but nobody more so than me.

  We spilled out of the truck and hurriedly formed into rows under the direction of the SRD.

  SRD looked different from regular Hitler Youth. Their uniforms were dark blue with special yellow bands on the cuffs that said PATROL FORCE, and when they were on special duty, like they were now, they wore shiny silver gorgets. Gorgets are metal plates that hang down on your chest from a heavy chain around your neck, like a huge, gaudy necklace. Theirs were shaped like six-inch-long kidney beans, with PATROL FORCE written on a banner underneath the double lightning-bolt insignia of the SS, in case you forgot.

  The gorgets would have been really silly if they hadn’t been worn by the scariest kids in Nazi Germany. The SRD’s mission was to watch all the other German kids and turn them in for doing anything illegal. I hated these guys. They ratted out kids for not saluting properly, for violating the nightly curfew, listening to foreign radio broadcasts, sneaking into movies for adults, singing songs they were weren’t supposed to sing, and dancing to music they weren’t supposed to listen to—all of which could get you sent to a concentration camp. The SRD joined the SS on raids, spied on their neighbors, and monitored church services for anti-Nazi sermons. But their favorite job was the one they were getting to do right now: hunting for Allied airmen shot down over Germany.

  Two adult SS officers stepped up to speak to us once the SRD had us in line. Scarier than the SRD, scarier than anything else in Nazi Germany, which was plenty scary enough, were the SS, the Death’s Head troops. When people did the German Look to see if anyone was listening, it was the SS they were most afraid they would see over their shoulders.

  “The airman is still at large,” one of the SS told us, and my heart fluttered with hope. “One group will search to the east, beginning with the farm and moving up into the foothills. The other will search to the west, inspecting the haystacks in the fields before moving into the woods. The pilot will be found. Fan out. Cover every centimeter of ground. Leave no place unsearched. Go!”

  I was on the team assigned to the farm, and I sprinted toward it faster than anybody.

  If I didn’t find the British pilot first, he was a dead man.

  I started with the barn. It’s where I would have hidden if I’d been on the run. The barn had the itchy smell of stacked hay and cow poops, and was filled with both. I watched my step as I searched for the airman.

  Fritz followed me inside, and I sagged. I needed to be alone in case I found the pilot. I couldn’t have Fritz or anybody else raising the alarm. I had to lose the kid.

  Fritz pulled a pitchfork from a wall of farm tools, and before I could think how to stop him, he jabbed the pointy end into the nearest pile of hay.

  I flinched, waiting for a cry of pain from the hiding pilot, but nothing came. Fritz pulled the pitchfork out and attacked another spot. And another. Jab, jab, jab. I closed my eyes and flinched every time.

  I couldn’t stand there and watch, and jabbing at the haystacks was exactly the kind of thing that could keep Fritz busy while I searched the rest of the barn. I just hoped the pilot was somewhere else.

  A rickety old ladder led up to a loft where more hay was stored—an even better hiding place than the haystacks Fritz was poking. But that meant going up.

  I held the rung in front of me and closed my eyes. You can do this, I told myself. You have to do this. If that pilot’s up there, you have to be the first one to find him. I put a foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, eyes still closed, and my breath came short and quick. I could already feel the familiar tightening in my chest, the sick churning in the pit of my stomach, the dizzy wobbling of my head. It’s not that far. It’s not that far. It’s not that far.

  I hoisted myself up a rung. And another. And another. I kept my eyes closed the whole time, groping blindly at the rough wood of the hayloft floor when I got to the top. I pulled myself over the edge on my belly, hugging the floor like a toddler clinging to his mother’s leg. I was panting now, panicking, and it took me several long seconds to calm down enough to even open my eyes.

  As long as I forgot where I was now and didn’t look back over the edge, I hoped I’d be okay. I pulled myself to my feet with effort, glad no one had been there to see my pathetic little display. My legs were still wobbly—there was no fooling myself that I was on solid ground, especially up here in this open space—but I wasn’t paralyzed with fear the way I got sometimes. It helped to have something else to worry about, and right now, that was finding the missing pilot.

  I couldn’t risk a German Look over my shoulder to see if anyone was listening, but I was pretty sure I was alone in this part of the barn. “Hello?” I whispered in English. “Are you up here? I’m not German. I’m Irish. I’m her
e to help.”

  I waited. Nothing. That didn’t mean he wasn’t here. He might be here and not believe me. I’m not sure I’d believe me. What were the chances of an Irish kid finding you in a hayloft in the middle of Germany?

  The hay in the loft didn’t look like it had been disturbed since it was stacked up here, but I dug into it anyway, kicking up all kinds of little tickly bits in the air. I sneezed again and again. I couldn’t stop sneezing. I was sure I had bits of hay permanently lodged in my nose.

  I was also pretty sure the pilot wasn’t up here. Which meant I’d gone through all that for nothing.

  And now I had to get back down.

  I backed warily toward the ladder. I didn’t want to look down until I had to, if at all.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” Fritz asked.

  I turned, startled, and saw Fritz at the top of the ladder.

  And the ground ten feet below me.

  My head became a helium balloon. The ground floor of the barn dropped away from me, as if I were watching an elevator car plummet down an elevator shaft. The world spun, my body seized up, and I fell over the side.

  Fritz grabbed my shirt. I swung out over the edge, about to drop, but I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed. Frozen with fear.

  “Michael! Michael, come on! What are you doing? Michael!”

  Fritz grabbed my arm, then my body. My weight almost took us both over the side, but Fritz was able to wrestle me back from the edge. We collapsed together on the floor of the hayloft.

  The familiar sick and dizzy feeling of vertigo slowly left me as we lay on our backs, panting and exhausted.

  “What happened?” Fritz asked.

  “I’m afraid of heights,” I said between breaths.

  “Since when?”

  “Since before I can remember.”

  Fritz propped himself up on his elbows to look down at me. “You froze up. You almost fell over the side. You would have broken your neck.”

  I closed my eyes, trying not to think about it and failing miserably.

  “Thank you for catching me.”

  Fritz stood and offered his hand to help me up. I took it.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t tell anybody.”

  It was weird for Fritz to stand there so solemnly and say he wouldn’t tell anybody about it. I was embarrassed, sure. Other people climbed up and down ladders and looked out windows all the time without becoming statues and falling over. Why couldn’t I? I should just be able to get over it. But it wasn’t as if my fear was some horrible secret. Then I realized: In Nazi Germany, every weakness was punished. It was why Fritz was picked on, and why I would be too if the other boys knew about my phobia. They’d forever be hauling me up onto rooftops and forcing me to look over the side. Because that’s what Nazi Germany was: the bully who found your most painful wound and poked at it with a stick.

  I nodded and shook Fritz’s hand. In the heart of enemy territory, without even wanting to, I’d found a friend. But I still hadn’t found the missing pilot.

  Fritz and I announced the barn cleared and continued our search. We were hunting in a hedgerow of shrubs that separated the barn from a cow pasture when I saw it: a spot of blood. Dark red, and still wet. And another. And another. Leading along the hedgerow to the east, up toward the foothills in the distance. And there—a boot print. The airman! He must have been injured in the fall, limped over here, and skirted the hedgerow on his way to higher ground. I quickly kicked dirt over the blood spots as I tried to think what to do.

  I had to throw the other searchers off the scent. Send them hunting in the wrong direction. Then I would double back and find the airman myself.

  I went back down the hedgerow, away from where the blood trail began and snapped a branch here, a twig there, as though the pilot had run west, toward the haystacks and the forest, not east toward the mountains.

  “A broken branch!” I called out, loud enough for the other boys to hear me.

  Fritz was the first one there. “He’s right! Someone’s been this way, and recently!”

  An SS officer blew a whistle, and everyone converged on the spot. I ran down the hedgerow, leading the searchers farther and farther away from the blood, secretly snapping a couple of branches along the way. I left those for others to find.

  I was feeling pretty good about my brilliant plan to lure the army of hunters in the wrong direction when I stopped to snap another branch and noticed a hint of blue among the mass of brown leaves in the hedge. I parted the branches, and my heart caught in my throat.

  Lying on the ground just inside the hedge, right where I’d been leading the entire Nazi search party, was the missing British pilot.

  I let the hedgerow branches snap back shut and muttered a short, harsh German word I wasn’t supposed to know or say. The British pilot wasn’t headed for the hills. He was right here, and I’d led the Nazis right to him! The quick glimpse I’d gotten of him told me he wasn’t doing too well, either. He was curled up in a ball as if he was hurt, and he hadn’t looked up at me.

  “Just stay quiet and still,” I told him. “I’m not German. I’m Irish. I’m here to help you.” Then I realized I’d said all that in German, which probably hadn’t helped. The searchers from the Hitler Youth were getting closer, beating at the hedgerow with rakes and poking into it with sticks. I switched to English and told him the same thing again. “My name’s Michael O’Shaunessey,” I added.

  “Well,” came a weak but distinctly English voice from below me, “you can’t get much more Irish than that.”

  “Are you hurt?” I asked him.

  “Not at all,” he said, even though he was gritting his teeth in agony. “Unless you mean this bloody gash on my arm, or my sprained ankle.”

  A sprained ankle! No wonder he hadn’t made it far.

  An SS officer joined the vanguard of Hitler Youth beating at the bushes. He’d be on the pilot in moments. I had to think of something. Do something.

  “Do you trust me?” I asked the airman, pretending to search the hedgerow.

  “Trust an Irishman?” the pilot said. “I’d sooner trust a fox in a henhouse.”

  “And I’d sooner carry an angry badger across the River Liffey than help an Englishman,” I told him.

  “Now I know you’re Irish. I’m entirely in your hands.”

  That was a scary thought. I waved Fritz over, hoping he wouldn’t see the blue of the pilot’s uniform through the brown leaves as I had.

  “Come on,” I told him, hurrying back the way we’d come. “I think the pilot may have doubled back on us.”

  “But the trail goes this way,” Fritz said.

  “Misdirection,” I told him. And suddenly I realized that’s exactly what the drops of blood had been. The pilot had limped as far as the barn, making it look like he was headed for the hills, then doubled back and hidden in the hedgerow.

  “Why would he stay here at the farm? He’s had more than an hour to run. He had to head for the hills,” I told Fritz. “Let’s look for tracks here.” I led him right to where I’d found the blood, hoping he’d see it. I didn’t want to be the one to cry wolf twice. But of course I’d swept dirt over the blood spots I’d seen, trying to hide them. Idiot!

  While Fritz was searching the ground, I snapped a twig off the hedgerow and dragged it across my palm, breaking the skin and bringing blood to the surface. It stung, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t have long before the searchers found the pilot. I stepped ahead of Fritz and bent down as though searching, squeezing a drop of blood from my clenched fist onto the cold, dry earth. I moved away, squeezing another, and another.

  Come on, Fritz, I thought. See the blood. See the blood!

  I watched the SS officer get closer to the place where the airman was hiding. Closer … Closer … I was going to have to say something myself—

  “Look! Blood!” Fritz cried. “Hey! Hey, I found blood!” he called to the searchers. “A trail of it!”

  Hitler Youth boys abandoned th
eir search of the hedgerow and came running. The SS officer stopped right beside where the British pilot was hiding, turned, and then walked back toward us. I heaved a huge sigh of relief. I’d saved the airman, but only for the moment.

  “There’s more blood here!” a boy cried, finding some in the grass beyond the barn. Blood I hadn’t shed. The pilot must have left a longer trail than even I’d seen.

  “He’s headed for the mountains,” the SS officer said, as though he’d always known. He blew his whistle, calling the searchers in the field across the road to join us. “Fan out,” he told us. “Form a line. Work your way into the foothills. Find him!”

  Fritz joined the growing line of boys and bounded off with them up the hill. I stayed behind, slipping back into the barn while all the other boys from the field joined the search. It felt bad to lie to Fritz, to not tell him the truth about the airman, but I didn’t know how much I could trust him yet. I remembered him saying he wanted to join the SRD. The glee he’d shown sticking that pitchfork into the hay in the barn. Was that just the excitement of the chase, or did he really believe all that Nazi claptrap about the master race?

  I still had to get the British pilot out of the hedgerow to somewhere safer. But where? I watched the searchers through the gaps in the barn wall until they were over the hill. The hay made me sneeze again, and then I had it.

  I knew where to hide the airman.

  The British pilot was tall, broad-shouldered, and pale, but that last part might just have been because he had a sprained ankle and had lost a lot of blood. He was heavy too. Heavier than I expected. He leaned on me for support as I led him away from the hedge. I didn’t know how much of a false blood trail he’d left, or how long we had until the searchers would come running back over that hill, so I picked up the pace.