Authors: Aleksandr Voinov
Skybound
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Riptide Publishing
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Hillsborough, NJ 08844
http://www.riptidepublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Skybound
Copyright © 2012 by Aleksandr Voinov
Cover Art by Jordan Taylor,
http://bit.ly/uGAHFK
Editors: JoSelle Vanderhooft and Rachel Haimowitz
Layout: L.C. Chase,
http://lcchase.com/design.htm
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Riptide Publishing at the mailing address above, at Riptidepublishing.com, or at
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ISBN: 978-1-937551-49-0
First edition
August, 2012
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Love soars.
Germany, 1945. The Third Reich is on its knees as Allied forces bomb Berlin to break the last resistance. Yet on an airfield near Berlin, the battle is far from over for a young mechanic, Felix, who’s attached to a squadron of fighter pilots. He’s especially attached to fighter ace Baldur Vogt, a man he admires and secretly loves. But there’s no room for love at the end of the world, never mind in Nazi Germany.
When Baldur narrowly cheats death, Felix pulls him from his plane, and the pilot makes his riskiest move yet. He takes a few days’ leave to recover, and he takes Felix with him. Away from the pressures of the airfield, their bond deepens, and Baldur shows Felix the kind of brotherhood he’d only ever dreamed of before.
But there’s no escaping the war, and when they return, Baldur joins the fray again in the skies over Berlin. As the Allies close in on the airfield where Felix waits for his lover, Baldur must face the truth that he is no longer the only one in mortal danger.
To my padawan, Peter, who gleefully told me what firing an anti-tank weapon feels like.
When he comes down again, his plane is steaming like a war horse. It is cold up there, despite the heat of battle. We all rush to him. Few others’ hearts are racing like mine, I expect. Mine is rattling like a badly maintained engine. The harsh tack-tack sound is hollow and sad and more dangerous than empty ammunition boxes in the middle of a dogfight.
The others are landing, too, steel eagles rolling over the tarmac; I don’t have time to count them. I’m normally counting the empty spaces. The absences. But I never count them in his
Staffel
. Nobody else exists to me when he lands. Everything stops existing when he takes off, as if he takes it all with him when he goes up there, to places I’ll never see again. That vast open non-place of emptiness that becomes significant only when his comrades are there, too, and of course the enemy fighters guarding the bombers bound for Berlin.
I freeze outside the small crowd greeting him as he pushes out of the cockpit—now the only animated part of the steel bird—briefly separating from it to drink, eat, rest while I care for the shell he leaves behind. Even from here I can see this was a bad fight. There’s a hole low in the cockpit window, the very end point of a line of them along the nose of the Messerschmitt Bf 109. I don’t expect to find a single bullet in the boxes when we open them up, but there might be a bullet meant for the pilot inside the cockpit.
He all but vanishes in the welcoming crowd, which is our signal. Like my other black-clad brethren, I’m there foremost for the plane, to fix what can be fixed, clean up what needs to be cleaned, to reload and refuel.
We push the plane to the side of the tarmac where we
Schwarzen Männer
, the “black men,” work, lately in grim silence. We know the bird needs to fly—there are few enough of them as it is, and while we dawdle, Berlin is burning, just as Hamburg has burned. This
Jagdgeschwader
is hunting bombers, downing them before they reach the city, if our pilots are lucky.
I used to count the absences when they landed.
There is a lot of work. They fight by day. They fight by night. We repair and reload whenever they come back. Once they receive word that bombers are en route, they jump out of their bunks, rookies and
Experten
alike, and get ready to fight. It’s the rookies who don’t last very long. At the speed at which the pilots are hurled again and again into the sky, many never make it. Their training is rushed, they are thrown into battle with hardly any flight hours at all, they cannot rest enough, and they take risks because they don’t know any better.
The Messerschmitt is not an easy plane. It can be volatile during landing and takeoff. It has pride; it doesn’t yield to just any man. Those who subdue it become old hands in a few flights.
It’s late at night when I sit near a wing on my toolbox. I can’t sleep. The cloud cover I see beyond the open hangar doors is heavy, no moon visible. This might be a flight night, or it might not be, but I’m not holding out much hope. This bird is ready to go. I fitted a new canopy myself—parts aren’t easy to come by, but there are wrecks I can salvage. Peter Christensen taught me everything I know about this, before they moved him west for a great offensive and he never came back.
I sit, smoking, my head against the cool comfort of the fighter plane’s wheel, its wing shielding but never embracing me. I’m a cold nestling tonight.
I want to read, but the situation won’t allow it. The leaden lump of what we’re doing and the sheer desperation of it stifles every thought of returning to the thick Karl May book I’d been reading. Adventure stories, where evil always loses in the end, defeated by the German hero and his American blood brother. The very idea feels like sacrilege now—there won’t be a red-skinned Indian brave to cover any German’s back. No cattle thieves, no bandits fighting over lost treasure in the endless prairie. This here is serious, and as far away as it can be from a schoolboy’s dreams.
And those other dreams, too. I must be the only one who felt an odd, deeper thrill at the rites of blood brotherhood in those books, of a friendship as deep as destiny that bound those characters together. Companions of my childhood, whispering words that inspired my sweaty dreams when I was old enough to see a deeper meaning. I would devote myself like this to another man. Take the bullet meant for him, and die in his arms, knowing I had fulfilled my destiny.
But I’m no Indian brave.
Steps circle the plane. I straighten up, expecting I-don’t-know-who. An inspection. My former superior, Christensen, who barked at me not to smoke anywhere near the priceless machines, his Berliner accent thick and comical but for his glare and his tendency to grab you by the scruff of your neck if you didn’t jump immediately. I never expected I’d miss him, but I guess I do.
I didn’t expect
him
, certainly not in uniform, and a recklessly dishevelled one at that. I’m about to jump up when he pushes an empty ammunition box closer to me and simply sits down, waving off any startled movement I could make. I’ve never spoken to him. Will he speak? Wordlessly, I offer him a cigarette, and he plucks it from the packet.
It’s the first time I see his hands, normally wrapped in black leather. His nails are so short that if they were any shorter, they’d bare the quick underneath. They are cut, not bitten.
I rub my hands on my coveralls before I offer him fire; he bends closer to take the flame rather than the lighter. My hands are steady, even though I expect them to lose that at any moment. I’ve never been so relieved to be able to snap the lighter shut, though I could have watched his face illuminated by fire for an hour. There’s a reflection of flame in his features, like in the painting of an old master. Flesh made light. I pull on my own cigarette, watch him cross his uniformed legs, then cross mine, realize what I’m doing and put them firmly back where they were.