The Echoes of Love by Jenny Ashcroft

Author:Jenny Ashcroft [Ashcroft, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

His strange disconnect lingered with him almost the entire night through, both disorientating, and welcome, in that it at least helped him to remain calm as the sun disappeared, plunging them all into darkness.

The same could not be said for everyone.

With the light gone, a jittery tension descended on the campsite, all eyes on its gates, waiting for the trucks that would take them to the airfield. No one slept, certainly not in Otto’s battalion, even though that would have been the most sensible course. Occasionally, someone sang of the Fatherland, but mostly, all was subdued, and the cicadas dominated, carrying above the hushed voices talking of homes, people loved, and missed.

As midnight finally started to draw nearer, a rumour began to circulate that intelligence had revised its report, and the British hadn’t fled Crete at all, but were very much still there, waiting to defend it. Otto heard it from Meyer, who’d picked it up on one of his frequent trips to the latrine.

‘They say there are thousands of them,’ said Meyer, pale-faced in the moonlight.

‘There are quite a few thousand of us,’ Otto pointed out, then, to distract him, distract them all, ordered everyone to attention, splitting them into their jumping squads, testing them on the objectives they’d gone through ad nauseam that day.

‘What’s your first priority when you reach the ground?’ he asked.

‘Getting to a weapon cannister,’ they chorused.

‘And what colour parachute will they be attached to?’

‘Green,’ they replied.

‘Correctly this time?’

‘Red,’ they said, and laughed.

For a few seconds.

‘Right,’ he said, hearing the approach of engines, ‘time to get suited up.’

They did, and immediately began to sweat beneath the layers of their uniforms and jumping gear.

‘Mein Gott,’ said Meyer, his zip sticking. ‘Mein Gott.’

The heat only seemed to intensify when, cramming into the transport trucks, they, and the hundreds of others at their encampment, arrived at the blacked-out airfield, where the last of the planes were being fuelled, the Junkers’ pilots revving the engines, taxing into place, flooding the frenetic darkness with noise and fumes.

‘Linder,’ Brahn yelled at Otto, from the back of his own truck, then said something else, which, in the cacophony, Otto couldn’t hear.

Almost immediately, he lost sight of Brahn.

There were too many others pouring out of their trucks, torch beams trembling, racing to their respective emplaning points, tripping over their own feet to keep up with one another.

Frowning, not liking how fraught the always calm Brahn had looked – feeling, rather, the first prickling of unease penetrate the detachment he’d been wearing like a shield – Otto commanded his men back into their squads, despatched those not flying with him to their own planes, then ordered the eleven he’d assigned to himself, Meyer included, Fischer too (keep your friends close… ), to follow him.

He kept searching for Brahn as they proceeded to their allocated Junker, using his own torch to illuminate the dripping, straining faces of strangers, but to no avail. He had a hard enough time just keeping track of his own eleven men, and a grip on Fischer, who kept disappearing to tell others where they should be.

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