Twelve Seconds to Live (2002) by Douglas Reeman Page B

speaker said, ‘Coming out now. Hold your breath, Gordon, my lad.’
    Masters felt his jaw clench, remembering it exactly. That first, purposeful contact.
    He saw Downie close his eyes tightly, then open them as if someone had spoken to him, reminded him.
    He said, ‘Past the gate, sir. A sort of stone bridge.’
    Masters nodded. The last resort, and the first lesson if you wanted to survive. You always marked your line of escape. Just in case. For Critchley there had been nowhere to run, and he had known it. Must have done.
    The speaker murmured, ‘It’s
out
, by God!’ They could hear his harsh intake of breath. ‘Now write this down.’
    Masters watched the pencil. It was quite steady. Poised.
    The next voice was that of a total stranger. Disbelief, anger, and a stark acceptance which was even beyond fear.
    ‘Get out! It’s blown!’
    Masters’ mind clicked like the switch. The drawing was a good one, Sewell’s instructions precise. The fuse had become active; there was no time to reach the other ditch.
    He swung round, horrified, as he saw the youth standing fully upright and staring at the wrecked Junkers.
    He seized him and pulled him down, sprawling across him, fighting him as he tried to free himself, their faces inches apart.
    The detonation was like a thunderclap, and the sky filled with flying debris and great clods of sodden soil which seemed to kick the breath from his lungs. Smoke too, and the sound of flames; the aircraft had finally exploded.
    But through it all he heard Downie’s voice. So close to his face that he could feel his anguish, the wetness on his skin.
    And his words.
‘He was my friend!’
Torn out of him, like an epitaph. It was something he would never forget.
    Captain Hubert Chavasse stood with his feet apart, hands in his jacket pockets, the protruding thumbs jutting forward like horns. The room was very bright, and slightly hazy with smoke although Masters could not recall seeing anyone pausing to light a cigarette. Outside the shuttered windows it was dark, and had been for some time; he could hardly believe that it was still the same day.
    He glanced at the others, Brayshaw, the captain’ssecretary, making notes, clarifying an occasional problem if Chavasse threw him a question. Two lieutenants from Operations, a Wren second officer representing the signals department, another Wren, a petty officer, legs crossed, taking shorthand.
    Chavasse stared around the room. ‘Nothing left out, I think? Countermeasures Section informed from the outset. The boffins from
Vernon
will have been and gone by now. Not much left to sift through, I’d have thought.’ He hurried on. ‘Rear-Admiral Fawcett is fully in the picture, and we can expect him down here tomorrow. I sometimes wonder if he ever sleeps! So we must be up and about early. I’ll not have anybody finding fault with
my
establishment.’ He looked at the clock. ‘So, if there’s nothing further . . .’
    One of the lieutenants asked something about the army being included in his report; Masters barely heard him.
    He was remembering the blazing fuel, the fragments of the fuselage flung about like so much rubbish. Chavasse had been right.
Not much to sift through.
A sickening job at the best of times, when there was nothing at all after an explosion, an ‘incident’. Rags and torn flesh, but the boffins from
Vernon
were hardened to it. They needed to be.
    When he had given his own account he had been conscious of the utter silence. Only the Wren’s pencil had moved as he related what he had seen and found at the field where a man he had known had been killed.
    Perhaps, like so many, Lieutenant Clive Sewell, ex-schoolmaster, would have died for nothing. But thedrawings and notes on his assistant’s pad, coupled with any scrap of material evidence the boffins might find in that blackened, grisly confusion might in the end save lives.
    He had been aware of Chavasse’s irritation when he had added, ‘In my opinion, it was a