Thread: A Survivor's Musings

Amour et Chtiment France ?? November 1941 This wasn??t what he volunteered for. Ethan Harke shuddered from the bite of the cold night air, even though he was bundled under the layers of a heavy flight jacket. The roar of the twin Allison V12 engines was strangely muffled under the turbo-superchargers attached to them, even allowing Ethan to hear the wind as it whistled over the wings of his F-4 reconnaissance plane. He didn??t mind the additional silence that the superchargers gave him, as stealth was really the only protection he had right now. The aircraft was a modified version of the P-38 ??Lighting?? fighter plane, and all of the machine guns had been removed and four K17 cameras had been mounted in their place. The lack of defenses for protection left it completely vulnerable to patrolling German fighters, and he was counting on the cover of darkness and his own plane??s sky camouflage to give him some better protection. That and praying. Lots of praying. In all honesty he would have preferred to have guns and bombs mounted to the wings instead of cameras. It was why he had joined the Air Force, after all. Back when the War was just something in the papers and in the newsreels, back before the Japs had bombed Pearl and pulled the United States into the global conflict, Ethan had volunteered to help Great Britain fight back the Germans. Taking pictures wasn??t going to kick the Krauts back to Berlin. But the brass had just puffed out their chests and insisted that reconnaissance was just as ?? if not more ?? important than actively attacking the Germans. And so here he was, the French countryside a flat plain far below him, getting ready to take pictures. Ethan kept a watchful eye on the instrument panel??s fuel gauge. Even though the P-38 had one of the longest flight ranges of any active Allied fighters, and with the external fuel tanks giving him additional flight time, crossing the Channel was still a daunting and stressful endeavor. If he ran out of fuel before he got back to Great Britain, he??d have to bail into the icy waters of the Channel, and pray that the Brits picked him up before he froze to death. There was also the ever-present danger in running into a German patrol. If that happened, all he could do was drop the reserve tanks and climb, hopefully lose his pursuers in the cloud cover. ??Alright, let??s get this over with?? He muttered to himself, pulling his mind away from those thoughts. He??d need to focus for this? Assuming that everything went as it was supposed to, his search pattern tonight began around the French town of Vignons, down the coast, before heading back across the Channel for England. From almost 40,000 feet up, it was almost impossible for him to distinguish anything. A few winks of light from the town, maybe a darker patch of trees, but trying to determine what was a tank or an artillery position was almost impossible for him. But that was for the planners to sort out. But, he cursed openly when he saw that the cloud cover had started to close in, making it nearly impossible to see what was below. A less daring pilot would have turned back to his base, abandoned the mission until the weather cleared, no one would blame them. He wasn??t that kind of pilot. He was out here in the first place, he was going to take those damn pictures, one way or the other. Slowly, he began to push down on the yoke, the aircraft descending towards the clouds below, and sacrificing the only real defense his aircraft had against detection. He knew the move was risky, and one that could potentially get him grounded for a few weeks, but if his lower altitude allowed him to pick up a better picture of the German positions, he was sure that nobody would mind. The altimeter crept lower and lower, the ground rising up to meet him. Vignons glittered below him, a scene that hardly evoked the Nazi occupation of the country. It was actually quite beautiful? Finally, he leveled out, at a level much lower than he should be flying at right now. ??There we go?? Ethan muttered softly, quickly checking the instrument panel. He started snapping pictures as he flew over the forests outside of the town, searching for German units. They were smart enough to camouflage them, or to park them under the foliage, but he was sure that there would be enough for the planners to work with. He started banking around, planning on heading back up to a safer altitude, when the sky around him was pierced by the blinding flash of a spotlight being aimed towards him. He squinted and turned his head away from the glaring light, pulling back on the stick, trying the pull out of the beam. For an instant, his heart froze in his chest. The sky exploded around him as the German AA batteries started opening up on his plane, twisted blasts of smoke and whirling shrapnel appearing instantly in the skies around him. Metal shards rattled like hail on a tin roof as they bounced off the frame of his aircraft. He had stirred up a hornet??s nest, and he wasn??t getting away without getting stung. He had almost reached the cover on the clouds when a well aimed burst exploded right in front of him, the sooty residue from the blast instantly coated the canopy, but he was too shocked by the knives of icy wind that tore at him through the holes in the canopy. The left engine was belching flame and smoke, and he could hear that it was seizing up. ??Come on!? He pulled back the throttles for both engines, slowly increasing the throttle for the right engine to keep the plane stabilized. With a wrenching noise, the left engine seized up, the plane began to drift towards the left. More shrapnel whirled around him, tearing apart the aircraft??s thin skin. He smelled the stinging scent of aviation fuel, one of the tanks had been ruptured. There was no getting back across the Channel, even if he got away from here. He had to bail out, take his chances on the ground... He reached up and wrenched back the canopy, being punched in the chest by a fist of freezing cold air that chilled the blood in his veins. With his hands off the yoke, the plane started to roll over towards the dead engine. He frantically undid his harness, trying to ignore the disorienting shift of gravity as he wound up upside down. Before he got in a spin that would make it impossible to bail out, he dropped out of the aircraft, the wind buffeting him back. The plane tore out from beneath him, twisting into and uncontrolled spiral until it flattened into the French countryside. The fireball rose up over the tree line, and he could hear the blast echoing by him. The ground was approaching quickly, too quickly. He reached back and grabbed for the ripcord of his parachute, giving it a hard yank. The parachute unfurled from the pack on his back, catching on the air and jerking him so hard that he nearly got whiplash. The ground was still approaching too fast, not to mention the group of trees he was swooping towards. He lifted his arms in a futile gesture of shielding his face as the parachute tore into the trees, the bare branches shredding through the thin fabric, while twigs stabbed at him. There was no cushion of leaves, as they had already fallen off. Finally, the parachute was so ensnared in the branches that he jerked to a stop, hanging like a marionette from its strings. He groaned miserably, feeling a warm trickle of blood oozing down his face where a branch had slashed at his skin. Luckily, his flight jacket had protected his torso. He took precious seconds to focus again, and when he did, he noticed that he was nearly fifteen feet up in the air, held up by the ropes of his parachute. The wind rocked him back and forth as he tried to come to his bearings. He had to get down from here, and fast. If the Germans found him here, they could shoot him at their leisure. With a grunt, he reached down and pulled a knife out from his coat pocket. Most pilots had a knife on them for this occasion, although they hoped they never had to use it for such. He was too far up from the ground. Cutting the harness would result in a nasty fall?but the consequences would be far worse if he didn??t. He sawed through the parachute straps with his knife, jerking lower each time one snapped through. Finally, the last strap gave though and he dropped like a bag of bricks. Ethan hit the ground at an awkward angle, and a sickening crunch echoed within his leg. He let out a yell of agony, a noise that echoed over the open fields. Gasping in pain and shock, he pulled himself to his good foot, only to collapse again from the white-hot pain that furiously raged through his leg. He dragged himself away from the tree, hearing the distant shouts of German soldiers, as flashlights swung through the trees in the distance. The glow of flames from the wreckage of the F-4 glowed over the hills, a cloud of smoke boiling up into the coal black sky. The fire had destroyed the cameras and film, at least? Still, now he had to escape the swarms of German soldiers that were sure to be combing the area. If he weren??t injured, that might have been less of a problem, but the shattered bone in his leg made walking impossible, let alone dashing across the French countryside in the dead of night. Add to that, his only weapon was a sidearm, a Colt M1911, would only be good for killing one or two soldiers before they killed him? He stared at the town of Vignons, breathing out a winded ??Fuuuck?.?