American security agents, suspecting Dr Zhang is hacking into U.S. computers, try to abduct him. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service is also interested.
And Murga is back in town with a proposition. I agree to tests of my super normal flyi...
I must have been unconscious for a long time because the first thing I noticed was a beam of sunlight shining through a hole in the planks in front of my face. It was so quiet, for a second I thought I was deaf . . . or dead . . . but then I could feel my arm was hurting and I needed to pee. I tried to get up but I could barely move my head and my legs were stuck. I called out but there was no answer only the eerie silence.
I had to go pee so I wriggled and twisted until my feet were under my body and I then I realized my helmet was trapped. I released the chin strap and pushed up at the planks. I found one that moved and kept pushing until I had made enough space to squeeze through.
The farm house was gone. Most of the floor had fallen into the cellar. But I was near the wall and several beams had left a triangular space. This and my helmet, which had been trapped under a heavy beam, had probably saved my life.
I pulled my cap from my pocket, brushed dust and bits of wood and broken masonry from my coat and stumbled over the wreckage toward the stairs. Incongruously someone had left a jackboot on the bottom step. I picked it up. It was heavy. And then I saw that there was a foot and part of a leg still inside the boot. I threw it aside, horrified.
It was hot. The stone arches and walls were radiating heat from the fire last night. A feeling of mounting dread filled my chest as I searched through the debris in the cellar. There was no sign of Beryl or Kozak and the paratroopers had gone. My only connection with reality in this nightmare had disappeared.
I cautiously crawled up through the one remaining exit. There wasn't much of the building left, only bits of charred wood still smoking from the fire. The farmhouse had been flattened by the shelling leaving only the reinforced cellar more or less intact. The barn was gone too, blown to pieces. A tank gun turret was on the ground about ten metres from a burned-out tank.
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It was ominously quiet. The only sound was some sporadic gunfire several kilometres away.
There was nothing alive in sight. The fields had been plowed into insane patterns by numberless tank tracks and overlapping shell craters. There were abandoned tanks and bodies of farm animals and men everywhere. Near the house were several dead German paratroopers. Kozak and Beryl were not among them.
I decided to follow the trail of boot prints in the mud heading back the way we had come, hoping to find Kozak with Beryl, Gustav and the kübelwagen. I was half way across the field, trying to avoid the water-filled shell craters and ruts left by the tanks, before I fell. After that I stopped worrying about getting my uniform dirty. With no helmet and covered in mud no one could tell which army I belonged to.
Walking in the ankle deep mud was exhausting. It stuck to my boots making them so heavy, simply pulling them out of the mud was all I could do. I needed a rest so, when I reached the verge of what might have been a road at some time recently, I sat down and started scraping mud off my boots. The stench of decomposing bodies was almost unbearable.
