Chapter Five Hundred Eighty-Seven
27th January 1947
Berlin
Tilo had made a point of burning everything he had written before getting conscripted. He’d settled for that when what he had really wanted to do was give his younger self a major ass kicking. Reier had found that extremely funny, I’m one of the ones who did give you that ass kicking, he’d said, along with the entire Pacific Theater. It was impossible to remain a conceited little shit when living on the transport ships and then in the jungles. Not if you wanted to live to talk about it.
The result was that as predicted, he had basically been back to square one as far as the University was concerned. The University had been apologetic and had offered him a leg up using what they referred to as Life Credits. His returning as a decorated Officer had certainly counted as having gotten exactly that over the prior years. He had debated with himself until he’d talked with his father who told him that he would have to be insane not to take that opportunity. He’d eventually taken the offer, meaning that he had three years to think about what he wanted instead of five.
Since then Tilo had been taking classes, working in the Military Museum’s Archive project and flirting with the girls who also worked there. He had found the portable typewriter that he’d used to type up Nietzschean screeds years earlier at his parent’s house, the screeds had been among the things he’d burnt, but he’d kept the typewriter. It had started off as a term project, but he had a growing stack of pages that were becoming his manuscript about his experiences in the Pacific. His hope was that it would help him put the events of his life into perspective.
Reichlin-Lars Airfield
The new plane from Focke-Wulf, FW-270 was a complete redesign of the FW-252 that they had grown used to. The plane had search radar in the nose and radome filled most of the enlarged air intake. The engine had been moved back to the tail which had allowed the wings and landing gear to be redesigned. All of this had allowed more hardpoints under the wings and a new one under the lengthened fuselage. Already, jokes were being made about it being a Großer Hühnerhabicht. Those who had never liked that name in the first place had immediately objected.
Lenz could have cared less, he was the one who had this fun new toy to play with. The radar was easy enough to use and in combat it worked in conjunction with the new air-to-air missiles. The old, extremely unpopular, wire guided missiles that were only good against bombers had required the interceptor to fly level while the pilot guided it in. With these new ones would get a radar lock from the search radar, the pilot would fire the missile and a few seconds later the target was an expanding fireball. The plane itself was a dream to fly. Where the Hühnerhabicht had been a stripped-down dragster the new plane was a finely tuned touring car. Just as fast, but could it ever take the turns. And the two 30mm Cannons left no doubts about this Chicken Hawk's pedigree.
When Lenz hopped out of the cockpit, he had such a wide smile on his face he overheard someone in the ground crew make a wisecrack about how they needed to look out if the JG’s XO was so happy. Lenz didn’t care, this new airplane was incredible.
London, England
No one knew who had been the first person to say it but so long as they spell your name right there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Ian Flemings book had been released to an indifferent public, a couple months earlier. Critics had panned it as being poorly written, misogynistic and full of innuendo. Fleming had to concede that those were valid critiques of his work. Then something happened. A copy of Romanov Express was reviewed by a New York Times literary critic who very vocally declared it to be evidence that of the decline and fall of Western Civilization was at hand. That had spurred sales of the in the New York market. Then America had discovered Andrea Herzog.
It had been a bit of a dig against Kat von Mischner for her reaction to the first draft that had prompted a rewrite. Fleming had included a few hints based on things that the Soviets had said about Kat and her close friendship with Helene von Richthofen. Fleming knew there was no truth to those rumors. An MI6 team had stumbled over Helene’s honeymoon in Italy with Kat’s older brother, the word voracious been thrown around. Fleming’s only thought on the matter was that they should see what was going on in a few years. But he had dropped more than a few hints in his book that Andrea Herzog swung both ways and the moral scolds across the Atlantic had screamed bloody murder because of it. Now the book couldn’t be printed fast enough to keep up with sales.
God bless America, Fleming thought to himself as he banged away on his typewriter. May that lot of flaming hypocrites never get a clue and ruin his aspirations.
Now, Fleming had the publisher asking him to write the sequel that he was already halfway done with. Of course, he wanted to do a sequel, he had sheep to fleece.
