Free The Templar Prophecy by Mario Reading Page A

qualities you have demonstrated to us on the way out here, you have encountered such a situation already in your life?’
    Now that she was in charge of her plane again, Inge was feeling the first clear return of hope. She had seen her son Johannes’s Max and Moritz marionettes dangling from the control stick and knew that all was well.
    â€˜Take away the chocks.’
    â€˜They are clear, Frau Flugkapitän.’
    Inge pulled back the throttle and the Fieseler Storch surged forward. She knew the plane intimately. She had been exaggerating when she had told the sergeant major that they would have to encroach over the Russian front line in order to take off. If she couldn’t take off within a hundred feet, and pretty much vertically, she didn’t deserve to be called a pilot.
    The moment the Storch was fifty feet off the ground and rising, Inge swung the plane away from the flak towers and north across the Spree River towards the Moabit District, which she had been assured was still held by forces loyal to the Führer. One thing she knew for a fact: the southerly Tempelhof Airfield had been taken by the Russians on 24 April, and the even more southerly Schönefeld had fallen on 22 April. Both had originally been mooted as possible landing points for the Storch and been as quickly discarded. Travel in that direction and she would be shot down by low-flying Soviet P-39 Kobrushkas. At least this way they would have an outside chance of catching the Ivans napping. Who, after all, would be expecting any more German planes out of Berlin at this late stage in the game? And at night?
    The ruins of Berlin opened out below them. The whole city seemed on fire. Little was left to the imagination thanks to the outstanding all-round visibility from the Storch cabin. Buildings burnt, or cast great shadows across other bomb-damaged skeletons of buildings. The fretwork of streets below them was thrown into even greater prominence by the retreat into rubble of the edifices and shop fronts that had once overlooked them. It seemed impossible that anyone or anything could still be living down there. The place was a wasteland.
    Inge banked left in the direction of the Havel River. As she did so, languid tracers arced towards them, fizzing past the Storch’s wing towers like streamers fired from a shotgun. If just one round struck the overload fuel tank underneaththe fuselage, the plane would brew up like a tank struck by a white phosphorous shell.
    â€˜My God.’ Eberhard was gazing out of the window, his eyes wide with shock. ‘This is a tragedy beyond all imagining.’
    Hartelius, who had already seen the devastation on the flight in, gazed fixedly at Eberhard. When the sergeant major bent forward to obtain a better view of the carnage, he struck.
    But Eberhard was a street fighter and a former SS boxing champion. It had been Eberhard’s prowess in the ring, rather than any intellectual acumen or leadership skills, that had led to him being promoted master sergeant. And he had been fighting, in one way or another, ever since the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. He had been expecting Hartelius to make a move – even hoping for it.
    As Hartelius attempted to ram Eberhard’s head against the metal surround of the window, Eberhard raised the cocked Luger he had been surreptitiously concealing beneath his greatcoat and shot Hartelius through the neck. The shot severed Hartelius’s spine and he died instantly.
    Inge von Hartelius reacted from pure instinct. She swung the steel lunchbox containing the two vacuum flasks backwards over her seat. The lunchbox struck Eberhard on the temple. He fell to the floor of the aircraft and lay still. Inge hammered and hammered at his supine body with the lunchbox, but the position of her seat in relation to the seats behind her made any formal attempt at accuracy impossible. Every time she struck out at Eberhard she screamed her husband’s name. But