Edgar was so pleased that he once had once trained as a fell runner, the last bullet had only just missed him. Now only the sides of the Ludendorff bridge offered him any potential sanctuary. As a SS officer pulled out his pistol, Edgar hurdled the steel girders as if he was leading in a race up Cookridge Fell. As he cleared a slanting beam he let go of his backpack, and swung himself into a small recess below the bridge deck. A hail of bullets peppered the river around a growing circle of ripples where his backpack had thankfully sunk. Escape never came easy. He was just glad that developing darkness of the night had allowed him to sink into the growing shadows of the steel work. Hopefully he would be able to quietly drop onto a Rhine barge. Then swim ashore and head back to where Mongomery’s forces were fighting there way out of Germany.

He had to get the documents that Klaudiusz had passed to him back to Montgomery. The plan for Montgomery’s divisions to retreat via the Ludendroff Bridge was not far off, and now the Germans knew all about the proposed plan to twist east and retake the bridge. Several extra German divisions had been put in place to block any retreat that way by the allied army. The few tanks that Montgomery had left stood no chance against the imbedded Jagdtigers. It would be a total disaster for the English army if they approached Ludendroff Bridge. With Stalin’s army retreating back to Russia, and Eisenhower’s forces retreating towards Paris, the German high command was out to totally destroy the English army with it supporting Polish and Canadian brigades.

Edgar had wondered how things had gone so wrong, only two months earlier it looked like the war would be over in time for Christmas 1944. Then Germany had developed two canons of immense power, they had turned the tide of the war against the allied forces. The allies had suffered huge losses in tanks and planes, for the canons focused perfectly on any heat produced by mechanical fiction. It seemed to use a flexible light beam to guide shells straight to any mechanic heat source. The losses suffered by the allies were enormous, the allied armies were unable to locate the canons and so return fire, the allies vehicles and planes became targets once their engines were started up.

Lieutenant Harris, Edgar to his friends had used a underground resistance group to gain access to slave workers at the Teir factory, and in so doing get inside the factory, what he saw there still left him baffled. He had seen things totally alien to him, and something that was so nearly human in form, yet not so. Because whatever it was that he had seen, it had had a fluctuating skin colour along with a slightly elongated conical shaped head. Edgar had not waited to see the creatures face, if indeed it had a face. Had he remained in the factory, the overpowering smell of ozone and putrefaction would have caused him to be violently sick.

He however did return and lay explosive charges, destroying the two canons, giving the allied forces a chance to use their remaining planes to blanket bomb the Teir factory. Now he must get back to Montgomery, for he had noted the same combination of ozone and putrefaction as a motor coach with its windows blacked out, left the factory just befor the bombers arrived. At least one of the strange creatures that were helping the Germans had managed to leave the factory.