Excerpt from The Dog Who Could Fly by Damien Lewis, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In desperation Robert heaved for all he was worth. Not a moment too soon, the harness came free and Pierre with it, and Robert found himself falling backward. He landed in a snowdrift, the weight of the Frenchman driving him deeper into the cold whiteness. Above them the fuselage was awash with flame, and Robert knew it was only a matter of moments before one of the fuel tanks caught, rendering the wrecked aircraft a white-hot, seething fireball.

With his arms gripping Pierre's flight jacket, Robert struggled backward through the snow, dragging the Frenchman farther from the wreckage. He'd gone about thirty paces when there was a massive explosion as the aircraft's fuel tanks ignited. Robert felt himself thrown backward by the blast as a wave of heat and fire washed over him. Burrowing deeper into the snow, and forcing the Frenchman down alongside him, he did his best to shelter himself from the searing heat, and from what he knew was coming.

An instant later the aircraft's ammunition started to explode as it roasted in the inferno. The silence was torn apart by the terrifying snarl and roar of bullets ripping through the air. It would be just his luck, thought Robert, to have survived a suicidal French pilot and the German guns only to be killed by their own bullets exploding.

It was then that he remembered the full extent of their predicament: they were far from safely out of this one yet. They were well within sight of the ridge to their south, which marked the mighty trenches and bunkers of the Germans' Siegfried Line. If the enemy hadn't seen exactly where their aircraft had gone down, they were bound to know now—for a giant black fist of smoke had punched upward from the fiery inferno.

Just as he was wondering how they might make their getaway without being gunned down by the Germans, Robert heard a faint groan from the figure lying in the snow at his side. Moments later the French pilot had struggled into a sitting position, apparently oblivious to the bullets and shrapnel zipping past like a swarm of angry hornets.

"Bloody keep down!" Robert yelled at Pierre as he wrestled the wounded Frenchman back into the snow. "Keep down!"

"I've hurt my leg," Pierre groaned confusedly.

"Bugger your leg," Robert shot back at him. "If you don't keep down you'll lose your bloody head as well!"

Robert managed to keep the Frenchman still until the worst of the explosions had died away. The aircraft was still burning fiercely, but it seemed as if the ammunition had mostly spent itself. Robert felt a crushing, leaden fatigue, but he knew they were finished if they stayed where they were. Sooner or later a German search party would reach them and he knew well what that would mean. There was a price on Robert's head as a Czech fighting for the French. The Germans would send Pierre to a prisoner-of-war camp, but for him there would be only a bare post before a bullet-pocked wall and the firing squad.

"Wait here," he told Pierre, who seemed pretty much unable to move. "We've got to get a look at that leg of yours and I need to find us some cover."

Rising to a kneeling position, Robert spotted what looked like an old farmhouse a hundred yards or so to their north. He hadn't seen it during the crash landing, but as the smoke and heat from the burning aircraft drove off the mist more and more of their surroundings were becoming visible. Leaving the fiery remains of their aircraft to his rear, Robert began crawling through the trees toward that patch of cover. As he did so he realized that the woodland in which they had crash-landed was actually an orchard, one that backed onto farm buildings.

He stopped a good few yards from the farmhouse and studied it closely. He didn't think for one moment that it would be occupied, sandwiched as it was between the German and French lines, but you could never be too careful. He couldn't detect the barest trace of footsteps in the thick drift outside the door. The snow had lain on the ground for weeks now, and it looked as if the farmhouse must have been abandoned shortly after the Germans had started to shell the French lines.

Excerpted from The Dog Who Could Fly by Damien Lewis. Copyright © 2014 by Damien Lewis. Excerpted by permission of Atria/Emily Bestler Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.