The Enigma Game

by Elizabeth Wein

  For a few seconds I was light-headed with relief that I wasn’t leading anyone to Utsira – and a moment later my stomach was in knots with a new anxiety.

  I couldn’t let A-Flight take the op to Stavanger. That part of Norway is all peninsulas and islands and inlets, and Stavanger to Utsira is less than forty miles in a straight line, about ten minutes in a Blenheim flying at cruise speed.

  ‘Permission to speak, sir?’

  Cromwell sighed again.

  ‘What is it this time, Beaufort-Stuart?’

  ‘They’ll expect a raid, after so many attacks here, won’t they? Stavanger’s a huge operation,’ I pointed out. ‘They’ll be ready. But Lista will be a piece of cake – it’s still under construction. And who has more combat experience, A-Flight or B-Flight?’

  I knew that just by our U-boat score, B-Flight would win that contest hands down. For all our scrapping on the ground, we flew together confidently now.

  ‘Let me guess what you’re trying to say, Beaufort-Stuart,’ Cromwell rumbled. ‘You’re suggesting that B-Flight make the Stavanger run, while A-Flight takes on Lista?’

  Then my lads astounded me.

  They backed me up.

  ‘I’m in,’ said Adam Stedman. ‘Madeira Section is ready for a fight. Stavanger will be a tougher op than Lista, but Beaufort-Stuart’s always one step ahead of the Jerries.’

  ‘Yes, he has a nose for them,’ Derfel Cledwyn said.

  ‘Scotty is careful, too,’ put in Ignacy Mazur. ‘Though we do not always agree!’

  ‘He’s usually right, though,’ said Chip.

  Bill Yorke snorted. But he said, ‘I’m in.’

  ‘I didn’t think I’d last a week when I joined 648 Squadron,’ said Harry Morrow. ‘At least now I know what we’re up against. Scotty’s a jolly good flight leader. I’m in.’

  Up and down the operations room, Pimms and Madeira claimed the Stavanger assignment for B-Flight.

  I was a bit stunned.

  Silver nudged me in the ribs. ‘You’re a jolly good flight leader.’

  ‘Stow it, mate,’ I muttered. ‘Behind every good flight leader …’

  He held up his hands: still in one piece.

  We knew that every single op might end in nothing but death. But this time I felt sure no one was going into it blindly. We were doing it together.

  ‘No heroics with Messerschmitts,’ I reminded them.

  ‘Keep us well south of Utsira,’ I told Silver.

  We flew north along the Scottish coast, past Aberdeen and RAF Deeside, on past Peterhead and Fraserburgh. Out to port, looking over my gauntleted left hand on the control yoke, I could see moorland blanketed with snow, gleaming like icing sugar beneath the rising moon. Scotland lay quiet and still and dangerously cold. I wished Louisa could see it, and then I was glad she couldn’t, was glad she wasn’t there.

  Off Fraserburgh we headed north-east out to sea. We flew at fifteen thousand feet to make the most of our speed, then came down to low level to avoid being tracked. Somewhere in the sky, A-Flight’s leader, Rob Lucknow, called over the radio on his way to Lista. ‘Hullo, Flight Lieutenant Beaufort-Stuart!’

  ‘It’s a beautiful night for flying!’ I told him, as if we were larking about.

  ‘Enjoy it while you have the chance!’

  We were over Norway in a little more than an hour.

  Norway was as bright with snow and moonlight as Scotland, the rocky islets spread out in black and silver. It felt strangely still, nothing moving anywhere, no anti-aircraft guns firing. We passed low over the aerodrome at Stavanger and dumped our bombs on their runway and hangars. No one fired a single shot at us. There was nothing to hear but the hum of our own engines, and the explosions beneath us in the dark.

  ‘Circle over the docks and dump whatever’s left, and let’s get out of here,’ I said.

  ‘Too right,’ called Adam Stedman. ‘This place is giving me the heebie-jeebies.’

  We knew there was only one reason they weren’t firing.

  There must be Luftwaffe night fighters patrolling – probably not more than ten minutes away, waiting for us to turn up at Utsira hoping to bag another submarine. The gunners on the ground didn’t want to hit their own planes, so they couldn’t fire at us, either.

  We detonated another load over the shipyard.

  I climbed away, scanning the moonlit sky for dark wings, holding my breath. We were high now – we’d just about got away with it.

  ‘Cup of tea, Jamie?’ said Silver, handing me the steaming cap of the thermos flask. I took it and raised it to my mouth.

  I’d been expecting an attack for the last half an hour; we all expected it, but none of us saw it coming. The first I knew there were Me-110s in the sky with us was when I saw one of Adam Stedman’s engines explode into flame beyond our starboard wingtip.

  I banked automatically away and got a faceful of hot tea at the same time. Silver caught the cup as I dropped it, spluttering and cursing, and a bloody good thing he did, or it would have been rolling around jamming the rudder pedals. I saw Stedman’s Blenheim screaming downhill as he dived in a desperate attempt to put the fire out, and I saw the black shape of the Messerschmitt 110 dive after him, then nothing but flames below.

  The sky was suddenly full of the black wings of night fighters. Someone must have called them home. And of course they hadn’t had far to go.

  When you’re there, fighting, it’s hard to keep track of anyone but your own crew. People hare off out to sea to get away, or inland to make a crash landing, or down to treetop level to try to hide, or up to the heavens to get a better shot. And when a plane is in a spiral dive engulfed in flames, you often can’t tell if it’s one of your own or the enemy’s. So a lot of my impression of that battle is based on what my crew was yelling into my earphones at the time. Silver had his head in the freezing gale out the open starboard window panel, barking instructions about which way I should turn; Chip gave us an irrepressible non-stop narrative from the gunner’s turret like an auctioneer or a horse-race announcer.

  ‘There goes another Messer, hot damn! Doesn’t that make us official aces? I don’t know who got that one – we’re definitely down two Blenheims but I can’t tell who’s still flying. Pull her up five degrees, would you, cap’n, I don’t want to shoot our tail off! Thank you – just a mo—’ That was followed by the rattle of his gun. ‘Aw, missed. Turn right, turn right—’

  ‘STARBOARD!’ roared Silver, and I threw the Blenheim into such a steep turn that the whole machine shuddered, and I dived to avoid tumbling into a stall. Another plane screamed past my left ear and soared away before I’d straightened the wings.

  ‘Gonna try again,’ Chip blethered on. ‘Here he comes, a little higher—’ Another rattle of gunfire and a whoop of triumph. He yelled, ‘GOT YOU, TAKE THAT, YOU SON OF A—’

  Something hit the turret so hard it knocked my head forward into the controls. I swam in sparkling blackness for a moment and when I came to, Silver was on his feet leaning over my shoulder desperately hanging on to the control yoke. An icy wind howled through the broken turret.

  ‘I’ve got her,’ I gasped.

  ‘You’re getting bloody low,’ Silver gasped back. ‘Never thought I’d try to fly a plane again—’

  ‘Nice work, mate,’ I croaked, levelling out.

  ‘Cheers.’

  We didn’t say anything about Chip. There wasn’t anything to say.

  Silver pointed ahead of us, northward.

  A flotilla of German battleships were cruising full tilt along the craggy coast, black against the silver sea. They wouldn’t reach us for another ten minutes, but they were trying their damnedest not to miss out on the action.

  That’s what we would have found waiting for us if we’d gone to Utsira – a squadron of Messerschmitts above and a load of anti-aircraft fire below.

  In the end, it was swings and roundabouts, really.

  Suddenly Ignacy’s voice crackled into life through my headset.


  ‘I’m on one engine and Taff is bleeding all over the cockpit. Cover me, Pimms Leader, I’m going to get those German bastards if it kills me. Keep the Messers off my tail. I’m going to sink a couple of those ships.’

  ‘There he is,’ Silver said, pointing. ‘Two o’clock high. Get behind him so nobody can sneak up on him, and I’ll climb back and see if the rear gun will still fire in case someone comes after us.’

  Everything else still worked. I had both my engines and all my control surfaces – only the rear turret dome had been shattered. I tore my mind away from Silver in the back, and what he’d have to deal with before he could climb into the rear gunner’s seat. I focused on Ignacy and Derfel and Bill Yorke in the plane ahead of me.

  We sped to meet the battleships. Silver and I had dropped our bombs over Stavanger a lifetime ago. I wondered, briefly and uneasily, why Ignacy hadn’t already got rid of his. Or if he had, how he was planning to get through the flak and sink a battleship with the slow-firing guns in the nose of the Blenheim.

  ‘Pimms and Madeira aircraft,’ I called. ‘Anyone about?’

  Silence.

  I hadn’t even noticed the Australian schoolboys going down.

  ‘Just us,’ Ignacy answered. ‘Thank you for the cover, Scotty, I am going in now – sorry, Yorkie, but I must take you with us.’

  Then he said something in Welsh to Derfel in a low voice.

  That’s when I realised what he meant to do.

  ‘We’re aces now, Mazur,’ I yelled at him. ‘Taff, Yorkie! We’re all aces!’

  He chose the two ships that were closest together. He calculated the dive so he hit them both, the Blenheim cartwheeling across the deck of one and slamming into the other.

  I climbed away through a trail of flame and shrapnel and a hailstorm of anti-aircraft fire. No one came after us.

  Silver tossed the bundled-up dinghy over the back of his seat and climbed into the front cockpit after it. He sat down next to me again.

  ‘Tex won’t mind if we ditch him. Thought you and I might need this, though,’ he said.

  ‘You are showing lack of moral fibre,’ I answered hollowly.

  We limped a hundred miles back west across the open water, leaking fuel through the bullet holes, and when the fuel ran out I made a Mayday call over the radio, because that’s what I’d been trained to do. If there was anyone out there to hear it, the chances of them being friendly were remote; we were still closer to Norway than to Scotland. Silver opened the hatch above us before I levelled the Blenheim to plough on its belly into the black-and-silver swell of the North Sea.

  ‘My hands are both still in one piece,’ Silver said.

  Then the Perspex in the nose gave way, letting in a waterfall of icy black salt water.

  Silver grabbed the strap of the dinghy out of the deluge and shoved the whole bundle up through the hatch ahead of him. We were both in water to our waists in the dark and it was impossible to get a firm foothold. I managed to push Silver out after the dinghy, one of his feet in the palm of my hand and the other on my shoulder – I don’t think he even realised he was standing on me. The Blenheim’s wings kept her from going straight to the bottom of the sea, but they were full of holes like the rest of her and filling up fast.

  Somehow I hauled myself through the hatch after Silver, and we knelt clinging to each other on the starboard wing, slippery with seawater as the swell washed gently over it and back. Silver got the cover off the dinghy, but he couldn’t get the inflating valve unscrewed, which we’d only ever seen demoed once, and the distance between pretending you’re doing something in a drill and actually doing it in the dark in the middle of the North Sea is like the distance between yourself and the shores of Scotland while you’re floating there on your sinking plane.

  ‘Let me do it,’ I said, thinking of his chilblained fiddler’s fingers. ‘Keep your gloves on.’

  I had to take off my gauntlets to release the valve. They were both instantly lost. Seconds before the Blenheim submerged beneath us, I finally got the dinghy to inflate. We didn’t have time to climb into it. All we could do was to hang on as the plane went down.

  Our flight suits were full of icy water now, and it was like wearing armour made of lead. Neither one of us had the superhuman strength it would take to lift ourselves up over the side of the dinghy and into it. In five minutes I couldn’t feel my hands at all.

  So that was us, hanging on to a life raft we couldn’t get into, up to our necks in water so cold it made every breath painful, under the most spectacular moon and starry sky I have ever seen.

  ‘Sod this,’ said Silver through chattering teeth.

  ‘Aye.’ It was too hard to breathe to try to talk.

  ‘No, I mean sod this. Sod moral fibre. I can’t do it. I’m d-d-d – I’m done. Thanks for b-being my pilot, Jamie. And my f-f-friend. If you make it b-b-back to Nancy’s, take my tanner out of the ceiling and b-b-buy yourself a drink on me.’

  And then the bastard just let go.

  Ellen:

  When Louisa came down for Jane’s breakfast tray on Friday morning, there was me standing at the bar picking at a bowl of porridge I would never eat if it were the last bowl of porridge on this earth. There was Nancy, banging cups about as usual, but not so usual was that she hadn’t combed her hair – the hairgrips she fixed in it yesterday were sliding out and she’d not noticed. Elisabeth Lind sat at the table by the fire with her neb in a newspaper, studying the personal notices as if she were swotting for an examination. She turned the page and it covered her own untouched porridge, the paper making a wee camp tent over the spoon stuck out of the bowl. When Louisa came in, Sergeant Lind looked to see who it was and then looked straight back at her newspaper as if she were clockwork instead of flesh and blood.

  I knew she must be dying inside. But we couldn’t weep in each other’s arms as we’d have done in peacetime. We had to play her stupid game of pretend.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Louisa asked.

  ‘Policemen, firemen, Germans, whatnot, I don’t know,’ said Nan, sounding angrier than usual.

  That was yesterday’s news and we all knew it. Dietrich Althammer had been carried away last night, but the room he’d died in was still a dog’s breakfast. They’d found how he escaped: when the rescue crew broke into his prison from the front, the old chimney was open to the sky above a heap of earth and broken stone and bricks and snow. The bomb debris had not hurt him, nor trapped him, and he’d scarpered up the chimney and lain hidden among the ruined pine trees on the ridge before creeping into the Limehouse.

  Nancy didn’t answer Louisa, and I couldn’t speak, so that left Elisabeth Lind to tell her.

  ‘The young men from 648 Squadron ran into trouble last night,’ Sergeant Lind said carefully, not looking up, turning another page. ‘Two planes confirmed down in B-Flight, and the rest are missing. “Failed to return” is how they report it.’

  Louisa met my eyes. I shook my head.

  She put her face in her hands. I saw her swallow, but she couldn’t speak. I knew what she wanted to ask.

  ‘Jamie made a radio call to Rob Lucknow in A-Flight while the party was going on,’ I told her, though I felt like my own voice would choke me. ‘He told Rob that Madeira was two down and that A-Flight should clear off before the Messers got wind there were more Blenheims about. A-Flight got back all right, but that was the last we heard from any of the others.’

  ‘What do you mean, any of the others?’ Louisa croaked. ‘Pimms and Madeira both? But it’s broad daylight!’

  Nan turned her back, not even able to take a keek at us while we talked.

  ‘Phyllis said she’d ring if she gets news,’ I said. ‘They might have landed away like they did the first time Windyedge got bombed. Sometimes if they’re shot up they’ll land at the nearest base, any old base, instead of coming home.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Poor disguised Elisabeth Lind stared at her newspaper. Anybody could tell she wasn’t reading it.

&n
bsp; One of the firemen came in through the front door. We spun around.

  ‘We’ve just got the last Jerry out,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if we bring him in to warm him up? Not sure where Old Cromwell wants him, but he’s had a pretty rough time and he’s not in any shape to march to the aerodrome – he’s been fair buried alive for a solid day.’

  Nancy faced the fireman with empty eyes and shrugged. ‘Do what you like,’ she said.

  And they brought in our old friend, that Jerry pilot Felix Baer.

  He was all over dust. His hair and face were all one colour, grey as grey. His eyes were black pools in the grey dust.

  Elisabeth Lind jumped to her feet, but Louisa was there first. She leaped forward and snatched at his hand.

  The grey dust cracked around his lips as he smiled at her faintly.

  Louisa:

  He took my other hand too. I thought of piano keys beneath those bony, nimble fingers; I could feel his ring with the engraved bear cool against my palm. They were things that made him whole before the war and were still part of him.

  He leaned down quickly and I stood on my toes and we kissed each other’s faces.

  I felt the grey dust come off on my cheek. He let go of one hand to brush it off me; he didn’t let go of the other.

  I pointed to Elisabeth Lind. ‘That is Calypso. Not me.’

  She nodded in agreement, looking as if she were about to cry. ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I am Calypso.’

  I didn’t dare say anything else; the room was full of guards and firemen.

  Miss Lind pulled Jane’s comfortable chair close to the fire. The men from the aerodrome covered it with a blanket to protect it, and they let Felix Baer sit and lean forward with his hands close to the flames.

  He spoke haltingly, trying to explain himself.

  ‘He wishes he had stayed here in November,’ Miss Lind translated softly. ‘But he didn’t want to break the link in his resistance network. After his first trip they began to watch him. They must have known what he’d done – what he left here. They sent him to bomb Windyedge himself – on Christmas Day, can you believe? But he didn’t. Althammer was his navigator on that flight, and when Althammer didn’t report his failure, Baer and Moritz disagreed about why. Moritz thought it was because he was sympathetic. But Baer suspected it was because he wanted to string them along and trap them both later.’