The Maltese Defence

by Simon Brading

  She would approach from the sea as fast, but as stealthily, as she could, and go directly for the fans, which had been extremely conveniently left outside of the main scaffolding which held up the airship. Then, while Scarlet kept Hummingbird hovering above a fan, Tanya would hop off and plant a single charge on its centre, which should be more than enough to completely destroy it. They would repeat the exercise with as many of the other fans as possible until they met with resistance, at which point Scarlet would take them up on to the top of the airship, where they would plant their remaining explosives above the five envelopes.

  After the two of them had gotten through with Bertha, the Prussians would be left with a completely intact gondola, the biggest and most expensive in the world, but no way to lift it into the sky.

  Thirty-five minutes after takeoff, the grey surface of the sea gave way to the darkness of the land.

  There were no landmarks to be had on such a dark night so Scarlet was flying by dead reckoning, but she wasn’t concerned; not only was she used to such missions, having carried out many over France in the early months of the war, but Bertha was too big a target to miss, especially since her light blue paintwork, which rendered her almost invisible in the air, would stand out against the ground.

  ‘Two minutes!’ Scarlet called out of the window.

  While remaining strapped in, Tanya carefully divested herself of the thick clothing, stripping down to the work coveralls she was wearing underneath and stuffed them deep into the cowl, which Scarlet had added to the front of the stretchers to protect anyone using them from the wind. She then took two of the cylinders from the bags which she’d shared the ride with, armed them, and put one into each of the voluminous thigh pockets of the coveralls.

  ‘Thirty seconds!’

  Tanya undid her straps and carefully pulled herself up to a crouch, grabbing hold of the curved cowl to keep herself from being blown off the back of the stretcher.

  Scarlet had told her that Hummingbird was at her most quiet flying at one hundred and thirty miles per hour and that was the speed at which she would make her final approach before transferring power to the gyrodyne’s overhead rotors to bring her to a hover. It felt like they were going far faster, though, and she was having trouble maintaining her grip on the smooth metal, which hadn’t exactly been designed for the use she was putting it to.

  ‘Ten!’

  There was a note of uncertainty in Scarlet’s voice, evident even over the noise of the air rushing past her and Tanya glanced at her. She found the Irishwoman peering over her aircraft’s nose and frowning down at the ground, her features dimly lit by the faint red lights of her instrument panel.

  Tanya crouched lower, back into the shelter of the cowl then stuck her head out the side, into the wind, and peered down over the edge of the stretcher.

  It took her a few seconds to get her bearings, comparing the shape of the nearby coastline to the image she had in her mind, but she soon realised they were in exactly the right place - Scarlet had pulled off a very impressive piece of navigation.

  The only problem was, Bertha wasn’t there.

  ‘Gone? What do you mean, gone?’

  ‘Exactly that - Aviator Sergeant Guseva and I went on a little sightseeing jaunt last night and we found Bertha.... gone.’ Scarlet grinned at Dorothy Campbell.

  Campbell sighed. ‘And what exactly was the purpose of this little unsanctioned trip?’

  ‘Oh, we were just going to say hello to the Prussians and ask them if they wouldn’t mind terribly if we blew up their airship from underneath them.’

  ‘With what explosives?’

  Scarlet waved in the direction of the two crates she had repacked the explosives in on their return. She had left them with Hummingbird, which an extremely disappointed Skidmore had brought back to the hangar in the early hours of the morning. The man had had a long night, rewinding and servicing Hummingbird in case she was needed again, and was snoozing, snoring loudly, propped up against the crates, using his greatcoat as a pillow. ‘Tanya managed to get hold of some really nice Italian stuff which would have made short work of that airship. I brought them back, in case I find someone else to donate them to.’

  While most of the Misfits could hardly hold back their laughter, Drake had been staring at Tanya the whole time and when she glanced at him he spoke to her accusingly. ‘You crept out of our room last night and flew to Sicily with Scarlet?’

  She smiled and patted him on the cheek. ‘Oh, Rudy. I’ve been creeping out of our room most nights since we got here. Or did you think I was getting hold of all those supplies we needed by just making a few calls?’

  Drake blinked. ‘I... but... This is different! You weren’t putting yourself in such danger before.’

  Tanya just gave him a crooked smile.

  ‘You... Were you?’ Drake’s voice had gotten higher and higher as the conversation had gone on and he was beginning to sound like a schoolboy. ‘How? What did you do?’

  The Muscovite shrugged. ‘Better you don’t know, darling.’

  Gwen was only very vaguely aware of the conversations going on around her because, ever since Scarlet had told them that the airship had disappeared, all she could think about was whether it had taken Kitty with it.

  Negotiations had stalled when the Italians had made unreasonable demands. They were fully aware of who Kitty was, her picture having been splashed all over newspapers around the world, and they knew that she was worth a lot to the British who had turned her into a symbol of American involvement in the war. However, nobody could reasonably expect Malta to surrender just to get her back, but that was what they were asking for, and as the days dragged on, Gwen was becoming more and more convinced that she would never see Kitty again.

  The other Misfits had tried to cheer her up and, when that failed, plied her with alcohol, but the only thing that took her mind off of the American for even a second was being in the air and she had thrown herself into her flying, using it to escape her worries. It was something she had done since she was a child - whenever she felt unhappy, or needed to clear her mind, she would jump into one of her aircraft and use the sheer joy and freedom of flight to wash everything away. However, her time on the ground was a seemingly endless ordeal of sleepless nights and nervous days spent watching the door to Dorothy Campbell’s office. It had gotten so that she barely recognised herself in the mirror in the mornings when she prepared for the day. Her hair, which Kitty so enjoyed running her fingers through, was lank and greasy, her nails had been bitten to the quick, something she hadn’t done since she was five, and there were thick black blotches under her eyes.

  The voices of her friends faded away completely as her fears surrounded and consumed her and she closed her eyes and drifted away into a nightmare vision of Kitty wasting away in the hellhole that Drake had described in the depths of the airship.

  Which was why she didn’t react when there were gasps from the Misfits and only did so slowly when strong arms went around her from behind and pulled her into a soft body.

  She spun within the embrace and shoved whoever it was away to arm’s length, but found herself caught and held by bright blue eyes.

  She stared into them for long seconds, wondering if she had gone mad, but when the beautiful vision didn’t disappear she flung herself back at the woman and broke down into tears.

  ‘Shh...’ Kitty cupped the back of Gwen’s head, holding her against her chest while she kissed the top of it. ‘It’s alright, I’m here now.’

  Gwen had no idea how long she stayed like that, but it was a catharsis and her fears and doubts flowed from her, evaporating in the fresh morning air. Eventually, she pulled back and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, but then wrinkled her nose and sniffed her fingers. She looked down at the American’s red flightsuit and sniffed again. ‘You smell of fish. Why do you smell of fish?’

  ‘I’ll tell you everything later, for now we have an island to defend.’ She looked at Abby. ‘If you’ll have me
?’

  ‘Are you up to it?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Kitty nodded eagerly. ‘I’m rested, well-fed and more than ready to get back into the fight.’

  ‘Then of course we’ll have you.’

  The Misfits had held back from the two in silence, allowing them their private moment, but now they swarmed forward to surround them, welcoming Kitty and comforting Gwen, who felt tears coming again, despite the wide smile on her face.

  It wasn’t just the pilots who were happy to have Kitty back, the entire base had been on edge, while they waited for the situation to be resolved, and when she told her story at dinner that night, she had an audience of more than a hundred people.

  While most of the support staff found places on the mossy forest floor, Kitty sat on one of the tables so that she could be seen better, directly in one of the pools of light, as if she were some old-world pagan priestess, imparting her wisdom to the people. She looked incredible, like something out of a baroque painting, her hair loose and shining gold, her skin a light bronze. The Italians had obviously been taking care of her and the time she’d had off from flying, almost a week, had done her a world of good.

  She spoke between mouthfuls of food and the Misfits and the rest of the staff, starved of decent entertainment, lapped up her words hungrily.

  Chapter 14

  The week before.

  Kitty swore as the Spitsteam slewed sideways and she fought for control, trying to stop the machine from nosing gently down into the trees and killing her. The trouble was, things didn’t seem to be working quite as they should - the stick was spongy as she drew it gently back and as for the rudder pedals... She kicked them one after the other, but all they did was clunk uselessly against the forward bulkhead.

  While she continued to try to coax the machine into obeying her commands, she glanced in the mirror over her head.

  ‘Well, that kinda explains it.’

  Usually, the vision in the small round mirror attached to the canopy framing was bisected by the tail of the Spit. It wasn’t anymore, because the vertical stabiliser was no longer there.

  ‘Leader, Three here. I’m hit.’

  Kitty finally managed to bring the Spitsteams nose a safe distance above the horizon, but without a rudder and only very weak aileron control she couldn’t risk making much of a turn and was heading almost directly eastwards towards the coast and the open sea and if she kept going that way she would end up in Tunisia.

  ‘Report, Three.’

  ‘I’ve lost rudder control and my elevators feel sluggish. I can barely turn, Leader.’

  ‘Get home, then, Three.’

  ‘Roger, Leader, breaking off now.’ She stifled a laugh; she’d already “broken off” mainly because she’d had no choice.

  ‘Good luck, Three. Four, escort her, please.’

  ‘Aye aye, Leader.’

  Kitty glanced to her right and found Farrier still faithfully on her wing, despite the fact that they’d been flying more or less straight and level for the last few minutes and had been sitting ducks for any Italian or Prussian with a gun who cared to point it at them. She switched to their private frequency. ‘Report, Four.’

  ‘All Bristol fashion, Three.’

  ‘Um, good.’ When Kitty had joined the squadron she hadn’t been quite sure what many of the Misfits were saying half the time, especially Bruce and Mac, but she’d managed to work out what most of the quirky phrases they used meant over the years. However, the naval aviators had brought with them a whole new set of sayings and slang and she was once again struggling. Why they couldn’t all just call a cog a cog was beyond her.

  Below her, the land gave way to sea and she breathed a sigh of relief - she know it was a false sense of security, that the water was just as hard as the ground if you hit it fast enough, but it just felt a lot safer. Also it meant that there were no more anti-aircraft guns to fret about.

  The Spitsteam had risen to three hundred feet and she decided it was as good a time as any to coax her around to the correct heading.

  ‘Four, I’m going to try turning towards home. This might take a while, don’t get bored.’

  ‘Aye aye, Three.’

  Kitty took a deep breath. ‘OK, then. Here goes nothing.’

  She gently pushed her stick to the side and lifted her right wing about ten degrees. Then, as the aircraft began to slide and the nose dip slightly, she pulled back slowly to compensate.

  The nose lifted almost imperceptibly and the aircraft began to come around, turning south, but then there was a twanging noise, accompanied by a minute vibration that she felt through her seat, and the stick came backwards as all resistance went away.

  The nose dipped again and she quickly levelled her wings, but it was too late - she had completely lost her elevators and the Spitsteam was in a shallow, but inevitable, dive towards the waves. She tried pushing the throttle forward, to see if the extra lift would help matters, but it had no effect.

  ‘Dammit!’ There was only one thing for it and she thumbed her radio switch. ‘Four, it’s no good, I’m going to have to hit the metal.’

  ‘Understood, Three. Best of British.’

  As death dives went, it was a fairly sedate one and Kitty had plenty of time to get out of the Spit. She unlatched and pulled back the canopy, locking it open, before undoing her straps and standing on the seat.

  The Spitsteam was too low for her to risk a standard exit where she would deploy her glidewings after she was safely away from the aircraft, so she gripped the handle of the glidewings with one hand, the frame of the canopy with the other, then stepped onto the lip and leapt straight upwards while simultaneously deploying the wings to their first level.

  Normally, what she was doing was tantamount to suicide, but the fact that she had no stabiliser meant that there was nothing to cut her in half as it went past and she was merely swept away by the wind as her aircraft kept flying. It was then an easy matter to open the Duralumin wings to their fullest extent and arrest her fall.

  The Spitsteam continued its slow dive and she took a moment to thank it for its faithful service, before taking stock of her situation.

  She was about a hundred feet up, perhaps ten miles out over the sea, with Farrier’s aircraft circling her about half a mile out. She was confident in the naval pilot’s ability to pinpoint her position and relay it to Malta when she got in range of the naval rescue services. However, it would take some time for them to get to her and, even though the small life jacket she was wearing would keep her afloat indefinitely, she would quite possibly have frozen to death or been moved somewhere else by the currents before then.

  Luckily, there was another option - a fishing boat a few miles away. If she could get Farrier to call their attention to her, then they could pick her up. It would almost certainly be a Sicilian boat, but she would be alive and there was always the possibility that she could bribe them to go to Malta with the gold sovereigns in her survival kit.

  She turned towards the boat and pointed at it to signal her intention to Farrier. The blue and white-tailed Spitsteam waggled its wings and turned towards the boat, abandoning her temporarily.

  All that was left for Kitty to do was to prepare herself and she ran through the procedure for bailing out over water in her mind.

  During basic training, she and the other Misfits had taken it in turns to jump off a scaffolding tower on the shore of a lake, just like every RAC pilot did. There they had had divers and a boat on hand to rescue them if they botched it up. Many pilots did, including Kitty, and ended up being dragged down under the water by the weight of their glidewings before the slack could be taken up on their safety harnesses and they could be pulled back to the surface. There was no such safety measure for her here, no drill sergeant to bawl at her and send her back to the top of the tower, sodden and shivering, and she would have to get it right first time.

  She made sure that the lenses on her helmet were secured in their up position, then removed her goggles and tossed the
m away. Next to go were the maps and documents from her thigh pockets - the water-soluble ink would make them unreadable, but it was best not to tempt fate. Lastly she pulled the toggle that released the liquid from the pockets of her flightsuit; she couldn’t afford her mobility to be restricted.

  Thirty feet above the waves, she prepared the quick release on the harness of the glidewings.

  Twenty feet.

  She dived slightly to get her speed up then flared five feet above the water, as if she were a bird coming in for a landing, carrying out a manoeuvre that Gwen had made look so simple and elegant over the summer when Abby had insisted they needed to “test” their glidewings.

  Too late she realised she had overcooked the dive, put on too much speed and was regaining far too much height. She had no choice but to continue, though; it was either dump the wings or be forever attached to them.

  In theory it was a simple manoeuvre - at the apex of the climb, at that so brief moment of stillness before you began to drop, you released the catch, then, as you began to slip out of the harness you simply raised both arms and fell away from the wings while they still held the air.

  Kitty had done it over and over, first on dry land over mattresses using the specially-constructed zip-line, or “death slide” as the Brits so encouragingly called it, then over the lake under glidewings, but had never quite gotten the knack of it, so she was understandably nervous.

  She released the catch, then raised her arms up over her head.

  She didn’t quite get the coordination right and one of the straps snagged on her elbow.

  She tumbled sideways, arms and legs flailing wildly as her mind told her to grab onto something, anything, despite knowing perfectly well that there was nothing.

  ‘Oh, sh...’

  Her expletive was cut off as she hit the water extremely hard and very awkwardly. Her breath was knocked out of her and water filled her mouth, making her cough and expend what little air she had left.

  She sank, her flightsuit and survival pack dragging her down. Bubbles surrounded her and she twisted and turned, not sure which way was up, flailing mindlessly as the urge to breath became more and more powerful. Fear overwhelmed her as she realised she was going to die and the image of Gwen filled her mind, along with regret that their hopes and dreams wouldn’t come to fruition.