The Maltese Defence

by Simon Brading

  It was Hal Far’s turn to bat, but no sooner had the opening pair padded up and made their way out onto the field, than the air raid warning siren sounded.

  The airfield went completely still, as everybody froze where they were in surprise, not quite knowing what to do, but then chaos ensued as people began running in every direction.

  Gwen and Kitty had been sitting on a blanket on the grass at the edge of the improvised pitch and they were among the closest to the ramp down into the hangar, which someone had had the foresight to keep clear. They left the blanket and the remnants of their snacks where they were and sprinted down the ramp to the ready room, where their flightsuits were hanging. They were joined almost immediately by the rest of the Misfits.

  Abby stripped quickly, then grabbed her flightsuit from where it had been hanging next to Gwen’s and stepped into it. She grinned as she pulled the zip up the front. ‘Saved by the bell, eh?’

  ‘Indeed!’ Gwen chuckled. One of the first things that the two of them had found they had in common was that they disliked cricket, despite it being the most popular sport in the world. They had both been roped into playing for the Misfit team, though, because, with Chalky flying, Owen not well enough to play and Kitty’s unfortunate status as an non-cricket-playing American, they were needed to make up the numbers. ‘Any idea what’s happening?’

  Abby shook her head. ‘I’m hoping it’s just a drill - Dot’s idea of a joke or something. We’ll find out soon enough.’

  One by one, the Misfits finished dressing and ran or waddled, depending on the tightness of their flightsuits, to where their machines were ready and waiting for them.

  Gwen clambered up onto Excalibur’s wing and hopped into the cockpit. Usually she would strap herself in before doing anything else, but she wanted to know what was going on, so she plugged in her radio and switched to the base frequency before letting Giuseppe help her with her safety harness. She was just in time to catch the end of the conversation between Chalky and Campbell.

  ‘...similar numbers coming from the north west of the island.’

  ‘And only the single flight of fighters?’

  ‘So far, Haven, yes.’

  ‘Thank you, Seeker. If the situation changes please inform us.’

  ‘Roger, Haven, I...’ Chalky’s clinically professional voice faltered and was filled with terror as he almost screamed his next words. ‘Oh, god, Bertha! Abby! It’s Bertha! The Barons...’

  A squeal of feedback made Gwen wince, but then there was silence until Campbell’s voice filled it. ‘Seeker, repeat your last, please. Seeker, are you there? Chalky? Come in please!’

  There was a note of despair in the woman’s voice as she tried to raise Chalky, but after a few tries she stopped. There was a long pause, during which only the background static could be heard, but eventually Campbell came back on, her voice composed and professional once more, although Gwen though she could notice a catch in it, as if there was something in her throat.

  ‘Badger Leader, this is Haven. Did you get that?’

  ‘Roger, Haven.’

  ‘We have one hundred plus bombers incoming, with an escort of two squadrons of Italian fighters, but don’t worry about them; the Spits and Harrys can handle them. Chalky’s last known position was fifty miles east at twenty-five thousand feet - go find the Barons and take the bastards down.’

  ‘Roger that, Haven. With pleasure. All Badgers, you heard her - let’s go.’

  Gwen powered up the ramp, a tricky manoeuvre that was nonetheless second nature to her now, after so many sorties, and turned onto the airfield. She immediately threw her throttle wide open and followed Abby as she accelerated away.

  Nothing needed to be said about Chalky’s fate; it was easy enough to work out what must have happened to him. Bertha was nearly invisible in the air and he wouldn’t have been looking out for her - she must have been waiting along his flight path and launched fighters when he approached. Vulture was a peacetime aircraft, built for stargazing, it had no armour whatsoever, no manoeuvrability to speak of and was very slow - there was no way it could have survived and it was extremely unlikely that her pilot had either.

  Once the Misfits were in the air and climbing hard to the east, Abby called Campbell again. ‘Haven, this is Badger Leader. Where did those bombers come from?’

  ‘Seeker spotted them taking off from the airfields on Sicily.’

  ‘I thought there weren’t any aircraft left on Sicily?’

  ‘They must have moved them there in secret and put them together in the hangars where we couldn’t see them.’

  ‘We should have been bombing those hangars, Haven...’

  ‘We don’t have the resources to waste on flattening a few buildings we thought were empty, and even if we did they would have just rebuilt them, or put them somewhere else. Now stop worrying about what we should have been done and concentrate on punishing them for what they have done.’

  ‘Roger, Haven.’ Abby sighed, but didn’t argue any further.

  Gwen kept a good watch as they flew up into the sky. A fighter could fly fifty miles in a very short time, especially if they were willing to sacrifice height for speed, and the Barons could well be over the island already, waiting to ambush any aircraft that took off. She thought that it was more likely that they would be back on Bertha, though, concealed by the camouflage and steaming away from the scene of the crime. She doubted that the Misfits would find the airship that day.

  Unfortunately, she was right.

  ‘Haven, this is Badger Leader. There’s nobody here. We’re going to broaden the search.’

  ‘Negative, Badger Leader; incoming aircraft are now three hundred plus, return and engage, please.’

  ‘Are the Barons with them, Haven?’

  ‘Negative, Badger Leader.’

  ‘Damn and blast!’

  Bruce laughed at Abby’s feeble swearing. ‘Gruber’s never going to do escort duty, Leader, you know that! Don’t worry, we’ll have a chance at him soon enough I reckon.’

  ‘I know, Five.’ Abby sighed. ‘Come on then, Badgers, let’s go take care of this little raid.’

  The Misfits banked around to reverse their course and Gwen peered over her wing at the sea below as she did so, hoping to find some trace of Vulture. The Mediterranean was calm, though, with no sign of any wreckage and none of the fishing boats seemed to be moving to rescue anybody. Chalky was gone.

  As her wings came level, her view of the sea was hidden and she resumed her search for the huge airship that had to be there somewhere.

  As the massed formations of Italian and Prussian bombers, droned towards them, the islanders rushed for the nearest shelter, abandoning the homes they had dared to return to in the major population centres like Valletta, praying that the repairs that they had made during the recent weeks of peace wouldn’t be destroyed.

  The Misfits were rested and had in no way lost their fighting instincts. They tore through the ranks of bombers, furious at the loss of their friend and seeking vengeance.

  Gwen tried to stay on Abby’s wing as she usually did, but she was finding it hard to maintain her usual discipline and it showed in her flying.

  After her wingmate had strayed from her wing for a third time in only a couple of minutes, Abby tutted. ‘Oh, just go and blow off some steam, would you, Two?’

  ‘If you insist, Leader.’ Gwen couldn’t help but grin as she pulled back on her stick, sending Excalibur rocketing into the sky, before spiralling down again, directly into the middle of the Italian bomber formation. Her wild actions surprised not only the group of bombers, who belatedly tried to scatter, but also the four MU9’s who had been following her and Abby as they’d made their run. She blasted one of the fighters to bits, before giving two of the larger machines much longer bursts as they passed across her nose.

  Her path took her under the bomber formation and she continued her dizzying loop, coming back up towards the bellies of the next flight of bombers. However, before she c
ould get in range, a couple of Harridans shot through them, cannons spurting fire. Only one of the bombers was hit enough to drop out of the formation, but she ignored the rest and aborted her run when she saw the flight of Italian fighters on the tails of the British fighters.

  She got her first good look at the new model of fighters just before she pulled her trigger and raked the first one with machine gun fire. They were streamlined and sleek, with long noses, tails which tapered to sharp points and wings that were very similar in design to the MU9. They were a lot tougher, too, as the hits she scored on the fighter failed to knock it out of the sky as they would have the older models.

  She pulled in behind the fighters and gave the trailing one a quick burst of combined fire. She was very pleased to see that her cannon were just as effective on them as they were on any other aircraft and, as that fighter disintegrated and fell away she adjusted her aim to the next one, but the Italians had had enough and abandoned their chase, scattering and diving away from her. She let them go and banked hard, bringing Excalibur around directly underneath a flight of big Prussian HO111’s. She sprayed two of them liberally as she climbed up at them, but was then forced to kick her rudder and turn away as the bombers began dropping their bombs.

  As she rolled around she was briefly inverted and she snatched a glance at the ground, wondering what the target was, and found the familiar sight of Hal Far almost directly below her, smoke and dirt blossoming as it was pounded remorselessly. With so much going on around her she couldn’t afford to watch for very long, so she put the airfield out of her mind, sure in the knowledge that the men and women working there were safely below ground, and got back into the fight.

  From high above and twenty miles east of the island, Hans Gruber munched on a bowl of popcorn while he watched the bombs exploding on the airfields of Malta. He wasn’t expecting the raid to do any lasting damage, with the facilities on the air bases underground, but it wasn’t as if there was anything else worth bombing on the island anyway; the civilian population was already terrified and the ships in the harbour were more of a liability to the British than they were an asset - an ancient aircraft carrier that was worse than useless and a couple of damaged destroyers that were using up resources to repair that they wouldn’t be able to replace.

  ‘What is the purpose of this?’

  Gruber frowned in annoyance as he retracted his lenses and turned from the spectacle to look at the man standing next to him at the window of the officers’ mess. The admiral had brought a huge antique brass telescope to watch the attack, mounting it on an equally antiquated wooden tripod. It was a wonder he could see any of it.

  ‘This attack will not do anything to inconvenience the British, save give their ordinary airmen practice at filling holes in their fields. All I can see is that it we are wasting pilots, aircraft and munitions.’

  The admiral was nominally in command of Bertha, but after the success in Greece, the Kaiser had promoted Gruber and placed him in charge of the assault on Malta, which meant the elderly man now had to obey his orders rather than granting his requests as before.

  Since the change in circumstances, the admiral had done nothing to conceal his distaste both for Gruber and the situation he had been placed in. However, instead of trying to make peace in the interest of cooperation, Gruber used any opportunity he could to rub the man’s nose into the change of seniority by keeping him out of the loop and only telling him what he needed to know for the operation of Bertha.

  He met the man’s eyes and deliberately sipped his schnapps, then took the time to wipe the back of his hand across his lips before answering.

  ‘You’ll see, Admiral, you’ll see. All in good time.’

  The man frowned in annoyance at being put off once again and Gruber grinned, delighted, as he turned back to the window, the same window through which he had watched the Misfits earlier when they had come searching for their companion, Charles “Chalky” Isaacs, hoping to find him still alive.

  It had been a vain hope, though, because the man had already disappeared beneath the waves, entombed forever in his machine.

  Chapter 20

  ‘Damn it, Dot, we should have been doing something to protect Chalky instead of playing bloody cricket!’

  After chasing the raid back over the sea the Misfits had flown straight home. They’d had to orbit the field for twenty minutes while enough potholes were filled in before they were able to land, but as soon as she was down, Abby had left Dragon in the care of her fitters and stormed over to Dorothy Campbell, who had come to watch the fighters return.

  ‘What the hell could we have done, Abby? We thought the Barons were in Greece and we were watching Sicily for threats. There was no way we could have prevented his death, unless we had him grounded, in which case we would have been blind, or escorted him the entire time, exhausting pilots with long shifts, in which case we probably would have lost them too.’

  Abby opened her mouth to continue arguing, but then shut it again when she realised that Campbell was right - there was nothing they could have reasonably done differently that would have affected the outcome in a positive manner. At the end of the day, like it or not, they were at war and Charles had known what he was getting into and known the risks when he’d agreed to join Misfit Squadron. And just like Mac he hadn’t died in vain, but with his dying breaths had warned the British that the Barons were there - it might not seem like much, but if the Barons launched unexpected into the middle of a fight from the nigh on invisible Bertha, even the Misfits would be hard-pressed to survive.

  She sighed and dropped her head. ‘You’re right, of course. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, though.’

  ‘Of course it hurts. I would be worried if you ever got to the point where you weren’t affected by the loss of one of your people because it would mean you were no longer the woman I helped start this squadron.’

  ‘I just hope that I have a squadron left after this nightmare ends.’ Abby turned to walk away, but came to a sudden halt when she saw that the rest of the Misfits had been standing silently behind her. There were long faces, as she’d been expecting, but more than anything else there was determination and she nodded. ‘We’ll have a drink and take Charles’ photograph to the cathedral tonight, but right now I want you ready to fly again; I’m pretty damn sure the Nelsons are getting ready to retaliate as we speak and I for one want to be with them. Be back on the flight line in fifteen minutes.’

  Without another word she stalked off towards Dragon.

  The Misfits watched her go, then drifted away, a few to their aircraft but most towards the ready room and the snacks that were always there between missions.

  Gwen slipped her hand into Kitty’s and together they clomped down the ramp, but she pulled her to a halt before they got half-way. ‘Hang on a second, there’s something we should do.’

  She pulled Kitty back up into the bright sunshine and over to Campbell, who was watching the last of the Harridans land. She saw them approaching and smiled weakly.

  ‘What can I do for you, ladies?’

  ‘I was just thinking that someone should tell Roberta Leyland, Chalky’s girlfriend, about him. She works in signals. We’ve gotten to know her pretty well, so we could do it if you want.’

  Campbell grimaced and sighed, shaking her head sadly. ‘I suppose there’s no way you could have known; I’ve only just been informed myself.’

  ‘Known what?’ Gwen asked, a sinking feeling in her stomach.

  ‘I’m sorry, but Aerial Officer Leyland was on Vulture when she went down. It was their anniversary or something and she sneaked on-board to surprise Charles.’

  While the fighters at Hal Far could make do with a narrow strip of just a few hundred yards to take off and land on, the bombers at Luqa and Ta’Kali couldn’t; they needed far more room, especially when they were taking off fully loaded, so repairs to their airfields took far longer than the fifteen minutes Abby had predicted and in the end it was more than forty-five min
utes before Luqa and Ta’Kali were open for business again. Not only would the delay have given the Coalition fighters ample time to get home, rearm and rewind, and get back into the air, but there was also the matter of the Barons’ ability to appear out of nowhere, thanks to Bertha. Campbell and the other station commanders came to the inescapable conclusion that, if they went ahead with the attack, loses would almost certainly be high, if not total.

  The reprisal raid was cancelled, the fighters at Hal Far stood down and the pilots trudged, disappointed, back to the ready room.

  ‘Are you really just expecting us to sit on our thumbs and do nothing?’ Bruce asked, slamming his mug of tea down on the coffee table between the sofas with far more force than necessary, spilling some of it and startling a couple of the more inexperienced Harridan pilots sitting nearby. He glared at Campbell. ‘Since when have the RAC been afraid of a fight?’

  ‘We are not cowards, if that is what you’re accusing us of, Mr Walker.’ Any conversations that were still going on after Bruce’s outburst came to a halt and all eyes went to her as she turned cold eyes on the Australian. ‘It is not cowardice, it is prudence. If the Barons are here, it means that Greece has either fallen or is on its knees, and that means we’re next. We’re going to need those bombers; they will be vital in stopping the invasion fleet when it comes, and we’re not going to put them at risk just to destroy a few bombers that can’t do much to us anyway and which you can shoot down easily enough.’

  ‘So, what?’ asked Abby, who hadn’t cooled down after her outburst on the airfield. ‘We just wait for them to decide they’re ready to send in their ships and scrape us off this godforsaken island?’