Brian sucked the last of the smoke from his cigarette butt. ‘How many, and when?’
‘Fifty to eighty is what I was told, but I’m loathe to count chickens. They’re loading now, so it will be a few days.’ Copeland laid a hand on Bryan’s shoulder. ‘You continue your rest until they get here. I’ll need pilots with experience to get through this.’
Bryan nodded his thanks, took a lingering look at the Spitfires at the perimeter and walked away towards the station gate.
****
A smell of stale fat greeted Bryan as he walked into Xara’s dining room with Ben. The cook stood behind the serving table, his face red from either heat or embarrassment. He scooped some broth into two bowls and handed them to the pilots.
‘What’s in this?’ Bryan asked.
‘Nothing much,’ the man said, handing them half-slices of grey bread.
They sat down at a table and Bryan swirled a spoon around in the liquid, searching for something solid. ‘No wonder I’ve got the shits,’ he muttered.
‘Have you seen this?’ Ben pulled a folded copy of The Times of Malta from his top pocket. ‘The King has awarded Malta The George Cross.’
Bryan slurped some of the warm liquid from his spoon and grimaced. ‘One each? For everyone?’ he asked.
Ben frowned and scanned the copy. ‘Just the one, I think. Awarded to the actual island itself.’
‘How very gracious of His Majesty. Where’s he going to pin it?’
‘Come on, Bryan. The Maltese deserve this.’
Bryan dropped his spoon into the bowl. ‘What the Maltese deserve is a government with the ability to organise a piss-up in a brewery.’ He tore his bread into small chunks and dropped them into his broth. ‘Or more precisely, an unloading in a harbour.’
Ben folded the paper and stuffed it back into his pocket. ‘I’m sure it’ll come right in the end,’ he said.
Monday, 20 April 1942
Bryan opened the door of his room to investigate the noise outside. A commotion of moving bodies came up the stairs and a pilot hurried along the corridor leading from the stairwell.
‘What’s up?’ Bryan asked him as he passed.
‘The RDF stations have called a large formation coming in from the west,’ he said, squeezing past. ‘It’s the Spitfires.’
Bryan retreated into his room and shovelled his feet into his shoes. He grabbed his jacket and dived back out the door, heading towards the stairs. He trotted down the steps into a hubbub of excited chatter. Copeland was picking the men to take the first transport. Bryan looked at him with eyebrows raised and Copeland nodded.
Bryan squirmed through the crush and out of the door, Ben ducked through with him. In the courtyard, under the glimmering dawn light, a battered blue truck stood with its engine idling. Bereft of its canvas, the open back was filling with pilots. Bryan and Ben accepted helping hands and clambered onto the vehicle, elbowing out a space to stand and hanging their hands from the crossbars that had supported the erstwhile covering.
Copeland emerged and climbed into the passenger seat. The truck revved and jolted out of the courtyard, along the narrow dog-legging lane that led from the palace, between the churches and convent walls and out through the Mdina Gate to the open road that dropped from the high ground into the depression that gave its space to Ta’Qali airfield.
The northern sky was speckled with aircraft, flying down the island’s spine like swifts arriving on a spring breeze. The sight drew a ragged cheer from the men jolting around in the back of the truck as it bounced and rolled over the pot-holed road.
The mitigating swarm of fighters curved gracefully into a circuit of the aerodrome and groups of three detached, one after the other, to swoop towards the landing strip. Bryan counted the circling machines. They numbered four squadrons at best; the lower end of Copeland’s expectations, but enough to make a difference.
The truck rolled onto the airfield and shuddered to a halt. The rolling wave of engine noise from taxiing Spitfires enveloped the men as they tumbled off the transport and stood in a loose group, watching the arrivals. The truck growled off behind them to collect more airmen from Mdina and Bryan weaved through the throng to find Copeland at its front.
The last pair of fighters flared out and settled on the runway and the noise diminished as the propellers of previously landed aircraft clunked into stillness. Bryan squinted through the haze of dust at the bright new Spitfires lined up either side of the runway, their pilots climbing out of their cockpits and chatting as they pulled off their parachute packs.
‘They can’t stay there like that,’ Bryan hissed. ‘The bloody Germans have got RDF as well, you know.’
Copeland looked confused for a second, then realisation drained through his features. ‘Fuck,’ he muttered, ‘you’re right.’ He turned to the men behind him. ‘Two groups,’ he yelled, ‘one with Hale, one with me. Let’s get these planes shifted!’
The men ran towards the nearest fighters. Bryan jumped up onto the wing and leaned into the cockpit to release the brakes. Stumbling back to the ground, he ducked under the wing and pushed his weight against the leading edge. Men shouldered in next to him and the fighter moved slowly backwards towards the perimeter, eight pilots pushing against its wings and tailplane, rolling the sagging tires over the hard ground towards the blast-pens.
Airmen jogged arduously in the other direction, their arms braced against the full petrol can that hung from each hand, their teeth clenched and chests tightened against the effort of getting fuel across to the depleted aircraft.
Minutes slipped by and sweat slid from Bryan’s brow, stinging his eyes closed as he heaved against the aircraft’s bulk, planting boot in front of boot in a slow and strenuous mission to save the plane.
‘Whoa!’
The shout came from a man at the tailplane and Bryan wiped his eyes to see the solid walls of an ochre limestone pen embracing the machine in its sanctuary. He pushed himself upright, away from the wing, swaying slightly with the dizziness of exertion.
‘Someone put the brakes on,’ he called. ‘Let’s go and get another one.’
As the group trotted back to the runway, isolated engines coughed into life and a couple of Spitfires taxied slowly away, heading for the other side of the field.
The men gathered around another fighter and heaved it into motion. Bryan’s ragged breathing dragged the corrosive vapour of spilt aviation fuel into his lungs and he choked, spitting stringy phlegm from his dried-out mouth. The strain on his thighs lessened; he glanced along the wing, more airmen had joined the effort, the Spitfire was rolling easily, backwards away from its dangerous exposure.
Behind him, Bryan heard the bark of a starter battery as another engine kicked into life. Then another sound rolled in to join it; the rising moan of air raid sirens washed over the aerodrome like a flowing tide.
‘Shit!’ Bryan staggered away from the wing and looked around; the Spitfire was less than halfway to the relative safety of the blast-pens. Over the harbour, away to the east, a garden of anti-aircraft shells bloomed in a tightly-packed bouquet, tiny and silent in the distance. A dread certainty rose in Bryan’s throat; Grand Harbour was not the bombers’ target on this morning.
‘Take cover!’ he shouted. ‘Get away from the aircraft!’
The men bolted towards the slit-trenches outside the perimeter track. Bryan dodged away from the slashing wingtip as the abandoned Spitfire rolled backwards, slewed sideways and half-pirouetted to a halt.
The bursts over the harbour ceased, leaving the smoke from their violence to drift northwards on the breeze. Against the clearing backdrop, the bombing force eased into visibility.
‘Shit.’ Bryan spun on his heel and sprinted after the others as the rumble of massed engines overtook the diminishing wail of the air raid klaxon, its hand crank deserted and left to wind away its own momentum. Finally, the airfield’s defences opened up with a sudden, brutal concussion.
Bryan ran by a trench crammed with cowering bod
ies as the first strikes hit the runway, licking waves of blast across the ground that buffeted his back. The next trench was similarly packed. With the cold finger of exposed vulnerability tickling the nape of his neck, Bryan dived behind the pile of spoil that stretched along the back of the trench line. Landing heavily on the hard ground, he fought for long seconds to suck air back into his winded lungs, then, panting against the pain in his side, he edged up the heap of sandy soil and squinted over its crest.
Explosions stitched a pattern of mayhem along the runway, disgorging the shallow earth into dun plumes and flipping aircraft to somersault into the air around their broken wings. Petrol splashed from ruptured tanks, igniting in lurid flashes of yellow and orange, balling flame around its burning vapour and rolling acrid black smoke into the air.
As the formation progressed the pattern of cascading ordnance widened, washing out from the main target, gouging holes in the perimeter track and tossing aircraft against the walls of the stone enclosure in which they’d hunkered for safety. Men, caught in the open, scampered to-and-fro like rodents on a hot plate. Some dived to the ground to squirm their bodies flat against the dry soil, others dropped with the gangly demeanour of rag-dolls, blown diagonally to earth by the vicious, flashing momentum of hot, spinning shrapnel.
The bombs ceased, giving way to the insistent boom of the AA that stuttered to a halt as the raiders processed out of range. Bryan’s ears popped as the air decompressed to stillness, his eyes watering with the sharp sting of cordite that drifted across from smouldering craters.
Moments after the guns fell silent, four men, newly arrived pilots by the crispness of their uniforms, climbed out of a trench and walked slowly down the slope towards the smoking destruction on the runways, drawn on by the morbid fascination of the inexperienced. Bryan cocked his head as a menacing rasp vibrated into his ear.
‘Get down!’ he howled into the void between the men and the sanctuary they’d left too early.
One of them turned to look at Bryan, his pale face blank with confusion, clean, white and unsuspecting. Then the vibration swelled to a roar and the face jerked to the direction of the terrible noise. Cannon shells cascaded through the group, cartwheeling two bodies away in curling fountains of red and purple viscera. The third man ran from the carnage, stumbling over a leg that was shattered midway down his shin, his booted foot flapping behind him as he loped across the ground. The pale-faced man watched him fall as three Messerschmitt 109s slammed over at fifty feet. He dropped in terror to his knees and pressed a fist to his mouth as urine spurted and trickled through the crotch of his trousers.
Another trio of fighters raked their fire along the lines of wrecked and burning Spitfires while three more worked over the gun positions around the airfield. Wave after wave, they strafed, circled and returned to strafe again, until, with a final waggle of wings, they climbed away, formed up and headed north.
The snarl of their engines faded, leaving only the screams of the injured pilot and the sobbing of a frightened boy.
****
The candle’s flame guttered and swayed, sending a thin line of greasy black smoke up to the ceiling. Wax dribbled from its wilting shoulder, glistening in the dancing light like a tear, then spreading out on the saucer and glazing to the pearlescence of a dying eye. The candlelight danced to a sudden air movement, jolting Bryan’s hunched shadow around on the dining room wall. He lifted his gaze from the flame and blinked against its drifting phantom at the dark figure that entered the room.
‘I was saving this for a special occasion.’ Copeland sat down opposite Bryan and placed a bottle of whisky and two glasses on the table. ‘And I found these in the bottom of my kitbag.’ He pulled a pack of twenty from his top pocket. Bryan lit a cigarette from the candle flame while the squadron leader poured two shots of whisky.
‘How many Spitfires do we have left?’ Bryan asked through a haze of tobacco smoke.
‘Seven,’ Copeland said quietly, taking a sip from his drink. ‘The Germans must’ve known they were coming.’
‘You can probably thank the Spanish for that.’ Bryan reached for his glass. ‘In any case, they’re close enough to see everything we do and it only takes them fifteen minutes to get here.’ He shook his head in dismay. ‘So, we lost forty brand new fighters, on the ground.’
‘It might not matter soon,’ Copeland said. ‘The reconnaissance types have photographed glider strips being built in Sicily. Invasion may not be too far off.’
Bryan drained his glass and shook his head, grimacing against the liquor’s harsh burn in his throat. ‘Invasion is a summer sport, they won’t come yet,’ he said. ‘I reckon we’ve still got a month or two to save Egypt.’
Copeland refilled their glasses. ‘To do that we need supplies,’ he said. ‘Those Spitfires were sent to give us the air cover to bring in a convoy and keep it safe while it unloads.’ He looked down into his glass. ‘And we fucked it up.’
Bryan hunched forward, stubbing his cigarette into the soft wax pooling in the saucer. ‘But we know how to do it,’ he hissed. ‘I was on Kenley aerodrome through the summer of ’40. When we landed, they had us turned around and ready to go again in twenty minutes or less. Flying in from an aircraft carrier is no different from coming back after a patrol over the channel.
‘As long as the planes are shipped with harmonised guns and tuned radios, and if the ground crews are organised and ready, we could get the first squadron of new arrivals back up to intercept the bombers that are sent to destroy them. Get the army in to do the lifting and carrying for each crew of armourers and fitters. Assign one team for every fighter that we’re expecting.’ He leaned back and smiled. ‘We only have to get it right once.’
Monday, 27 April 1942
The ropes thrummed with tension as the men pulled hard against the lump of stubborn metal. The charred engine rocked, shifted reluctantly and then relented. It carved a shallow furrow of ochre through the blackened patch of earth in which it sat as the team of men hauled it away towards the pile of scrap in the scrubland beyond the perimeter. Bryan and Ben sweated alongside six other pilots, dragging the weight up the incline. The engine slid in against the edge of the scrappage pile and they dropped the ropes, stretching their spines back into vertical with hands on their hips.
‘I would kill my favourite aunty for a beer right now,’ Ben said, wiping the sheen of perspiration from his forehead.
‘That’s shocking,’ Bryan said. ‘You have a favourite aunty?’
‘Flight Lieutenant Hale?’ The two pilots turned to see an airman hurrying towards them.
‘Yes,’ Bryan said, ‘that’s me.’
‘The squadron leader wants to see you, sir, together with’ – the airman checked a slip of paper in his hand – ‘Pilot Officer Stevens. He’s over at the readiness tent.’
Bryan and Ben walked the short distance to readiness, ignoring the protesting cat calls from the working party they left behind.
The dappled shade under the camouflage netting offered a welcome relief from the strengthening spring sunshine. Copeland sat behind the trestle desk and greeted them with a smile.
‘I want you two to get back to Xara, sort out your kit and standby. You’re flying out on the next available transport.’
Bryan’s face flushed at the news. ‘Flying out?’
Copeland nodded. ‘To Gibraltar,’ he said. ‘You’re part of a team of six pioneer pilots. You’ll meet an American aircraft carrier there. She’ll be loaded with sixty-odd Spitfires. You two will lead the first wave back here’ – he raised his eyebrows at Bryan – ‘where we shall have ample ground crews standing by for a thirty-minute turnaround to get the aircraft back in the air to protect the second and third waves.’ He looked from one to the other. ‘This could be our last throw of the dice. Let’s see if we can make it a winner.’
PART 3
SOPRAVVIVENZA
Chapter 19
Thursday, 30 April 1942
Bryan eyed the full moon warily
as it embroidered the wavelets on Marsaxlokk Bay with silver edges, and it returned his gaze with baleful disdain. Behind him, the outboard motor rattled a staccato rhythm against its own rolling echo as the small launch pulled away from the dock.
Their journey was a short one; the prow swung out towards a squat dark shape resting no more that seventy yards out in the bay. The Sunderland rocked sedately on its mooring. Its tall, narrow fuselage suggested it was a boat, but its four engines and outreaching wings proved it was a plane. The stabilising floats near the end of each wing testified to the marriage of the two.
As the launch approached, a door opened in the flying-boat’s port side, close to the water. A man at the prow secured the boat to a cleat, and Bryan, Ben and four other pilots threw their kitbags through the door and clambered in after them. A man in flying gear watched as the launch pulled clear, then closed the door. He indicated the fold-down seats arranged under the portholes that punctuated the side of the fuselage, then ducked away to climb a short ladder into the cockpit.
Bryan sat down and pulled the lap-strap tight. His seat vibrated as the engines swelled into life one after the other. The Sunderland drifted away from its moorings for a few minutes and then surged forward with urgent intent as the throttles opened up.
Bryan craned his neck to peer through the porthole above his shoulder. A foaming wake streamed past, gradually diminishing, together with the battering noise against the hull, as the speed increased and the giant aeroplane lifted away from the water.
Bryan kept his eyes locked on the moonlit silhouette of the receding island until he could no longer distinguish it from the sea’s black mass.
Friday, 1 May 1942
A Wellington bomber taxied slowly along the runway where it extended into the bay, like a walrus walking the plank. At the end, it swung through a ponderous semi-circle and sat vibrating under its own idling engines, as if steeling itself for its run along a strip that ended with the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The engines’ grumbling rose to a roar and the boxy fuselage strained against its brakes for a moment, then rolled ever faster along the tarmac, finally wallowing into the air and banking away to starboard across the sea.
The Bluebirds Trilogy Box Set Page 71
