The Challenging Heights

by Max Hennessy

  Copyright & Information

  The Challenging Heights

  First published in 1983

  © Juliet Harris; House of Stratus 1983-2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Max Hennessy (John Harris) to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 0755128036 EAN: 9780755128037

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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  About the Author

  John Harris, wrote under his own name and also the pen names of Mark Hebden and Max Hennessy.

  He was born in 1916 and educated at Rotherham Grammar School before becoming a journalist on the staff of the local paper. A short period freelancing preceded World War II, during which he served as a corporal attached to the South African Air Force. Moving to the Sheffield Telegraph after the war, he also became known as an accomplished writer and cartoonist. Other ‘part time’ careers followed.

  He started writing novels in 1951 and in 1953 had considerable success when his best-selling The Sea Shall Not Have Them was filmed. He went on to write many more war and modern adventure novels under his own name, and also some authoritative non-fiction, such as Dunkirk. Using the name Max Hennessy, he wrote some very accomplished historical fiction and as Mark Hebden, the ‘Chief Inspector’ Pel novels which feature a quirky Burgundian policeman.

  Harris was a sailor, an airman, a journalist, a travel courier, a cartoonist and a history teacher, who also managed to squeeze in over eighty books. A master of war and crime fiction, his enduring novels are versatile and entertaining.

  Author’s Note

  For many of the details contained in the last part of this book, I am indebted to the account of a similar operation in Wings Over Kabul, by Ann Baker and Air Chief Marshal Sir Ronald Ivelaw-Chapman, Kimber, 1975.

  Part One

  One

  There was no wind and in the damp stillness of the winter day the trees were motionless. Falling leaves spiralled down to stir the surface of the pools of water in the road that picked up the daylight like fragments of polished steel. As the taxi in which he rode headed towards Brooklands aerodrome, Nicholas Dicken Quinney reflected that the year 1919 seemed as empty as the landscape.

  Not very long before, he had been sitting in a hospital ward staring out at the frosted garden. With him there had been several other RAF men, all casualties of the greatest war the world had ever known, and all equally lost with its ending. For a while at the end of 1918 they had all been certain that the Germans would denounce the Armistice and that there would be a flare-up of the fighting so that the Allies would have to batter their way to the Rhineland for a final ending in the coming spring. But, even if the German generals had wanted to continue, the German soldiers did not. They had had enough and had gone home, leaving the whole of Northern France silent, with a mist in the valleys and a stillness over it like that of the grave. Even in the hospital, knowing that the great guns which had rumbled for four and a half years had finally stopped, it was like being buried alive. It was as if the ghosts of everyone they’d known for the last four and a half years were rising to remind them of the past, so that the only thing they could be certain of was that the world would never be the same again and that they could never live like those who had been too old or too young to have been part of the tragedy.

  Several of the pilots, some of them with wounds, had talked together.

  ‘What are you going to do now it’s over?’ someone had asked.

  Coetzee, the South African, was the first to decide. For him it had seemed simple. ‘I’m going back to my job in Durban,’ he said. ‘Weekends on the beach. A garden. A wife. Kids. That’s the height of my ambition.’

  Williams, who was an American and had joined the RAF because he was young and adventurous and wanted to fly in action, disagreed. ‘I’ll stay in,’ he announced. ‘I want to. I can’t imagine being out.’

  ‘Not me.’ Noble had been flying RE8s and had spent most of his time in hospital lying on his face because his backside had been nicked by a piece of anti-aircraft shell. ‘I’ll get a job flying, but a civil job.’

  ‘Same here.’ Charley Wright was a snub-nosed red-faced man who had found a back exit from the hospital within a fortnight of arriving and slipped out regularly after dark to head for the nearest bar. ‘I can’t imagine living without aeroplanes.’

  They had looked at Dicken for his reaction. They had always been a little overawed by the number of decorations he wore, but even more by the fact that he had been flying as long ago as 1914 and had contrived – by what supernatural lottery there was no telling – to survive without much harm until only weeks before the Armistice when he had been shot out of the sky with four wounds and a lot of broken bones.

  When he didn’t answer the talk had turned inevitably to girls. Coetzee had a girl in South Africa and Williams, the American, one in Houston. Wright had a woman in the town whom he visited whenever he could get out of hospital and wasn’t going to a bar. Dicken had listened to them quietly. There had been only three girls in his life – Annys Toshack, his first love who had turned him down; Zoë, her sister, to whom he had transferred his affections but who had put the Atlantic ocean between them by disappearing to Canada on almost the first ship that had left England after the Armistice, searching for a man called Casey Harmer who had promised her a job in flying and even, he suspected, the chance of a marriage; and Nicola Aubrey, whom he had met in Italy, where her father had been a member of the Diplomatic Corps. He frowned at the thought of her. She had meant a lot to him but she also had disappeared.

  He had barely been old enough to have a girl when the war had broken out but, like most young men about to face the possibility of death in battle, he had suddenly become aware of their importance as he had felt he might well die without knowing anything about them. He had suffered agonised pangs over Annys Toshack but had grown out of them as quickly as he had slipped into them. Zoë Toshack. She was an enigma to him still. He h
ad never been in love with her but there had always been something between them, shared secrets, a mutual love of flying perhaps, and always a frankness that was unusual in girls of her generation, who were more given to a greater delicacy of expression. Nicola Aubrey. His heart sank as he thought of her. Her family had wholeheartedly accepted him into their midst and, despite their being Catholics and of a different religion, had even seemed to encourage him. Perhaps being in Italy, surrounded by the romance of nearby mediaeval Venice and its adjacent towns, had had something to do with it, but no other girl had touched him as deeply as she had. Like the others, however, she too had disappeared from his life. He had written to her but there had been no reply from any member of the family except a blotched and ill-spelled letter from her youngest sister, Marie-Gabrielle, postmarked Genoa and devoid of any address, saying they all missed him and that she, Marie-Gabrielle, would love him all her life. Since Marie-Gabrielle had been no more than nine years old at the time it had not meant much. Nicola had vanished. Her father, he had heard, had been posted to Delhi, and she had been placed totally beyond his reach.

  He was still thinking of her as the taxi rattled along and only a slash of squally rain on the windscreen brought him back to the present. He could see his reflection in the glass behind the driver’s back, a strong-featured young man but of no particular distinction save a straight nose and a firm chin. A few months before, he wouldn’t have given himself a dog’s chance of ever flying again, but once they had told him he wasn’t going to lose his sight he had recovered quickly. Though his legs were still stiff, they worked and, so he had been told, would eventually be as good as new. But the squadron he had been promised had not materialised; with the end of the war, views had changed and nobody seemed now to know what to do with the RAF.

  As the taxi drew to a stop, the driver handed him his walking sticks and, moving slowly, he hobbled into the mess. Several young-old faces looked round at him. There were Americans, Canadians, South Africans, Australians, New Zealanders, to say nothing of Frenchmen and Italians and two disconsolate Russians who had been learning to fly Camels when the Revolution in Russia in 1917 had removed the whole point so that now nobody knew what to do with them. There were a few faces from the past: Archard, who had flown BEs with him and then gone on to RE8s and was still, like himself, miraculously alive; Griffiths, who’d flown 1½-Strutters; Almonde who’d started as an observer but had ended the war as a pilot; Tom Howarth, who’d served alongside him in Italy.

  ‘It’s funny flying now the war’s finished,’ Howarth said as he handed over a drink. ‘The wind seems to deal with you more gently than it used to. There’s no crackle of bullets, no need to celebrate at the end of the day because you’re still alive when so many others are dead. One day I flew to the Rhine and round the cathedral at Cologne. But I found it dull. I was the one who brought the squadron home. I hear now that the machines are to be reduced to produce.’

  ‘Which is a Service euphemism for scrap,’ Dicken commented.

  Howarth shrugged. ‘I reckon the Government’s betrayed us all. Demobilisation isn’t working and there are cases of last in, first out – because, they say, industry needs ’em. In December I only got the chaps on parade by threatening to withhold their wages. They weren’t mutinous, just fed up. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Looking for Willie Hatto.’

  When Hatto arrived, he grinned at Dicken with unrestrained pleasure. Like Dicken, like Archard, he was one of those who had survived the long months of aerial fighting and, after four and a half years of the bloodiest battles in the history of the world, was one of the few friends Dicken had left. They had come together from the opposite ends of the social scale: Dicken, brought up by a divorced mother in a row of terraced cottages in a Sussex village, had joined the army in 1914. Hatto, with Eton and Oxford behind him, part of a titled family with a crumbling country seat in Northamptonshire, was a regular officer. He was tall, monocled and languid and, despite his uniform, seemed always to be clad in the clothing of the cavalryman he had originally been. Somehow, he seemed undressed without leather patches on his elbows, a cravat and a riding whip. To the astonishment of everybody in the mess, he grasped Dicken’s hands and they went into what they had always called their gloat dance – a solemn ring-o’-roses they had always performed in France and Italy with Foote, the American who had formed with them an anarchical trinity dedicated to the pricking of balloons, the reduction of pomposity and the deriding of inefficiency in senior officers. They had performed it whenever they had been successful at anything not permitted by King’s Regulations or the chances of war, whether it was obtaining unofficial leave, routing some difficult officer from Wing, dodging a more than normally aggressive group of German aeroplanes, or merely simply surviving when by all the law of averages they ought not to have done.

  When they had finished, Hatto slapped Dicken’s shoulder and grinned. ‘For a man with a pair of perforated legs,’ he said, ‘you perform remarkably well. The last time I saw you, you were lying on your back full of holes put there by Ernst Udet and his gang of graverobbers. I thought you’d be out of action for at least a year. I expect you’re now badgering everybody to let you fly.’

  ‘Carlin flew with a wooden leg.’

  ‘Not four months after he lost the original. Heard about Diplock? He fixed himself up with a job at the Air Ministry.’

  They smiled at each other. Cecil Arthur Diplock, from the next village to the one where Dicken had been born, had married Dicken’s first love, Annys Toshack. There had never been much affection between them and what there was had disappeared when Diplock had turned up in France on the same airfield. His inability to screw up his courage to facing the enemy had removed him very rapidly from the scene but, a crafty and resourceful young man, from being appointed personal pilot to the Wing Colonel he had advanced to become his aide. Turning up again as squadron CO in Italy, he had managed to get rid of Dicken, Hatto and Foote, the American, every one of them men who knew his past history, and – though he knew he could never prove it – Dicken even had a suspicion that Diplock had sent him up for his last flight in the knowledge that Udet and his staffel were in the vicinity.

  ‘He’s applied for a permanent commission,’ Hatto said. ‘So have I. What about you?’

  ‘If there’s an air force.’

  Before 1914 there had been no flying service and even now the RAF, the successor to the Royal Flying Corps and no more than a year old, had still not been provided with any plan for an establishment of regular officers. There were even ugly rumours that, with the politicians eager to cut expenditure now that the war was won and with the Navy and the Army fighting for funds, the RAF might even not survive.

  They both avoided the subject. ‘How’s your wife, Willie?’

  Hatto smiled. ‘Fine. How about that girl of yours?’

  ‘Which one do you mean?’

  ‘Either of ’em ’ll do.’

  Dicken managed a smile. ‘One’s in Canada,’ he said.

  ‘T’other–’ He shrugged.

  ‘No ties?’

  ‘None.’

  Hatto smiled. ‘Because the war isn’t over, old son. It’s still going on. In Russia. When the Russians opted out of the war in 1917, the Czechs who’d been fighting for them set off across Siberia to join the Allies in France. They were still armed and started fighting the Bolsheviks. They now practically control the whole of the Trans-Siberian Railway and it’s encouraged a lot of other people to set up anti-Bolshevik governments. Now the French, the British, the Americans, the Japanese and a few more are making it official. We’re going in.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘A number of places. They say it’s to relieve the distress of the Russian people but my brother, at the Foreign Office, says it’s because everybody in Western Europe’s scared stiff of Communism.’

  Dicken looked dubious. ‘Isn’t
it a bit cold in Russia?’

  ‘We won’t be going to the north. We’re going to the south round Yalta. That’s different. It’s where all the Russian princes and princesses have their holiday palaces. There are a lot of them down there still enjoying life, and countesses are a penny a hundred. My brother’s been there and he says it’s beautiful.’ Hatto grimaced. ‘It’s either that or the awful bloody anti-climax of the Army of Occupation in Germany. Can you imagine it? People like Diplock in charge, and the Germans wishing you’d drop dead or break out all over in warts.’

  Dicken grinned. Hatto was a forceful persuader. ‘Are you going?’

  ‘Not half.’

  ‘All right. Count me in.’

  ‘How about the old legs?’

  ‘You sit down to fly.’

  Hatto vanished almost overnight and, as soon as he was discharged from hospital, Dicken expected to follow him. But the commanding officer at the camp to which he was posted was an ex-Royal Naval Air Service type transferred to the RAF who still retained the esoteric salute used by the Navy and liked to make everyone aware of his seafaring background by referring to ‘decks’, ‘going ashore’, ‘the ship’s company’ and ‘running a tight ship’. Free time became ‘off watch’ and the bus into town from the main gate became the ‘liberty boat’. He disapproved of people under his command going off to fight minor wars and, when he heard of Dicken’s decision to do so, threatened to court martial him if he tried. It seemed to call for strong measures and Dicken simply packed his kit and arranged for a taxi. As he hobbled from the officers’ mess, he was stopped by the adjutant, another ex-RNAS type.