Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  “You’re soaking wet.”

  “Wine.”

  “That’s no good. Better take it off.”

  “Yes.”

  But she did nothing, so he unbuttoned the dress and peeled it away. Surprise, surprise, he thought. He sat on the edge of the mattress and untied his shoes, carefully, so as not to get the laces knotted. Half a minute later he was in bed, and she was curling her arms around him. “Don’t go, don’t go,” she whispered. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “Quite the reverse.”

  Stickwell raised the revolver, aimed, fired. The explosion ripped out the calm of the day, and the recoil flung his hand upward. He brought it down and fired again, teeth clenched and eyes squeezed half-shut.

  His fourth shot hit an ear.

  “That’s better, Sticky,” Flip Moran said.

  “Really? I didn’t see anything.”

  “Yes. You got an ear.”

  They walked over to the targets, a row of statues set up in a corner of the kitchen garden behind the chateau. Moran pointed to the missing ear. “See?”

  “Damn. I wasn’t aiming at that chap. I was after the next-but-one.”

  “You don’t say?” Moran’s thick black mustache twitched. “My stars, Sticky, you’re an awful dangerous man with a gun, and that’s a fact.”

  “It’s not funny, Flip. I told you, I can’t shoot to save my life. Well, that doesn’t worry me, I don’t care what Moggy says, I’m not afraid of getting killed, I can face that. But I ought to be able to do something before I snuff it, oughtn’t I?” He spun the revolver on his finger.

  Moran took it from him and applied the safety-catch. “This proves nothing, this thing,” he said.

  “What about the Dornier? I missed the Dornier completely.”

  “That didn’t matter.”

  “It mattered to me, Flip. The trouble is my eyes seem to go funny when I try to shoot someone down. They keep blinking. That’s no good, is it? It happened at the Battle of Southend Sands. I couldn’t even hit a bloody Blenheim!”

  “Just as well.”

  “Not the point, though, is it?” Stickwell picked up a chunk of the ear and tried to replace it on the statue’s head, but it fell off. “I sometimes think Moggy’s right,” he said. “I’m not cut out to be a fighter pilot. All my family have funny eyes, you know.”

  “Moggy knows nothing. The man’s a bag of wind.”

  “Uncle George is totally blind. Can’t see a damn thing.”

  “Ah, just wait, Sticky. One of these days you’ll stuff a Jerry all on your own, and after that you’ll wonder what the fuss was all about.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Stickwell said gloomily. “I’ve got to do something about it, anyway.” He took back the revolver, and began practicing quick draws from his canvas holster. “He keeps on about it, I don’t know why …” On his third attempt he dropped the gun. “We used to be quite good pals, but now he can’t stand the sight of me. I don’t understand it.”

  A heavy growl had been chewing at the tranquility of the day: engines getting tested. Now the growl, like an animal baring its teeth, became a roar, and the roar fed on itself and grew fiercer. “Hello, hello,” Moran said. They turned to face the sound, and before long a Hurricane sprang into view and thundered directly over the chateau. “Micky’s got the field open,” Stickwell said. “Terrific. Now we can go out to play.” The Hurricane came back and flew all around the grounds of the chateau in a near-vertical turn. “That’s Flash,” Moran said. “He’s full of old buck now he’s got himself engaged, isn’t he?”

  Cox and Fitzgerald came back from leave to find the squadron in a state of keen excitement. On two consecutive days, enemy aircraft had been found and attacked. In all, three Dornier 17’s and six Heinkel 111’s had been involved, including one glorious occasion when the entire squadron had come across a formation of three Heinkels and chased it twenty miles, starting at eighteen thousand feet and ending at ground level with the German aircraft jinking furiously as they raced over the frontier.

  “Krautland’s still out-of-bounds,” Moke Miller told Cox and Fitzgerald, “so we had to let them go. Pity, really. Another mile and—”

  “My kite got slightly stitched-up by one of their gunners,” Pip Patterson said. “Dumbo got a packet of flak through a wing.”

  “Dumbo?” Cox said.

  “Dutton. And Sticky came back with half a mile of telephone wire wrapped around his tail-wheel.”

  “Cracking good fun,” Miller said. “Have a good leave?”

  “Ate too much,” said Fitzgerald.

  “Got taken to the opera,” said Cox.

  “You poor buggers. Anyway, there should be plenty more sport tomorrow. The Hun seems to be up to something.”

  That night, Fitzgerald went to see Mary Blandin. He went alone; he didn’t tell Flash that he was going; he slipped away quietly after dinner. On the way there, he wondered about this secrecy. What was he ashamed of? Nothing. But he was afraid of something, he had to admit that. The dread of failure followed him like a bad shadow. If nobody else knew, did that make the failure any the less? Rubbish! Thus, despising himself already, Fitz went up to Mary’s cottage and banged on the door of a dark and empty house.

  He knew it was empty as soon as he swung the knocker. No crack of light around the blackout curtains. No smoke from the chimney. The windows shuttered, in fact.

  He stood in the starry night and listened to his breath making smoke-plumes in the freezing air. After the first sense of shock there was a certain relief. At least he was spared having to make yet another limp excuse.

  There was an estaminet down the road. He went off and bought himself a drink, thinking: She might have sent me a note. No consideration.

  The year ended with a fine flurry of action. “A” flight got sent to investigate an unidentified aircraft reported between Bar-le-Duc and Toul, climbed to 25,000 feet and found a Dornier 17. They chased it for thirty miles and shot it down in flames near Lunéville. “B” flight when on patrol came across a Heinkel circling St. Mihiel, apparently lost. They put one engine out of action and killed the upper gunner, at which point the German pilot put the plane into a vertical dive. He pulled out, very skillfully, at low level and tried to land on a small civilian airfield, but the bomber’s remaining engine kept dragging it sideways and he flew into a wood. There was a large explosion and many trees caught fire. When Moran landed, his windscreen was smeared with blood: the blood of the Heinkel’s upper gunner.

  Jacky Bellamy happened to be in the control tower when “A” flight got the Dornier. She was able to follow the entire sequence of events, from the sighting to the kill, by listening to Rex’s comments and commands given over the R/T. She wrote it all down. It was a good story for her: the quiet calm on the ground contrasting with the crisp, crackling aggression five miles in the sky; the long chase; the total victory. She saw CH3 in the mess that evening and mentioned it.

  “I’m pleased you’re pleased,” he said.

  “I take it that means you’re not wildly impressed.”

  “Should I be? The odds were six to one. Why did they have to chase it so far before they destroyed it?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “The tactics were wrong. They obviously didn’t achieve any surprise.”

  “Tactics again.” She wrinkled her nose, and that offended him and he began to turn away, so she said quickly: “Anyway, you can’t always guarantee surprise, can you?”

  “All right, forget tactics. Just think about six fighters attacking one bomber continuously over a thirty-mile stretch. Something’s got to be wrong with the gunnery.”

  “You mean the guns jammed, or something?”

  “No. I mean most of the shots missed. For a start, the guns are harmonized wrongly. They’re aimed so as to make the bullet-streams converge at a point four hundred yards ahead of the aircraft. That’s no good.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s too far. Four hundred yards is nearly a qua
rter of a mile. D’you know what sort of target a Dornier 17 presents at a range of a quarter of a mile? It looks like a matchstick.”

  “Yes, but surely that’s only the beginning of the attack. You keep firing, you get closer, the thing gets bigger, so—”

  “So now the bullet-streams are converging way beyond the target. You’ve lost your lethal density. You’re spraying shots all around the area, instead of focusing your fire on one vital spot.”

  “I see.” She thought about it. “So why do they harmonize at four hundred, then?”

  “Because they reckon the average RAF fighter pilot’s such a lousy shot that if he had to come in close and fire a short burst, he’d miss. This way, he can stand off and fire a long burst and miss.”

  “They didn’t all miss today.”

  “Look,” he said patiently. “You asked me and I told you. If it’s not what your readers want, I can’t help that.”

  She went to see Rex.

  “Well, of course, he wasn’t there, was he?” Rex said. “I suppose if you’re not there, thirty miles sounds a lot, but believe me when you’re covering five or six miles a minute, it goes by in a flash … Did he mention the Dornier’s speed? No, I thought not. Racy customer, the Dornier, especially going downhill, which this one was, since he had a vast amount of height to spare. That meant we had a flat-out tail-chase. What did he tell you about the guns?”

  “Wrongly harmonized.”

  “No, the Dornier’s guns.”

  “Oh. Nothing.”

  “Really.” Rex tugged gently at an eyebrow. “Well, nothing is not an adequate description, I’m afraid. Four machineguns, two of them rear-facing—one dorsal, one ventral, so the field-of-fire is very well calculated. Unlike us, these gunners don’t have to fly their crates. They can concentrate exclusively on destroying us. Hence I was not too anxious to offer them an easy target, which takes me to the question of gun-harmonization. What was his complaint, again?”

  “The harmonized range is too great.”

  “This squadron, like every squadron in Fighter Command, uses the Dowding Spread. You’ve met Air Chief Marshal Dowding?”

  “No, but I know he’s C-in-C Fighter Command.”

  “A fine officer and a true gentleman. I had the honor to attend a meeting where he analyzed the thinking behind the Dowding Spread. He made three crucial points. One: an enemy bomber is a relatively big target. Two: the bullet pattern created by the Dowding Spread is big enough to compensate for pilot error. Some error is inevitable in air fighting, and by using a heavy spray rather than a jet, one is more likely to splash the enemy. Third: a range of four hundred yards places the fighter outside the effective defensive fire of the bomber.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “We think so. And there are several German crews who would agree, if they could speak.”

  She went back to the mess. “I checked it out with Squadron Leader Rex,” she said to CH3. “He explained everything, he answered all your objections, and I have to say his version makes a lot more sense than yours.”

  He cocked his head. “I’m surprised at you. I thought the first thing they taught you at journalism school was never to believe anything official.”

  “It’s not that easy. Sometimes it’s just as stupid to disbelieve everything simply because it’s official. I reckon this is one of those times.”

  “Reckon away. Go ahead and write it. I should care.”

  Mother Cox looked up from an Illustrated London News. “For goodness sake!” he said. “What’s he been binding about now? Doesn’t he like the way we part our hair?”

  Moke Miller immediately took out a comb and parted his hair in the middle. It made him look foolish, and for a few days everyone else copied him. As a result the squadron resembled a bunch of 1920’s danceband musicians. “You will tell us if we’ve got it wrong, won’t you?” Miller asked. CH3 smiled and said nothing.

  Fitzgerald visited the cottage twice more, and then asked Cattermole if he knew where Mary was.

  “Not the foggiest. Gone away for Christmas, I expect.”

  “Was she all right when you saw her?”

  “Couldn’t have been better, Fitz. First-class.”

  “Nothing worrying her, then.”

  “When I left her,” Cattermole said, “she seemed very contented.”

  “Good. Thanks for looking after her, Moggy.”

  “What else are friends for?”

  Dumbo Dutton was a burly, amiable young man whose only claim to fame was that he owned a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, bought in Paris on his way to join the squadron. He was reading it in the anteroom after lunch, and making occasional gasps and soft whistles for the benefit of the others, when Rex tapped him on the shoulder and said they were going flying. A couple of aspects of his close-formation drill needed a bit of polishing.

  They went above the weather, exchanging a dead snowscape for a fresh, bright world of sunshine. The air was astonishingly clear: Dutton saw mountain peaks to the south, and realized they must be Swiss Alps. The sky was a soft, pale blue at the horizon, deepening as he looked up until it became indigo overhead. As he kept turning his head it faded to turquoise and then, beyond the sun, to a shining buttermilk. He had seen nothing like it outside the cinema.

  They flew for nearly an hour. Rex was pleased, and said so, which made Dutton happy.

  They dropped down through the clouds and circled the airfield. It all looked smudged and grubby: the sun was nearly down; the light was flat and listless. Rex landed first. Dutton made a wide circuit to give Rex plenty of time to clear the runway, and then made his approach. Now undercarriage down. He tugged the selector lever and it wouldn’t move. Damn. He heaved hard but it seemed locked. “Wake up, Dumbo!” he said aloud, remembered the thumbcatch, squeezed and pulled. Down went the undercarriage, thud-thud, two green lights, but as he lowered the flaps he realized he’d drifted away from the runway while he had his little panic, and now the plowed-out strip was off to his left.

  He sideslipped and suddenly realized, as he glanced down at the blank stretches of snow, that he was quite low. It was hard to judge height in this gray, gutless light, but really this was too low, in fact far too low! He gave the engine a bucketful of throttle and hauled back the stick to go round again. The Hurricane seesawed, stalled and, its propeller thrashing furiously at the end of the bellowing Merlin, spun awkwardly.

  Rex was taxiing when he saw the Hurricane land on its tail just inside the perimeter fence. It bounced like a pogo-stick and went a clear forty feet in the air. He saw its wings in silhouette like the arms of a gymnast attempting a cartwheel. Then it whacked its nose into the runway with a bang that penetrated his own engineroar, and everything either folded up or flew off or bounced away.

  By then Rex had his machine turned around and he was racing it back up the strip. Sparks were sizzling around Dutton’s cockpit from fractured electrical leads when he reached the crash, and the air stank so much of petrol that he was coughing and choking as he wrestled and struggled with the hood. All around, chunks of hot metal sizzled in the snow. He kicked out a Perspex panel, got both hands around a torn metal frame, and heaved. The hood fell off. The instrument panel was half-buried in Dutton’s crumpled body and colored cables were smoking and sparking everywhere. Rex got Dutton under the arms. He bent at the knees and straightened so powerfully that both the pilot and the dashboard came free. He ran with them, away from the stench of fuel. It was only when he laid them down that he saw that Dutton had no legs. At that moment a wing-tank went up with a whoosh of flame, and the fire-truck and bloodwagon arrived.

  Later, the adjutant took Skull to Dutton’s room. “You might as well learn how to do this,” he said. They went through the belongings. “Read all his letters. Anything unpleasant, chuck it on the fire.” They packed his clothes in his suitcase and found a packet of contraceptive sheaths under his socks. “That goes out, straight away,” Kellaway grunted.

  Flash Gordon appeared in the doorwa
y. “Dumbo said I could have it when he was finished,” he said. Skull stared.

  “On the dressing-table,” Kellaway said.

  “Thanks.” Flash took Lady Chatterley and left.

  JANUARY

  1940

  The school holidays came to an end but Mary Blandin did not return. Fitzgerald visited the cottage several times. He asked Flash if Nicole knew anything; she did not. “I shouldn’t worry if I were you,” Flash said. “You know what women are like. Brains like grasshoppers. She probably wrote to you and forgot to stick a stamp on.”

  “All the same, it’s a bit peculiar.”

  “Women are peculiar, Fitz. Nicole is very peculiar sometimes. The other day I happened to mention that we won the battle of Waterloo and she went off the deep end for hours and hours. I had to put a stop to it finally.”

  Fitz gave up worrying about Mary for a moment. “How did you manage that?” he asked.

  “Oh … you know,” Flash said. “Ways and means.”

  The trenches of the British Expeditionary Force had been flooded by the storms of November; now they were thick with ice and often blocked with snow. More than one sentry, drugged by the cold, drifted into sleep and never woke up again. Tanks and Bren-gun carriers froze to the mud as if welded. Aircraft refused to start, guns failed to fire. A Morane pilot broke both legs in a forced landing on a hillside, crawled out of the wreckage and was dead from exposure when the search party found him an hour later.

  In the face of a perpetual struggle to keep warm, the formal war lost much of its meaning. Hornet squadron still went up looking for trouble but by now everyone knew that finding the odd Dornier or Heinkel doing a recce flight was largely a matter of luck, a bit like going out with a gun to get a pheasant: if the birds didn’t appear, then that was that. The real fight was inside the squadron, where Cattermole was still gunning for Stickwell. The original cause (whatever that may have been) no longer mattered: Stickwell was simply a target, and Cattermole lost no opportunity of sniping at him, belittling him, snubbing him. It was all very adolescent. Rex knew it was going on but he considered it a purely personal matter (which in a sense it was) and did not interfere.