“Quite absurd,” Flash Gordon said, looking in through a window.
“Beat it!” CH3 cried.
“None of this is new,” Barton said. “You’ve all heard it in umpteen lectures ever since you began flying, but it doesn’t seem to have sunk in. You’ve got to get in close.”
“That’s dangerous,” Gordon said doubtfully.
“Don’t shoot unless you can read the numbers on the fuselage,” CH3 said. “Better yet, get close enough to count the crew.”
“Count their teeth,” Gordon said. “Like buying a horse.”
“Beat it before I kill you,” CH3 told him.
“And always attack from behind if you can,” Barton said. “Stick your nose up his tailpipe. Don’t fart about with fancy deflection shots, leave that to experts like Haddy.”
“This is all a load of cock,” Gordon said. His arms dangled inside the window, his chin rested on the sill and his eyelids drooped goofily. “What’s wrong with the old Area Fighting Attacks, I say? Bloody good fun, they were.”
Fury gripped CH3. It showed in his face: the eyes suddenly widened, the jaws clamped together, the color intensified. Barton saw this and tried to grab his arm but CH3 went out of the hut like a sprinter from his blocks. Gordon had a few yards’ start. Giggling with fear, he dodged behind the wheels of a Hurricane. CH3 plunged after him, tripped over the chocks and fell on his face. By the time he was up, spitting out grass and obscenities, Gordon had escaped. CH3 saw him trying to hide behind some deckchairs and went for him. Barton, watching from the doorway, knew that this was no joke: the chase was too savage, the cursing too vicious.
CH3 caught Gordon as he was scrambling up an apple-tree. He seized him by a foot, yanked at it and twisted it as if he wanted to screw it off. Gordon howled with pain and lashed at him with the other foot. CH3 grabbed that too and was clawing his way up Gordon’s body when Barton and Cox dragged him off.
As suddenly as the rage began, so it ceased. He stood limp and exhausted, ashamed to look anyone in the face. Eventually he walked slowly away. Barton stayed and said: “That’ll teach you not to be such a lunatic, Flash. Come on down.” But Gordon politely refused, and he stayed in the apple-tree until the scramble sounded.
Mary came back again next day. They could see her from dispersal, a small, dark, plump figure standing just beyond the wire. She rarely moved.
The fourth scramble of the day led to a prolonged fight at high level. A squadron of Spitfires had drawn off the escorting 109’s just before the Hurricanes arrived. The bombers were Ju-88’s, fast, capable of being thrown about like a fighter and apparently tough enough to absorb any number of bullets. Hornet squadron chased them all across Kent. Con-trails unfurled neatly, like endless bandages that soon sprawled and wore thin until the sky seemed littered with discarded dressings. The Hurricanes made hit-and-run attacks until they ran out of ammunition. When they withdrew, a couple of bombers were flying on one engine only and more fighters were being scrambled, but the raid reached its target, which was Manston, and bombed it.
Barton was talking to his rigger as the last member of “A” flight was coming in to land. The Merlin growled, then picked up with a roar, then sank to a growl again. “Who’s that?” he asked.
“Looks like Mr. Phillips, sir.”
Barton dumped his parachute on the wing and strode across the field. “You!” he shouted when Phillips got out. “What’s the matter? Tired of life? Ready to end it all?”
Phillips was startled and puzzled. “Sorry?” he said.
“Sorry? Sorry?” Barton shouted. Half the squadron had stopped to listen. “You’re worse than sorry, Phillips, you’re bloody tragic! Why did you open up just now?”
“Open up?” Phillips had been awake since before dawn, had flown four sorties, seen several deaths, been scared speechless more than once. He was very tired, but Barton looked thoroughly angry, so he made an effort to think, and failed. “Don’t understand,” he said.
“You opened up. Opened the throttle. Throttle” Barton pointed a furious finger at the sky where it had happened.
“I was a bit low,” Phillips said.
“Low? You were nearly bloody underground! What if your engine hadn’t opened up? Where would you be now?”
Phillips looked across the field. “In the hedge, I suppose.”
“No! The kite would be in the hedge and you would be in the morgue and serve you bloody well right!” They could hear him in the control tower. “Never trust your engine after a scrap! Always give yourself more height than you need! Play safe! Understand?”
Phillips nodded. He felt bruised by this blast. Barton strode away. CH3 nodded as he went by and said: “Serve him right.”
Without pausing, Barton said: “He’s in your flight, chum. You should be bollocking him, not me.”
Skull had a bright idea. If estimating range was so difficult for most pilots, why not erect dummy German aircraft at the correct distance so that their size and appearance would become familiar? Barton told him to do it. He requisitioned a truckload of plywood and a dozen carpenters and painters. They worked through the night. Next morning three mock-ups were ranged in an arc, two hundred yards from the crewroom: a Dornier 17 seen head-on, a Junkers 88 seen from the left rear, and a Messerschmitt 109 seen from the side and slightly above. The pilots, when they landed, were amused and impressed. “That is what your target should look like,” Skull told them. “If it’s not that big then you’re not close enough to open fire.”
“If I get you the wood,” Cattermole said, “will you make me a Sunderland flyingboat for my birthday?”
Skull yawned so hugely that his jaw hurt. He was trembling with fatigue but he was so pleased with his creations that he couldn’t leave them. About an hour later he was drinking tea in the control tower when he heard rifle-fire. Gordon, Cattermole and Renouf were standing outside the crewroom, shooting at the mockups. “What the devil d’you think you’re doing?” Skull shouted, but they couldn’t hear. He hurried to the stairs. Barton grabbed his arm. “Leave them be,” he said.
“But …” Skull gestured helplessly with paint-streaked hands.
“They’re doing what you want, aren’t they? Besides, they hardly ever hit the bloody things. Just watch.”
The rifles banged like fireworks. “Look over there,” Skull said. “The black widow’s back.”
“Is that what they call her?” Barton aimed his binoculars. “Yes. I see. She does look a bit gloomy, doesn’t she?”
“Bloody Mary,” Skull said. “That’s another name they’ve given her. They say she sends pilots to their doom.”
“Superstitious claptrap. She’s waiting for Fitz, that’s all. I wish there was something we could do …” Then the telephone rang and he had more urgent things to think of.
CH3 saw Jacky Bellamy sitting at a table in the corner of the Spreadeagle with a sergeant-pilot he vaguely remembered having seen at Brambledown. He went over to them.
“Excuse me, old boy,” he said, “but you’re wanted on the phone. They said it’s urgent.”
“Damn … Thank you, sir.” He disappeared into the crowd, and CH3 took his place. “You shouldn’t associate with sergeant-pilots,” he said. “They’re terribly lower-class. What’s his name?”
“White, and I like him. Have you turned into a snob at last?”
“Sure. You can’t live in this country for a whole year without becoming class-conscious. It’s the great British pastime. That’s what they’re all fighting for: the freedom to sneer.”
She gave him a sideways glance and then looked away. “Everything you say to me is fake,” she said. “We’ve never had a simple, honest, natural conversation all the time I’ve known you. Why do you have to be such a phony with me? What are you afraid of?”
“Okay, what d’you want to talk about?”
She made rings on the table with her glass. In the next bar they were singing Roll Out the Barrel. Somebody dropped a drink, which smashed, and everyone cheered.
“I used to be in love with you,” she said. There was no nostalgic regret in the way she spoke: it was a straightforward statement. “That was in France. It didn’t last long: you saw to that. Now I’m definitely not in love with you, and I don’t think I ever shall be again. That’s a pity, because there’s not much love about so it’s a shame to waste it. And I certainly wasted mine on you.”
“I’m sorry. It’s an area of life I’m not very good at.”
“No, you’re not. As I found out the other night, when we went for that walk. I wish now I hadn’t phoned you up. Big mistake.”
“Come on, it wasn’t that bad. In fact I enjoyed it.”
“Yes. That was the mistake. I think you enjoyed it too much. Look, CH3: after what’s happened between us, or maybe what hasn’t happened between us, I don’t want you falling in love with me. And I only say that because of the way you behave when we’re together. It’s ominous.”
“Really? How do I behave?”
“Like a bad actor reading a bad script. I’ve met it before and I know what it means. It means trouble.”
The sergeant-pilot returned. “Must have been a mistake, sir,” he said. “The phone’s on the hook.”
“Someone’s hung it up. You’d better go and call back.” The man looked doubtful. “You are Sergeant White, aren’t you? Chalky White? It was the sergeants’ mess. Bit of a flap on. D’you need any change?”
They watched him squeeze through the crowd again.
“Suppose I stopped reading the bad script badly,” he said. “Would there be any hope?”
“No.”
He sat leaning forward, with his elbows on his knees and his fingers locked together, and watched her adding to the chain of rings. The singers had started on Tipperary.
“How is your wreck-hunting getting on?” he asked.
“I never give interviews. People like you always get it wrong anyway, and besides, what I do is nobody’s business but my own.”
“I see. I guess I asked for that. All the same, how is your wreck-hunting getting on?”
“I’m not going to tell you.”
“I don’t believe you’re doing it at all.”
“Oh, I’m doing it all right. What’s more I’m doing it in the comfort of an Air Ministry car. You see, I’m not the only skeptic in the press corps. These claims of yours have been getting some bad reviews abroad, so now Air Ministry has decided to double-check the figures, with me as an observer. Every day we drive around, me and the man from Air Ministry, with a long list of claims, when and where each plane was shot down. And we look, and we look, and then we look some more.” She smiled wryly. “Here comes Chalky.”
CH3 stood up. “You’d better hurry,” he said. “Hitler might get here first and spoil your story.”
She shook her head. “Hitler won’t invade.”
“You have inside information on that too?”
“In a way,” she said, “I guess I have.”
Baggy Bletchley stood in the middle of the ops room at Brambledown and looked at the fluffy clouds drifting overhead. A near-miss by a five-hundred-kilogram high-explosive bomb had folded two walls flat and the roof had collapsed. Mobile cranes had been brought in to lift the jagged slabs of concrete and men had worked through the night, shoveling rubble. The bodies of four Waafs and two airmen had been removed, the blood washed off the plotting table, most of the lines reconnected. Everything was makeshift but at least the ops room was working. “Bloody good show,” he said.
“Why they didn’t put these places underground beats me,” the sector controller grumbled.
“Presumably they thought they were safe enough above ground.”
“Then why put the Group ops room underground? And Command ops?”
“God knows.” Bletchley had been up all night, driving from one sector station to another: Biggin Hill, Kenley, Hornchurch, North Weald: checking the damage, counting the casualties, applying every pressure to get the stations fully operational again by daybreak. He had not always been welcome. Morale in some places was less than good. The strain of repeated bombings and strafings was beginning to tell. “There are lots of things they should have done. They should have trained another thousand fighter pilots immediately after Dunkirk, but they didn’t, and now we’re sending up spotty youths and lunatics left over from Bomber Command. But that’s the way it is, so …” He squinted at the blackboard leaning against the broken remains of the tote. “What does that say about Hornet squadron?”
“Airborne ten minutes ago. We’ve handed them over to Kenley Sector. They’ve got raid 430 if it doesn’t turn back.”
Bletchley found the plaque reading H430 on the table. Fifty plus at angels eighteen. The arrows below it drove deep into the heart of Kent. “Good luck,” he grunted.
The sector controller had just been handed a teleprinter message. “Charming,” he said. “Group have changed the angels code again. Evidently Luftwaffe intelligence has cottoned onto our little subterfuge, so from now on we understate height by four thousand, not two. Angels eight now means twelve thousand.”
“That should keep the Hun guessing for a while.”
“Yes.” He blew against the edge of the paper and made a soft whistle. “There’s only one problem. The land lines are still down at Bodkin Hazel. This signal won’t have got through.”
“Well …” Bletchley had been inventing stop-gap solutions all night. “Get on the R/T and tell Barton … No. Not a good idea. Sorry. The brain’s slowing down. Dispatch-rider?”
“He’d take an hour to get there. By that time they might have been scrambled again.” He re-read the signal. “Never mind, I can’t think of anything better so a dispatch-rider it’ll have to be.” He reached for the telephone.
“Wait a minute,” Bletchley said. “I’ll go. I can nip down there in ten minutes in the Tiger Moth. Leave it to me.”
Everything was quiet at Bodkin Hazel when he landed. GPO vans clustered around the control tower. A small steamroller chuntered up and down the middle of the field, flattening the refilled craters. Groundcrews sat or lay in the shade of the reserve Hurricanes and waited for the squadron to return. Away in the distance, beyond the perimeter wire, a small black car shimmered in the baking heat.
Baggy Bletchley strolled around the three plywood mock-ups, slightly pockmarked by rifle-fire, and wondered what they were for. He turned away and walked toward the tower. After a few yards his digestive system began demanding action. It was accustomed to a regular schedule of bowel movements. That schedule had been disrupted by the constant travel and activity of the past twenty-four hours but enough was enough. Nature called, insistently. He changed direction.
The portable lavatory had been cleaned out since Steele-Stebbing took Cattermole for a ride. It smelled powerfully of pine disinfectant and it was hot. There was no ventilation and the door refused to stay open. Baggy Bletchley was soon sweating and his buttocks stuck to the toilet seat.
His nickname was well-earned. When he was a young lieutenant, Bletchley’s testicles hung unusually low; now, with the weight of years, they had dropped even further.
He took a handful of toilet paper and gently raised himself. The seat—stuck to his buttocks—rose with him. Slightly disconcerted, he sat down; but as he did so his testicles swung forward and slipped between the inside of the seat and the outside of the bucket, and he sat on them, which was very painful. His natural reaction was to stand, but now the seat had come unstuck and his testicles were trapped in the gap between seat and bucket. This gap was too narrow to let them be pulled out, and so the more he stood the more they hurt. The pain of standing made him sit; the agony of sitting forced him to stand.
At first he laughed through his tears. What worried him most was the possible embarrassment of being found in this ludicrous situation, squatting, caught by the balls in a mobile bog. After a couple of minutes it wasn’t funny: His thighs ached. His stomach muscles were about to give way. He pounded on the wall and shouted. No
body came. In his sweating, suffering obsession with his dilemma he had failed to hear the air-raid warning.
The ack-ack opened up with a clamor like a hundred drunken blacksmiths. The racket made Bletchley all the more desperate to escape. He managed to get one hand onto the rim of the bucket and he transferred much of his weight to it. The raiders were Me-110’s, charging in from the sea at fifty feet, too low for most of the guns. They made one sweep, one raging, strafing, blinding, swamping attack, and then they were gone. Six 110’s totaled twelve machine-guns, firing armor-piercing and incendiary rounds, and twelve cannon, firing explosive shells. The reserve Hurricanes collapsed, ripped apart. Skull’s plywood mock-ups flew apart. The crew-room was wrecked, a petrol bowser exploded, and the portable lavatory was bowled over, rolling like a log as it got kicked by repeated bursts of fire.
The squadron landed twenty minutes later. The groundcrews were running alongside the planes as they taxied to a halt. Armorers scrambled onto the wings with belts of ammunition slung around their necks while fitters and riggers leaned into the cockpits to ask about damage. Fresh oxygen bottles were installed. The pilots stayed in their seats. Within fifteen minutes the petrol bowsers were backing away and a last polish was being given to the windscreens. The engines, still hot, fired at once. A white flare climbed from the tower. The squadron took off.
The controller was crisp and clear. “Hello, Popcorn Leader, this is Teacake. Vector one-zero-zero, make angels eight.”
Barton acknowledged. Eight and two was ten, which sounded a bit low, so he stuck on five hundred for luck. The raid came in at twelve thousand, a great mob of Heinkels with a swarm of 109’s all around. Hornet squadron was still clawing for height, which suited the escort perfectly. Half of them came down like the wrath of God.
Renouf lost his prop almost immediately and baled out, landing safely. Mother Cox took a burst in the right aileron and fluttered down like a broken butterfly before he too baled out. CH3 and Barton limped home and had to make belly-landings. Flash Gordon’s undercarriage collapsed on touchdown and the plane pirouetted on a wingtip. He whacked his head against the gunsight and was carried away with a mask of blood hiding his face.
Piece of Cake Page 71
