The Eagle's Cry

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  A lump in Denton’s throat made it difficult for him to speak. “I never suspected ...”

  “All the clues were there, but of course they were all so plausibly explained ... how could you possibly have been suspicious?”

  Critchley said, his voice as strained and melancholy as Denton’s, “The escapes from the hospital ... never once being stopped and questioned when we made those journeys in Athens and Piraeus ...” He shook his head with a gesture of incredulity.

  “Exactly,” Creon continued. “And the hasty departure in the small hours of the morning, on the spur of the moment ... apparently. The lucky circumstance that there was a separate place for Kathia to sleep on board the caique... the luck that it was a moonless night ... and the tide was on the turn at the right time. Everything was carefully calculated so that Kathia would arrive here with the best possible credentials and be able to insinuate herself into a job where she could be of immense help to the enemy.”

  Butler gave Denton a derisive look. “I suppose the Pefkoses took it for granted the Nazis and Fascists are going to win this war and run Greece when we’ve been beaten?”

  “Yes,” said Creon. “I hate them for being traitors, but I can understand their fears. And their putting their hopes in the Nazis. After all, Franco won in Spain. And Salazar has got Portugal completely under control. They’re both poor countries, like Greece. They could have gone communist. The same danger exists in my country.”

  “How terrible!” All three of them gave Butler sharp looks but his face did not reflect the sarcasm in his voice.

  “You had your eye on her from the moment she arrived, I suppose.” Denton’s voice sounded dull and hopeless.

  “Knowing her background, yes.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, then Denton asked “Has she been arrested?”

  “I don’t know. There’s no concrete evidence: no secret wireless transmitter and receiver in her flat, no witnesses to secret communications or meetings with enemy agents. She’s too clever and too efficient.”

  “How was it discovered that we were flying into a trap?”

  “A stroke of luck really,” Creon said with modesty. “I left two of my vehicles in position last night and went off on my own with one of my chaps. I knew where to find a bedawi tribe whose sheik is an old friend of mine. He told me there was a place where the Germans and Italians had put a huge collection of dummy guns and tanks. It sounded as though it must be on the site of your target, so I went to take a look; and it was. He also gave me some vague directions about hidden real gun sites. Those took longer to find and I was getting worried. When I did locate them, you’d already taken off. I managed to get a message back to G.H.Q., who passed it to Desert Air Force, who recalled you at almost the last minute. I’m afraid I had no warning about the fighters going to intercept you, however.”

  “What will happen to Kathia?”

  Creon shrugged. He tried to make a joke of it, to allay Denton’s worry. “She’ll lose her job, I’m afraid! And so. thank God, will bloody Smith-Jones. I should think he’ll be on the first available boat home; and next seen as a lieutenant colonel if not a major.”

  “Damn him, what about Kathia?”

  “Internment?” Creon sounded as though he, as uncertain as Denton, were merely making a reasonable supposition. “Imprisonment” was too harsh a word to inflict on his friend in his present sorrow.

  Afterwards Denton strolled with Creon to where the two jeeps and the captured scout car stood surrounded by the patrol’s small bivouac tents.

  “I’m sorry, Geoffrey.” Creon gripped Denton’s arm.

  “You had to do it. Don’t let it worry you. I don’t have much luck with my women, do I?”

  “You won’t be lonely for ever, Geoffrey.”

  “I still love her. I thought she genuinely loved me.”

  “She did. I’m sure of that. I’m sure she still does.”

  “But how could she make such a fool of me? And if she really cared, she wouldn’t have contrived that booby trap ... Christ! Creon, I came back with one engine shot to bits, half the tail shot off and the undercarriage jammed. I had to make a belly landing and the aircraft caught fire while we were still untangling ourselves from it. We were damn nearly roasted or blown up.” He paused and then added bitterly: “I suppose she’d have had a bloody good laugh.”

  “No, she wouldn’t. She’d have been grief-stricken. She loves you, Geoffrey, I can assure you of that. But what she did she did in complete detachment. Politics, for her, are entirely separate from her private emotions. She loves you, all right. I can tell you what must have been in her mind: that the Nazis would win the war, Britain would be occupied by Germany and she’d take you back with her to Greece: to become reconciled to a Nazi regime and live happily ever afterwards.” Creon smiled at him with affection and encouragement.

  They walked in silence for a few paces.

  “I loved her so much, Creon. And now I’m lonely again.”

  “She loved you and she still loves you.”

  “Perhaps. I thought so; but I never really had a chance to find out, it seems.”

  He knew that he never would, now, have the chance to find out.

  If you enjoyed reading The Eagle’s Cry, you might be interested in Fighters Up, also by Richard Townsend Bickers and published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from Fighters Up by Richard Townsend Bickers

  One

  Images and sensations; and the cold.

  The pictures forming in his mind of violent death and flaming destruction, the icy tremors of his body, the voices - sometimes the screams - in his ears: all formed a pattern, and, he supposed, a kind of crazy rhythm. Every experience, every event and situation, had its own rhythm, and this one was the rhythm of aerial combat.

  The memories came whether he was sleeping or awake. If asleep, they roused him with a start and sweating: in bed, or a deep doze in a canvas chair in the pilots’ but out at dispersals, where the Hurricanes and Spitfires stood ranged in their blast pens. They came when he was wide awake: ostensibly reading Flight or The Aeroplane in the dispersal hut, or the Daily Telegraph in the mess ante-room. They recurred even when he was in conversation, or among a group with a pint tankard in his hand in mess or a pub. All it needed to set the images and the sensations going was the glimpse of a face that had shared them, the mention of a name, or some allusion.

  “Break! Blue Two, break!”

  “Behind you, Simon!”

  And his own voice: “Break right, Tug!” “Bandits, two-o’clock, above, coming in.” “Blast you, Robbie, you nearly took my tail off.”

  But Robbie had not heard him. When the Hurricane flashed past, Howard saw that it was burning and its pilot was limp, head lolling.

  The rhythm of air fighting: attack and defence, thrust and parry in a three-dimensional brawl at over three hundred miles an hour, closing speeds of twice that much.

  The rhythm of gunfire from an adversary, coming at him in short bursts: of multi-coloured tracer drawing curved lines across the sky, the bark of cannon and the rattle of machineguns; the cadence of his own shooting and the joyful shock of the bright splashes his incendiaries made when they hit their target; the dazzle from his .303 Brownings and 20 millimetre Hispanos, at first light and dusk, from muzzle flashes and tracer; the wing-overs, half-rolls off the top of a loop, sideslips and stall turns that were the aerobatics of battle; the shrieking of the wind in his gun muzzles when he had blasted their canvas covers off, the howling it made as it tore through the holes that enemy fighters or flak had punched in his Hurricane or Spitfire: these were the kaleidoscopic fragments of sight and sound that composed the pictures and noises which tormented him.

  The war would enter its third year in four months’ time. In 1939 - away back in 1939 - four months had been a short period which brought no change to his life; except the addition of several hours’ flying time in his logbook. Now, in the early summer of 1942, four months seemed as long as a peaceti
me year used to. No operational fighter pilot could delude himself with the certainty that he would live so long.

  The mental pictures, lively with their accompanying noises, were sharper now than they had been for six months. R.A.F. Monkston lay only another twenty miles ahead; and it was at Monkston that he was stationed when war broke out.

  With his recollections came the physical response that made him shiver as though he were in an unheated cockpit at 30,000 feet, or crouching in a slit trench in Norway while the Germans bombed the airfield. He had always loathed the cold, but those few weeks of the farcical, abortive Norwegian campaign had made his hatred personal, it was so deep; as though Cold were an entity, anthropomorphic, tangible.

  The Medical officers had said he would get over his nightmares and the horrors that could descend on him at any time in broad daylight. The bad memories and physical reactions never assailed him in the air; which, it seemed, was all that mattered. The doctors’ bland earnest reassurances were sometimes, however, accompanied by a look of such intensity that it made him wonder what was really in their thoughts.

  Two years later, driving his six-year-old Morris Oxford two-seater along a country road in Sussex on a summer’s day, he still felt the cold biting into his flesh when he remembered the snow and strong winds, the frozen lakes; and the North Sea, where the ship that was taking him home was torpedoed.

  The doctors had been kind, patient and emphatic. He would find out soon enough about himself and the truth of what they had said. His six-month “rest”, instructing at an operational training unit, was over. Now another - yet another - tour of ops confronted him. Not that instructing had been much of a respite from the danger of calamity. Flying in close formation with inexperienced pilots was often lethal: especially at low level - down to less than twenty feet, on some exercises - or in cloud; and in mock fights, when pupils also had a tendency to collide with their instructors. He had had to bail out only three weeks ago, his Spitfire’s tail fin and half a tail plane ripped off by an over-enthusiastic nineteen-year-old Canadian who had pressed a dummy attack as though he were a Japanese bent on suicide.

  That brolly-hop was his fourth; so far. Thinking about it brought no sweat or chilly shudders, which was encouraging.

  Intrepid, he told himself wryly. That’s what I am, downright intrepid. Come to think of it, I didn’t exactly funk a fight in Norway... or the B of B - the Battle of Britain - or on the sweeps and Circuses and Rhubarbs that followed it. But I still get the fantods and flaming abdabs from those days.

  He could see Spits taking off and coming in to land, although the airfield was still hidden by a slight rise in the ground, by trees and by Monkston village. High above he saw condensation trails made by others which he could not discern except as small shapeless glints of silver, their green and brown camouflage reflecting the sun like mirrors. At 5000 feet a Halifax lumbered past, presumably on a navigation exercise. In another direction a bright yellow Oxford trainer was cruising. Elsewhere in the sky he made out a Tiger Moth, circling an anti-aircraft site so that the gunners could practise aiming; a black Beaufighter night fighter; a pair of Blenheims. Everybody’s doing it now, he reflected. Three years ago, being able to fly an aircraft was a rare accomplishment. Now, insurance clerks and stock-brokers, undergraduates, grocers’ assistants and vacuum-cleaner salesmen, carpenters and lawyers are all getting in on the act.

  A world gone mad with war! He smiled as he recalled the parodic recitation, popular in R.A.F. messes when drink was flowing, in which the sententious phrase recurred.

  A world gone mad on defying the law of gravity, it seemed to him: it must be the pay that attracted them in preference to the Navy and Army. Or maybe it was the special appeal they thought a pilot’s wings held for the girls. It was all right with him: he didn’t care what the motive was, as long as they watched where they were going and didn’t fly into him or any of his friends. He didn’t resent the wartime intake. They were amateurs, but they were needed, they had their uses. Some of them, particularly those who joined at eighteen, would be good enough to be kept on after the war. Anything that was good for the Service had his approval. But it had taken a lot of getting used to: to fly with, to put his life to a great extent in the hands of, men whom he scarcely knew and whose ability he doubted. After two years of peacetime flying with the same squadron, that had come very hard.

  There had been few changes among his comrades in those two years. A couple had been posted overseas, another two had died in accidents; his first Commanding Officer had been sent to Staff College, but his successor had taken over more than a year before war was declared. All the other pilots, both officers and sergeants, were his friends as well as his brothers-in-arms. He trusted their judgment and skill in the air, whether in formation drill, aerobatics or battle; as he knew they trusted his.

  The first time he was shot down it had been because a Volunteer Reservist who had been only ten days on the squadron lost him while supposed to be keeping watch for an attack from astern. This had made him suspect all non-regulars; which in turn had made him the most demanding, and often intolerant, instructor at the O.T.U. he had just left. An Irish pupil had called him Hard Man Howard and the name had been taken up by all the others. It amused, and rather pleased, him. The R.A.F. was prolific with nicknames and he had been known, on his old squadron, as Boost: because he was a scorching sprinter on the track and rugger field. He played right wing three-quarter for the station or Fighter Command on Wednesdays and for a leading Sussex club on Saturdays. He won the 100 and 220 yards at Service and civilian athletics meetings consistently in the summer. Part of the pleasure of returning to squadron life was that he had left Hard Man behind and would be Boost again.

  There was comfort in any link with the old days, the pre-war years and the first few months of the war; and he had two: returning to a long familiar station and, he knew, the use of his friendly and flattering nickname.

  The Pig and Whistle was on the left as he drove through the centre of the village and he looked on it with some of the affection with which he regarded his family home in Wiltshire. But at The Manor he could still count on seeing his parents, his brother and sister, while too many faces he remembered with affection would never be seen again in the snug old inn.

  The thought brought back the devil who sat so persistently on his shoulder. His hands felt cold and pins and needles prickled his feet, his pulse quickened. Then the main gate appeared around a curve in the road and all emotion had gone except the excitement of being back on a squadron.

  The young conscript Service policeman (corporal, acting and unpaid; and automatically unpopular with the troops) checked his identity card, gave him a sycophantic salute.

  It would be a happy station under Group Captain Jones’s firm but genial command, Howard reflected. He had known Jones when they were respectively pilot officer and wing commander.

  He drove slowly towards Station Headquarters, taking in the changes since his first squadron had left here, eighteen months ago, for a quieter sector in Lincolnshire. There were Nissen and wooden huts in unfamiliar places, and a third huge hangar loomed beside the others. More airmen and W.A.A.F. moved about from building to building or along the camp roads. With three squadrons based here instead of two, the population had noticeably grown. But it was still Monkston, where he had been happy.

  He would feel better now if he were not coming to fill a dead man’s shoes. It was never easy to replace a good flight commander; all the more difficult when he had been as well liked as this predecessor. Being posted in to take over after a man who had been killed in action a week ago brought a heightened reminder of the special dangers of leadership. The posting was a compliment. The squadron had asked for an immediate replacement, but Fighter Command kept the vacancy open until he could reasonably be released by Flying Training Command. The augury was excellent: command of a squadron before long.

  He parked outside No 2 hangar and paused for a moment to watch two Spitfires take off
together, then entered the echoing steel vastness and went upstairs to the squadron Adjutant’s office. In the old days, the job had been done as an ancillary duty by one of the pilots. Now, it was a full-time one. The flying officer seated behind the desk was thirtyish and bespectacled, wingless, with the air of a conscientious prefect in a shoddy public school. He did not stand up. “Ah! Howard?”

  “Flight Lieutenant Howard.” Regulars’ etiquette demanded formality on a first official meeting.

  Fishy eyes took in the two faded rings of braid and the D.F.C. ribbon. The Adjutant rose and leaned over his desk to shake hands; his was as cold as a fish, too. “We’ve been looking forward to... welcome to the squadron...”

  “Is the C.O. in or flying?”

  “He’s in. If you’d just sign the... er...” The Arrivals book lay open. The formalities of booking in were brief. The Adjutant opened the door to the adjoining room, mumbled and stood aside to motion the new flight commander into his squadron commander’s office.

  The squadron leader’s battle dress blouse bore a D.S.O. and D.F.C. He had straw coloured hair and a livid burn scar disfigured his right cheek. The glazed and shrunken flesh tugged the corner of his mouth up in what looked misleadingly like an incipient smile. He walked round the desk with his hand outstretched. “Glad to have you on the squadron, Boost old boy.”

  “Thank you, sir. I’m lucky to get the posting.” It was his way of acknowledging that Squadron Leader Kennard had maintained the squadron’s high reputation, which dated back to the Great War.

  Kennard pushed a chair forward with his foot and perched on the edge of his desk while Howard removed his Service Dress cap. “Have a pew.” He regarded Howard with attention. “How long did they keep you at O.T.U.?”

  “Six months almost to the day.”