Squadron Scramble (1978)
Page 14
The buoyancy of his lifejacket brought him some relief and he rested for a moment, coughing up salt water. Then, his teeth chattering with the cold, he pulled the handle of his dinghy’s CO2 bottle, relief coursing through him as the gas hissed into the yellow liferaft.
The dinghy was upside down and it took him a couple of minutes of exhausting effort before he succeeded in righting it. By the time he dragged himself into it he was utterly worn out and frozen to the marrow in his sodden clothing.
After a while he roused himself sufficiently to take stock of his surroundings, beating himself with his arms in a vain attempt to keep warm. Nausea rose in him as the dinghy was lifted on the crests of waves and then plunged sickeningly into the troughs between them, soaking him each time with a torrent of freezing water. It was broad daylight now, although the overcast had grown thicker and hid the rising sun. A sudden flurry of sleet struck his face. He had never felt so miserable and alone.
He began to lose all sense of time. A numbness crept through his body, accompanied by a leaden tiredness. After a while, he no longer felt cold. He knew that he was dying from exposure, but strangely he didn’t care.
The throb of engines jerked him back to consciousness. He blinked, clearing reddened, salt-caked eyes, and tried to locate the source of the sound.
A grey-painted craft, long and rakish, was churning slowly through the waves towards him. It was a German E-boat. Yeoman could see men moving about on deck. The craft hove to fifty yards away. This is it, he thought; this is where it all ends. All the hopes, all the aspirations. And I don’t give a damn.
The E-boat’s quick-firing cannon opened up with a staccato bark and Yeoman cried out involuntarily, throwing an arm across his face. A stream of glowing coals crackled above his head.
After that, it all happened very quickly. A great noise battered at him, a deafening snarl of engines. A geyser of water erupted close by the E-boat, and a split second later a huge flower of smoke and flame burst into the air. Flaming pieces of wreckage hissed into the sea. The shockwave of the blast tore at the man in the dinghy.
The twin-engined Hudson patrol bomber turned steeply overhead, arcing through the steadily growing pall of smoke. Yeoman looked up. Two Spitfires were circling; he could just make out their code-letters. They were 505 Squadron aircraft.
‘You bastards,’ he whispered. ‘You beautiful bastards.’
A sea of burning fuel from the shattered E-boat spread out over the water, pushing its tentacles towards the drifting dinghy; but the air-sea rescue launch that came nosing out of the mist to the north was the first to reach it.
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