Ghosts of the Empire

by Justin Sheedy

  He saw crystal clear space all the way to the white cloud layer now a thousand feet below though above his head at the top of the loop, g-forces now greying his vision. Brozek was still there, and pulling them through the top of the loop and back, back down towards where they’d popped up through the cloud layer. Upside-down, still scanning, scanning in all directions – back and behind as far as physically possible, still Mick couldn’t see the German fighters behind him, the ones just about to kill him.

  The grey of his vision easing, what he saw was Brozek a short way ahead rolling upright. Rolling upright himself, Mick saw that by some freak they were still living, still flying, and picking up speed in a medium-steep dive towards the white cloud layer. Straight ahead through his windscreen, vision clear now, Mick saw specks against the white layer. They were much smaller than the ones he’d seen in his windscreen mirror. Yet very, very gradually getting larger. He checked the airspeed dial – 325, 350, the specks, two of them, becoming cross-shaped – 375, 400, 420 mph…

  Mick now understood what he saw and that Brozek had understood and reacted to it from the very first: When they’d surfaced from the cloud layer, the specks they’d seen in their rear-vision mirrors had been not fighters pursuing but fighters heading directly away – must have passed overhead above the cloud the instant before he and Brozek had surfaced: the purest good luck of which Brozek had taken immediate and utter advantage. Mick checked the dial: 440, 450 mph…

  The cross shapes dead ahead had become aircraft with white-outlined black crosses on each wing, their black and olive camouflage colours now vivid against the white cloud layer, from their rounded wingtips and the rectangular shape of their cockpits, a pair of Messerschmitt 109s – the first Mick had seen since his last flight with Jules. And they were coming down on them out of the sun: The German in the left-hand one, who Mick now lined up in his gun-sight, would have no idea he was about to be blown to pieces. Mick turned the ring on his joystick handle from SAFETY to FIRE – just as Brozek opened up on the right-hand 109, his twin cannon and four machine-guns blazing, tracer streams flying out towards the 109, hitting it sweetly, immediately, inducing a quick stream of white smoke before it wholly exploded, black smoke-trailing pieces tumbling down toward and into the cloud layer. Mick thumbed his own gun button hard, his tracers flying out at the second 109 already dropping fast into the cloud… BASTARD! When he saw tracers whipping past his own cockpit from behind.

  Mick jinked left in the dive, his Spit piercing the cloudbank. Through it almost instantly, he shallowed his dive, jinked back right, checked his mirror and craned hard behind in the gloom beneath the cloud. A few hundred yards back, two fighters dived across his wake. Back left, they kept on – Lost him. Forward left, the coast, and bright sunlight inland… No sign of his 109, but sun-glints ahead left: fighters oncoming! Spits scrambled from Hawkinge? Directly ahead an aircraft passed right to left, from its elliptical wing shape a Spit, Brozek, close behind him another craft, wings stumpier, geometrical, black crosses at their tips.

  It was after this craft that Mick now curved. If he didn’t kill it in a second it would kill Brozek. Mick was left-banking in toward it – gently, gently, letting his Spit have its way, keep its energy, keep its speed. His reflector gun-sight hovering quite high over the German in his windscreen, Mick thumbed the firing button, lines of tracers spitting out ahead in downward-curving streams. As they did, Mick relaxed his back-tension on the joystick to nothing, letting the tracer streams drift down onto, over and past the German, who rolled slowly – as if uncertainly – to the left, Mick rolling with the German into a dive toward a bank of low cumulus cloud, suddenly blind within it.

  Out into clear sky moments later, Mick’s whole body chilled with terror as the ocean rushed at his face.

  His hands edged back on the stick – pull the wings off or hit the ocean, one must surely happen. In the g-force dimming moments until either did, he was glad at what he saw: He saw his father – looking younger and much happier than last time he’d seen him; Mum was there – she looked so pretty, they were holding hands, under the Christmas lights in Martin Place. Yet the coloured lights dimmed, down to nothing, down to darkness. Mick never felt the impact. In fact, crashing felt like he was still flying: the sensation smooth and rather comfortable, he thought, the killer g-force gone, now only a pleasant downward press as if in a gentle climb. And once again he was glad: that Death could feel like this. Like flying.

  And things were again brightening now… Darkness lightening to grey. To light grey. To foggy vision. Vision sharpening. Green and white numbers and letters within black disks, white needles pointing. Brighter shapes above: fluffy white, a glint of sunlight on clear perspex. Forward right, clear blue. Hard right now, another aircraft settling from above. Olive and blue-grey. RAF roundels…

  ‘You bluddy crazyman, Oregan,’ crackled a voice in Mick’s ears. ‘You fight good. I would drink with you.’

  *

  From a not-quite ruined armchair in a corner of Brozek’s tiny lamp-lit quarters, Mick considered his host. Feliks Brozek was clearly a man of his word: Mick had heard of it; Mr Blinkhorn at the railyards was well-known as partial to it – just as he was well-known as secretary of the Redfern Communist Party and for his keenness for all things Russian… Mick had never seen anyone drink it, though… In any event, evidently Poles swore by it.

  ‘Wodka,’ Brozek pronounced it, deftly pouring Mick’s third – or was it his fourth? – into a very small glass he’d given Mick, and raising his own. ‘ Na zdrowie,’ he said.

  ‘Eh?’ put Mick, lifting his glass to Brozek, then draining it as one with him.

  ‘Is Polski for “your health”, my friend.’

  Mick had always enjoyed a beer at the end of the working day, but found the odd occasional one-too-many had him feeling a bit, well, sort of ragged and craving a meat pie. His first experience of drinking vodka was an altogether different sort of one-too-many feeling: Sort of like going up in a lift but the room staying where it was – more or less. ‘Nuzdr… Nuzdrow…’ he attempted.

  ‘Your health,’ smiled Brozek, pouring him yet another. ‘…You deserve, Mike. You got the bluddy bastard trying to get me. I saw it, was Focke-Wulf. You got him quick. Is good. Next time I think you get him quicker: without thinking at all. But is confirmed kill. You see now that sometimes is very good not to think, yes?’ He raised his tiny glass. ‘ This, too, is what for we have wodka.’

  Mick raised his glass a little carefully, though paused. ‘…What’s that thing you keep sayin’?’

  ‘What thing is this, my friend?’

  ‘That thing… Y’keep sayin’ it about people…’

  Brozek seemed to grow a squint on his squint. Yet it broke: ‘ Ah… I know this thing you ask: In my country, we do not say, “I trust this man; he is fine fellow.” In Polska we say, “I would drink with this man”.’

  August 1942

  Bournemnouth

  Squadron Leader Crispin Jessop selected the next item from his in-tray, centering the sheet of paper on the desktop before him.

  Another blasted transfer request – Jessop was sick of the sight of them.

  This one from Flying Officer O’Regan, M., 217831, Royal Australian Air Force, currently with 611 Squadron, RAF Redhill, 11 Group. Requesting transfer back to Pacific Theatre of Operations – All the Aussies were…

  Jessop picked up the carbon-copied sheet, and eased back with it in his chair.

  Ah yes. The stink-maker. And here he was, following through with his wildly ambitious notion from back in March. Jessop had been perfectly frank with him, and had, in fact, told him the truth: In essence, he first had to belong to something away from which to request transfer. Which he now did: 611 Squadron. May as well have told the chap not to bother but you couldn’t tell these Australians ‘no’… What was it about this particular word, mused Jessop, that they simply could not understand?

  Still, he had to concede, little wonder they so craved transfer back
homewards, what with New Guinea invaded by the Japs the week previous… Back in June, Jessop had assumed it a joke – as had a lot of people – when he’d heard about the Jap ‘midget submarines’ in Sydney Harbour. Alas it had proven no joke at all: According to reliable reports Jessop had subseqently been privy to, the Japanese ‘mother’ submarine had then surfaced close off Sydney’s eastern suburbs and opened fire with a deck-gun! On residential areas. So yes indeed: Eminently understandable that these chaps wanted to high-tail it home…

  However…

  Whether from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, even bally Jamaica, these volunteers for the Empire Air Training Scheme seemed to have most conspicuously overlooked one salient point.

  The point of just who the fuck it was that ran the Empire.

  The British Empire which, with Rommel hounding Alamein at this moment, was on the precipice of losing Cairo, with that the Suez Canal, and with that its entire oil supply from the Middle East. No, these boys from the Colonies would be staying well and truly put on this side of the planet, thank-you-very-much, where the Empire needed them.

  Besides, recent indications had been that, at some point in the imminent future, they’d be well and truly needed locally…

  As far as Jessop was concerned, the recent ‘loose-lips’ stuff about a major Fighter Command flap in the offing was utter tosh. It must be: If Jessop himself had caught the French Channel port of Dieppe as the target for a full-scale amphibious raid planned for a few weeks’ time it could hardly be true, could it; security could never be that bad… Bags of Canadians to be shipped across, RAF squadrons to provide air cover, a ‘maximum effort’ show, Jessop had caught the whole thing. And if he had then it could not be true as the Germans would now know too and would slaughter it. No, most likely a slap-up cover story for something else on the cards…

  Still, whatever the truth or untruth might be, Jessop’s duty was a simple one: to file the carbon copies of these transfer requests very firmly away. He leant forward to his desk once again, dipped his pen in the ink well, initialled the Request Denied stamp imprint already on the page, passed O’Regan, M. to the out-tray, and reached to the in-tray for the next.

  *

  With the two-stage, two-speed supercharger central to its Merlin V12 engine, the Spitfire IX could fly high. Very high. Up where Mick, if his oxygen supply failed, would be dead in moments. Though it felt he might just survive on pure adrenalin, it pumped that strongly…

  25 miles inland from the French coast, he and Brozek were 38-thousand feet above the Luftwaffe airfield of St-Omer, also five thousand feet above a squadron of Focke-Wulfs. These were poised as ‘top cover’ for two lower Focke-Wulf squadrons which were just about to engage a ‘wing’ of three Spitfire squadrons. The wing, which included 611 Squadron, was escorting a mere handful of Blenheim light bombers about to release their rather small bomb-loads on St-Omer. Called a ‘circus’, aptly, Mick thought, he gathered this type of op was an unpopular one amongst Spitfire pilots; designed by Fighter Command to draw up Luftwaffe fighters and hopefully knock some down, more often than not it only drew up German anti-aircraft fire, air-exploding ‘flak’ which knocked down Spitfires. However, on this day, Mick could see, the Luftwaffe were up. Very definitely up.

  The closest thing to ‘strategy’ that Mick had heard from Brozek’s lips to date, he and Brozek were this instant waiting for the lower fighters to join battle with each other – and all hell to break loose – at which cue he and Brozek would dive down on the rear-most fighters of the Focke-Wulf top cover in a ‘slashing’ attack: dive on the back-markers, kill them and keep the hell going. With luck the rest of this Focke-Wulf top cover squadron would be none the wiser until someone realised their back-markers were simply no longer there. With a clear mid-morning in all directions, no clouds to hide behind and vapour trails streaming out the back of Mick and Brozek at this height, the Germans might have already spotted them too except for one thing, something Brozek had made sure of: They were up-sun of the Germans and would be diving on them directly out of it.

  Hearing in his headphones the sound of battle just joined now way below, Brozek peeled off, Mick peeling closely with him into their dive, target down in front, the sun at their backs. On only half throttle, still their speed built in the dive – 400, 410, the Spit’s internal purr winding up. Long, long seconds compressed to moments – 430, 450, Mick lining up the left of the rearmost Focke-Wulfs in his gun-sight. Just a moment more – 200 yards’ range, Brozek had said – NOW Mick opened fire on his mark which exploded instantly, entirely. Out of the corner of his eye, though, he saw that Brozek’s hadn’t: It entered the uncertain-looking sort of roll which Mick could read by now: Brozek had killed the pilot.

  Whipping past and below the German formation whose tail they’d just cut off, they kept on diving. Still flying as one, Brozek slightly in the lead, Mick could see they were fast drawing down on a swirling melée of Spitfires and Focke-Wulfs, the Blenheims nowhere to be seen. Their speed teetering on the 500 miles per hour mark, their Spits buffeting from over-speed, Mick stayed with his leader, their dive shallowing, flattening, buffet decreasing, until levelling out at long last, his Spit’s airspeed needle dropping with its usual reluctance.

  Mick checked his rear mirror, then swiftly in all directions, the mirror again – all clear, then forward once more. Directly in front of them over the reddish-brown patchwork of the French countyside, he saw a speck, also that Brozek was dropping their height slightly. As the speck grew into an aircraft ahead, Mick saw they were coming up behind it from narrowly beneath, just as Brozek’s tracers flew out ahead and hit it. Closing rapidly now, and levelling behind it, Mick saw the black crosses on its wings, its cockpit canopy sliding back, a figure tumbling out, a blossom of white parachute silk which promptly whipped past.

  As Brozek peeled smoothly right into a wide banking curve, Mick followed suit, automatically easing back on his throttle to stay behind Brozek as the French countryside scrolled through his vision. He checked the altimeter – 4000 feet, fuel getting low but okay, still banking, still curving. And curving… He checked the compass: It just kept turning – much more of this and they’d have pulled through a full 360 degrees… Still curving, he checked it again, yes, almost a full circle now… Until finally Brozek flattened out. And straightened.

  About a thousand yards directly in front, Mick saw the small, white mushroom of the fully-opened parachute, the unmistakable shape of a human figure dangling beneath it. 500 yards. 300. Then Brozek’s tracers.

  For a moment Mick saw the figure flailing its arms and legs like a string puppet gone berserk. Then go limp. And flash past.

  *

  No word between them on the way back to Redhill, after landing Mick fairly marched up to Brozek’s Spit, pulled himself up on the wing-root, Brozek still seated in the cockpit. Mick fought hard, hard not to yell it – He fought hard not to smash Brozek in the teeth…

  ‘WHAT IN THE NAME OF FUCKEN HELL D’YA DO THAT FOR?!!’

  Brozek’s ground crew had surely heard it. Yet turned not a hair, merely continuing at their tasks around the Spitfire.

  Brozek shed his leather helmet, angled to Mick, though paused, his face only stern. When he spoke, it was with quiet certainty.

  ‘Mike, I do not believe it is my duty to explain to you. But I will. Because I believe you are a good man.’ He paused again briefly. ‘In ’39, when the Germans came to my village, my mother, my father, my brothers and my sister they were killed. After I learned of this I escaped from my country with some other members of my air force. We came to England so is possible to go on flying against the Germans. The RAF they put us in their Polish squadron, Number 303. There I meet Kaminsky. Kaminsky he knows of my village. And, though he does not want to tell, I make him… in the end. And he tells me that the Germans have killed everyone in my village. Everyone… Then they burn it.’

  Brozek looked away from Mick for a moment, unplugging his oxygen and radio cords from their
sockets within the Spitfire’s cockpit, then peered back to Mick.

  ‘I am at war, Mike. And even if we win the bluddy thing, still I cannot go home to my family… I cannot even go home.’ His voice had softened slightly. ‘Not even go home…’

  Brozek scraped his hand across his forehead, and came back stronger. ‘Today over France, yes? If that German I had not shot today he would have landed in his parachute and gone direct back into combat against you, against me, tomorrow. Direct. But I will not lie to you, Mike: I tell you that so that you may sleep better tonight, not for me, my friend. For if over England we had been flying today, still would I have shot this man.’

  He began to unclip his cockpit and parachute straps, continuing as he did, ‘I do not believe you are at war like me, my friend. …Not yet.’ He cast off the straps, shifting up slightly in the cockpit.

  ‘However, my friend, I am at war. A war which I did not start… But a war I intend to win.’

  He drew himself fully up in the cockpit now, Mick stepping back off the wing-root onto the grass. Hefting out of the cockpit, Brozek reached back into it from the wing-root. ‘And you do not win a war playing by the rules.’ He pulled out his parachute pack, slung it over his shoulder and stepped off the aircraft.

  They faced each other in silence.

  Until Brozek broke it.

  ‘You win a war, my friend, by smashing your enemy to bluddy hell.’

  His eyes still fixed on the Pole’s, when Mick finally spoke his voice was low, and sincere.

  ‘Mate, I’m sorry.’

  Brozek raised a gloved hand beside the forearm of Mick’s flying jacket. Gave its leather a single, solid pat. And they trudged away from the Spitfire together.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Crispin Jessop felt at the end of his tether. Nothing could lift his spirits. Not the fineness of the morning, not the rare blue it lent the Channel out on which he now stared. On his tea break – his usual tea rooms just a bit along from the Bournemouth Pier – his morning so far had seemed a week.