Mick looked up from the newspaper. ‘Yes.’
‘And there’s one other thing in our favour, sir,’ said Fraser.
‘Glad to hear it,’ released Bedfords.
‘Yes, sir. It’s also just my own personal theory at the moment but the wood of the Mosquito should, if my calculations are correct, produce lower radar “returns” than from metal aircraft.’
Bedfords’ eyes narrowed. ‘Affording you a sort of… “stealth”… in the air.’
‘Yes, sir,’ nodded Fraser, visibly impressed with the Wingco’s summation. ‘In fact I’d say that’s a very good word for it.’
‘Thank you.’ Bedfords sat back. Took a moment. Then settled his famously heavy gaze upon the pair. ‘O-K then… It begins.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sunday, December 6, 1942
Piet Vanderheyden hadn’t sold a painting in months. As if in solidarity with his resultant near-starvation, something caused a shaking of the framed canvases round the walls of his sixth floor garret – some idiot’s gas water heater blown up, most likely – someone who could still afford gas… Yet now Piet sat up; the room’s closed window rattling fit to shatter – Who had ever heard of an earthquake in Holland? – though as far as Piet Vanderheyden was concerned it could use one… He sprang to the window, pulled it up and open – a blast of cold air, but thunder on a day so clear?! He peered down the Eindhoven main street, then back up it…
The great Philips factory, its rectangular shapes iconic from any point in the city, was shooting white fireworks and pouring smoke! They made radio valves in there, for the Germans, bitched one and all…
But something was coming! Up the street between the buildings – an aircraft!! Now passing like a comet about three floors below and whipping on, on down the street and now another! – just like the first a good three floors down, twin-engined, red-on-blue roundels atop camouflage-painted wings. As these swept past, between Piet saw in the glass-house of the cockpit a goggle-faced helmet looking forward, one looking back, and gone…
Since his home had been invaded and occupied by the Germans two years previous, Piet and his friends from the art college, yes, they still shared a laugh. Now and then. But not in the way they always used to; since the Occupation, to Piet, their laughter had felt a mask. A mask for their truthful gloom. But now, as still another of these magnificent Royal Air Force things roared up the street, yet another fiery blast pouring from the giant building in its wake, something emerged from Piet that had not in two solid years…
The old laughter.
Laughter so full and rich it echoed back at him from the other side of the street, out of whose windows people were now leaning, awed and smiling, waving handkerchiefs and tea-towels, one whistling, one making the Sign: the one with two fingers held up, the one Mr Churchill had bestowed on the people of Holland two years ago. ‘V for Victory’. Piet made it now. And held it out at full arm’s length towards the windscreen of the oncoming airplane.
Piet’s English was good – fluent – he’d studied it at the university. His ‘V’ sign outstretched towards the airplane as it passed, Piet knew the young men within it would not hear but hoped they did anyway and he shouted anyway in the very best and most fluent English he knew…
‘YOU - FUCKING - BEE - EAUTIES!’
Mick fumed…
Yes, they’d all gone in at zero feet, the whole way in. That the ‘way in’ routed them almost directly over the Luftwaffe fighter aerodrome of Woensdrecht Mick had at first assumed some dreadful mistake. It wasn’t. On their way out of the briefing hall Bedfords had shrugged his shoulders sombrely and let go a single word. ‘Command.’
Skimming along at full throttle, Eindhoven behind them now, they’d bombed dead-on target alright – incendiaries – Fraser had been sure of it out the back. ‘ Operation Oyster’: Hit the Philips factory; churning out valves for German radar, 93 aircraft in all, eight squadrons led by Bedfords personally. 105 Squadron plus another flying Mosquitos, that was well and good. But the six other squadrons of 2 Group were flying pre-war bombers in daylight! Twin-engined Bostons and Venturas. The Boston against unavoidable enemy fighters, that was bad enough, but they called the Ventura ‘the Flying Pig’! As flown this very moment by the poor sods of 21 Squadron, RAF, 464, Royal Australian Air Force and 487, Royal New Zealand.
‘Look ahead,’ urged Fraser. ’12 o’clock level!’
Over open Dutch countryside, the North Sea coast now in sight, directly in front Mick saw a twin-engined bomber at about half a mile, a single-engined fighter lowering onto its tail. Mick flicked the boost switch, bearing in on the two craft rapidly, in moments close enough to make out a Focke-Wulf lining up on the tail of a Ventura. Some Mosquito versions had guns. Mick’s bomber version did not. He would do all he could…
‘Hang on t’your seat, Jack.’
At just a few hundred yards behind them, Mick saw the tracers from the Ventura’s twin machine-gun turret flying back past the Focke-Wulf, also so close past his own cockpit he flinch-ducked. He mainly felt the bullet impacts in the Mosquito’s starboard wing yet already was the Focke-Wulf looming large in his windscreen. He touched back on his control column, the Mossie lifting slightly, passing directly over the Focke-Wulf from behind.
Through their perspex nose cone Jack Fraser glimpsed the German pilot’s goggled face as it peered up in horror mere feet beneath – their eyes met before the German face dropped away, the Focke-Wulf quick-rolling out to the right, Jack now saw, and peeling off.
Sailing past the twin-tailed Ventura, which was all Mick could do now, he saw within its upper turret dome the gunner looking only back towards the broken-off German fighter, his machine-guns still trained on it and tracking. Then, passing by and beyond the Ventura’s cockpit, Mick saw the side-by-side faces of its pilot and navigator only staring ahead with terrified concentration.
Leaving them further and further behind, crossing a beach and now open water, Jack Fraser, glued aft, saw the Focke-Wulf angling expertly back in, tracers flying, the Ventura’s port engine flaming, leading a long trail of black smoke as the aircraft sank into a shallow dive, sinking, sinking, smashing almost flat onto the beach, countless pieces of all sizes scattering out over the water in a morass of white spray and foam.
*
Jacqueline Orval sat close by the farmhouse fireplace, by her fire, which, nightly, she kept low; the Boches could come at any time, she knew it…
Back on her first morning alone, her first thought had been to leave, leave forever. Perhaps for Paris now that she could, now that, finally, nothing was keeping her here. But then it occurred to her that her identity papers – integral to finding shelter, work, food, to simple survival in a big city – would lead the authorities to her as sure as breathing. Daughter of a suspected Traitor. And so she had remained. Here in this place that kept her out of the snow and from starvation. Alive. Simply that. Alive to stay afraid.
Perhaps the Boches did not realise she remained: A mile from the main road, the hedgerowed approaches to the orchard becoming overgrown – this she had very carefully checked to see just days previous – a passer-by might think the orchard now deserted. Just as well; informers, it had long been said, were everywhere. For the smoke it would give off, Jacqueline burnt no fire by day, only by night to keep from freezing. Now a prisoner in her own home, she realised she had long been. A prisoner of the war.
Since the night in the landing field and her farewell to Mick, she had seen not a living soul except the Résistance man, who left things for her from time to time though barely spoke – She still did not know his name. ‘ Un bon Communiste,’ he had gruffed early on. She could assist them later, when the time came, he had said one time soon after, but scarcely a thing ever since.
Jacqueline had picked what she could of the apple harvest for herself, and assumed the Résistance man had too. The rest had rotted. On the trees and on the ground. A first in her entire life, the sight of it had so gripped her with sadness she th
rew up.
As the days passed, with no option but to prepare for the winter, she got the firewood chopped, something she had never done before, not such a great deal of it; a winter’s worth. But she did it, she got strong doing it, good at it too; she had to. Also at the sharpening of the axe blade on a fine turning stone of Papa’s.
One day nearing completion of the woodpiles, she remembered the dagger Mick had left with her, and thought to sharpen that too. This, however, she knew would need one of Papa’s finer stones, a small, flat one, and the use of seed-oil – She remembered Papa doing it. Finding this special stone, and the oil, she tried it herself, a smooth, circular motion of the dagger’s metal over the surface of the stone tablet, at length the slender blade becoming sharp indeed. She remembered the type of knife Mick had said it was, a ‘throwing’ knife. With little to do now but settle in for the winter, she thought to try it.
Only to find it hopeless: At the end of every day for the past week she had attempted to throw it at the old stump in the yard. Which the dagger had hit flat, hit with the handle, missed completely as well as on occasion with its actual point before falling straight back out. Nothing worked. No matter the care she took to calculate the number of times it might spin in the air before hitting, altering her distance from the stump, changing the strength with which she threw it, nothing. All she got was a sad sort of music: Blings and clungs and doomps and a host of dispiriting others. This very day, with the dusk on the snow of the yard, she had cursed the damn thing, picked it up a final time – it still had to be hidden – and swore she would never take it from its hiding place again.
Now as with every night since the winter began she settled in to her keep-warm routine: She ate – from the well-stocked but emptying larder – and sat by the fire with a glass of the powerful apple brandy Papa had made, of which at least there seemed an infinite supply of barrels down in the cellar, and stared into the fire.
Looking into the glowing coals, for the moment soothed by the brandy, her imagination began to wander, as every night. It would be her first Christmas without Papa… Her second without Jean-Noël… She saw her brother’s face. His dark good looks. Remembered his hilarious cruelty. She thought of Papa. Of his kind and determined smile. Swallowed a mouthful of the brandy.
And cried.
*
Dear Michael
Next month it will be Christmas Gezza says the mail takes ages to get to you so I am sending you this nice and early. We will be having chicken! Gezza says chicken is what rich people have arent we lucky! But the best part is you get a wish bone Gezza says even if she gets it I can have her wish youll never guess what Im going to wish for but I cant tell cause then the wish goes.
I got my map! It is marvlus all big and no rips! Dad got it special for me from a man. It shows England then the ocean which is much bigger and then where the Germans are. Dad says they are in the ocean too so its lucky you are in the air force not the navy.
Mike we have not received a letter from you in a while but we know you must be alright if you werent Dad says we would of got a telegram. And we havnt. Big boys riding bicycles bring them to peoples houses they are dressed in black. When they come riding up anyones street all the people living anywhere just want them to keep riding past to another street I heard Mrs Plunket from next door talking to Dad. Nobody likes them she said nobody wants to hear a knock on their front door like they always used to.
The man of the British Merchant Marine could read no more. Nor, any longer, did he know his own name. Just the faintest memory of dear friends. The last one breathing in the lifeboat, as far as he could tell, he had heard the thing was to keep thinking. And so some time back had picked up some of the letters he saw floating on the surface of the water. Of those he had been able to open, most had been just run ink. But the last one had been in pencil; written by a child. Yet now he could but close his eyes.
And died.
January 1943
Werner Gruber stared out the carriage window of the north-bound train. The words with which his superior officer had dismissed him addled his aching head.
‘Your rage, Gruber, will be your undoing. Take that Frog farmer… What use is he to us shot in the head?! And here you are barking we should kill 20, 40, 50 for every German who comes to grief. We’re going to rule here, Gruber, masters of France and of Europe: We cannot go killing them all; we, as masters, will need a few subjects left to rule or hasn’t that occurred to you? And besides, we want them alive…
‘Dieppe was an exercise – We know it, the Allies know it. An exercise for the real thing, a proper invasion, Gruber, not this year, maybe not even next but it will come. And that’s when the Allies will use their prized Résistance, monsieur: to insure their invasion in front of us with Frog chaos behind us. So for now we watch them. Let them blow a few things up. Land a few Tommy aircraft with lamps in the middle of the night. In short, we let these amateur theatre enthusiasts feel good about themselves. On the eve of the invasion, when it comes, that is when we annihilate them, not before. Because on its eve the Résistance will know when and where the invasion is coming and by that time we will have them so infiltrated they will tell us.
‘We are Germans, Gruber. We are disciplined. We have control of ourselves and so of everybody else. You do not. I can only hope that your next failure does not send you berserk. Yes, as you so robotically insist, our beloved Gestapo’s official function is “Suppression of Opposition”. Yet it is a game of chess which you, Gruber, clearly have not the subtlety to play. You have given us a dead Frog farmer. …At least we have an agent now watching the daughter – That is something. And yes, things might be radically different for you this very moment if you had nabbed an English Spitfire pilot but you did not. This is why, Gruber, you are off to Holland.’
Saturday, January 30, 1943
Jack Fraser was in awe. True and actual awe…
Mick made holding 20 feet at 300 mph over the North Sea look easy. Indeed, he made doing it in close formation with two other fully bomb-loaded Mosquitos look something almost other than certifiably insane. Or, at the very least, as if insanity was, for blokes like them, something perfectly normal, solid and smooth.
The morning was clear, the ocean calm for the depths of winter, no wind so hardly a white-cap in sight, just endless ridges of blue ocean swell planing so close beneath they were glassy ripples to the eye, above, the sky a lighter blue and ghostly white with ultra-high cirrus clouds.
Fraser looked down to his navigational map, upon it an evenly zig-zagging line of red crayon. He checked his watch, flicked his intercom switch: ‘Alright, Mick. Enemy coast ahead.’
There was a click in his headphones.
‘Roger,’ came the reply.
The sand-spits of Holland swept beneath, a flurry of white ahead and something hit the starboard windscreen like a brick. After his own near heart-failure, Fraser saw Mick only check an instrument and tweak a dial as white feathers, blood and entrails were scraped back off bullet-proof glass by the force of the slipstream.
But now swept Holland proper: Houses, villages, a steeple, a chimney stack, out to starboard everything passing faster than Jack Fraser had ever imagined anything could pass – as if too quickly for the senses to latch on to any one thing; seen, it was already gone.
Fraser looked back down at his navigational map. And at the point upon it to which the line of red crayon led. Their target.
Berlin.
*
Unterfeldwebel Klaus Steinhoff strolled along the sidewalk of the Kurfürstendamm – most exciting street of the most exciting city in the world.
Leave!
48 hours of the heavenly stuff!
And here, in this so wonderful place. Yes, it had been bombed, but still: Its fabulous bars, its cafés and theatres, the wicked cabarets, not to mention all the galleries and museums, but most of all the palpable way this city made its people seem so ALIVE. And, anyway, there were several hours of daylight to go yet, so ages bef
ore the nightly bombing danger began. A good time right now to pop in on one of the city’s nightclubs running so vibrantly by day! Perhaps the legendary Resi’s. Maybe the Trocadero…
What a place. And yet at the train station Klaus had caught the rumour of all the nightclubs being closed down. Of everything being closed down. Until things improved on the Eastern Front. What, Klaus fumed, WHAT was the point of fighting for the greatest city on earth if you had to close it down until Hell froze over?! Madness. That’s what it was. And surely, hopefully, only rumour.
Klaus saw a cat bolt across the bustling main street – right under a tram, out the other side and down an alley. Then he saw the rats. A stream of them. At which point Klaus stopped. He had seen this on the Eastern Front. And knew what it meant. Scanning about for the nearest Air Raid Shelter sign, he saw one, and walked quickly and quietly straight towards it.
*
In Berlin’s iconic Haus des Rundfunks the German State Radio RRG staff cafeteria was only half full, about a hundred people; there wasn’t much to eat – there hadn’t been for some time now – though plenty of ersatz coffee as ever. The studio technician on his break thought he heard the noise of aircraft. Peering to the hall’s vast wall of windows, he caught no air-raid siren or alert – anyway he didn’t expect one; it was still broad daylight. As the cafeteria clock struck 11 the windows blew in as one, the hall now a rage of sideways-flying glass, blood and clothing fragments.
*
‘Close bomb doors,’ said Fraser.
‘Bomb doors closed,’ replied Mick.
‘You blokes all okay?’ came Dave Matthews’ voice.
‘Seems so, Dave,’ said Mick.
‘Red 2 and 3, cut the chatter.’ Perry sounded the Squadron Leader he was. ‘Loose formation, follow me out low. Buster. Out.’
Mick pushed his throttles full forward and flicked on boost.
Ghosts of the Empire Page 26
