Hunter Squadron

by Robert Jackson

  ‘Run complete,’ he told Sharma. ‘Very unexciting, really.’

  A moment later, he could have bitten off his tongue. ‘Forget I said that,’ he told his navigator calmly. ‘We have company. Two swept-wing fighters, three o’clock high. No, there are three of them, one some distance behind the other two. I think they are Sabres. Make sure your harness is good and tight.’

  Sharma did as he was ordered, cursing the fact that from the navigator’s position in the Canberra the view of the outside world was restricted. All he could do was sit tight, trust in his pilot’s skill, and pray.

  Quickly, Engineer called up Warambe on the radio and informed air traffic control what was happening. His message was acknowledged, so he knew that Yeoman’s section of four Hunters would be taking off, if they had not already done so, to cover his retreat.

  It was not going to be easy. Looking to his right, Engineer saw that two of the Sabres were heading to cut him off, black smoke trails streaming from their jet pipes as they increased speed, while the third was curving round to attack him from astern.

  ‘Hold on,’ he told Sharma. ‘I’m going low, as low as I can. I don’t want them to get underneath me.’

  He stuck the Canberra’s nose down and opened the throttles, sending a surge of power through the twin Rolls-Royce Avon engines. The airframe buffeted as the speed increased, and Sharma felt his ears pop as the Canberra plummeted downhill. From his vantage point in the pilot’s seat, Engineer kept an eye on the two Sabres on his starboard beam and saw them start to turn in towards him; the one astern was still some distance away.

  He levelled out a few feet above the forest, feeling a terrific sensation of speed as the treetops flashed beneath the Canberra’s wings. The two Sabres were closing fast from the beam, but he kept the Canberra’s nose pointed doggedly towards the sanctuary of the river, which was still a good five minutes’ flying time away. Every few seconds counted; his timing would have to be as near-perfect as possible if he and Sharma were going to escape from this potential trap.

  He risked a glance back and caught sight of the third Sabre, several thousand feet above and about a mile astern. Its pilot seemed to be making no move to attack; it was as though he were leaving the kill to the other two. The latter were now head-on silhouettes, their size swelling with frightening speed through the Perspex of the cockpit canopy.

  Engineer’s instinct told him when to act. With a fluid movement of stick and rudder, he stood the Canberra on its wing-tip and pulled the nose round towards the attacking Sabres, the ‘g’ forces crushing Sharma and himself into their seats. Levelling the wings again, he sped straight at the two jet fighters, which broke upwards to left and right, their pilots startled by the sudden manoeuvre. One of them fired a short burst, but his tracers went hopelessly wide of the mark.

  Engineer swung the Canberra eastward again, its belly almost brushing the forest canopy. The two Sabres, carried on by their high speed, were away to the left and high, waggling their wings as they began to turn in search of their quarry.

  The Canberra pilot made a lightning calculation. It would be anything up to sixty seconds before the Sabres were in a position to make another attack. The real immediate danger lay with the third Sabre, which Engineer saw was now diving from astern. If he held his present course, the fighter pilot would be presented with a straightforward no-deflection shot; it would be almost impossible for him to miss.

  Ahead and to the right, and several thousand feet higher up, the base of a large cumulus cloud hung like a white cap over the apex of a hill that pushed its way up from the forest. Engineer knew that the cloud was his only salvation — if only he could reach it in time, before the three Sabres boxed him in and delivered the coup de grâce.

  Once again he waited, ignoring the two Sabres which were once more running-in from the left and concentrating on the third, which had dived down to his own level and was closing rapidly. He knew that the Sabre was armed with six .50- calibre machine-guns; formidable weapons with a highly concentrated cone of fire, but weapons that made it necessary for the pilot to get in close in order to be certain of his kill. If the Sabre had been armed with longer-range cannon, he and Sharma would now be dead.

  In his rear-view mirror, he saw the Sabre’s nose suddenly light up with the flashes of its guns, and in that split second he heaved the Canberra into a turn to starboard. Pressure-induced contrails streamed from its wing-tips, and through a grey blur Engineer caught a dizzying glimpse of the treetops rotating beneath his right shoulder. His vision cleared and he reversed his turn, hurling the Canberra in the opposite direction. Over the intercom, he could hear Sharma’s laboured breathing.

  Engineer levelled out, and abruptly dropped the Canberra’s flaps and dive brakes. The aircraft reared up, losing speed as though it had flown into an invisible barrier. Its pilot craned his neck, peering above and behind, and was just in time to see the dirty green belly of number three Sabre flashing over his cockpit canopy, its pilot having miscalculated his attack badly thanks to Engineer’s sudden manoeuvre.

  The Sabre pilot, an American who had destroyed four MiGs during the Korean war and who should have known better than to let himself be taken by surprise, swore at himself and turned away to make another attack. In doing so, he narrowly missed the two other Sabres, which were flown by the South Africans, Jan and Piet, and created momentary confusion.

  It was Wing Commander Engineer’s salvation. Cleaning up his aircraft, he applied full power and climbed hard for the cloud cover. Turning hard after him, the American was just in time to see the Canberra’s angular silhouette swallowed up by the grey vapour. Without pausing for a second thought, only half hearing a cautionary warning that came over the R/T from one of the South Africans, the American also shot up into the cloud at a steep angle, the Sabre climbing at more than seven thousand feet per minute.

  High above the cloud, which now extended across the eastern side of the frontier river, Yeoman, leading his section of four Hunters, heard Engineer report over the radio that he was being attacked and was taking evasive action in the cloud. Almost immediately, he saw the twin-jet aircraft pop out of the white wall of the cumulus some three miles east of the river, turning slightly as Engineer got his bearings and headed for base in a shallow dive.

  Yeoman pressed the R/T transmit button. ‘Pearly One,’ he radioed, giving the Indian Canberra’s call-sign, ‘we have you in sight at eleven o’clock, low. Will cover you.’

  Engineer acknowledged, not troubling to disguise the relief in his voice, and looked up to see the four Hunters, diving down to guard his tail. He was not aware that he was still being pursued, but all four Hunter pilots saw the lone Sabre emerge from the cloud at the same moment, and Yeoman’s warning call alerted him to the danger.

  He had no cause to worry. The four Hunters split into pairs, one of which, consisting of Yeoman and Neil Hart, sped down to cut off the Sabre’s line of retreat while the other pair arrowed in to place themselves between the attacking fighter and the Canberra. The American pilot, who now realized for the first time that he was on the wrong side of the river, saw the second pair of Hunters streak across his nose and turned hard to port to avoid them, intent on regaining his own territory.

  The manoeuvre took him straight through the luminous ‘pipper’ of Yeoman’s gunsight at a range of one hundred yards. A one-second burst was all that was necessary. Four 30-mm shells exploded on the Sabre’s port wing root and the wing folded up, tearing away and whirling back in the slipstream. A fraction of a second before the fighter broke up and plunged into the jungle in a welter of burning debris, its transparent cockpit canopy flew off and a dark bundle ejected from the cockpit in a puff of white smoke. The ejection seat dropped away from the pilot; a yellow parachute deployed and floated down into the jungle.

  Circling the spot, Yeoman made a radio call to base, fixing the downed pilot’s position and calling for army units to search the area. He had no intention of allowing the mercenary pilot to slip t
hrough his fingers. The man would be able to tell him much of what he needed to know.

  Returning to base, Yeoman placed all defensive forces in Warambe on a full war alert, anticipating the possibility that Nkrombe might use the shooting down of the Sabre as a pretext for launching a full-scale attack on his neighbour. But there was no doubt that the Sabre had been well inside Warambe air space; the wreckage was there to prove it. The remains of the fighter had been quickly located, but the day wore on and there was still no sign of the pilot. Yeoman knew, however, that he had escaped, because he had been careless enough to leave his parachute draped over the branches of a tree, where it had been spotted by a patrol. He would almost certainly be making for the river, and once he reached it it would not be too difficult for him to slip across under cover of darkness.

  Meanwhile, as the hours went by, the fear that an invasion might be imminent increased, for the film brought back by Engineer revealed a convoy of what appeared to be armoured cars and trucks on one of the roads that led to a major river crossing point. At Yeoman’s suggestion, the part of the Canberra’s camera bay that was normally occupied by photoflashes was loaded up with standard magnesium flares; if a night attack developed, these would prove of invaluable help to the defenders.

  Soon after dark, Yeoman, conscious that a busy night might lie ahead, went off to snatch a little sleep, and ordered those of his pilots who were not on standby to do the same.

  He seemed hardly to have closed his eyes when he was summoned to the telephone by an RAF orderly. Bright was on the other end of the line.

  ‘I think you should come over to the airfield right away, sir,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the Sabre pilot. He’s in Operations; Major Jones is looking after him.’

  Ten minutes later Yeoman, feeling wide awake now, strode into one of the rooms that had been set aside for operational use next to the airfield control tower. Bright was there, together with Jones and Swalwell, but it was the man who sat on a bench in the middle of the room who captured Yeoman’s attention.

  He wore a flying suit of USAF pattern, streaked with mud. His hands, unbound, rested on his thighs, and the fingertips of one of them drummed a nervous pattern. His face was square and dark-jowled, surmounted by a crew-cut, and it wore a truculent scowl.

  ‘Has he said anything?’ Yeoman asked. Swalwell shook his head.

  ‘Not a word. He arrived in rather mysterious circumstances, though. About half an hour ago, our chaps who were guarding the main gate heard a commotion. Two men — at least, they think it was two, because it was hard to tell in the dark — ran out of the shadows and dumped something in the middle of the road, then they vanished again. Our men investigated, and the “something” was our friend here, trussed up like a turkey and with a hood over his head.’

  ‘Well, well,’ Yeoman mused, looking at the scowling prisoner. ‘And he won’t talk, eh?’

  He walked slowly round behind the man and stood next to Jones, who was smoking a cigarette. He winked at the para-troop officer, took the cigarette from between his fingers, advanced a few steps and jabbed the glowing butt down hard on the back of the prisoner’s right hand.

  The man let out a yelp of pain and surprise and sprang to his feet.

  ‘You goddam limey bastard, I’ll take your eyes out!’ he yelled. Swalwell hit him a sharp crack at the base of the throat and he fell back on to the bench, choking.

  Yeoman coughed politely, hand over mouth. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘at least we know his nationality.’ He walked forward and stood in front of the man, hands clasped behind his back, and stared hard at him.

  ‘I want you to know,’ he told him in a voice that was barely above a whisper, ‘that this limey bastard does not intend to mess around with you, and neither do the other gentlemen in this room.’

  The prisoner coughed a couple of times and finally got his breath back. He stared at Yeoman murderously. ‘I’m an American citizen,’ he snarled. ‘You can’t knock me around and get away with it, you sonofabitch.’

  Before Yeoman could reply, Swalwell stepped forward and stamped hard on the American’s instep. As he jerked back in pain, Danglin’ Jones hit him on the right shoulder with the edge of his hand. Something cracked.

  ‘Don’t cast doubts on the group captain’s parentage,’ Swalwell told him. The man groaned, clutching his shoulder with one hand and his instep with the other.

  ‘You are a bloody mercenary,’ Yeoman said, ‘and as such I doubt very much whether your State Department will want to have anything to do with you. In other words nobody is likely to give a damn if you vanish off the face of the earth. Which is exactly what will happen to you, unless you start talking.’

  The man groaned. ‘The English don’t do this kind of thing to people,’ he muttered, as though to himself. Danglin’ Jones gave a wolfish grin.

  ‘Don’t you believe it, boyo,’ he said. ‘And anyway, I’m not English, I’m Welsh. Nasty buggers we are. So be a good lad and spare yourself a lot of unnecessary pain. Tell us what we want to know.’

  ‘After all,’ Yeoman pointed out, ‘it’s not as if you’ll be betraying your country, is it?’

  Suddenly, the fight went out of the American. His shoulders slumped and he looked thoroughly miserable. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t believe I went through a year in a Chinese POW camp and never cracked, would you? Okay, I’ve got nothing to lose anyway, and I have no special grievance against you guys. My name’s Cardwell. David G. Cardwell. What do you want to know?’

  ‘Everything,’ Yeoman said, ‘beginning with Nkrombe’s air power set-up. I want to know how many aircraft he’s got, and who’s flying them.’

  ‘All right, but I can’t give you exact identities. We all used pseudonyms, even the guy at the top. He’s a strange bird. We just called him “The Colonel”. It’s my guess he’s German, though, and a war veteran, because he has a little iron cross painted on his airplane.’

  ‘Describe him.’

  The American looked at Yeoman. ‘About your height, I guess. Blond, close-cropped. Not a man to trifle with; very strict, but very fair too. And he can fly. Believe me, he can fly.’

  Cardwell’s eyes suddenly opened wide, as though in revelation. ‘Is your name Yeoman?’ he asked. The recipient of his stare nodded.

  ‘Well then,’ Cardwell said, ‘the Colonel knows all about you. Some guy came up with a photo of you. The Colonel called us all together and gave us a special briefing. He didn’t say how he knew about you — just told us who we were up against. You were one of the RAF’S top scorers during the war, weren’t you?’

  Yeoman made no answer. Instead, he put another question to Cardwell. ‘How many aircraft?’

  ‘Ten.’ The American smiled ruefully. ‘No, only nine now. All based at Kerewata airstrip. They’re dispersed around the perimeter in jungle clearings.’

  ‘I thought as much,’ Yeoman said. ‘That explains why they haven’t shown up in our recce photos.’ Abruptly, he changed the subject. ‘Does Nkrombe really intend to invade Warambe?’

  Cardwell looked startled for a moment, then said cautiously, ‘We’ve been briefed to provide air cover for an invasion force, yes. But I don’t know when the attack will take place. None of us was told that — just that it’ll come sometime soon.’

  Swalwell took a threatening step forward and the American winced in anticipation of another blow. ‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘that’s all I know. Why would I hold anything back? I’m not likely to receive any payment for my services from Nkrombe now, am I?’ He suddenly looked very glum.

  Yeoman nodded. ‘All right. Leave him alone, Chris. I think he’s telling the truth.’

  Cardwell looked at him. ‘What’ll happen to me now?’ he asked apprehensively.

  Yeoman pretended to ponder the question. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I could have you shot, or your balls cut off, or something. Instead, we’ll give you a feed and patch you up a bit — and then lock you away nice and securely until all this business has blown over. After that,
I don’t give a damn what happens to you. I expect you’ll be turned over to the US authorities.’

  Cardwell looked very unhappy at the prospect, and Yeoman briefly wondered what skeletons the man had locked away in his personal cupboard. Suddenly, he thought of something.

  ‘One last question. Who brought you here?’

  The American rubbed the back of his head. ‘That’s a very good question,’ he said. ‘This much I know. After being shot down, I lay doggo until dark, then set off in the direction of the river, following a road I came across. After a while I heard voices up ahead and assumed they belonged to a patrol, so I dived into the bush. The next thing I knew, somebody had me round the neck with a grip like a vice, and the muzzle of a gun was poking into my ear. Whoever the guy was told me to keep quiet, or he’d blow my head off. I didn’t argue, not even when they blindfolded me and tied me up. Then I was thrown over the back of some animal — a horse or mule, I’d guess — and I don’t recall much more until a little while ago. I was half suffocated and all the wind was knocked out of me, so I guess I must have passed out.’ He paused and furrowed his brow.

  ‘I can tell you one thing, though. I’ll never forget the voice of the guy with the revolver. It was sharp, like the blade of a razor. And it was more English than yours.’

  Chapter Six

  THE MAN THEY CALLED THE COLONEL WAS NOT IN THE sweetest of moods as he drove down the bumpy road that led to Kerewata. It was not often that he showed flashes of intolerance, and he regretted the dressing-down he had administered to the two South Africans, Jan and Piet. After all, it was not their fault that the American had disobeyed orders and crossed the river to get himself shot down. He fervently hoped that the man was dead.

  His thoughts went to another time, twenty years earlier, when he himself had been the target of bitter recriminations. That had been at the very outset of his career as a fighter pilot. It had happened on his first operation, when his lack of vigilance had resulted in two comrades being shot down. He had never forgiven himself for that episode, not forgotten the harangue delivered to him by his commanding officer in front of all the assembled pilots of his unit. After that, he had resolved never to criticize any of his own men unjustly; now he had broken that resolve, and felt the worse for it.