by Neil Gaiman
In early 1938 his old coach Davy Cale had another proposal: for a while now the Royal Air Force had been training a "Volunteer Reserve." Local flying schools would teach young men to fly, tuition paid by the government; in addition, the volunteers took night courses in gunnery and signals. They would be sergeants, if some other things happened: if a war broke out, if Britain entered it.
As usual, Lee did not oppose a reasonable suggestion. He joined the RAFVR.
Then some other things happened.
In 1940, not long after the fall of France, Dick Lee was posted to RAF Crowborough, in East Sussex, part of 11 Group of Fighter Command. It was farther from home than he had ever been, and for a few days he seemed dazed by the greenness of the fields, the clarity of the air, far from the Mersey quay. It was apparent soon enough that his quietness was not a response to anything, but an essential bit of Lee himself.
He was friendly without being convivial, well liked without any special likability. Once the German air attacks began in earnest, with the inescapable tensions and terrors, it was accepted that whatever kept a man sane and able in the cockpit was right. Lee got the squadron's second confirmed kill, and was a good man to have on your flight; that, for the second tune in his life, paid for any other failings.
Lee's one actual friend in the squadron was a Lieutenant called Chips Wayborne, a wealthy young man, three years older than Lee, who had been in one of the Auxiliary Air Squadrons before the war. Wayborne had scored the squadron's first kill, on the same flight as Lee; it was the closest thing to a cause the friendship had. The two men seemed to have nothing else in common.
On a late night in August, after a long dogfight in which Wayborne had gotten his fifth German and Lee his seventh, they sat in the barracks with cold cigarettes and staling beer, talking.
"Do you sleep bad, after a fight?" Wayborne said. "I always do. When we're warming up, I think about the other chap, the one I'm trying to kill, but once the wheels come up I don't anymore. It's just our machines and their machines. But the night after, I see them again. In my dreams, I see them."
"People are always talking about dreams," Lee said."There are songs about them, on the radio, all the time it seems."
Wayborne laughed through his tiredness, and sang a bit of a song about things never being as bad as they seemed, in the worst imitation of Vera Lynn ever heard by man.
Lee said, "People say they dream. When they're asleep. They say it's like the cinema."
"Well, yes, we dream," Chips said, trying to get the joke.
"I don't," Dickie said.
"What, never at all? I mean, you don't remember most of them, but--"
"I mean never. I fall asleep and that's it till I wake up again."
"Have you told any of the medical boys about this?"
"I hardly ever saw a doctor until I was in the service. I don't think the first one believed me. Since the shooting started, I've been afraid to say anything. I'm afraid they'll think I've cracked--"
"Not bloody probable."
"--or funked it."
"Balls to that."
"You won't say anything, Chipper?" Lee's voice was flat, as if it didn't really matter.
"Course not, Dickie. Nothing to say, is there?"
In September of 1940, a young man in Luftwaffe uniform arrived at a hospital near Munich. He was wearing the insignia of a Staffelkapitan, a bomber flight leader, and had the "double badge" showing that he was both a highly qualified pilot and an aircraft commander. He was promptly shown to the office of the hospital director, a doctor in a crisp white coat, his Party badge prominently displayed.
"Good afternoon, Captain. What may we do for you?"
"I am Peter Himmels. Where is Dr. Rachlin?"
"Dismissed," the doctor said. "It is of no importance. What brings you here, sir?"
"My sister is a patient here. I haven't been able to visit in some time." He gestured at his uniform, smiled and said, "You know. Now I should like to see her."
"We are trying to discourage visitation," the doctor said. "It tends to disturb the patients."
"If only!" Peter said.
The doctor looked puzzled, and said, "Of course, Captain, I shall see what can be arranged." He clicked his heels and went out of the room.
A few minutes later he returned, his expression oddly blank. "Your pardon, Captain. The old staff here have left the records in an atrocious state. I was not aware your sister was one of the encephalitis patients. They are, of course, quarantined."
"They are what?"
"Encephalitis lethargica is a very severe disease. We certainly do not wish to start an epidemic. Why, its effect on the war effort--you must understand this."
Himmels laughed. "I've been dancing with my sister for years, Herr Doctor."
"Excuse me?"
"I just want to see her. Please."
"That is not possible today, Captain. Perhaps another time. Now, it is almost time for afternoon medications; you must excuse me. Heil Hitler."
Peter Himmels returned the salute and was left alone in the office.
At about the same time, Sergeant James Richard Lee was being called into his squadron leader's office. The officer was turning a letter over in his hands.
"This is the bad part of the job, Dick. There's this message, from Liverpool. They were pretty badly blitzed two nights back, and, well--" He handed the letter over. Lee read it, without any change of expression.
The squadron leader said, "I am sorry, Dick."
"Hadn't been our house, would have been a neighbor's," Lee said. "If my dad had been out on the docks when it hit, one of the other men would have been there asleep. Or else it would have been one of the mums."
"If you want leave ..."
"If it's all right, sir, I'd sooner stay. Here I've a chance of keeping a few of them out of the goal. That's more use than I'd be up there. Sir."
"As you wish."
"Thank you, sir."
A few days after his visit to Munich, Peter Himmels walked into the officers' bar, wearing a leather flying jacket. Men were drinking, idling, telling tales; one of the fighter captains, a man named lost, was playing the piano.
Jost looked up, played a few measures of the "Stukalied"--a joke, parodying the rivalry between fighter and bomber fliers--and everyone laughed. Jost went to the bar with Himmels. "Good to have you back, Peter. Take your coat off, stay awhile."
"We're supposed to go on a raid shortly. Those radio towers again."
"They didn't tell me! No escorts?"
"Weather's supposed to be too bad for fighters. Besides, we're only going to the coast and back."
Jost said, "Well, before you go, we got some good cognac. Compliments of the Reichsmarschall. A small one for luck."
"A small one for luck," Himmels said. "And a bottle for my men, eh? With Goring's compliments."
"Just as the Staffelkapitdn says!" lost poured a glass, which Himmels drank with grace.
Himmels said, "I'd better go see that they've put the propellers on right way forward. See you for breakfast, Jossi."
"Surely, Peter."
When Himmels had gone, another fighter pilot came over to Jost. "Peter was rather quiet."
"They've given him a mission tonight, if you can believe it. And he just got back from leave."
"Oh. 'Good-bye, Johnny,' eh?"
"I think he went to see his sister. She's been in a hospital most of her life, I hear, and the parents are gone."
"That's a lot to carry."
"I suppose you learn how. Did you see what happened, just now? I offered him a drink and he said to make sure his Staffel got a bottle." Jost shook his head. "If anything could get a man out of fighters and into bombers, it would be an officer like that."
"Don't let the Reichsmarschall hear you say that."
"Oh, yes, Goring." Jost raised his glass. "Here's to him again. Until the brandy runs out."
The Dornier Do 17 was an
older aircraft, designed for powerful engines that few planes received; slow therefore, with a small bomb capacity. They were called Fliegende Bleistiften, Flying Pencils, for their slender fuselages. They had four seats, closely placed; the cockpit was so small that the crew had to board in a particular order.
Still the crews liked the Dornier; it was stable in flight and very strongly built. One plane, badly shot up over England, limped home with over two hundred bullet holes, and the crew all survived to count them.
The radioman climbed into his seat, then the flight engineer; they each had a machine gun as well. The last two seats were for the pilot and observer, but Captain Himmels had both those jobs. He checked controls and communications, then gave the order to the Staffel to begin taking off.
"Radio towers and home for dinner, right, Captain?" the engineer said.
"The towers, yes," Himmels said, as if there were something else entirely on his mind.
The British had two kinds of air-defense radar, then known as Radio Direction Finding or RDF. The Chain Home antennas were tall, open structures, something like oil derricks; the Germans across the Channel could see them. Chain Home had a long range, at points reaching back to France, and looked only out to sea. It was also blind to low-flying aircraft.
The Chain Home Low radar used smaller, rotating antennas. Its reach was shorter, only about half the width of the Channel, but it could see inland and pick up planes near the ground.
Both systems produced blips: not clearly defined lights on a dark screen, but spikes and tremors in a wobbling line of light on a glass tube a few inches across. Young women, many in their teens, watched the tubes and waited for the flickers. Officers, as ever jealous of others' right to play the best of games, said they would panic, said they would faint.
The reports from the radar watchers went to a room that combined them, adding visual observations and pilots' reports, trying to assemble a picture of what was actually happening in the air; this was communicated to the flight controllers, and then to the pilots, who followed instructions to whatever degree they felt like following them.
Any student of organizations could tell you that this system could not work. All those separate people, threaded together by telephone wire or crackling radios, keeping count with wooden blocks pushed about on a map, could not possibly bind together into a workable model of fluid, chaotic, three-dimensional reality, any more than twenty thousand people separated by continents and oceans could all have the same dream in the same night.
At the 11 Group Filter room, the telephone was ringing. One of the operators answered, and waved to the flight controller.
"Sir, RDF Hollowell's reporting. Bomber flight, very low. They'll be over the coast in eight minutes."
"Assuming they're there," the controller said. Bloody women, he thought; not even women. Girls. Girls on the telephone, ringing you up--
"Shall I alert squadrons, sir?"
Oh, dear! Jerry's coming and my hair's a fright! Hitler's in Whitehall and I'm not dressed!
"On the coast in five minutes, sir."
"Anything from the observers?" What was RDF anyway, a lot of wire, couldn't tell a bird from a bomber, a twitch on a piece of glass, a voice on a telephone--
"Nothing yet."
"Then we don't send planes up, young lady. It is an X classification because there is no confirmation. That is the procedure."
"Yes, sir ... Oh, God."
Oh God indeed. They were always hysterical, always not ready, always either dumb or delirious, on the telephone, the telephone, the bloody mad telephone telling you good-bye.... "What are you cursing on an open line for, Corporal?"
"It's the RDF station, sir. They're saying--"
"What are they saying? What are they saying, by God?" He grabbed a handset, shouted in a voice hardly removed from delirium, "Hollowell, report. What's going on down there?"
The voice on the other end of the line was absolutely calm, though she was speaking loudly above a terrible racket. "Your X raid is bombing us, sir."
Then the line went dead.
"Good job, all crews," Peter Himmels told his Staffel. "All planes head for home, maximum speed. We'll be along."
"We haven't dropped our bombs," the radioman said.
"I'm certainly aware of that," Himmels said, and the way he said it made the other crewmen laugh. Then, quite seriously, he said, "I have special orders. Very secret. Radio silent, please."
"Yes, sir." The radio was switched off. The radioman gave a small smile to the engineer. Where were they going? London, perhaps? It didn't matter. They would go with Captain Himmels wherever he led.
In Serecombe, the air-raid warnings had sounded, the houses were blacked out, Tiger Martyn's father had put on his flat A.R.P. warden's helmet, slung his gas mask, and gone out on his rounds. The house was quiet.
Tiger was in his bed, entirely awake. He had been dreaming, but he was very sure he was not dreaming now. If there were going to be planes, he wanted to see them. He dressed, pulled on his jacket, slipped a torch into his pocket, and was down the stairs and out the back door with no sound at all.
It was very dark. The sky was all opaque cloud, and the town showed no lights. Tiger didn't dare use his torch until he was certain no one else would see it.
Somehow he didn't need it. The Wych Road glistened before him as if it were silvered over, and the elm trees arched above it like a cathedral ceiling. A spirit--possibly of Adventure--drew him on.
Over RAF Crowborough, the clouds were thick, and there were spatterings of rain. About nine o'clock, Dickie Lee was having a cigarette with Chips Wayborne. Lee had never smoked before his Crowborough posting, but it was something to do between scrambles that required no thought, and the mechanics of lending, borrowing, and lighting cigarettes were a fair substitute for idle conversation.
Wayborne was telling a story passed over from a neighboring squadron: "So the Ministry says, 'Nobody could have got that many in one sortie, and anyway we don't think there were any Germans in the sector in the first place. We'll call them probables.' Tom says balls to that, goes out and finds the wrecks, and brings home their serial numbers."
The squadron leader looked into the hut. "We've got an alert."
"In this stuff?" someone said.
"A flight of Dorniers bombed Hollowell radar station. Last message through said one of 'em broke off and headed our way. Could be lost."
"Or a pathfinder," Wayborne said.
"Or photo-recce. At any rate, he seems to be up there, and we're selected. You chaps drink up and get some sleep; I'll take it."
"I've had as much sleep as anyone, sir," Lee said. "If this muck clears tomorrow, there'll be more than one of them--well, the flight'11 need you then."
"Do you really want this one, Sergeant?"
Lee's face was invisible in the dark. He said without inflection, "If he's up there, I'll get him, sir."
"Care for company?" Wayborne said.
"This is better for one, Chips. Wouldn't do to run into each other. Thanks for the offer, though."
The squadron leader said, "Very well then. Good hunting, Sergeant."
"Thank you, sir." Lee started to turn toward the hangars, then paused. "Sleep well, Chips."
When Lee had gone, the squadron leader said, "I'd lay eight to five he can't take off in this. That German's either lost, or mad."
"I believe Dickie, sir. If there's a plane up there, he'll get him."
"You're a better pilot. He's good, but you're better."
"Possibly, sir." Wayborne ground out his half-finished cigarette. Quietly, evenly, as if it were something he had been considering for a long time, Wayborne said, "Sometimes you have the best team, and the right wind, and the prettiest girls cheering you from the stands, everything on your side, but there's this chap at the other end of the field; maybe he's not as nice as you or your mates, but he knows what he's out there for, and he's there when you don't expect him. T
he best scheme in the world can't get past a man like that."
"Lee was a footballer, wasn't he?"
"Yes, sir, he was. If you think I'm the best pilot in this squadron, I'm honored to hear it. But Sergeant Lee's the best killer, God forgive me for saying so. And God help him for its being true."
An hour and a half after leaving his bedroom, Tiger Martyn stood at the gates of Fawney Rig. Beyond the rusty iron and the vines twisted around it, he could see lights, small and wavering, like candles or handheld torches. Were the people in the big house just careless, as the Martyns' neighbors were when the air raid wardens weren't looking? Or was the house full of spies, signaling to the German bombers?
The gate was closed, but the bars were quite far enough apart for Tiger to slip through, and he had learned from Simon Templar to test fences for electricity with a tossed twig.
So. He was through. He could hear no guard dogs, though a murmur did carry through the wind and the wet, from near the front of the house, where the lights were. The house was to Tiger's left; Wych Dyke was to the right, perfectly placed to cover a closer approach. The ground was soft, and the fallen leaves were wet; he made no sound as he moved to the ring of earth.
Dickie Lee opened his wireless link to ground control. While RDF Hollowell was being patched together, they were trying to stretch the neighboring CHL radars to cover.
"Crow Flight to Control, airborne and climbing. Can you give me a vector?"
"Roger, Crow Flight, vector one nine zero. Bandit at angels two."
"Say angels again, Control?"
"I say again, bandit at angels two."
Two thousand feet of altitude wasn't much room to work with. Not that there was much to work with for anyone tonight. Lee turned south-south-west as ordered and climbed to eight thousand. The weather was no better at that height; if he tried to get above the cloud, he might never find the bandit.
After twenty minutes and three new vectors, Lee had him. Just a smear of light; it could have been almost anything, that low. But it was moving too fast to be anything but a plane.
Lee let it pull a few hundred yards ahead, just to the limits of visibility. Then he dived on it. It didn't evade; they hadn't heard him, they surely hadn't seen him. If one of the gunners opened up, he could still get a burst off before veering aside--assuming there was enough space beneath them that a veer aside didn't auger the Spit straight into the ground.
There were only two ways to bring a plane down. You could pump bullets into the airframe, trying to bend enough tin to make the machine unflyable, or you could kill the men inside. There was no question which way was easier.
Lee brought his nose up, came to within a thousand feet of the Dornier, and pressed the trigger. Eight streams of half-inch slugs raked the plane. Lee pulled up, hearing his own airframe creak, putting as much load on the thin Mitchell wings as they would take.
Tiger Martyn crested the dyke. In front of him, halfway between the dyke and the house, he saw a man, standing bareheaded in the wet.
