As one Quinn and Stone skimmed a broad rise which fell away, before them, another valley, a long curve of train track skirting its side. Quinn watched from behind as, in a subtly curving dive down towards the track, Stone’s rockets loosed in volleys of two, twin streams of smoke trailing one after the other, about a second between each. Then came the explosions on the train track, dead on, two by two by two up its curving line.
Red and Blue Sections saw their leaders pull out of the dive and flatten over the forest ahead.
Just as the train roared out of the tunnel…
In daylight once more, its flatbed trucks plowed over the twisted metal that until moments before had been rails. Up front, its black steam engine had already departed the track’s curve – and led the way down the side of the valley – the flat-bed trucks could only follow, now rolling and slowing.
Yet their cargo kept on charging, 20-ton monsters, about a dozen of them, the utter mass of the German tanks now over-taking the wrecked train until, a landslide of giant turtles, they tumbled down into a river at the valley floor.
Quinn climbed and looked back to the destruction still raging in his wake. ‘Reaper Leader to Reaper Squadron. That is what you do. Out.’
*
The British Sergeant-Major wore the coveted maroon beret with silver parachute and wings badge of the Royal Parachute Regiment. Built like a heavy-weight boxer, he also wore the ribbon of the Military Medal and, Quinn observed, had already had one too many to drink. Quinn was additionally aware that, despite talking quietly with two other Para Sergeants, the Brit’s stare had been on Maddox for the last few minutes.
The tiny Lympne pub was crowded, and Stone excused himself past the bereted men as he returned with three pints, placing them carefully on the bench before Maddox and Quinn.
‘Everything alright, blokes?’
The Sergeant-Major answered to the room. ‘Not if ya mind drinking near three queers it’s not.’
Quinn looked at Stone and Maddox and shook his head minutely. Yet the Sergeant-Major pressed, and now more loudly.
‘Fookin’ glamour boys. Wouldn’t know a fight if it came oop and bit them on the arse.’
His stare was now focused sharply on Maddox.
‘Look a’ that one. Fookin’ queer.’
Stone bent slightly towards Quinn and whispered in his ear. ‘How many drinks y’reckon he’s had, Skip?’
‘You mean how quickly might he react?’
Stone put his pint down, turned slowly round to the Para, and spoke through a pleasant smile. ‘Sorry?’
The man’s face was now reaching the maroon of his beret. ‘Ah said… w’don’t lark drinkin’ near fookin’ colonial qu-’
Stone swung the punch at the man’s chin so quickly and so hard that he was flat on his back before Quinn, for one, even had time to blink.
Even the two still-standing Paras seemed too surprised to react. Stone addressed them over the body of the Sergeant-Major, out cold.
‘Bet the cunt’ll be sorry when he wakes up… Now. Can I buy you two fellas a beer?’
*
As Intelligence Officer for 609 Squadron, the door of Jillian Brown’s office remained closed. On the other side of it, she well knew, stood an armed guard at all times, a Corporal of the RAF Military Police.
Across her desk lay intelligence reports, maps, and aerial photos of the enemy-occupied coast of France: German divisions, coastal defenses, troop concentrations and, of most crucial relevance to Squadron Leader Quinn, anti-aircraft batteries.
She closed a file, remembering how her parents had liked Daniel Quinn – They truly had. At their home at Notting Hill, her mother had brought him breakfast in bed. But Dad had been the biggest surprise: Charming without artifice, he’d whispered in his daughter’s ear on her way out. His daughter agreed.
Jillian sat back in her chair. She replayed in her mind the moment she’d kissed Daniel. In hindsight, she was relieved he hadn’t responded – Either he’d taken it as a sisterly one or his senses had been dulled by the drinks they’d sunk. Still, she wondered what it would feel like to have his arms around her. She knew what it would feel like. But no, she mustn’t: Mustn’t imagine it; it could not be… The Germans and Italians had surrendered in North Africa. The Allies had landed in Sicily, then Italy, the Italians had surrendered. Now it was maximum effort against the Germans, and Jillian Brown knew her role in that effort.
Her boss was happy with her. Indeed, he had awarded her a token of his approval: As to the Invasion plans, he’d said recently, she could be told nothing yet. Nobody could, he said. In fact, he knew almost nothing himself. So he claimed.
Yet he’d told her one thing regarding the Invasion…
Its operational code-name, still top-secret.
Operation Overlord.
Brown opened the file again and started to consider, of all the information before her, what she would share with the Squadron Leader. And, according to her instructions from the LCS, what she would not.
October 1943
The squadron had seen nothing.
In line with standard procedure, they’d crossed the Channel at zero altitude, climbed to 2000 on sighting the French coast, avoided the enemy light flak there, then dived down to 200 to search for targets inland.
Nothing.
For the last hour.
‘Reaper Squadron, Reaper Leader. Hold onto your rockets and follow me home. Out.’
As he followed the squadron’s bank back to the west for the coast, Stephen Maddox was perplexed.
Hold onto your rockets?
No, that didn’t make sense at all. The Squadron Leader had drummed it into them time after time: Don’t bring your rockets home: You’ve paid a hell of a price getting here and now you are. Face to face with the enemy. So use your rockets on him. Plenty more at home where they came from…
Yet Maddox checked himself before transmitting: He wouldn’t question his leader in front of the men.
A minute later, the squadron still howling along at just a few hundred feet, Maddox saw the coast ahead. Now he transmitted…
‘Reaper Leader, Green Leader. Enemy flak positions ahead. Climb to altitude, sir? Over.’
Quinn’s voice returned firmly. ‘Wait till my order, Stephen.’
‘Sir.’
Maddox now saw the German coastal emplacements ahead very clearly. Why didn’t Quinn say something? Enemy flak guns ahead and they hadn’t climbed? What in the name of God did he think he was doing?!
Then the order came.
‘Reaper Leader to Reaper Squadron. Enemy troop concentrations directly in front. Diving to attack NOW.’
Maddox saw the line of German positions down ahead – and the smoke trails of rockets fired en masse from the Typhoons all around him. His eyes found a target, lined up on it, and he loosed his own, all eight at once.
Pulling up out of the dive, carnage swept beneath. Flattening over the sea, Maddox understood…
Of course the Skipper had held his intent to the last moment: He knew the Germans on the coast would be listening in, and, with merely a few seconds’ warning, would have turned their guns inland to meet the attack.
The Skipper had played it brilliantly: The Germans would be expecting the squadron to pass back over them at a few thousand, trying to stay out of range, just as they had on the way in. Quinn knew the Germans would be looking up, not low to the inland horizon. He knew the last thing they’d expect was a rocket broadside from behind their backs.
*
It had been Sergeant Christie’s first operation. He was twenty, from Sydney, a nice kid it seemed, and, as Blue Section’s new Number 4, under Stone’s wing.
Landing back at Lympne, he’d brought the Typhoon in a little bumpily, Stone had observed mid-conversation with Quinn. After the boy had taxied it in to Dispersals well enough, Stone went directly over and climbed up on his wing-root.
Quinn had followed discretely so as to catch the exchange – best he know it first hand if th
e new pilot couldn’t take it. The engine blading finally to a halt, Quinn looked on from the grass as Stone lent forward into the cockpit.
‘Alright, son?’
Stone caught an unpleasant smell.
Christie unclipped his oxygen mask. And clearly smelt it also. Shamefaced, he winced back at Stone. ‘I’m sorry, sir. …But I seem to have soiled my pants.’
Stone paused, and smiled: ‘Any bloke who isn’t shit-scared on his first op’s a bloody fool. And would be out of my Section before you can say buy-me-a-beer.’
The Sergeant appeared faintly heartened, his face now something slightly better than pathetic.
‘But… were you, sir? I mean… shit- scared?’
‘Shit-scared?’ laughed Stone. ‘Old Stoney? Threw up into the instrument panel my first time… Right into it. Shorted out the electrics! Whole aircraft was a write-off. Had to re-wire the bastard…’
The Sergeant was smiling back now. Though it was Stone who continued, and softly.
‘Look, mate. You go get a shower and a change of clothes. I’ll get this lot cleaned up. Our little secret, alright? See you in the Officers’ Mess in ten minutes. Buy you a beer.’
‘But what about the Officers, sir?’ returned Christie. ‘Won’t they see it as, y’know… bad form?’
Stone’s face lit up at the prospect.
‘Bugger ’em. An’ it’s Stoney, not “sir”.’ He hopped down off the wing and walked away with Quinn.
As they did so, Quinn slapped him on the back and whispered.
‘ Well done, Col.’
*
While Stone engaged in a beer with the Sergeant-Pilot, on the other side of the bar Quinn very quietly discussed the twenty-year-old with Maddox, breaking off as Section Officer Brown entered the Mess and joined them.
‘Sirs.’
‘Miss Brown,’ smiled Quinn, signalling to the barman for her usual sherry.
‘F-funny thing, bravery, isn’t it.’
‘How’s that, Stephen?’ Brown angled to Maddox.
‘Well, s-some call it the lack of fear. Yet I’d say, in all honesty, what it must really be is when you’re b-bloody terrified but you keep going. I mean, logically, if you feel no fear, then you’re not really being b-brave at all, are you.’
Quinn had heard the notion somewhere before – He knew it. Though he tried to remember, he couldn’t think where. ‘…Strange, isn’t it.’
Maddox reflected into his beer. ‘Yes, it is. And sort of c-cancels itself out, in a way, if bravery and being scared to death are one in the s-same thing.’ He looked up at them momentarily.
Quinn was struck: eye contact – rare for Maddox.
‘It all just feels so odd,’ Maddox continued quietly, ‘…not just d-doing what we’re doing… but doing it such a l-long way from home. I mean, I feel alright, most of the time, but then I rem-member I come from the other side of the p-planet. From so far away.’
His turn of phrase reminded Quinn of the Raven-Master, and his ‘little birds’. Yet Quinn now recalled another point of his conversation with the old soldier: ‘What do you know about General Monash, Stephen?’
‘Oh, Monash, c-certainly,’ piped up Maddox. ‘Invented what the Germans now call Blitzkrieg. Last war.’
Brown’s eyes widened. ‘An Australian invented Blitzkrieg? You can’t be serious…’
‘P-perfectly,’ returned Maddox. ‘At a place called Le Hamel. He broke the t-trench deadlock with the co-ordinated use of infantry, artillery, t-tanks and aircraft. Germans only named it. Except of course, M-Monash didn’t use it on civilians like the Germans have.’
‘And what, they copied it off this man?’ posed Brown.
‘Possibly… Ironic, given he was of Polish-Jewish extraction. From Melbourne. …B-bet you can’t guess what he was before the war…’
‘I can’t imagine.’
‘Bridge-builder. Except that your then Prime M-Minister, Lloyd-George, wanted to make him supreme commander of Imperial F-Forces for doing what your General Haig hadn’t been able to accomplish in f-four years.’
Brown’s eyes had widened even further. ‘What, so he wanted to sack Haig? Replace him with an Australian?’
‘Y-yes, and he tried to, too.’
‘What happened?’
‘W-well they wouldn’t let him make Monash supreme commander.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Be-cause the M-Melbourne boy who broke the trench deadlock wasn’t a r-regular soldier.’
Brown took a large sip of her sherry and gazed at Maddox. ‘Stephen, you are a most remarkable young man.’
Trying not to blush, he continued determinedly. ‘F-funny thing about the Nazis…’
‘What’s funny about the Nazis?’ trailed Brown, at a loss.
‘Well, they’re so f-fundamentally misguided… Take their Volk preoccupation, for example. “M-Master Race” and all that…’
‘What about it?’
‘Well the word volk has n-never had the re-motest thing to do with racial purity: It would seem that, on their great m-migration from the North, the N-Nordic tribes Herr Hitler seems to put so much store in were happy to p-pick up anyone who would j-join them along the way. Volk means “Folk”. Which means “Follower”.’
Quinn shook his head, grinning, and swallowed a mouthful of beer. ‘Bloody hell, Stephen… What were you studying before the war?’
Maddox looked up again briefly. ‘…Philosophy… mainly.’
Stone appeared by them with a beer and a smile, Maddox continuing to reflect, into his glass once more.
‘I s-suppose that’s why we’re here, really… and who we’re f-fighting…’
‘What, philosophers?’ Stone pitched in with a mad wink.
‘No,’ continued Maddox, his contemplation quite unbroken. ‘The fundamentally misguided.’
Stone raised his pint in reply. ‘Cheers to it, eh?’
December 1943
The Lancaster groaned in from the sea and put down in the dark.
At 3am Quinn had been standing by for a solo night op – a ‘search and destroy’ Rhubarb across to France – a perfect night for it, clear and moonlit.
Why 609 Squadron had been sent to Manston, no one knew for certain. Though a fighter station, as the nearest possible point to occupied France, Manston was also the closest point of landfall for mauled night-bombers to make emergency landings on their way back from Berlin. Since 609’s arrival, Quinn had quietly avoided the station’s anti-aircraft battery personnel: Though more than a year had elapsed since his infamous phonecall, he gathered the officer in question was still around.
The moon was out alright. Quinn would need it to see ground targets; they’d stand out nicely against the snow. Yet the moonlight also favoured the Luftwaffe night-fighters in seeing the Lancasters – The first thing their crews knew about it was when they were being shot to pieces. For the Lancs had no belly turret, and the twin-engined Messerschmitt 110s attacked from underneath, savaging up and under, unseen. The RAF were mounting thousand-bomber raids regularly now. Lancs were dropping like flies.
The wounded bomber had come to a halt somewhere on the other side of the airfield. As its engines finally spluttered out in the distance, Quinn checked his watch: 45 minutes to take-off. He told his ground crew he’d be going across for a look.
The moon lit up the grass before him as he walked, the crunching of his flying boots on frozen dew the only thing invading the icy silence. This was soon broken by the bells of the ambulance trucks that hurtled in towards the bomber from either side. At least now Quinn had a clearer idea of where it had come to rest.
After a few minutes’ walking he could make out the bomber, its gulled wingspan in the moonlight, then dim red torch-lights moving around it, and the emergency vehicles that surrounded. Yet all was quiet now.
Yes: He’d come up behind the thing – He could see it quite clearly now, and heard low voices. Twin doors slammed on one of the ambulances, its engine started, a figure thumpe
d its rear and it lurched away, bell ringing.
As Quinn drew up to the stern of the bomber, a voice challenged him.
‘Who goes there?’
‘Squadron Leader Quinn. Just coming for a look.’
The voice returned lower. ‘Oh. That’s alright then, sir. ’Fraid it’s pretty bad, sir.’
Though Quinn tried to make out the four machine-guns of the Lancaster’s rear turret, he couldn’t see them. He squinted, leant in more closely, and saw the reason why not.
The whole rear turret was missing. All that remained was its cavity, an airman splashing a fire-hose into it. In the torch-light on the metal floor of the cavity, Quinn saw a dark liquid being washed away.
He stepped back, moved around the bomber’s left tail fin, and headed forward beside its black fuselage. He saw it was peppered with holes as he passed the open escape hatch and under the wing.
Peering up into the perspex of the bomber’s nose, it seemed to be empty, yet now he heard a slow clumping back down the inside of the fuselage. Quinn walked back under the wing towards the side escape hatch.
A pair of flying boots heaved out of it and down onto the grass, the figure stumbling for a moment against Quinn, then painfully shedding its Mae West.
‘You alright, mate?’ Quinn offered. In the moonlight, he saw the wings on the man’s chest and knew this was the pilot.
After a pause, an unmistakably Australian voice drawled back in disgust.
‘Get the fuck out of the way.’
Just then, another figure appeared and put a torch beam on the man.
‘Joost checking you for injuries, sir.’
As the red beam illumined the cuts on it, Quinn saw the pilot’s face. And recognised it.
‘Tim? …Tim McCarthy!’
The face betrayed only the faintest glimmer of recognition. The medical orderly was swabbing its gashes.
‘Tim, it’s Daniel Quinn. …From uni… school, mate… We joined up together…’
The pilot’s eyes looked at Quinn, a look that died.
When the medical orderly had finished, the Lancaster captain trudged away into the darkness.
Tim McCarthy had gone to Bomber Command.
*
At merely 20 feet before touch-down, the radar operator in the rear of the Messerschmitt 110 assumed it was another 110 landing slow and closely behind them. It must be; he had his wheels down…
Nor the Years Condemn Page 30
