Billy plugged himself into the intercom and tested the system. Hammond, forward in the cockpit, grunted an acknowledgement. Moments later, the port outer coughed and caught, followed by the other three engines. The thunder of the props settled down and then, with a burst of throttle, the aircraft began to move. The rain was suddenly heavier, drumming on the fuselage above Billy’s head.
He carefully stored his caffeine tablets, chocolate bars and orange juice. The latter could become a hazard if Hammond was forced to corkscrew to avoid flak, as could the empty screw-top bottle Billy always used if he needed to take a piss. In the early days with the old crew he’d filled the bottle but forgotten to secure it properly, a mistake he’d never make again.
The aircraft was rumbling around the perimeter track now, part of an ever-lengthening queue of Lancasters, and the Nav was confirming the heading they’d need for the climb-out after take-off. The Germans routinely monitored all operational radio frequencies for early clues about impending raids and so at this launch stage Flying Control communicated by means of lights. A green light from Control cleared you for take-off. A red one, for whatever reason, signalled a scrub.
Was Les Hammond praying for a scarlet Very flare to soar into the darkness? Was he waiting for the moment when dozens of Lancs throttled back and returned to their dispersal pans? Was he dreaming of a warm bed and the certain knowledge that he’d see the sun rise again? Billy didn’t know, couldn’t even hazard a guess, but as he checked again through the window at his elbow he saw the flash of green from control and felt the slow press of acceleration as Hammond released the brakes against the roaring props.
It took nearly a mile, always tugging to the left, for the Lanc to unstick. Then came the moment when the tail lifted and the blur of gooseneck runway flares gave way to darkness as the bomber lumbered into the air. Climbing slowly, still at maximum power, V-Victor entered cloud minutes later and the view from Billy’s window offered nothing but the fiery red glow of the port engine exhausts.
At 9,000 feet, without warning, they burst through the last of the cloud and emerged into a starlit night. Billy had been tuning in to the first of the half-hourly radio transmissions from Group Headquarters in case of a change of target or a last-minute scrub but there was no indication of either. Just the string of Morse ‘V’s – dit dit dit dah – that told the bomber stream to maintain the briefed heading.
Billy struggled to his feet. Above him was the astrodome. He wedged his head against the cold Perspex and took a look round. It was a beautiful night. The bomber stream stretched around him in every direction, hundreds of heavy black Lancasters hanging in the darkness above the rumpled grey eiderdown of cloud. According to the Nav, they’d left the English coast over Mablethorpe. Ahead lay a 230-mile transit across the North Sea before they hit the Dutch coast.
The bomber stream was still climbing. At 10,000 feet, Hammond ordered the crew to go onto oxygen. Billy, back at his desk, was noting down a transmission from Group detailing the frequency currently being used by Luftwaffe night fighters operating out of airfields on the Dutch/German border. In an hour, as they approached the coast, it would be his job to tune his transmitter to this frequency, and then return to the astrodome to play sentry. With luck, he’d be able to jam the night fighter transmissions and throw them off the scent.
It worked. As the Nav calculated their track, confirming the coast beneath the thinning layer of cloud, the sky remained empty of enemy fighters. Billy, still in the astrodome, was desperately resisting the impulse to fart. At this height, 20,000 feet, the reduction in air pressure played havoc with your guts and he was beginning to regret the second helping of cauliflower cheese when he saw the first nest of searchlights lying in wait maybe sixty miles ahead. We’re running out of cloud, he thought. Exactly as the Met man had predicted.
Minutes later he was groping his way back down the fuselage to help the Flt Engineer shovel handfuls of Window into the chute at the rear of the aircraft. This stuff was new to the bomber crews but the boffins swore that the little strips of aluminium would cascade down through the night, playing havoc with the enemy radar screens below. With the slipstream blasting up through the chute, the temperature had plunged way below zero and once the strips had gone Billy was glad to get back to the warmth of his desk. So far, so good.
He tuned to Group again to catch their latest transmission and stole a glance through the window. He could see the glitter of ice on the port wing and the looming silhouette of another aircraft beyond. The bomber stream appeared to have changed course to dog-leg around the searchlights, for which Billy was grateful. Give it another hour, he thought, and we might be on our way home.
Hammond reported a glow on the horizon minutes later. The first wave had already bombed and Chopburg was on fire. The Flight Engineer, perched in the cockpit beside Hammond, had a grandstand seat. He was a Yorkshireman, blunt to a fault, and he never bothered to hide his views on area bombing. Billy heard the click on the intercom as he opened his microphone.
‘It’s a right bonfire,’ he said. ‘The bastards had it coming.’
Hammond was on next, reporting heavy flak and a picket line of searchlights. This close to the target, the bomber stream was committed to a straight run-in but Billy could detect no flutter of nervousness in his voice. Good, he thought. Maybe the skipper’s finally got a grip.
Minutes ticked by with occasional updates from Hammond in the cockpit. Then came a burst of static in Billy’s headphones before the Rear Gunner reported night fighters climbing to meet them.
‘Two of them, Skip. Your seven o’clock. Maybe a thousand feet below.’
Hammond grunted in acknowledgement and then told Billy to get back in the astrodome. Another pair of eyes on a night this clear could make the difference between life and death. Billy struggled to his feet again. The sweat beneath his flying suit quickly cooled once he’d left the furnace of the desk. Back in the astrodome he hunted in vain for the incoming night fighters. They’re below us, he thought. Lurking with intent.
‘One’s coming at us, Skip. Astern and below.’ The Rear Gunner again.
Billy heard the chatter of the .303 machine guns as the gunner hosed bullets into the night. Of late, the German fighter pilots had been working on a new tactic, stationing themselves below the target, using a remote cannon mounted in the fuselage to blast shells vertically upwards. This way they could target the bomb bay with consequences Billy shuddered to contemplate. The biggest of tonight’s payload was a two-ton ‘cookie’ that could flatten half a street. At least it would be quick.
Hammond wanted an update on the fighter.
‘Broken off, Skip. I think he’s gone.’
‘And the other one?’
‘Can’t see him.’
The Rear Gunner, a soft-spoken infant from Northern Ireland, never betrayed an ounce of emotion. Like Johnny Phelps in Billy’s last crew, he seemed to have no fear. Billy knew how hard it was to pull off a trick like this. Once they started to approach the target, everyone was frightened. All the time.
Billy thought, quite suddenly, of his dead father, the way it must have been in the trenches, awaiting the blast of the whistle. The men poised to scale the ladders, ready to surge into no man’s land. The hurricane of enemy machine-gun fire that awaited them. And the dad he’d never met battling onwards, only to fall.
V-Victor was close now. In a couple of minutes the Bomb Aimer would take control, flat on his belly in the aircraft’s nose, calling tiny course corrections to Hammond as the Lancaster headed for the red glow of the target indicators. The bomber stream had tightened formation. Angels of death, Billy thought. No way back.
Billy struggled down to his desk. A small hatch at his feet opened directly into the bomb bay. After the Bomb Aimer pressed the release it was Billy’s job to check that the ordnance had gone. Normally he didn’t bother with the hatch because the big cookie fell nose first and the tail always clunked against the floor of the fuselage, but on this occasion he�
��d decided to do it by the book. God willing, he might never get to perform this action again. Chopburg, he told himself, would be a sight to cherish for the rest of his life.
The flak was evil now, streams of golden tracer climbing faster and faster to tear them to pieces while the searchlights stabbed at target after target. Billy, dry-mouthed, watched a Lanc off to port caught by the master beam. Within seconds, the aircraft was coned, pinned like a giant black insect by at least three searchlights. Then came the puffs of dirty grey smoke as the flak shells exploded around her. Committed to the bombing run, the pilot held his nerve until a huge chunk of the starboard wing cartwheeled into the darkness. First one engine caught fire, then another, and seconds later the aircraft erupted as a flak shell burst beneath the half-open bomb bay. V-Victor bucked in the violence of the explosion. Thrown backwards in his chair, Billy prayed that the master beam might linger for a second or two on the remains of the Lancaster. Not us next. Please God, not us.
By now, Hammond had wrestled V-Victor back on track for the beckoning target indicators. The Bomb Aimer was talking Hammond in.
‘Steady… steady… that’s nice. That’s good.’
‘OK?’
‘Perfect… bomb doors open…’
‘Roger that.’
‘Steady… right a bit… right… right… steady… bombs gone…’
V-Victor leapt upwards as six tons of high explosive left the aircraft. On his knees beside the desk, Billy tugged the hatch open. The blast of icy night air took his breath away. As did the sight below.
It was like looking into the mouth of a volcano. The firestorm must have been several miles from edge to edge, deep reds and yellows and thick coils of smoke inset with tiny twinkling diamonds as yet more bombs added to the misery that had once been Chopburg. With his eyes half closed against the roaring slipstream, Billy told himself he could feel the heat, smell the charring timbers. He and his mates had turned the city into a furnace. From 20,000 feet this was a place you could warm your hands on. Hell, he thought, was too small a word.
He shut the hatch and confirmed bombs gone. The Bomb Aimer had taken his impact shots for the Intel debrief and Hammond had pulled the aircraft into a tight starboard turn when the master beam finally caught them.
‘Shit…’ Hammond was a man who never cursed.
Billy shut his eyes. There was nothing he could do now, no transmissions he could make, no warnings he could yell from his perch in the astrodome. They were in the hands of God and the flak gunners below. If it happens, he told himself, let it be swift.
Hammond had wrenched the Lanc into the tightest corkscrew dive Billy could remember. His entire face beneath the oxygen mask seemed to be squeezing sideways. He tried to fight the force of the turn, pushing hard against the fuselage, but it was hopeless. Through the window, when he dared look, he could see nothing but a blinding white light suffused with blue. His eyes hurt. His lungs hurt. Everything hurt. How could a man fly an aircraft under pressures like these? How could he keep control? Remember where the turn had taken him? Try and find somewhere to hide? Pilots back in the Mess were right to say that sometimes the sky can be the smallest place in the world. And here was the living proof.
The flak gunners had the range. A shell burst aft with a red-hot spray of shrapnel and the aircraft was suddenly full of coiling smoke from the explosion. It must have taken out a lump of the fuselage because the roar of the engines was suddenly much louder and there was another noise, too. It was high-pitched, an animal scream of pain, and it took Billy – still dazed – a second or two to realise it must be the Rear Gunner.
He fought his way back down the fuselage as the force of the turn slackened. The Elsan toilet had taken a direct hit. He could smell shit in the freezing air, laced with cordite from the shell, and when he finally made it to the Rear Gunner he knew it was too late. A huge chunk of shrapnel had torn through the revolving turret and taken off one of his legs. Blood was pouring from the severed artery and Billy could see the jagged whiteness of what remained of his thighbone. The rest of him was a shape in the darkness, a flying jacket hunched over the machine gun. Billy reached out and gave him a shake, then another, screaming his name, but nothing happened. As he watched, appalled, the pumping flood of blood from the artery started to slacken, then stopped completely. On the intercom, Hammond was calling for news but Billy couldn’t find the words. Gone, he thought.
Abruptly, the master beam left them. Hammond pulled the aircraft out of the dive and Billy fought again for balance as the airframe groaned around him. Back at straight and level, Hammond was calling for a heading.
‘Fly two three zero, Skip.’
Billy hadn’t a clue where they were. He’d lost all sense of time. All he could think about was the whiteness of the Rear Gunner’s bone in the roaring darkness. He began to claw his way back towards the front of the aircraft. Then came another huge explosion and V-Victor reared like a horse before settling down again. This time it was the Nav on the intercom.
‘The Skipper,’ he yelled.
Billy had made it back to his desk. The Nav was on his feet, fighting a blast of icy air. Then he caught sight of Billy.
‘Flak on the nose,’ he said. ‘I thought the skip was a goner but I’m not sure. Check him out.’
He gestured up towards the cockpit and then stood aside as Billy squeezed past. The whole crew were casualty-trained but only Billy had done the advanced course.
The first aid box was stowed behind the Flt Engineer’s seat. The Engineer himself had engaged the autopilot and was now trying to wrestle Hammond out of his seat but Hammond, it seemed, had other ideas. What Billy could see of his face was a mask of blood. Two of the Perspex panels in the cockpit’s windscreen had been shattered in the explosion and Hammond was trying to protect his head from the numbing blast of icy air.
Billy gestured to the Flt Engineer to get out of his seat. The aircraft appeared to still be intact. Billy knelt beside Hammond and extracted a wad of thick gauze from the first aid box. He wiped away most of the blood. Dozens of fragments of Perspex had torn into Hammond’s face but the damage seemed to be superficial. The real problem was going to be his eyes.
Billy opened the intercom.
‘Can you hear me, Skip? Just nod.’
Hammond nodded, raising a single gloved thumb.
‘What about your eyes?’
The thumb again, and then a halting confirmation on the intercom.
‘I can see. Just about.’
‘How well?’
‘Well enough.’
‘Well enough to get us home?’
A nod this time but nothing on the intercom.
Billy stared at him for a moment. All he knew was that salvation, if it ever happened, would mean losing as much altitude as possible. The lower they flew, the less cold it would be.
‘My goggles.’ It was Hammond again, his voice barely a whisper. He was making a downward gesture with his right hand. Billy fumbled on the floor of the cockpit between the two seats. Almost immediately, he found a shape in the darkness. Hammond’s goggles. Like most pilots he preferred to fly without them. Now he had no choice.
Billy fitted them gently around his head. The Perspex wounds were beginning to weep but the intense cold had sealed most of the damaged blood vessels. Every cloud, Billy thought grimly.
Hammond was reaching for the control column. Then, very slowly, he disengaged the automatic pilot and began to fly the aircraft again. Billy felt a tap on his shoulder. It was the Nav. He was nodding back towards the escape hatch, one eyebrow raised. The question was no less obvious for being mute. Was now the time to bail out?
Billy didn’t want to, though he wasn’t sure about the Nav. When he looked at the Flight Engineer, all he got was a blank shrug. The man was deep in shock and Billy realised for the first time that there was blood trickling down his face, too. We’re all going to die from hypothermia, Billy thought, unless we get this aircraft lower.
He turned back to
Hammond.
‘What do you think, Skip? We jump or press on?’
‘Press on.’
‘Then we need to go down.’
‘You’re right.’ He glanced up, then managed a wink. ‘I might leave the landing to you, Billy. God help us, eh?’
6
Hélène awoke in the darkness. Something had disturbed her but she didn’t know what. The storm had broken over the chateau before midnight, long drum rolls of thunder creeping down from Tours, then a sudden wind that stirred the elms beyond the terrace followed by torrential rain. She’d dreamed of a waterfall in the high Alps, a memory from the days in her youth when her father had taken her skiing, and she thought she could still hear cow bells when she lay in the darkness, the rain and the thunder gone.
The noise again. A voice, definitely. A woman’s voice. From the room next door. Agnès, she thought. Fat little Agnès with the staring eyes and the skin problem and the neat little transmitter she hid in her bag beneath a tired assortment of underwear. She’d arrived last week on the back of an ancient motorbike. Her driver, whom she’d never introduced, had given Hélène an envelope before clattering off in a cloud of dust, refusing even a glass of water.
The note was unsigned but Hélène had recognised the loopy script and the line of kisses at the end. Evangelina had been her husband’s assistant at the first of his galleries. She was Italian, small and squat, a female version of Nathan, and what had sealed the bond between them was her passion for a man called Carlo Rosselli.
Rosselli was an anti-Fascist intellectual who had made his home in Paris after fleeing death threats in his native Rome. His various schemes to assassinate Mussolini had put a sizeable price on his head, and to Evangelina’s distress his life had ended on a sunny day in 1937 beside a country road in Normandy. He’d been stabbed twice and shot.
Evangelina had never met Rosselli, never even laid eyes on him. But the man’s fervour had won her heart and the year after his murder the football World Cup had come to France. By now, Evangelina was working for Nathan Khorrami, who adored her. He’d bought two tickets for the quarter-final between France and Italy, and when they returned from the stadium to the apartment Nathan was sharing with Hélène, Evangelina was still in tears. France, her adopted country, had been beaten by a bunch of thugs thinly disguised as Italians. Worse still, they’d disgraced her homeland by giving the Fascist salute throughout the singing of the national anthem. On both counts, she was unforgiving. One day, she promised, would come the reckoning.
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