The Beaufighter banked smoothly onto the southerly bearing and Tommy glanced out of the dome over the dipped port wing. The early evening sky was hard and clear, glowing with the dying embers of daylight. Bournemouth slid by underneath and, in the middle distance, the chalk spires of The Needles hunched in the freezing mists like a coven of skeletal witches plotting dark deals with fate.
The minutes rolled past and the strange luminosity clung on, reflecting around the hard dome of the heavens, defying the fall of darkness. Tommy’s gunner instincts took over: He dimmed the cathode ray tubes and looked ahead, quartering the sky with unfocussed eyes, searching for any hint of movement. He smiled as a tiny shape shimmered into being.
‘I see him, Flight. Above us to port.’
The silhouette grew, a small, hard-edged, black hole in the ethereal sheen of twilight. As it grew, it acquired the unmistakable outline of a Heinkel.
Bryan hauled the fighter into a tight left bank and dropped into station a thousand feet below and behind the intruder, shadowing its north-easterly course towards London.
‘This is ticklish,’ he said. ‘They can’t fail to spot us.’
Tommy screwed his head about to check down-light. The sky behind them darkened into the slate haze of the sea and the water swallowed what light there was into its thick murk.
‘We might get away with it, Flight.’
‘Well, let’s give him a little time.’
Bryan held their position and the two aircraft droned on in tandem towards the English coast. The white chalk boundary drew a line across the horizon, starkly visible against the gloom. Several miles before landfall, the Heinkel pulled into a long, slow turn to starboard.
‘Looks like he’s got the jitters.’ Bryan banked to shadow his quarry’s flightpath.
A strange swell of relief made Tommy’s skin tingle. There was no need to risk a dangerous attack now, there was no imperative to kill anyone. This crew could go home.
The Heinkel wallowed through 180 degrees but didn’t straighten up. The turn continued around the clock until it settled back onto its previous course.
‘Well I’ll be,’ Bryan muttered. ‘The poor sod was waiting for it to get darker.’
The last of the light shrank away, one or two stars blinked into life and the darkness they had played for closed over the German crew like a shroud.
‘Enough,’ Bryan said. ‘It’s time.’
The engines swelled a tone higher as he eased the throttle forward and climbed towards his target.
Tommy’s throat constricted with dread and he displaced his fear by rechecking the air pressure gauge to the cannons and making sure the safeties were set to fire.
The Beaufighter climbed steadily. Tommy scanned the sky above and behind. Their backdrop still wasn’t completely dark. If the ventral gunner was on the alert, he simply had to spot them.
‘Attacking now,’ Bryan’s voice carried an edge of kindred tension.
‘Thank God,’ Tommy muttered to himself.
The cannons leapt into life, pounding like demon blacksmiths hammering in the devil’s own forge, belching clouds of smoke and cordite around Tommy’s boots. Looking ahead through the dome Tommy saw explosive strikes peppering their adversary’s tail and, as the Beaufighter drifted to the right, these walked down the side of the fuselage and into the starboard wing root. The Heinkel cocked into a gentle dive as the ammunition ran out and the cannons shuddered into silence.
Tommy jumped down onto the catwalk, hauled the empty drums out and swung them into the racks. He lowered the new drums into the guns, muscles tightening against their weight and sweat prickling on his forehead from the heat of the breeches.
‘Reloaded. Ready to fire.’ Tommy scrambled away from the cannon mechanisms and regained his seat.
‘I’ve lost him. He dived below the horizon. Shame he’s not on fire.’ Bryan tilted the Beaufighter into a shallow bank to ameliorate any evasive action the bomber might be taking. ‘Can you pick him up again, Scott?’
Tommy cursed under his breath and turned up the cathode ray tubes. He blinked against the sudden, smarting brightness and squinted at the screens. A small blip travelled off the extreme right of his screen.
‘He’s heading due west. I think he’s still diving. The contact isn’t steady.’
Bryan threw the night-fighter onto a westerly heading and pushed the nose down to give chase. Tommy sat helpless in front of two screens that filled with increasing interference as their altitude dropped, until each became a scrambled mess of ground returns.
Tommy gave up: ‘We’re too low. I’ll never find him now.’
‘No matter. Take a look.’
Tommy craned his neck forward. A line of incendiary strikes stitched their way across the landscape a couple of miles ahead, perforating the darkness with angry yellow flashes. Moments later a gush of red and orange flame plumed at their extreme end as the Heinkel ploughed into the earth and exploded.
Sunday, 29 December 1940
‘Come on, Alice,’ Jenny chided, ‘they have a piano player up there on a Sunday. I’ll pay, belated Christmas present.’
Alice looked up from her prone position on her bed. ‘What about the warning? What if there’s an air raid?’
‘Nothing’s dropped within a mile of here for weeks.’ Jenny tugged at the other’s foot. ‘I believe we’re through the worst of it. I really do.’
Alice closed her magazine. ‘Still infected with Christmas cheer, I see.’
‘It’s my New Year’s resolution. I’m going to be more optimistic. Come on, it’s only upstairs. We don’t even have to go out into the cold.’
***
Alice pushed the potatoes around the plate searching for any sign of chicken in her casserole.
‘So, I take it you had a lovely Christmas at your parents?’
Jenny smiled: ‘It’s always a joy to go home. I saw Bryan, too.’
Alice measured her tone: ‘How is our knight of the sky?’
Jenny shrugged: ‘Same as ever. Married to the war.’
‘I don’t know why you bother-’
‘Because I like him. Anyway, it is what it is.’
‘You deserve better. Especially after your salesman…’
Jenny shook her head: ‘I can’t carry that load forever. I understand that now. I need to set it down and move on.’
‘Don’t sell yourself short, that’s all I’m saying.’
Jenny grinned at her friend. ‘Don’t worry, I know my price tag. Now, I wonder if they still have any coffee…’
***
Jenny paid the bill and they walked back down the dimly-lit corridors and opened their flat door.
‘Did you leave a candle burning?’ Jenny frowned.
At the other end of the hallway, a flickering light danced and shimmied against the walls.
‘I haven’t been in there.’ Alice kicked off her shoes and headed for her bedroom.
Jenny walked to the living room and tottered to a standstill.
The light came from outside. The opened blackouts framed a skyline ablaze. Swirls of orange flame writhed into the air from the dense, huddle of buildings in The City, their silhouettes cut with sharp edges against the hellish glow of the conflagration.
‘Alice?’ Jenny croaked. ‘Alice, come here.’
Her friend padded into the room and a gasp escaped her lips.
‘They’re back.’ Jenny’s voice wavered. ‘It was too good to be true.’
Alice came to stand at her friend’s shoulder and the two women gazed through the glass with the fascinated dread of children in a reptile house.
‘London’s burning,’ Jenny said. ‘I wonder if Faith will survive this one.’
Tuesday, 31 December 1940
‘This feels a bit strange,’ Tommy said, ‘going hunting on New Year’s Eve. I’d normally be supping a few brown ales down the local.’
The darkness thickened over their heads as they trudged out to their Beaufighter. Silhouettes of air
men in ones and twos floated along the barely discernible junction of field and sky, their breath curling away behind them like fleeing spirits.
‘How did you used to celebrate Old Year’s Night, Flight?’
‘I didn’t; it always struck me as a bit pointless.’
‘How is it pointless?’
‘All you get is a hangover and a different number on your gravestone.’
Tommy barked a wry laugh: ‘Let’s not tempt fate. I’m aiming for the biggest number I can get.’
They reached their fighter, climbed in and launched into the habitual routine to ready themselves and the aircraft for flight and combat. Like factory workers arriving on shift, they started up the systems specifically developed to destroy human life at freezing altitudes in the dark. Catastrophic injury, fire and explosive destruction were the intended outcomes of the tools contained in this sleek, black raven of death.
Tommy whistled while he worked.
***
Bryan was still climbing to patrol altitude through thick cloud cover when control directed them to a contact. Tommy picked up the trace on the AI and control signed off.
‘It’s well above us, Flight, and travelling fast.’
‘Thank you, Scott. I’ll climb in steps.’
Bryan levelled out to increase airspeed, then nudged the nose up for a minute before levelling out to recover speed before the next climb.
Tommy glanced out through the dome at nothing. The muffle of water vapour remained impervious to the penetration of moonlight.
‘Range is reducing nicely, Flight. Keep up this rhythm.’
The minutes ticked by and the blanket of cloud covering the dome remained stubbornly opaque. The blip on the screen drifted towards minimum range.
‘Range three-fifty, twenty degrees above. Throttle back.’
The engine note softened a shade and the blip drifted on.
‘Range three hundred yards.’
Tommy squinted hard at the screens; the edges of the trace blurred as it settled onto the fringe of background interference.
‘Range two seventy-five, now thirty degrees above. If we get any closer, I shall lose him.’
‘I’m still flying blind in ten-tenths. We’ll hold position and see if it clears.’
Time stretched on and Tommy’s eyes tingled with the effort of separating the blip from the clutter.
‘He can’t be flying in this soup on purpose. I’ll drop back and climb a bit more.’
Tommy blinked in relief as the blip disentangled itself from the grass and the Beaufighter surged into a climb.
‘It’s clearing…’
The aircraft continued to rise.
‘Ah, there he is. He’s sitting right on top.’
Tommy looked forward. The Beaufighter, still semi-submerged, cut through the cloud like a torpedo. The seemingly disembodied propellers carved two furrows that lapped closed behind the speeding plane. Four hundred yards away a Heinkel skimmed the rolling sea of cloud, its propellers occasionally clipping the waves of vapour and throwing back twisting spirals of mist.
‘Right,’ Bryan said, ‘let’s get closer.’
The Beaufighter sank back into the roiling cloud like a wily orca and Tommy turned back to his screens.
‘Range three hundred… two-fifty… two-twenty… losing contact.’
Tommy felt the night-fighter rise through the lightening mist and the wan moonlight penetrated the dome as he fought again to discern the close-range contact in the swirl of interference.
Bryan pulled the nose up another degree to settle the target in the gunsight and squeezed off a long burst of cannon fire. Pieces of debris spun back past the cockpit as the shells struck home, on and around the raider’s starboard engine.
The Heinkel dived into the clouds like a wounded whale and Bryan dived into the blinding depths to give chase.
‘Can you hold the contact, Scott?’
‘I think so.’ The blip became more distinct as the bomber increased speed and pulled away from them in the dive.
The Beaufighter broke through cloud base. Directly ahead the Heinkel continued diving, the right propeller milling aimlessly and smoke streaming from the engine. Bryan fired another long burst.
The enemy’s dive steepened and the Beaufighter bumped and juddered through the turbulent air, engines howling like justice in pursuit of the guilty.
Two quick bursts of cannon fire stripped more pieces off the German machine that spiralled back in the bomber’s slipstream and flashed past like aerial flotsam.
The dive steepened further and the Beaufighter’s fuselage quaked and rattled under the stress.
‘That’s it’ – physical strain stretched Bryan’s voice – ‘the controls are getting solid.’
The engines coughed, barking out orange flames from their exhausts as Bryan throttled right back and curved gently into level flight.
Tommy craned his neck to where he guessed their quarry might be, and thousands of feet below, the Heinkel’s dive terminated in a sickly flash of orange and turquoise flame. Tommy looked on as the blossoming ball of flame dissipated and diminished to a sullen tangerine glow. He glanced at his watch: ‘It’ll be midnight in five minutes.’
‘Mmmm,’ Bryan murmured, ‘no different number for those chaps.’
PART 4
NOCTIS
Chapter 19
Wednesday, 8 January 1941
Jenny sat at her desk, poring over scribbled damage reports. Her in tray overflowed with documents, all to be correlated to an executive summary which was, of course, required urgently by some shadowy committee operating elsewhere in the building. The staccato clack of typing nibbled at her concentration, an unrelenting sonic backdrop punctuated by the whizz-clunk of carriage returns. Her fingers stung with a dozen tiny paper cuts and her head throbbed with the effort of focussing in the face of this gentle, insidious bedlam.
‘Pssst.’
She looked up to see Alice standing by her side, a folder under her arm.
‘I was going to stay in town for a couple of drinks after work, if you fancy it?’
Jenny screwed up her nose. ‘Not sure we should. It’s the middle of the week, after all.’
‘Come on’ – Alice nudged Jenny’s shoulder with her hip – ‘you need to let your hair down.’
‘Alright’ – Jenny smiled – ‘one or two can’t hurt.’
‘That’s my girl. See you out the front at five.’
Alice strode off and Jenny bent to her task once more. The unrelenting clatter of typewriters marked out the time as the columns of casualty and destruction lengthened under her pen nib.
***
Jenny skipped down the front steps to where her friend waited on the dark-shrouded pavement. They linked arms and set off into the gloom.
‘Let’s head up to Liverpool Street,’ Alice said. ‘It’s still quite lively up there.’
‘Isn’t that dangerous?’
‘Isn’t everywhere dangerous?’ Alice sighed. ‘But I have heard someone say the Germans are losing an awful lot of bombers to the big guns and they’ll be giving up on bombing London any time now.’
‘I hadn’t heard that,’ Jenny said, ‘and if it were true, where are all these bombers crashing and why aren’t there pictures of them in all the newspapers?’
‘Oh, shush. I’ll buy the first round.’
They walked along the unlit roads, now becoming busier as the capital’s working day ground to an end. Gossiping about office politics and complaining about their workload filled the time it took to arrive at a pub that Jenny instantly recognised.
‘Isn’t this where we went with those sailors?’ she asked.
‘What if it is?’ Alice grinned: ‘Maybe you’ll get lucky again.’
They pushed their way through the door and into the smoky interior. Jenny found a free table tucked away at the back of the pub while her friend went to the bar to buy drinks. Jenny looked around at the groups of customers scattered through the room. Most
were workmen, drinking alone or in tight groups of three or four, squeezing in a couple of pints before going home to their wives and their evening meal. In amongst them stood servicemen in the process of arriving or leaving the city from the railway station across the road, exactly as Bryan had done three months before. There were men from all the services but, with the image of Bryan lingering in her mind, her eyes rested on a young man in RAF uniform talking with animated enthusiasm to a girl who nodded as she listened, but gazed over the airman’s shoulder with glazed distraction.
‘Here’ – Alice put two gins and tonic on the table – ‘I got doubles. These should sort us out.’ She followed Jenny’s eyes around the room: ‘Seen anything you fancy?’
‘Alice, please!’ Jenny admonished. ‘That’s not the way it works.’
‘It seemed to work that way the night you first met Bryan.’
Jenny inhaled a sharp breath to reply, but the words died in her throat. The clamouring conversations in the bar subsided into silence as another noise insinuated from the cold darkness outside. Moaning through the register and sliding into a flat, dead wail, the air raid sirens delivered their foreboding like the howling of mournful wraiths haunting the bomb-shattered wreckage of their family’s hearth.
No-one moved for a long, leaden moment, standing transfixed by the hateful, grinding dirge of the warning. The light-hearted laughter in a dozen throats was strangled by a return to the baleful realities of London life. Faces sagged and heads dropped. Somewhere a man cursed under his breath and a few conversations restarted in lower, deferential tones. With the slow, deliberate movements of mourners in a church, many in the crowd finished their drinks, pulled on their coats and shuffled towards the door.
The blast sucked all of the sound from the air. Shattered glass fired through shredded blackouts, scything into the heads and faces of those nearest the windows with spinning shards of vitreous daggers. Jenny felt a sharp impact on the back of her head and saw a flash of red erupt from Alice’s cheek before the lights failed and darkness dropped like oblivion.
The muffling compression of the air gave way to a billowing gust of turbulent winter breeze sucked in through the shattered pub frontage. Noise cascaded back into the room. Screams and cries filtered through Jenny’s pressure-damped hearing, made distant and other-worldly by the high-pitched ringing that filled her skull. She reached out and grabbed for Alice, feeling her friend’s hand grip her arm in reply. They sat clutching each other over their toppled drinks, impaled on their panic and disabled by terror.
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