by Nevil Shute
I cut him short. “Why did they choose an Englishman?”
He laughed. “Bar the English and the Germans, I don’t suppose there’s a pilot in Russia that can lay a course properly, night flying. Not to call a pilot.
“They wanted a set of flashlight photographs taken from the air,” he said. “Of Portsmouth.”
The scheme, as they put it to him, was worth the thousand as a pilot’s fee alone. There was the devil of a lot of risk about it. He was to take a machine from Kieff and fly by night across Poland and Germany to a place near Hamburg, where he was to land and wait during the day. On the next night he was to fly to Portsmouth, do his job, and return to Hamburg before dawn. The following night he was to return to Kieff.
If anything went wrong he was to land and burn the machine, and get away back to Russia with the plates by land.
I stared at him incredulously. “I never heard of night flying like that,” I said. “It’s absolutely crazy. Do you mean to say you took it on?”
He smiled a little bitterly. “I wanted that thousand. You see, I’m getting towards the end of my time out there. Yes, I took it on. I made damn sure about the money, though. I had it paid into my bank at Croydon by the Trade Delegation, and I wouldn’t stir a finger till I had a letter from the manager about it in his own handwriting. That made it as certain as it could be—and when I got that I carried on with the preparations.”
He began upon a long, technical description of the machine and its equipment for this flight. It was many years since I had had to do with aeroplanes, and much of what he told me passed over my head. I was afraid to put him off his tale by asking questions. He said that they had several of those Breguets in the school at Kieff, and he chose one of them for the job. And he told me, in a mass of technicalities, that they had a propeller for that machine which at slow speeds was very quiet.
Now half the noise of an aeroplane comes from the propeller. Virtually they had washed that out; they set to work then and built a silencer for the exhaust of the engine. They made the machine into a single-seater, and fitted her with fuel tanks for about fifteen hours’ flight. By the time they’d finished with her they had a machine which would fly from Hamburg to Portsmouth and back in a night, and would keep in the air without losing height … silently.
“We did two machines like that,” he said. “One for a reserve, in case anything happened to mine. We fixed it that old Keumer should fly the reserve one if it was necessary. By the time we’d done with mine she’d fly at about eighty so quietly that you could hear the rustle of a map as you unfolded it in the cockpit. It gave me a queer start the first time I heard that. And they couldn’t hear her on the ground at all when she was a couple of hundred metres up.”
They had one or two rehearsals of the photography, using a parachute flare, and then they were ready.
“What day’s this?” he asked suddenly.
“Thursday,” I said. “Or I suppose it’s Friday by this time.”
He thought for a little. “We were all ready last week. I started for Germany on Sunday night.”
The landing-place in Germany was between Lubeck and Elmshorn, a little to the north of Hamburg. The flight, by the route he took, was about seven hundred and fifty miles; he took about six and three-quarter hours to do it. He left Kieff with a full load of fuel at about five o’clock in the afternoon, mid-Europe time, and set a compass course for the Baltic. It was a very dark night, and the ground was covered with snow. He said that it was very cold.
He flew most of the way at about five thousand feet. The Breguet wasn’t a silent machine at her cruising speed by any means, and he didn’t want to wake the Poles up down below. Between Kieff and Danzig he didn’t check his course at all. He just sat there watching his compass and trying to fight the miseries of cold, and when he had been in the air for four hours he came down to about a couple of hundred feet to see where he was.
He saw the lights of a village on the snow, and he nearly hit a hill in trying to get down lower to see the sort of country he was over. Upon that he went up again and carried on for another twenty minutes. At the end of that time he found that he was over sea.
He thought it out, and came to the conclusion that he must be to the east of his course, since there was a westerly wind blowing and he had seen no sign of Danzig on the coast. Accordingly he swung round and set a course south-west by south to hit the coast again, and in a few minutes he had picked up the lighthouse at Putzig.
That gave him his position, and he set to flying along the coast towards Rügen, about a hundred and twenty miles farther on. There was a stiffish wind against him, and that leg of the course took him an hour and a quarter. The darkness and the intense cold, together with the strain, were making him sleepy. He had several drinks out of his flask, he said, and presently he picked up a lighthouse on Rugen.
After that he was pretty well home. He passed over Rostock and Lubeck, and then set about looking for his landing-ground. The Russians had secured a great country house that stood in the middle of that marshy land; he said that it was all shut up except for three rooms that they lived in. He said he didn’t ask many questions about the place.
“Anyway,” he said, “they’d done their part of it all right. The arrangement was that they’d have the devil of a great bonfire lighted half-way between Elmshorn and Lubeck, and three miles south of that I’d find the landing lights laid out on the ground for me to land by, inconspicuous-like. Well, I picked up the bonfire all right. They’d given a beano to some village there, and supplied the wood and the drink and everything. It was a good fire, that. The flames must have been getting on for fifty feet high at times. I saw it twenty miles away, and gave it a pretty good berth. It was easy then. I circled round a bit and found the landing, and put the Breguet down on to the grass along the line of lights.”
He said that it had been a very cold flight. “Living in England, you don’t know what it’s like. I was all sort of cramped and stiffened in the one position. I tried to get out of the machine when she stopped, but I had to sit there till they came and climbed up on to the fuselage to help me out. I’ve never been like that before. The usual crowd of Jew Boys, but they were damn good to me that night. They had hot soup all ready, and a fire, and as soon as I was thawed out a bit and had a quart or so of soup inside me, I fell asleep where I was, pretty well standing up.”
He slept till noon the next day, and spent the afternoon with a mechanic, overhauling the machine for the flight to Portsmouth.
“That was Monday afternoon,” he said. “I started at about six in the evening, with fifteen hours’ fuel on board. That flight should take about eleven hours for the return journey, allowing a bit for head winds and for about a quarter of an hour over Portsmouth.”
He took a compass course over Holland, passing pretty well inland. He said he was afraid of getting mixed up with the Zuyder Zee. He came out on the coast near Ostend, and took a departure from there for Dover, flying at about three thousand feet. Finally he came to the Island at about half-past eleven. He picked up the Nab lighthouse first, and from there he followed straight along in through Spithead.
He took up the poker absently, and scraped a little of the ash from the bars of the grate. The fire was glowing very red into his face.
“I throttled down at the Nab,” he said, “and then we went creeping in, doing about eighty, and so quiet that I might have heard my watch ticking if I’d put it to my ear. I had the parachute flare all ready, with a little stick to poke it down the tube with. It was the entrance to the harbour that I had to take—the narrow part.”
My pipe was out, but I was afraid to interrupt his narrative by stirring to relight it.
“It was easy enough. The lights from the town—the street-lamps—showed on both sides of the water, so that the entrance looked like a great streak of black between the lights. I cruised round a bit before I set off the flare and dropped off a little height, so that I finished up at about two thousand five hundre
d feet. Eight hundred metres was the height that we’d fixed for the focus of the camera, you see.”
He paused. “I could see that there was something funny going on before I set off the flare,” he said. “There was a string of green lights stretching right across the entrance from side to side, near the mouth. Like a barrier to stop vessels coming in. And about half a mile inside from that there was a sort of faint glow in the middle of the harbour. Like a couple of floodlights running a bit dim. You couldn’t see anything from the air but just that there was light there—in the middle of the water. Not like the lights of a ship, either. More like a quay.”
He laid down the poker and glanced across at me. “Well, I was all ready. I went over to the Gosport side to start the fun. It was a westerly wind, you see, and I wanted to place the flare so that it would drift over the target. I turned her beyond the town and came back again down wind towards the entrance. And when the target bore about thirty degrees from the vertical with me, I made contact and shoved the flare down through the tube. It burst about thirty feet below me, and I had time for a quick glance round before the sights came on.”
He relapsed into a long silence. I knew that having got so far he would finish the story in his own time, and I left him to think it over. Looking back upon it now, I think he may have been reluctant to tell what he had seen to any living person. I think that may have been one of the reasons for his pause.
“Was there much going on?” I asked at last.
He raised his head and eyed me steadily. “I don’t know what it was,” he said, “and that’s the truth. I’ve never seen anything like it before. There was some damn great thing out there in the middle of the harbour—it wasn’t a ship, and it wasn’t a barge. I don’t know what it was. There were three or four vessels standing by it, and there was a sort of thick black line of something running from it to the Gosport shore. That’s what I saw—it’s all I had time to see, because the sights began to bear and I got busy. It stood out pretty well as clear as daylight, the shadows all black and sharp. That flare was a corker of a thing.”
He flung his half-smoked cigarette into the fire, and lit another.
“It burnt for about thirty seconds. I flew straight over the target and got in three good shots one after the other, that would join up to make a long strip photograph, you see. When the sights ceased to bear, I chucked her round in a quick turn and made another run over the target. I went slower over the ground that time because I was flying against the wind. I got in five shots on that run and I passed the flare about half-way, a little below me and to starboard. I swung her round again at the end of that run and got in two more shots as I headed east over the thing. In the middle of the second one the light went out. I tell you, it was a fine flare, that. There wasn’t even a red glow to show where it had been and make them smell a rat. It just flicked clean out into the darkness.”
He was heading east when that happened. He didn’t linger over Portsmouth, but went straight on ahead and back the way he came. He kept his machine flying slowly and quietly till he was well out at sea past the Nab, then opened up his engine and made straight along the coast for Dover.
I got up from my chair and crossed to the back of the room. The daily papers generally lie about there for a week or so before they disappear, and I had no difficulty in finding the one I wanted. That passage was there as I remembered it.
FIREBALL AT PORTSMOUTH
Meteorologists to-day are eagerly discussing the appearance of alarge fireball, or meteor, over Portsmouth on Monday night. According to eyewitnesses the phenomenon made its appearance at about half-past eleven, and lasted for a period variously estimated as from forty seconds to a minute. The body materialised at a comparatively low height, and according to one statement was accompanied by a low rumbling noise. The streets of the city and the harbour were brilliantly illuminated for a few moments during the passage of the phenomenon, which moved slowly in an easterly direction. No damage is reported.
I showed it to Lenden. He read it through, and smiled.
“You got back all right, then?” I asked.
He was staring into the fire, and shivering a little. “Yes, I got back,” he said slowly. “I landed at about four o’clock. It was twice as long a flight as the one from Kieff, but I didn’t feel it half so much. I was tired, of course, but nothing beyond the ordinary. It hadn’t been so cold, for one thing.”
As soon as he landed they set about pegging down the machine for the night, and draining the radiator. Then they went to get the plates from the camera. He said that the plates for that camera were held in two chargers; they were all in one box to start with, and as you exposed each plate it slid over to the other box automatically leaving a fresh plate all ready over the lens. They went to take off the box of exposed plates. It didn’t come away freely, and when they finally got it off there was a crack and a tinkle of glass.
He glanced at me. “The first plate had jammed,” he said quietly. “It was the tripping gear. They hadn’t been passing the lens at all. I’d taken all the ten exposures on the one plate. I’d done it all, and flown all that way—for nothing.”
It was bad luck, that, from his point of view. It meant that the flight all had to be done again. He told me that he was forced to leave it for a day or two. He’d done two long night flights on two successive nights, and he wasn’t fit to do another one straight off. He had to have some rest; he said that he was getting jumpy and feverish with the exposure. He talked it over with the Jews, and they made it Thursday night for the second shot; the interval he spent mostly in bed.
“There was another thing,” he said. “I knew there’d be some risk about the second trip. I mean to say, whatever it is that’s going on there, it’s pretty secret. One can’t go on letting off fireballs over Portsmouth indefinitely, and think they won’t tumble to the game. And it’s a protected area, you know. They’ve got every right to shoot you down if you go monkeying about over that sort of place. It had been all right the first time; I’d taken them by surprise. But I knew it wasn’t going to be so easy the second time.”
He paused. “And, by God, it wasn’t!”
He shivered violently, and drew up closer to the fire. He flew over in exactly the same way. He found the same subdued light in the middle of the entrance, but the thing had moved nearer to the Gosport shore. And as he drew closer, he saw one thing that scared him stiff and put the wind up him properly. They had the landing-lights out on Gosport aerodrome.
He sat there very still, staring at the glowing embers of the fire. “I could see that I was in for it then,” he said very quietly. “And from our own people. I knew that as soon as I let off my flare it’d be like poking a stick into a wasps’ nest. I knew there’d be machines coming up from the aerodrome after me, and that in a few minutes I might have something like a Gamecock hanging on behind me, and then I’d have to land or be shot down.”
He was silent for a minute.
“The worst part of it—what put the wind up me most”—he was speaking so quietly that I could hardly hear what he said—“was that they’d be our own people. Somebody like Dick Scott or Poddy Armstrong, that I’d played pills with at the Royal Aero Club, sitting there in the Gamecock pooping off tracer bullets at me, and thinking he was doing a damn good job….”
He pulled himself together and lit another cigarette. He was still shivering a bit; I wondered if he had taken cold.
He said that the job went through almost exactly as it had before. He set his flare off on the Gosport side of the harbour and began taking photographs as he went east. As he turned the machine at the end of that run he saw the first of the green lights come up.
They were setting off green rockets from Gosport, in groups of three at a time. It was the signal to land at once. The things rose to a height of about a thousand feet and burst in a cluster of green stars. They were shooting them up in groups of three at intervals of about ten seconds. Lenden paid no attention to them, but he got in five p
hotographs on his way west over the target. He took nine exposures in all, and then swung the machine round and went straight out to sea.
“I didn’t dare to open out my engine. The Breguet can do about a hundred and sixty miles an hour, but to do that you’ve got to make a noise. I kept her throttled down and silent, and went drifting out towards the Island, doing about eighty. I turned in my seat as I went, and had a good look at the aerodrome behind me. They had stopped sending up the rockets, and as I watched I distinctly saw a machine sweep across the aerodrome in front of the landing-lights as she took off. I knew then that they were after me.”
He sat playing with the poker for a bit. “Well,” he said. “They didn’t find me.”
They didn’t get their searchlights going fast enough. By the time the first of those came up he was miles away, right out to sea above Spithead. He carried on like that till he was somewhere off St. Helen’s; then he thought that his best course was to put on speed and get clear. So he switched on the little shaded light over his instruments and, with an eye wandering over the dials, thrust forward the throttle. He saw the needle of the oil gauge go leaping up till it jammed at the limit of the dial.
He glanced at me. I had barely appreciated the significance of that; it was so long since I had flown. “It’s rotten when a thing like that happens,” he said quietly, “at night, and over strange country. And I was right out to sea, mind you—about five miles from land. I didn’t see the fun in coming down in the water if my engine was going to pack up, and so I turned towards the coast, somewhere by Selsey. And then, quite suddenly, the gauge flicked down to zero, and oil began to come spraying down the fuselage from the engine, coating the windscreen and blowing in my face. Warm oil, all black and sticky in the darkness….
“I knew that I was in for it then,” he said. “And it was all dark below. Pitch dark, with only a little white surf to show the line of the beaches. No hope of being able to pick out a field to land in. And I knew that very soon the engine would pack up.”