Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  Bad start.

  When he took off it had seemed like a bright idea to stay at zero feet, catch everyone by surprise, whiz into krautland, find a fighter field, do the dirty deed, whiz back home.

  Not healthy at zero feet. Better think again.

  Guessing he was clear of the flak belt, Stickwell eased down until he broke cloud. He dropped one wing, studied the ground, saw nothing but forest and field and hopped back into the cloud, not too disappointed.

  He repeated this three times. The next time, he saw more forest and field plus a twin-engined plane, quite low, flying north.

  He turned and followed it, still ducking in and out of cloud. Within two minutes it led him to a large Luftwaffe airfield: three concrete runways, a dozen hangars, plenty of aircraft dotted about. He looked it over for three seconds and then ran away and hid.

  “Congratulations, Simon,” he said aloud. “You have located the enemy and you have him at your mercy. Now jump on the buggers and win the war. Piece of cake.”

  From beside his seat he pulled out the battered metal chamberpot that had been dropped by the Me-109, and placed it between his knees. He slid open the cockpit hood and locked it. “Piece of cake,” he said again, and before he could give himself a chance to think, he shoved everything into a corner: stick, rudder, throttle; and hurtled into clear air.

  The triangle of runways spread across his windscreen, tilted almost vertical. Aircraft were perched on them like flies on a wall. Some of the flies were moving. Stickwell felt a tremor begin to build as the speed increased. He straightened his legs to get more force on the rudder-pedals and wrapped both hands around the spade-grip of the control column. A red flare burst above the airfield tower and fell sideways. The howl of the Merlin grew and intensified, like a power saw screaming at a hardwood log, and he rolled the Hurricane straight, swinging the airfield back to the horizontal. Suddenly everything down there seemed to be moving. Men who had been walking were running, vehicles were vanishing behind hangars, the very hangars were changing as their huge doors slid shut. The activity gave Stickwell a surge of confidence: he was making them jump! Then the flak opened up and everywhere the sky was dotted and blotted with bursts of brown and puffs of white.

  He leveled out at fifty feet and aimed for the control tower half a mile away. It was like flying through a tunnel: everything in front was abnormally clear and sharply detailed, everything to the sides was a streak, a blur. The flak ceased. “Thank you!” Stickwell shouted, and then saw why: a plane had just taken off, was heading for him. Twin engines, long thrusting snout, lean and hungry look: Messerschmitt 110. The pilot hauled its nose up and four points of fire blazed from the top of the snout. “Hey!” Stickwell shouted. The streams of bullets seemed to strain upward and chase him, but the Messerschmitt was always ten feet too low. It flashed beneath him. “You bastard!” screamed Stickwell. The fright left him furiously angry. He skidded away from the tower, chucked the Hurricane onto the other wingtip and whipped back in a full circle, hunting for the 110.

  It was gone. Nowhere. “Bugger it!” he bawled. The flak returned, chasing him with its dirty snowballs, and he was overtaken by rage. Everyone ganged up on Sticky! He kept turning, looking for blood, and into his tunnel vision swam a line of parked aircraft.

  The blast of his eight Brownings made him flinch, and their recoil checked the Hurricane like a headwind. He kept his thumb on the button and gloried in those rods of golden fury converging to thrash and smash one German plane after another, until he had swept past the line and there was only a petrol bowser in view so he gave it a massive burst and felt it blow up beneath him and help the Hurricane on its way like a wave heaving a boat.

  It was a good time to go. A dozen ropes of tracer in lots of jolly colors were snaking about, seeking to snag him. Planes were getting airborne all around, mainly little 109’s. Something walloped the Hurricane’s tail and made the plane skitter. Bullet-strikes pounded the engine-cowling, stripping paint, flinging ricochets past the cockpit, some bouncing off the reinforced windscreen. Stickwell prayed nothing was bust and hared over the perimeter.

  Jinking and swerving between a house and a haystack, he felt something loose banging about in the cockpit. He was over a hill and crossing a lake before he felt safe enough to look down. It was the old metal jerry. He’d forgotten to drop it.

  A glimmer of wintry sunshine leaked through the clouds as he banked, turned, and aimed for the hill. It tinged the lake with silver, leaving the rest of the water twice as black, twice as cold. He was amazed at what he was doing: he muttered, admiringly: “This isn’t like you, Sticky.” Racing over the hilltop he passed an Me-109, going flat-out in the opposite direction: gone before he could even wave. A mile or so ahead, thick black smoke climbed high, billowing like deep velvet.

  The Hurricane smashed through the smoke and reappeared in the middle of the airfield like the demon king in a pantomime. He swung toward the tower, tossed the jerry out of the cockpit, immediately slammed the plane into an opposite bank, and flew straight into a burst from a heavy machinegun.

  The instrument panel seemed to blow itself to bits. For a second, Stickwell couldn’t see through the chaos of splintered glass and wood. Automatically he leveled out and climbed. That gave the flak batteries a better view. There was a hell of a bang under the port wing and the poor bloody Hurricane was hurled on its side. When he got it straight the cockpit had cleared and there was a great rip in the port wing with petrol gushing from it. Automatically, he dived. “Make up your sodding mind!” he shouted at himself. The barrier of smoke loomed up and he rushed at it thankfully.

  The hill led back to the lake, the lake to a river. Nobody chased him, nobody caught him. He followed the river through a forest, staying always at tree-level, counting every mile he put between himself and that frightful place, until eventually the truth was inescapable. He had got away with it. Amazing!

  Well, perhaps not so amazing. The light was getting bad: that glimmer of sunshine had marked the end of the afternoon. Now gloom blotted out the horizon. Stickwell felt safe enough to climb to a thousand feet and try to get his bearings.

  From a thousand feet the world looked equally bleak in all directions. His compass, of course, was a ruin. Bearings would not be easy to get. His left wing had stopped leaking petrol, which meant that one tank was empty. The Merlin sounded happy enough. But how long, oh Lord, how long?

  The answer to that was twenty-seven minutes.

  Stickwell guessed which way France lay and tried to keep a straight course in that direction while searching for landmarks. The cockpit stank of some disgusting chemical from the smashed-up panel, and his face was stinging: he touched it and shards of glass came away on his gloves; but as long as the Merlin was happy, he was happy. He was happier than he had ever been. He had proved himself. He belonged!

  After twenty-seven minutes the Merlin coughed once, and then died. The nose dropped. Stickwell poked his head out and tried to see something helpful through the windmilling propeller. It was gloomy down there. Nothing but fields. Oh well, one field was as good as another. He watched and waited while the Hurricane whooshed softly downward. He could hear the fluting of air in the gun-ports. A lovely sound. He noticed a hedge drifting past, and then everything seemed hidden by the wings so he guessed it was time to haul the stick back. He guessed too soon. Slightly less than three tons of fighter fell out of the sky like a truckload of bricks. Stickwell’s body jack-knifed inside his straps and his head cracked against the gunsight. The plane bounced twice and went skating across a muddy pasture, but he knew nothing of that.

  “Overdue?” said Rex. “Who gave him permission to be overdue?”

  “More to the point, sir,” Moran said, “who gave him permission to fly?”

  Rex looked wistfully at the billiard table and handed his cue to Mother Cox. “If you don’t win now,” he told him, “I’ll have you grilled in parsley butter with an apple in your mouth.” He took Moran outside. “You didn’t know he�
��d gone?”

  “He didn’t even get clearance from the tower. Just climbed aboard and skedaddled.”

  “So he might be anywhere.” Rex ran his knuckles along the top of a radiator. “And anywhere is a big place. Especially at night.”

  “I talked to his fitter,” Moran said. “He says Sticky took that old tin jerry with him, the one the Messerschmitt dropped.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser.”

  Rex went upstairs and told the adjutant.

  “Sounds as if he was pissed,” Kellaway said. “He wandered in here a couple of hours ago, talking a lot of cock.”

  “What, for instance? It might give us a clue.”

  Kellaway scratched his head with the eraser-end of a pencil. “He said he wanted to join the cowboys.”

  Rex sighed, and walked over to a typewriter. Using one finger, he hit a few keys at random. “Anything else?”

  “Or the merchant navy, he said. Frankly, I didn’t pay much attention. You know what they’re like. They all talk a load of cock half the time.”

  Rex nodded. “You’d better tell Headquarters he’s missing.”

  Hornet squadron was sitting down to dinner when Skull hurried in. “Rheims just called,” he said. “The French army have a report of an airplane apparently making a forced landing near the Belgian border. They seem to think it might be a Hurricane.”

  “Seem to think?” Rex said. “Might be? What’s the matter? Can’t they go and look?”

  “No, they can’t. It’s inside Belgium.” Skull spread out a map. “There. Between Bouillon and Florenville,” he said. “Near Sedan.”

  “About sixty miles from here,” Moran said. “I bet that’s him.”

  “If so, the Belgians will, of course, have interned him,” Skull said confidently. “They guard their neutrality very jealously, so I’m told.”

  “Damn their neutrality!” Rex cried. His fist came down on the map with a crash that made the candelabras flicker. “I want my pilot! Who’s with me?”

  At ground level the night was so black that the pilots crossed the field with arms outstretched. A local thaw had melted all the snow. Only the squelch of the gumboots of the man in front guided them; and when the French officer stopped, the line behind him bumped into each other and stumbled and cursed beneath their breath.

  The Frenchman steered Rex to an oak tree and showed him a ladder that was lashed to the trunk. It proved to be the first of three. Rex guessed they were fifty feet up when they stopped climbing. The darkness was fractionally less: after a lot of staring between the branches he thought he could see the blurred beginnings of more fields.

  The officer took Rex’s arm and pointed it. “par là” he whispered. “Peut-être cent mètres, pas plus. Au milieu d’un champ.”

  Rex stared beyond his arm, but it might as well have been pointing into a coalsack. “Vous pouvez le voir?” he asked.

  “Non. Mais nous avons illuminè la terre avec une fusée éclairante. Vous comprenez? Lumière brillante.”

  “A flare. You sent up a flare?”

  “Oui, oui.”

  “Didn’t it attract the Belgians? Faire venir les Belges?”

  “Non.”

  They climbed down.

  “Gather round,” Rex said softly. “Stickwell’s Hurricane is apparently in the middle of a field, about a hundred yards ahead. Now the French have, at my request, already cut the barbed wire to let us through. They’ve also stationed a very large tractor by the hole. We’re going to take some wire rope and tow the plane back over the border. We’re also going to collect Stickwell, of course, if he’s there. Who’s got Reilly? I’ll take him now. Right, off we go. If anyone gets lost, find the rope. That’ll lead you home.”

  The French officer guided them to the wire. A hulking caterpillartractor made a heavier blackness in the night. Someone sitting on it cleared his throat as they passed. Another man gave Rex the looped end of the wire rope. He stepped through the gap and leaned forward to make the rope pay out. The drum squeaked as it turned, in time with his steps. Others took hold of the rope and the resistance vanished. Rex tramped forward with Reilly at his side. The drum-squeak faded to nothing.

  He took short paces to avoid splashing through puddles, and counted his paces: At a hundred and twenty he stopped and looked around, still blind in the blackness. He could smell the Hurricane, an unmistakeable reek of oil and petrol and coolant. Reilly smelled it too and strained against his collar.

  The wreckage lay thirty yards to the right. One wing had snapped in half; the other had buckled and was pointing upward, like an extra rudder. The tail-unit was nearly torn off and the fuselage looked thoroughly dislocated. All this he saw by the shielded glow of a flashlight.

  The cockpit was empty.

  Rex found Moran. “If the Belgians took him,” he whispered, “they’d have left a guard, wouldn’t they?”

  “Maybe he bailed out.”

  “This looks more like a belly-landing to me.”

  Moran fingered the edge of the cockpit. “The hood’s been locked open. Maybe he got thrown out and broke his neck.”

  “Maybe. Look: you get the rope fixed. I’ll scout around.”

  He walked slowly along the track plowed out by the Hurricane, feeling the broken turf under his feet. Reilly was not interested. Reilly wanted to go a different way. Eventually Rex gave in and allowed himself to be towed behind the dog. Reilly got more excited, thrusting this way and that as the scent twisted and turned, until he suddenly stopped and began scratching at something. Rex took out the flashlight and flicked it on and off. They were standing beside a fox’s earth. He dragged Reilly away. “This is serious,” he told him.

  The rope was hooked around the Hurricane when he got back. Rex sent the new man, Lloyd, to tell the tractor driver to start hauling. The rest stood with their hands in their pockets and shivered. They had left the mess without having had dinner, and it was starting to rain.

  Reilly howled.

  “Shut up!” Rex hissed, and jerked the leash. Reilly howled more loudly, a long and passionate delivery. Rex stooped and groped for him. Reilly felt the leash slacken and he leaped forward, breaking Rex’s grip, and charged into the night. “Heel!” Rex commanded, uselessly.

  “Bloody foxes,” he explained. “Oh well.”

  For another minute they stood listening to the feeble patter of the drizzle.

  The tractor rumbled distantly. The rumble rose to a roar and, as if this had been a drumroll in a circus, a searchlight split the night. It came from the Belgian end of the field and it shone almost horizontally, boring a dazzling hole through which the rain drifted like smoke.

  “Everybody down!” Rex shouted. They flattened themselves on the boggy grass. The searchlight scanned fast and found the Hurricane, which by now was bouncing and bucking as the rope began to wind in. Caught in the narrow glare, the wreck seemed to be making its own way over the field, and the searchlight followed it as if fascinated.

  For five seconds they pressed their faces in the mud. A loudhailer spoke, harshly and incomprehensibly. Rex raised his head. “Keep well away from the plane!” he called. “Get back to the wire! Run!”

  They heaved themselves up and ran, splashing and skidding. The Belgians noticed something: the searchlight wandered suspiciously. Just as it was about to start nibbling on the first runner, it changed its mind and swung back to the other side of the field. There it hunted around until it found Stickwell, lurching across the grass while Reilly repeatedly jumped up and scrabbled at him.

  Everyone stopped. They could hear Stickwell snarling at the dog: “Gerroff! Gerroff! Bloody animal …” The loudhailer manufactured another string of urgent noises. Stickwell seemed suddenly to become aware of the light. He turned and squinted at it through his fingers. More loudhailer. He dropped his hands and walked on. A rifle cracked. Stickwell halted. Reilly sat and scratched himself behind the ear. “What’s up?” Stickwell asked vaguely.

  “Forget him!” Rex told the others. “
Leave him! Keep running!”

  Rex stood, sucking in dank air as the squelch of gumboots receded. He switched on his flashlight and waved it, signaling to the Belgians; then he threw it, with a careful underarm lob, away from Stickwell. The beam flickered through the night, bounced, and stayed on.

  Rex fell flat. The searchlight raced over him and started searching. At once he was up and running, calling Stickwell’s name. Reilly heard, and came to meet him. They blundered about, splashing through shallow pools. “What’s the game?” Stickwell asked, complaining. Rex ran at the voice and they collided. Rex grabbed an arm and headed for the barbed wire. “Here, what’s the rotten game?” Stickwell demanded. “Come on!” Rex urged. Stickwell fell down and took Rex with him.

  The searchlight was coming back. It had another look at the Hurricane, now being hustled along at a steady pace, and then rediscovered Stickwell and Reilly, with Rex as a bonus.

  The loudhailer barked. It was obviously an order.

  “Come on!” Rex said. “Run, you silly bugger!”

  Stickwell got up. The light was merciless. It bleached him, flattened him, rubbed out all color. “Wossa game?” he muttered. His legs folded. Rex caught him and heaved him onto a shoulder and set off at a slithering trot.

  The fizz of the bullet overhead reached his ears before the bang. He tried to zigzag and dodge the searchlight but it tracked him with appalling ease. Mud doubled the weight of his boots. All the time, the loudhailer kept barking, the tractor roaring, the battered Hurricane squealing and screeching. The next fizz-bang sounded closer, much closer, an angry insect looking for trouble. Two warnings, he thought. Third time unlucky.

  Obviously they wouldn’t miss. Aiming along this beam was like dropping stones down a well. Stickwell grew heavier with every stride, but the wire seemed to get no closer.