Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  The speckle of dots split in two, and one part fell away. “Hilltop aircraft,” Rex called, “bandits at one o’clock, up we go.” They climbed toward the enemy. The dots took shape as tiny crosses, the crosses grew tails; light gleamed on cockpits and prop-discs. “Pick your targets,” Rex said calmly. How the hell can I? Fanny Barton thought. You’re slap in front of me, you great turd. All the same he chose a 109 at the left rear and hoped it was being flown by a panicky cretin who would stall and pick his nose and get himself shot down before he could …

  The 109’s almost vanished. One moment they were diving, the next they were head-on, knife-edge wings nearly invisible. And then they were sheering off, climbing away. “No stomach,” Rex grunted. Barton watched the enemy make height, and let his muscles unclench. He felt weak, and he took a deep breath of oxygen. Now why did they do that? he asked himself, and the answer came back: Because they know where we’re going and what we’re doing and they want the Battles.

  Three more times they met bands of German fighters. They were at various heights, in various strengths: a dozen 110’s, a handful of 109’s, a mixed bunch of both, maybe twenty-strong. Each time the enemy wandered over, had a look, and lost interest. “Don’t worry, we’ll catch them on the way back,” Rex said. Cox, at Red Three, glanced unhappily at his leader.

  They droned on. There was nothing but a sea of dirty cloud beneath them. Occasionally it split open and revealed an underwater glimpse of a lot of even dirtier cloud. At the tail of the formation, Fitz Fitzgerald realized that he had stopped feeling afraid. Ever since they took off he had been frightened, and whenever the enemy came near he had begun trembling so much that he had to force himself to breathe; but now, suddenly, he seemed to have run out of fear. It didn’t make him any happier. Anyone who’d been shot down and wasn’t afraid it might happen again must be very stupid.

  “Right, Hilltop aircraft, we’re there,” Rex announced.

  Beautiful, Moran thought. Now turn around and go straight home and don’t talk to any strangers.

  They flew a wide circle. “We’ll just pop down and have a look,” Rex said. Moran glanced sideways at Fitzgerald and threw up a hand in disgust. “The Battle boys might need some help,” Rex added. Somebody pressed his transmission switch and blew a raspberry.

  The descent through cloud seemed endless. The lower they went the thicker it got; and then abruptly it rose like a theater curtain and they were in clear air. Eight hundred feet below, a broad band of water cut across the landscape. “Albert Canal!” Rex said triumphantly. “Right: fingers out.”

  They followed the canal, throttles wide open, exhausts trailing smoke, and saw flak bursting a few miles ahead. The nearer they got to it the more there was, each burst spawning two more, doubling and redoubling until the sky was blotched with blackness, flecked with small white puffs, streaked with red and green and orange. “Holy shit,” someone said quietly. “Shut up!” Rex barked. “Radio discipline!”

  Baggy Bletchley had been right about one thing. The cloud was a godsend to the Battles. It had hidden them from the enemy fighters. It had also forced them desperately low on their bombing runs. The Hornet pilots could see three Battles at about five hundred feet: slim monoplanes flying straight and level through the barrage like blind men walking down the middle of a busy road.

  One exploded. A thick line of flak appeared as if someone had shaken a loaded pen at the sky and the Battle just touched a blot and blew up: a flicker of incandescence that pulverized three men in the time it took to draw breath. Almost at once another plane was hit, and it angled steeply downward as if seeking out the source of the hurt. The third bomber was on fire. It dropped its bombs and tried to climb away, but though the nose went up the plane did not. Flak raged around it, obsessed with annihilation. Still the Battle slogged on. The Hornet pilots saw its bombs burst in a long row, nowhere near the bridge, and then the plane sank and hit the ground, and the flames claimed it with a rush.

  The Hurricanes swept through the dying flak like cavalry fording a stream. Rex led them up through the cloud and headed west. Every machine had been holed. “Close up,” Rex said to them. “I can’t afford stragglers.”

  Almost at once, CH3 called him: “Bandits behind, bandits behind, coming down now.”

  Rex wheeled the squadron. They were still in the spearhead formation and they needed a wide turning-circle. Patterson, at Yellow Three, was looking from Barton’s wingtip to Cox’s tailplane and back again when the corner of his eye glimpsed a double file of Messerschmitt 110’s hurtling at him from the side. Hot flame bubbled out of the leading pair. The planes split left and right. Two more sprang forward, pumping fire, heaved apart, were replaced. Bullet-streams flickered and slashed across the Hurricanes. Patterson felt them rip through his fuselage and he shouted with fear and anger; by then the 110’s were gone, the squadron had made its turn, and there in front was a pack of 109’s, pouring down, head-on.

  Rex immediately hauled back and climbed. Cox and Cattermole went with him and fired when he fired. Yellow Section, chasing too hard, swerved outward to avoid them. Blue Section instinctively followed Yellow. Within a second the squadron had scattered and the plunging 109’s were hosing its exposed flanks with fire. For an instant the air was brightly stitched with tracer. Then the 109’s sliced past the wallowing Hurricanes and howled off into nowhere. “Regroup!” Rex was shouting. “Hilltop, regroup! Hilltop, regroup!”

  It was a struggle. They were all over the sky. Barton was undamaged but Patterson was not: control cables hit, probably: the plane wouldn’t do what he told it, needed continuous full opposite rudder to stop it swinging left. Gordon couldn’t see through his bullet-crazed windscreen and his cockpit was filling with black-green smoke, until he got the canopy open. Moran was all right apart from a perforated wing that vibrated during turns. Fitzgerald’s propeller was making a noise like a rusty saw hitting a rusty nail: it had probably stopped a couple of bullets. CH3 had seen the enemy coming and climbed above them. Lloyd too was intact.

  The man in real trouble was Moke Miller. He had no fingers on his left hand.

  The burst from the 109 that chopped through his knuckles also hit him in both thighs, missing the bone but tearing great holes in the muscle. At the same time, a spent bullet ricocheted around the cockpit and smashed into his mouth. This hurt most of all. The agony of torn lips and tongue and broken teeth was too great and he blacked out. At once his mouth filled with blood and he began to choke. The choking brought him back to consciousness: he coughed and spat, and lifted his left hand to wipe off the mess. But the glove seemed to be hinged. It flapped open the wrong way. As he looked, blood ran out in a brilliant red stream. Pain raged through the hand, a flame that kept flaring bigger and hotter until once again his brain rejected it, his vision fogged, his ears went deaf, and the cockpit receded as if he were falling backward.

  When he could see again, the horizon was moving rapidly from left to right. There seemed to be no end to this rotation.

  After a while he noticed that the Hurricane was flying a continuous bank. It was therefore making a circle. He looked down and saw his feet on the rudder-pedals and his right hand gripping the control column. That explained everything. He moved his feet and screamed at the pain in his legs. The Hurricane leveled out. He was sick, vomit and blood and bits of broken teeth slopping down his front. Needle-sharp sparks of light danced furiously before his eyes. His ears were full of a loud beehive buzz. The dancing lights faded to soft purple blooms and the buzz died and a voice was speaking to him.

  “… any damage? How’s your radio? Blue Leader to Blue Three, over.”

  Miller looked out and saw Flip Moran flying alongside. He tried to speak but his mouth was too broken so he shook his head instead. Gobs of blood flew off and stained the Perspex.

  “Are you hit, Blue Three?”

  Miller showed him his left hand. That was a mistake. The hand burned like a furnace. The needle-sparks rushed back to the dance and the beehive-b
uzz surged.

  “Stay with me, Blue Three. We’ll see you home.”

  The squadron regrouped and flew west. Miller did very well: he switched on his oxygen, he tucked his left hand under his chin so as to cut down the blood flow, he coughed out most of the debris, he even got rid of his goggles, which were spattered with blood. For twenty miles he tagged along at the rear, seeing nothing but Moran’s plane to his right. Then CH3 called: “Bandits behind, bandits behind. 109’s coming down.”

  Rex wheeled the squadron again, but Miller flew on. Violent tactics like that were beyond him now. Moran hesitated, then turned and joined him. He gestured downward: down where the cloud offered cover. Miller fed this information into his stumbling, fumbling brain. Eventually his good right arm responded. They went down.

  This time Rex managed to face the enemy fighters before they could strike. The diving 109’s still looked no bigger than skylarks. Fanny Barton marveled at CH3’s eyesight as he braced himself for another split-second whizz-bang head-on attack. It never came. The Messerschmitts curled away and went into a wide orbit—all except one, which pulled up to a climbing stall, toppled sideways, and went down again in a slow, flat spiral, trailing smoke.

  “Decoy,” Rex said. “Old trick.”

  Hornet squadron held height and held formation and watched the decoy, while the other 109’s orbited and watched them. Eventually the decoy gave up and climbed back to rejoin his friends.

  “Let’s go,” Rex said. They turned and flew westward. The 109’s followed. Twice more, CH3 called a warning; twice more, Rex wheeled the squadron and the attackers sheered off. Boy Lloyd, trailing along behind, had time to watch and wonder. It seemed a stupid way for the Germans to behave; they were just making nuisances of themselves. It reminded him of a yarn he had read when he was a boy: all about British infantry in the desert forming a hollow square to beat off the fuzzy-wuzzies. Every time Rex wheeled the squadron the Huns got cold feet.

  Lloyd was watching the enemy and wondering what sort of pansies they were when CH3 called: “Bandits behind, bandits behind!”

  Simultaneously the 109’s tipped into a dive. Lloyd stared up. He watched them for perhaps two seconds. When he looked down the Hurricanes, had disappeared. He fingered his transmission switch, thinking Rex ought to know about those 109’s. That made three seconds. He was still fingering it when tracer started flickering past. He blinked, and actually heard the first meaty thud-thud-thud of cannonfire. Three and a half seconds after CH3’s warning, those cannonshells smashed through the tail unit, whizzed along the fuselage, punched a dozen holes in the seat-back, and blew most of Boy Lloyd’s chest and stomach all over the instrument panel.

  The shells still had enough energy to bash through the reserve petrol tank just beyond the panel and rip open the glycol header tank in front of that. Some shells went on and battered the engine. Fuel gushed backward and ignited. It made a long, brilliant streamer, as thin and bright as a knight’s pennant. Then one of the wings came off and the Hurricane was just a piece of falling junk.

  The enemy aircraft that destroyed it was a 110, the last of three that had come out of the sun. The other two dived too far and too fast; when Rex wheeled they overshot their target. But the third had had time to see a lone Hurricane flying straight and level and looking the wrong way, and he gratefully slid into place dead astern. CH3, still weaving, saw it happen. He also saw the departing 110 fly across the diving 109’s and force them to swerve away: the German pilot, he guessed, had been too busy watching his victim go down. It was Hornet squadron’s first bit of luck all day.

  Ten minutes later they, caught up with Moran and Miller, limping along half-in, half-out of cloud. Almost immediately they ran into a dozen 109’s, evidently on their way home. There was a short, savage skirmish and Flash Gordon’s engine died in the middle of it. He drifted through a couple of dogfights, shouting angrily at people to get out of his way, when a bucketful of bullets pounded past his head and the stink of petrol surged everywhere, and he bailed out. He fell head-first. A Hurricane streaked beneath him, so close that the wash of air sent him tumbling. He tumbled for a very long way, sprawling and spinning like a bad acrobat, until he plunged into cloud and pulled the rip-cord.

  The 109’s broke off and cruised away. What was left of Hornet squadron caught up with Miller and Moran again. They went down through the cloud and Rex called Amifontaine. By great good fortune it was only ten miles away.

  “Blue Three pancakes first,” Rex ordered.

  Moran escorted Miller down while the others circled and watched.

  Miller knew he had a problem. His problem was that he could do only one thing at a time, and doing that one thing was a sluggish business. His legs had stopped hurting. He felt nothing from the waist down. His left hand was just a stump with a flap on it, sloppy with blood. Maybe it would move the throttle lever, maybe not. His right arm was okay, provided he gave it plenty of time. That was another problem. Landing a Hurricane meant doing several things at once, quite quickly.

  Also he was very sleepy. His mouth had formed a thick shield of dried blood, behind which the pain merely flickered occasionally. He watched Moran and did what Moran did, if he could.

  “Lose more speed, Moke,” Moran said. They were far too fast.

  “Throttle back, Moke. Lose speed.” No flaps down, no wheels. Far too fast.

  Miller poked at the throttle with his bloody stub and failed to shift it. He looked at Moran and the other Hurricane distorted hugely, like a bad reflection, so he looked away. Moran was shouting at him again. The drome was down there, somewhere. He didn’t know where. He took his right hand off the joystick, swung it, and bashed the throttle with his fist, hard.

  Too hard. The engine faltered, the Hurricane nearly stalled. Moran bawled something and Miller gave the stick an almighty shove.

  The Hurricane teetered for a moment. Moran flinched: she was going to fall on her tail. Instead she dropped her nose and swooped; swooped like a hawk; but there was only a hundred feet of air beneath her and she needed twice that. She hit the ground hard and broke her back. The wreckage slithered fifty yards, crushed and concertinaed so badly that at first the crash crew couldn’t even find Miller.

  In the ambulance his left glove finally dropped off. Not much blood was coming out of the remains of the hand. Not much blood was left.

  Mary Fitzgerald was all right. She was eating a small steak and drinking a half-bottle of Macon while she watched the boats bustling up and down the Rhone.

  When she limped into Nancy in the middle of the night, every step she took had depressed her more. The town was clogged with refugees, all either anxious or angry. There was a lot of misery, plenty of squalor, and quite a bit of drunkenness. The railway station was jammed; men were fighting to get at the ticket counters; a train was standing, so crammed that people had climbed onto the roof. But the locomotive had no steam up.

  It seemed pointless to go back into the streets. She walked along the tracks out of the station, into the darkness. Normally she would have considered that the height of folly. Now, with folly everywhere, it seemed quite normal behavior.

  A mile down the tracks she came across a small freight train, waiting in a siding. The crew gave her some hot coffee. They weren’t going into Nancy, they said; not into that madhouse. Besides, everyone there wanted to go to Paris. This train was going south. Dijon.

  Mary gave them some money and they looked the other way as she climbed into an empty cattletruck. When she woke, they were sliding open the doors. Dijon. The station was crowded but she managed to squeeze into an express to Lyon, although all the seats were taken. Lyon was better still. She got a first-class seat to Nîmes. She washed and changed in the lavatory, and found the dining-car. The line followed the Rhone, which was almost as spectacular as the steak. Mary began to enjoy herself.

  Nicole had run into difficulties. The first problem had been a series of punctures. By the time she repaired them and toiled into Mailly it was past mid
night. She slept on a park bench. When the sun came up she found a café that served breakfast, and they told her how to get to the aerodrome.

  She heard a distant roar when the squadron took off, but she never saw the planes. When she reached the airfield, the sentry at the main gate refused to let her in. She explained that she was the wife of Pilot Officer Gordon, but the sentry had only recently joined the squadron and that name meant nothing to him. He was not very intelligent, and he had a way of looking at her with one eye half-closed that she found annoying.

  “At least,” she said, “tell me if his squadron has arrived here.”

  The sentry had heard all about French fifth columnists and saboteurs. “Ah,” he said. “That would be telling, wouldn’t it?”

  “I demand to speak to the adjutant.”

  While the sentry was considering this, a car came out of the gates and stopped. He stamped to attention. “Hello, Nicole!” Micky Marriott called. “Looking for Flash? They’ve all gone, I’m afraid. You just missed them.”

  “Where? Where are they going?”

  Marriott scratched his nose while he wondered if he should tell her. He asked himself what possible harm it could do, and decided: none. “Belgium, of all places. Somewhere called Amifontaine.”

  “Belgium.” She knew from the radio that the main German thrust was toward Belgium. “When will they return?”

  “God knows. It’s all a bit confused at the moment.”

  “Perhaps they stay in Belgium?”

  “It’s quite possible. I honestly don’t know.”

  The sentry spoke. “Mr. Skelton’s gone to Belgium, sir.”

  “Skull has? What, by car?”

  “Checked him out myself, sir.”

  “Well, there you are, you see,” Marriott told her. “Everyone seems to be on the move. Can I give you a lift anywhere, by the way?”