Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  “The Pole and the Czech,” CH3 said at once.

  “Oh? What makes you so sure?”

  “They said unless they get Spits they’ll strangle someone, probably you.”

  “You’re kidding!” Barton said.

  “They told me the same,” Skull said.

  “Good God.”

  “I’ll have a quiet word with them,” the adjutant said. “They obviously don’t understand the form.”

  They drove in silence for a while.

  “Interesting that none of us has mentioned the biggest problem,” Skull remarked. He gave them five seconds to work it out, and said: “Young Gordon.”

  “Flash has certainly turned a bit wild and woolly.” Kellaway thumped his bad knee: long journeys made it ache. “Still, he always was peculiar.”

  “No, he’s more than peculiar,” Skull said. “Have you seen his eyes? He’s in a state that many a doctor in the outside world would consider verges on the certifiable.”

  “Extraordinary thing,” Kellaway said. “He told me his wife was dead before she was actually killed. I’ve checked the dates. The poor sod was convinced he’d killed her the day before she actually bought it. I mean, that’s enough to drive anyone loopy.”

  “Anyway, this isn’t the outside world,” Barton said. “And I like Flash. He may be dotty but he’s not completely crackers. I mean, he hasn’t tried to strangle anyone, has he?”

  “The real question is: can he fly?” CH3 asked. “That’s all that matters. You don’t want a fighter pilot who’s completely normal, for Pete’s sake. That’s what’s wrong with Stainless Steel or Iron Filings or whatever his name is. Too well-behaved. Never picks his nose, beats his wife or uses the lavatory while the train is standing in the station. Hopeless.”

  “I realize you don’t want a pillar of rectitude,” Skull said. “On the other hand, even if he can fly like a bird, do you want a lunatic?”

  “Flash isn’t a lunatic,” Kellaway said. “He’s on the daft side of crackers, I agree, but he’s not a lunatic, not yet. Believe me, I’ve seen plenty.”

  “I don’t even think he’s daft,” Barton said thoughtfully. “He’s just a bit … I dunno … potty, that’s all.”

  CH3 said: “Frankly, I’d put him on the loopy side of potty.”

  “Where exactly is that in relation to plumb loco?” Skull asked.

  “You’ve been to the pictures again,” Barton accused.

  “The Lone Ranger,” Skull said. “Now there is a thoroughgoing psychopath. Compared to him, Flash is restraint itself.”

  Flip Moran and Pip Patterson turned up at Brambledown that same evening. Both had been delayed by missed train connections. They were stiff from travel. Patterson had come from Scotland, Moran from Ulster. Moran had spent twenty-four hours in trains, on the ferry and then in more trains.

  They stood round-shouldered and stiff-legged at dispersal and watched Hurricanes circling the field, until one Hurricane landed and taxied over.

  Barton climbed down. “Glad you could make it,” he said. “Micky Marriott’s got your new kites ready. Grab some kit and do a test flight.”

  “Now?” Moran yawned enormously. “Sweet Jesus, Fanny. Can’t it wait till morning?”

  “We’re on convoy patrol in the morning. Eight o’clock.”

  “Christ … I wish I’d stayed at home.”

  “Well, that can easily be arranged,” Barton said crisply.

  Patterson flinched at the clamor of a klaxon amplified by the Tannoy. After ten seconds the racket stopped, and men were running to distant aircraft. “You want to watch out for that,” Barton said. “If you’re in the circuit and you see a white flare, clear off fast before you get mixed up in the scramble.”

  “Eight o’clock, eh?” Moran said. “That doesn’t leave a lot of time for me to work my flight up to the peak of perfection.”

  A white flare banged.

  “Times have changed,” Barton said. “It’s on-the-job training here.”

  A section of Spitfires bustled over the grass, put their noses down and shoved off, engines roaring hungrily.

  “Convoy patrol,” Patterson said. “I’ve never done that. What’s it like?”

  “Well, it’s not much fun,” Barton told him, “but on the other hand it doesn’t serve any useful purpose, either. Can you swim?”

  “Not much. Why?”

  “Come on, Pip,” Moran said. “Let’s go upstairs before it gets dark. You know how frightened I am of the dark.”

  The waterspouts seemed to freeze at their maximum height for a few seconds. The early morning sun picked them out, as white as heaps of whipped cream. Then they slowly collapsed and dissolved and tumbled into the sea. Between and around them the convoy crawled, and around the convoy the escort destroyers flickered with gunfire.

  It was four minutes past eight. Hornet squadron had just seen the convoy. The German bombers finished their attack and climbed into cloud. There was an endless layer of the stuff at three thousand feet. By the time the Hurricanes were near enough to help, the raid was over. One ship was dead in the water, another was burning, the rest trudged on, and the destroyers all fired at the Hurricanes, which came as no surprise to Fanny Barton. He took his squadron out of their range and flew a wide circle around the convoy.

  The patrol lasted an hour and ten minutes. Time passed slowly. They went round and round the convoy in a permanent orbit. The monotony made it deadly. An enemy might slide out of cover at any second. It was seductively easy, as the twenty-ninth orbit merged into the thirtieth, to stop searching the blank and boring sky and look at the interesting ships instead.

  After an hour and ten minutes the convoy had traveled fifteen miles while the squadron had flown about two hundred miles. The relief escort had not appeared, but Barton turned for home. He glanced back only once, and saw gun-flashes on the destroyers, shell-bursts in the sky. That might mean the escort had arrived or it might mean something else. He looked away, punched a button on his VHF and asked for a bearing for Brambledown.

  The Sector ops officer was a middleaged squadron leader called Wood. He wore the brevet of an Observer and the purple-and-white-striped ribbon of the DFC, both much faded. “Look, old chap,” he said, “I’m the pig-in-the-middle. I can only tell you what the Navy told me, and according to them you chaps were late. Too late to stop a mob of Ju-88’s divebombing the convoy and sinking the …” He searched his blotter for the name. “… SS Benjamin.”

  “We weren’t late,” Barton said. “We were at the right place at the right time, but the convoy wasn’t there. The convoy was late.”

  “Um,” Wood said, and scratched the back of his neck with a pencil. “I don’t think the Navy will buy that, old boy.”

  “I don’t give a damn whether they buy it, sell it, or use it to wash their feet in. We were at the right place at the right time.”

  “Yes, of course, I’m sure. Too bad about the boat, though.”

  “Oh, come on, Woody, don’t talk balls. I’ve been flying convoy patrols ever since Dunkirk. It’s a mug’s game! Surely for Christ’s sake someone in Fighter Command has worked that out by now.”

  “Yes?” Wood tapped the pencil on his teeth. “Say on.”

  “Well, Jerry’s no fool, he knows by now how long our patrols stay up, I mean he’s had plenty of chance to find out, hasn’t he? He knows the weak point is the changeover, doesn’t he? And this weather’s perfect for him, isn’t it? Bit of dead reckoning, down through the cloud, there’s your convoy smiling up at you in the bomb-sights.”

  “Well …” Wood stuck the pencil in his ear. “Are you telling me we can’t protect these convoys?”

  “Not in the Straits of Dover, we can’t. Not with Jerry a short sprint away.”

  “Our fighters against his bombers?”

  “So what?” Barton swung his flying-boots onto the desk and knocked over a tankard full of pencils. “We’re usually too low and we’re always too slow. Convoy patrol means stooging about to sav
e fuel. Jerry doesn’t worry about fuel. Jerry comes at us like a bat out of hell.”

  “Yes.” Wood tried to clench the pencil between his upper lip and his nose. “He would, wouldn’t he?”

  “If you want to do something useful with that bloody silly thing,” Barton said, “you can cross out all convoy patrols.”

  “What—this?” The pencil slipped. Wood caught it and examined it as if he had never seen it before. “Not nearly big enough for that job, I’m afraid,” he said.

  Hornet squadron was released until 2 p.m. Barton and the flight commanders used the time to test the new pilots. Barton took off with Renouf.

  They climbed to ten thousand feet and went onto oxygen.

  “Okay, Red Two, listen,” Barton said. “Your job is to cover my tail. Stay with me. Where I go, you go, understand? If you lose me I’m dead. Right?”

  “Right, sir.”

  “Not sir. Red Leader.”

  “Right, Red Leader.”

  Barton half-rolled and dived and immediately lost Renouf.

  When they came together again, Barton said: “You just got me killed, didn’t you? Where the hell were you, Red Two?”

  “Sorry, Red Leader. Very sorry.”

  “Oh, that’s all right, then. I get a gutful of tracer from some Jerry on my tail and you’re very sorry, Red Two.”

  “Won’t happen again, Red Leader.”

  Barton chucked his Hurricane onto its right wingtip and charged off. For the next three minutes he dodged and swerved, reared up and stall-turned, threw himself in the odd loop and roll and skid. Renouf was always behind him.

  Barton leveled out and got his breath back.

  “Okay, Red Two, I’m a dirty great Heinkel. Give me a minute and then come and get me.”

  Barton went up a thousand feet and turned and flew west. Renouf had vanished. Barton cruised along, changing direction as the mood seized him, until he began to wonder if Renouf had got himself lost. The sun flickered. It was no more than the tremor of a stray eyelash, but Barton thumbed the safety off his gun-button. A Hurricane swam out of the dazzle, dummied a beam-attack and dipped beneath him. Not bad. Not at all bad.

  When they came together, Barton said: “Done any low flying, Red Two?”

  “Done a bit, Leader.”

  “Okay. You lead this time. As low as you like.”

  They landed twenty minutes later. Barton climbed down from the cockpit as his groundcrew got to work, refueling, cleaning the dead bugs off the windscreen, checking. The day was hot. He took off his parachute and dumped it on a wing. One of the fitters was whistling a perky little tune, with lots of trills: in the vast tranquility of the airfield it sounded amazingly neat and clearcut. “What’s that?” Barton asked. The fitter looked up, twirling a screwdriver. “That tune,” Barton said. “Little Sir Echo, sir,” the fitter said. Barton nodded. “Oh yes,” he said. He rested his head and arms on the wing. Already the metal skin was warm.

  Renouf walked up, Irvine jacket unzipped, parachute slung over his shoulder, helmet and mask dangling from his fingers. Barton did not raise his head. He could smell the sweet, crushed grass against the hot tang of the Merlin. “You can fly too low, you know,” he said. “I mean, we all like shaking the apples off the trees, but you were mowing the bloody lawn, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.” Renouf’s overcrowded face was serious but his eyes were bright.

  You little bastard, Barton thought, you were getting your own back. He remembered chasing Renouf into a valley that twisted and narrowed, and he shut his eyes. “All right,” he said. “Tell Macfarlane he’s next.”

  Steele-Stebbing’s face was one great grimace. Partly this was the drag of centrifugal force, partly it was nervousness. His Hurricane was tearing around a small circle in a near-vertical bank and he knew he was forcing it to turn harder than was good for it, so hard that his head and body were jammed immoveable and he could sense the intolerable strain on the aircraft through the awful strain on his muscles.

  “Tighter,” CH3 said. “Tighter.”

  Steele-Stebbing began to despair. They had been circling like this for an eternity. Five minutes, at least. First to the left, then to the right, then back to the left. He sucked down oxygen and tried to blink away the wandering sparks of light.

  “Tighter, tighter, for Christ’s sake. Tighter!”

  Steele-Stebbing heaved harder, harder than he knew he could, and screwed another couple of degrees of tightness into his turn. He still couldn’t see the other plane. Then suddenly it was slanting across his nose and diving hard. Gratefully he abandoned the turn and fell into a relaxed dive. After a thousand feet CH3 suddenly hoisted his Hurricane up into a climbing turn. Steele-Stebbing did his best to spring after him but his stomach rebelled and he vomited. After a while he tried to call CH3 and explain, but the microphone was so splattered and his mouth was so foul that it took rather a long time.

  Five minutes was enough to tell Moran that Haducek was an excellent fighter pilot. He had good eyes and a restless, suspicious manner: always looking behind him. He could do all the usual things with a Hurricane and several very unusual things, plus a couple of things that Moran had no wish to copy in case the wings came off. He cut short their mock dog-fight. “Good enough,” he said. “Relax now. We’ll just do a familiarization flight. Get to know the landmarks.”

  They flew down the coast to Beachy Head and turned over the Sussex Downs. Moran was routinely checking the sky above when Haducek left him. Moran had to search hard until he found the other Hurricane about three thousand feet below, climbing back up.

  Haducek resumed station, a hundred yards to the right. “Been out to buy a paper?” Moran asked.

  “I see bomber. Junkers 88, so I go down and bomber is Blenheim, only Blenheim, so come back. Damn shame, eh?”

  “Next time, tell me.”

  “I just told.”

  “Tell me first, you fool.”

  “Not me, no fool. I got two university degrees.”

  “Save it for later.”

  “How many university degrees you got, leader?”

  God speed the plow, Moran thought. As if the English aren’t bad enough, we have to have these overeducated anarchists from the Balkans too. Wherever the bloody Balkans are.

  It was so easy that Macfarlane paused and wondered what the catch was.

  Barton had told him to imagine that he, Barton, was a Dornier and to intercept him. Barton had then sheered off.

  Macfarlane had done as he had been taught and gained the advantage of height, rather a lot of height, about three thousand feet of height, and now Barton-the-supposed-Dornier was sitting there, stooging along, an absolute sitting duck. Or stooging duck. What could be easier?

  Macfarlane stuffed the nose down and proceeded to turn his height advantage into speed advantage, as per all the best textbooks. He was closing on his target at a spanking pace, something like 350 mph probably, when it turned and climbed toward him and, quick as winking Macfarlane whistled clear past it.

  He hauled his Hurricane out of the dive and climbed high again.

  The dummy Dornier was still there, stooging along, so he had another go. This time it turned away, just as he was closing, and he shot right past the bloody thing again! Trouble was, before he could do anything, a voice spoke in his earphones. “Bang-bang,” it said. “I thought you were supposed to attack me” Macfarlane twisted his head. Barton was fifty yards behind. He tried everything but he couldn’t shake him off. “Too bad,” Barton said. “You had your whole life ahead of you. It’s not fair, is it?”

  Zabarnowski and CH3 battle-climbed to fifteen thousand feet. CH3 leveled off, but Zabarnowski kept climbing. CH3 called him several times but the Pole ignored him. The last CH3 saw of him he was at twenty-five thousand feet: just a smudge on the sky. Thirty minutes later he was still up there, wandering about. CH3 gave up and went home. “We can’t wait,” Barton said. It was twelve-thirty and they were all in the crewroom except Zabarnowski. The old pi
lots sat, the new pilots leaned against the wall. Barton perched on a table, away from the windows and the distraction of aircraft.

  “Now, you’re all nice chaps,” he said. “The squadron has always had its fair share of nice chaps. This fellow, for instance.” He tipped a big buff envelope onto the table and held up an eight-by-ten print. “Fellow called Lloyd. Heart of gold … There’s another: Miller: everyone’s pal. Now here you see the friendly face of Dicky Starr. What a nice man Dicky was! And if this was Dutton then that must have been Trevelyan, or maybe it was the other way around, but it doesn’t much matter because they were both equally nice chaps, just like any of you. They all had something else in common, by the way. They made a mistake. Just one, but then one’s enough, isn’t it? Maybe they thought that, as they were such awfully nice chaps, they’d get a second chance. Strange idea, that, wasn’t it? I’m sure they wouldn’t have given any Jerry a second chance. Still …” Barton got off the table and began pinning the pictures to the wall, upside down. “If they were here now, I’m sure they’d want to wish you the very best of luck, but as it happens they’re all lying at the bottoms of various deep holes in various bits of France and Belgium. Nice chaps. Blown up, shot down, battered, shattered and chopped into dogsmeat, but oh-so-awfully-nice. Flip?”

  Moran said: “Mr. Haducek is a bloody idiot. He thought he saw a Junkers 88 so he went down all on his own to look. An idiot.”

  “I kill Germans,” Haducek said. “Anywhere.”

  “Not for long, you won’t. Fly alone, Germans kill you.”

  “Remember this,” Barton told them all. “If you see one Jerry, there’s almost certainly another not far away. Probably above you. Did you look above?” he asked Haducek. “No, you didn’t. Jerry never flies alone. So don’t you fly alone. CH3?”

  “Nobody has torn the wings off a Hurricane by turning it too hard,” CH3 said. “The kites we’ve got are all fully modified and they are bloody tough. Tougher than you,” he said to Steele-Stebbing. “We both flew the same fighter. I had my sight on your tail. You never got your sight on my tail. Never. If you’re not going to fly the machine to its limits, why bother to go up? I’ll get you a nice safe bicycle instead.”