Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  Steele-Stebbing stared, pale and miserable, at the upside-down picture of Moke Miller.

  “A Hurricane is not a horse,” Moran said. “You can’t hurt it.”

  Outside, the scramble klaxon went off. Barton waited for the din to stop.

  “Gunnery,” he said. “Bullets kill. Flying does not kill. You,” he said to Macfarlane, “went screaming about the sky as if you had a stick of ginger up your ass.” Macfarlane reddened. “By the time you reached the point of interception you were going so fast you had no time to fire. What’s the good of that?”

  “It’s what I was taught, sir. Maximum speed in attack.”

  “Un-teach yourself. And never make an absolute square-on beam attack,” Barton told Renouf. “Didn’t anyone tell you about deflection shooting?”

  “Yes, sir,” Renouf said, “but we didn’t have much practice.”

  “Bullets go slower than you think. Huns go faster. Make a beam-attack and hold the target in your sights and you might hit the plane behind it if you’re lucky.”

  “Give it plenty of lead,” CH3 said. “Allow one length, maybe two.”

  “Better still, don’t make a beam-attack,” Moran said. “Get behind him where you can’t miss.”

  A flight of Spitfires took off and the telephone rang. Barton closed one ear while he took the call. The crackling roar mounted to a booming thunder that climbed and faded. Barton hung up. “Grab some lunch,” he said. “We’re on fifteen-minute standby at one o’clock, not two.”

  As they surged to the door, Zabarnowski arrived. “What the hell happened to you?” CH3 asked.

  Zabarnowski made a face. “Lousy plane. After twenty thousand no climb, no speed, nothing. I want Spitfire.”

  “I told you we were going to fifteen thousand.”

  “Why? German fighters fly high.”

  “Next time, do what I say or you won’t fly anything.”

  “Is lousy, Hurricane,” Zabarnowski grumbled. “Is dump.”

  They had just sat down to lunch when an airman arrived with a message for Barton. Fitzgerald, Cox and Cattermole groaned. “‘A’ flight only,” Barton said. “Called to readiness. You’re leading, CH3.” Fitzgerald cheered softly, and relaxed. “A” flight grabbed chunks of bread and hurried out. Their flap wagon was waiting downstairs. The scramble klaxon was already blaring when they piled out at the crewroom. Two minutes later the first Hurricane was airborne.

  The controller spoke. “Hello, Mango Leader, this is Snowball. Steer one-three-zero, angels two. Ten plus bandits, five miles south of Folkestone.”

  “Mango Leader to Snowball,” CH3 said. “Check angels two?”

  “Mango Leader, confirm angels two.”

  “Okay, Snowball.” CH3 began climbing to three thousand feet. It was always better to be too high. Angels two? Nothing down there but tired seagulls.

  Crossing Romney Marsh, he saw the enemy far ahead. They looked like circling crows so they must be Ju-87’s, Stukas, divebombing a ship presumably. He cheered up: Stukas were easy meat; then he cheered down: there was bound to be an escort. Oh, well. “Mango aircraft,” he said. “Fight in pairs. Watch your back. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  They were flying in a wide, loose vic of three pairs: Cox and Macfarlane in White Section, CH3 and Steele-Stebbing in Red Section, Cattermole and Haducek in Yellow Section. The cloudbase had risen to five thousand and begun to fragment: the sky was as blue as it was gray. CH3 soon recognized the ship, a coaster from the morning convoy, left burning and disabled. Now it was being washed up-Channel by the tide.

  The Stukas made one last pass. It was remarkable how calm and unhurried they were. CH3 glanced down at his airspeed: 290 knots: a mile every thirteen seconds. Yet the Stukas continued to topple and plunge down their invisible roller-coasters like children at play. They were playing with the ship: it had taken so many hits that the decks were awash. They dropped their last bombs, stayed down low and headed for France.

  The Hurricanes could dive and catch them. CH3 looked at the broken cloud and saw nothing but broken sky. For a full minute he led the flight high above the Stukas and searched for the escort. By now they were in mid-Channel.

  “Mango Leader, this is Snowball. Any joy?”

  “Roger, Snowball. Eight or nine Stukas at angels zero.” He made one last search. Well, even the Germans made mistakes … “Mango White and Yellow, attack. Mango Red will provide cover.”

  The four Hurricanes fell away. CH3 felt a prickling at the back of his neck and he weaved the aircraft so that he could search behind. A high-pitched voice yapped: “Bandits, bandits! Three o’clock,” and he snapped his head around to see a flock of 109’s barreling down from the cloud. “Mango aircraft, bandits above,” he called. “Turn and face, turn and face.”

  Earlier he had throttled back to avoid overshooting the Stukas. Now, to get at the Messerschmitts, he thrust the lever forward and woke up the Merlin. It was like flicking a baton to bring in the bass trombones. A huge surge of power gave him a solid shove in the back, and the needles on the panel were jumping and quivering.

  But not enough.

  The 109’s were already too fast and too far away. They would escape Red Section, and hope to catch White and Yellow Sections on the turn.

  CH3 tugged at the tit for boost over-ride and got emergency power: a brutal abuse of the engine, a hammering racket that was worth an extra twenty miles an hour unless the Merlin blew herself apart. The cockpit vibrated savagely, shuddering so much he couldn’t focus his eyes on the 109’s but he guessed the range at a quarter of a mile, gave plenty of lead, fired a two-second burst, then another, and a third. All useless.

  White and Yellow Sections managed to complete their turn but they were laboring upward when the 109’s swept past in a storm of fire.

  CH3 turned off his boost over-ride. The Merlin ceased its racket, the cockpit stopped shaking and amazingly he saw all four Hurricanes still climbing. “Mango, regroup, regroup,” he ordered.

  They came together and he checked for damage. Macfarlane failed to answer. Cox eased alongside him. Macfarlane waved his radio lead, and grinned. “His VHFs gone duff,” Cox reported. “What he doesn’t know is he’s losing coolant. Not much. Just a dribble.”

  The Messerschmitts shadowed them back to the English coast and then turned away. By that time the trickle of coolant had become a stream and Macfarlane was no longer grinning. CH3 kept calling, telling him to do a belly-landing on the sands or to bale out before the engine caught fire. No response.

  Over Romney Marsh, at fifteen hundred feet, the coolant stopped.

  Macfarlane could see his temperature gauges knocking into the red. He could smell the heat. There was just enough elemental sense in him to switch off the magnetos and the fuel. A whispering silence washed over the plane. He gave up. It wasn’t a case of panic. It was simply that he had no idea what to do. Without power, or height, or someone to shout at him, or an airfield to aim at, he was helpless, childlike.

  His hands clung to the control column for comfort and the Hurricane made its own flightpath above the Kent countryside. It cleared the marsh, bypassed a little hill, sighed over an old stone barn, and settled on a small plantation of young fir trees. Macfarlane blinked at the hundreds of whippy treetops flickering past him, checking the fighter’s rush, softening its impact. The wings sank and sheared a path through the thicker branches. Bit by bit the plantation soaked up the impetus, until the Hurricane hit the ground with a bang that made Macfarlane’s teeth snap together. It careered out of the trees and slid into a meadow and stopped. Lucky man. There was even a pub in sight, and it was even open. Lucky, lucky man.

  The weather worsened after lunch, with rain squalls blowing in from the west. “B” flight got scrambled and recalled immediately, then scrambled again to hunt a pair of intruders reported over Canterbury. For more than an hour they were vectored back and forth, in and out of towering clouds, sent climbing to fifteen thousand, to eighteen, down to ten. Finally they achieved a
perfect interception on a section of Defiant fighters who were looking for the same intruders. Everyone went home.

  Daddy Dalgleish had boxed and played rugby for the Royal Air Force. While he was stationed with the Northwest Frontier Force in India he had broken a sentry’s jaw in three places with a single punch. The sentry had been a smelly tribesman, guarding Daddy after his airplane had forced-landed in the hills and he had been captured; he was eventually released following a lot of delicate diplomatic negotiations in which a couple of villages got bombed flat just to demonstrate the British government’s good faith.

  Now he was station commander at RAF Brambledown, responsible for three squadrons as well as all the ancillary paraphernalia in the way of cooks and clerks and medicos, which inevitably meant problems; and although Daddy Dalgleish’s instinct was to treat problems as if they were smelly sentries, he was a group captain and he often had to butter people up.

  When Fanny Barton and CH3 came into his office, he braced himself for a spell of buttering-up.

  “I understand you’re getting a bit browned-off with convoy patrols,” he said. “Always getting shelled by damnfool destroyers and so on.”

  Barton nodded.

  “I sympathize,” Dalgleish said. “Damn difficult job you’ve got. Calls for the greatest qualities. Dogged determination, steady nerve, staunch stamina. Nothing flashy. Just … backbone.”

  Barton grunted.

  “Must be a bit frustrating, too,” Dalgleish said, “not being able to make a big score. I know how you feel. Fighter pilot myself. The point is, it’s the convoy that counts. That’s the lifeline of the nation, isn’t it? And you chaps are doing a vital, an absolutely essential job of keeping the Hun off our ships, and doing it brilliantly.”

  “Are we, sir?” Barton asked.

  “No doubt about it.”

  “Then why are so many ships sunk?”

  “Well, Jerry’s bound to catch a few, isn’t he? I mean he’s got all the advantages. You’ve no need to feel bad about that. You’ve done your stuff.”

  “Some of us have done more than that, sir. I personally know of five or six pilots who got shot down on convoy patrol. Bloody good pilots, too. Not new boys. Flight commanders and the like.”

  “Yes, I realize that. We’ve witnessed some very gallant sacrifices in the last few weeks.”

  “Bloody stupid sacrifices,” CH3 said, “sir.”

  Dalgleish looked at him in surprise. “Are you … um … Canadian, Hart?”

  “American. Convoy patrol is the stupidest waste of fighter pilots imaginable. They’re tied to the convoy, they’re forced to fly slowly, they’re like staked goats waiting for the tiger. No wonder they get jumped.”

  “In the worst possible place, too,” Barton said. “Very wet, the English Channel, sir.”

  “Nobody underestimates the hazards, Barton,” Dalgleish said. “But I ask you, why are the Germans launching these desperate attacks? Because they know how crucial these convoys are.”

  “No, sir,” Barton said. “Because they know it’s a great opportunity to kill our fighter pilots. How many have we lost already? One hundred? Two hundred? It’s idiotic.”

  “Look,” Dalgleish said firmly. “All war comes down to a battle of wills. That’s what this is, a test of determination, and we mustn’t give in now. We mustn’t allow our morale to break. That’s why I wanted to talk to you both. It’s like a team … As long as the team has faith in its skipper it can do anything. You’re a New Zealander, aren’t you, Barton? You must have experienced this on the rugger field.”

  “No, sir.”

  “No?”

  “I never played rugby.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  “It struck me as a game for people who sit on their brains.”

  “Oh.” Dalgleish was briefly silenced. “Well … The fact remains, doesn’t it, these convoys are, as I said, the lifeline of the nation and—”

  “No, they’re not,” CH3 said, “sir.”

  “That bunch we escorted this morning,” Barton said. “Most of them were coasters. Colliers, stuff like that. Half of them were in ballast. They’re not even carrying cargo, for Christ’s sake!”

  “You can’t be sure of that.”

  “I got scrambled this afternoon,” CH3 said, “to protect one small ship that was going to sink anyway. We got jumped, shot up, lost a plane, damn near lost a pilot.”

  “But that’s the task of Fighter Command,” Dalgleish protested. “We have a duty—”

  “It’s not worth it, sir,” Barton said.

  “Send the stuff by rail,” CH3 said.

  “I see,” said Dalgleish. “You would just hand over the Straits of Dover to the Germans, would you? Admit failure? Tell the world we can’t even guard our own ships?”

  “Ah, now I understand,” CH3 said. “We’re flying these convoy patrols to avoid the embarrassment of losing face.”

  Dalgleish sighed. “I’m not surprised you don’t understand, Hart. It’s a matter of duty and dedication. We may be a young Service but we do have our traditions, you know.”

  “Drowning good pilots to get empty coal-boats past Dover,” Barton said. “Is that an RAF tradition, sir?”

  “We don’t measure honor by the ton,” Dalgleish said. That was, for him, a pretty weighty statement. On the strength of it he decided to bring the meeting to an end. “Believe me, I appreciate your concern for your men. But we all have to do things we don’t particularly enjoy, and convoy patrols are just one of those things. That’s war, I’m afraid.”

  “It’s horseshit,” CH3 said, “sir.”

  “Much of war is horseshit,” Dalgleish said evenly. He showed them out. Bloody colonials, he thought. Never know when to stop.

  Walking back to their quarters, CH3 said: “I wonder what Jacky Bellamy would have made of that lot. Tradition conquers all, and so on.”

  “Dunno. She might even decide that Daddy’s right despite all his guff. I mean, maybe the convoys really are essential.”

  “God knows.” CH3 looked at the sky, wondering about tomorrow’s weather.

  “Talking of God … Macfarlane was lucky, wasn’t he?”

  “So were the others. They all got hit. Every time I see a 109, I wish I had a cannon. Hell of a weapon.”

  “Not so loud,” Barton said, “they’ll all want one.”

  Fitz and Mary rented a cottage near Brambledown. Flash Gordon came to dinner. Mary had not met him since France, and Fitz had warned her he was a bit wild, a bit moody; but he behaved perfectly all through the meal. She was eating a lot, and the men always had good appetites, so she had roasted a large leg of lamb. Flash had three helpings, with roast potatoes and peas and great spoonfuls of redcurrant jelly. She was pleased: anybody who ate like that must be in good health. Apple-and-raspberry pie came and went. He talked, too. The conversation flowed freely and easily. They took their coffee into the garden to enjoy the sunset. The rain had blown over but stormclouds still blockaded the light. The western sky was volcanic.

  “It’s going to be a boy,” Mary said. “I wasn’t sure until I looked at that sunset but now I know. Definitely a boy.”

  “That’s not very scientific, love,” Fitz said. “I mean to say, sunsets, for heaven’s sake. You might as well read your tea-leaves.”

  “Ah, but he just kicked me,” Mary told him. “Right here.” She pressed her swollen stomach. “A good strong right-footed boot, it was. Obviously a footballer.”

  “Nicole always wanted a boy,” Flash said. It was the first time any of them had mentioned her. “In fact she wanted several. I did my best, but. … Funny, isn’t it? You’d think God would give extra marks for trying.”

  Fitz said: “Yes.” There didn’t seem to be anything useful he could add.

  “If all it took was effort,” Flash said to Mary, “I reckon Nicole would have been ahead of you.”

  “It’s just as well she wasn’t, isn’t it?” Mary said, as gently as possible. If Flash wanted to remembe
r Nicole, he had to remember everything.

  “I dunno. I sometimes think … If Nicole had been pregnant like you, she wouldn’t have gone rushing across France and …”

  Mary shivered. Fitz took off his tunic and draped it across her shoulders. “How d’you feel about it all, Flash?” he asked. “Have you got over it yet? I mean, I know you’ll never completely, but … Well, I only ask because you seem in pretty good shape. Physically.”

  “Oh, I’m fine. You see,” Flash said, turning to them with a blithely confident smile, “I know who did it.”

  “Oh, come on, Flash,” Fitz said.

  “Yes, I do. I saw him. I was there, I was right behind him, I know exactly who he is, and believe you me, when I see him again I’ll recognize him in a flash.”

  “That’s … that’s not possible,” Fitz said. He didn’t want to look at Flash, who had the glitter of fraudulent triumph in his eye. It was like talking to a man who’s won because he has five aces. “Let’s go inside. Mary’s getting cold.”

  “I’ll come across the bastard one of these days,” Flash said. “You don’t forget people like that. Then you watch!”

  They went inside.

  Next morning, Hornet squadron flew down to Bodkin Hazel. The field had been made fully operational, with fire-trucks and bloodwagons, petrol bowsers and starter-trolleys, a cookhouse, tents and deckchairs for the pilots, portable workshops for the groundcrew.

  Each flight was scrambled once that day. Controllers steered them all over southeastern England but the sky was full of cloud and the ground was misty and they saw nothing except barrage balloons, floating on the mist like hippos. In the evening they flew back to Brambledown, had a quick wash and found a pub. Next day was much the same: dull weather, a convoy patrol, no action, home to the pub. That became the pattern of life for the first week or ten days in August: few convoys, sporadic rain, poor visibility, not much sign of the Luftwaffe. Fanny Barton was relieved. It gave him time to pull the squadron together.

  Between patrols and practice flights there was a lot of hanging-about on the ground. Hours and hours of it. Cattermole soon got bored. Everyone suffered from his boredom but the man who suffered most was Steele-Stebbing. He was a painstaking and conscientious young man with no ambition except to be a good fighter pilot. He knew that many people found his seriousness faintly ridiculous and so he tried to adopt an amiability that would be more acceptable. He wasn’t much good at it. Often he looked more diffident than amiable. Cattermole sensed this uncertainty, and probed it.