By the time Cox descended they had all disappeared into cloud. When he came out below the cloud, the burning Hurricane was about to hit the sea and Nim Renouf was hanging in his parachute, about four minutes away from doing the same thing.
Cox went straight back up, switched to the Mayday channel and transmitted for a fix. Then he went down again, and they watched Renouf make his splash. The Kent coast was about ten miles away. No boats were near. Fuel was low. Cox made a pass over the yellow-and-white blob that was Renouf’s Mae West and face, and took his patrol home.
The doctor was a chubby, friendly, middleaged squadron leader called Hubbard. He had a large yellow notepad and several pencils but he never wrote anything. “And what do you think of the war?” he asked. He shut one eye and cocked his head as if he had put a tremendously tricky question.
“Oh, gosh,” Flash Gordon said. He was in his best uniform, sitting up straight, his eyes wide with interest. “Well, I agree with the Prime Minister, sir. The Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin. That’s what he said, and I think he’s right, don’t you?”
“You’ve seen quite a bit of the war already, haven’t you? Is it what you expected? Tell me your impressions.”
“Mmm.” Flash chewed his lower lip and concentrated hard. “If you ask me, sir, the whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.”
“And personally? How do you respond to the prospect of such bloodshed?”
“If we can stand up to him,” Flash declared, “all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad sunlit uplands.”
“After all,” Hubbard said sensibly, “the German pilots you blow to bits are probably just men like you, aren’t they?”
“But if we fail,” Flash told him, and shook his head grimly, “then the whole world will sink into the abyss of—”
“What I meant was—”
“If I might finish,” Flash said, leaning forward and raising a finger, “because I do think that this is a pretty crucial point: the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister by the lights of perverted science.” He sat back.
Hubbard fiddled with his pencils. “I’m no expert on fighter pilots,” he lied, “but I’m told that sometimes … well, the strain gets a bit much, and then a chap might need a spot of help … Mmm?”
Flash nodded. “I’ll keep a weather eye open, sir,” he said. “Anybody starts acting funny, you’ll be the first to know.”
Fitzgerald and Patterson each claimed a 109. Mother Cox was delighted. He had seen none of their part of the fight, but they told him that while one pair of 109’s concentrated on him (he was shocked to realize that he had never noticed the wingman in the background) the other pair had gone for Nim Renouf, obviously thinking he was easy meat. So Fitz and Pip had chased them off, or tried to, and anyway there was a hell of a scrap. Poor old Nim took a pasting but Fitz and Pip gave the Huns what-for and hit them where it hurt. When last seen they were going down with a great deal of smoke coming out and no hope of getting back to krautland this side of Christmas.
Nobody knew why Renouf suddenly went into a spin.
Skull finished scribbling his combat reports and went to phone Group.
“A” flight got scrambled at 10:15 and flew west along the coast, past Hastings, past Eastbourne, all the time being told to look out for a raid coming in across the Channel. Nothing appeared. They orbited Beachy Head for ten minutes. They were told the raid had turned back. They were to return to base. Halfway home they saw three Spitfires chase a very decrepit Dornier 17 out to sea and shoot it down. They landed after fifty wasted minutes, feeling disgusted. There was a message for Barton to call Brambledown.
It was Squadron Leader Hubbard. “I’ve had a good look at him,” Hubbard said. “He’s a peculiar fellow, isn’t he?”
“I could have told you that. Is he batty, though? That’s the point.”
“We had a long chat. About the war, and killing people, and so on. Not very productive, though. He kept quoting great chunks of Churchill’s speeches. Did he know I was coming to see him?”
Barton thought. Did he? “I suppose he could have guessed,” he said.
Hubbard grunted. “He must have swatted them up. The speeches, that is. I must say he spoke them very well.”
“But is he batty?”
Hubbard sighed. “I can’t go on record as saying that a pilot who quotes Churchill is ipso facto mentally unstable. I mean, a lot of people quote Churchill. On the other hand … Yes, of course, he’s batty. He’s completely off his rocker. If you ask your average fighter pilot what he thinks of the war he shuffles his feet and looks embarrassed and says well they started it, didn’t they? He doesn’t talk about the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister by the lights of perverted science.”
“Flash said that?” The more Barton thought about it, the funnier it seemed.
“I’m sending him back,” Hubbard said. “Keep him away from Downing Street and he should be all right”
Flash landed at Bodkin Hazel before lunch. With him came a new Hurricane flown by a replacement pilot, a naval sub-lieutenant. He had a remarkably smooth, pale face which tapered to a pointed chin. His hair was blond and glossy, his eyes were blue-gray and he seemed never to blink. Everything about him was neat and controlled.
“This is Quirk, sir,” Gordon said to Barton. “He’s a sailor. I swopped him for two bottles of rum.”
Quirk saluted. “Transferred from the Fleet Air Arm, sir,” he said.
“I hope you’ve done an operational conversion course,” Barton said sharply.
“Yes. Fifteen hours on Hurricanes.”
“Fifteen. Bloody hell … Did that include air firing?”
“Only once. I’m afraid they couldn’t spare more than a couple of hundred rounds, so I didn’t learn much.”
“God in heaven!” Barton spun his cap in the air and caught it. “You don’t know one end of a Hurricane from the other.”
“Let me see.” Quirk pointed at his plane. “The sharp end goes first, doesn’t it, sir?”
“I looked up ‘quirk’ in the dictionary,” Gordon said. “It says it means strange and fantastic behavior.”
“What were you flying in the Fleet Air Arm?” Barton asked.
“Stringbags, sir. That is, Swordfish.”
“You don’t mean that funny old biplane, with all the wires? Looks like something left over from the RFC? What does it do, flat-out?”
“The book says a hundred and thirty-odd knots, but frankly that’s rather optimistic. Say a hundred and twenty. Maybe a bit less with the torpedo underneath.”
Barton wasn’t listening. “Fifteen hours … Look, as soon as she’s refueled get back up there and stooge about, put in some practice. Use your guns. Try and shoot down some seagulls. Don’t worry about the bullets. If you see a Jerry, run away. No risks, understand? No heroics. Just … survive.”
“The Jerries are the ones with the crosses on, aren’t they?” Quirk said.
“They are if you see them in time,” Barton said. “If you don’t, then the cross is on you, chum. Incidentally,” he told Gordon, “Nim’s down in the drink. Somewhere off the North Foreland.”
“Oh dear. Poor Nim. You sailors know all about the sea,” Gordon said to Quirk. “Is that bit nice or nasty?”
Quirk shrugged. “What matters is your friend’s build. The fatter you are, the longer you survive.”
“Nim’s not fat. If anything, he’s thin.”
Quirk carefully avoided their eyes. “I’d better check my kite,” he said.
Nim Renouf woke when the cannonshells hit his engine. The crash of explosions made his eyes open and he got jolted further awake as the Hurricane bucked and bounced. Then an acrid stench reached his nose and he coughed himself fully conscious.
The first thing he saw was the altimeter. The hands shot past nine thousand and went spinnin
g toward eight. He looked out of the cockpit and saw nothing but smoke; looked the other side and saw the horizon, also spinning but not so fast. The stink got suddenly worse, choking him, so he heaved on the canopy and amazingly it slid back as smooth as a sled. The air improved. Bullet-strikes pranced along the port wing, then sparkled on the engine, and a plane streaked beneath him, a blur that vanished.
Renouf felt awful. His ears ached, his head ached, his stomach was queasy, and this bloody lunatic airplane wouldn’t stop chucking him about. He got his feet on the pedals but there was no strength in his legs. He grabbed the stick. It slopped about like a spoon in a bowl, broken, useless. Dazzling cloud rushed up and drowned him in its murk.
It was easier to think when there was nothing to see. By the time he fell out of the cloud he knew he had to get out. The sight of the sea was discouraging, but when everything was going horribly wrong another disaster made little difference. Baling out was easy. He unplugged everything in sight and slid over the side.
Hanging under his parachute was wonderfully refreshing and restful. Everything was clean and quiet and comfortable. The sea was only a few hundred feet away when he fully realized what was about to happen to him and he began blowing up his Mae West. It was only half-inflated when he hit the water, awkwardly, and got a mouthful as he went under, a long way under, so far under that his lungs were hurting for air before his head bobbed up. No sky. Just clammy silk everywhere.
He swam clear of the parachute. That took a long time because he was still attached to the harness, but eventually he worked the release and escaped altogether. He trod water while he dragged off his gloves. Then he half-swam while he unzipped his boots and kicked them off. After all that, he had no breath left to finish blowing up his Mae West, but he had to keep swimming or the sodden weight of his Irvine jacket pulled him down.
The sea was much choppier than it looked from above, and the chop had a savage knack of finding his mouth. Ten minutes after the Hurricanes had gone, Nim Renouf was almost exhausted. Without actually deciding to do it, he floated on his back, kicking weakly. That was less tiring. He got some breath back. Once or twice a minute he managed to blow a good puff into his Mae West, until he risked letting his legs fall. The life jacket held his chin clear of the water. He relaxed.
There was nothing to do. He had a whistle, and he blew it once; it sounded puny and pointless. The water was cold. Not stinging-cold, as a bathe in the outdoor pool at his school had been, but numbing-cold: it drained the warmth from his body and left his limbs feeling bloodless. After a while he couldn’t move his legs, but that was all right: why move them anyway? Then, later, his arms hung like a dummy’s, and finally the wet cold reached deep into his body and sucked all the warmth from that. Renouf never saw the fishing boat that saw him. Another five minutes and it wouldn’t have mattered if the skipper had missed him, too. When they laid him on a bunk and stripped off his clothes, his body was colder than the fish in the ship’s hold.
By noon the cloud had rolled away eastward and the sun shone on Bodkin Hazel. Squads of airmen, stripped to the waist, sweated to dig trenches. Other squads filled sandbags and built aircraft bays near the perimeter. Several Fighter Command airfields had been shot-up, planes destroyed. During the morning there were two airraid warnings but nobody stopped work. The sky was rarely empty of aircraft, and once a Junkers 88 flew slap over the aerodrome at two hundred feet, so fast the ack-ack never even fired. Everyone was supposed to carry his gas-mask with him, and the pilots were told to keep their Colt revolvers handy at all times. Skull gave them a short lecture on anti-invasion precautions. “The enemy may try to land troops by glider,” he said, “which is why obstacles are being set up on all open land. If you have to put down on a field or at a strange airfield for any reason, watch out for poles or heaps of rocks or the like. If you make a forced landing anywhere, do not argue with the Home Guard. I have met some of them. They tend to be elderly and short-tempered. Often their aim is poor. Annoy them and they may fire a warning shot that hits you. Are there any questions?”
Steele-Stebbing raised his hand. “Sir, what’s the best approach to take in that situation, vis-à-vis the Home Guard?”
“Identify yourself clearly,” Skull said.
“Show them your hyphen,” Cattermole advised. “They wouldn’t dare shoot a man with a hyphen.”
“Yes they would,” Patterson said. “That’s what double-barreled shotguns are for.”
Some laughed, some groaned, some were too tired to do either. Cattermole said: “Actually, I’ve seen Iron Filings’ hyphen. He showed it to me in the showers the other night. It’s not very impressive, I’m afraid, but then nobody in his family—”
“Lunch,” Barton said. “Thank you, Skull. Jolly useful.”
There was another air-raid warning during lunch (cold roast chicken, boiled potatoes, gooseberry tart, cream) and gunfire thudded and rumbled from the direction of Dover. Aircraft were always wandering about the sky but they were far too high to be identified. Rumors circulated of heavy raids on Portsmouth and Norwich, of huge destruction and raging fires, of colossal scores by Spitfire squadrons. A Heinkel, it was said, had bombed an infants’ school in Canterbury, massacred seventy-nine toddlers, then been hit by ack-ack; the pilot baled out and was lynched by mothers before the police could reach him. Flash Gordon had that story. “Who says?” CH3 asked. “I heard it on the radio,” Gordon said, “So there.”
Skull got up and made a telephone call. When he came back he said: “As it happens, my cousin is assistant chief constable of Canterbury. He says that no school in Canterbury has been bombed.”
“Did I say Canterbury?” Gordon said. “I meant Winchester.”
“Know anybody in Winchester, Skull?” CH3 asked.
Skull thought. “Only the bishop,” he said.
“Or it might have been Salisbury,” Gordon said. He helped himself to more gooseberry tart. “They hung him from a lamppost. With a clothesline.”
“Seventy-nine toddlers, you said.” CH3 balanced his spoon on his outstretched finger. “That’s a very precise figure.”
“Yes, it is, isn’t it?” Gordon was generous with the cream.
“Mind you, it was a good school. That’s why they got so upset. Education is very important in Salisbury.”
“Or Winchester,” Cox said.
“Tell me, Flash,” CH3 said, “did they count the dead toddlers before or after they lynched the Jerry pilot?”
“Yes, definitely,” Gordon said, his mouth full. “Before or after. No mistake.” When they laughed he looked mildly surprised. “Please yourself,” he said. “I’ve seen it before.”
“Eat up,” CH3 said. “I want to take a squadron photograph.”
He arranged them in a line in front of the control tower. There was the usual horseplay and clowning until he told them that his first shot was useless because they had all moved. “Now look at me this time,” he said. For a moment they stood still and smiled at the camera. “Hold it!” he said, and behind them a revolver went off with a startling crack-boom. Inevitably they all looked around. “What the hell are you doing?” Barton shouted at a police corporal. The man was pointing his gun at the ground.
“It’s all right, Fanny,” CH3 said. “I told him to do that. Thank you, corporal. Now, can you all see the naked lady standing behind me?” The camera clicked. “Beautiful.”
“I take it that was some kind of joke,” Barton said, as they strolled to the deckchairs near dispersal.
“Practical joke. Very practical.”
“I see.” Barton glanced, warily. “Glad to see you’re having fun again.”
The revolver shot had not helped Steele-Stebbing’s nerves. He had awoken with a hangover, his first ever, and loud noises still made him flinch. He avoided conversation, sat in the shade with his Daily Telegraph and waited for his brain to stop throbbing.
“What d’you think of that, then, Skull?” Fitzgerald pointed to the headline on the front page. “Sixty-t
hree Huns knocked down yesterday. And we only lost a dozen.”
“Fifteen, actually.”
“All right, fifteen, if you’re going to be bloody sniffy about it. Fifteen to sixty-three, it’s still a damn good score, isn’t it?”
“Quite. Mind you, in addition to the fifteen of ours shot down, one must add fighters lost through bad landings and taxiing accidents and so on. At least half a dozen a day.”
“Skull,” Barton said, “has anybody worked out how long the Luftwaffe can last if they lose sixty-odd kites every time they come over here?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, have a go at it. How many kites did they have to start with?”
“It’s not as simple as that. You see …”
“I’ll do it for you, Fanny.” Cattermole got up and, as he walked behind Steele-Stebbing, plucked the Telegraph from his fingers. “You divide Hitler’s birthday by the starting price of the favorite in the 3.30 at Ascot,” he said as he made for the portable lavatory, “and take away the number you first thought of. The answer’s next Tuesday.”
Steele-Stebbing’s fingers squeezed the struts of his deckchair. His face was a dull red and his eyelids were heavy. He looked as if he might cry. Nobody spoke. He got up and walked away. “What a drip,” Macfarlane said.
“If you ask me, they’ll run out of pilots before they run out of planes,” Fitzgerald said lazily. “Stands to reason. If they don’t get any proper training they’re not going to last the pace, are they?”
“I read in the paper the other day …” Patterson began, when he saw Skull shaking his head. “What’s up?”
“The popular belief that Luftwaffe training is of poor quality is a myth, and in my opinion a dangerous myth.” Heads turned: Skull was not usually as crisp as this. “You would be well-advised to ignore any propaganda about German pilots being rushed through inadequate flying schools. My information is that enemy aircrew have been very well trained indeed. Perhaps better trained than some of you.”
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