Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  “Beats me, old boy. You pick a place.”

  CH3 took out his revolver and fired at the opposite wall. The bang was enormous. “There,” he said.

  “Here, what’s the game?” the man said faintly.

  “Not there,” Barton said, and fired his revolver at a different wall. Fragments of red brick flew off. “There,” he said.

  The engineer turned and bolted. “On second thoughts,” CH3 said, “how about there?” He fired at a corner. “Don’t be bloody ridiculous,” Barton told him, and shot a box of books. “That’s the place.”

  “Wrong.” CH3 aimed at a wastebasket and missed. The bullet sang as it ricocheted off the floor. “You mean there?” Barton asked, and shot the wastebasket. The air stank. CH3 put a bullet into the ceiling and Barton nearly hit a calendar hanging from a nail.

  “You win,” CH3 said. “My wrist hurts.”

  “You came second,” Barton said. “I’ll tell you what. How’d you like to be my senior flight commander?”

  CH3 stuffed the gun back in its holster. “It’s all a cock-up, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Of course it’s all a cock-up. I could have told you it was all a cock-up. In fact I did tell you but you weren’t bloody listening, as usual. Come on. Let’s go and find the new boys.”

  The adjutant met them as they were going out. “What was all that din?” he asked.

  “We were putting up some shelves,” CH3 said, but Kellaway wasn’t listening. “You’re on twenty-minute standby,” he said. “I’d better organize some sandwiches.”

  Two hours later the pilots of Hornet squadron were still lying on the grass, a short sprint from their Hurricanes. Standby time had come down to ten minutes, then to five. Now it was two. They had watched one of the Spitfire squadrons take off and disappear, heading east. A few minutes later the other Spitfire squadron had followed them. The rumble of their engines could still be heard, faintly.

  Skull appeared on a bicycle, pedaling hard. “I’ve been in the ops room,” he said to Barton. “It’s the most extraordinary thing. In the last fifteen minutes every squadron in the Group has been scrambled. That’s twenty squadrons airborne.”

  “And how many raids?”

  “One.”

  “What? Hey, that’s marvelous! Twenty squadrons, at least two hundred kites, all on one raid … We’ve got the buggers where we want them.” Barton grinned at his pilots, and they grinned back. “For months I’ve been waiting for the day when woutnumbered them, and here it is!” He whooped with glee and threw his hat at the sky.

  “How big is the raid?” CH3 asked.

  “Oh, it’s big. It’s—”

  “Come on, come on, come on!” Barton kicked the pole that had the telephone attached to it. “What are they waiting for? Everybody else is up. Why not us?”

  “You say everyone else is scrambled?” CH3 said. “We’re the only reserve? That’s damn dangerous, isn’t it?”

  The telephone rang, and Barton grabbed it. It was the scramble order, and they pounded to their planes.

  The controller’s instructions were unusually brief.

  “Hello Bearskin Leader, this is Trombone,” he said. All the codenames had been changed. “Steer zero-four-five and patrol Lampstand at angels six.”

  “Happy to oblige, Trombone,” Barton said, and ran his finger down the codelist of the day. Lampstand was the Isle of Sheppey. Angels six meant angels ten.

  He held the squadron in a power climb. After a minute, Trombone raised the angels to eight, which meant twelve.

  Barton felt restless; he was always twisting to look and make sure nobody was lagging behind, and then leaning forward to search for the scrap. There must surely be a major scrap ahead, what with twenty squadrons scrambled already. He couldn’t imagine what twenty squadrons would look like, all concentrated on one raid.

  The voice of his wingman cut in. “What’s wrong, Leader?” CH3 said. “Dropped sixpence?” Barton stopped twisting. “Found it,” he said. “Threepenny bit.”

  CH3 felt content. Flash Gordon’s death had cleansed his emotions: all pettiness had been swept away in that rush of shared grief. By their manic horseplay with revolvers they had briefly held a wake for Flash. Life had saluted death in a suitably random fashion, and now life went on.

  Trombone raised the angels again. Now the target height was sixteen thousand. Hornet squadron went onto oxygen. No word about the raid. Barton assumed it was holding its course.

  A dun-colored skim of industrial haze covered the Thames estuary. To the right, Kent was a huge green-and-gold thumb stuck into the Channel, and the Channel itself sparkled as if touched with static electricity. Barton found Ramsgate, out at the end of the thumb, and saw where Manston must be. A year ago he had flown to Manston to apologize to the skipper of a Blenheim squadron. He remembered it quite calmly and evenly. That was the young Fanny Barton, that was. No relation to the old Fanny Barton now leading his squadron to a lovely great scrap, if only they could find the bloody thing.

  “Hello, Leader,” CH3 called. “You sure we’re in the place of honor?”

  “I think we missed a turning somewhere,” Barton said.

  “Bloody Spits,” Cox said. “They’ve gone and scoffed the lot.”

  “Bogey at ten o’clock,” Patterson warned.

  Far away to the left, a faint bundle of dots could be made out, heading east. Eventually it grew and matured into a hard, tight clump.

  “Hurricanes,” Cattermole said. “In their Sunday best.”

  The other squadron was using the orthodox, peacetime formation: four vies of three, neatly locked into an arrowhead. The sight made Barton uneasy, and he checked his own aircraft. “Ease out a bit, everyone,” he said.

  Patterson, at Blue Two, began to wonder if the Spits really had scoffed the lot. Maybe Hornet squadron had been sent to clean up the leftovers. Maybe there were no leftovers. Patterson welcomed that idea. All the way from Brambledown his stomach muscles had been jumping with fear and tension. Everything about him felt uncomfortable: his mouth ached where his teeth had been knocked out, his legs and feet were ice-cold, his torso was wet with sweat, he needed desperately to pee, his straps were all wrong and the buckle stuck into his ribs. He wanted to get this patrol over as soon as possible.

  Alongside Cattermole, Steele-Stebbing was happy about everything except his eyes. He had been up and down so often in the past few weeks that his sinuses had become very sensitive to changes of pressure. Now they felt as if they had been blown up with a bicycle pump, and every other breath sent sparks drifting across his eyeballs. He trained himself to look between and beyond the sparks.

  The north Kent coast was not far away when they met a layer of haze.

  The other Hurricane squadron was now a mile or so ahead. Beyond his left wingtip Barton could just make out the Isle of Sheppey. The haze thinned and dissolved and fled away and he saw, crossing his front from right to left about a mile ahead, the first wave of a flood of aircraft. Automatically he counted the bombers in the front rank, doubled it for the second, doubled that for the third and fourth. Forty bombers, close-packed. After them the flood grew stronger, layer stacked on layer, rearing ever upward until the mass was more than a mile high, and that was only the beginning. The flood went on. It was an orderly torrent of aircraft that stretched to the horizon.

  Hornet squadron was at sixteen thousand feet, and the pilots could look far down on the lowest layers and then far up at the highest. The enemy darkened the sky. In this colossal wedge there were something like a thousand German bombers and fighters, all making for London.

  Barton searched, and found odd flights and sections of Hurricanes and Spitfires darting at the mass. Then he looked ahead and saw the other Hurricane squadron—still as compact as a troop of Household Cavalry—go wheeling into the first stages of a Fighting Area Attack. “Silly sods’ll get jumped,” Cox said. Barton checked the sky above. Dropping fast were four Me-109’s. He called a warning. No response: the other squadron must
be on a different frequency. He ignored it and concentrated on the bomber stream, now coming up fast.

  “Okay, Bearskin aircraft,” he said. “In and out fast. Let’s chivy the buggers.” As his sections split up to make their separate attacks he glimpsed the four 109’s rolling away from two burning Hurricanes at the tail of the formation.

  Hornet squadron accomplished quite a bit of chivying before the escort got amongst them. The raiders were so thick that it was like shooting at a parade. This parade shot back, with ten times the firepower. The sky was a moving embroidery of tracer and incendiary and cannonshells.

  Cattermole made the first kill.

  Steele-Stebbing was Yellow Two and he guarded Cattermole’s tail faithfully. Although his stomach was much harder nowadays, his heart pumped like a sprinter’s as Cattermole made him do the utmost violence to the Hurricane’s controls. But it paid off. A wandering 109 flew straight and level for one second too long and Cattermole put a burst into its cockpit. The 109 reared. Cattermole plunged under it and Steele-Stebbing followed, dust and fluff swirling up from the cockpit floor. Cattermole jigged to go left, changed his mind and went screaming off to the right. Steele-Stebbing tipped his machine onto its wingtip and the g-forces briefly drained strength from his arms and legs. Cattermole’s plane came in view again, chasing a wildly-rocking Dornier. As Steele-Stebbing leveled out a spot of oil flew up and splattered itself on his goggles. He dragged the back of his glove across the goggles and saw a 109 nipping in behind Cattermole. Everyone fired at once: Cattermole hit the Dornier, the 109 hit Cattermole, and Steele-Stebbing missed the 109 but he gave it the fright of its life and it sheered away. Then he heard a faint thump-thump-thump that wasn’t the pulse in his ears and the instrument panel turned into shattered glass and splintered wood and a small tornado was blasting into the cockpit and his left arm was chopped off at the elbow and blood was squirting all over the canopy.

  Patterson saw it happen. Less than a minute had passed since he led Quirk into the attack and already Patterson had wet himself twice: once when a bomber exploded in front of him and a gun-turret whirled by, no more than six feet from his prop; and once when he was climbing and a pair of 109’s stormed toward him, apparently obsessed with collision. Patterson had been convinced there was no escape, yet he made the gesture of frantic action and his Hurricane bounced like a ball on the Shockwave. When he got it under control again he was alone. He saw the pair of 109’s far below, closing on a Hurricane that was last in a line of planes. The Hurricane flipped onto its back and went into a spin.

  Patterson was enraged. He charged after the Messerschmitts and eventually caught one. It broke hard left and he followed. At once they were in a tail-chasing circle. Patterson hated this. His mouth was stretched wide open, straining to drag breath into lungs that felt flattened by the leaden clamp of g-forces as he dragged the plane into a circle so tight that he felt nailed to his seat and his vision threatened to fade into grayness. That was what he dreaded most: weakening for the one second it would take that 109 to catch him and blast him.

  He forced his head to turn, and was rewarded with a glimpse of a tail-unit. A blurred swastika registered. Mightily encouraged, he dredged up some strength and bullied the Hurricane until his arms and legs throbbed and trembled. More reward! More tail-unit, a chunk of fuselage, and yet more, a 2, a German cross, a 6, wingroots, cockpit … Patterson fired, and shot off the Messerschmitt’s tail-wheel. Nothing else. The tail-wheel flicked away, and he swore, but the blow was enough to startle the German pilot, and he did the worst possible thing: he changed his turn. The 109 floated generously across Patterson’s gunsight and he fired again and missed again. It was impossible, but he missed; and when he looked again the enemy had gone.

  Six thousand feet below, Steele-Stebbing’s machine was still spinning clumsily to earth, thrashing its tail as if it wanted to snap it off. Steele-Stebbing felt no pain. He felt a huge shock. God had turned his world inside out and upside down, and his left arm was flopping and spraying as the plane threw it about, but it took him several seconds to believe that the stump was his and so this bloody lump of sleeve getting flung about the cockpit was his too. The Hurricane thrashed and the severed arm bashed him in the face. His brain was elsewhere, outside this little red madhouse, observing with horror and disbelief, struggling to cope with the disaster, that was saturating everything with blood. The Hurricane kicked viciously and the rogue arm shot out of the broken canopy and vanished. At last his brain, caught up. He snatched at the stick, stamped on the pedals, killed off the spin. With the stick jammed between his knees he slammed his hand on the gushing stub of his left elbow, found the artery and stopped the jet. Everything around him dripped red.

  At three thousand feet, Cattermole flew alongside. “Someone bust your window,” he said.

  Steele-Stebbing dragged the stub up to his mask and used his right thumb to flick the R/T switch. “One of your rough friends,” he said.

  Cattermole rolled over the top and took a look from the other side. “I can’t see in,” he said, “so how the hell can you see out?”

  Steele-Stebbing couldn’t reply. He was starting to feel very shaky. The stick was slipping.

  “You want to chuck that kite away,” Cattermole advised. “Get out and walk.”

  Steele-Stebbing had thought of it. The problem was that to open the hood he would have to let go of his arm. In any case he didn’t feel strong enough to drag back the hood. Always assuming it wasn’t jammed.

  “If you can still work the doings,” Cattermole said, “I’ll talk you down.”

  Steele-Stebbing heard that but he didn’t really understand: it was like words clearly typed but written in a foreign language. His thumb was getting weak and the throbbing wetness was pumping out again. Quite easily and peacefully he fell asleep. His knees came apart and the stick twitched nervously.

  Cattermole flew with him to the end. The Hurricane hit the face of the South Downs at just under two hundred knots. In less than a second, thirty-one feet of fighter was smashed down to nine feet, the wings ripped off and discarded, the propeller blades left behind the tail, the seat and back-armor crushed into the reserve tank, the tank collapsed into the engine. Mixed up with the armor and the tank and the engine was what was left of Steele-Stebbing.

  Three miles higher, Cox was having no luck at all. His targets always flinched out of the way of his bullets, and several unidentified enemies had frightened the life out of him. Also his wingman, Jolliff, had vanished. So far, it wasn’t Cox’s day.

  A 109 dived in front, trailing smoke. He stuffed the nose down and the Merlin cut out for a second or two. Bits of dust and dirt rose from the cockpit floor. The Merlin picked up, and two miles below him was the sea, revolving gently to the right as he spiraled down in search of that smoking 109.

  It was the wrong thing to do. He knew it as soon as he did it: chasing singleton Jerries downhill was a mug’s game, everyone said so. Too late now. In the corner of his eye he saw a spurt of flame and hoped it wasn’t Jolliff. He felt guilty about Jolliff. The smoking 109 seemed to be getting away. Cox heard a faint trickle of popping noises and then his Hurricane got bashed nine times in two seconds with such ferocity that the prop fell off.

  He never saw the 109 that hit him. He hauled back the stick and tasted bile. The plane wallowed into a clumsy glide. Another bang, and the engine caught fire: flames as big as bedsheets; the heat came surging through the Perspex. He slammed the plane into a sideslip that washed the blaze away from him, heaved back the canopy and dived out.

  The sea was still a long way below when his parachute opened. No ships were in sight. Cox couldn’t swim, he hated water, and he couldn’t tolerate the thought of a slow, cold death in it. He took his revolver from his flying boot and wondered what was the best way to shoot himself. While he was wondering he noticed that the wind was quite strong. He was drifting toward land. He dropped the revolver and watched it fall at enormous speed.

  With his radio dead
and his engine coughing and shaking, Pip Patterson flew away from the raid, across the Thames estuary, and searched for a landing-ground. There were plenty of other stray aircraft limping home. He followed one down. It wasn’t until he was over the village church that he realized he was back at RAF Kingsmere in Essex.

  He parked a long way from the tower. Nobody signaled or came out to see him. He switched off, climbed out and sat on a wing. The noise of the enemy raid was a distant grumble. His engine ticked and hissed as it cooled. Otherwise everything was calm and tranquil. The breeze played with a strip of torn fabric on his fuselage.

  It was almost exactly a year ago that they had flown out of Kingsmere. As Patterson took off his Mae West and unzipped his jacket, those twelve months flickered through his brain. There was no pattern or purpose to his memories: just a jumble of faces and places, of scrambles and scraps and parties and popsies and more scrambles and crashed kites and yet more scrambles and endless bloody battle-climbs. Most of the faces he remembered had no names. Patterson didn’t try to remember them. He didn’t try to do anything. All he knew was that he was dead tired and he never wanted to fly again. The air smelled sweet. Just breathing it was a pleasure. He lay on his back and closed his eyes.

  By now many of Hornet squadron had broken off the fight and were returning to base: fifteen seconds’ worth of ammunition was soon gone. Moggy Cattermole, however, was still climbing. He had ammunition left, and there were stragglers to be potted.

  The straggler he found and fancied was a tattered Dornier with its undercarriage down. He followed it through a confused patch of sky, all flak-bursts and con-trails and roving fighters, and as he gained on it a solitary Spitfire saw him and came over. This was reassuring: it let Cattermole concentrate on his kill. But he was still out of range of the Dornier when gunfire hacked a string of holes in his port wing and he had to break hard right. As he banked he glimpsed his attacker. It was the Spitfire, and it was still coming for him. It knocked chunks off his rudder and it battered his back-armor before he shook it off.