The Germans hit back when they could. Thicker cloud cover let more Luftwaffe planes sneak across the Channel. They might not bomb very accurately, but they did some damage and reminded England it was in the war. A.E. hardly noticed when 1942 passed into 1943.
Groundcrew men painted yellow bands on the Typhoons’ wings. The new planes looked enough like F-W 190s that enthusiastic antiaircraft gunners sometimes fired on them. She had that happen to her once. Some of the things she said when she got back to the field at Manston made the other pilots look at her as if they’d never seen her before.
“I had no idea you talked that way,” one said, still wide-eyed.
“I don’t usually,” she answered. “But it’s bad enough when the Jerries try to kill us. When my own side does, too …”
With the new recognition signal, the fools on the ground opened up on their own aircraft less often. A.E. promised herself she’d shoot back if they ever did that to her again. Luckily, she didn’t have to find out whether she meant it.
Before long, the sign for Tiffies changed to a white nose and two white-lined black stripes on the bottom of each wing. A.E. didn’t see how the new pattern made any great difference, but it was decreed from On High and so had to be done.
She flew her patrols. She had enough experience to understand that most of the time she wouldn’t come across anything interesting at all. Long, dreary hours over the North Sea and the English Channel had drilled that knowledge into her. Not spotting anything was all right as long as nothing was there to spot. You had to stay alert, though. Missing something that was there didn’t bear thinking about.
And so she didn’t miss the little flicker of motion at the very edge of visibility. She swung her Typhoon southwest and went to see what it was. That it was heading north raised her suspicions. The silhouette looked a lot like that of the plane she flew, but a 190 would. It was why her fighter was marked the way it was.
She maneuvered to keep her plane between the sun and the stranger. Before long, she saw its engine cowling was dark. It had white-edged black crosses on its wings. She reported her position and said “Attacking the target” as she shoved the stick forward and dove.
It was the easiest kill she’d ever made. The F-W pilot had no idea she was in the neighborhood till she fired the 20mms. The big, heavy rounds slammed into the cockpit and fuselage. Trailing black smoke, the 190 tumbled toward the ground. The enemy flyer didn’t get out. She would have bet she’d killed or badly wounded him in that first moment.
“Target is destroyed. Returning to base,” she said.
“Acknowledged,” said the voice in her earphones, and then, “Well done.”
She did a victory roll when she flew over the field at RAF Manston. The groundcrew men all congratulated her on the kill after she landed. None of the other pilots said a word, though. She couldn’t decide whether she felt more hurt or miffed. She’d thought they liked her, but …
The silence persisted through boiled beef and soggy potatoes at supper. After the squadron had finished, David Crooke stepped out for a moment. He came back with a cake on a tray: a rectangle iced in white, with a black A at the top left corner and another one, upside down to it, at the bottom right. A big black spade sign dominated the center.
“For Amelia!” he said loudly. “Our new ace!”
Everybody whooped. She realized they’d been playing the same game as a pitcher’s teammates when he was throwing a no-hitter. Till the moment the cake came in, they hadn’t let on that they knew a thing. “Speech!” someone bawled, and they all took up the cry.
A.E. got to her feet. She didn’t like speaking in public, but the lecture circuit and teaching at Purdue had taught her how. And these were friends after all, sure enough. “Thanks,” she said. “You’re a pack of loonies, every goddamn one of you, and I’m awful glad you let me stay a part of—this.” When she threw her arms wide, she tried to take in not just the mess hall, not just the strip at Manston, but the whole RAF.
Their cheers said she’d done it. She couldn’t remember a time when she’d ever been happier.
Chapter Twenty-Two
As 1943 moved forward, she began to see the Allies would win the war unless something really went haywire. In Tunisia, the British and Americans were grinding the Africa Korps to pieces. The Nazis surrendered in Stalingrad, and the Red Army surged west. Then it lurched back again—the Germans did still have some punches left. But if they weren’t on the ropes yet, they sure were backed into a corner.
She wondered if the USA and England would try to invade France when better weather came in summer. She saw no sign of it, but also didn’t know how much that proved. The cross-Channel air war went on as it had since 1941.
The technicians gave her Typhoon the night-flying treatment Bee Beamont had pioneered. She blasted a locomotive to pieces somewhere near Amiens, then zoomed away. Even in the dark, trains made easy targets.
Patrols and daylight raids went on, too. By now, she hardly thought about them. She just did them. She expected to keep on the same way at least till the landing came. Then she supposed she might fly from an airstrip on the Continent. Shooting up Germany the way the RAF had been shooting up France …
But the future wasn’t real. You couldn’t take it seriously. It might not be there for you. The present was an eight-plane Rhubarb raid. A.E. was flying as David Crooke’s wingman. That he’d asked her to do it pleased her very much. The pilot who usually went with him was having engine trouble on his Typhoon.
Red Tobin’s face came up in her mind as vividly as if he stood in front of her, grinning and joking. He didn’t, of course. He never would, not any more. She hadn’t been there to try to help him. She’d be there now, by God!
“I’ll watch your back,” she promised Crooke.
He nodded, and said, “I’ll watch yours, too. That’s why we fly pairs.” He didn’t know why she stressed the words so much. The past was as much a ghost as the future. But sometimes, as now, it was a restless ghost.
They scooted across the Channel almost low enough for their props to crop wavetops. The Germans had radar, too. The boffins said it wasn’t as good as what the RAF used, but it was good enough to treat with respect. They didn’t want to stir up a hornets’ nest of 190s and 109s.
Like England, France was going from brown and yellow to green. Spring was coming on, if you had time to notice it. A.E. had noticed, but only by fits and starts. The mission, how her Typhoon was doing mechanically … those were the things that counted.
Even in war-focused England, other people had time to pay attention to robins and blackbirds. English robins weren’t much like the American ones, except for their red breasts. They were much smaller and bouncier. English blackbirds walked and sang like American robins, but they were, well, black. All that probably meant something, but she had no idea what.
And it all blew out of her head when Crooke’s voice sounded in her earphones. “See that smoke plume off to the southeast? It’s moving—I think that’s a train.”
A.E.’s head swung to the right. “I see it,” she said. “Shall we say hello?”
“Let’s,” he said gaily, as if they really were calling on friends.
They went in together. She flew a couple of hundred yards to his right and a little behind him, ready to do whatever she could if trouble came. She tried to look every which way at the same time. As when she’d been weaving along behind most of the squadron above embattled London, that was what she was there for.
They closed on the train fast. But the RAF was not the only outfit to come up with new ideas as the war wore along. A flatcar near the tail end of the train had something—two somethings—mounted on it, one facing forward, the other back. Men were dashing to the rear-facing one, the one pointing at the oncoming Typhoons.
“Break, David! Break!” A.E. shouted into her microphone. “It’s an—”
The four-barreled antiaircraft gun opened up, spitting flame and death at the RAF planes. She fired back, bu
t something slammed into her right wing root and sent the Typhoon spinning crazily out of control. She tried to get the canopy open, but the ground was rushing up and …
She thought David Crooke got away. She wasn’t sure, but she thought so.
About the Author
Harry Turtledove is the award-winning author of the Alternate History works The Man with the Iron Heart, The Guns of the South, and How Few Remain (winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Novel); the Hot War books: Bombs Away, Fallout, and Armistice; the War That Came Early novels: Hitler’s War, West and East, The Big Switch, Coup d’etat, Two Fronts, and Last Orders; the Worldwar saga: In the Balance, Tilting the Balance, Upsetting the Balance, and Striking the Balance; the Colonization books: Second Contact, Down to Earth, and Aftershocks; the Great War epics: American Front, Walk in Hell, and Breakthroughs; the American Empire novels: Blood and Iron, The Center Cannot Hold, and Victorious Opposition; and the Settling Accounts series: Return Engagement, Drive to the East, The Grapple, and In at the Death.
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As the Master of Alternate History, Harry Turtledove has written some of the greatest “What ifs” of fiction.
Turtledove is married to fellow novelist Laura Frankos. They have three daughters—Alison, Rachel, and Rebecca—and two granddaughters, Cordelia Turtledove Katayanagi and Phoebe Quinn Turtledove Katayanagi.
Other Titles From Prince of Cats Literary Productions
The Imperials Saga:
The High Ground
Melinda M. Snodgrass
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MacGyver:
Meltdown
Eric Kelley & Lee Zlotoff
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Seventh Age:
Dawn
Rick Heinz
Or Even Eagle Flew Page 12