The Kingdom of the Air

by C. T. Wells

  When they talked, they spoke about technical matters, the weather, manoeuvres, or they boasted and told stories of legendary exploits. Sometimes stories of pilot error filtered through from bases all over northern France—botched takeoffs and all the miscalculations and mistakes that ruined aircraft and maimed men. Some of it was fact, some of it exaggeration and some pure fiction, but the airfield gossip became lore.

  They told these stories to mock those who made mistakes and somehow convince themselves they could never make such foolish errors themselves. Fools deserved to die and, by insisting on it, they girded themselves against folly. Rarely did they discuss why they were fighting or how fragile their lives were. Questions and fears had no place. That was the way of the fighter tribe.

  Josef entered the lounge, moving slowly, taking it all in, wondering where to make contact. Beyond glazed doors, in a paved courtyard, Jurgen Brandt was shadow–boxing. He trained like a professional athlete. Sometimes he invited Josef to spar with him. Josef always obliged. A fit body was essential for keeping your edge. Brandt was a tough opponent, but minds and bodies had to be conditioned for combat.

  Another pair of pilots were perched on the edge of sofas absorbed in a game of chess, honing their tactical thinking without ever wondering if they themselves were kings or knights or pawns.

  Sitting at a low table by himself, the saturnine Oskar Wedermeyer was building a house of cards as though he were the Reich’s greatest architect. He was utterly absorbed in placing each card. It took nerve, precision and a deft hand. It was a test.

  Wedermeyer detected Josef’s movement through the room and frowned a warning at him, not wanting the air to be disturbed around his masterpiece. Josef complied, pausing as the next card was placed with exquisite care. Wedermeyer misjudged. The whole structure collapsed like a silent Jericho.

  Josef watched as panic flickered in Wedermeyer’s eyes. To him, it was something more than fluttering cards. It was a portent. Josef resisted the superstitions of his comrades. Wedermeyer wallowed in them.

  ‘Can I help?’ Josef stooped to pick up the cards.

  ‘No,’ Wedermeyer said. ‘The cards have fallen.’

  ***

  She felt his gaze slither over her body. Giselle tensed. Edouard had noticed Anton’s lecherous looks before she had. It had taken until today for her to sense them herself. She was sweeping out the dairy and Anton was nearby, feeding calves in the adjacent yard. She snapped her eyes in his direction, but his gaze lingered unashamedly for another moment before returning to the animal, shoving a thumb into the calf’s mouth to make it take the bottle.

  Giselle shook her head in disbelief. How could Anton be so shameless in his ogling? She could not have felt more unattractive. Oversized boots, men’s trousers gathered in at the waist, a grubby blouse. Her hair tied back beneath a distinctly boyish cap.

  What made it worse was that Anton was a married man at least twenty years her senior. She had hoped she might find some solace in the simple jobs around the farm, but whenever Anton was nearby she was uneasy.

  She moved the broom over the soiled floor of the dairy, sweeping away the hay and manure and mud, hoping to finish the chore quickly and get away from Anton.

  A figure darkened the door to the dairy. Giselle gripped the broomstick fiercely and looked up. It was Edouard.

  ‘Giselle! It is nearly time. You are needed at the radio.’

  Anton growled at him from the yard. ‘Mai non! She must finish her chores first.’

  Edouard stopped walking and looked at the farmer. ‘I’m sorry, she alone must receive a message …’

  ‘There are jobs to be done. You cannot use your radio as an excuse not to work!’

  Edouard stood his ground but his voice wavered as he spoke to the burly farmer. ‘No. This is an operational requirement. She is the only one authorised to receive the transmission.’

  Anton shrugged and turned to Giselle. ‘Come back and sweep the dairy later.’

  She nodded and, leaving the broom against the wall, crossed the yard with Edouard. Relief swept over her with every step she took away from Anton.

  ‘I’ve set up the radio in the loft.’ Edouard led the way up the ladder. It was a low space, mostly filled with sacks of grain. The radio transceiver sat on some sacks that served as a makeshift desk. Matches and fuel were kept nearby in case they had to destroy the device quickly. One of the pistols was close at hand.

  ‘I thought you were just making it up to get me away from Anton.’

  ‘No, it’s nearly six. This is the scheduled time. Can you still remember how to do it?’

  Giselle looked down at the transceiver unit, headset and Morse key. ‘Yes, of course.’ In training, her signals instructor had expected her to transmit and receive morse signals at more than one hundred letters per minute. For her, it was just like playing a piece with the tempo marked as Allegro.

  Edouard looked at his watch. ‘You still have a few minutes.’ He suddenly seemed lost for words.

  This happened to him sometimes. When they were alone shyness seemed to overwhelm him completely. He fumbled for his cigarettes and offered one to Giselle.

  She smiled. ‘No, thanks, Edouard. It might not be such a good idea to smoke in an old barn full of hay.’

  ‘Oh, ah, good point.’ Edouard tucked the cigarettes away.

  ‘Do you have the code sheets?’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Edouard reached into his jacket and pulled out some folded pieces of paper that had been cut from a poetry anthology. It was a book cipher. Their cell had been assigned a particular poem. The contact in England had the same poem and transmitted a coded Morse message that could only be deciphered by its correspondence to letters in the poem. Each transmission would use a different decryption key.

  Every cooperating cell of the résistance had a unique poem assigned to them, ensuring secure transmissions. The capture of one cell would therefore not compromise others operating throughout occupied France. It had all been arranged before the English fled from Dunkirk. Edouard handed over the pages and Giselle unfolded them. She scanned the words typed in English. It was Hyperion, by Keats. She smiled as she remembered studying it in school. How appropriate.

  ‘I know it’s just for decryption,’ Edouard said. ‘But what’s it actually about, this Hyperion?’

  ‘It’s a romantic epic. It’s about the Titans, mythical gods—Saturn, the king, Enceladus, the God of War and others including Hyperion. They are destined to fall to a new order of Gods, the Olympians. It begins with a lament. The Titans have lost their dominion and the sheer power of a new order overwhelms them. Only Hyperion seems able to resist the new Gods.’

  ‘So Hyperion is an agent of the résistance! I think I like him.’

  Giselle laughed. ‘He is the only Titan who can withstand the likes of Jupiter, the new ruler, and Apollo, the sun god. The story is about the inevitability of change. The replacing of old with new.’

  ‘Who wins in the end?’

  She shrugged. ‘Keats never finished the story. He abandoned it in the middle of a line. Left us hanging. It must be up to us to finish the story.’

  Edouard nodded and frowned at the same time.

  ‘What’s the time?’ asked Giselle

  Edouard looked at his watch. ‘Three minutes to six.’

  Giselle put the headset on and turned on the transceiver. She picked up the pad and pencil kept with the radio. They waited in silence. She could feel Edouard’s sleeve brushing the skin of her arm.

  At precisely six o’clock a stream of Morse pulses came through the headset. Giselle used a pencil to jot down the letters. There was a pause and she used the key to guide her to specific words in Keats’ text. The morse letters led her to the word ‘celestial’ in the poem and, then, specifically the letter ‘s’. This told her that the S-algorithm would apply to decrypting the following message. Only
someone who had the same passage of text, formatted exactly the same way, could use the key to unlock the message, and the next transmission would use a different decryption algorithm. The Germans could easily be listening to the signal broadcast from England, but they could not know what the stream of dits and dahs actually meant or to whom the message was sent. It was a simple but almost uncrackable form of communication between the English spymasters and their French agents.

  She tapped a brief message to confirm receipt of the key.

  Another stream of morse followed and she wrote the letters on the pad. They were gibberish, but in the pause that followed, she decrypted them using the S–Algorithm to transpose the cyphertext into English–language plaintext. She was conscious of Edouard looking over her shoulder and she wanted to do it quickly. A moment later she had the plaintext written out: ‘Cardinal to Seraphim. Are you alone?’

  Giselle looked at Edouard.

  Edouard sighed but he took the hint. ‘I’ll go and finish sweeping the dairy. That should keep you out of trouble with Anton.’

  ‘Thank you, Edouard.’

  As he descended the ladder, Giselle keyed her response: ‘Alone’. Return messages were kept to an absolute minimum, usually just a confirmation of instructions. In theory the Germans could triangulate the signal to locate the source of transmission.

  More messages followed and Giselle worked steadily to record the incoming signal of dots and dashes. She confirmed receipt of the message and set about deciphering the text. The English were going to make an airdrop nearby.

  She was absorbed in the process and almost missed the sound of someone entering the barn. The door swung shut and she heard someone walking towards the loft.

  She tensed her whole body. The radio was an absolute secret. Torture and death would follow for anyone caught with such a device in France. And even if it were Anton approaching ... that disturbed her in other ways.

  She picked up the automatic pistol with shaking hands as she heard someone climbing the ladder. She was about to cock it when Martin’s head appeared.

  ‘Hello, little sister. You seem a bit jumpy.’

  Giselle sighed and put down the pistol. ‘We have new orders.’

  Martin nodded. ‘Edouard told me you had received a message.’

  ‘I have a job for him. There’s going to be a drop. Someone needs to go and collect a package from England.’

  ‘Nice of them to remember my birthday’s coming up.’ Martin grinned.

  She smiled back. He had a way of dissipating fear and imparting strength to those around him. He was a Titan.

  ***

  In the middle of the night, Edouard stood alone in a dark field. Cicadas chirped and he could make out the rhythmic whump and whoosh of waves on a nearby shore, but there was no sound of an aircraft. He had hiked cross-country for two hours to this exact location. It was too dangerous to use the motorcycle after curfew, so he had moved like a wraith through the countryside to the coordinates that Cardinal had sent.

  Evidently the farm was too close to Luftwaffe installations and the Brits wouldn’t make the drop so close to a den of Messerschmitts. He huddled in his coat, hands thrust deep into pockets. He hoped that all this walking through the cold and lonely night would impress Giselle. She needed impressing. He had seen her grin and take delight in him at times, but he had also seen her react the same way to her brother. Was he just another brother to her? He wanted to be admired in different ways.

  Just after midnight, a dark Lysander came in low over the beach. A black swatch against the starlight. Edouard flashed a signal with a hand–held torch to show he was in position. The little aircraft circled once and the pilot threw something out of the cockpit before immediately heading for the channel.

  Edouard watched as the package dropped to the ground, trailing a white ribbon. He kept his eyes on it and jogged across the grass to collect the bundle. It was just a brown paper parcel like those in the regular postal service. He bundled up the ribbon and tucked the parcel inside his jacket wondering what it contained. He had been told it was only for Giselle to open.

  Edouard set off for the farm. It would take another couple of hours to get there and he hoped to snatch some sleep before Anton roused them for another day of hard labour.

  XIV

  They came in a stepped formation, a schwarm of death and destruction like a curse of pestilence. Josef stood in the chilly dawn with the other eleven pilots of his staffel, and they watched the planes fly north, overhead.

  In the first line were Ju87 Stukas, dive bombers with the distinctive V–shaped wings designed for pulling out of vertical attacks on their target. They were the spearhead of blitzkrieg. Above and behind were the escorts, twin–engined Messerschmitt 110s. They were bound for the channel to wreak havoc amongst the shipping.

  Hauptmann Langer was looking at his watch and fondling the ears of the dog at his feet. After a set interval, they would follow in their 109s, ready to spring a trap on any RAF fighters seeking to intercept the raid on the channel convoy.

  Langer looked up from his watch. ‘Nearly time, boys. We’ll be on station above them with plenty of fuel to take on the English. So far, we’ve been dodging around them, escorting bombers to their targets, taking photographs. Today it’s different. Now we engage. The objective is simple. Eliminate fighter aircraft. Hurricanes and Spitfires.’

  The pilots of the staffel grinned and nodded. For Josef, standing on the runway with the other pilots was like the huddle before a big rugby match—the tense moments before bodies collided and mettle was tested.

  At school in South Africa, he had been a scrum half. His rugby captain had roused the team with spittle flying from his lips and veins bulging from a thick neck. These days, such a man might motivate others to make a bayonet charge on an enemy position. But Josef had never liked that approach—all sound and fury. A scrum half had to have quick hands and feet, but a cool head. Had to receive the ball without fumbling. Had to dispose of it accurately while bigger bodies closed in for the tackle. Had to make decisions under pressure just like a fighter pilot. He didn’t need to be brought to the boil. He needed to be ice–cold, and Langer helped him be that way.

  Langer was altogether different to the rugby captain. His voice was calm and measured, his words more like a teacher explaining the way to the elegant solution of an equation. The staffelkapitan needed cool, calculating pilots, not hot–heads. Josef breathed deeply and nodded. This was what he was made for—the right move at the right time, regardless of the chaos around him.

  Langer made eye contact with each of them as he spoke. ‘We can win a war of attrition. We will take apart the Royal Air Force plane by plane, faster than they can replace them.’

  There was the elegant solution.

  ‘Remember, wait until they fill your gunsight. Don’t shoot too soon because you will only waste your ammunition. Slashing attacks right through their formation, not weaving.’ He grinned at them now and Josef was pleased to be on his team. ‘And there’s a case of brandy for the first one to bag an English fighter. Let’s go.’

  They strode out to their aircraft. Josef wanted to get airborne but he kept himself in check. It was like taking his position on the rugby pitch. Stay calm and when the moment comes, play your part to perfection.

  Men climbed into their machines, pulled on their flying helmets and oxygen masks, connected their radio–leads and waited for clearance. The cockpits were sealed, chocks pulled away and when they were given the all–clear, the 109s charged along the runway one by one. They gained altitude effortlessly.

  Soon they were in position above and behind the bombers at four thousand metres. The staffel of twelve fighters was broken into three schwarm of four aircraft, which were in turn divided into two rotten. Each rotte consisted of a leader and a wingman.

  Josef formatted his 109 above and behind Langer’s plane. He would
be guarding him so the veteran could concentrate on attack.

  The morning was perfectly still and Josef felt the Daimler–Benz roar and shudder in front of him, ready to do his bidding. The channel was a silvery expanse, stained red in the east where dawn rimmed the horizon. Giant arrows of wake pointed to the targets—ships bound for London or Liverpool with supplies for the besieged island nation.

  Langer spoke a command over the radio and the 109s kept spiralling higher, east of the bomber formation. As he banked through the turns, Josef watched the Stukas make their first move. One by one, they rolled and fell on the convoy like raptors.

  The dive bombers were fitted with sirens which screamed at a horrendous pitch. Jericho Trumpets, they were called; instruments of terror.

  Josef watched the vertical descent of the Stukas and saw their bombs fall amongst the convoy. Great gouts of spray erupted from the ocean and bright bursts of flame bloomed on the deck of the freighters when they hit their mark. Men were dying down there. The lucky ones went instantaneously, slain by shrapnel or pasted across the bulkheads by the blast waves. The unlucky ones had a long moment of dread, knowing they would plunge to the bottom of the channel, entombed in the ruptured hulls of their ships, never to be returned to dry land or kin.

  The Stukas flattened out from their dives at an impossibly low altitude and streaked away over the ocean. Josef saw shipboard weapons filling the air with white smoke as they returned fire on the dive bombers. He glimpsed a Stuka lose its wing to gunfire and spin crazily into the ocean. Two more corpses to join the underwater graveyard.

  One of the freighters listed severely, hesitated, then capsized. He lost sight of the hull beneath his own wing; when he looked again the ship was completely gone.

  Six thousand metres and climbing. Langer was placing them further and further above the destruction. The 109s would make their entrance in the Second Act. Below, at around four thousand, the twin–engined 110s formed a defensive circle and orbited the convoy far below. Each plane covered the next with the rear–mounted machine gun. They looked like top cover for the Stukas, but Langer wanted them there as bait.