As the leading Fiat turned in again, the fuel tank suddenly erupted with a dull roar. One by one, the Italian fighters sprayed more bullets into the smoke that burgeoned up. The wreck was well alight now, the flames spreading rapidly to engulf the fuselage, soon creating a funeral pyre for the luckless rear gunner. Ammunition that remained in the bomber started to explode, sending a pyrotechnic display of tracer high into the air.
The fourth and last Fiat sped through the spreading pall of smoke and flew past the spot where the six airmen were sheltering. As it did so, it dipped a wing towards them before climbing away. There was no doubt that its pilot had seen them. All of them watched it as it curved up past the mountainside, showing its mottled upper surfaces, following the three ahead.
It exploded.
There was no warning. One moment the Italian fighter was there, its sleek lines resplendent in the sunlight. The next it was a ball of debris, bouncing and fragmenting down the mountain slope, leaving a trail of blazing fuel in its wake.
A Curtiss Hawk sped past the flaming wreck, followed by three more, heading to intercept the other Fiats. The six airmen looked up as more aircraft thundered overhead: Dewoitines this time, skimming over the plateau and disappearing beyond it. The bark of their 20-mm cannon joined the rattle of their machine-guns as they pounded the unseen Italian troops. Armstrong and the others jumped to their feet, shouting and waving, clapping one another on the back as they watched the D.520s rocket up in a climb, looking like dark toys against the background of the far mountain slopes.
Armstrong looked in the opposite direction and gave a yell, pointing. Threading its way through the pass on the western side of the plateau was a twin-engined, low-wing monoplane. At first Armstrong thought that it was an Airspeed Oxford, an RAF trainer, but then he recognised it for what it was: a Potez 56 civil airliner. He had glimpsed it on the airfield at Luc, being worked on by an Air France crew.
The Potez pilot throttled back, his engines burbling as he touched down as close as possible to the western edge of the plateau to give himself plenty of room. The small airliner’s undercarriage crunched on the hard-packed snow. The aircraft rolled on past Armstrong and the others, skidding a little, but the pilot controlled its landing run skilfully. It stopped in an amazingly short distance, just beyond the smoke from the burning Wellington, then turned in a large and cautious circle until it was facing into wind again, close to where the six were waiting. A side cockpit window opened and a head poked out.
“Come on, get in. I haven’t got all bloody day,” shouted Stanislaw Kalinksi, in his heavily accented English.
Epilogue
“God, what a homecoming.”
Armstrong stared at the Liverpool skyline, shrouded in drizzle. The others — Kalinski and the Poles, Pittaway and his crew — were spread out along the destroyer’s rail.
“Oh, I dunno,” the New Zealander commented. “It’s good to be back.”
They had been among the last personnel to be evacuated from the south of France, on the day the anticipated armistice had come into effect. Most of the French pilots had flown their aircraft to North Africa; the Poles, to a man, had elected to come to England. The French had fought gallantly to the bitter end, but it had been hopeless. Hopeless ever since, weeks earlier, France’s politicians had lost the will to fight.
But there were Frenchmen who would fight on; Armstrong was sure of that. British, French, Poles, Belgians, Czechs, Dutch, Norwegians — a bond of nations strengthened by their first-hand experience of the evil that had descended on the continent of Europe.
There remained a small offshore island, facing the direst challenge in a thousand years of its history. Armstrong knew, they all knew, that the great battle to come, the battle upon which Britain’s survival and the fate of the free world depended, would be fought and decided in the air.
Pittaway tapped him on the arm. He looked up, and saw a pair of purposeful, shark-like aircraft drop down through the drizzle. The Spitfires flew low past the destroyer as it continued its passage through Liverpool Bay, then disappeared inland, their outlines blurred by the rain.
Yes, thought Armstrong, Pittaway was right. It was good to be back.
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