‘We’re being attacked by a football team?’ That was me. I always got the good question. The policeman probably thought he owed us some sort of explanation,
‘You gotta understand, bud; the goddamned Kraut takes his goddamned football goddamned . . . seriously.’
A bullet slammed into the ambulance above us with such force that it rocked on its springs. I lay with my face pressed against the concrete. Welcome back to Germany, Charlie.
It was over as quickly as it blew up. That was because the warehouse did as well. I watched a bazooka crew lined up on it. I think that they only intended to scare the thieves. They aimed high, the charge thumped in close to the top of the tin shed, and a second later its roof came off with a detonation you could have heard in Vienna. I distinctly saw two bodies cartwheeling through the air.
The copper used the phrase I’d picked up from Max a couple of days earlier. ‘Hot damn,’ he said, ‘what had they got in there?’
Max was taking some interest again. He said, ‘Just flour. Just like you said. It’s the dust. Once it’s in the air you’re sitting on a bomb. Father had an old flour mill in Poughkeepsie that blew itself to Kingdom Come. He got out of flour after that.’
We followed the cop over to inspect the damage. What was left of the warehouse – the old hangar – was no higher than my shoulder, and burning fiercely. The heavy smoke smelled like burnt porridge. There was one blackened body high in a nearby tree, and another on the peritrack. We walked past a dead GI spread out like Da Vinci’s Man. He was wearing old khaki ovies and had dropped a spanner: some kind of mechanic. There was a neat hole in his forehead; he wore a gentle, fixed smile. He looked as if he had been a nice guy, but I suppose that you never can tell. The Snowdrop closed his eyes and put a handkerchief over the dead face.
‘Who’s gonna tell his folks,’ he asked us, ‘that he was killed by a goddamned Kraut football team?’ No one, I hoped. Maybe they’d come up with a better story. Maybe the policeman was already working on it. ‘What did you say those last Nazis called themselves?’
‘Werewolves.’
‘Werewolves.’ He spoke softly. ‘Poor kid.’ I could tell he was already getting his story straight.
‘I’ve just been attacked by a football team,’ I told Old Man Halton on the telephone. ‘The Pink Pig has a few holes in her, but that’s not serious. She also has a flat main wheel, which is. They shot the tyre out. I’m negotiating for another, but Dakota tyres are scarcer than hen’s teeth over here.’
‘Are you all right, Charlie?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘What are our two new Americans like?’
‘Horrible. The worst yet, but I doubt you’ll get anyone cheaper.’
The line crackled, and his voice drifted away. The last thing he said was that as soon as he could squeeze a place in the schedule he’d send Randall over with spare tyres we could store. Where? I wondered. I hadn’t told him that I wasn’t at Celle yet. It wasn’t something that I wanted to explain.
Max had gone for coffee. I sat on the Pig’s cargo door sill. There were fewer boxes in the Pig than we’d set out with. Either Max and Red were already into a bit of private enterprise, or we’d been visited during the night. I wondered where the bloody engineer was until Greg drove up in his big GAZ jeep. I didn’t question how they came to be in the middle of the Berlin US airbase: he seemed to be able to go anywhere – king of the bleeding castle. Red Ronson was in the back, out for the count.
‘What did you do to him?’
‘Rescued him from a bordello in our zone,’ Greg said. ‘He was kicking up shit. I don’t know how he got there.’
‘Why isn’t he moving?’
‘I got the police doctor to give him a shot. It was the only way we could get him into the car: he’s a feisty little bastard. He tell you about Mantell?’
‘Who’s Mantell?’
‘Who was Mantell, you mean. Never mind.’
I asked Red Greg, ‘Didn’t your air force get a load of Dakotas from the Yanks in the war?’
‘Yes English. Now we make our own. Just the same, but stronger.’
‘Can you get me some tyres?’
I thought that he was going to laugh, but he didn’t: quite a little triumph for him.
‘Yes, Charlie, I can get you tyres. You gonna fly my sister out of Germany?’
Six-beat intro, and main theme.
‘Yes,’ I told him.
Then he did laugh, and held his hand up for that high five thing the Yank boxers had started to do. It took another thirty years to catch on. Then he did a little gloat dance in a circle. I guess he deserved it.
Two hours later he was back with an old US GMC truck. It had Red Ball Express painted on its ragged canvas, so I guess that’s why the Russians stole it in the first place. They’re keen on red. He had two tyres and a sullen group of fitters, who jacked the Pig up and changed both her boots. I love the smell of new rubber. We took our own good tyre, and tied it down in the back.
‘Is there anywhere in Berlin you can’t go?’ I asked him.
‘I think not, Charlie.’
‘Is there anything you can’t get?’
‘I can’t get liquorice. My General wants liquorice from when he was a boy – he asks me every time he sees me.’
‘Want me to get some for you?’
‘That’s kind, Charlie.’
‘No, Greg; it’s what you and Tommo have been teaching me. It’s business.’
It was raining in Celle. A soft, warm blanket of water in the air. I wondered if it was raining in Berlin, and damping down the flour fire. The Pig’s Russian tyres were more heavily grooved than their Goodyear counterparts, and displaced so much water that we bowled down the runway like an enormous speedboat. Maxwell sang a passable imitation of Benny Goodman’s ‘On a slow boat to China’ and Red, strapped in behind, just groaned. He’d been sick on himself, and it stank of thin, bitter wine. I preferred Morten-sen’s stench to that.
There was an RAF jeep waiting for us at the end of the runway. It had a large painted signboard on its arse which read Follow Me!, so when it set off in front of us, we did. It led us to a hard standing, and there alongside was the old control caravan I’d been promised. It had had a new coat of RAF blue, and the word Halton was stencilled in white on its door. Maxwell powered down, and the Pig’s props stopped spinning. Then he lifted his medal from where it hung around his neck and kissed it before he let it drop back. That became his routine for successful touchdowns.
We were there for the night. The Officers’ Mess had its own small dance floor, and a jazz band of army musicians played there twice a week. A stocky young national serviceman called Derek Webber blew his heart out for us, on jazz bassoon of all things; I reckoned he had a great future if he got the right break.
I ended up on my own in the easy room – a kind of lounge – sobering myself up with cup after cup of black coffee. And I wasn’t exactly on my own either; a mess servant was clearing up for the night. When we spoke it was in German. He spoke good German: most Germans do. I just about got by. He asked me, ‘Pilot?’
He was a tall thin guy, who would have been good-looking but for a livid scar like a jagged line which ran above his right eye.
‘No. Radio operator. Radioman.’
He touched the scar. ‘So. I was a pilot. Töpfer.’ He gave that little nod of the head they use to introduce their name. ‘Harald; Harry.’
‘Charlie Bassett. Would you like a cup of coffee?’
‘No. Thank you. I take mine in the kitchen.’
He continued to tidy up. On a low table there was a heap of books and services magazines. Most of the books were those photographic hymns of praise to the British armed services that the WD published just after the war, to justify all the killing and the sacrifice. He picked one up as he stacked them, and turned it so that I could see it. It was The Battle of Britain, and had that picture of St Paul’s wreathed in vapour trails on its cover.
‘A very good
story,’ he told me with a gentle smile, ‘but a sad ending.’
Despite the half-promise of a cottage, we slept in a concrete accommodation block like that at Wunstorf. I had a cell of my own, while Red and Max shared the one alongside. When I awoke facing the wall in the morning I could see the imprint of the wood shuttering from when the concrete had been poured, right in front of my face. It was like sleeping in a bunker. The rain had stopped, and the runways and the concrete steamed in the weak early sunlight.
There was a wide concrete apron around the administration buildings at Celle, and that morning there were two RAF Gloster Meteor jet fighters parked on it. I walked over to have a gander at them. One was unpainted, and the other an overall light grey. They both had those new postwar roundels on their wings, with a narrow band of white separating the red centre from the blue margin. They looked odd to my eye, and even more unsettlingly like an archery target. On the grey aircraft the jet pods in each wing were stained underneath by green streaks: the RAF was getting sloppy since my time. Even so, they looked purposeful, and spoke of the future. As I turned away from it I was attracted to its name, in yellow italic on the nose: Baster Fastard.
I went in to breakfast. The German with the scarred face nodded to me from the serving tables. Neither Max nor Red Ronson showed up. They must have been on the skite the night before.
The three-storey tower on the end of the block was what the Americans, and our own papers, had begun to call the Control Tower. In my day we called them the Watch Office. It was topped with a glass box from which the Duty Officer controlled the movements of aircraft on or around the airfield. I climbed the outside iron staircase; it was good for me. Then I talked myself over the threshold. I think that the flight lieutenant and his clerk were getting lonely up there anyway. My excuse was that if I was to operate my company’s precious aircraft out of Celle, I wanted a picture of its layout. I wanted to see the goddamned place, so that I could describe it to others. The grey Meteor had left.
‘Border patrol,’ the AC clerk told me. ‘Out high, in low.’
‘We only do it to piss Ivan off,’ his boss said.
‘How low?’ I asked.
From the intercom speakers above our heads a crackling squawk intruded. A pilot made all the right sounds and the Duty Officer the right responses. ‘See for yourself,’ he said. ‘That’s him back now.’
The Luftwaffe had obviously known how to build Watch Offices. From the goldfish bowl of this one I could see for miles. I could see Max and Red supervising the unloading of the Pig into a couple of army Bedfords – maybe I’d been a bit hard on them. Max’s medal gleamed at his throat. I could see the peritrack and the taxiways, and the infield of uncut grass. And I could see a black dot, growing instantly larger, thundering at us at treetop height from the northwest.
‘That’s Peter Dare, but everyone calls him Dan.’ That was the Duty Officer again. ‘Look you, on the pilot of the future!’ He was obviously going to buzz the erks unloading the Pink Pig. The controller picked up his mic and said emphatically, ‘More height Fox Baker, more height.’
From the speakers overhead I heard the pilot laugh, and then he was on us with a shattering scream of jets that rattled the glass. His small jet made more row than a Lanc at full chat. Looking down on him I could see that he was so low that the long grass was being swept aside by his progress. Ripples of green waves flowed away from the aircraft. The erk observed, ‘’e says ’e judges ’is ’ight, sir, by feeling the grass on the bottom of his aircraft. That’s why we never cuts the grass out there.’
Halfway across the field there was a sudden flash of yellow light from the exhaust of his starboard engine, followed by a long and continuous streak of orange flame, and a thin line of dark smoke. Immediately he climbed away to port with, ‘Fox Baker . . . bird strike. Immediate pancake.’
‘The bird must ’ave stood up!’ The erk said.
His boss replied with, ‘Shut up, Ivor. Hit the tit,’ and into the microphone handset barked, ‘Roger Fox Baker. Immediate pancake.’ The phonetic alphabet was changing a bit, but at least somewhere in the world they were still using most of the words we went to war with.
The tit the erk hit was a big red knob on the small bench in front of him. It activated a mighty klaxon, and the klaxon activated the fire and rescue teams. They were probably pleased to have something to do, because they jumped to it and were on the apron before the stricken jet had lined up for its touchdown. As it happened all they had to do was trundle down the runway behind it. They made an impressive parade. The erk hit the tit again, and the klaxon ran down to blessed silence.
‘It’s on the roof above us,’ the lieutenant said. ‘That’s why it makes so much bloody noise. The Jerry hooter is that much less musical than ours, don’t you think? I’m sure it’s damaging our ears.’
‘Your fire crews seem quite good.’
‘All done with kindness.’
‘You’re the second person in a few days to tell me that. Kindness must be catching.’
‘That’ll be the day, sir,’ his erk said. ‘Then we can all go ’ome to Blighty an’ ’ave a right old knees-up.’
Then the Duty Officer briefed me on the air corridors into Berlin, and how he expected my people to operate in them under RAF control.
The RAF controlled the northern corridor. Anyone flying in the southern corridor was under the direction of the Yanks. Each corridor was marked at each end by radio and radar beacons – although the Russians were already trying to bugger about with them – and instructions concerning height and separation would be rigorously enforced. Orders, he told me, were to be obeyed without question at all times. Weren’t they saying that sort of thing around here in the 1930s? Luckily, both Gatow and Tempelhof had GCA. That meant that they could talk us in if we couldn’t see the bloody runways. When you looked at the prevailing weather patterns, and the frequency with which they were fogged in, that was a reassuring fact. I could see that I was going to love Berlin.
I waved goodbye to the Pink Pig. Actually it was a bit of a relief to see the tail of her – Max and Red were a disaster waiting to occur, and I felt less responsible for them when I wasn’t with them.
The Halton caravan was a little home from home, with an office, a radio desk from which we could talk with either our aircraft or the tower, a kitchenette with an easy chair, and even a small glass greenhouse on the roof, under a couple of steps. You could poke your head into it, and watch your aircraft chugging along the runway.
For this trip the Pig had been overloaded with wooden staves. They were supposed to be for building things like hen houses with, but I liked to think that I was beginning to know the Berliners by now: they’d wait until winter, eat the chickens and then burn the bloody wood. Anyway, that was it. The RAF, for the WD, invoked our contract, and the Pig had the honour of flying our first proper load of the Berlin Airlift. Some time later Old Man Halton told me that we were the third commercial outfit to be called up. He seemed to take that as a compliment.
Pig was supposed to run the corridor with a radio operator to spin the beacons, and we didn’t have a spare one. The RAF did, and lent us one of their duds . . . this became a not infrequent occurrence. He was a wizened Scots kid with overgrown teeth. Ratlike. His nose lifted slightly, and twitched as he spoke. He was named Patterson – part-way through his national service after the end of a university course. When he was excited his voice came out in a high-pitched quivery Highland squeal. He was bound to end up covered in hair, and teaching his gibberish to gibbering students in a university at the fag end of the universe somewhere. From the moment I first saw him, I mistrusted him . . . and just hoped he knew his business. I had to pay him the difference between his service pay and the commercial rate. I resented every shekel.
Vera drove over. She was smiling as I opened the caravan door. That was a first.
‘You look happy.’
‘So would you, if you had just been given your ticket out of this palsied dump. I’m
off home.’
‘Demob?’
‘Something like that.’ She was carrying a large cardboard tube. ‘I thought that you’d like my spare charts; save you buying them.’
‘That’s kind. Thank you.’
‘. . . and I brought you this; why don’t we have a look at it.’
This was a single printed piece of paper. It looked like an old-fashioned Wild West ‘wanted’ poster.
‘What is it? It looks a bit like a wanted poster.’
I had forgotten that Vera had first described her job to me as being something like a policeman.
‘It is. The Cousins send them to us occasionally.’ That was a word we sometimes used for our American allies.
The paper was the description of an American air force engineer on the run. There were four pictures of his head: each side, back and front. Dangerous and dishonest, it told us.
‘What’s Mr Lieter supposed to have done, other than desert? It doesn’t say.’
‘They rarely do. It’s usually what we’d call treason. A threat to the State, that sort of thing . . .’
It wasn’t his name, but the pictures were definitely of Red Ronson. I said, ‘A few days ago he was fished out of a brothel in Berlin, and shanghaied back onto one of my aircraft.’
‘Who was this hero that brought him back?’
‘I believe that he’s a Red Army Intelligence officer.’
It was Vera’s turn. ‘Fuck it!’
‘You swear too much, for a woman, Vera. You know that?’
‘. . . and it’s dealing with twerps like you that makes me!’
My blushes were saved by the taxi: Randall came motoring down the runway with the red Oxford. When Vera saw it she started to make her excuses. I asked her, ‘Do you want to come back with us? I’ve got a small job at Lübeck; then I think I can go home.’
She was calm again. The tiger I had seen in her was back in its den. ‘You’re a sweet man, Charlie.’
‘I know.’ Also a big-headed one I guess.
‘. . . but the RAF has laid on a seat on a Hastings for me. They’re going to give me the VIP treatment until they wash their hands of me.’
The Hidden War Page 20