by Phillip Rock
He had always liked and admired the general even before he became his father-in-law. Outspoken, caustic, and cynical, The Hawk made good copy—not that much of it could pass the censors.
Fenton waved a hand at a bin filled with dusty bottles. “We have wine galore, but are flat out of whisky.”
“Wine will do nicely.”
“Not bad stuff, actually. Clos Vougeot.” He uncorked a bottle and poured some into two glasses. “You know, it’s so terribly odd. Déjà vu … is that what they call it? I wake up some mornings and think it’s nineteen fifteen. I was camped just a few miles from here before the battle of Aubers Ridge. I hate to think of how many men I knew who are buried within walking distance of this spot.”
Albert took a reflective sip of his wine. “My sister Ivy’s grave isn’t far away.”
“At Poperinghe, I believe Martin told me once. No, not far.” He drank his wine and poured another. “? ‘A richer dust concealed,’ as the poet said.”
Through an open window they could see a tank crew working on one of the Matildas parked under a tree, a soldier in black coveralls whistling as he pulled a cleaning rod through the barrel of the gun.
“Happy soul,” Albert said.
“That lad’s only nineteen and eager to put all his training to the test. He may enjoy combat. Oddly enough, a few men do, but I wonder if he’ll be whistling a month from now.”
“You believe we’re in for something, don’t you, Hawk?”
“Oh, we’re in for something all right. Beyond anyone’s imagining. Only a fool would think otherwise. The German method of warfare is hardly a secret—it’s essentially my own. The only difference is that they have everything it takes to make it work in the field and not just on paper. If Hitler attacks he won’t hurl his army against the Maginot line. The man fought on the Somme and at Ypres and doesn’t want any more gains measured in yards and costing a hundred lives per foot. He’ll slash into Belgium and Luxembourg long before we get official permission from those countries to step in and defend them. When we do move it will be too late. Jerry will cut through the Ardennes, by-pass Maginot, and nip us off from any possibility of escape to the coast. A sorry kettle of fish, I must say.”
“You paint a bleak picture. A shame you’re out of whisky.”
“One of the true horrors of war, Thax old lad. Supply failing demand.”
“Any bright spot I can tell my eager readers?”
“There’s a bright spot you could ruddy well tell me. I’d like a grandchild or two.”
“I’ll get to work on it—when I have the time. Anything at all?”
Fenton tipped his oil-stained beret to the back of his head and stared through the window with tired eyes. His pathetically undermanned, undertanked armored division lay scattered in the woods beyond. The young gunner was still whistling “The Lambeth Walk” in the pallid shadows of the gray afternoon. “You can tell them that all of us in command positions, great or small … Lord Gort … Thorne … Alexander … Holmes … Montgomery … me … have the highest faith in the poor bastards we lead. That they will all, when their day comes, do Britain proud—win or lose.”
Albert was silent for a moment, oddly moved by Fenton’s quiet, bone-weary sincerity. “I’ll write that. Although ‘poor bastards’ will have to go and ‘lose’ will get snipped by the censors.”
Fenton sighed and drew a flat tin box of cigarettes from a pocket in his coveralls. “I don’t care about ‘lose,’ but ‘poor bastards’ is a pity. It’s what they are, you know. Ours and theirs. Poor bastards all.”
GREEN SECTION OF 624 Squadron was at readiness, three Hurricanes warmed up on the tarmac in front of the dispersal hut. There was no tension among the three pilots playing cards inside. They had never been scrambled yet except in practice and didn’t expect to be now. The long afternoon at readiness on this cold, overcast day had been fatiguing and they played their cards listlessly.
“I wonder if the sergeant-fitter made any tea,” Barratt said.
“Probably,” Derek yawned. “It always tastes of machine oil.”
“Does, now that you mention it.” He discarded a trey.
“Ah ha!” The section leader picked it up. He was a heavyset flight lieutenant who had been with the squadron for nearly ten years. His name was Rodgers and his nickname “Jolly.”
“You can go out, I suppose,” Barratt said, glassy-eyed with boredom.
“Yes, old son. Chalk up another for me.”
The loudspeaker on the wall suddenly hummed and the voice of the operations officer blared into the room. “Squadron six-two-four Green Section … scramble!”
Barratt whooped and knocked over his chair getting to his feet while Derek scattered his cards across the floor to the obvious annoyance of Jolly Rodgers. Within minutes they were airborne, the three fighter planes thundering down the runway and zooming up into the low clouds.
Derek concentrated to keep in formation. Jolly was a stickler for tight vics. He stayed close to the leader, flying wingtip to wingtip with Barratt. The radio hummed in his ear and he could hear Jolly calling Sector Control and reporting that they were off the ground.
“Righto, Green Leader. Vector nine-zero. Intruder off Sheerness. Are you receiving me?”
Rodgers replied that he was and asked for intruder identity, if possible. A Heinkel, he was told. Zero feet in the mouth of the Thames. Mine laying, Derek was thinking as he set his reflector sight to the bomber’s wingspan of seventy-four feet. They burst through the cloud layer at twelve thousand feet into brilliant sunshine and set a course for the estuary.
“Don’t lag, Green Three.” Jolly’s voice over the R.T.
Derek glanced to the side. Barratt was easing back, a thin plume of white vapor streaming from his engine.
“Green Three to Green Leader … I’m losing glycol, skipper.”
“Return to base, Green Three. Hop it.”
Barratt rolled out of the formation and was gone. Derek prayed he’d make it before his engine stalled from loss of coolant.
“Bloody hell,” Jolly swore.
Derek shifted his position, boosting the engine to come up on Jolly’s right side and slightly back.
“Let’s go down, Green Two … take a look-see.”
“Righto, skipper.”
They dived as one back into the clouds. Derek watched his instruments, seeing nothing through the windshield except gray vapor that turned darker the deeper they flew into it. Eight thousand feet … seven … five … the airspeed indicator needle quivering close to four hundred.
“Level off at three zero, Green Two.”
He pulled out of the dive at three thousand feet in thick sheets of scudding cloud. The sea and obscured patches of coastline below. Not a sign of Jolly Rodgers, only his voice in his ear over the R.T.
“Where the hell are you, Green Two?”
“Over the drink, Skipper. Herne Bay below me … I think.”
“Then you’re off course. Blast it to hell.”
A weary acceptance in Jolly’s voice. There was always something going wrong in the squadron’s vintage Hurricanes. All the new models had been shipped over to France. The Auxiliaries were stuck with the ones that had been issued in the summer of 1939. A leak in Barratt’s glycol lines … and now a compass out of whack. It would have been all right if he hadn’t lost the leader in the clouds. On his own unless he could spot him. He eased the stick forward and dropped to twenty-five hundred feet. Visibility less than two miles. Not a hope. He eased the plane down to a few hundred feet over the sea. Clearer there … five miles at least, but no sight of Jolly. He kept the coast of Sheppey Island to his left and streaked toward the mouth of the Thames.
The Heinkel III was a surprise. All he saw of it was a shimmer of sunlight off its bulbous glass greenhouse of a nose. The rest of the big twin-engine bomber seemed to blend into the haze. They came at each other on a collision course at a combined speed of over six hundred miles an hour. He yanked back hard on the stick and sh
ot up and over it, feeling the blood drain from his head and his jaw drag down, cutting into the chinstrap of his helmet.
“Green Two to Green Leader,” he said thickly. “Bandit … am chasing.”
“Shoot the bugger.”
He rolled up and over and leveled out close to the water. The Heinkel was a long way ahead of him … a speck heading toward Margate. He slammed the throttle through the seals and the big engine howled at full revs, pushing him hard against the back of the seat as the plane surged ahead. He turned the firing button from safety and switched on the gunsight. “In pursuit now, Skipper … five miles off Margate … heading almost due east … compass going crazy.”
“Good hunting,” said Jolly Rodgers sadly, far away off Sheerness.
He was gaining rapidly on the bomber now. Two miles … a mile. The German’s flight seemed leisurely. Was it possible the pilot had not even noticed the near collision? It had all taken place so quickly … a flash out of the mist. Or if he had been aware, perhaps he thought the fighter was miles behind him. He nursed stick and rudder, dropping so close to the sea that the prop was kicking spray behind him. But he was slightly below the Heinkel and to its left. Be difficult for the ventral gunner to spot him and he had the sun behind him, a pallid disk in the west.
Nine hundred yards. Too far. He wanted the fuselage and the engines fully within the lines reflected on the windshield. Four hundred yards minimum. Coming up too fast now with the engine on full boost. Ease off the throttle. Jig right … whip in on the beam. Now! He pressed the firing button and felt all eight guns shudder, the recoil slowing the plane, a stench of cordite drifting up from the wing roots. The tracer hosed under the belly of the bomber, well forward. Clean miss. He pulled back on the controls and zoomed over, catching a fleeting glimpse of a pale face staring at him from the teardrop bubble of the top gunner’s position. He rolled and came around for a frontal approach. They were firing now, the streams of orange smoke slashing around him. The Hurricane shuddered and he could hear the snap of metal and wood, the shriek of wind across ripped fabric. The right engine and the bomber’s nose filled the sights and he jammed his finger on the button and saw his fire thudding home. Chunks of plastic from the nose whipped away, boiling off in the windstream. Control column hard into his stomach—up and over in a gut-wrenching climbing turn to the right. When he leveled off, the Heinkel was below and ahead of him, staggering now, weaving back and forth with black muck vomiting from the right engine. He closed and gave it another long burst, holding his thumb down until he could hear the hiss of compressed air and the clank of empty guns. The bomber dipped its shattered nose to the sea and slammed into it, raising a geyser that slapped salt water against the windshield as the Hurricane swept through it, turning toward the coast and home.
SQUADRON LEADER POWELL, a well-known barrister in civilian life, smiled broadly as he hung up the phone. “Impeccable confirmation, Ramsay. The Margate lifeboat crew went out to the spot but there were no survivors. Congratulations. You bagged the squadron’s first kill. I’ll see that you get another ring on your sleeve for it. And Sergeant Cooper tells me your crate’s a writeoff. It’s a wonder your left wing didn’t fall off on the way back. Someone on that Hun crew was a bloody good shot.”
The thought began to nag at him as he raced toward London on his motorbike, his kit dumped in the sidecar. Seventy-two hours’ leave. No plane for him to fly yet anyway.
Someone on that crew … In the excitement of it all he hadn’t given a thought to it, but the adrenaline was out of his blood now. He was heading for London—drinks, a decent meal in a good restaurant—and out in the North Sea, entombed in a crumpled bomber, were the bodies of the men he had killed. Men of his own age, probably. Men who, except for that brief moment of bad luck, would have been heading off somewhere themselves tonight—into Wilhelmshaven or Emden, to drink beer, meet some girls.
“Poor bastards,” he whispered against the cold wind.
THERE SEEMED TO be a feverish air of excitement about the town, an expectancy left unsaid. Hitler on the move at last. The end of the “phony war.” There seemed to be more people than usual in the city and he failed to get a room at the Strand Palace. Not wanting to spend time checking the other hotels, he went to the Portland in St. James’s Square, one of the three clubs where his grandfather had membership, and checked in there.
The Unicorn in Albemarle Street, Jolly Rodgers had told him. The RAF had taken it for its own. He dropped in there after a particularly satisfying meal in an outrageously expensive restaurant. It was one of the older London pubs, all warm woods and etched glass, and was jammed with people, the atmosphere opaque with tobacco smoke. There were some men standing at the bar that he knew from his days with the Cambridge University Air Squadron. They were, they told him, flying Spitfires out of Hornchurch, but hadn’t done anything yet except training ops. Something prevented him from mentioning his afternoon kill. That pale face staring up at him from the gun blister … the shambled mess of the nose where the rest of the crew would have been. Four to five men on that plane. Dead on the bottom of the sea. He ordered a pint of bitter and shot the breeze.
“I say, Ramsay,” one of the pilots drawled. “There’s an absolutely smashing blond WAAF over there who can’t seem to keep her eyes off you.”
“Don’t be daft.”
“I mean it. I keep seeing her out of the corner of my eye. She hasn’t stopped staring since you walked in.”
He ventured a glance. Two WAAF sergeants seated at a table. A tall, dark-haired woman and a slender, petite blonde with a small, oval face and large blue eyes. Those eyes met his own in a cool, contemplating stare. He looked away.
“Probably thinks I’m someone else.”
“Maybe she’s an air marshal’s bit of fluff looking for a good time.”
Derek took a swig of beer. “She doesn’t strike me as a bit of fluff.”
“Only one way to find out, old boy. Direct and vigorous pressing of attack—that’s the fighter pilot’s creed. Come on, I’ll toss you for the blonde, but, quite frankly, I don’t care if I lose. I’ve always had a passion for tall, dark, beautiful sergeants.”
They walked over, carrying their drinks. The pilot from Hornchurch bowed with stiff formality. “Good evening, ladies. May I take the liberty of introducing us. I am Pilot Officer Terrible Tommy Blythe, the scourge of the Luftwaffe, and this gentlemen is Pilot Officer Derek Destruction Ramsay, the only man who can fly upside down and backward. May we have the honor of buying you a drink?”
The dark-haired girl laughed. “You may. I’m Judy … Judy Davis. Are you really a terrible Tommy?”
“I like to think so.”
“How marvelous! Do pull up a chair and sit down.”
The blonde stared gravely at Derek. Then she smiled. Warm and faintly sad. “I thought it was you, Fat Chap. Do you remember me? Valerie A’Dean-Spender.”
A group of pilots back from France on leave burst noisily into the pub waving bottles of champagne and it became impossible to talk without yelling. Derek impulsively took Valerie by the arm and led her out. Terrible Tommy was deep in mouth-to-ear conversation with the lovely brunette.
They brushed through the blackout curtain to the dark street.
“That’s better. My God, what a racket.” He turned to her in the gloom. “Valerie! I can hardly believe it.”
“I recognized you instantly … or at least I felt reasonably certain it was you. You haven’t changed that much, Fat Chap—except for the broken nose.”
“Cricket ball … after I left Burgate. But, look, there’s so much to talk about. Brown’s is across the street. How about a brandy or something?”
“I’d love it.”
“What about your friend?”
“Judy seems to be in good hands. We’re not really together, I just gave her a lift into town.”
He took her arm and they crossed the street to Brown’s Hotel and into the small, quiet bar where he ordered two cognacs. She hadn’t cha
nged that much either, he was thinking. A nineteen- or twenty-year-old woman, but the same elfin delicacy and luminous eyes. Pest, he had called her in those days. Not a name he would use now.
“What drew you to the RAF?” he asked. “And what are you doing … and where?”
Her laughter was bright, musical. “One thing at a time. I joined up because I was bored doing nothing. I’m stationed, very comfortably I might add, in Bushey Heath. I work for Air Intelligence. Decoding … translating German radio intercepts … that sort of thing.”
“How interesting. To be frank, Val, you never struck me as being much of a scholar.”
“No, I was too busy being … a pest. Remember?”
“I didn’t want to bring that up.”
“I left Burgate just after you did. That would have been, let me see, nineteen thirty-three. My mother had remarried and won my custody in court. We went to live in the South of France—at Villefranche near Nice—and I was packed off to Switzerland to go to school.”
“Like it?”
She wrinkled her nose in distaste. “Hated it—at first. I mean, after the marvelous freedom of Burgate I felt I was in an all-girls’ prison. But I grew to enjoy it and I learned a great deal … German, Italian—French, of course—and music.”
“Do you play?”
“Piano. Not concert quality, just well enough to brighten parties.”
He grinned foolishly at her. God, but she was pretty. “I bet you’re invited to a lot of them.”
“More than enough.”
“Have a boyfriend?”
She frowned at her drink. “I’m married.”
“Oh.” He looked at her left hand. It was ringless.
She noticed the direction of his glance. “I don’t wear a ring. We separated a year ago.”