Hunter Squadron

by Robert Jackson

  They were fractionally too late. Even as they turned, four Hunters blasted low across the airfield in a thunderclap of sound, pulling thin trails of black smoke. The British fighters pulled up steeply and broke to left and right, gaining several thousand feet of altitude. Four more jets crossed the field at a higher level.

  The Colonel and his two wingmen went on turning, keeping pace with the nearest pair of Hunters. Below them, the other three Sabres were taking off, one after the other. The Colonel was puzzled. If the British had wanted to, they could easily have destroyed the three Sabres on the ground, and then turned on the three that were already in the air, but they were making no move to attack.

  He ordered his pilots to continue climbing and to keep a watchful eye on the British jets. He would wait for the Hunters to make the first move. Soon, the last three Sabres would also be airborne, and then he would have a numerical advantage.

  He glanced down to see what was happening on the airstrip, and immediately caught sight of something very odd. In the extreme south-east corner of the field, a bright orange-coloured object was rising slowly into the air. Quickly, he radioed Koppejans and told the Belgian what he had seen. Koppejans came on the air after a few seconds’ delay.

  ‘Looks like a balloon of some sort,’ he said. ‘Can’t quite make out what’s going on. I’ll send some of my chaps to investigate.’

  The time was just after 0630 hours. Five minutes earlier, Peter de Salis and his men, unobserved by anyone, had quietly crept forward from their place of concealment at the edge of the forest into a patch of open ground on the airfield itself. While some of the Special Force men fanned out and assumed defensive positions, others busied themselves with the bulky packs that they had brought with them. As they did so, the first flight of Sabres thundered into the air, and almost immediately afterwards the Hunters swept across the field.

  De Salis glanced up at the jets, circling watchfully around each other, and nodded with satisfaction. So far, the plan seemed to be working.

  The mysterious packs were quickly opened and their contents laid out on the ground. First came a roll of orange material which, when spread out, resolved itself into the deflated envelope of a balloon. A small gas cylinder was attached to its neck. Next came a harness and a hundred-foot length of super-tough nylon rope. One end was clipped to a fitting on the balloon envelope, the other to the harness. A few feet from the balloon, the rope passed through a curious cross-shaped metal structure, which was held in place by strong clips. The metal was titanium, one of the strongest and lightest alloys devised by man.

  ‘Get him into the harness,’ de Salis ordered, indicating Nkrombe. Within seconds, the African was trussed up like a turkey in what was really a modified parachute harness. He sat cross-legged on the ground, arms folded across his chest, dumbly wondering what strange fate awaited him.

  ‘Here she comes, sir,’ one of the Special Force men said, pointing. ‘Right on time.’

  De Salis looked. Low over the forest, still a couple of miles distant, the great bulk of the Beverley cruised slowly towards the airfield.

  ‘Inflate,’ de Salis ordered. One of his men turned a valve, and helium gas hissed from the cylinder into the envelope of the balloon. It writhed like a crushed slug, then began to billow out as the gas filled it. In thirty seconds it was rising from the ground, trailing its length of rope. Below the neck of the balloon, the metal cross revolved slowly, glinting in the sunlight which was now beginning to penetrate the eastern cloud bank.

  On the flight deck of the Beverley, Air Commodore Sampson, in the co-pilot’s seat, peered ahead and saw the tiny disc of the balloon as it rose against the backdrop of the forest on the far side of the airfield. The pilot had seen it too, although he was preoccupied with the activities of the jet fighters circling over the field. He moved the control column and the huge aircraft responded ponderously.

  ‘I’m going to make my run from the south,’ he said over the intercom, ‘straight into wind. That’ll reduce our ground speed and increase our chances of a first-time hook-up.’

  Sampson looked at him and nodded. ‘Roger.’ He spoke over the intercom to the men standing by in the Beverley’s great, barn-like cargo hold. ‘Extend your gear,’ he told them.

  A few moments later, a strange, trapeze-like structure emerged over the lip of the cargo hold and swung down into the slipstream, held rigidly in place by two metal arms. ‘Gear in position, sir,’ one of the operators told the men on the flight deck.

  As the Beverley turned, Sampson looked out of the side window. He was in time to see two Sabres, a few thousand feet higher up, curving round in what looked like the start of an attack pattern. He said nothing to the pilot; there was no point. Either the Hunters would do their work, or the Beverley would end up as a sixty-ton pile of blazing scrap metal.

  Up above, Yeoman spotted the sudden move made by the Sabres, the last ones to take off, and swore to himself. Their aggressive intentions made it plain that no contact had been established with the mercenaries, as he had hoped. He snapped an order over the R/T.

  ‘Yellow Section, two bandits heading for the transport, diving from one o’clock.’

  The warning was unnecessary; Bright, leading Yellow Section, had already spotted the danger and was bringing his four Hunters down to head off the Sabres. The pilots of the latter, both Frenchmen, saw the Hunters coming down on them and one of them turned towards the British jets, leaving the other to continue his attack on the Beverley. Bright, covered by his wingman, went after this aircraft. The Hunter was much faster than the American fighter and overhauled it rapidly. Bright closed in to four hundred yards’ range and fired a burst with his cannon, seeing the flash of a shell burst on the Sabre’s dark green fuselage, aft of the cockpit. The Sabre at once pulled up sharply, losing speed and presenting a plan-view target to the RAF pilot, who fired a second burst from one hundred yards. This time, pieces flew off the Sabre as Bright’s shells found their mark on its port wing. There was a puff of smoke which rapidly turned into a sheet of flame as the Sabre came apart in a blaze of exploding fuel tanks. The fragments described a long parabola through the air and impacted on the eastern edge of the airfield.

  The second Sabre pilot pulled back the stick and climbed hard, zooming up almost vertically. One of the Hunter pilots, Yellow Four, went after it. Bright ordered him to break off the engagement and rejoin the others, but the Hunter pilot, who was Peter Gibbons, did not appear to have heard the instruction. He continued his climb, intent on achieving what would have been his first ‘kill’.

  High above, Yeoman’s four Hunters and the Colonel’s three Sabres were still circling the airfield cautiously, sizing one another up like packs of dogs about to launch themselves into a fight. The Colonel was beside himself with fury, for the two Frenchmen had begun their attack on the transport without his authority, and now one of them had paid with his life. The second would soon do so, too, unless prompt action saved him.

  The Colonel pressed the R/T button and called his wingmen, telling them to cover him, and then winged over in a dive towards the two climbing jets. Passing the Frenchman’s Sabre in a blur of speed, he attacked Gibbons’ Hunter head-on, firing one short burst before he was forced to pull out of his dive as the ground rushed up to meet him. His bullets struck the Hunter on its starboard air intake and removed several feet of metal skin from the wing root. Startled, his mind overtaken by the speed of the sudden attack, Gibbons rolled out of the climb and brought his damaged aircraft into level flight. More metal fragments whirled away in the slipstream. Before he had time to think, the Avon engine flamed out and the Hunter began to descend in a glide towards the airfield below. Frantically, he tried to relight the engine as the altimeter unwound with sickening speed, but the Avon remained dead. At last, down to five hundred feet, he pulled the face-blind handle of his ejection seat and blasted himself out of the cockpit.

  Meanwhile, the Beverley, as yet unmolested, was turning back towards the airfield from the sou
th. De Salis watched it coming in, so low that its stalky fixed undercarriage almost brushed the ground. He warned Nkrombe to brace himself, then glanced across the airfield; a small armoured scout car, still a long way off, was racing towards his group. Quickly, he turned to his NCO.

  ‘Tell the men to fall back to the edge of the forest,’ he ordered. ‘We’ll be in trouble if that scout car catches us out in the open.’

  There might just be time enough, he thought, as he turned his attention back to the approaching Beverley. If, that is, the pilot gets it right first time.

  In the Beverley’s cockpit, Sampson found himself holding his breath as the pilot held a rock-steady course towards the orange balloon. Above the airfield, a battle seemed to be developing as the Hunter pilots tangled with the Sabres, preventing the latter from interfering with the transport aircraft.

  The roar of the Beverley’s four Bristol Centaurus engines became deafening as the huge aircraft thundered closer, its trapeze fully extended. Its belly brushed the orange balloon, and a moment later there was an audible slap as the trapeze struck the nylon rope. The metal bar of the trapeze slid rapidly up the rope and struck the cross-piece just below the balloon, tripping a device that caused the four arms of the metal cross to fold inwards and lock firmly into position around the bar.

  The rope snapped taut and Nkrombe gave an involuntary cry as his harness bit into him. Instantly, he was whipped off the ground, a grotesque figure, trailing behind the Beverley, his arms and legs flailing in terror. In the belly of the aircraft, the crew set about the task of reeling him in. The pilot climbed a little, in order to clear the trees, and turned away from the airfield. Up above, Yeoman heard his radio call, saying that the pickup run had been successful.

  Yeoman had his hands full. His task, and that of his pilots, was to shepherd the Beverley safely home, but the Sabre pilots were showing more signs of fight than he had anticipated. They flew aggressively and with discipline, making it impossible for the British pilots to break off the action cleanly.

  A quick glance told him that the Beverley was turning away to the south of the airfield, levelling out with its nose pointing eastwards, in the direction of Warambe. He ordered his section to edge their way towards the transport while the three remaining Hunters of Yellow Section kept the Sabres busy. The mercenary squadron had now lost another aircraft; flown by one of the Germans, the Sabre had fallen victim to Flight Lieutenant Neil Hart, who had nailed it with a single short burst from five hundred yards. The Sabre had banked steeply to the left and had then turned into the ground, exploding in a huge sheet of flame among the trees to the east of the field. The pilot had not got out.

  The two sides were evenly matched now, in terms of numbers; it was seven against seven. Yeoman looked up and to the rear. A section of three Sabres was turning towards the lumbering Beverley, and a fourth — possibly the aircraft that had shot down Gibbons — was climbing to join them. Rapping a curt order over the R/T, Yeoman led his four Hunters on a course that would intercept the hostile formation.

  Meanwhile, their mission accomplished, de Salis and his men had once again taken cover in the forest, seconds before the scout car sped on to the scene. The armoured vehicle’s machine-gun sprayed the trees, sending a spatter of wood splinters flying in all directions. The scout car drew off a little and sat there, squat and menacing, its machine-gun moving from side to side in search of a target. De Salis ordered his men to lie low and wait to see what happened. If contact had been established with the mercenaries, they might find themselves with some unexpected allies. If not, they were likely to be caught in the middle of a battle between the mercenaries and the Kerewatan troops. In either event, they would have to fight their way out.

  Through the screen of trees, they could see something of the air battle that had developed overhead. The Beverley was well on its way by now, its bulk dwindling in the distance. Two groups of aircraft were chasing after it, one composed of Sabres, the other of Hunters.

  Yeoman, in the leading Hunter of Red Section, curved in pursuit of the foremost Sabre, whose pilot seemed intent on catching the retreating Beverley and shooting it down at all costs. The other three Sabres suddenly broke hard to the left, climbing and turning steeply, which was their mistake; the manoeuvre placed them in loose line astern, which meant that they stayed right in front of the pursuing Hunters. Two of the Hunters immediately broke hard after them and Yeoman ordered his wingman to join them, feeling confident that he could deal with the lone Sabre out in front.

  In level flight the Hunter had a far better acceleration than the American fighter, and Yeoman saw with relief that he would be well within range long before the Sabre managed to overtake the Beverley. The Sabre pilot knew it, too, and suddenly racked his fighter round in a maximum-rate turn to the right. Yeoman followed him, his body suddenly five times its normal weight as the ‘g’ force gripped him.

  The Sabre pilot was going to fight on the turn, and the reasoning behind his choice was simple. Because of its better thrust-weight ratio, the Hunter was faster then the Sabre in level flight and the climb. It was also very manoeuvrable at low speed, but in a turn the British fighter’s drag curve rose sharply and its extra thrust could not compensate for this. The overall result was that speed in a turn tended to fall off quite dramatically. It was obvious that the Sabre pilot wanted to put Yeoman into this position; if he could get on the Hunter’s tail, Yeoman would not be able to out-turn him. The Sabre pilot could then catch up with the Hunter, tightening up his own turn at fairly low speed in order to get inside his opponent’s turning radius, and then open fire.

  Yeoman, an old hand at this sort of game, had no intention of allowing any such thing to happen. Reducing his speed, he lowered the Hunter’s nose and then flicked the fighter into a low-speed ‘yo-yo’, rolling over and pulling over to cut inside the Sabre’s turn. The manoeuvre, devised by fighter pilots during the Second World War, was designed to bring the pursuing fighter gradually closer to his opponent’s six o’clock position and break the stalemate of a turning fight.

  For a moment, as he rolled out of the ‘yo-yo’ and the luminous pipper of his gunsight crept towards the Sabre’s tail pipe, Yeoman thought that the manoeuvre had worked, and almost immediately realized that it had not. His speed was still a good deal higher than the Sabre’s, and the mercenary pilot, whoever he was, took full advantage of the fact.

  As Yeoman closed in, intent on achieving a kill, the Sabre suddenly pulled up into a high-g barrel roll, a manoeuvre designed to turn the tables on an opponent approaching with excess speed. It was a dangerous form of defence, because the aircraft carrying it out lost a great deal of speed, and if the pilot’s timing was not exactly right he ended up dead. If he pulled into the roll too late, the pursuing fighter would swat him like a fly as he hung defencelessly in mid-roll, with no manoeuvring capability; if he began the roll too soon, the attacker would see it coming, zoom-climb for height and then dive down to complete his kill.

  The Sabre pilot got it exactly right, as Yeoman found to his cost a moment later. Unable to manoeuvre crisply because of his high speed, he shot through the middle of his opponent’s roll, like a thread passing through the eye of a needle. Breaking hard, he frantically searched the sky to the rear of the cockpit, and was just in time to see the Sabre arcing round on to his tail as it came out of its roll.

  It was time to think fast. Yeoman knew that he had met his match in terms of skill and experience. He had to pull something out of the hat, quickly, or his twenty years as a fighter pilot would come to an abrupt end in this stinking backwater. As his mind raced, the Sabre pilot opened fire.

  The battle had taken the two jets well to the east of the airfield, over the jungle. From the field itself, three tall columns of smoke rose into the morning air, two from the shattered wrecks of Sabres, the third from Peter Gibbons’ Hunter, which had struck the ground at a shallow angle and had bounced across the airfield for two hundred yards before exploding.

  Gibbo
ns, exiting at low level from his crashing fighter, had landed near the control tower with a thump that broke one of his ankles and momentarily knocked him unconscious.

  When he came to, it was to find himself lying on his back with three men bending over him. Automatically, he groped for his parachute’s quick-release box, but someone had already stripped him of his harness.

  The men bending over him were white, their faces bronzed by the African sun, and they wore jungle-green fatigues. One of them had some kind of silver insignia on his epaulettes. Gibbons, badly shaken, struggled to sit up and addressed him, asking if he spoke English. The other nodded.

  ‘I want to see your commander,’ Gibbons said. ‘It’s urgent. There’s an important message.’

  ‘I am the commander,’ Koppejans told him. ‘What is it you want?’

  Gibbons shivered slightly as reaction began to set in. He swallowed with difficulty.

  ‘Our people have been trying to make contact with you,’ he said. ‘The Kerewatan Army is in revolt.’

  ‘I know that,’ Koppejans said. ‘But go on.’

  ‘We’ve got Nkrombe. That was what the transport aircraft was for. We tried to warn you not to resist, but for some reason our people haven’t been able to get through. Can’t you call off your pilots?’

  ‘They are not my pilots,’ Koppejans pointed out. ‘And anyway, why should I trust you?’

  Helplessly, Gibbons gestured towards the rising columns of smoke. ‘Your men are dying needlessly,’ he said, gasping as a spasm of pain from his shattered ankle shot through him. ‘Call them off. Tell them to divert to Warambe. You are going to have to fight your way out of here, and you’ll need all the air cover you can get. There’s a plan to let your pilots operate alongside our own,’ he lied.

  Koppejans straightened up. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I will send out the necessary instructions. Meanwhile, we had better get you under cover.’