At that moment, as if to underline the truth of what Gibbons had just said, three artillery shells burst on the airfield. From the perimeter defences, close to the main gate, a heavy machine-gun hammered. At last, the rebel Kerewatan forces had decided to make their move.
A very few minutes later, the mercenary pilots who were still engaging the Hunters, with no further losses on either side thanks to the high skill of the opposing forces, were surprised to hear Koppejans’ voice suddenly burst over the R/T. The mercenary commander identified himself in plain language.
‘This is Koppejans. The airfield is under attack. Do not land. I repeat, the airfield is under attack. Do not land. Divert to Warambe. Acknowledge your instructions.’
One by one, the surviving Sabre pilots complied, breaking off their sparring with the Hunters and withdrawing to the west of the field to form up. In loose formation, they circled slowly round the perimeter and set course for the river. The pilots were puzzled by the sudden turn of events, but below them they could see shells bursting on the solitary runway and knew that any attempt to land would be suicidal. Short of baling out into heaven knew what, Warambe was their only alternative.
On the far side of the airfield, Peter de Salis, still under cover at the edge of the forest and menaced by the scout car, also experienced a shock of surprise when, through the screen of undergrowth, he saw the hatch in the armoured vehicle’s squat turret open and a hand emerge, waving what looked like a white handkerchief. He hissed an order to his men, telling them to hold their fire.
A moment later, cautiously, the hand was followed by a head and shoulders and a voice rang out, speaking in what might have been an Australian accent.
‘Hey, you blokes. We’ve just had a radio signal. Looks as though we’re on the same side all of a sudden. Can I talk to your boss?’
After a moment’s hesitation, de Salis yelled, ‘All right! But come down out of there, where I can see you. And no tricks.’ He rose slowly to his feet and ordered his men, ‘Keep me covered.’
The scout car commander climbed down and came forward. The two men stood face to face on the edge of the forest, and de Salis noted that the mercenary’s bearded face wore an expression of bewilderment.
‘This is a funny business,’ he said. ‘I’ve just had orders to rejoin the main force and invite you to come along. The airfield is under attack,’ he added, stating the obvious. ‘Anyway, who the hell are you?’
‘Never mind about that,’ de Salis told him firmly. ‘All you need to know is that your former boss, Nkrombe, is on his way to Warambe, and I suggest we all start heading in that direction as soon as possible. It’s going to get very unhealthy around here. With our firepower added to yours, we might just about make it.’
High above the airfield, the Hunters turned towards the Sabre formation, ready to attack. But the Sabres were showing no aggressive intentions; they were flying very slowly, and as the RAF pilots watched, the leading Sabre lowered its undercarriage in a gesture of surrender.
Norman Bright, who had vainly been trying to contact Yeoman over the R/T, assumed command.
‘They’re heading for Warambe,’ he told the other pilots. ‘The message must have got through to them. Stay above and astern; if they change their minds and decide to fight again, we’ll hit them hard.’ He paused, and then asked, ‘Has anybody seen any sign of Red Leader?’
None of them had. Then Neil Hart, flying on the extreme left of the Hunter formation, drew Bright’s attention to something ahead.
Bright looked, and felt his heart sink. From the jungle, close to the road that led to the main river crossing, two oily mushrooms of smoke rose slowly above the treetops. Bright knew, from long experience, that at the base of those sinister clouds lay the burning wreckage of aircraft.
Chapter Eleven
YEOMAN PULLED HARD RIGHT IN AN ATTEMPT TO EVADE the stream of machine-gun bullets that lanced towards him, and knew at once that he was too late. The Hunter shuddered as the bullets struck it somewhere aft of the cockpit. He kept on turning, pressure-induced contrails streaming from his wing-tips, and felt another burst of fire strike home.
The Sabre was very close astern, its nose lit by the flashes of its gunfire. Behind him, Yeoman sensed rather than heard a terrific bang and his seat harness bit into him suddenly as the Hunter decelerated. At the same moment, the control column went sloppy in his hand and the fighter began to roll to the left.
He reached down and grabbed the seat-pan handle, saving a vital fraction of a second. An instant later, with a jolt that compressed him from neck to buttocks, the Martin-Baker seat kicked him out into space.
Less than a hundred yards astern of the Hunter, the Colonel watched the smoke trails of his bullets punch into the British fighter’s fuselage and felt a surge of elation. He fired again, saw white fuel vapour stream behind his target, and saw the Hunter waver. Its left wing started to drop. Then its glittering cockpit canopy flew off and the dark bundle of ejection seat and pilot punched out in a puff of grey smoke.
Before the Colonel even had time to think about turning away from his kill, the Hunter exploded. It tumbled on across the tree tops, trailing streamers of blazing fuel and scattering debris in all directions. Instinctively, the Colonel raised an arm over his face as his Sabre’s speed took him straight through the heart of the inferno.
A series of dull thuds shook the fighter as its gaping air intake ingested lethal fragments of metal. The pilot hauled back the stick and the Sabre reared up, vibrating horribly. Behind the cockpit, unseen, a turbine disc came adrift and ripped through the side of the fuselage, biting great chunks out of the port wing before it whirled away.
Time froze as the Colonel reached down and, as though in slow motion, grasped the ejection seat handle, built into the arm-rest of his seat. Then, as the Sabre reached the top of its climb, breaking up as it went, he too blasted out of the cockpit.
Unlike the Hunter, the Sabre was not fitted with a fully-automatic seat. Desperately, for he knew that his life was measured in seconds, the Colonel twisted the mechanism of the seat-harness release and kicked himself free, at the same time pulling the D-ring of his parachute. For what seemed an age, he and the seat went on falling together; then a ribbon of silk streamed from his parachute pack as the drogue deployed, slowing him down, and the seat dropped away beneath him.
The small drogue pulled the main parachute canopy clear and it deployed over his head with a crack and a jerk that sent the breath gasping out of his body.
There was neither the time, nor the height, for him to worry about searching for a clear patch among the trees that were now rapidly rushing up to meet him. He held his legs tightly together and crossed his arms over his face to protect his eyes as he plummeted into the forest canopy at a slight angle. Branches whipped at him and something caught him a painful blow on the shoulder. Then there came another fearsome jerk and his downward progress was halted abruptly. He swung backwards like a pendulum and struck a tree trunk with a bruising force that knocked the wind out of him a second time. His arms dropped limply to his sides as he hung there, stunned and unable to move, his parachute canopy caught fast in the branches of the tree that had broken his fall.
Regaining his senses, he opened his eyes and saw immediately that he was suspended less than six feet from the jungle floor. He moved his legs in an effort to find out whether anything was broken; it did not seem to be, so he took a chance and banged the quick-release box of his parachute harness. A moment later, he was sprawling on the spongy ground at the base of the tree, his first sensation one of relief at being free from the biting constraint of his parachute straps.
He stood up, trying to get his bearings. Through the trees, some distance away, he saw a bright glow and heard the roar of a fierce fire; the noise was accompanied by the sharp crack of exploding ammunition.
He glanced up at the sunlight that filtered through the trees and worked out that the main Kerewata-Warambe road lay on his left, in the direction of the f
ire. He began to walk towards it, and in a few minutes came upon a scene of devastation.
The crashing Hunter, his recent victim, had torn a great swathe through the trees, scattering metal fragments everywhere. One of its wings was impaled on a splintered trunk; there was no sign of the other, or of the tail. The engine lay smouldering and crumpled among the undergrowth, while the fuselage, blazing fiercely, had been reduced to a pile of twisted scrap metal.
The Colonel was used to the sight of the shattered remnants of aircraft. What caught his attention now was the parachute canopy, almost entirely consumed by the flames, that lay close to the broken fuselage. Some distance away, still attached to the canopy by his harness and shroud lines, a man lay face-down in the mud, motionless.
At first the Colonel thought he was dead, but then he saw the man’s right arm twitch feebly. Braving the intense heat, the mercenary pilot ran across to the sprawled figure and turned it over. He twisted the round metal quick-release box of the parachute harness and struck it a sharp blow, causing the harness to fall apart. Then, gripping the man under the armpits, he dragged him away from the encroaching flames.
A rapid inspection told him that the pilot did not seem to be badly hurt. There was a nasty bruise on the side of his face and a cut on the eyebrow above it, but no bones appeared to be broken. He unfastened the man’s flying helmet and tossed it aside into the undergrowth.
He looked down at the face of the unconscious pilot, and at once knew the identity of the man he had shot down. He knew, also, what he had to do.
Suddenly, he raised his head, listening. Over the crackle of the flames, he caught the sound of a truck’s engine. The road must not be far away. There was no way of telling who was in the truck, and he did not propose to take any chances. Using a fireman’s lift, he hoisted the dead weight of the other pilot and stumbled away among the trees until he came upon a tangle of undergrowth. He lowered the other carefully to the ground and then lay down beside him, peering back towards the wreck of the Hunter.
After a while, several men emerged from the forest on the far side of the wreck and approached it cautiously. The Colonel saw that they were Kerewatan troops. He watched as they circled the debris, prodding at bits of wreckage with their rifles. Then one of them spotted the parachute harness, and called out excitedly to the others. He bent over, peering at the ground, and the Colonel knew that he must have seen footprints in the mud. The man stood upright and shouted, pointing vaguely towards the spot where the two pilots were hiding.
Strapped to the Colonel’s right leg, below the knee, was a holster. It contained a Luger automatic, one of his prized possessions. He had owned it for a very long time, and never flew in action without it. Now he pulled it out and cocked it in readiness to fight for his own life and that of the man beside him.
Three Africans began to move towards his hiding-place, their rifles at the ready. Suddenly, they stopped in their tracks and hurled themselves to the ground as, with a terrific roar, the remainder of the Hunter’s 30-mm cannon shells exploded, spewing white-hot shrapnel everywhere. The Africans scrambled to their feet and, yelling in terror, fled back into the trees beyond the wreck. A minute later, the Colonel heard the truck’s engine start up again, its note rising as the vehicle moved away. The Kerewatan soldiers had clearly lost all desire to investigate further.
George Yeoman groaned and opened his eyes. Everything in front of him was blurred, and the whole of his body, especially the right side of his face, ached abominably. He struggled to sit up and immediately fell back, gasping, as pain lanced through his spine.
A pale mist slowly coalesced and swam into focus through the blur. It was the face of a man. He stared at it in disbelief as its mouth formed words.
‘So, George, you have woken up.’
Yeoman tried to speak, failed, and tried again, this time with success.
‘Richter, Joachim Richter. Is it you, or am I dreaming?’
The other nodded. ‘It’s me, all right. And I have to tell you that I have just had the dubious pleasure of shooting you down. Not that it made much difference, because I flew into debris from your aircraft, and here I am. We are both in the same pickle, as the English say.’
‘In the same boat,’ Yeoman corrected him. The comment was so ludicrous that they both started to laugh. They laughed until the tears ran down their faces and the reaction oozed out of them.
Richter. Formerly a colonel in Hitler’s Luftwaffe and the commander of one of its elite fighter units, Jagdgeschwader 66, his wartime career had closely matched Yeoman’s own. Both of them had been blooded in action during the Battle of France; both of them had survived five years of almost continuous combat flying. Their paths had crossed in action on more than one occasion, as they discovered when they compared experiences after the war. The last time had been early in May 1945, when Richter, together with his adjutant, Hasso von Gleiwitz, had made his escape from the madhouse of Hitler’s bunker and the ruins of Berlin, which was encircled by the Russians; they had got away in a flying-boat, which had taken off from one of Berlin’s lakes.
That flying-boat had also brought to safety a key SOE agent and several German scientists who had been working on Germany’s atomic bomb project. The name of the agent was Julia Connors, later to become Julia Yeoman. And it was Yeoman’s fighter squadron which had escorted the aircraft into Allied territory.
Yeoman and Richter had kept in touch with one another for some time after the war, then their correspondence had gradually petered out. The reason, Yeoman knew now, was not hard to find. The life of a mercenary was not conducive to regular letter-writing.
He looked at Richter, and felt the years roll away. ‘I’m bloody annoyed,’ he grunted, ‘about you shooting me down. It should have been the other way round.’
Richter grinned at him. ‘Well, I tried to do it for five years, and never succeeded,’ he said. ‘Better late than never.’ Suddenly, his face grew sober.
‘I have not forgotten, George, that I owe my life to you,’ he said quietly. ‘If I had known it was you up there, I would not have tried quite so hard. I should have guessed it was you, though, by the way you flew. I knew that you were in command of the RAF squadron in Warambe.’
‘We need not have fought at all,’ Yeoman said. Briefly, for it hurt to speak, he told Richter of the Kerewatan Army’s revolt and the British plan to bring out Nkrombe. The mercenary forces, he said, would have to battle their way out of Kerewata.
‘Well,’ said Richter thoughtfully, ‘they ought to be quite capable of doing that. It doesn’t leave you and me with much choice, though; our only way out of this mess is eastwards, towards the river. Can you walk?’
‘I don’t even know if I can stand up,’ Yeoman said ruefully. ‘My back got a hell of a jolt when I ejected. But here goes.’
Again, more slowly this time, he eased himself into a sitting position, wincing with the pain. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead, and he looked up helplessly at the German.
‘Give me a hand, will you?’ he gasped.
Richter obligingly swung Yeoman’s arm around his neck and helped the Englishman to stand upright. Yeoman took a faltering step and cried out in agony, causing Richter to lower him to the ground again. ‘Christ,’ Yeoman groaned, ‘this is bloody well impossible!’
Richter sensed that shock and pain were combining to cloud Yeoman’s powers of reason. ‘Nothing is impossible,’ he said firmly. ‘We are going to get out of this hole, even if I have to carry you. What we need, first of all, is a plan of action.’ He glanced across the forest at the remains of the Hunter, which continued to belch forth large volumes of smoke.
‘The smoke is bound to attract somebody,’ he pointed out. ‘While you were unconscious, a truck-load of Africans came to have a look, but they went away again. There will probably be more. I think the best thing we can do is hole up somewhere near the road and wait for a while to see what happens. If our boys are fighting their way out, as you say, they will come along that
rood sooner or later; there is nowhere else to go.’
A distant thud and a spatter of shots suddenly startled the two men. Then Richter grinned and relaxed. ‘That must be the ammunition cooking off in my Sabre,’ he said. ‘It crashed somewhere to the south of here. Nothing to worry about.’ He looked down at Yeoman’s suffering figure. ‘All right, it’s time we moved. Sorry if this is going to hurt, but it can’t be helped.’
Again, as gently as he could, he pulled Yeoman upright. The pain was worse than anything Yeoman had ever experienced. Blood flowed from his lower lip as he bit into it; then, mercifully, he passed out.
*
Back at the airfield, a savage fire-fight had developed as the mercenaries and a few loyal Africans, joined now by de Salis and his small but highly effective group, beat off the first assault by the rebel Kerewatans. The latter, supported by an armoured car, made a direct assault on the northern perimeter, where the main defences were concentrated.
Koppejans and his men were ready for them. Dug into positions which were well protected by logs and bags of earth, they waited until the armoured car advanced right on to the airfield and then hit it with a single round from a bazooka. A plume of smoke shot from the armoured vehicle’s turret and it continued for a few yards on a wavering course, its crew dead inside, before slewing off to one side and coming to a halt. The African troops who had accompanied it, sheltering behind its bulk, were cut down by machine-gun fire.
After that, there was a ten-minute lull during which Koppejans conferred with de Salis. The two commanders retired to the operations room that had been used by the mercenary squadron and pored over a map together. It was apparent to both of them that breaking out of Kerewata would be a difficult business.
‘We have to face it,’ Koppejans said. ‘They’ve got us pinned down. God knows how many of them there are out there, but they probably outnumber us ten to one. What’s more, they’ve got some artillery.’
Hunter Squadron Page 14