by Robert Ryan
I handed the photo back, the thick South African accent of that pilot still ringing in my ears, my throat suddenly dry. At some point, I had drunk my whisky so I ordered another and asked Lindy, ‘How many missions?’
‘Over Warsaw? He went three times. Then there were the oilfields at Ploesti in Romania and bombing the Brennerpass in Austria …’
‘He survived three passes over Warsaw?’
‘Yes. He went down supplying partisans in Northern Italy.’
I felt my heart lurch. ‘Did you tell me that? That he was supplying partisans?’
‘I thought I had. On the telephone.’
My drink arrived. I reassured myself that it would be too much of a coincidence. How many partisan supply missions did they fly out of Foggia? Fifty? A hundred? Then she said something else.
‘Mr Lang said you were up there. Said you had an unusual RAF career.’
‘Unusual—yes,’ I agreed. ‘I’ll tell you all about it sometime. So what do you know about his sortie?’
‘Ten Liberators went out that night, with drop zones all over the occupied area. A milk run, they said, after Warsaw. Easy peasy. Four came back. I have traced five of the others. My dad’s is still missing.’
‘Where was your father’s DZ?’
I braced myself, but it hit me like a steam train anyway.
‘Domodossola. It’s a little town—’
‘I know where it is.’
‘Actually the drop zone proper was to the east of the town. Designated as Plymouth on the mission maps.’
I was having to continually re-evaluate this girl. ‘You have the mission maps?’
‘Yes. There was a reunion of the squadron in Cape Town I attended where the people were ever so helpful.’
I realised then that I had underestimated her, had thought that because of her age she was just playing at this. There was steel inside, and not too far below the surface. Lindy Carr was serious about finding William Carr, Bill to his friends.
‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked her.
‘I beg you pardon?’
‘It’s been twenty years. Shouldn’t you be at home listening to the Beatles or the Bachelors or some other racket?’
‘You probably won’t believe this of an Australian, but Bach is more my thing.’
‘All right then, tapping your toe to the Toccata and Fugue. What I’m getting at … I mean, you can’t devote your life to this.’
‘I don’t intend to, Mr Kirby, just that part of it required to find him.’
‘Jack.’
She took a sip of champagne. ‘The offer is simple. I want you to help me survey the area. To find EH-148, E for Echo.’
I shook my head. ‘You know what you’re talking about? Needle in a haystack doesn’t even begin to describe it.’ I’d done some PR—photo-reconnaissance—in ‘shuftikites’ in 1945, during the dying days of the war. I knew what an imprecise science it was. ‘Then there are the Italians.’
‘What about them?’
‘They are very security conscious. You want to fly up near the border, photographing the landscape? They arrest you if you turn up with a box Brownie near a military installation.’
She passed me another sheaf of documents. I flicked through them and felt impressed, despite myself.
‘You went to the Air Ministry in Rome?’
‘My Italian isn’t that hot,’ she admitted, ‘but I got a friend to do it. It’s permission—’
‘I can see what it is.’ A permit to overfly a great swathe of the countryside near the Swiss border. I muttered something about hen’s teeth. ‘You know how much this is going to cost?’
‘You don’t look expensive.’
‘Don’t be cheeky.’
She grinned at me and I found myself returning the smile.
‘My plane burns fifty gallons of fuel an hour, wheels up to wheels down. We’ll need a camera, a decent one, probably a Wild. Even hiring them doesn’t come cheap. Then there’s the film. Now I am not up to date, but I soon can be, and I can imagine the developing costs—’
She waved a hand impatiently. ‘Look, if you don’t want to do it, I have a stand-by pilot who is willing to take my offer.’
‘And who would that be?’
‘Furio Gabbiano.’
My partner. Make that erstwhile partner, as soon as we’d worked the rest of the summer. Although part of me bristled, the rest wanted to ruffle the conniving bastard’s hair. At least Furio had ambition. Mine seemed to have drained away entirely these last few years. ‘That was sneaky’ I said at last.
‘Sneaky and cheeky, that’s me.’ She signalled for more champagne. ‘And rich. My stepfather gave me a substantial amount of money in a trust, which I came into when I was twenty-one. I could have bought a house, a yacht, some fancy cars. I decided instead to find my father.’
‘How did your stepfather react to that news?’
‘Like I give a flying fuck.’
The profanity hung in the air, as if it couldn’t believe it came from this young woman’s mouth, and I found myself laughing, if only at the expressions around us.
‘Sorry.’
‘I’m sure they’ve heard worse in here. There’s a woman behind you who appears to be having a seizure, but there’s always one, isn’t there?’
Lindy coloured a little. It was a nice effect. I realised those two whiskies were running round my bloodstream and making mischief. She’s just a girl, I reminded my various appetites and imaginations.
‘Look, it’s your money,’ I said at last. ‘And I am sure you can find someone to take it if I don’t. But not Furio.’
‘Why not?’
‘He’s not as good as he thinks he is.’
‘And are you?’
After a moment’s hesitation I went for the third Scotch. ‘Yes.’
‘Lang told me you crashed once.’
I nodded. How come that always popped up? I’d walked away from it. Well, swum. And, just like every pilot claims, it wasn’t my fault. Shearing spinners aren’t anybody’s fault. ‘Like I said, I’ll tell you about it sometime.’
‘Tell me now.’
‘I’d rather not. It was a long time ago.’
‘But not very far away. Not from where I’ll be sitting. I think as a prospective employer I am entitled to know how you came to crash, Mr Kirby.’
The third whisky came with some nuts and crisps. Maybe the barman was worried about my alcohol absorption, too. Even without the booze, I’d have been a little pissed off about being bullied by a girl half my age, just because she had a trust fund burning a hole in the Bank of Sydney’s vault. But I went ahead and told her the story all the same.
Six
Over Italy, 1944
FLIGHT LIEUTENANT JACK KIRBY felt the misfire as they approached the Italian coast. It wasn’t much, just a skip of a beat from one of the Merlin engines which sent a tiny shiver through the Mosquito’s wooden frame. He risked a glance at Sergeant Thornton, sitting to his right, slightly behind him. His navigator was still hunched over the charts, breaking off only to check the luminous green line in the cathode-ray tubes of the AI—the Airborne Interceptor—VHF system, alert for enemy nightfighter activity. He’d sensed nothing amiss with the plane.
Kirby examined each engine in turn, the solid discs of the prop blades spinning just a couple of feet away from where he sat, then scanned the instruments for signs of distress, but all was as it should have been. The blip could have been a supercharger surge, he figured, so he upped the power and boost for thirty seconds as recommended in the manual. There was a slight sense of flexing in the frame as the extra torque kicked in, then the plane settled back down as he reset. It was nothing, Kirby told himself.
They made landfall just to the south of the island of Elba. There had been flak ships moored offshore here until a week ago. Kirby had been part of the group that had fallen on them from a not-so-great height, skimming over the sea so low it felt as if the Merlin’s props were shaving the tops o
f the waves, before launching rockets into the hulks. Most of the enemy guns were designed to aim high, and were unable to crank down to sea level, so they’d got away with one casualty out of six planes. He could still taste the adrenalin and recall the after-shock of fear that chilled him as they landed at Alghero on the west coast of Sardinia. It wasn’t like that tonight, though. This was a Red Stocking job, flying high and lonely, six hours in the air for a desperate snatch of conversation with a frightened man at the other end.
Kirby began to climb and adjusted the 02 supply, feeling the soft flow from the mask against his cheeks. Like most nightflyers, Kirby liked to use the oxygen from the moment of take-off. One less thing to worry about forgetting. As he flew through the ragged clouds with the gentlest of bumps, the heavens were starting to shine brighter. By the time they hit 25,000 feet, the celestial display would be clear and vast.
He checked airspeed. Nudging 250 knots. They were well short of the Mozzie’s maximum speed—he had to conserve fuel—but still gobbling up the miles. However, there was nothing to judge their progress by, just the steady, satisfying thrum of the big V12 engines, their noise and vibration filling the cockpit.
He took her higher and the cold began to seep through his heated flight suit as the first ice crystals bloomed on the canopy. He flicked on the airjets that were supposed to keep them from spreading like cancer across the field of vision.
Albie Thornton gave him a new heading and Kirby turned the Mosquito, parallel with the coast now, planning to cut between Pisa and Florence and fly up towards Milan. One last adjustment would take them to the east of the city, well above the marauding nightfighters. Then he would go on to the lakes for the radio run, before making a long loop, crossing back to the Med to the east of Genoa at Portofino, and home.
Kirby pressed the interphone link. ‘OK back there?’
‘Cold.’
Kirby heard Bishop’s teeth chattering.
‘You can turn up the heat on the suit. There is a rheostat on the wall.’
‘It’s on full. Thanks.’
‘You put the silk underwear on?’
‘Two pairs.’
‘Where you from, Bishop?’
The American laughed. ‘California. I guess they should’ve found a Yank from Nebraska for this, huh?’
‘Or a Canuck from Saskatchewan. Out.’
Albie Thornton looked at him and rolled his eyes. He was, indeed, a Canadian from cold climes. ‘It’s crazy enough being up here with you,’ Thornton said, shaking his head. He flicked a thumb towards the rear. ‘Lock me up if I volunteer for that land of idiocy.’
Bishop was in a specially constructed cabin that had been shoehorned into the rear of the Mosquito fuselage, between bomb bay and rear wheel. There was no window, just room for one man, his parachute, a radio set, a wire-recording device, and a flask of coffee. Kirby also thought you’d have to be mad to sit folded inside that cramped space for hours on end.
Red Stockings were normally flown by the USAAF using A-26 Invaders out of the UK. However, they’d had trouble getting down into Italy and lost a couple of their planes in the Alps, so 23 Squadron in Sardinia had been given the task of running Italian Red Stockings until the Yanks had a re-think.
A Red Stocking was a covert overfly to intercept and record an Allied spy’s transmissions from the ground, an invention of Bishop’s outfit, the Office of Strategic Services. The name was a variation on Blue Stocking, the accepted code for a weather observation mission, and it used a system called Eleanor-Joan which operated on 260 MHz, a frequency they were assured the enemy did not monitor. Eleanor, the airborne element of the partnership, was linked to a recording device, which meant the agent on the ground, who used the Joan set, with its range of twenty miles, didn’t have to waste time with codes. He spoke his report, it was recorded, and the Intelligence boys played it back at home at their leisure.
Flight Lieutenant Kirby, of course, only knew the time and position at which he had to rendezvous. He had no idea who the agent was, or what he would say. He would not be privy to this. But looking at the flight plans when he was briefed, he couldn’t help but notice they would be orbiting at 30,000 feet not far from Salò on the western shore of Lake Garda. Even Kirby knew who was holed up in Salò. Il Duce, Benito Mussolini himself.
The second misfire happened as they turned and came in for their run. Thornton felt it this time, and looked across at Kirby, who in turn re-checked his instruments. The needle on the oil-pressure gauge for the starboard engine gave a twitch and dropped slightly. Nothing to worry about, thought Kirby. You could fly one of these beauties home on just one. He held his breath and brought her level.
‘Contact.’ It was Bishop. He had his man. Kirby put the plane into a shallow bank, looping back round towards the south. Twenty minutes maximum. There were no nightfighters in this area, so it was just a case of passing the time until Bishop said, ‘Complete.’
Below he could just make out the lights from a poorly observed blackout and a sudden sparkle of red and white. Fireworks? Unlikely, he thought. Who would be stupid enough to let off fireworks with Allied bombers in the sky?
Eighteen minutes later the needle began to move erratically on the oil gauge. Just above it, the dials indicating oil temperature had started to climb too. Kirby swore to himself. ‘Bishop?’
‘Not now,’ the American snapped back.
Kirby began to lose height. ‘Not too much,’ advised Thornton as he indicated the altimeter. He, too, could feel a judder in the airframe.
Bishop crackled in Kirby’s ear. ‘Complete. Everything all right up there?’
‘Got a bit of concern over one engine. We’re going home.’
‘Fine by me.’
The pressure needle on the suspect unit was swinging wildly, the temperature jabbing over into the danger zone. Kirby closed the throttle and pushed in the feathering button to the misbehaving engine so that the blades would turn sideways and reduce drag. It was going to be a long run back, tenser than he had anticipated. Booster pump was off, fuel cock closed, radiator shutter open. That should keep her happy for now.
Wrong. The starboard engine speed shot up into the red. The Mosquito lurched violently and pulled to port. He heard Bishop yell over his headset, and saw Thornton reach for his grab handle, but Kirby heaved her back straight by pulling full port rudder and half aileron. There was a screeching noise and he heard metal hit the fuselage, as if they were taking cannon rounds.
‘Are we under attack?’ It was Bishop.
Only by the gods, thought Kirby. ‘No. Hang on.’
There was another squealing sound that set his teeth on edge and in his headphones he heard Thornton gasp: ‘I think the spinner has sheered off.’
‘How low dare I go?’
Thornton flicked on his lamp and directed the beam onto the chart. The sudden yawing meant he had lost sense of where they were. ‘What are you thinking?’
Kirby looked at him. ‘I’m thinking about getting us down. Jesus.’
The oil pressure on the rogue engine was zero, but the prop was windmilling wildly, the drag making the plane buck. Kirby tried to re-feather, but nothing happened. He could hear the grinding of metal on metal. The engine was going to tear itself apart.
‘I have peaks at around eleven thousand feet. But they should be to the north of us. Round here, seven thousand.’
Kirby checked the altimeter. They were just falling below twenty. Airspeed at 150 knots. He could taste the tang of adrenalin. The fire warning light on the feathering pushbutton winked on and steadied as metal punched through the cowling, revealing the glow within, soon masked by thick smoke pouring out to merge with the night. Thornton quickly flipped up the lids and hit the extinguisher systems for the engine and the damaged wing’s fuel tank bay. The nacelle vanished for a second behind a white mist but, within seconds, puffs of dark smoke started to bleed through again.
Kirby called to Bishop. ‘You got that parachute back there?’
‘Jesus, you’re joking,’ said Bishop.
A fresh burst of flame spewed forth. Globs of molten metal spat into the sky. She was still burning all right.
‘Kirby?’ shouted Bishop, his voice thick with fright.
‘Sorry,’ said Kirby, ‘but I’m afraid I’m not joking. I’ll tell you when—’
‘Where are we?’ asked Bishop.
‘West of Brescia,’ said Thornton. ‘Can’t be more precise, I’m afraid.’
An angry shower of sparks spluttered out of the cowling, trailing behind them. The doped fabric of the wing was aflame now. ‘Go, Bishop.’
There was a pause and a dry voice said: ‘Good luck, Kirby.’
He imagined him taking the wire spool off the machine and destroying it, very much the professional spy. He felt the plane twitch as the rear panel was released and Bishop went out into the night.
‘Your turn, Albie.’ Thornton hesitated, and Kirby risked letting go of the column with one hand to pat him on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
‘Yeah. See you back home, Jack.’
Thornton struggled into his ’chute, crawled awkwardly through the gap in the control panel and down into the nose, pulled the red handle and kicked out the lower access hatch. Kirby felt the icy air snatching at his legs. Maps and papers swirled in front of him, before they were sucked out into the darkness. Thornton took a deep breath, turned to give a thumbs up and he was gone with a terrifying whoosh. Kirby hoped he’d missed the propeller.
He let the plane ride along for a few minutes, listening to her creak and growl before he undid his harness and let go of the controls to follow Thornton. The moment his hands left the column, the Mosquito spasmed violently and began to roll, throwing him across the cockpit in a tangle. His head smacked onto a sharp corner, and he wiped blood from his eyes. Kirby struggled to the seat, and managed to get one foot onto the rudder bar and a hand on the column, and yanked for all he was worth until he felt her rotate reluctantly back to level flight.
He flopped back into place, his chest heaving from the exertion. As the calm acceptance that he was in serious trouble fell on him, he felt himself relax. This was it then. No need to kick against it. He’d always known this one was on the cards, that sooner or later it would be his name on the board posted as ‘overdue’.