After Midnight

by Robert Ryan

  Get a grip, he told himself. Get a bloody grip, man. It took a second for him to grasp what the dangling tube flapping on his chest meant. It was his oxygen supply. It had jerked free when he tried to get the ’chute on. He replugged it in, cranked up the flow and felt his head clear.

  Right, Kirby you bonehead, think. He was going to have to exit through the upper canopy. To do that, the manual said he had to shut down the other engine, the good one. The moment he did that, the windmilling duffer meant the plane would yaw all over the sky, as well as turning topsy-turvy. So he had to go out through the top, which the same manual said wasn’t a good idea. He didn’t have any better ones though.

  As he reached for the upper panel release toggle, Kirby saw the lights below and to his starboard side, and he dipped his wing to get a better look. The lights of Switzerland, perhaps? And could he see them reflecting on water? Was that dark finger an illusion, or could he just make out a lake? Perhaps he’d let Thornton go too soon. No, the man deserved a chance. He had a sweetheart in—

  Three deep thuds resounded through the plane, and fresh flames rolled over the wing. ‘The Wooden Wonder’ they called this crate. Right now, building it out of timber didn’t seem such a clever idea.

  In the weak starlight, the vague shape down below hardened, until he was certain he was looking at water. Water might be good. There was an L-Type dinghy in the fuselage, which would inflate automatically thanks to an immersion switch, and he had a Mae West. If he survived the landing he’d probably be all right, whereas the chances of walking away from a mountainside impact were slim. If he could turn into the wind and along any swell, he might just be able to drop her down and kiss the surface. The trick was, he knew, to try to avoid digging in the air scoops under the engine nacelles, which would cause the whole plane to flip. Gently does it.

  Kirby apologised for the insults he had heaped on her, banked the stricken Mozzie and began to pray like never before as he took her rapidly earthwards.

  At first, he thought he was in hell, plunged into a sea of bodies. They writhed around him, arms and legs trying to drag him under the water. Hideous faces leered at him, many of them grinning at his terror and the fate that awaited him.

  Then a waxy arm floated past him, severed at the bicep. Kirby kicked back, away from the corpses, and shook his head. The water was cold, but not icy, and his Mae West was inflated. He was alive. He could see the dinghy, on the far side of the corpses, bobbing tantalisingly close.

  He couldn’t remember getting out of the plane and was only dimly aware of the ditching. He must have hit a boat or a ferry. Why else would there be these bodies? Had he done this? Had he ploughed into these people as he ditched, the props slicing into the poor sods? How many were there? He looked at them again, noted the bloated flesh, and realised that they must have been in the water some time. Dozens at least. But how did they come to be out here in the first place?

  There was oil in the water, he could feel it sticking to his skin, so the Mozzie must be somewhere below him. He hoped the lake was deep enough to ensure that nobody could recover the radio gear. He kicked hard for the inflatable, but it seemed to swirl away from him.

  After a time he began to shiver violently, his teeth chattering. As this subsided, his lids felt heavy, and he knew he was going to die.

  The sound came so faint at first, he thought he was imagining it. Kirby lifted his head from the flotation jacket and cocked an ear. It was a small outboard motor, a two-stroke. Someone was blipping the throttle, trying to stay as quiet as possible. He willed himself to be still. The noise died.

  He peered into the night and, a few hundred metres away, a beam of light flared briefly and he heard the ring of voices. German? No, Italian. But what kind of Italian? Friend or foe? Another burst of engine, another flicker of light, and an exclamation of horror. They had found a body part. Then one voice drifted above the others, carried on the breeze, the softer sound of a woman. Perhaps someone searching for a relative.

  He heard it again, and he decided it was worth taking a chance. He put his whistle to his numbed lips and began to blow.

  Seven

  I TOLD THE STORY of ditching my Mosquito in Lake Maggiore in my usual detached way as if it had happened to someone else. As I was talking, Scotch number three drained away, which led nicely into number four, which I always like to have by my side when I answer the question about the bodies in the lake. It came right on cue.

  ‘They were Jews,’ I said flatly. ‘Italian, a few Serbs. And an Englishman.’

  Lindy Carr looked at me with uncomprehending eyes, the way they all did. I didn’t blame her. It took some believing. ‘What were they doing in the lake?’

  ‘By this point of the war, the Allies were bombing the hell out of the Italian railway system. At the same time, the Germans were trying to get various undesirables north to their extermination camps. One night, a train of cattle cars ground to a halt near Lake Maggiore. The SS men were told they weren’t going to move for days, so they unloaded the cargo. They led them down to the shore and shot them in batches, then dumped the bodies in the lake.’

  ‘How horrible.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I tried to keep the image of the bloated limbs where it belonged, buried deep.

  ‘What about your crewmen? The ones who jumped.’

  I hadn’t felt the weight of that for a long time, tugging on my heart. Neither of them had made it. I had.

  ‘What was that about a Red Stocking?’ she asked.

  ‘Probably still classified. Don’t tell Major Lang I told you or I’ll be in the Tower by tomorrow night.’

  ‘Major Lang? He called himself Mr.’

  I waved my empty glass around, hoping it would thump a passing waiter. ‘He was Major when I knew him. Probably a colonel by the time he retired. Anyway, he was a spook. Special Operations Executive in the war, joined SIS—the secret service—afterwards. Never liked him. But then, he was never wild about me.’ I finally made contact with a member of staff. ‘Ah, there you are. Same again.’ We were getting close to the big question now, and I wanted to be comfortably numb when the time came.

  ‘My father’s mission was logged as a White Stocking.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It means as well as canisters, there was a passenger on board. A VIP.’ I knew that, but I just nodded. I even knew who the VIP was.

  Go on, ask her now.

  ‘What date was your father’s flight?’

  ‘Do we have a deal, Mr Kirby?’

  I thought about a Liberator lost somewhere in the mountains, the crew and plane gradually rotting together over the years among the burst canisters, guns, food, medical supplies strewn up the slope like scree. If I’d been lost somewhere in Northern Italy, would I like to think someone, a son or a daughter, would come looking for me? Hell, yes. Course, I’d have to get myself a son or a daughter first.

  ‘We have a deal,’ I agreed finally, and she said we should drink to seal the bargain, and I began to like her even more, especially when she wrote me a cheque for £200 to cover initial expenses.

  It was only when we left thirty minutes later and I poured myself into a cab to Victoria to catch the last train back to Brighton that I realised she hadn’t answered my question. She didn’t have to.

  I got the train back up from Brighton to London the next morning, splurging some of Lindy Carr’s money on first class and the best breakfast British Rail could provide. The grease, and the endless pots of tea a sympathetic steward kept bringing me, did the trick by Clapham. When we reached Victoria, I had managed the evolutionary leap from Australopithecus to Cro-Magnon man. Human was going to take a little longer.

  I made some calls from a phone booth at the station, confirmed where my quarry was based these days, and decided to walk to my rendezvous, to try to jump those last few million years in twenty minutes or so. I opted for the long route, up Buckingham Gate, and past the Palace and other arcane institutions for which men like Bill Carr had died.

&nbs
p; It seemed remarkable at this remove, that Australians, Kiwis, Canadians, South Africans and Rhodesians had left their homes to come and fly some of the most perilous missions of the war for this nebulous concept of Empire. Bill Carr was the son of sheep farmers in New South Wales who felt the need to give all that up and learn to fly huge, ugly bombers across Europe. He got home only once in four years, just before shipping out of Oz, the result being Lindy, a daughter of whom I suspected he could be very proud.

  I struck out along Birdcage Walk, thinking about the Brazilians and the all-black 92nd infantry of the US Army who had liberated large chunks of Italy in World War Two. I guessed there were plenty more anomalies if you dwelt on it. Like the very idea of an Italian SS unit, the one we helped stop in its tracks en route to Chiasso.

  I reached Whitehall half an hour early and passed the time watching a march of what my father would call beatniks and lefties heading for Trafalgar Square and the South African Embassy, the banners and chants telling me they were protesting about some black terrorist called Nelson Mandela being sentenced to life imprisonment for treason.

  Once that had passed, I played a game where I tried to guess who was in the big ministerial barges—the bulbous black Rover 3.5s—which ferried people to and from the various offices but, of course, my knowledge of British politicians was way out of date.

  There was a new government, a man of the people at the top, all beer and sandwiches and promises to go and fetch the white heat of technology. To the civil service mandarins behind the elegant, soot-stained façades surrounding me, it must have seemed as if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were riding into town.

  My man appeared right on time, five minutes past one, and he hardly broke stride when he saw me loitering at the entrance to the Foreign Office. He slowed only slightly as he headed towards lunch in St James’s, allowing me to fall in at his side.

  ‘Ah, Kirby. Still flying the sartorial flag for pilots, I see.’

  I was back in leather jacket, jeans and boots. He was wearing the kind of pin-striped Savile Row suit he might have picked up from his tailor ten days or ten years ago, with shoes so shiny you could signal sputniks with them. On his head was a threatened species—a bowler. Last time I’d been in England, Westminster and the City of London were a sea of bobbing black domes. Now, it seemed, only smooth television spies and Archibald Lang were supporting the likes of James Lock & Co.

  ‘Hello, Major.’

  ‘Oh, just Mr now. I find those people who cling on to their military titles rather sad, don’t you?’

  He was Special Adviser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for Special Forces. The keeper of the keys to all the files, many of which were sealed until 2005 or 2010, when we’d all be gone. Which was the idea, of course. ‘Why did you send me Lindy Carr?’

  He grinned, but it came out as a leer. ‘Charming, isn’t she? Have to admire a woman with gumption like that.’

  ‘EH-148. It was my plane, wasn’t it? Did you tell her that?’

  He stopped suddenly, and I thought I’d shocked him, but he turned and bought an early edition of the Evening News from a vendor and tucked it under his arm before continuing. ‘No. Did you?’

  ‘She didn’t tell me the date.’

  ‘Twenty-eighth of August, 1944.’

  My insides gave a little jolt, even though I had known this was coming. ‘What are you playing at, Lang?’

  ‘You know, I have to advise on various films and television shows now. Carve Her Name, Moonstrike, The Guns of … what’s that one called?’

  ‘Navarone.’

  ‘That it. All about our wonderful Special Ops men and women. Which they were—mostly. Perhaps it is time someone showed that there were some real shits in the outfit.’

  ‘Meaning me?’ I asked, rather redundantly.

  He didn’t reply. We were almost at Trafalgar Square, where the protesters had halted the traffic, and police horses were wading in to try to move them on. A chant went up about the fascist police and I suppressed a grin. These kids had no idea what real fascism was. Then I groaned inwardly. I was turning into my father.

  ‘Lang, are you playing games with that girl?’

  ‘Did she show you the letter?’

  ‘No. What letter?’

  He flashed me his best reptilian smile. ‘She’s cleverer than I thought. She’s holding that back. What arrangements did you make with her?’

  ‘I am to meet her in Domodossola in a few weeks’ time.’ Once the summer was over, the dense vegetation that covered much of the area would start to thin, which gave us a better chance of spotting something on the ground. That is, if there was anything down there to spot.

  ‘Look, Kirby, it struck me like this. She is clearly obsessed with her father, you don’t have to be Roger Corder—’ I dimly recalled this was the name of a TV shrink—‘to work that one out. In a way, the war has damaged her as much as anyone who was in it. She isn’t going to rest until she finds the plane and Bill Carr. Now, much as I think you were a wash-out as a British Liaison Officer, Kirby, I know you are a good pilot. Maybe you can make amends. How many of us get a chance to do that, eh?’

  ‘Don’t the RAF have people to do this sort of thing?’

  ‘The RAF are busy patrolling the airspace over the Atlantic for intrusions by Bears and Bisons.’ He was using the NATO code for types of Russian bombers. ‘They might not have it in sunny Italy, but we have a bit of a Cold War going on here, Kirby.’ He gave a heartfelt sigh. ‘There are some organisations trying to locate missing aircrew, but do you know how many aircraft are still unaccounted for, from the last war? Hundreds. They are still finding Spits and 109s and Heinkels in Kent and Essex, Lancasters and Halifaxes in Germany. The SAAF is a long way down their list. But you find that Liberator, the RAF will send a team to collect the bodies, make sure the poor buggers, or what’s left of them, get a proper burial. I’ll see to that.’

  ‘I’d take your name off the list for the first human heart transplant, Lang. You finally seem to have grown your own.’

  He halted again, and for a second I thought he was going to try to slug me, but he merely took off his bowler hat and ran a hand over his lightly oiled hair. We were outside his club, and it didn’t look like I was about to be invited in. From the way he was glaring at me, the uniformed commissioner certainly didn’t think it would be a good idea. It would take more than a borrowed tie and blazer to make me presentable behind the imposing high gloss and polished brass door.

  Lang’s tone softened. ‘My job now is all about tying up loose ends, Kirby. This is one you can help with. Simple as that. You look after that girl, or you’ll have me to answer to.’

  With that he bounded up the steps and disappeared, leaving the doorman and me to exchange non-verbal hate signals. I walked off half-wishing Lang had tried to punch me.

  I headed up towards Soho. One of the things I missed about Italy was the coffee and, in between the strip clubs and bohemian drinking dens, Soho was the best place for something close to the real thing. As I walked down past the bookshops along Charing Cross Road, I wondered what Lang’s game was. It was hard to explain to young people like Lindy the breakdown in Italy in 1944, the shifting boundaries that could turn a downed Mosquito pilot like me into a BLO—a British Liaison Officer.

  As soon as I accepted the ad hoc position with a partisan group, Lang, who operated out of Bern, was technically my superior, although at one point he had relieved me of my post. Which was odd, because nobody from the British side had actually appointed me in the first place. I often wondered if he had helped screw up my subsequent career, made it difficult for me to get back into combat flying, and perhaps nixed a move to proper airline pilot. Was he the reason BOAC and the others had scribbled a hasty ‘no thanks’ to me?

  So after the war I had done a couple of years as a CAT hunter, just to try to shake the feeling that I hadn’t flown my due. It turned out that, thanks to the debriefing of bomber crews during the war, the Met Office had reams
of data on clear air turbulence—CAT for short. With the expansion of airline routes, the Civil Aviation Authority had backed a project to investigate the cause of this phenomenon, which had taken more than one commercial flyer by surprise.

  So they looked around for pilots who would go chasing these atmospheric roller-coasters up near the jet stream and my name had come up, mainly because of the type of plane they had converted for the job. They were Mosquitoes, two of them, with a meteorologist in the right-hand seat and a belly full of instruments, which would go up after any report of treacherous conditions, looking for the kind of sneaky turbulence that might tear the wings off the unwary.

  It was fun, in an edgy way, because although I got the Mozzie into some pretty strange positions, it never felt like she was going to come apart on me. I often had trouble conveying that to the Met men, though. They changed with predictable regularity.

  We pulled in enough data to keep the boffins going for a decade. It didn’t cure me of the bug. I helped out in the Berlin airlift, working for a shrewd businessman called Freddie Laker, then went back to bikes for a while, to the TT; however, while it was OK, it wasn’t flying.

  I marvelled at the new face of Soho, how the grey seediness of five years ago seemed to have disappeared. There was a current of energy in the streets that even I could pick up on, smart kids with bright faces and knowing smiles outnumbering the shabbier old guard. I bumped into one young man in a startling white suit and hair over his collar who barked at me to watch where I was going, and then inspected his attire to make sure I hadn’t sullied it. A faun-eyed girl waiting in a doorway nearby giggled at the boy, who brushed his lapels and winked at her knowingly. Something had happened that I didn’t quite catch, a little crackle between them, on a frequency I could no longer receive.

  I reached the haven of the Bar Italia, ordered a double espresso and found a spot beneath a signed poster of Sandro Mazzola celebrating a goal. I’d barely sat and slugged the coffee down, before I was back at the counter ordering another, shuddering with pleasure at the caffeine hit.