Suddenly, as the woods slowly petered out, Kalinski made out a confluence of roads, dim in the darkness. Urgently, he told Armstrong, “We’re over Loudeac. The small town, right under the nose. The reservoir is dead ahead at six miles. You should see it at any moment.”
Armstrong stared into the night, trying to make his eyes relax, searching for the glint of water that would betray the reservoir’s position. After a few nervous seconds he saw it, exactly where Kalinski had said it would be. He flew directly over it and then made a right-handed turn to the north, looking down for a sign of the lights that would guide him down to land, but the blackness below remained unbroken.
Damn, thought Armstrong, we could have done with a moon to lighten things up a bit. He prayed that nothing had happened to the ‘reception committee’. For the mission to be aborted, especially after Kalinski’s magnificent effort in getting to the objective right on schedule, would be a tragedy. But he couldn’t go on swanning around the sky for much longer. The Hudson’s distinctly non-Germanic engine sound must surely have alerted the enemy, or at least any pro-German French police in the area, by this time.
Kalinski, too, was concentrating on the ground as carefully as he knew how. After a few more tense minutes, his persistence was rewarded by the sight of a red light ahead and off to the left. It flickered on and off in a series of dots and dashes.
Armstrong saw it too, and with relief surging through him he turned the Hudson towards the flickering signal and flashed the aircraft’s navigation lights in response. A few moments later, two parallel lines of glowing dots appeared against the dark backdrop of the earth.
The flarepath seemed ridiculously small. This landing, the pilot knew, was going to need every ounce of his accumulated skill. He made a last call over the intercom, telling Wilson to make sure that the passengers were firmly strapped in.
“Right, here we go, then.” Gently, Armstrong eased the Hudson round until it was in line with the improvised flarepath, landing into wind. They already knew which direction the wind was coming from at ground level, for Kalinski had been checking it throughout the flight by reference to chimney smoke, but the pilot saw with satisfaction that the reception committee had placed an additional flare at the upwind end of the strip. He suspected, although he could not see, that it also marked the boundary of the landing ground, which was useful to know.
He lowered the undercarriage and flaps and throttled back gradually, allowing the Hudson to sink towards the flarepath, ready to open the throttles again instantly if some unexpected obstacle loomed up out of the darkness. But the reception committee had done its work well and the approach to land was faultless and trouble-free, the flarepath seeming to expand and meet the Hudson as it sank through the last fifty feet. The pilot checked its sink rate with a gentle backward pressure on the stick and, with the flares rushing past the wingtips, allowed it to stall onto the ground.
The undercarriage hit the earth with a thud that rattled the entire aircraft. The Hudson bounced a little way into the air and the pilot fought to keep the wings level as it settled again. This time it stayed down, the pilot ruddering to keep it straight and applying the brakes cautiously. Mud or water, possibly both, splattered against the fuselage. The flares rushed past, then slid by more slowly as the Hudson lost momentum and finally stopped altogether, its engines ticking over. A collective sigh sounded in the cabin as the passengers expelled their pent-up breath.
Kalinski left his position in the nose and hurried back into the cabin, unlatching the main fuselage door. The passengers, with a little help from Wilson, unfastened their seat belts, made for the door and tumbled out into the night. A couple were immediately sick. Kalinski looked on in sympathy; he knew that quite apart from the usual turbulence, sickness in an aircraft could be brought on by the smell of its interior, a mixture of aluminium, cellulose paint, oil and fuel.
The Pole stuck his head outside, inhaling the fresh breeze that held a strong scent of churned-up earth. Wilson joined him.
“I say, would you give me a hand with the passengers’ equipment? They seem to have forgotten it in their rush to get out.”
Kalinski jumped down from the hatch and helped to unload some suitcases, handing them to the erstwhile passengers. He could see the reception committee, dim shapes in the darkness, standing some distance away. Suddenly, a figure detached itself and approached the aircraft.
“Well done, old chap,” it said in extremely cultured English tones. “You’d better be off now. Jolly good effort.” The man turned away without another word, leaving Kalinski open-mouthed.
Pulling himself together, he ducked back inside the aircraft and hastened back to the cockpit.
“That’s it,” he shouted into Armstrong’s ear as he went past. “Let’s get out of here.”
The pilot nodded and opened the throttles, intending to turn the aircraft round and taxi back to the downwind end of the flarepath prior to his take-off run.
The Hudson shuddered, but refused to move. The engines were making enough racket to awaken the dead.
“Bugger it,” Armstrong said over the intercom. “We’re stuck. She’s going to need a shove to free her. Jump out and trap our friends before they disappear, Stan.” He throttled back and the roar of the engines died away to a rumble.
Kalinski was out of the aircraft in record time. He ran to catch up with the Frenchmen, who were making for a copse some distance away. They stopped at his shout and he breathlessly explained the situation to them. Returning to the aircraft, the Frenchmen — there were about a dozen of them, in addition to the mysterious Englishman — clustered around the Hudson and laid willing hands on it at points indicated by the Polish officer, who now jumped back on board. The pilot gunned the engines again, showering his helpers with mud as they pushed with all their strength.
After a couple of minutes, it was apparent that the Hudson was not going to come free. The wheels were sinking deeper into the waterlogged ground. At length, the pilot shut down the engines altogether and climbed down from the aircraft.
“It’s no use,” he said dejectedly. “She’s bogged, and no mistake. Anyone got any bright ideas?”
The cultured Englishman spoke rapidly to the reception committee, some of whom immediately turned and ran off into the night.
“They’ve gone to get shovels,” he explained. “They always bring some with them in case it proves necessary to bury equipment. We’ll have a go at digging you out.”
“That’s fine,” Armstrong said with considerable relief, “but I don’t think I can risk giving it much more than half an hour. If we haven’t got clear of the mud at the end of that time I shall have to set fire to the aircraft and we’ll have to take our chances.” Uppermost in his mind was the special radio equipment installed in the Hudson; it would be his first duty to ensure that it was destroyed completely.
A few minutes later, the Frenchmen returned with the shovels and a couple of picks, which they immediately applied to the mushy ground in an effort to dig shallow, sloping trenches to front and rear of the Hudson’s main undercarriage. It was difficult work in the darkness, especially as the trenches rapidly began to fill up with water. After a while Armstrong, afraid that one of the picks might pierce a tyre, called a halt.
“I’m afraid it’s hopeless,” he said. “Look — she’s sinking even deeper. The bottom of the fuselage is just about resting on the ground. I’m just going to have to burn her,” he ended mournfully.
Suddenly, a warning shout came from one of the Frenchmen, who had been acting as lookout and who thought he had seen some movement beyond the flarepath. He was right — in the flickering light of the flares, some figures approached cautiously. The lookout, gun at the ready, ordered them to put up their hands and come closer. Whoever they were, Armstrong thought, it was apparent that they were not Germans.
They turned out to be men from a nearby village. Alerted by the roar of the Hudson’s engines, they had defied the local curfew to see what was going on
. One of the reception committee spoke to them in low and urgent tones, and after a couple of minutes they hurried off.
“That’s a stroke of luck,” said Kalinski, who had been listening to the conversation. ‘They’ve gone to fetch some horses and oxen. They say they’ll be back inside an hour.”
“All this is making us damnably late,” the Englishman interjected, “but I don’t see what else is to be done. We want to get you away from here. The last thing we want is you chaps roaming the countryside; you’re bound to be nabbed sooner or later, and I’m afraid we don’t have the facilities to hide you or to help you in evading capture. If it hadn’t been for a blasted rainstorm earlier on, the ground would have been all right, I’m certain of that.”
Armstrong nodded. “Right. But let’s get these flares extinguished until the villagers come back. If anything flies overhead, we’ll be spotted for sure.”
He resigned himself to what seemed an interminable wait, trying vainly to relax, dying for a smoke. Every small night sound made his nerves jump, and his eyes began to ache and smart with the effort of peering into the shadows. The minutes, ticked off by the luminous hands of his wristwatch, crawled around the dial with the speed of a lame snail.
Kalinski, who had exceptionally keen hearing, was the first to detect the jingle of harness, and alerted the others. Suddenly, at the edge of the landing ground, a light flared, followed by another and another.
“Oh, my God,” Armstrong groaned, “They’ve lit torches! What the hell do they think this is — bonfire night?”
“It will be, if we don’t get the Hudson out of the shit,” remarked Kalinski, whose already excellent command of English had been greatly enhanced by a collection of four-letter words. “Anyway, they must be pretty certain there are no Germans around.”
They watched the approaching cavalcade. It seemed almost that the whole village had turned out to help.
The two groups of Frenchmen greeted each other with much handshaking and back-slapping. The throng milled around the stranded Hudson for a while, then sorted itself out into some kind of order; a team of draught horses was harnessed to the undercarriage legs, and the work of freeing the aircraft began once more.
Despite the efforts of men and animals, it was another thirty minutes before the Hudson finally came clear of the mud with a huge sucking sound.
After a brief exchange of farewells the crew lost no time in boarding the aircraft, the Frenchmen scattering to relight the flarepath as the horses were unharnessed. The Hudson’s engines coughed into life and the aircraft began to move, the pilot turning cautiously and starting his taxi run to the downwind end of the flarepath. A group of Frenchmen completed their task of filling in the holes which the Hudson’s wheels had dug into the ground, and ran clear as the pilot revved his engines up to full power.
Armstrong released the brakes and the aircraft began to gather speed, its momentum slowed by the weight of the thrown-up mud that caked it. Halfway down the strip, with the tailwheel only just clear of the ground, Armstrong felt with sickening certainty that he was not going to make it. The Hudson’s take-off speed was ninety miles per hour, and with the flare that marked the far boundary rushing closer, the airspeed indicator showed only fifty.
Then the miracle happened. The Hudson hit a bump and lurched into the air. Somehow the pilot kept it flying, teetering on the edge of a stall, and flew between two trees at the far end of the field. There was a crunch as its wingtip sliced through some branches, and then it was climbing away into the night.
A plaintive voice sounded over the intercom from the wireless operator’s station.
“I say, I felt a little bump. Did we hit something?” The response that came from the navigator’s position was in Kalinski’s native Polish, but its tone left Wilson in no doubt that the message was extremely rude.
Chapter Eight
“You gave us a bit of a fright, Ken,” Air Commodore Glendenning said. “Thought you weren’t going to make it.”
“So did we, sir. It was touch and go on take-off. Really close. This close, in fact.”
He delved into his tunic pocket and produced a piece of twig, with a leaf still attached to it, and laid it on the air commodore’s desk top.
“A piece of the French countryside,” he explained. “I knew we’d hit some trees as we took off, but I didn’t know we’d brought a branch back with us, embedded in the wingtip.” He retrieved the twig and put it back in his pocket: it was going to be his inseparable companion from now on, a reminder of the night when fortune had smiled.
“Well,” Glendenning said, “I can tell you that your mission was a complete success. I have Pilot Officer Wilson’s report here; it states that he was able to establish clear contact with the French operatives in the course of your return flight.”
Armstrong and Kalinski, who was also present, both looked perplexed. The bespectacled radio specialist had said nothing to either of them. Armstrong coughed politely and said, “Are we permitted to know more about all this, sir?”
Glendenning nodded. “Yes, that’s why I asked you to come here. I expect you’ve already guessed that the agents you delivered to France have the priority task of keeping a watch on the German warships in Brest. They also have the secondary task of monitoring other German naval movements in the Biscay area. In order to do this efficiently, we needed to equip them with an effective means of communication with us. Morse transmissions in the high frequency band are slow and too easily detectable, so a very high frequency system has been devised whereby they can communicate directly by voice — in code, of course — with a receiver aircraft flying at altitude over the Channel. Thanks to you, and to Wilson’s efforts, this system has now been proved.”
The air commodore gave one of his rare smiles. “I expect you were rather puzzled by Wilson. Actually, he invented the system. He’s one of the key boffins at the Telecommunications Research Establishment.
“Our eventual aim,” the air commodore continued, “is to form a special squadron whose sole task will be to support anti-German resistance movements on the Continent. It will be controlled by an organisation known as the Special Operations Executive, set up on the orders of the Prime Minister. Its function, in Mr Churchill’s own words, is ‘to set Europe ablaze’. You may yet have a part to play in these operations, Ken.”
Glendenning changed the subject abruptly, opening a folder that lay on the desk in front of him. Armstrong knew that it contained the report he had painstakingly compiled over the previous months, detailing the new techniques and operational procedures developed by his special duties squadron. Some, like the catapult fighter concept, were already in operation, although the ‘catafighters’, as they were known, had yet to score a success.
Glendenning tapped the folder with his index finger. “It seems to me that two recommendations in your report stand out, Ken, because they can be implemented more or less immediately. The first is the potential use of long-range Beaufighters or Westland Whirlwinds against the Focke-Wulf Kondor aircraft that continue to give us a great deal of trouble; the second is the use of very long-range aircraft to patrol the mid-Atlantic gap where our convoys are very much at the mercy of enemy submarines. I see that you recommend the American B-24 Liberator as first choice. Why the Liberator, and not one of our own aircraft — say the Halifax?”
Armstrong smiled wryly. “Can you imagine, sir, the fuss that would be made by Bomber Command if we suggested diverting their newest four-engined bomber to support the Navy? To my mind, the Liberator has all the attributes we need — very long endurance and the ability to carry a substantial weapons load — and we already have half a dozen of them, to my mind completely wasted in ferrying stores over the Atlantic.”
Glendenning looked at him in surprise. “I didn’t know that. You’ve obviously done your homework. Tell me more.”
“They were originally ordered by the French,” Armstrong told him, “and when France surrendered they were taken over by the RAF. As a matter of fact
, we’ve had them since last December, when RAF crews picked them up at Montreal. Bomber Command didn’t want to know about them because they did not have self-sealing fuel tanks, so they were turned over to Ferry Command.”
Armstrong could not blame Bomber Command for its attitude. In the early weeks of the War, when he had accompanied the then Flight Lieutenant David Pittaway in a daylight attack by Wellington bombers on the German naval base at Wilhelmshaven, he had watched one Wellington after another go down in flames because the bombers did not have self-sealing tanks. It had been a bitter lesson.
“I’ll look into that right away,” Glendenning said. “I’ll also look into the possibility of borrowing a couple of Liberators from Bomber Command, but as you say, it will probably be an uphill struggle. Now, what about this long-range fighter idea?”
Armstrong furrowed his brow. “I’ve thought a good deal about that,” he said, “and on balance I think the Beaufighter will be the better aircraft for the job, even though it will mean taking some off night operations. It was precisely for that reason that I suggested the Whirlwind as an alternative. As you know, only one squadron — No. 263 — is using it at the moment, and they’ve been leading a pretty nomadic existence hopping between various airfields in the south-west on convoy protection duties. The Whirlwind is a nice aeroplane, with a good armament of twenty-millimetre cannon and a range of about a thousand miles, but its Rolls-Royce Peregrine engines are terrible. The 263 Squadron boys are suffering a grim accident rate, and it’s mostly to do with engine failure. Unless the Whirlwind could be fitted with Merlin engines — and I’m told that none are available because they’re all going into Spitfires and Hurricanes — I wouldn’t risk flying over water in it for any length of time, so that virtually rules it out. It’s fast, though, and it would probably make a very good fighter-bomber for anti-shipping operations,” he added thoughtfully.
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