by Ted Bell
11
PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE
· Greybeard Island ·
Had she known about it, the Baroness de Villiers would have been much cheered by events taking place at that exact moment just a few miles across the sea from where she now stood beside her bicycle.
A young saboteur was already plotting his own resistance against the inevitable Nazi invasion. Young Nicholas McIver, the would-be saboteur, was seated in the cockpit of a vintage 1914 Sopwith Camel, watching his friend Gunner prepare for his first bombing run of the morning.
Gunner was stepping off the width of Lord Hawke’s grassy landing strip. He had a large wooden rain barrel in his hands. When he reached dead center of the strip, he placed it firmly on the ground. He turned the barrel so the bright red swastikas he’d painted on the staves would be visible to his pilot. He looked over at Nick, some fifty yards away, and gave him the thumbs-up signal. Nick flashed Churchill’s famous V for Victory sign, and Gunner marched across the new mown grass to the Camel.
“She’s dead center, lad,” Gunner said. “Exactly halfway down the length of the strip, and smack dab in the middle of it. Are you ready?”
“I was born ready, sir!” Nick said, smiling down at his friend. “Well, don’t expect much on your first few runs. It’s a tricky business, this aerial bombing. I spent years behind a twelve-inch naval gun, most of them practicing. So, don’t expect miracles. Going to take a great deal of trial and error before you become any good at this, y’know?”
“Aye. But we’ve not much time left according to the BBC last night. The assault could come at any time now.”
Gunner shook his head in agreement. “We’re going to be all on our own, y’know.”
“What do you mean, Gunner?”
“I mean I was over to Guernsey just yesterday evening, visiting me mum. There were troop ships in the harbor, Nick. All the British soldiers are leaving.”
“Leaving? I can’t believe it!”
“Every last one. Apparently it’s been decided in London we’re not worth defending. All the British troops are sailing for home on the evening tide.”
Nick regarded his friend for a long, hard moment before he said, “Well, then, nothing for it, is there? I fancy it’s going to be up to us, all of us on these islands, to defend ourselves.”
Gunner shook his head in agreement, but there was a mixture of sadness, fear, and anger in his crinkly blue eyes. Farmers and fishermen against battalions of crack Nazi SS units? It was likely to be a a short and very lopsided battle.
“Let’s have a last look at your bomb basket, boy,” he said finally, forcing a cheery smile.
Nick reached down and lifted the small wooden peach basket from his lap. It looked to be full of white cotton beanbags.
“How many bags in the basket?”
“I thought I’d start with ten. Do ten runs. See how I do. Then I’ll land and we can look at the patterns around the barrel, figure out what I’m doing wrong. Then I’ll go back up with ten more sacks and keep going until we get it right.”
“Good thinking. We won’t quit until you’ve dropped ten bags in a row into the heart of the barrel! Ready to start, Cap’n?”
“Ready to start, sir.”
“Fuel on, switches off, throttles closed?”
“Fuel is on, switches are off, throttle is closed.”
“Sucking in,” Gunner said, rotating the blades three times.
“Throttle set?”
“Throttle set!”
“Contact!”
“Contact! Give her a good, strong rip!”
Gunner and Nick had spent many of their previous evenings in a secret upstairs room at the Greybeard Inn. Gunner, the proprietor of the inn, called it his “Armoury” and the room was filled with all manner of weaponry—swords, firearms, small cannons, barrels and barrels of black powder. Battle flags from all nations hung out from the walls. It was one of Nick’s favorite places.
While Nick sat at the center table, poring over World War I–era books on the principles of aerial bombardment, Gunner was at his workbench, filling small cotton pouches with lead shot and white flour. Sixteen ounces of shot and one cupful of flour went into each little sack before he stitched it up. This is what they’d practice with.
While Nick had been honing his flying skills night and day, Gunner had been busy making real bombs, too. Sixteen ounces was the weight of the live bombs he’d been making for Nick over these last weeks. The black one-pounders he’d designed for the young pilot were perfectly round and roughly the size of a large apple. They were filled with an oily liquid called nitroglycerine and surrounded by black gunpowder. Nitroglycerine was an extremely powerful explosive and extremely sensitive to shock. So each of Gunner’s bombs was basically a pound of dynamite that would explode on contact with any solid surface.
To test his new weapon, he and Nick had climbed out of the attic window on the fourth floor of Gunner’s inn, crawled to the edge of the roof, and Nick had heaved one of the very first bombs produced out onto the seaside rocks. The resulting fiery explosion sent chunks of rock a hundred feet into the air and left a vast hole on the shore where boulders had stood. The blast far exceeded Gunner’s wildest expectations, and the huge smile on Nick’s face made all the work worthwhile.
But this morning they wouldn’t be using real bombs for their practice. They’d be using small sacks of flour.
Gunner pulled down on the propeller, and she fired up instantly. Nick then taxied out toward the barrel, made a quick right turn and firewalled the throttle selector. He was airborne moments later and flew out over Hawke Castle and the sparkling blue sea below. Making a tight left-hand turn, he slowed the aeroplane, lined up at the leading edge of the airstrip, and leveled off at two hundred feet. He adjusted his goggles and concentrated on the approaching target. The barrel was coming up fast.
He grabbed a sack from the basket, held his hand out over the side of the cockpit . . . waited . . . and let it fly.
Looking back down over his right shoulder, he saw a small puff of white explode on the grass. Miles from the barrel! What? How could that be? He’d been sure he was spot on the target. But he’d overshot the barrel by at least a hundred feet. His drop had obviously been far too late. He banked hard right and went around for another approach.
This time he slowed the aeroplane considerably and dropped his altitude to one hundred fifty feet. He was well aware that he’d be vulnerable to ground fire if he flew his runs this low, but he felt he had to perfect his aim at any altitude.
Gunner watched him come roaring up the strip, saw him waggle his wings once, and saw the little white pouch hit the ground way to the left and about fifty feet shy of the barrel. He’d dropped it too soon. Nick made seven more bombing runs, and all of his drops were wide of the mark. Gunner knew he had one more flour bomb aboard.
He did a slow looping turn out over the sea and got lined up for his approach to the strip early. He kept her dead straight as he approached the barrel, flying right down on the deck at about fifty feet. Gunner saw his right arm extend out of the edge of the cockpit, saw the bag fly . . . and drop right into the center of the barrel.
The boy immediately climbed, did a barrel roll just over the treetops, and circled the field for the downwind leg of his landing. He banked left, straightened out, and began his final approach.
When Nick had parked the Sopwith and walked over to Gunner, he had a sorely disappointed look on his face. He was surprised to see Commander Hobbes standing outside the barn beside his friend.
“Well done, lad, well done, indeed!” Hobbes said, clapping him on the back. “I saw that last one!”
“Only one out of ten, sir, to be honest. Quite a bit more difficult than I’d imagined. I may not be cut out for a bombardier, after all, looking at that sorry result out there.”
“Practice, practice, practice, Nick. That’s all it takes. Now, both of you come inside the barn. I’ve brought along some equipment I developed in t
he laboratory that I want to show you.”
Hobbes, a scientific genius if ever there was one, was the Royal Navy’s most famous weapons designer. He’d designed the world’s first two-man submarine and a dozen other items and weapons the Royal Navy used on destroyers, battleships, and submarines every day. His recent capture, with the help of Nick’s sister Kate, of the highly experimental Nazi U-boat U-33 had provided the navy with an untold treasure trove of the latest German technology, including the Crossfire propulsion system.
Inside the barn, Gunner had a lamp burning on his work-table. There were two items on the table. A long metallic tube and a rather large wooden box with brass fixtures.
“What’s this?” Nick asked, picking up the metal tube. It was surprisingly light.
“Believe or not, it’s lead, Nicholas,” Hobbes said. “I’ve milled it down to one-sixteenth of an inch, but it should do the job. Without adding too much weight.”
Hobbes took the tube and unrolled it out on the table. It was about four feet long and three feet wide.
“There. That should do very nicely, don’t you think?” Hobbes asked, sounding very pleased with himself.
“Do what, sir?” Nick said.
“Why, protect you during your bombing raids, Nick. It’s made so that it exactly conforms to the shape of the cockpit floor. And up the sides as well. We’ll have to take the seat out and reattach it of course, but that will be no problem.”
“How will it work?”
“It’s very thin, I know, but I’ve invented an entirely new process. It’s a thin wafer of titanium sandwiched between two lead sheets. That’s made it strong enough to withstand enemy ground fire, should you encounter any. I tested it myself with a German Mauser rifle and a fifty-caliber machine gun just this morning. See those small dents? Dents, not holes, are what one looks for in a bulletproof shield.”
Nick considered the thought of machine-gun rounds thumping just beneath his feet.
“Nelson the strong, Nelson the brave, Nelson the Lord of the Sea.”
As usual, his little prayer bucked him up a bit.
“It’s a brilliant idea, if I may say so, Commander,” Gunner said. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself.”
“Too busy building bombs, I’d say,” Hobbes said with a laugh. “Now. Take a look inside this case of mine.”
He unsnapped two latches and opened the lid.
Nick peered in and had no idea what he was looking at. “What on earth is it, Commander?”
“A camera, Nick, a German camera, as a matter fact, since they make far and away the best lenses. It’s a highly modified Leica I designed for aerial surveillance.”
“You want me to take pictures from the plane? While flying? Sorry, Commander, but it’s all I can manage to keep it aloft with both hands on the stick.”
“No, no. When I said modified, I meant it. Rather a new idea I think, and I’m quite proud of it.”
Hobbes lifted it out of the box and placed it on the table. It certainly didn’t look like any camera Nick had ever seen. Besides, it was very complicated looking, very large, and quite heavy looking. Nick suddenly began to feel overwhelmed by the idea of flying an aeroplane in combat conditions. He loved adventure and a good challenge, but perhaps he’d gotten himself in over his head.
“With all due respect, sir, I don’t think I could even lift that thing up over the sides of the cockpit, much less take a picture with it. I need my hands on the controls every second of flight.”
“You don’t have to, Nick! You see this section here on the bottom of the device? That’s the mounting bracket. The camera mounts on the underside of the aircraft. Just beneath the cockpit.”
“And how do I . . . shoot it, then?”
“See this silver button? Called a shutter release and attached to a very long wire. The wire will be fed through a hole in the bottom of the cockpit and attach to the camera. I will mount the shutter button within easy reach, right on your instrument panel. When you’re over an area or object you want to shoot, say, a ship in Saint Peter Port on Guernsey, you simply press the button and take the picture. A bit ingenious, if I do say so myself.”
“Pictures of the port? What else?”
“I’ll explain our needs in detail later, Nick. I fully intend to take you and Gunner into my confidence. But you must swear never to breathe a word. Churchill fought within the government to keep the troops in place on the Channel Islands and lost. But that doesn’t mean he’s given up on you. Once the Germans have invaded, he plans to make raids on these islands, with an eye toward driving the invaders out.”
“Good news to me ears, Commander,” Gunner said with some emotion. “And for me poor heart as well. I thought we’d all been thrown to the wolves.”
“Not so far as Prime Minister Churchill is concerned. He knows the Germans plan to fortify the islands as part of their Atlantic Wall. Hitler’s aim is to control the channel during any future Allied attack on the European mainland.”
“I’m happy to help, sir. Just tell me what you’d like me to do,” Nick said. He knew his work was important. This was no time for worry and queasy stomachs.
“Nick, I’m going to mount the camera on the Camel’s underside now. Shouldn’t take more than an hour. Would you mind suspending your practice bombing runs for the afternoon? If so, we could do a test of our photo recon system right away. Before the sun sets, at any rate. You might fly over to Guernsey, take some photos of Saint Peter Port. They’ve begun to evacuate school children and some parents who wish to leave with ships provided by His Majesty. Your pictures could be helpful there. I’ve brought a chart along to help with your navigation.”
“I’m a sailor, sir. Guernsey’s due west, no matter how you get there.”
“Quite right, Nick,” Hobbes said with a laugh.
“Who are the pictures for, Commander?”
“Prime Minister Churchill, eventually. Right now the War Office at Whitehall wishes to keep track of all events here preparatory to any attempt to retake the islands from the Germans.”
“Commander,” Nick said, eyeing the man carefully, “if Guernsey is evacuating children, shouldn’t we be as well?”
“It’s a decision each family must make for itself. But I’m going from here out to the lighthouse to discuss exactly that matter with your father.”
“It’s our home,” Nick said, his brow furrowed. “We’re patriots. He won’t leave it, and neither will I.”
“I certainly understand that feeling, Nick. But there are a lot of things to consider. Every family will have to weigh the options of going or staying.”
“I suppose you’re right, sir,” Nick said, not at all sure that he was.
“What’s happening on the other islands, Commander?” Gunner asked.
“Each is different. In Jersey, the majority of islanders have chosen to stay, no matter what. That’s their choice. Authorities on Alderney have recommended that all islanders evacuate, and nearly all plan to do so. The Dame of Sark has encouraged all of her 471 inhabitants to stay put on Sark, and no doubt they will bend to her iron will.”
“Let’s get moving, then” Gunner said. “We haven’t got all day. I’ll install the lead shield in the floor of the cockpit, while you get that camera mounted, Commander.”
“And how can I help?” Nick asked Hobbes.
“That book on the table. Dynamic Principles of Aerial Bombardment. You could spend another hour with that. Based on the pattern of your first attempts, I’d recommend you pay special attention to Chapter Seventeen. It covers the principles of speed, elevation, and distance to the target. I’m especially proud of that.”
“Proud?”
“Notice the name of the author on the cover?”
“RAF Flight Lieutenant B. Hobbes? That’s you?”
“Lieutenant Bertram Hobbes, at your service. Book’s a bit outdated now. But a bestseller in her day! Garnered some first-rate reviews from Bomber Command, I will say.”
“
Are you a betting man, Commander?” Gunner said, rubbing his grizzled chin.
“Indeed.”
“Give the lad an hour or two with that bombing book, and I’ll wager five quid this boy will put ten straight sacks of flour right in the throat of that barrel out there by sundown tomorrow.”
“Nick?” Hobbes said, smiling. “What do you think?”
“I wouldn’t bet against me, sir.”
“Nor would I, lad, nor would I.”
12
HOME ON A WING AND A PRAYER
· Guernsey Island ·
Nick McIver’s first mission as a civilian reconnaissance pilot may have commenced without a hitch. But before the day was over, he’d be a far, far more seasoned aviator. A battle-tested aviator.
As he began his bumpy roll down the grassy airstrip, keenly anticipating that great thrill when the wheels separated from the earth, he’d caught sight of the top of a familiar tree off to his right. It was the one where he and Kate had found the dead German spy just weeks ago.
The Germans were sending reconnaissance flights over the islands on an almost weekly basis now. What if he came upon one of those German planes? Would he be fired upon? Did those kinds of aircraft even have weapons? But the real question in his mind was whether or not he should try to use the twin Vickers machine guns to defend himself.
They were loaded, but Gunner had not yet trained him in their use.
If he did encounter a German aeroplane flying at low altitude, at least he could take a picture of it. And what if a U-boat should happen to surface? He could certainly dive down and get pictures of that! Surely that’s the kind of thing Hobbes and Lord Hawke would be looking for. Any kind of German military activity at all.
He took off to the north, soaring out over Hawke Castle, then banked hard right, flying right along the south coast of Greybeard Island. He could see the fearsome Gravestone Rock thrusting from the sea and, not far away, his home, the Greybeard Light, standing high above the sea at the northwestern tip of the island.