The Time Pirate

by Ted Bell

  If he had expected the boy to look nervous, or frightened, or even excited about tonight’s mission, he’d have been wrong. Nick looked like an aviator preparing to go into battle. Calm, confident, even cheerful. He seemed, to Gunner anyway, a warrior. A very young warrior, but a warrior all the same. Lord knows he’d proven himself to be one in that sea battle against Billy Blood. He had the fire in his blood, he did, that’s all there was to it.

  The old U-boat searchlight was trained on the Camel, and she looked splendid, Nick thought. Gunner had clearly been working on her through the night while Nick grabbed a few hours sleep before slipping quietly out of the lighthouse in the pre-dawn hours.

  He’d left a note for his parents on the kitchen table, explaining that he couldn’t sleep and was headed to the barn to work with Gunner on the Camel. He’d spend the night at Gunner’s inn if it got too late and see them sometime tomorrow.

  “She looks good,” Nick said, staring at his beloved plane. “Beautiful, in fact.”

  “She’s in apple-pie trim,” Gunner replied. “Engine sweet as a nut as well.”

  The old seaman climbed down from the ladder and turned to face the boy.

  “I guess this is it, then, isn’t it?” Nick said, running his hand lovingly over the glossy red paint on the cockpit’s side.

  “It is, lad.”

  “How many bombs have I got again?”

  “Twenty. Two baskets of ten, each apple carefully packed in cotton.”

  “Vickers guns fully reloaded?”

  “As many ammo belts as she’ll carry. You’ve got enough lead to shoot down half the Luftwaffe, should you be unlucky enough to run across them.”

  “Fuel? Oil?”

  “Both topped off.”

  “Radio?”

  “Working like a charm. Good old Hobbes.”

  “I’ll do a radio check when I get out over the channel.”

  “Sounds good. I’ll be here. Wasn’t planning to go anywhere this evening until you’re home safe.”

  “Weather looks really good,” Nick said, casting a glance out the opened barn doors. “Enough cloud cover to hide the moon periodically.”

  “And little wind, which is good. Chance of fog rolling in, of course. I put the RDF right under your seat.”

  “Thanks,” Nick replied, smiling as he mounted the ladder and dropped down into the cockpit. His island was named after the famous pea-soupers called greybeards. Even in good weather, these thick sea-fogs could appear out of nowhere, reducing visibility to a few yards and making sailing, and certainly flying, very dangerous. But at least he had the comfort of knowing Hobbes’s Radio Direction Finder was stowed in the cockpit.

  “Best of luck, then, Nicholas,” Gunner said, raising his big hand up so Nick could shake it. He’d wanted to hug the boy badly but felt a good, firm handshake would benefit Nick more.

  “Thanks,” Nick said, eyes roving over his instrument panel.

  “Wish it were me going, instead of you.”

  “But since you don’t know how to fly, I’m probably our best bet.”

  “Oh, I can fly an aeroplane all right, Nick.”

  “You cannot. Don’t be silly. You were a gunnery officer in the Royal Navy.”

  “Before that, I was a cadet in the Royal Flying Corps. In France with the 306th.”

  “What? All these years and you’ve never told me that? I always wondered how you knew so much about these things. What happened, Gunner?”

  “A story for another time, lad, another time,” Gunner said with a sad smile, and Nick let it go.

  Gunner walked to the front of the plane and took hold of one of the wooden propeller’s two broad, angled blades, varnished to gleaming perfection.

  “Magnetos?” Gunner cried.

  “Magnetos, check!” Nick replied.

  Gunner hauled down on the blade and the big Bentley rotary engine caught the very first time. Now there was a good omen.

  Nick gave him the thumbs-up, and Gunner stepped out of the way as the boy taxied the aeroplane out of the barn and out to the center of the airstrip. He turned right, braked, and revved his engine, listening carefully. It had never sounded better.

  Sweet as a nut. He liked that.

  He turned and saw his friend standing in the doorway of the barn, his hand raised, waving farewell.

  Nick gave him a wave and began his takeoff roll just as the moon peeked out from behind a cloud.

  “HQ, This is Blitz. I repeat, this is Blitz. How do you read me?”

  “Loud and clear, Blitz,” he heard Gunner reply in his headphones. “What is your location?”

  “HQ, my altimeter shows me at three thousand feet. Some clouds at two thousand and below. Half a mile out from the Guernsey shore. I have the field in sight. Looks quiet.”

  “Searchlights?”

  “Negative. Lights on in the guard house at the field entrance. That’s it. No one visible on the ground. No lights or movement around enemy barracks or antiaircraft emplacements.”

  “Sleeping like wee little babies, are they? Sounds good.”

  “It is. I’m commencing my attack now. Blitz, over and out . . .”

  “Give ’em bloody hell, lad!” was the last thing Nick heard Gunner say as he put his nose over and went into a steep dive, left hand on the stick, his right gently cradling the first apple. Two more were resting on his lap. Three should be enough to take out his first target, the shed filled with high explosives. He hoped three would do it, at least.

  He saw the ammunition shed ahead and below and coming up fast. He still had some cloud cover. Maybe no one had spotted him yet.

  Pulling out of his dive, he leveled off at exactly one hundred feet, heading directly for his target. So far, he’d still seen no activity at all on the ground. The antiaircraft gun emplacements around the perimeter were all dark and silent. He scanned the perimeter for his next target, the searchlights. Too dark to make them out!

  He slowed his airspeed just short of a stall as he approached the shed from the south. He lined up on the pitch-line of the roof and began his bombing run. One apple into the center of the south wall, two more directly onto the roof, one to either side of the pitch if he could manage it. That was the plan.

  Calculating the trajectory as he dove toward the target, he let the first apple fly. He knew as soon as he it let it go, he’d dropped it too soon. Early release! How could he have misjudged it so badly? The bomb would fall well short of the ammo shed’s south wall! It did.

  Concentrate!

  Nick’s bomb hit the ground, exploding three feet shy of the building itself. But the tremendous power of the nitroglycerine combined with black powder was enough to blow a hole in the south end wall you could drive a truck through! He was over the roof now, right hand poised, and another apple hit the angled roof and immediately exploded, tearing a huge gash in the corrugated steel roof and sending sheets of flame down into the interior of the building. A second later, he dropped his third and final bomb, just barely catching the roofline and blowing the whole front of the shed off.

  He hauled back on the stick, wanting to get out of the way of what he hoped would come next. He wasn’t disappointed. The blast exploded skyward and rocked his plane violently and he had to fight to keep her level.

  The entire shed suddenly erupted into a second monstrous explosion that lit up the entire field. Flames and thick black smoke climbed into the air as Nick circled above, looking down with satisfaction on the tremendous destruction he had caused the enemy.

  A shaft of pure white light suddenly shot into the sky, missing his plane by mere feet. Searchlight. The other two would be sweeping the skies shortly. He cursed himself for not finding and taking them out first as he’d planned. He had to avoid those criss-crossing beams and come around for another strafing run, this one right down over the row of Messerschmitts. There was cloud cover above, and he raced upward toward it, finally emerging into the clear, moonlit sky.

  The fire below was intense, what was l
eft of the shed a raging inferno that illuminated the entire aerodrome. He saw plenty of activity on the ground now. Luftwaffe pilots in flight suits racing from their barracks toward their waiting fighters. Gun crews running full-tilt toward their perimeter antiaircraft emplacements. Fire engines and equipment were roaring out of a hangar and racing toward the ammo shed, the pumpers already aiming their useless streams at the raging fire.

  Too little, too late. The former ammunition shed was already a heap of twisted metal and blackened wood. Phase one of his mission had gone exactly as he’d hoped.

  Emerging from a cloudbank, Nick got a good look at the precisely aligned German fighter planes on the tarmac. The sprinting pilots were still a few hundred feet away. He put the Camel into a steep diving turn that would set him up for his final attack. He would skim down the long line of Nazi fighter planes at very low altitude, dropping his apples as fast as he could heave them over the side.

  The still-rising cloud of black smoke provided fairly good cover. And the clouds above, scudding by the moon, helped now and then, giving him periodic protection from three German searchlights sweeping the skies overhead. Then, out on the edge of night, a tracer flashed through the darkness in a great arc, a star shell burst, and all hell broke loose below.

  The first of the three antiaircraft guns had begun firing at him. He dove lower, until his undercarriage was practically skipping over the canopies of the fighters. The only thing that saved him from antiaircraft fire was how close he was to the formation of Messerschmitts. The ack-ack guns simply couldn’t afford to target him now for fear of destroying their own aircraft.

  Nick McIver had no such fear.

  Heaving his bombs, he saw fire suddenly spurting from the exhaust manifolds of several German fighters as their engines exploded into life. He had them dead in his gunsights, and he pressed the trigger button on top of his joystick. The twin machine guns rattled with an enormous roar, and the muzzle flash was dazzling. He saw two or three of the enemy pilots slump forward in their cockpits, followed quickly by a great mushroom of fire and smoke climbing into the sky as some of the Messerschmitt fuel tanks started to go.

  Nick was dropping apples over the side as quickly as humanly possible. He saw some pilots turn and run from the exploding fighters. He had been momentarily night-blinded by the blazing Vickers guns, just as Gunner had warned. But the fiery light on the ground more than compensated for his loss of night vision. With his right hand, he managed to grab two of the remaining apples from the first basket between his knees in one hand. Then he pulled back on the joystick and climbed through the vertical, executing an inside loop and gaining much-needed altitude.

  He lined up on his target and dove down through the clouds toward the field. The enemy was shooting back now, and the return journey back across the embattled airfield looked like a thousand-mile-long death trap. But he wanted one more shot at the many fighters still intact on the ground, planes that would soon be headed for Dover to protect German bombers bound for London unless he could take them out.

  Some of the Messerschmitts were beginning to pull out of the formation. They were veering left and right, speeding out onto the seriously damaged runway as he leveled off at one hundred feet, lining up for his final run. It was then that he realized throwing the bombs one or two at a time wasn’t practical now. This would be his last shot at destroying as many remaining enemy aircraft as he could.

  He held the stick fast between his knees, reached down and carefully lifted the bomb basket onto his lap. He’d tilt it on its side on the edge of the cockpit and let the apples fall where they may. He was flying low enough that Gunner’s nitro bombs were sure to cause a lot of damage, even if a few weren’t right on target. He was trying to destroy the runway, too, so not an apple would be wasted.

  He sped down the line of Nazi fighters, the bombs spilling from the basket and causing a deafening staccato of jarring explosions. Each one violently rocked his little aeroplane. He tossed the empty basket over the side and hauled back on the stick, going to full throttle as he headed toward the distant perimeter at the seaward side of the Nazi airbase.

  His foot, moving off the rudder pedal, brushed the second basket. He planned to drop the entire second basket on the antiaircraft emplacement on his way out. He’d have to fly over the ack-ack gun as he returned over the field for the last time, headed for the channel and home. But the antiaircraft gun beat him to the punch. He saw its long-barreled muzzle fire, and the little puffs of black smoke appeared directly in his path.

  Flak.

  If he caught any flak in the nose of the airplane, that full basket down by his feet, those ten remaining bombs full of nitroglycerine, well, that would mean—no time for that kind of thinking. He knew he had to get rid of the second bomb basket. Now, before he took a hit! He reached forward and grabbed the flimsy wooden fruit basket with one hand, yanked it up, and balanced it on the edge of the cockpit. He might just as well still try to take out the ack-ack gun on his way out. There was nothing to lose, not now.

  He’d no time to climb over the flak layer or fly around it. He’d have to dive under it, fly just a few feet above the tarmac, heading straight into the throat of the gun emplacement. There were people on the ground shooting at him, rifle and machine gun fire, and he felt the dreaded thunk-thunkthunk of rounds striking the lead shield that lined his cockpit.

  He opened up with his twin Vickers and was pleased to see the deadly effect of his machine guns as German soldiers either dove for safety or fell mortally wounded or dead. The sleepy Guernsey aerodrome had come fully awake, and every German soldier on the ground had but one single objective: blow the antique British warplane out of the sky.

  Time to go, Nick thought to himself, as he flew on straight toward the gun emplacement, both machine guns blazing, and managed to skim just below the first layer of flak that had been fired.

  Amazing. He was still alive, and his aeroplane, though no doubt somewhat damaged, seemed very capable of getting him across the sea and home. Beyond the gun he saw the airfield’s barbed-wire fence line coming up, and beyond that, waves breaking white upon the huge black rocks.

  He gripped the rim of the basket tightly, waiting for the right moment. He was coming right up on the ack-ack gun now, carefully calculating his trajectory. Now, he thought and gave the basket a shove overboard.

  A millisecond later, he saw the silhouette of a lone sentinel, a single German soldier standing atop the mound of sandbags surrounding the big ack-ack gun. He had a machine gun, and he kept a bead right on the Camel. Nick both heard and felt the rounds whizzing by his head, ripping up his wings.

  And then the basket hit and there was a huge black crater with a rising ball of fire at its center, right where the German machine gunner and the huge antiaircraft gun had been.

  He was over the field, over the fence now, over the rocky coast of Guernsey. At the back of his mind were all the Mess-erschmitts that had survived his attack. Surely some were airborne, even now. The runways, he was glad to see, had been severely damaged, but more of the lethal fighters would surely make it into the air. He craned his head around to see, wiping oil and smoke from his goggles with his scarf, but the entire airfield was nothing but flames and black smoke climbing hundreds of feet into the air.

  He flew on across the water, counting his blessings. Still alive. Plane intact. Engine smooth, good rpms, no odd sounds. No sea fog had rolled in, thank goodness. No Mess-erschmitts on his tail, not yet, anyway, and—

  What was that sound?

  His engine had missed a beat.

  Then another. It was coughing now, sputtering, still turning over and—smoke. Smoke pouring out of his engine. He grabbed his radio transmitter.

  “Mayday, Mayday, this is Blitz. Do you read?”

  “Loud and clear, Blitz! What is your situation?”

  “Leaving Guernsey coastline, flying due east for HQ at about a hundred feet, Gunner. But I’ve got a problem.”

  “Tell me.”
/>   “Engine’s smoking badly. Still turning over. Very rough, though. She’s flying, but barely. Impossible to gain altitude now. Maybe I can keep her aloft, I don’t know . . .”

  “Any fire?”

  “Uh . . . no . . . I don’t . . . yes . . . yes, roger, my engine’s on fire.”

  “Stay calm, Nick. You’ll be all right. But you’re going to have to ditch. Right now before the fire reaches her fuel tank or the ammunition blows. Just remember the emergency ditch drill your father taught you, you’ll come out of this alive.”

  Nick had drilled this into his brain and now spoke each procedure aloud, the way his father had taught him when they’d practiced for just such an emergency.

  Gunner, alone in the barn, his heart in his mouth, craned his head toward the wireless and listened intently to Nick’s every word, the boy’s voice on the speaker cracking and choked from the black smoke pouring back from his flaming engine.

  “All emergency procedures complete?” Gunner said.

  “Affirmative. Over.”

  “Good lad. Listen carefully. You’ve got calm seas. That’s good. Get her right down over the water, quickly now, just above stall speed. Just keep her nose up and set her down as gently as ever you can, like a wee butterfly on a pond. When you stall out, she’ll settle right off. Then you get out of there fast, boy, I mean you move as fast as you ever moved in your life, and you swim away from that damn sewing basket any damn way you can.”

  “Roger. Descending . . .”

  “Don’t forget to untie yer lap rope, lad. Slow you down gettin’ out if you don’t.”

  Nick tore at the line around his waist and whipped it away. “Thanks, I would’ve forgotten, too, Gunner. Lots of smoke and fire now, can barely see. I’ve never felt this close to . . . to . . . you know.”

  “All in the game. How close to the surface?”

  “Twenty feet . . . fifteen . . . ten. Engine completely engulfed in flames . . . ammo bound to blow . . . I need to put her down right now, Gunner. . . . Over and out.”

  “God love you, Nicky. And Godspeed, boy.”

  The radio squawked once and went dead.