Puzzled, he followed her. But there had been some curious looks, so no doubt she wanted privacy for their chat.
She did. The room was empty. He closed the door. She set her glass on a table.
'I thought you deserved this, for coming all this way just to see me.' She put her arms around his neck and kissed him.
'Elizabeth... about...' About what you said last night... about Roy What's-his-name… But she did not let him say any of it.
'Subject closed.' She was as firm as a schoolmarm admonishing a small boy. 'Come on, m'lad, lunch.'
He grasped her shoulders and smiled down at her. 'Is that all I get? Just one...' Kiss? She didn't give him time, again, to finish.
'One more, then.' It was a fleeting peck, he hardly felt it. She walked briskly to the door.
Flying back, by a circuitous route, he reflected that there may be a certain attraction about an enigmatic woman, but enigmas were damnably irritating just the same. He had felt like bending over and applying a pingpong bat to her bottom. A delectable little bottom it was, too.
Seven
'R-R-over-r pat-r-rols.'
"E must've 'ad 'aggis for breakfast,' Sergeant Noyes whispered.
The Group Captain was at his most Scottish this morning. Alden heard a pibroch wailing in his mind's ear. It sounded a note of warning. He half expected to see Groupie cross a couple of claymores on the floor and break into a deft heel-and-toe between them. Group Captain lain Jameson looked happy. Happiness, to the station commander, meant a good fight. Evidently Rover patrols were an innovation in which he could participate. When his Scots brogue broadened, you could be sure he was in the best of moods.
'It's something new... for this war. In the last show the term (tai-r-rm!) wasn't used, but the principle was the same: go out looking for the enemy in his own territory and shoot him down. Or, in this instance, sink him.
'It is going to put considerable demands on captains: you will have a lot of discretion, in your target area, in selecting the best target to attack.' He smiled. 'And sink. What it means is that aircraft, singly, in pairs or a threesome, will be sent to a stretch of the enemy coast to find an enemy ship, or ships, and attack.'
Enemy shipping stayed close inshore. This meant that fighter bases would be nearby. There would even be standing fighter patrols along the coast. Heavy flak sites on the coast could be another menace. Both British and enemy merchant ships in coastal convoys flew barrage balloons. All vessels had at least one 20 mm flak mounting.
It was two days since East Crondal had received its new issue of torpedoes. Everyone had been wondering how long it would be before the squadrons were required to make a torpedo attack; and where and what the target would be. Now they knew.
Rover patrols. Insistently the old song kept repeating the same words in Alden's head. A-roving, a-roving, I'll go no more a-ro-oving with you, Fair Maid. Damn stupid nervous habit, he chided himself. Stop it. It's as bad as having a twitch. Not so noticeable, though. And there were plenty of plain and fancy twitches to be seen by now, after so many months of mine-laying and bombing; low-level and dive. There were aircrew who chewed their nails until they bled, who kept jerking their heads from side to side, or nodding, or yawning, or tugging their ear lobes, or talking silently to themselves and moving their lips, or chain-smoking, or drinking heavily, or laughing inanely when there was nothing to be amused about. Twitches came in all varieties. Being haunted by the same few words of a song qualified as one.
Alden resolutely silenced the infuriating repetition and concentrated on the briefing.
The Wing Commander followed the Group Captain. 'We'll start with a section of three. I'll lead. When we've found a target, and there are enough ships to warrant a second attack - or more - I'll signal back and the next sortie can follow at once.' He looked at Hanbury. 'I'll take two of your crews first, Jack.'
'Alden and Flight Sergeant Jenkins, sir.'
Alden had a momentary sensation of an indigestible and very heavy suet pudding, a very cold one, weighing his stomach down. It passed. Well, might as well get it over quickly… with you, Fair Maid… fair maid? Elizabeth, of course... Listen to the briefing...
On either side of him, his crew shifted uneasily on their chairs.
The squadron commander indicated a length of the Dutch coast along which there was a busy shipping lane. Both squadrons knew it well. They had sowed many mines there. Some they had failed to sow, because their mines had blown up prematurely and scattered aircraft and crews piecemeal on the grey waters. Only Tregear's squadron was at this briefing. Alden wondered why it was the one that had been chosen for the first Rover patrols against targets of opportunity. He assumed it was a compliment to its greater efficiency than the other's.
He looked away from the wing commander and caught Jenkins's eyes, obviously waiting to catch his. Jenkins smirked; whether with satisfaction at his selection or in commiseration for them both, Alden could not divine. Jenkins was short, burly, built to be a hooker in a hard-driving rugger pack. He was dark, with a glossy moustache which he had a habit of preening. He was doing so now. Alden wondered whether it was from pride, conceit even, or nervous tension. It was not easy to attribute nerves to the flight sergeant. His extroverted temperament provided a release for his tensions. He seemed never to be keeping any emotion suppressed. Physically, he channelled his energies into playing rugger in the winter and keeping wicket in the squadron and station cricket teams in summer, at which he was astoundingly acrobatic. And, of course, copulating with great frequency in spring, summer, autumn and winter. Mentally, or perhaps even spiritually, he expressed himself in song. He was a baritone in a choir conducted by the station chaplain, which gave concerts in towns and villages as far as twenty miles away.
It was unconvincing to interpret his moustache gentling as a nervous twitch. Alden did not want to detect anxiety in Flight Sergeant Jenkins. He could see no sign of it in the squadron commander, but he had never expected to. Wing Commander Tregear was the epitome of phlegmatic insouciance in the face of danger. It made Alden ashamed to acknowledge silently and very privately that he was not at all pleased to be a guinea-pig in this new type of operation.
The briefing was true to its definition, but brevity gave little comfort this time. Too much was left to be found out. The crews left the Operations Room with the barest of information. Their route would be direct, they would fly at 1,000 ft., which would give them some little chance of avoiding a watery grave if an engine failed, they would attack in echelon starboard, the wind was light and the weather fair, the torpedoes were set to run at 40 knots (the alternative was 27 knots, for a longer run).
Going to the Parachute section, Jenkins winked at Alden. 'Seen the new ginger-haired parachute-packer, sir?'
'A pusher?' The job was also done by men. Alden was trying to be matey, which did not come easily to him except with his brother officers.
Jenkins feigned astonishment. 'Need you ask? The day I notice the colour of an erk's hair, you’ll know it's time to send me to a psychiatrist. Lovely singer, she is. I've recruited her for the choir.'
'Is that your only interest, Flight?' asked Lalabalava.
'Heaven forbid, sir. Pretty as a picture, she is. A Celt, like me, see. From Belfast.'
'I've got a bird in the Parachute section, an' all,' Noyes said. 'Safety precaution, like.'
'Your personal packer?' Alden looked amused.
'That's right, sir. She ain't much to look at, and she don't sing soprano in no choir, but she makes sure I draw a 'chute as she's packed herself.'
'Waste of time, Knocker.' Jenkins's voice was scornful. 'Don't think you'd have time to bale out of a Beaufort, do you?'
'Not if you were flying it, Taff, no!' Knocker Noyes was equal to any Welshman's mordant wit. 'In our crew, yeah.'
'Thank you, Sergeant,' said Alden mildly. And he thought: Even our banter can't keep away from the subject of sudden death.
And what about my bird, my pusher? What sort of talism
an is she, to ensure my safety? Sitting at her Typex machine, coding and decoding, what can she contribute to my protection? Nothing practical. But she's not my pusher, either. Is she anyone's? What about the Bentley-driver Roy, D.F.C.? Is she seriously contemplating his proposal? Surely not, after what went on in the billiards room; at her express invitation, too.
He looked with interest at the pretty redhead behind the long counter on which the parachutes were put for them to pick up. She was flirting overtly with Jenkins, who was making the most of it. Further along the counter, a plump pasty mousey-haired girl with prominent teeth but a dazzling grin was chirruping to Noyes in a Cockney as marked as his own; but subtly different: his the hah-nah-brahn-cah of Dockland, hers the haow-naow-braown-caow of Hammersmith. He envied both men.
He was not thinking of romantic relationships a short while later. His whole being was involved in removing his newly repaired Beaufort from its adhesion to solid earth and persuading it not only to commit itself and its heavy burden to being supported by the induced flow of air over its wings, but also to remain airborne until he himself deliberately returned it to terra firma in a manner of his own choosing. Which meant with its torpedo lodged in the guts of some enemy ship and both engines still functioning.
Norfolk flashed past close beneath as he held the aircraft straight and level at a height that barely cleared treetops and church steeples. The broad beach, exposed by the tide at its ebb, reminded him of the picnicking throngs he used to see there when flying this way in other summers. Then the North Sea, as cold-looking as a millionaire property-developer's charity; except that the one existed and the other was a figment.
The Beauforts began their climb to 5,000 ft., Alden on the squadron commander's right, Jenkins on his left, both stepped back from the leader a couple of lengths. A few miles to the south a coastal convoy was on its way to the Port of London with jute from Dundee, coal from Newcastle and iron from Hartlepool. Alden hoped that no German aircraft had sowed mines overnight in its path. He searched the sky for enemy bombers that had come to harass the small steamers with their cargoes of war materials. But there was none to be seen.
All Quiet On The Western Front, he rt1minated. And what a delusion that had been. Not that the North Sea had ever been a part of it in fact or fiction. But wartime delusions and illusions were an integral feature of this falsely calm-looking stretch of water, as he had found out.
The monotony of the featureless sea, with not even a fishing vessel to be seen, created another deception. It was as if they were flying over a serene emptiness which boded no harm. At nought feet, a pilot had to be taut, sensitive to the smallest fluctuation in the aircraft's attitude. It kept him as alert as if he were crossing a bullring, unarmed, expecting the bull to come charging in at any second. With 5,000 ft. of space between the aircraft and the sea, the apparent lessening of danger was soporific. It was sheer cozenage. The pilot of a fully-laden aircraft that could not maintain altitude on one engine was no more safe from sudden extinction at five thousand feet than at fifty.
And it was not only the sea that was a constant threat. Messerschmitt 110s had a range of over 500 miles: which meant that one was within their radius of action at 250 miles.
Lalabalava said, 'Pilot from observer. Thirty miles to Dutch coast.'
'Thirty, thanks.' Alden looked landward, seeking Messerschmitts. It was too soon to spot shipping. If there were fighters around, they would have to be within five or six miles to be seen. Even then there would have to be several of them and it would be the sun glinting on them that betrayed them. They would be too far away to be seen as recognisable shapes.
His eyes dwelt on the sea, where there must surely be some traffic. He looked up again. Were those fighters in the far distance? He narrowed his eyes. There seemed to be a cluster of black dots in the sky. Impossible to tell if they were moving. He blinked a couple of times. The dots had gone when he looked again. He lowered his eyes to the most distant part of the sea ahead. Nothing.
Lalabalava, using binoculars, said, 'Observer to pilot. A few ships… must be ten miles away... can't see how many, or what type.'
'Thank you.' Alden saw Wing Commander Tregear rock his aircraft twice. 'The Wingco's spotted them, too.' His observer had, of course.
The leading aircraft's wings waggled again and it began a steep dive. Alden felt the knotting sensation in his entrails that he had felt on the brink of each encounter with the enemy.
The three Beauforts levelled off at eighty feet, ready to drop their torpedoes. They held a steady 140 knots. Now all that each pilot had to do was select a target and launch the torpedo from a range of 600 to 1,000 yards... or up to 2,000 yards if he could go no closer. All, except to judge the amount of aim-off that was necessary. Any ship that knew itself to be a target would change direction, so there was a better chance of hitting it from 600 yards than from 2,000.
If so much as one sharp-eyed sailor had spotted the Beauforts, a signal would already have gone to the nearest Luftwaffe base. But the Beauforts would close the ships in a few minutes, well before any fighters could turn up.
Alden saw a ship appear on the horizon... and then another... a third... and yet another. But they were not in convoy. They were spread unevenly over a distance of about a mile. Two of them, on the port bow, were some 200 yards apart. A third was perhaps half a mile astern of the latter, and on the aircraft's starboard bow. The fourth was 500 yards astern of it. And now a fifth had come in sight, on its own, also to starboard and further off shore than the others.
The two on the port side were steaming in opposite directions. The other three all appeared to be crossing the Beauforts from starboard to port. It was towards these that the Wing Commander turned, followed by his Nos 2 and 3.
'I can see the bow waves of three small vessels beyond the merchantmen,' Lalabalava reported. 'Must be E-boats coming out. Which means we've been spotted.'
'Big bow waves?'
'Yes, typical M.T.B. or E-boat.'
The choice of individual targets was not difficult. The squadron commander changed course directly towards the centre one of the three ships to starboard. Jenkins accordingly shifted his course and made for the one to its left. Alden banked and turned towards the sternmost of the three, which was also the farthest offshore and therefore the nearest.
The E-boats were fast approaching, their forms now discernible between the curving waves of spray through which the bows were cutting at high speed.
Alden made two gentle corrections of course to put his track at right-angles to the target's. She was a twin funnel coaster of some 3,000 tons, he judged, with well decks fore and aft, laden with deck cargo. She was low in the water, so her holds must be full too.
'Watch out for fighters, Observer and Gunner.'
Alden gave all his attention to the target. He checked his speed and height constantly. He counted to himself as the gap narrowed: a count of ten from the moment when he judged that he had 1,000 yards to go to the point of release, and another 600 yards to the target. He would drop the torp one second early, to ensure that he did not render it ineffectual by leaving it less than the 600 yards it needed for its mechanism to arm it.
And still there was no opposition.
Twenty millimetre cannon on the bow and stern of each ship opened fire. The tracer curved with familiar laziness in the Beauforts' various directions. Alden was unconcerned by the shells that he knew were flighting at him.
Ten... nine...eight… At zero he let the torpedo go, held his course for two more seconds, then swung away, diving to fifty feet and accelerating.
He turned his head to watch the torpedo's trail while he banked around. It was cutting a furrow that it thrilled him to see.
'Gunner to Pilot… two One-o-nines landward, about a thousand feet up.' Dymond-Forbes could not give a clock code position while the aircraft was turning. The fighters had been at seven-o'clock when he first saw them. By the time Alden had completed his circle, they were at eleven.
&nb
sp; Alden saw his torpedo hit the target just aft of the bow. The flames of the explosion on impact lit the sky as though a violent thunderstorm had broken out and sent a sheet of lightning darting at the ship. Huge dense clouds of smoke billowed from the conflagration and enveloped her.
'Well done, Derek.' It was Lalabalava's enthusiastic praise.
'Good shooting, sir.' That was Dymond-Forbes.
From Noyes came a slightly plaintive, 'All right if I have a shufti, sir?'
'Come up front,' invited Alden.
The wireless operator appeared at his side, staring out at the fiercely burning and already half-sunken wreck. 'Coo!' was his only utterance. After a pause: 'Only one thing missing.'
'What?' asked Alden.
'I wish my young lady's ma was aboard, an' all.'
'Aboard this aircraft?' Alden was astonished.
'Nah, sir. Aboard that flaming ship. She's gonna be a lahsy ma-in-law.'
The whole crew had heard this and laughter coursed along the intercom wiring.
Alden sought the other aircraft and their targets. He was in time to see two huge bubbles burst on the sea's surface and hurl foaming cascades high and wide, which subsided into widening and violent ripples. Both eruptions were about 200 yards short of the two torpedoes' targets.
'What the hell?' Lalabalava exclaimed.
They must have hit the bottom or a sandbank,' Alden said. He sounded vexed and amazed. 'Nobody thought of checking the depth of water from an Admiralty chart. Both those ships are much closer inshore than ours was.'
He was interrupted by his dorsal gunner's urgent, 'Fighters coming in at three-o'clock, sir.'
This was followed by the sound of the dorsal gun in action and the tang of cordite.
Alden, staring out of his port window, saw a Me109 coming into the attack in a shallow dive. He yanked the Beaufort up into a tightly turning climb. A Me109 scorched past and turned towards the land: no ammunition left, he supposed, thankfully.
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