Wasp took off moments later, a hundred yards behind, and Gwen had to slot mildly magnifying lenses in place to keep the machine in sight. Despite Bloodhound’s light blue colouring and the full moon, it was almost invisible in the night sky and she wondered how she was ever going to spot the enemy aircraft, which presumably would be appropriately painted for night-time activities. Gwen was able to drop back slightly to a safer distance, though, when Owen turned on his wingtip lights. Left over from before the war when Bloodhound was his own personal scientifically-orientated aircraft, the lights weren’t exactly very tactical, but there was nothing else in the sky with them apart from the enemy bomber, which was still many miles away, well beyond visual range, so it didn’t matter.
‘Badger Leader to Badger Two.’
‘Two here. Go ahead Leader.’ Gwen put extra emphasis on the Owen’s call sign, but didn’t otherwise comment.
‘I’m going to grab some height. Make Angels five, heading one three five, best speed, and we’ll see about guiding you onto the target.’
‘Roger, Leader.’
Gwen turned gently away from the red and green lights of Bloodhound and pointed her noise into the black, accelerating and quickly leaving the big machine behind as it continued to climb into the sky.
England was nigh on invisible beneath her; there were no lights of houses, no headlamps from passing cars, no street lights. There weren’t even any running lights to be seen from the ever-present barges on the canals leading to London. The only sign that there was anything at all below her was the reflection of the moon on the occasional water surface as she flitted silently past.
Gwen felt strange. Not just because she was flying in the dark, something that she had only ever done a few times before during training, but because she was going into combat on her own, with only a single support aircraft. She never been as alone in the sky as she was at that moment - there was only her, the Prussian bomber and the watchers, Owen and Tophat, neither of whom would be able to help her if she got in trouble.
‘Badger Leader, Tophat here. Bandit is holding steady on course three four zero, now at angels four. Speed two-fifty approx.’
‘Roger, Tophat. I have him on scope. Moving to intercept. Keep this frequency clear until further notice, please.’
‘Roger, Badger Leader. Happy hunting, out.’
There was a brief silence, then Owen came back over the radio. ‘Badger Two, adjust course to one one five and make angels four. Target ten miles and closing, moving from right to left in front of you.’
‘Roger, Leader.’
Gwen adjusted her course and height, hating the fact that she had to keep most of her attention on her red-lit instruments, but having to; with no external reference it was all too easy to become disorientated and confused and many a pilot had fallen out of the sky and crashed, not even realising they weren’t flying straight and level.
‘Target now four miles, turn five degrees left.’
‘Roger.’
A nudge of the controls swung Wasp onto her new heading and Gwen slotted lenses in place and began to search the sky in front of her.
‘Three miles.’
Gwen’s eyes began to play tricks on her, blotches appearing at the corners of her vision, drawing her attention and she had to resist turning towards them every time.
‘Two miles. Turn two degrees right.’
Owen had to be very close if his scope could pick out enough detail to give such accurate course corrections and Gwen relaxed slightly, knowing that, despite not having a wingman, she was at least better informed than her target, who would have no idea she was coming.
‘One mile. Dead ahead.’
Gwen leaned forwards against her straps and squinted into the night, sure that she should be able to spot a large bomber at less than a mile. There had to be some glint of light off of its fuselage from the full moon, or some patch of darkness that was blacker than the surrounding...
Her heart leapt into her mouth and she jerked her stick back into her lap in a panic as a shape loomed large directly in front of her and the drone of huge steam engines filled her cockpit. Too late, she realised that the bomber was much further away than she had thought it was and tried to correct, but it flashed past beneath her before she could bring her guns to bear.
‘That bloody thing is huge!’
It was only when Owen responded that Gwen realised that she had spoken aloud and that her radio was still open. ‘Say again, please, Badger Two.’
‘Repeat, I have made contact with the target, Leader.’ She grinned to herself, even as she flung Wasp into a hard turn to bring her round to the left, putting her on a course that would slowly converge with the bomber’s and threw the spring into full unwind, wanting to pull ahead of it and cut it off. She lifted her eyes from the instruments and searched for the enemy aircraft, but it had disappeared into the night.
‘Understood, Two.’
Gwen could almost hear the smirk on Owen’s face; he’d heard her the first time and was just teasing her about her lack of discipline.
‘Um, Badger Two requesting directions, please; I seem to have lost him.’
‘Target is half a mile off your left wing, recommend heading three five zero for twenty seconds, then hard turn.’
‘Roger, Leader.’ Gwen stared into the night in the direction where the Flea should be, trying to spot him again, while keeping half an eye on her chronograph, but it was useless; there was no way to spot the intruder. She was going to have to trust in Owen’s directions and rely on her own reactions to get in whatever shots she could.
Twenty seconds passed and she turned hard, simultaneously throttling back.
Owen saw her manoeuvre and gave her the information she needed. ‘Turn to two one zero. Target half a mile, closing fast, almost head on.’
Gwen gritted her teeth, the numbers involved flashing through her head in an instant - the combined speed of the two machines was around six hundred miles an hour, that was ten miles every minute, a mile every six seconds. Half a mile would be covered in three, two...
Lines of incandescence reached out towards her, deceptively lazily, seemingly coming from nowhere, and she kicked her rudder and twisted her stick, jerking Wasp around while trying to line her reflector scope on their source. She squeezed the trigger, letting off less than half a second’s burst, but then had to jerk the stick back to avoid the enormous machine as it flashed past her.
A quick glance at her altimeter told her that she was still safely at five thousand feet, so she throttled back, then rolled Wasp over and pulled the stick into her lap.
Wasp built up speed, going through the vertical, then slowly came back up to horizontal on a reverse course, now almost two thousand feet below and directly behind her target, although the only thing that told Gwen all of that was happening was the red illuminated gyroscopic attitude indicator directly in front of her.
The realisation of what had happened slowly came to her - just because she couldn’t see the bomber, didn’t mean it couldn’t see her and while the bomber was evidently painted a dull dark colour, the top side of Wasp was a lovely pink colour.
She glanced out of the cockpit to confirm her theory and found that her wings were glowing beautifully in the moonlight. Gwen chuckled wryly; she had almost been killed by her favourite colour. Well, in her current position below the bomber, there was something she could do about that.
Gwen flipped Wasp on her back again and flew on into the night, upside down; while Wasp’s topside was pink, her underside was painted black in honour of her previous pilot. It was a shiny black, polished to a high gloss, but it would hide her far better than the pink.
‘Badger Two, this is Leader. Maintain heading - target is holding steady one mile ahead of you. Time to interception at current speed approximately forty-five seconds.’
‘Roger, Leader. Give me a countdown to contact please.’ Gwen’s voice was slightly strained; she wasn’t used to being upside down for so long and it
was making her feel quite strange, but better the blood rushing to her head than a lump of lead, so she maintained her unconventional orientation.
Gwen kept an eye on her instruments as she pushed the stick forwards slightly and began a slight climb, aiming to come up under the enemy’s belly, hopefully unseen until the last moment.
‘Twenty seconds.’
The altimeter climbed through three thousand feet.
‘Ten seconds.’
Knowing that there would be no way to see the bomber because it would be below her nose, Gwen kept her eyes glued firmly to the instruments. Three thousand five hundred feet came and went.
‘Five.’
Three thousand eight hundred.
‘Now!’
At Owen’s shout Gwen flipped Wasp right-side up, pulling up to point her nose at the sky and there, a hundred feet almost directly above her, silhouetted against sparse silver clouds, was one of the biggest aircraft she had ever seen, almost twice as big as Dreadnought.
She lined her guns up on the target and opened fire, holding the button down.
The tracer rounds painted the way through the darkness, intercepting with the enemy bomber and she saw sparks fly as they hit metal. She nudged her rudder, walking the spray along the aircraft, spreading the damage from the heavy cannon shells as widely as she could.
Too late, the enemy reacted and swung guns towards her, tracer reaching out for her, spraying haphazardly across the night, but she had finished her run and was already banking past the big machine.
There was a flare in the darkness that illuminated her cockpit and she jumped, thinking that she had been hit, but there had been no corresponding thump from an impact. and she swung around to bring the bomber back into view.
The sight she was confronted with was awesome in its majesty and yet terrifying - the huge aircraft was wreathed in flames. The hydrogen reserves in at least two of the engines must have exploded, causing the flash that she had seen, and the flames were spreading along the feed lines, unchecked.
She allowed the bomber to pull away slightly, not wanting to be too close to it if the fire reached the main hydrogen tanks before the supply was cut off. The aircraft was completely out of control, its pilot either dead or no longer at the controls, and she watched as it went into a dive that started shallow, but swiftly accelerated until it was pointing almost directly downwards.
She dived smoothly after it, throttling right back and using flaps to fall back even further, easily following it as it fell from the sky until, with a crashing crump that was audible even from a thousand feet, it ploughed into the ground.
Burning pieces scattered everywhere, illuminating the surrounding farmland for miles around and Gwen nodded in grim satisfaction; there would be fewer bombs falling on London tonight.
Abby walked into the dining room of The Dorchester for breakfast and sat at one of the small tables. A waiter immediately brought her tea, toast and a copy of the morning edition of The Times. As she put sugar into her tea, she glanced at the headlines to see if there was anything of interest and immediately waved for the waiter to come back.
She gave him instructions, then, as he went to follow them, she began buttering her toast.
She was tucking into scrambled eggs by the time the waiter returned, bringing with him a telephone.
Abby took the apparatus from him and spoke clearly into the receiver as she fluffed out the newspaper and gazed at the photo depicting the wreckage of a huge bomber, under the headline “The Return of Misfit Squadron.”
‘Hello, Owen? It’s Abby. Is there anything you’d like to tell me?’
The British newspaper, The Times, didn’t name the aircraft that the Misfits had shot down, but even in its mangled condition, Gruber knew it by sight as the Nachtfalter and couldn’t stop laughing.
The mess was silent apart from his laughter and the pilots of his squadron were eyeing him nervously from the other side of the room, but he couldn’t care less; everything about the report was just too delicious.
Not only had the pompous, arrogant pilot - a pacifist scientist turned fanatic - been found dead in a machine that he had touted as invincible to whoever would listen and gotten exactly what he deserved, but he would also no longer be able to argue against Gruber and his squadron, or take any of the interest and praise of the public that should rightly be his. And then there was the stupidity of the British at sending a bright pink aircraft at night during an almost full moon and the novel and ingenious way that the pilot had removed that disadvantage.
It all conspired to have him almost rolling around in his seat as the journalist, one of his favourite war correspondents, Mr F. Featherstonehaugh, added his own special touch of humour to his description of the deadly duel.
Eventually, though, Gruber finished the article and managed to regain control of himself. He threw the paper to one side and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief, then waved for one of the waiters to bring him another drink.
While he waited for it, he gazed around the walls of the mess, taking in his numerous trophies. They were leaving for Norway in the morning, flying to the forward base in Denmark from where they would support the invasion, so it would be the last time he would see them in a while and had wanted to admire them one last time. His gaze lingered on the ones above the bar, the ones from Misfit aircraft, and he replayed the kills in his mind, his fists curling around an imaginary yoke as he sent a stream of death into the enemy machines, feeling the familiar surge of adrenaline and triumph. Unfortunately, it looked like it would be a long time before he would be able to add any more pieces of Misfit aircraft to his collection, but there should be at least a few kills to be made up north.
He smiled at the thought, then glanced across the room at his pilots and immediately started laughing again when they hastily looked away from him, avoiding his eyes - he had been hard on them during their training flights and they were nervous for the coming fight, fearful of him.
As they should be.
The waiter brought his drink and he grabbed it from the tray, swallowing half of it in one gulp to sooth a throat that was unaccustomed to such merriment, before staring back across the room, assessing.
His pilots had shown some of the skill he had chosen them for during those training flights, but he couldn’t wait to properly test them in combat; then he would see exactly what kind of men he had allowed into his squadron.
Chapter 5
There were mixed reactions from the Misfits to the news of the mission to Muscovy. Some of the pilots were looking forward to getting back into the fighting, but others, like Owen, saw things much the same way as Abby had.
‘It’s a suicide mission! They’re sacrificing us to keep the Tsar happy!’
Abby had gotten back to Bagshot Hall at midday, just in time for the brief meal the pilots allowed themselves, and thankfully it was just them, Lord Bagshot and Lady Penelope in the luncheon room to hear Owens outburst. She shook her head, trying to deny something that she suspected was true. ‘Yes, it’s going to be dangerous, but suicide? We’ve been in tough spots before and we always got out of them.’
Owen glared at her. ‘Yes. Most of us, anyway.’
Abby glared at him, ready to bawl him out, but managed to stop just in time. She took a deep breath to calm herself; while she was hurt by Owen’s callous and unnecessary reference to her sister, she wasn’t going to bite back at him. The squadron couldn’t afford any rifts when there was so much to be done. Everybody had to be completely focused during the next two weeks if they were going to be ready for the trip to Muscovy and have the best odds of survival.
She looked around the table, meeting the eyes of her pilots. ‘Like it or not, we’re soldiers. We signed up for the war and promised to obey orders. And these are our orders.’ She forced a smile. ‘Ours not to reason why and all that.’
‘We promised to obey orders that make sense, Abby. We signed up to be Misfits, not grunts to be thrown away...’
Abby glared
at her second-in-command. ‘So, our lives are worth more than anyone else’s? Than a Harridan driver’s, for example?’
Owen blanched. ‘No, of course not, but our training, our experience...’
‘If it wasn’t us going it would be someone else and we have a better chance of getting the job done and coming back alive precisely because of that training and experience, not to mention our skill and aircraft.’
‘I know, but...’ Owen gritted his teeth and shook his head in frustration. ‘Look, I’m willing to give my life if need be, if it saves lives or takes us a step closer to winning the war, but I just don’t see how trying to do the impossible in Muscovy and dying uselessly is going to do that!’
‘You’re not the only one who sees this as a bad idea, Owen, but as I said, we have no choice in the matter and besides, just think how famous we’ll be if we succeed.’ Abby forced a grin, changing the subject and hoping that everyone would forget about Muscovy for at least a while. ‘Almost as famous as Gwen here, who has managed to put the squadron, but especially herself, firmly back into the spotlight. Front page news in all the papers and I particularly enjoyed the report in The Times... Speaking of which, we are going to be joined sometime today by a journalist: the King has allowed the press to send a writer to follow our daily routine and write about who we really are.’
Again, there were mixed reactions from the pilots. Most of them were wary, just as she was, and only a few, Scarlet and Bruce predictably among them, seemed genuinely enthusiastic at the chance to gain renown.
Mac was one of the sceptics. ‘Well, if we have to be stuck with some nosey busybody then I at least hope they’re from the New Aviator; they’re the only ones who actually understand something about what we do, but even they, well...’
He left what he was accusing them of unsaid, but the pilots understood perfectly and there were nods of agreement and many a rolled eye at the thought of the technically inaccurate and often overly dramatised articles in what was supposed to be the foremost publication for aviation enthusiasts.
The Russian Resistance Page 8