‘I don’t like to see Hawk like that, like a bird with clipped wings.’
Scarlet shook her head. ‘Chin up, for goodness sake! It’s only for a week or so and then by all accounts you’ll get more flying than you know what to do with!’
‘I know, but still...’ The American shrugged and Gwen put her arm around the woman’s shoulder.
Simkin waited for everyone to arrive before opening a door in the starboard bulkhead and taking them out into a small stairwell, which was open to the elements and had one of the ship’s six large anti-aircraft guns on a platform to one side. They went up the four short flights of stairs and stepped up onto the flight deck.
There were dozens of Navy personnel on the flat landing platform that formed the very top of the ship, but not all of them were working. It seemed that, in good weather at least, it was a favoured place to spend time off. There at least half a dozen men and women sitting with their legs dangling perilously off the edge over the water next to the stairwell, a few others were kicking a football around in the very middle, away from anything dangerous, and another dozen or so were lying down, enjoying a bit of a kip in what would probably be the last warmth that any of them were likely to see in a while. The pilots took this in quickly, but the gaze of every single one of them were drawn inexorably towards the rear of the ship where there were two dark blue aircraft.
The Arturo’s fighters, Hammond “Martinets”, had been circling when the Misfits had arrived, to give them room with which to land, but they were present now, tied securely to the rear of the deck and ready for take-off at a moment’s notice.
At the start of the war, Britain had no carriers. The ones left over from the Great War were all in mothballs or scrapped, and when a few were hurriedly recommissioned, there were no aircraft to fly from them, so the British had bought some from the only source available. The American-built and designed Martinets were equipped with equally American “Full and Houston” springs which were powerful, so as to get them off the carrier safely, but very short ranged, although that didn’t matter so much since they were purely for convoy defence and didn’t have to travel far. However, to keep weight down to a minimum, they were very lightly armed, with only four machine guns. That would be enough to take down a lightly armoured scout aircraft, but they wouldn’t have much hope against even a single Hoffmann HO111 or Funkel FU88.
Once again, without waiting for Simkin to tell them it was alright, the Misfits made a beeline for the aircraft.
Two Naval aviators in dark blue flightsuits were supervising the rewinding and securing of their aircraft, but it was a third man, standing unobtrusively to one side observing the work that caught Scarlet’s eye and made her pull Gwen and Kitty to a halt.
‘Look at that! Doesn’t he look dreamy!’
Gwen frowned, not quite knowing who her friend was talking about. ‘You mean the pilot? The tall one? He’s... alright I suppose.’
‘No, not him, dummy! Freddy!’ She jerked her head in the direction of the journalist. He was writing in his notebook, but every so often he had to stop and brush his hair from his face, pouting in annoyance as he did so.
Gwen took in the sight of the journalist. She had to admit he did cut quite a dashing figure, especially because he was the only person not in military uniform on the entire deck. It was alright for her to notice and appreciate that, but Scarlet on the other hand... ‘I thought you were with Sir Dougie?’
Scarlet grinned and shrugged. ‘I am, yes, but that doesn’t mean I’m blind. Besides, when the cat’s away...’
Kitty broke in. ‘Well, if you wanted to play then I’m afraid you’ve got competition.’
The three women watched as Chastity broke away from the group of Misfits that had gathered around the two pilots and wandered over to the journalist.
Scarlet scowled. ‘That...’
The rest of her sentence was lost in the deafening sound of the ship’s horn blowing, a warning to a passing sailing boat that had gotten a just a little bit too close, but their meaning had been perfectly clear and Kitty and Gwen laughed as they dragged their friend over to join the rest of the squadron in inspecting the aircraft.
Gwen spotted Rudy Drake bending down to inspect the heavily reinforced undercarriage of one of the fighters and she left her friends and crept over to stand behind him. She bent down until her lips were only inches from his ear.
‘You could have used something that strong when you were learning.’
Drake started. He tried to twist, stand and look up at the same time and only succeeded in overbalancing and landing on his arse.
‘Bloody hell, Goosy, what did you want to go and do a thing like that for! You frightened the life out of me!’
Gwen laughed and offered him her hand.
He allowed her to help him up then brushed his trousers down.
She jerked her chin at the undercarriage. ‘Why are they so strong? Do you know?’
‘One of the pilots said that it’s because the American carriers have shorter decks with ramps at the ends to give fighters a boost into the air.’
Gwen nodded. ‘So, a normal undercarriage would just buckle if it wasn’t reinforced.’
‘Exactly.’ Drake grinned. He looked her up and down, taking in her officer’s uniform and nodding in approval. ‘So, they promoted you and made you a Misfit, did they? I had no idea. It suits you, though; you never did like to do what you were told.’
Gwen gasped and feigned a shocked expression. ‘Whatever do you mean?’
Drake laughed, then shook his head. ‘You haven’t changed one bit, Gwen.’
He smiled warmly at her and she smiled back, gazing into deep blue eyes that were so different from Kitty’s but just as inviting...
She caught herself when she realised the direction her thoughts were going and flinched back slightly.
He frowned. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I...’ Gwen searched for the words to tell him about Richard and Kitty, to tell him about the feelings that she was only just coming to terms with, but couldn’t find them, so instead she forced a smile and turned back to the aircraft, doing what she always did when things got too intense. ‘Do you think they’ll let us go for a joyride if we ask nicely?’
She pretended that she didn’t see Drake’s puzzled expression and wandered away to rejoin the other Misfits.
The two naval aviators, Lieutenant Chalmers and Sub Lieutenant Rossiter were more than happy to show off their machines to the Misfits and swap stories with them, but Simkin pointed out that, not only were the two pilots theoretically on duty and had work to do, but there was the whole voyage ahead of them during which to socialise.
The Misfits reluctantly said goodbye to the aviators and the Midshipman led them towards the nearest stairwell, but before they’d gone a dozen paces Bruce tapped Abby on shoulder and stopped her.
‘Erm, don’tcha think we’re missing someone boss?’
He pointed towards the bow, where Chastity and Featherstonehaugh were wandering down the middle of the deck, more than a hundred yards away, as if they were taking a romantic turn around the park together.
Abby rolled her eyes. ‘Mac. If you can’t keep Badger Eight under control, then maybe it should be you that Penelope replaces when she returns and not Owen.’
Mac growled in annoyance and stomped away towards his errant wingmate.
Chastity’s instincts served her well and, before Mac had even got half-way to her, she sensed the approaching threat. She looked up, saw the approaching enemy, then hurriedly disengaged from her target and headed full speed for the shelter of the rest of her squadron.
Mac glared at her as she bustled past her, then gave the journalist the evil eye, before stalking back towards the waiting pilots who just laughed and followed Simkin down the stairs.
The rest of the tour wasn’t nearly as interesting, although the engine room held at least some fascination for the engineers among them, being filled as it was with immense steam engines that
were as antiquated as the rest of the ship, which had been built in 1917, then retired, then refitted and brought back into service when the Powers That Be saw that war was inevitable. The three-storey high engines had been modernised and converted to burn hydrogen, but they retained the over-decoration and useless embellishments that had become all the rage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The steel shells of the machines were covered with brass pipes, kept polished to within an inch of their lives and adorned with fins and whorls and cogs that served no discernible purpose. Their hydrogen was supplied by rows of tanks built into the very centre of the ship, armoured so that if any one of them blew up it wouldn’t set off a chain reaction that would destroy the vessel, and the smoke that they exhaled, already far less than when they had been fuelled by coal, was passed through filters before it was expelled under the waterline, to minimise the chances of giving away the ship’s position.
The Misfits and instructors finished their tour at the officer’s mess, just in time for lunch, and they joined the naval aviators, who still had Freddy Featherstonehaugh with them, at one of the tables.
The mess was panelled in dark wood and hung about with trophies, much like the officer’s mess at Badger Base, although there were more photographs and less pieces of enemy vessels - understandable since most things destroyed at sea tended to sink without leaving behind much in the way of mementos. There was, however, one item that drew the interest of the Misfits - one of the walls was divided diagonally by four yards-long pieces of wood in the shape of an X which many of the pilots took to be oars at first, but on closer inspection proved to be an enormous airscrew.
Lieutenant Chalmers saw the direction of their gaze. ‘That’s off one of the big Italian flying boats, a Q501. Rossiter shot it down in the Med off Malta in August. Huge ruddy great beast it was. Made a bloody great splash when it went in and the wings tore right off, but the airscrew’s above the fuselage on those things so it survived intact. What was left of it floated long enough for us to rescue the crew and take a few souvenirs. We got that, the non-com mess got the tailplane and the enlisted men’s mess uses the two floats as buffet tables.’ He grinned. ‘If you ask me, we’re getting more use out of it than the Eyeties ever did in the air.’
The pilots laughed, but then conversation was momentarily suspended when stewards appeared with the soup course.
When everybody had had a chance to sample some of the delicious cock-a-leekie soup, Abby raised her voice to be heard across the table. ‘Mr Featherstonehaugh!’
The journalist looked up and raised an eyebrow with a smile. ‘Who?’
Abby chuckled. ‘Sorry, Freddy. I was under the impression that Mr Jones would be accompanying us.’
Featherstonehaugh nodded. ‘He is.’
‘Then where is he?’
‘I’m not quite sure exactly. The last I saw him he was embracing a porcelain bowl and giving his breakfast a second chance at life, but he might have made it to his bunk by now.’
Chalmers guffawed. ‘Seasick? In port? That is a feat unheard of except in literature. What will he do when we hit the North Sea?’
‘He assured me that it was just the haggis he ate last night.’
‘Ah.’ Mac nodded sagely. ‘If he got it in Glasgow then there’s no tellin’ what was in it. Ye cannae get a decent haggis in toon, ye got ter get it fresh.’
‘So I have heard,’ said Featherstonehaugh. ‘And that might well be the cause, but I rather suspect that the amount of whisky he washed it down with might have aided matters.’
Abby chuckled. ‘Well, we can only hope that he recovers enough to have a steady hand for his camera, otherwise the British press will not be getting very much from him until we reach Muscovy. Speaking of which - when can we expect your articles to start appearing?’
‘I managed to finish my series of articles about the formation of the squadron last night before bed and cabled them to the ministry this morning. As soon as they give their approval, they will go to the papers, who will run one each day. I was instructed to divide the story up into as many parts as I could, while still keeping each individual article as interesting as possible and I’m happy to say that, with the quality and quantity of material you all gave me, I have been able to put together a sizeable amount of them. At least enough to keep Misfit Squadron in the papers until they come back from the frozen north, which is what the Ministry wanted.’
Abby chuckled. ‘Out if sight, but not out of mind?’
‘Or heart.’ Featherstonehaugh looked around the group, perfectly seriously. ‘Or must I remind you all once again of your importance to the morale of the country?’
Chapter 10
It was a two day journey to Iceland to rendezvous with the rest of the convoy and then, depending on the weather, another five or six around Norway to Murmansk where the Misfits would disembark and fly to the nearby Vaenga airfield, while the rest of the convoy went on to Archangel.
Knowing that they weren’t going to be able to fly whenever they wanted, the Misfits had already agreed that they would use their time to help Wendy and the fitters with Dreadnought - repairs were almost finished and there were only four or five days of work left at the most. It wasn’t what most of them would prefer to be doing, but it would get them out of their quarters and keep them from getting bored.
They began straight after lunch, but almost immediately Gwen found another distraction for them all.
She had been working with a couple of Wasp’s fitters, fixing armour plating to the fuselage, when she happened to look through one of the plate glass windows., Instead of an empty space, she found crates of all shapes and sizes with the Misfit Squadron crest on them. She called Abby over from where she was bolting Duralumin to a wing and pointed them out.
The rest of the pilots needed very little excuse to put down their tools and they gathered around the fuselage.
‘Wendy?’ Abby raised an eyebrow at the big woman, who just shrugged innocently.
Owen took in the sight of the crates in his wife’s aircraft and laughed. ‘Please tell me you smuggled the contents of Badger Base’s wine cellar aboard!’
Quite a few eyes lit up at that thought and Abby gave Wendy a mock stern look. ‘Do you have illegal alcohol that we are going to have to dispose of?’
Wendy chuckled cheekily. ‘Sorry, no - I packed the contents of my workshop in there to save room, I must have um, forgotten to leave it all at Bagshot Hall.’
Abby groaned. ‘I wonder what Captain Hewer would say if he knew we’ve smuggled experimental weapons on board his ship.’
Owen laughed. ‘And our aircraft? What are they? Hell, Misfit Squadron itself is one big experimental weapon!’
Abby laughed and nodded. ‘You’re right. Although, I think we’re going to keep this between ourselves for now.’ She bent and took another look at the crates, a slow smile spreading across her face. ‘What the captain doesn’t know about can’t hurt him, but it might hurt the Prussians...’
Dinner that night was to be a formal affair to properly welcome them on board, so the Misfits put on their dress uniforms, complete with silk sash for Abby and numerous medals for all, except for Chastity who had yet to win any and Gwen, who only had one.
The dinner didn’t take place in the officer’s mess, as they had expected, but instead in the Captain’s state room which was a leftover, like the engines, of another time.
The Captain claimed that it was designed to be a replica of the Dining Cabin in the HMS Victory, which was preserved in Portsmouth, only on a slightly larger scale.
The walls were painted a light blue and covered with paintings, all portraits of famous captains, except for one, which covered almost the entire wall behind the captain’s seat and depicted the Victory at Trafalgar. The floor was tiled in a black and white check and the ceiling, thankfully higher than the room it was based on, was made entirely of wood with the thick support beams painted white. The long wooden table, solid English oak, was bolted to the f
loor and seated forty, although that evening there were only thirty diners, including the Misfits, the RAC instructors, Freddy Featherstonehaugh, and the captain and senior staff, who were wearing tail coats the dark blue of the water outside the portholes over breeches and stockings the pure white of sea spray - Napoleonic War era uniforms that were perfectly suitable for their surroundings.
The Misfits were introduced to various Naval traditions during the meal, like remaining seated when they toasted the King and immediately following the Royal toast with the traditional one for a Saturday “our husbands, wives and sweethearts” which was given quietly and rather timidly by Simkin, as the junior Navy officer present, and which was replied to with far more enthusiasm and relish by the rest of the officers, who cried out “may they never meet!” in unison.
After dessert, while the stewards were offering around tea and an assortment of liquors from the Captain’s personal stock, the Captain pushed his chair back from the table and smiled, raising his voice into a break in the conversations. ‘How about a game of cards? I know my officers prefer that awful American game, poker, but I don’t suppose any of you Wreckers fancy a rubber or two of whist?’
Gwen smiled, not just at the captain’s use of the Navy’s nickname for the RAC, but also because it seemed anachronistic for them to play whist after a meal, but it was entirely appropriate for the Napoleonic setting. She herself had learnt to play at an early age, part of her mother’s attempts to broaden her horizons beyond mechanics and she eagerly volunteered as did Abby, but it seemed that none of their fellow Misfits played.
She had to hide her grin behind her hand when the Navy officers saw that there were only three players and tried to make themselves as unobtrusive as possible, desperately looking anywhere but at the captain, obviously having struggled through games with him before.
Her eyes briefly met those of Drake, but she instantly looked away, not wanting to give the impression that she wanted him to play - she had been avoiding him all afternoon and the things that had been left unsaid between them would make the game very awkward indeed.
The Russian Resistance Page 16