AUGUST
1940

The weather in the south of England during the first half of the summer of 1940 was unusually bad.

In July the skies were overcast on two days out of three; often there was fog or thick haze as well as low cloud. On half the days of July, rain fell. Usually it was only scattered showers but sometimes it was a heavy and continuous downpour. There were violent thunderstorms on five or six occasions.

All this was not good for flying.

At least one Spitfire got struck by lightning and knocked out of the sky. Another Spitfire dived into cloud and hit the ground. Bad weather concealed a hill from a lowflying Hurricane: that pilot was killed too. And there were a dozen crashes in which mud or rain played a part. Meanwhile the air war went on, as and when conditions allowed. The bad weather was either a mixed blessing or a mixed curse. If it held off the Luftwaffe, it also slowed down the training of new fighter pilots. When raids came, the same poor visibility that made it hard for German bombers to find their targets also protected them from RAF patrols and from flak. Moreover, the German pilots could rest and recover between missions, but the front-line RAF pilots were under a constant strain. They had to be available from dawn to dusk. They might fly several times a day. During July, one fighter squadron flew 504 combat sorties in three weeks and spent more than eight hundred hours in the air. Not every scramble led to an interception, but each one demanded the same intense concentration. Before the end of July that squadron had destroyed six enemy aircraft but it had lost five men killed and three wounded. The survivors were near exhaustion. They, and others like them, had to be withdrawn from the battle zone. Brand new or rebuilt squadrons replaced them.

It was a pity that there had been so little time to bring these replacement pilots up to operational standard, what with the weather, and the lack of instructors who had combat experience, and the shortage of spares, the lack of skilled groundcrew, even the scarcity of ammunition. It was a great pity.

On a clear day you could see France from RAF Bodkin Hazel. On a very clear day from the control tower, with binoculars, you could even see German aircraft in their landing circuits over the Luftwaffe bases on the other side of the Straits of Dover. Or so it was saidby people who had never tried it. In any case there had been precious few clear days in July. August might turn out better, but it began gray and dank, which was why Flash Gordon wore his flying-boots and his Irvine jacket when he went out to shoot seagulls.

He took a deckchair, a Very pistol and a box of signal cartridges. Bodkin Hazel was a small grass aerodrome, formerly a private flying club. Flash set up his deckchair in the middle of the field and waited for a gull to wander in from the Channel.

An hour passed and nothing much happened.

Then a green sports car appeared. It drove across the grass and stopped about fifty yards away. A tall, thin young man climbed out and put on his cap and gloves. Everything about him was serious. His blue eyes rarely blinked, his mouth was firm and slightly depressed, and his long jaw was cleanshaven to the tops of his ears. Even his ears were neatly tucked away. He had the head of an intelligent monk above the uniform of a pilot officer.

He reached the deckchair and cleared his throat. “Good morning, sir,” he said. Gordon’s Irvine jacket concealed his rank. “Pilot Officer Steele-Stebbing, sir.” He saluted.

“Never heard of him,” Gordon said curtly. “Nobody of that name here. Try lost property down the corridor. Still got your ticket? They won’t give up anything without a ticket. I should know. That’s how I lost my wife. No ticket. Looked everywhere. What name did you say?”

“Um … Steele-Stebbing …”

“Umsteelestebbing.” Gordon shook his head. “Sounds a bit Swedish.”

He scratched one of his teeth while he watched a gull skirt the airfield. “They know,” he said. “They’re not completely stupid.”

“Where can I find the CO, sir?”

“I am the CO.” For the first time, Gordon looked him full in the face, and Steele-Stebbing was startled by the fierceness in his eyes. His lips were tight-pressed, his nose pinched, his brows forced together. “I’m in charge here,” Gordon said angrily. “There’s nobody else.”

Steele-Stebbing glanced around at the dull, deserted field. “What’s the form, sir?” he asked. But Gordon had seen another bird, and he raised the Very pistol. “I wouldn’t worry too much,” he muttered. “I expect it’s all been changed by now.” He fired, and a green flare climbed into the sky. The seagull ignored it. “Bastard,” he said.

Steele-Stebbing went back to his car and drove away.

Half an hour later a taxi delivered another pilot officer. He had two suitcases. He put them inside the open-ended hangar, wandered around, tried the doors of the control tower. Locked. He tried the clubhouse. Locked. A white flare soared over the airfield, quickly followed by a green and a red. He stared, saw the deckchair, and hurried across the grass. Gordon was still re-loading. “I say!” he called. “Anything wrong? Need any help?”

Gordon swung around so sharply that he nearly fell out. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded furiously.

“Macfarlane.” He was redheaded and stocky, with wide-open eyes and a curl to his lips that suggested a cheerful willingness. “Just arrived.”

Gordon studied him, sniffed and turned away. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I’ve been here all morning, I’d’ve seen him if … Keep still.” He raised the pistol and tracked an approaching gull. Macfarlane flinched at the bang, and watched a yellow flare loop over the bird. “Bastard,” Gordon said. “Come to think-of it, there was someone. Some Swedish bastard.”

“What: just arrived?” Macfarlane asked.

“No bloody fear. Just departed.” Gordon laughed, briefly and bitterly. “One of the dear departed.” He reloaded. “The dear, dear departed. Dear, dear, dear.”

Macfarlane gave up, and walked away.

He had reached the perimeter wire, and was whistling in competition with a skylark, when a motorcycle roared onto the airfield. The rider slowed down to look at the clubhouse, then went past the control tower, and finally saw the deckchair. He rode toward it at high speed, circled it, stopped, and got off. “Is dump, huh?” he said.

“Nobody of that name here,” Gordon said, not looking.

“Must be mistake. Is cock-up. Always cock-up.” He took off a leather flying helmet and revealed sleek dark hair combed straight back, no parting. He wore the uniform of a pilot officer but he looked older than the others: more meat on his shoulders, more flesh on his face. It was a handsome face if you liked thick eyebrows and a powerful nose, with slightly swarthy skin. He put his gauntleted hands on his hips and examined Gordon. “You are who?” he said.

“That’s still being sorted out. There may have to be an inquiry. Come back tomorrow. What name did you say?”

“Zabarnowski. Polish Air Force.”

“No, no, no. Nobody of that name here. My God, I should hope not. There are limits, even in wartime. If anyone asks tell them it’s been lost in the post. Hello: who’s this bugger?”

Macfarlane had come back. “Looking for Hornet squadron?” he asked Zabarnowski. The Pole nodded. “Waste of time talking to him,” Macfarlane said. “Let’s go and find a pub.”

“Is dump,” Zabarnowski agreed.

“Piss off!” Gordon shouted. “And that’s an order!” But Macfarlane was already settling himself astride the pillion, and Zabarnowski was kick-starting the bike. They roared off.

The sun broke through the haze. No birds came near, and Gordon dozed. He was awoken by the blare of a horn. Sticky’s Buick had stopped beside him, and Cattermole, Cox and Fitzgerald were looking out of it. “What-ho, Flash,” Cattermole said. “Shocking hole, this. Where’s the mess?”

“Well, well!” Gordon struggled out of the deckchair. “Fancy seeing you again!” He was quite delighted. He shook hands with each of them. “And Sticky’s old wagon, too! How did—”

“Never mind that. Where’s the mess?”

“Oh, there isn’t one. Just the old clubhouse, and that’s locked. I’ve got the key but there’s no booze, so it’s—”

“Shut up and get in.” Cattermole released the handbrake. Cox opened the rear door and Gordon scrambled in as the Buick swung away and headed for the gate.

“I can’t tell you how nice it is to see you,” Gordon said.

“Then don’t try,” Cox said. “I’m starving, and I can’t stand guff on an empty stomach.”

“Yes, but I’ve been stuck out here for two weeks. You can’t imagine—”

“Two weeks?” Fitzgerald swung around from the front seat. “You mean you’ve been alone in this hole for two weeks?”

“Yes.”

“But we all had two weeks’ leave, Flash.”

“Me too. I spent it here.”

“You’re crazy!” Cox said. “Why didn’t you stay with your family? Or friends?”

Gordon looked out of the window. “Didn’t want to,” he muttered.

Fitzgerald turned away. The narrow, dusty lane rushed past. Sometimes the edge of the windscreen was whipped by strands of bramble or the overgrown shoots of hawthorn. Cattermole drove hard, making the big car jump at every open stretch. “Seen Fanny?” he asked.

“No,” Gordon said.

“Adj? Skull?”

“Nobody. There hasn’t been a sodding soul in sight until you arrived. Nothing to do all day except shoot seagulls.”

“Hit many?” Cox asked.

“Four thousand exactly.”

“Nice round figure.”

“Like Mae West,” Fitzgerald said, and they grunted with amusement; but Gordon glanced anxiously. “What’s that?” he said. “Mae West hasn’t been shot, has she?”

“You need a large drink,” Cattermole said. “If you’re nice to us, Flash, we’ll let you buy a round.”

They stopped at a pub, The Fleece, and Cattermole ordered four pints. Macfarlane, Zabarnowski and Steele-Stebbing were playing darts at the other end of the bar. Both groups ignored each other. The landlord pulled four pints and looked at Cattermole. Cattermole nudged Gordon. “Cough up, Flash,” he said. Gordon searched his pockets and found sevenpence.

“That’s a start, anyway,” the landlord said.

“Just remembered,” Gordon said. “I’m broke.”

“So are we,” Cox said. “Filling up the Buick in London cleaned us out. None of us has got a bean.”

“Will you take a check?” Cattermole asked.

“If I have to,” the landlord said.

“Give the gentleman a check, Flash, for goodness sake,” Cattermole urged.

“No checkbook, Moggy. Lost it in France.”

“Sorry about this,” Fitzgerald said. “The thing is, our pay hasn’t caught up with us yet. Everything went down the pan in France and ever since then—”

“I know.” The landlord tossed a cardboard beermat in front of him. “Go on, write a check on that.”

“Damn decent of you,” Fitzgerald said.

“Well, you’re not the first, you know.”

“In that case,” Cattermole said, “I’ll have another pint and a plate of ham sandwiches, if it’s all right by you.”

“Don’t forget the twopenny stamp,” the landlord warned. “Check’s not legal without a twopenny stamp.”

“Oh dear,” Fitzgerald said. “I haven’t got one.”

“I have. Add twopence to the amount.”

Many RAF pilots had money troubles when they returned from France; Hornet squadron was simply unluckier than most. Problems began when all their records got lost.

The order to abandon the airfield at Mailly-le-Camp came during something of a flap. The place had been bombed, twice, a German reconnaissance plane had circled it, and a Messerschmitt 109 had created ten seconds of terror with a raging low-level attack that killed a cook and blew the foot off a sergeant armorer before he even had time to drop his mug of tea. After that, everyone wanted to get out in a rush. The last remaining Hurricanes had long since left for Berry-au-Bac. The essentials—food, medical supplies, weapons—were slung into the backs of trucks. Flash Gordon’s P-36 was burned. Fitzgerald’s crippled Hurricane was burned. The fuel dump in the woods was most spectacularly burned. And in the haste and confusion, half the orderly office’s records were burned too.

The other half had already been loaded into a truck. Between Rheims and Amiens it got separated from the convoy. Some said it broke down; some said it was commandeered at gunpoint by French military police. The truth was the driver lagged behind, took a wrong turning and became thoroughly lost. In the end he attached himself to a British infantry unit, who were glad of the help. He carried their mortars; they gave him food and protection. Together they retreated, slowly and painfully, up through northern France. The truck was abandoned on the dockside in Dunkirk. Next day a bomb blew it into the water.

By then, of course, the Hornet pilots were home and dry. None had money (apart from a few tattered francs) and only Mother Cox had a checkbook. The others had lost their personal belongings during the continuous scrambling from Château St. Pierre to Mailly to Amifontaine back to Mailly to Berry to a whole string of depots and transit camps. Mother Cox always kept a spare, second checkbook for emergencies, but even that wasn’t much use to him in England because his bank account was empty. Like the rest of them, his pay was hugely in arrears.

The situation was explained to him by a wing commander in charge of accounts at Tangmere, a very large and efficient flying station near Chichester. After a couple of weeks’ leave, Cox had been posted there on temporary attachment to a fighter squadron.

“Look, I can give you a bit,” the wing commander said. “I can pay you for now. But France …” He sucked in his breath. “Different story. No authorization, you see.”

“But sir,” Cox said, “there’s no doubt I’ve been over there all winter, is there? I mean, the squadron got sent—”

“Ah, but you don’t understand the system, old boy.” The wing commander saw an error creeping into a sheet of figures on the desk before him. He took an eraser, eliminated a penciled entry, and blew the bits away. “It’s all done with documents. You’ve got to have your docs. I mean, without docs, Air Ministry wouldn’t know what to do, would it?”

“Isn’t there some emergency procedure, sir?”

“I’ll send a memo.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t get your hopes up. Air Ministry’s got a lot on its mind at the moment.” He sharpened a pencil. “Where you went wrong, you see, was in losing your docs.”

“Yes. Very careless of me. Next time I’m in France I must remember to look for them.”

“No point in getting shirty, old boy. We’re all in this together, you know.”

Much the same happened to the other Hornet pilots. After leave, they were sent to strengthen units all over the country. Barton went to Manston and was in time to help cover the last days of the Dunkirk evacuation. Fitzgerald went to Exeter and flew endless convoy patrols, then got shifted to Hornchurch, northeast of London, and flew twice as many convoy patrols. Cattermole had a spell at Middle Wallop on Salisbury Plain, got moved to Duxford, near Cambridge, and ended up in Scotland, at Dyce airfield.

Toward the end of his leave, Flash Gordon was informed of Nicole’s death by the International Red Cross and he got another two weeks’ leave on compassionate grounds, most of which he spent blind drunk in London. As a result of some confusion at Air Ministry he was then posted to an operational conversion unit which trained pilots to fly Lysanders for Army Cooperation. The Lysander was a very slow, stable, gull-winged job with spats on its fixed wheels. Gordon crashed three and got sent back to Fighter Command.

CH3 spent two boring weeks in a concrete bunker, supposedly advising on the training of fighter controllers, until he wangled a job as a ferry pilot. He had just delivered a new Hurricane to Manston when he met Fanny Barton in the mess. Barton was surprised to learn that CH3 was as broke as the rest of them. “What about the family millions?” he said. “Can’t you raid Fort Knox?”

“I could but I won’t,” CH3 said. “Why the hell should I subsidize the British Government? They hired me, they can damn well pay me the rate for the job.” A barman put drinks in front of them. Barton watched CH3 sign the bar-chit E. J. P. Demaron. “Who’s that?” he asked.

“Guy I used to know. Ferry pilot. Stalled on takeoff and spunin, so I got his job.”

They clinked glasses. “Here’s to Dameron,” Barton said.

“Demaron.”

“Both of them.” They drank. “Baggy Bletchley was here yesterday,” Barton said. “He says they’re going to re-form Hornet squadron and give it to me.”

“Baggy Bletchley? Didn’t he forecast light flak over Maastricht?”

“Suppose he’s right this time, would you agree to be ‘A’ flight commander?”

“I might. Work on me a little.”

Barton was puzzled. “How?” he asked.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Fanny … The usual methods. Flattery. Bribery. Threats.”

“Oh.” Barton drank and thought. “Well, you’re the man for the job,” he said, “and you’ll get immediate promotion to flying-officer-acting-flight-lieutenant, and if you don’t agree, then, well, frankly, I shall be, you know, very disappointed.”

CH3 turned his back on the bar and rested his elbows. Barton had always been spare, he thought, but he had lost five or six pounds since France. “That’s it, is it?” he said.

“More or less. I suppose you’ll stand a chance of a gong. Eventually.”

“I’ve already got a gong. Got it in China. Chinese gong.”

“Well, you can have another.”

“What would I do with two gongs?”

“Play extremely simple tunes on them, I suppose.”

“Don’t know any.”

“Well, for God’s sake,” Barton said, suddenly losing patience, “buy a simple song-book and learn some of the bloody things.”

“All right, Fanny.” CH3 raised a hand to pacify him. “I accept. I just wanted to be sure I wasn’t getting swept away by your silver-tongued New Zealand sophistication.”

Barton pushed the empty glasses across the bar, and grunted. The barman hurried forward.

“There you go again,” CH3 said. “Irresistible.”

Barton was driving to RAF Bodkin Hazel, together with CH3, the adjutant and Skull, when he saw the Buick parked outside a pub.

The reunion was friendly without being hearty. They shook hands, Barton was congratulated on his promotion, Cattermole waited until Kellaway was reaching for his wallet before asking the newcomers what they wanted to drink and then skillfully deferred and let Kellaway buy the round. They all talked at and across each other for a while before Barton noticed the three pilot officers sitting at the other end of the room. He went over and introduced himself. “You’re for Bodkin Hazel? Good, I thought you must be. Haven’t you met these chaps?”

Macfarlane and Steele-Stebbing glanced at each other. “No, sir,” Macfarlane said. It was easier than explaining. “Come on, then,” Barton said.

They trooped across the room. “Now then, where shall we start?” Barton said. “Tell you what—”

“Steele-Stebbing, isn’t it?” Flash Gordon came forward with a big smile and an outstretched hand. “And MacGregor, no, wait a minute, don’t tell me, Macfarlane, of course, Macfarlane, and oh my goodness now I’m in trouble, begins with a zed, sounds like one of those longhaired musicians, not Paderewski, oh dear I wish I’d never started this …”

“Zabarnowski,” said the Pole.

“Right!” said Gordon, and shook his hand. “Zabarnowski. I got the zed right, anyway, didn’t I?”

“So you have met?” Barton said.

“Briefly,” Steele-Stebbing said, frowning hard.

“Sort of bumped into … um … this chap,” Macfarlane added. Embarrassment made him gruff.

“I say, play the game!” Cattermole exclaimed, and he flashed the friendliest grin that Skull had ever seen on him. “We showed you chaps all over the airfield, didn’t we, Mother?”

“Of course we did. You remember the airfield, Mac?” Cox said to Macfarlane. “Big flat place, lots of grass?”

“Yes, but …” A guilty blush was spreading rapidly over Macfarlane’s face.

“Don’t blame you for being bored,” Gordon said, with a chuckle. “Boring places, airfields. They couldn’t wait to get back here and play darts,” he told Barton.

“Is that right?” Barton asked.

“Far from it, sir,” Steele-Stebbing said.

“Dominoes, then. Or gin rummy,” Gordon said. “Whatever it was, we couldn’t get a look-in.”

“Pity, really, because I wanted to practice my Polish,” Fitzgerald said. “Jag tycker om det?” he asked Zabarnowski, who merely stared.

“Well, as long as you’ve met,” Barton said. “That leaves Skull and uncle and CH3, and you can get to know them on the way to the airfield, because that’s where we’re going now.”

They drank up, found their caps, thanked the landlord, and shuffled out, the junior pilots last.

“What was all that in aid of?” Macfarlane muttered.

“They lied,” Steele-Stebbing said to him, “and now the CO thinks we’re stupid and dishonest. It’s intolerable.”

“If I get that little bastard on his own I’ll wrap his deckchair round his head.” Macfarlane’s voice was flattened by anger. “What d’you reckon, Zab?”

“Is cock-up,” Zabarnowski said calmly.

Two more pilots were waiting at Bodkin Hazel: Renouf and Haducek. Barton greeted them, welcomed them to the squadron, and silently hoped they were better than they seemed. Renouf was English, slim, with small features crowded into a small face. He wore a mustache that looked too old for him and his handshake was soft and slack. Haducek, by contrast, had a grip like a wrestler and a strong, intelligent, bluntly honest face. The trouble was he looked restless and bored and didn’t bother to hide it. Barton already knew something about him: he was a Czech who had flown with the French Air Force and made his way to England via Spain and Portugal. “I hope you’ll be happy with us,” Barton said to them both. Renouf nodded a lot. Haducek said: “Happy?” and shrugged. “Happy is not here,” he said, wrinkling his nose at the barren airfield. “Happy is killing Germans.”

“We’ll see what we can do.”

“Easy. Give me plane. Spitfire.”

“The planes are waiting, elsewhere. And they’re Hurricanes, not Spits.” Haducek made a scoffing snort that Barton chose to ignore.

He called them all together. “No doubt you’re wondering what we’re doing here when you’ve actually been posted to RAF Brambledown. Well, Brambledown is the Sector station and that’s where we’ll be living, but this little strip is a satellite of Brambledown and I expect us to operate from here a lot of the time. I know it looks pretty dead but I’m told that everything we need is tucked away out of sight, and of course it’s got one tremendous advantage over Brambledown: we’re about forty miles nearer Jerry. So we should get first crack at any raids coming this way. Before that, however, we’re going to do a lot of training. I want to say a couple of words about that …”

Haducek wasn’t listening. He had wandered away from the group and was staring into the sky. As Barton paused, Zabarnowski ambled over and joined him. Haducek pointed. “What’s up?” Barton asked sharply, but they ignored him. He glanced at the adjutant, who merely rolled his eyes. CH3 murmured: “Bandits.”

That was when Barton heard the first, faint tremor of aeroengines. “We’ll talk about training later,” he said, and shaded his eyes with his hand.

The formation was just visible. It was so high that each plane was no more than a tiny glint against the blue.

“They can’t possibly bomb from that height,” Steele-Stebbing said. “Can they?”

Cox asked: “How high d’you think they are?”

“Ten or twelve thousand.”

“Try again.”

“Fifteen?”

“More like twenty.”

Gordon came over and put his hand on Macfarlane’s arm. “I know what you’d like,” he said. Macfarlane went rigid with dislike. “You’d like to jump into a Hurricane and take off and give those rotten Huns what-for, wouldn’t you?”

Macfarlane picked the hand off his arm. “Obviously,” he said.

“What a twat,” Gordon said. “It’d take you fifteen minutes to reach their height and by then they’ll be over London.” He wandered away. Macfarlane put his hands behind his back and gripped his right wrist hard, as if it couldn’t be trusted to behave itself.

The little bundle of glints proceeded almost silently until it was well inland.

“Come on, come on,” Barton muttered. “Finger out, somebody.”

“Con-trails,” CH3 said, and pointed. White streamers had suddenly appeared and were reaching out toward the enemy formation. “Spits from Berrydown,” he said.

“What Jacky Bellamy would call ‘aerial chess,’” Cattermole said drily.

The con-trails continued to stretch, closing the gap. Then they checked, curled and angled away. A few seconds later they slowly split up and scattered in all directions, making a fuzzy tangle of white strands. Meanwhile the bombers cruised on.

“Fool’s mate,” Cattermole said.

“What happened, sir?” Renouf asked.

“Well,” Barton said, “guessing, I’d say the controller didn’t send them high enough, and before they could hit the raid the Jerry cover came down and hit them.”

“Hello, someone’s bought it,” Cattermole said.

A dark streak had fallen out of the fuzzy tangle. The further it fell the darker it got. “Ours or theirs?” Kellaway wondered.

Nobody responded. The falling plane was only a speck. Behind it the trail of smoke steadily widened, as if someone had drawn a thin pen across a wet sheet of paper.

Skull said: “I can’t see any parachute.”

“You wouldn’t,” CH3 told him. “Not at that height. If he jumped, it’ll be five minutes before we see him.”

“The air’s very thin up there,” Cox told Steele-Stebbing. “If you ever have to jump, you want to take a few good puffs of oxygen first.”

“What balls!” Fitzgerald said. “Anyone who’s got time for that sort of carry-on doesn’t need to bale out.”

An argument began. They had lost interest in the battle, which in any case seemed to be over. “I’ll see each man in the clubhouse now, adj,” Barton said. “One at a time, starting with the new boys. Skull, I want you with me. CH3, take Flash and Fitz and check the field for potholes and ruts and things.”

“No,” Gordon said. He thrust his hands in his pockets and glowered at the ground. “Shan’t.”

“Come on, Flash, be a sport,” CH3 said.

“Oh, all right then.” Gordon strode off. “Follow me, men!” he shouted. “Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eggs!”

Later that afternoon, driving north to Brambledown, Barton asked Skull what he made of them all.

“Inevitably, as in all things British,” Skull said, “the class system dominates. When Rex was CO the relationship was almost feudal. Evidently that didn’t work terribly well, which is no great surprise, because after all the feudal system itself was less than totally satisfactory. Sudden pressures—”

“What about the blokes?”

“Oh, the blokes are behaving exactly as one would expect. The old sweats have ganged up on the young bloods and both sides are deeply suspicious of the foreigners. All quite normal.”

Barton sighed. “But what about the blokes as blokes?”

“Ah.” Skull found his notes. “Macfarlane’s all right. He’s a young animal, shallow, easily bored, little imagination, full of self-confidence and aggression. Should do well.”

“Don’t like him,” Kellaway said. “Too cocky. Never listens.”

Barton glanced at CH3, who shrugged. “He’ll either go to hell in a hurry or he’ll make a killing,” he said. “Probably the first.”

“Steele-Stebbing’s interesting,” Skull said. “I was an undergraduate with his father. Insufferable man, bloated by ambition. I rather think the son is trying to escape him, which of course is impossible.”

“He got very good marks in training,” Barton said.

“Of course he did,” CH3 said. “He’s been on his best behavior ever since he was toilet-trained, and I’ll bet that happened bloody early.”

“Renouf?” Barton said.

“Renouf is a mystery.” Skull put his notes away. “Or perhaps a paradox. He’s the only one of the three with a mind of his own, and yet he’s profoundly uneasy.”

“The little bugger’s windy,” Kellaway said. “If you said ‘Boo!’ to him he’d turn into a goose.”

Barton said: “Think I should chop him, CH3?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. You can’t always spot a good fighter pilot on the ground. Look at the last war aces: Mannock, McCudden, Bishop … They weren’t the life and soul of the party, were they, uncle?”

“Bit stand-offish, some of them, but then they lived to kill, didn’t they? I don’t see this little lad living to kill. He looks like one of nature’s victims to me.”

“Have we got any of nature’s murderers in this squadron?” Barton asked. “Besides Moggy, that is.”

“The Pole and the Czech,” CH3 said at once.

“Oh? What makes you so sure?”

“They said unless they get Spits they’ll strangle someone, probably you.”

“You’re kidding!” Barton said.

“They told me the same,” Skull said.

“Good God.”

“I’ll have a quiet word with them,” the adjutant said. “They obviously don’t understand the form.”

They drove in silence for a while.

“Interesting that none of us has mentioned the biggest problem,” Skull remarked. He gave them five seconds to work it out, and said: “Young Gordon.”

“Flash has certainly turned a bit wild and woolly.” Kellaway thumped his bad knee: long journeys made it ache. “Still, he always was peculiar.”

“No, he’s more than peculiar,” Skull said. “Have you seen his eyes? He’s in a state that many a doctor in the outside world would consider verges on the certifiable.”

“Extraordinary thing,” Kellaway said. “He told me his wife was dead before she was actually killed. I’ve checked the dates. The poor sod was convinced he’d killed her the day before she actually bought it. I mean, that’s enough to drive anyone loopy.”

“Anyway, this isn’t the outside world,” Barton said. “And I like Flash. He may be dotty but he’s not completely crackers. I mean, he hasn’t tried to strangle anyone, has he?”

“The real question is: can he fly?” CH3 asked. “That’s all that matters. You don’t want a fighter pilot who’s completely normal, for Pete’s sake. That’s what’s wrong with Stainless Steel or Iron Filings or whatever his name is. Too well-behaved. Never picks his nose, beats his wife or uses the lavatory while the train is standing in the station. Hopeless.”

“I realize you don’t want a pillar of rectitude,” Skull said. “On the other hand, even if he can fly like a bird, do you want a lunatic?”

“Flash isn’t a lunatic,” Kellaway said. “He’s on the daft side of crackers, I agree, but he’s not a lunatic, not yet. Believe me, I’ve seen plenty.”

“I don’t even think he’s daft,” Barton said thoughtfully. “He’s just a bit … I dunno … potty, that’s all.”

CH3 said: “Frankly, I’d put him on the loopy side of potty.”

“Where exactly is that in relation to plumb loco?” Skull asked.

“You’ve been to the pictures again,” Barton accused.

“The Lone Ranger,” Skull said. “Now there is a thoroughgoing psychopath. Compared to him, Flash is restraint itself.”

Flip Moran and Pip Patterson turned up at Brambledown that same evening. Both had been delayed by missed train connections. They were stiff from travel. Patterson had come from Scotland, Moran from Ulster. Moran had spent twenty-four hours in trains, on the ferry and then in more trains.

They stood round-shouldered and stiff-legged at dispersal and watched Hurricanes circling the field, until one Hurricane landed and taxied over.

Barton climbed down. “Glad you could make it,” he said. “Micky Marriott’s got your new kites ready. Grab some kit and do a test flight.”

“Now?” Moran yawned enormously. “Sweet Jesus, Fanny. Can’t it wait till morning?”

“We’re on convoy patrol in the morning. Eight o’clock.”

“Christ … I wish I’d stayed at home.”

“Well, that can easily be arranged,” Barton said crisply.

Patterson flinched at the clamor of a klaxon amplified by the Tannoy. After ten seconds the racket stopped, and men were running to distant aircraft. “You want to watch out for that,” Barton said. “If you’re in the circuit and you see a white flare, clear off fast before you get mixed up in the scramble.”

“Eight o’clock, eh?” Moran said. “That doesn’t leave a lot of time for me to work my flight up to the peak of perfection.”

A white flare banged.

“Times have changed,” Barton said. “It’s on-the-job training here.”

A section of Spitfires bustled over the grass, put their noses down and shoved off, engines roaring hungrily.

“Convoy patrol,” Patterson said. “I’ve never done that. What’s it like?”

“Well, it’s not much fun,” Barton told him, “but on the other hand it doesn’t serve any useful purpose, either. Can you swim?”

“Not much. Why?”

“Come on, Pip,” Moran said. “Let’s go upstairs before it gets dark. You know how frightened I am of the dark.”

The waterspouts seemed to freeze at their maximum height for a few seconds. The early morning sun picked them out, as white as heaps of whipped cream. Then they slowly collapsed and dissolved and tumbled into the sea. Between and around them the convoy crawled, and around the convoy the escort destroyers flickered with gunfire.

It was four minutes past eight. Hornet squadron had just seen the convoy. The German bombers finished their attack and climbed into cloud. There was an endless layer of the stuff at three thousand feet. By the time the Hurricanes were near enough to help, the raid was over. One ship was dead in the water, another was burning, the rest trudged on, and the destroyers all fired at the Hurricanes, which came as no surprise to Fanny Barton. He took his squadron out of their range and flew a wide circle around the convoy.

The patrol lasted an hour and ten minutes. Time passed slowly. They went round and round the convoy in a permanent orbit. The monotony made it deadly. An enemy might slide out of cover at any second. It was seductively easy, as the twenty-ninth orbit merged into the thirtieth, to stop searching the blank and boring sky and look at the interesting ships instead.

After an hour and ten minutes the convoy had traveled fifteen miles while the squadron had flown about two hundred miles. The relief escort had not appeared, but Barton turned for home. He glanced back only once, and saw gun-flashes on the destroyers, shell-bursts in the sky. That might mean the escort had arrived or it might mean something else. He looked away, punched a button on his VHF and asked for a bearing for Brambledown.

The Sector ops officer was a middleaged squadron leader called Wood. He wore the brevet of an Observer and the purple-and-white-striped ribbon of the DFC, both much faded. “Look, old chap,” he said, “I’m the pig-in-the-middle. I can only tell you what the Navy told me, and according to them you chaps were late. Too late to stop a mob of Ju-88’s divebombing the convoy and sinking the …” He searched his blotter for the name. “… SS Benjamin.”

“We weren’t late,” Barton said. “We were at the right place at the right time, but the convoy wasn’t there. The convoy was late.”

“Um,” Wood said, and scratched the back of his neck with a pencil. “I don’t think the Navy will buy that, old boy.”

“I don’t give a damn whether they buy it, sell it, or use it to wash their feet in. We were at the right place at the right time.”

“Yes, of course, I’m sure. Too bad about the boat, though.”

“Oh, come on, Woody, don’t talk balls. I’ve been flying convoy patrols ever since Dunkirk. It’s a mug’s game! Surely for Christ’s sake someone in Fighter Command has worked that out by now.”

“Yes?” Wood tapped the pencil on his teeth. “Say on.”

“Well, Jerry’s no fool, he knows by now how long our patrols stay up, I mean he’s had plenty of chance to find out, hasn’t he? He knows the weak point is the changeover, doesn’t he? And this weather’s perfect for him, isn’t it? Bit of dead reckoning, down through the cloud, there’s your convoy smiling up at you in the bomb-sights.”

“Well …” Wood stuck the pencil in his ear. “Are you telling me we can’t protect these convoys?”

“Not in the Straits of Dover, we can’t. Not with Jerry a short sprint away.”

“Our fighters against his bombers?”

“So what?” Barton swung his flying-boots onto the desk and knocked over a tankard full of pencils. “We’re usually too low and we’re always too slow. Convoy patrol means stooging about to save fuel. Jerry doesn’t worry about fuel. Jerry comes at us like a bat out of hell.”

“Yes.” Wood tried to clench the pencil between his upper lip and his nose. “He would, wouldn’t he?”

“If you want to do something useful with that bloody silly thing,” Barton said, “you can cross out all convoy patrols.”

“What—this?” The pencil slipped. Wood caught it and examined it as if he had never seen it before. “Not nearly big enough for that job, I’m afraid,” he said.

Hornet squadron was released until 2 p.m. Barton and the flight commanders used the time to test the new pilots. Barton took off with Renouf.

They climbed to ten thousand feet and went onto oxygen.

“Okay, Red Two, listen,” Barton said. “Your job is to cover my tail. Stay with me. Where I go, you go, understand? If you lose me I’m dead. Right?”

“Right, sir.”

“Not sir. Red Leader.”

“Right, Red Leader.”

Barton half-rolled and dived and immediately lost Renouf.

When they came together again, Barton said: “You just got me killed, didn’t you? Where the hell were you, Red Two?”

“Sorry, Red Leader. Very sorry.”

“Oh, that’s all right, then. I get a gutful of tracer from some Jerry on my tail and you’re very sorry, Red Two.”

“Won’t happen again, Red Leader.”

Barton chucked his Hurricane onto its right wingtip and charged off. For the next three minutes he dodged and swerved, reared up and stall-turned, threw himself in the odd loop and roll and skid. Renouf was always behind him.

Barton leveled out and got his breath back.

“Okay, Red Two, I’m a dirty great Heinkel. Give me a minute and then come and get me.”

Barton went up a thousand feet and turned and flew west. Renouf had vanished. Barton cruised along, changing direction as the mood seized him, until he began to wonder if Renouf had got himself lost. The sun flickered. It was no more than the tremor of a stray eyelash, but Barton thumbed the safety off his gun-button. A Hurricane swam out of the dazzle, dummied a beam-attack and dipped beneath him. Not bad. Not at all bad.

When they came together, Barton said: “Done any low flying, Red Two?”

“Done a bit, Leader.”

“Okay. You lead this time. As low as you like.”

They landed twenty minutes later. Barton climbed down from the cockpit as his groundcrew got to work, refueling, cleaning the dead bugs off the windscreen, checking. The day was hot. He took off his parachute and dumped it on a wing. One of the fitters was whistling a perky little tune, with lots of trills: in the vast tranquility of the airfield it sounded amazingly neat and clearcut. “What’s that?” Barton asked. The fitter looked up, twirling a screwdriver. “That tune,” Barton said. “Little Sir Echo, sir,” the fitter said. Barton nodded. “Oh yes,” he said. He rested his head and arms on the wing. Already the metal skin was warm.

Renouf walked up, Irvine jacket unzipped, parachute slung over his shoulder, helmet and mask dangling from his fingers. Barton did not raise his head. He could smell the sweet, crushed grass against the hot tang of the Merlin. “You can fly too low, you know,” he said. “I mean, we all like shaking the apples off the trees, but you were mowing the bloody lawn, weren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.” Renouf’s overcrowded face was serious but his eyes were bright.

You little bastard, Barton thought, you were getting your own back. He remembered chasing Renouf into a valley that twisted and narrowed, and he shut his eyes. “All right,” he said. “Tell Macfarlane he’s next.”

Steele-Stebbing’s face was one great grimace. Partly this was the drag of centrifugal force, partly it was nervousness. His Hurricane was tearing around a small circle in a near-vertical bank and he knew he was forcing it to turn harder than was good for it, so hard that his head and body were jammed immoveable and he could sense the intolerable strain on the aircraft through the awful strain on his muscles.

“Tighter,” CH3 said. “Tighter.”

Steele-Stebbing began to despair. They had been circling like this for an eternity. Five minutes, at least. First to the left, then to the right, then back to the left. He sucked down oxygen and tried to blink away the wandering sparks of light.

“Tighter, tighter, for Christ’s sake. Tighter!”

Steele-Stebbing heaved harder, harder than he knew he could, and screwed another couple of degrees of tightness into his turn. He still couldn’t see the other plane. Then suddenly it was slanting across his nose and diving hard. Gratefully he abandoned the turn and fell into a relaxed dive. After a thousand feet CH3 suddenly hoisted his Hurricane up into a climbing turn. Steele-Stebbing did his best to spring after him but his stomach rebelled and he vomited. After a while he tried to call CH3 and explain, but the microphone was so splattered and his mouth was so foul that it took rather a long time.

Five minutes was enough to tell Moran that Haducek was an excellent fighter pilot. He had good eyes and a restless, suspicious manner: always looking behind him. He could do all the usual things with a Hurricane and several very unusual things, plus a couple of things that Moran had no wish to copy in case the wings came off. He cut short their mock dog-fight. “Good enough,” he said. “Relax now. We’ll just do a familiarization flight. Get to know the landmarks.”

They flew down the coast to Beachy Head and turned over the Sussex Downs. Moran was routinely checking the sky above when Haducek left him. Moran had to search hard until he found the other Hurricane about three thousand feet below, climbing back up.

Haducek resumed station, a hundred yards to the right. “Been out to buy a paper?” Moran asked.

“I see bomber. Junkers 88, so I go down and bomber is Blenheim, only Blenheim, so come back. Damn shame, eh?”

“Next time, tell me.”

“I just told.”

“Tell me first, you fool.”

“Not me, no fool. I got two university degrees.”

“Save it for later.”

“How many university degrees you got, leader?”

God speed the plow, Moran thought. As if the English aren’t bad enough, we have to have these overeducated anarchists from the Balkans too. Wherever the bloody Balkans are.

It was so easy that Macfarlane paused and wondered what the catch was.

Barton had told him to imagine that he, Barton, was a Dornier and to intercept him. Barton had then sheered off.

Macfarlane had done as he had been taught and gained the advantage of height, rather a lot of height, about three thousand feet of height, and now Barton-the-supposed-Dornier was sitting there, stooging along, an absolute sitting duck. Or stooging duck. What could be easier?

Macfarlane stuffed the nose down and proceeded to turn his height advantage into speed advantage, as per all the best textbooks. He was closing on his target at a spanking pace, something like 350 mph probably, when it turned and climbed toward him and, quick as winking Macfarlane whistled clear past it.

He hauled his Hurricane out of the dive and climbed high again.

The dummy Dornier was still there, stooging along, so he had another go. This time it turned away, just as he was closing, and he shot right past the bloody thing again! Trouble was, before he could do anything, a voice spoke in his earphones. “Bang-bang,” it said. “I thought you were supposed to attack me” Macfarlane twisted his head. Barton was fifty yards behind. He tried everything but he couldn’t shake him off. “Too bad,” Barton said. “You had your whole life ahead of you. It’s not fair, is it?”

Zabarnowski and CH3 battle-climbed to fifteen thousand feet. CH3 leveled off, but Zabarnowski kept climbing. CH3 called him several times but the Pole ignored him. The last CH3 saw of him he was at twenty-five thousand feet: just a smudge on the sky. Thirty minutes later he was still up there, wandering about. CH3 gave up and went home. “We can’t wait,” Barton said. It was twelve-thirty and they were all in the crewroom except Zabarnowski. The old pilots sat, the new pilots leaned against the wall. Barton perched on a table, away from the windows and the distraction of aircraft.

“Now, you’re all nice chaps,” he said. “The squadron has always had its fair share of nice chaps. This fellow, for instance.” He tipped a big buff envelope onto the table and held up an eight-by-ten print. “Fellow called Lloyd. Heart of gold … There’s another: Miller: everyone’s pal. Now here you see the friendly face of Dicky Starr. What a nice man Dicky was! And if this was Dutton then that must have been Trevelyan, or maybe it was the other way around, but it doesn’t much matter because they were both equally nice chaps, just like any of you. They all had something else in common, by the way. They made a mistake. Just one, but then one’s enough, isn’t it? Maybe they thought that, as they were such awfully nice chaps, they’d get a second chance. Strange idea, that, wasn’t it? I’m sure they wouldn’t have given any Jerry a second chance. Still …” Barton got off the table and began pinning the pictures to the wall, upside down. “If they were here now, I’m sure they’d want to wish you the very best of luck, but as it happens they’re all lying at the bottoms of various deep holes in various bits of France and Belgium. Nice chaps. Blown up, shot down, battered, shattered and chopped into dogsmeat, but oh-so-awfully-nice. Flip?”

Moran said: “Mr. Haducek is a bloody idiot. He thought he saw a Junkers 88 so he went down all on his own to look. An idiot.”

“I kill Germans,” Haducek said. “Anywhere.”

“Not for long, you won’t. Fly alone, Germans kill you.”

“Remember this,” Barton told them all. “If you see one Jerry, there’s almost certainly another not far away. Probably above you. Did you look above?” he asked Haducek. “No, you didn’t. Jerry never flies alone. So don’t you fly alone. CH3?”

“Nobody has torn the wings off a Hurricane by turning it too hard,” CH3 said. “The kites we’ve got are all fully modified and they are bloody tough. Tougher than you,” he said to Steele-Stebbing. “We both flew the same fighter. I had my sight on your tail. You never got your sight on my tail. Never. If you’re not going to fly the machine to its limits, why bother to go up? I’ll get you a nice safe bicycle instead.”

Steele-Stebbing stared, pale and miserable, at the upside-down picture of Moke Miller.

“A Hurricane is not a horse,” Moran said. “You can’t hurt it.”

Outside, the scramble klaxon went off. Barton waited for the din to stop.

“Gunnery,” he said. “Bullets kill. Flying does not kill. You,” he said to Macfarlane, “went screaming about the sky as if you had a stick of ginger up your ass.” Macfarlane reddened. “By the time you reached the point of interception you were going so fast you had no time to fire. What’s the good of that?”

“It’s what I was taught, sir. Maximum speed in attack.”

“Un-teach yourself. And never make an absolute square-on beam attack,” Barton told Renouf. “Didn’t anyone tell you about deflection shooting?”

“Yes, sir,” Renouf said, “but we didn’t have much practice.”

“Bullets go slower than you think. Huns go faster. Make a beam-attack and hold the target in your sights and you might hit the plane behind it if you’re lucky.”

“Give it plenty of lead,” CH3 said. “Allow one length, maybe two.”

“Better still, don’t make a beam-attack,” Moran said. “Get behind him where you can’t miss.”

A flight of Spitfires took off and the telephone rang. Barton closed one ear while he took the call. The crackling roar mounted to a booming thunder that climbed and faded. Barton hung up. “Grab some lunch,” he said. “We’re on fifteen-minute standby at one o’clock, not two.”

As they surged to the door, Zabarnowski arrived. “What the hell happened to you?” CH3 asked.

Zabarnowski made a face. “Lousy plane. After twenty thousand no climb, no speed, nothing. I want Spitfire.”

“I told you we were going to fifteen thousand.”

“Why? German fighters fly high.”

“Next time, do what I say or you won’t fly anything.”

“Is lousy, Hurricane,” Zabarnowski grumbled. “Is dump.”

They had just sat down to lunch when an airman arrived with a message for Barton. Fitzgerald, Cox and Cattermole groaned. “‘A’ flight only,” Barton said. “Called to readiness. You’re leading, CH3.” Fitzgerald cheered softly, and relaxed. “A” flight grabbed chunks of bread and hurried out. Their flap wagon was waiting downstairs. The scramble klaxon was already blaring when they piled out at the crewroom. Two minutes later the first Hurricane was airborne.

The controller spoke. “Hello, Mango Leader, this is Snowball. Steer one-three-zero, angels two. Ten plus bandits, five miles south of Folkestone.”

“Mango Leader to Snowball,” CH3 said. “Check angels two?”

“Mango Leader, confirm angels two.”

“Okay, Snowball.” CH3 began climbing to three thousand feet. It was always better to be too high. Angels two? Nothing down there but tired seagulls.

Crossing Romney Marsh, he saw the enemy far ahead. They looked like circling crows so they must be Ju-87’s, Stukas, divebombing a ship presumably. He cheered up: Stukas were easy meat; then he cheered down: there was bound to be an escort. Oh, well. “Mango aircraft,” he said. “Fight in pairs. Watch your back. Don’t do anything stupid.”

They were flying in a wide, loose vic of three pairs: Cox and Macfarlane in White Section, CH3 and Steele-Stebbing in Red Section, Cattermole and Haducek in Yellow Section. The cloudbase had risen to five thousand and begun to fragment: the sky was as blue as it was gray. CH3 soon recognized the ship, a coaster from the morning convoy, left burning and disabled. Now it was being washed up-Channel by the tide.

The Stukas made one last pass. It was remarkable how calm and unhurried they were. CH3 glanced down at his airspeed: 290 knots: a mile every thirteen seconds. Yet the Stukas continued to topple and plunge down their invisible roller-coasters like children at play. They were playing with the ship: it had taken so many hits that the decks were awash. They dropped their last bombs, stayed down low and headed for France.

The Hurricanes could dive and catch them. CH3 looked at the broken cloud and saw nothing but broken sky. For a full minute he led the flight high above the Stukas and searched for the escort. By now they were in mid-Channel.

“Mango Leader, this is Snowball. Any joy?”

“Roger, Snowball. Eight or nine Stukas at angels zero.” He made one last search. Well, even the Germans made mistakes … “Mango White and Yellow, attack. Mango Red will provide cover.”

The four Hurricanes fell away. CH3 felt a prickling at the back of his neck and he weaved the aircraft so that he could search behind. A high-pitched voice yapped: “Bandits, bandits! Three o’clock,” and he snapped his head around to see a flock of 109’s barreling down from the cloud. “Mango aircraft, bandits above,” he called. “Turn and face, turn and face.”

Earlier he had throttled back to avoid overshooting the Stukas. Now, to get at the Messerschmitts, he thrust the lever forward and woke up the Merlin. It was like flicking a baton to bring in the bass trombones. A huge surge of power gave him a solid shove in the back, and the needles on the panel were jumping and quivering.

But not enough.

The 109’s were already too fast and too far away. They would escape Red Section, and hope to catch White and Yellow Sections on the turn.

CH3 tugged at the tit for boost over-ride and got emergency power: a brutal abuse of the engine, a hammering racket that was worth an extra twenty miles an hour unless the Merlin blew herself apart. The cockpit vibrated savagely, shuddering so much he couldn’t focus his eyes on the 109’s but he guessed the range at a quarter of a mile, gave plenty of lead, fired a two-second burst, then another, and a third. All useless.

White and Yellow Sections managed to complete their turn but they were laboring upward when the 109’s swept past in a storm of fire.

CH3 turned off his boost over-ride. The Merlin ceased its racket, the cockpit stopped shaking and amazingly he saw all four Hurricanes still climbing. “Mango, regroup, regroup,” he ordered.

They came together and he checked for damage. Macfarlane failed to answer. Cox eased alongside him. Macfarlane waved his radio lead, and grinned. “His VHFs gone duff,” Cox reported. “What he doesn’t know is he’s losing coolant. Not much. Just a dribble.”

The Messerschmitts shadowed them back to the English coast and then turned away. By that time the trickle of coolant had become a stream and Macfarlane was no longer grinning. CH3 kept calling, telling him to do a belly-landing on the sands or to bale out before the engine caught fire. No response.

Over Romney Marsh, at fifteen hundred feet, the coolant stopped.

Macfarlane could see his temperature gauges knocking into the red. He could smell the heat. There was just enough elemental sense in him to switch off the magnetos and the fuel. A whispering silence washed over the plane. He gave up. It wasn’t a case of panic. It was simply that he had no idea what to do. Without power, or height, or someone to shout at him, or an airfield to aim at, he was helpless, childlike.

His hands clung to the control column for comfort and the Hurricane made its own flightpath above the Kent countryside. It cleared the marsh, bypassed a little hill, sighed over an old stone barn, and settled on a small plantation of young fir trees. Macfarlane blinked at the hundreds of whippy treetops flickering past him, checking the fighter’s rush, softening its impact. The wings sank and sheared a path through the thicker branches. Bit by bit the plantation soaked up the impetus, until the Hurricane hit the ground with a bang that made Macfarlane’s teeth snap together. It careered out of the trees and slid into a meadow and stopped. Lucky man. There was even a pub in sight, and it was even open. Lucky, lucky man.

The weather worsened after lunch, with rain squalls blowing in from the west. “B” flight got scrambled and recalled immediately, then scrambled again to hunt a pair of intruders reported over Canterbury. For more than an hour they were vectored back and forth, in and out of towering clouds, sent climbing to fifteen thousand, to eighteen, down to ten. Finally they achieved a perfect interception on a section of Defiant fighters who were looking for the same intruders. Everyone went home.

Daddy Dalgleish had boxed and played rugby for the Royal Air Force. While he was stationed with the Northwest Frontier Force in India he had broken a sentry’s jaw in three places with a single punch. The sentry had been a smelly tribesman, guarding Daddy after his airplane had forced-landed in the hills and he had been captured; he was eventually released following a lot of delicate diplomatic negotiations in which a couple of villages got bombed flat just to demonstrate the British government’s good faith.

Now he was station commander at RAF Brambledown, responsible for three squadrons as well as all the ancillary paraphernalia in the way of cooks and clerks and medicos, which inevitably meant problems; and although Daddy Dalgleish’s instinct was to treat problems as if they were smelly sentries, he was a group captain and he often had to butter people up.

When Fanny Barton and CH3 came into his office, he braced himself for a spell of buttering-up.

“I understand you’re getting a bit browned-off with convoy patrols,” he said. “Always getting shelled by damnfool destroyers and so on.”

Barton nodded.

“I sympathize,” Dalgleish said. “Damn difficult job you’ve got. Calls for the greatest qualities. Dogged determination, steady nerve, staunch stamina. Nothing flashy. Just … backbone.”

Barton grunted.

“Must be a bit frustrating, too,” Dalgleish said, “not being able to make a big score. I know how you feel. Fighter pilot myself. The point is, it’s the convoy that counts. That’s the lifeline of the nation, isn’t it? And you chaps are doing a vital, an absolutely essential job of keeping the Hun off our ships, and doing it brilliantly.”

“Are we, sir?” Barton asked.

“No doubt about it.”

“Then why are so many ships sunk?”

“Well, Jerry’s bound to catch a few, isn’t he? I mean he’s got all the advantages. You’ve no need to feel bad about that. You’ve done your stuff.”

“Some of us have done more than that, sir. I personally know of five or six pilots who got shot down on convoy patrol. Bloody good pilots, too. Not new boys. Flight commanders and the like.”

“Yes, I realize that. We’ve witnessed some very gallant sacrifices in the last few weeks.”

“Bloody stupid sacrifices,” CH3 said, “sir.”

Dalgleish looked at him in surprise. “Are you … um … Canadian, Hart?”

“American. Convoy patrol is the stupidest waste of fighter pilots imaginable. They’re tied to the convoy, they’re forced to fly slowly, they’re like staked goats waiting for the tiger. No wonder they get jumped.”

“In the worst possible place, too,” Barton said. “Very wet, the English Channel, sir.”

“Nobody underestimates the hazards, Barton,” Dalgleish said. “But I ask you, why are the Germans launching these desperate attacks? Because they know how crucial these convoys are.”

“No, sir,” Barton said. “Because they know it’s a great opportunity to kill our fighter pilots. How many have we lost already? One hundred? Two hundred? It’s idiotic.”

“Look,” Dalgleish said firmly. “All war comes down to a battle of wills. That’s what this is, a test of determination, and we mustn’t give in now. We mustn’t allow our morale to break. That’s why I wanted to talk to you both. It’s like a team … As long as the team has faith in its skipper it can do anything. You’re a New Zealander, aren’t you, Barton? You must have experienced this on the rugger field.”

“No, sir.”

“No?”

“I never played rugby.”

“Really? Why not?”

“It struck me as a game for people who sit on their brains.”

“Oh.” Dalgleish was briefly silenced. “Well … The fact remains, doesn’t it, these convoys are, as I said, the lifeline of the nation and—”

“No, they’re not,” CH3 said, “sir.”

“That bunch we escorted this morning,” Barton said. “Most of them were coasters. Colliers, stuff like that. Half of them were in ballast. They’re not even carrying cargo, for Christ’s sake!”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“I got scrambled this afternoon,” CH3 said, “to protect one small ship that was going to sink anyway. We got jumped, shot up, lost a plane, damn near lost a pilot.”

“But that’s the task of Fighter Command,” Dalgleish protested. “We have a duty—”

“It’s not worth it, sir,” Barton said.

“Send the stuff by rail,” CH3 said.

“I see,” said Dalgleish. “You would just hand over the Straits of Dover to the Germans, would you? Admit failure? Tell the world we can’t even guard our own ships?”

“Ah, now I understand,” CH3 said. “We’re flying these convoy patrols to avoid the embarrassment of losing face.”

Dalgleish sighed. “I’m not surprised you don’t understand, Hart. It’s a matter of duty and dedication. We may be a young Service but we do have our traditions, you know.”

“Drowning good pilots to get empty coal-boats past Dover,” Barton said. “Is that an RAF tradition, sir?”

“We don’t measure honor by the ton,” Dalgleish said. That was, for him, a pretty weighty statement. On the strength of it he decided to bring the meeting to an end. “Believe me, I appreciate your concern for your men. But we all have to do things we don’t particularly enjoy, and convoy patrols are just one of those things. That’s war, I’m afraid.”

“It’s horseshit,” CH3 said, “sir.”

“Much of war is horseshit,” Dalgleish said evenly. He showed them out. Bloody colonials, he thought. Never know when to stop.

Walking back to their quarters, CH3 said: “I wonder what Jacky Bellamy would have made of that lot. Tradition conquers all, and so on.”

“Dunno. She might even decide that Daddy’s right despite all his guff. I mean, maybe the convoys really are essential.”

“God knows.” CH3 looked at the sky, wondering about tomorrow’s weather.

“Talking of God … Macfarlane was lucky, wasn’t he?”

“So were the others. They all got hit. Every time I see a 109, I wish I had a cannon. Hell of a weapon.”

“Not so loud,” Barton said, “they’ll all want one.”

Fitz and Mary rented a cottage near Brambledown. Flash Gordon came to dinner. Mary had not met him since France, and Fitz had warned her he was a bit wild, a bit moody; but he behaved perfectly all through the meal. She was eating a lot, and the men always had good appetites, so she had roasted a large leg of lamb. Flash had three helpings, with roast potatoes and peas and great spoonfuls of redcurrant jelly. She was pleased: anybody who ate like that must be in good health. Apple-and-raspberry pie came and went. He talked, too. The conversation flowed freely and easily. They took their coffee into the garden to enjoy the sunset. The rain had blown over but stormclouds still blockaded the light. The western sky was volcanic.

“It’s going to be a boy,” Mary said. “I wasn’t sure until I looked at that sunset but now I know. Definitely a boy.”

“That’s not very scientific, love,” Fitz said. “I mean to say, sunsets, for heaven’s sake. You might as well read your tea-leaves.”

“Ah, but he just kicked me,” Mary told him. “Right here.” She pressed her swollen stomach. “A good strong right-footed boot, it was. Obviously a footballer.”

“Nicole always wanted a boy,” Flash said. It was the first time any of them had mentioned her. “In fact she wanted several. I did my best, but. … Funny, isn’t it? You’d think God would give extra marks for trying.”

Fitz said: “Yes.” There didn’t seem to be anything useful he could add.

“If all it took was effort,” Flash said to Mary, “I reckon Nicole would have been ahead of you.”

“It’s just as well she wasn’t, isn’t it?” Mary said, as gently as possible. If Flash wanted to remember Nicole, he had to remember everything.

“I dunno. I sometimes think … If Nicole had been pregnant like you, she wouldn’t have gone rushing across France and …”

Mary shivered. Fitz took off his tunic and draped it across her shoulders. “How d’you feel about it all, Flash?” he asked. “Have you got over it yet? I mean, I know you’ll never completely, but … Well, I only ask because you seem in pretty good shape. Physically.”

“Oh, I’m fine. You see,” Flash said, turning to them with a blithely confident smile, “I know who did it.”

“Oh, come on, Flash,” Fitz said.

“Yes, I do. I saw him. I was there, I was right behind him, I know exactly who he is, and believe you me, when I see him again I’ll recognize him in a flash.”

“That’s … that’s not possible,” Fitz said. He didn’t want to look at Flash, who had the glitter of fraudulent triumph in his eye. It was like talking to a man who’s won because he has five aces. “Let’s go inside. Mary’s getting cold.”

“I’ll come across the bastard one of these days,” Flash said. “You don’t forget people like that. Then you watch!”

They went inside.

Next morning, Hornet squadron flew down to Bodkin Hazel. The field had been made fully operational, with fire-trucks and bloodwagons, petrol bowsers and starter-trolleys, a cookhouse, tents and deckchairs for the pilots, portable workshops for the groundcrew.

Each flight was scrambled once that day. Controllers steered them all over southeastern England but the sky was full of cloud and the ground was misty and they saw nothing except barrage balloons, floating on the mist like hippos. In the evening they flew back to Brambledown, had a quick wash and found a pub. Next day was much the same: dull weather, a convoy patrol, no action, home to the pub. That became the pattern of life for the first week or ten days in August: few convoys, sporadic rain, poor visibility, not much sign of the Luftwaffe. Fanny Barton was relieved. It gave him time to pull the squadron together.

Between patrols and practice flights there was a lot of hanging-about on the ground. Hours and hours of it. Cattermole soon got bored. Everyone suffered from his boredom but the man who suffered most was Steele-Stebbing. He was a painstaking and conscientious young man with no ambition except to be a good fighter pilot. He knew that many people found his seriousness faintly ridiculous and so he tried to adopt an amiability that would be more acceptable. He wasn’t much good at it. Often he looked more diffident than amiable. Cattermole sensed this uncertainty, and probed it.

“Steele-Stebbing,” Cattermole said thoughtfully. They had been sitting below the control tower for over an hour. The overcast flattened the day and pressed the life out of it. Most of the pilots were dozing. The portable gramophone had run down and nobody felt energetic enough to rewind it. “I knew a Steele-Stebbing at school. Nice lad.”

Steele-Stebbing put down his book. “Oh, yes,” he said brightly.

“He wanted to join the Church, but … Oh, well. Awfully sad.”

Cox half-opened his eyes. “What?” he mumbled.

“Expelled, poor chap. Caught the pox, you see. Got it from matron, actually.”

“That doesn’t sound very likely,” Steele-Stebbing said.

“No? Well, you know the chap best. Who did he catch it from?” Cattermole stared until Steele-Stebbing, unable to think of an answer, looked down. “Come to think of it,” Cattermole went on, “I knew another Steele-Stebbing at Oxford. Used to wear ladies’ clothes.”

This time Steele-Stebbing thought of an answer. “Perhaps that was my cousin. Amanda Steele-Stebbing.”

“Amanda? Funny name for a boxing Blue. He certainly didn’t have the figure for summer frocks. But then, neither do you, do you?”

Steele-Stebbing knew that any answer would be dangerous, so he merely shrugged.

“Really?” Cattermole went over and examined him. “Yes, perhaps you’re right. You do have the figure for it.”

“Shut up, Moggy,” Fitzgerald said.

“No, no. Iron Filings is right.” Cattermole began poking and feeling him. “He’s a bit flat-chested but he has the most exciting hips.”

“Excuse me.” Steele-Stebbing got up.

“And rather a nice bottom, too,” Cattermole said, as Steele-Stebbing walked away. “See how it goes up and down?”

“Leave the blighter alone,” Patterson said.

“Ah. The tea-boy speaks. What is it, tea-boy?”

“Next time I’ll make it battery acid,” Patterson muttered.

“Promises, promises! A word of warning to all you young lads. When Pip says he loves you … pay no attention. Pip toys with our affections. He—”

“Shut your dirty, filthy, stinking trap,” Patterson said harshly.

“You see?” Cattermole said. “So fickle. Only yesterday, poor Pip was pleading with me to rub tomato ketchup in his hair, he finds that very exciting, almost as thrilling as Steele-Stebbing’s bottom—”

“Pack it in, Moggy,” Moran ordered.

“Hey!” Flash Gordon seemed to come awake, although he had been staring at the clouds for a long time. “How would you …” He swiveled in his chair, searching faces, and ended on Renouf. “How would you destroy an Me-110?”

Renouf was startled by Gordon’s glittering stare. “Well … uh … I suppose the … the thing to do is to try to take it by surprise and … uh … I mean if—”

Gordon was shaking his head. “Get up close,” he said. “Stick your guns right up the animal’s ass. Blow the bugger to bits.”

“I see,” Renouf said. When Gordon continued to stare, he added, “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. Thank Hitler. Without Hitler there wouldn’t be any 110’s to blow to bits. Would there?”

“No, I suppose not.” Renouf was getting used to this.

“Well, then.” Unexpectedly, Gordon put on a friendly smile. “Remember one thing, MacArthy. Bullets don’t kill the enemy. Fancy flying doesn’t kill the enemy. Only one thing kills the enemy, and that’s clear, logical thinking.”

“Beautiful,” Fitz said lazily, and Gordon turned the smile on him like a fading flashlight. “But it’s not MacArthy. It’s Renouf.”

The smile died. “What happened to MacArthy?”

“Fanny shot him,” Moran said, and yawned. “Battle of Southend Sands. Remember?”

Gordon nodded several times, the nods getting deeper and deeper. “No,” he said.

“South End?” Haducek said. “Where is this South End?”

“London. Between the East End and the West End,” Renouf said. Fitzgerald blew a raspberry.

Haducek and Zabarnowski exchanged a few words in one of their languages. Zabarnowski said: “Was battle in the South End?”

“Was cock-up, Zab,” Moran said. “Always cock-up.”

The adjutant’s car came in sight. As it bumped across the grass, Barton and CH3 came down the steps of the control tower. Kellaway got out and spoke to Barton, who smiled, and went over to the pilots.

“With effect from today,” he announced, “Pilot Officers Cox, Cattermole, Gordon, Fitzgerald and Patterson are promoted to the rank of flying officer.”

Some of them cheered with a deliberate feebleness, some languidly applauded. “This will go down,” Moran said, “as the biggest mass accident in the history of aviation.”

“I thoroughly deserve it,” Cattermole said, “but I do think, Fanny, that you might have left a decent interval before you promoted Pip as well. Damn it all, what has Pip ever done?”

“Fallen out of airplanes,” Patterson said.

“Exactly,” Cattermole said. “I mean, if you’re going to promote people just for doing bloody silly things like that you might as well make Flash an air vice-marshal.”

“Hey!” Macfarlane said. “We don’t have to salute these elderly gents now, do we?” He had become quite daring since he had discovered that you could write-off a brand new Hurricane and be given a new one without so much as a reprimand. It wasn’t like school, where you got a telling-off for breaking a window. Not a bit like school.

“Okay, uncle, now give us the good news,” Cox said. “Tell us you’ve sorted out our back-pay.”

“Still working on it, Mother. No luck yet.”

“Bloody hell. When’s it going to come through? I’ve got an overdraft the size of Ben Hur.”

“Explain, please,” Haducek said.

“Ben Hur, mountain in Scotland,” Patterson told him. “Very big.”

“Pip jolly nearly made a joke then,” Cattermole said. “Go and lie down, Pip. You’re covered in sweat.”

“Think yourself lucky,” Fitzgerald said to Cox. “My bank manager won’t let me have an overdraft.”

Steele-Stebbing had come back and was keeping his distance from Cattermole. Now he raised his hand. “Sir,” he said to Kellaway, “is there any activity at Sector?”

“Adj, not sir,” Kellaway said easily, and Steele-Stebbing flinched. “No, nothing doing. Somebody caught a Heinkel up in Norfolk, so I heard. Getting bored, are you?”

“Try and speed up the money, uncle,” Barton said. “Can’t Baggy Bletchley do anything?”

A telephone rang in the tower. A corporal looked out. “Scramble one section, sir. Patrol Hastings, angels ten.”

Barton glanced at his squadron. His command. Death or glory was waiting up there. Maybe. “Green Section,” he said. Patterson and Renouf jumped up, grabbed gloves and helmets, and ran. “You won’t find anything,” Macfarlane shouted. “It’s early closing in Germany today.”

He was wrong, however. They found a runaway barrage balloon at twelve thousand feet and shot it down. Renouf chased the tumbling, blazing carcass and got some useful practice at deflection shooting.

After a few days, Steele-Stebbing asked for a few words in private with CH3.

“Cattermole seems to have elected me his private and personal butt,” he said. “I don’t think I need go into detail.”

“No.”

“I can put up with the insults, they’re all rather schoolboyish anyway. And the practical jokes don’t matter. I’m used to sitting on collapsing deckchairs by now. It’s a bit of a bore, that’s all.”

“Yes, I’m sure it is.”

CH3 waited, but Steele-Stebbing didn’t seem to know what to say next. He chewed his lip, and frowned. The silence became uncomfortable. Eventually he half-turned away. “Well,” he said, “I just thought you ought to know.”

“No, you didn’t,” CH3 said. “I’ve known all along. It’s no secret, is it? Now you want me to do something. Right?”

“I simply don’t understand,” Steele-Stebbing said. “Why does he pick on me? If I’ve done something wrong, or if there’s something I ought to be doing that I’m not doing, I wish someone would tell me. Then I’ll try to put the matter right. As it is … Well, to be blunt, I feel I’m being victimized, and frankly it’s unfair.”

“Of course it’s unfair, you fool. So what? Life is unfair. The question is, what’s to be done about it? And I’ll tell you here and now: I’m not going to do anything.”

“Oh no, of course not.” Greatly daring, he risked a hint of sarcasm.

“Unless and until Moggy’s nonsense affects your flying it’s none of my business. I could make it my business, I suppose. I could make Moggy behave himself. That would identify you as the sort of man who can’t stand on his own two feet, who has to be given special protection. Is that what you want?”

“No.”

“Glad to hear it. If nobody else is going to help you, it looks as if you’ll have to sort it out yourself, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Good. That’s settled then.”

Macfarlane and Renouf were quickly accepted into the squadron. They knew they were in when they were given nicknames. Macfarlane became Bing because he kept playing Crosby records. Renouf, whose initials were N.I.M., was called Nim.

The foreigners’ names were shortened to Zab and Haddy, but only for convenience. They were not popular. They either brooded or they bitched. When they talked to each other it was in some Central European tongue that sounded like wet barbed wire. Perhaps they felt homesick and lonely; who could tell? The only thing anyone was sure of was their opinion of the Hurricane. After every patrol, at debriefing, they expressed their contempt.

Fanny Barton called Skull, Kellaway and the flight commanders into his room to discuss the problem.

“It’s the others I’m worried about,” he said. “I mean, a kite’s as good as the pilot thinks it is, right? Once he starts thinking he’s sitting in a load of duff machinery, bang goes his confidence.”

“So chop the miserable buggers,” Moran said.

Barton sniffed. “Doesn’t look good, Flip. New squadron, new CO. Looks as if I’m not bloody trying.”

“Besides,” CH3 said, “they’re both very good pilots.”

“D’you know what I think?” the adjutant said. “I think they’re not really interested in getting Spits at all. What they really desperately want to get is some Huns.”

“Very angry men, Zab and Haddy,” Moran said.

“You mean, because we’re not getting Huns, they’re bitching about the Hurricanes?” Barton said. “That’s a bit boss-eyed, isn’t it?”

“Oh, no!” Skull exclaimed. “It’s a perfect example of transferred hostility. Quite beautiful, in its way.”

“God stone the crows,” Kellaway grumbled. “This is a fighter squadron, not a looney-bin.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” CH3 said.

“Um,” Barton said. “Okay. I’ll think about it. Thanks.”

As they went out, Kellaway poked Skull in the ribs with the stem of his pipe. “Transferred hostility!” he scoffed. “Utter guff.”

“On the contrary, you’ve just demonstrated it …”

The voices faded. Barton stared at the wall. If they had been English, or English-speaking, he could have torn them off a strip and told them to stop binding and start pulling together for the common cause. But the buggers weren’t English. They didn’t believe in Westminster Abbey and Windsor Castle and cricket and Wimbledon and London bobbies and roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and thatched pubs and village flower shows and all the stuff that Fanny had first seen on calendars sent to New Zealand by English relatives. God knows what they did believe in. Apart from killing Germans. Not much love left in Zab and Haddy. Just plenty of hatred, which they couldn’t switch off.

Tricky.

Haducek was sitting on the lavatory when the scramble sounded, which was why Nim Renouf took off with Moggy Cattermole as Yellow Section.

The controller had one bandit for them, reported fifteen, one-five, miles northwest of Dover, angels eight to ten. Apparently the little blighter had been wandering all over Kent but there was so much mist the Observer Corps kept losing him. Now they’d found him again, and he was heading east.

Correction, west.

Correction, south. “Sorry, Mango Yellow Leader,” Snowball said. “Bandit is definitely heading south. What are your angels?”

“Angels five.”

“Mango Yellow, make angels six. Your bandit seems to be losing height.”

For the next twenty minutes, Snowball steered them back and forth and up and down. Canterbury Cathedral poked through the mist like a mooring mast. Renouf watched Cattermole’s tail and covered the sky behind and above. Cattermole hunted the bandit. Once, there was a burst of flak about a mile astern, looking as small and innocent as smoke-smuts.

“Mango Yellow Leader to Snowball,” Cattermole said eventually. “Fritz doesn’t live here any more.”

“Steer one-zero-zero, Mango Yellow.”

“We’ve been down that street, Snowball, and it’s empty.”

“Bandit is still on the table, Mango Yellow.”

“That’s us you’re plotting, Snowball. He’s gone. Scarpered.”

“Steer one-zero-zero, Mango Yellow.”

One minute later it was zero-two-zero. That became three-one-zero. Which became three-four-zero. Snowball held them on that course until he abruptly announced a new bandit, five miles south of Dover. “Vector one-four-zero, angels one, Mango Yellow,” he said. “Buster, buster.” Buster was the code word for maximum speed, short of pulling the tit.

They came screaming over Folkestone and began slicing down through the top of the Channel mist at a speed that made Renouf’s eyeballs dilate and his toes curl. Cattermole leveled out at five hundred feet. The mist was not thick: the sea was just visible, a flat oily black like spilled creosote. There seemed to be no ripple; just an occasional white smear where a swell had stretched too far and split itself open. Renouf stuck behind Cattermole and tried not to blink. He was scared and exhilarated. No horizon, no sun, just this shapeless gloom that gave the frightening illusion of not moving. Then a white smear flicked past the edge of his vision and he put all his trust in Moggy Cattermole, who shouted, “Got the bastards!”

Renouf glimpsed the edge of something on the water. Then Cattermole was turning, circling, shedding speed as he called Snowball. “Bandit’s down in the drink. Looks like a Heinkel 59 next to him. Damn foggy. Hard to see. Lost them for a sec.”

Renouf trailed him around and around, the circle getting steadily smaller.

In theory they were bound to find their target again. In practice Renouf rapidly lost all sense of direction: he soon had no idea whether they were north or south of that first sighting. Gray mist and black sea blurred into each other, endless, changeless, featureless. Again, it was Cattermole who found the enemy and who told Renouf where to look, far to the right. The silhouettes on the water were as soft as moths at dusk.

The next circuit carried them, low and slow, straight over the two planes. An Me-110 had ditched, expertly. Oil skims trailed behind the engines like dull silk. Fifty yards away sat a big white twin-engined float-plane with prominent red crosses. Between the two, a rubber dinghy was being paddled. There were also numbers of seagulls wandering about the scene and one flew slap into Cattermole’s airscrew.

The blades minced it into an instant flurry of bloody feathers. Most sprayed wide, but enough splashed onto the windscreen to blind Cattermole’s view ahead. As he climbed, he told Renouf to make the attack.

Renouf turned and came down and gave the 110 a quick squirt that boiled a bit of sea, and he went up again. “Hello, Leader,” he called. “I think I hit the 110 but it’s sinking anyway. Wings are under water.”

“Yes.” Pause. “Get the Heinkel?”

Joke, Renouf thought; but only for a second. Cattermole didn’t make that sort of joke. As he swung the Hurricane, careful to turn through an exact half-circle, his mind was briefly touched by revulsion. He did not allow this emotion to affect his efficiency. Indeed, when he saw that the seaplane was taxiing, trying to takeoff, he welcomed the added challenge of a moving target.

It was a biggish machine, the He-59: a biplane nearly eighty feet across, nearly sixty feet long, riding on twin floats that were each longer than a Hurricane. Apart from a red tail-band with a black swastika, the whole machine was painted white, presumably to show off its red crosses. It had three open cockpits. Renouf could see the crew quite clearly. They looked too small for such a big aircraft. He had a silly impression of children, caught joyriding. A single machine-gun opened up wildly, shaken by jolting as the plane gained speed. Renouf fired.

The results were strange and spectacular. It was as if the floats struck flame from the sea. The further and faster the plane traveled, the more flame it struck, until it was leaving a long double track flaring in the gloom. Renouf suddenly understood: the floats were also the petrol tanks. His incendiary bullets had pierced them.

He banked to make a beam-attack and felt slightly sorry for the crew, having to lay a great blazing trail. They wouldn’t have escaped anyway, but this was rubbing it in.

So much fuel had been lost that the seaplane almost got airborne. It was coming unstuck just as he fired again, allowing half a length for deflection. It shuddered, the nose dipped, the tips of the floats dug in, and the whole heavy, complicated airplane performed a slow somersault. Burning petrol sprayed and made a broken necklace of flame.

When Renouf came back, all he could see was the underside of the floats, resting uppermost on the water. He called Cattermole, and was told to climb above the mist. They regrouped and got a bearing for home.

Cattermole landed with his head sticking out of the cockpit. He was looking at his propeller when Renouf walked over. The stench from bits of seagull roasted on the exhaust vents was still strong. “Did you get those Jerries in the dinghy?” Cattermole asked.

Renouf had forgotten about them. “Oh,” he said. “Those.”

“You pathetic fart,” Cattermole said.

Two more scrambles at Section strength, neither of them productive. Squadron released at 8 p.m. Back to Brambledown. Quick wash. Dinner in the mess.

Daddy Dalgleish pressed Barton’s shoulder as he was finishing his pudding. “Old friend to see you,” he said. Baggy Bletchley stood with a large smile on his face and a large brandy in his hand. “Good evening, squadron leader,” he said.

The pilots made room for them. “I’m afraid you’ve caught us on a very ordinary evening, sir,” Barton said. “It’s just tripe and onions with sago for afters, but I can promise you a rather peculiar cabbage wine, the chaplain’s wife made it with her own bare feet. Somewhat fruity but not lacking in humility, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh, I know what you mean,” Bletchley said happily. “By the way: did you see that I got Rex a gong? The family were very pleased. I believe they’ve commissioned an enormous stained-glass window, with him in the middle looking like St. George.”

“What’s the gen, sir?” Moran asked. “What’s Jerry up to?”

“At the moment, you mean? Not much. We’re getting a few more of his fighters whizzing about the south of England, but they only do it to annoy because they know it teases. Longterm … Well, if he’s not planning to invade, then your guess is as good as mine.”

That made them stop and think. It wasn’t the first time invasion had been mentioned; people in pubs were always talking about it; but coming from Baggy Bletchley, an air commodore, a chap who was in and out of Air Ministry every day … Well, that somehow brought the future into focus with a jolt. Very soon there was going to be a colossal scrap, much bigger than France, far more serious than France, with nowhere to retreat if it all went wrong. Life, for a moment, looked a bit grim. Even the new boys caught a slight sense of dread.

“They’d better bloody well invade,” Flash Gordon said severely. “If they don’t come here, I’m not going all the way over there again. I mean to say, fair’s fair.”

“Good old Flash,” Cox said; but Gordon simply stared. “I mean it,” he told him. “It takes two to have a fight, you know.”

“Of course it does,” Bletchley said. “While I’m here, Fanny, I’d very much like to see your Hurricanes, if I may.”

Daddy Dalgleish came with him, so Barton took his flight commanders along in case there was a vote. When they reached the hangars, Bletchley walked around a couple of Hurricanes and turned away. “Splendid, splendid,” he said. “I hear you got one of their red-cross planes today.”

“Heinkel 59,” Barton said. “It was on the water, trying to pick up a crew. One of the new boys got it. Renouf.”

“Jolly good show.” They strolled out of the hangar and stood looking at the twilight. “I’d keep it under my hat, if I were you. Don’t go shouting about it. Least said, soonest mended, sort of thing.”

“Now I’m seriously confused, sir,” Moran said. “I thought we got an order about German red-cross planes, and I thought it said blow the buggers up.”

“Quite correct. They’re an absolute menace. They snoop on our convoys and monitor our radio transmissions and sneak in and snaffle their own pilots when they have to ditch. You’re entitled to hit them as hard as you like. Just don’t come back and tell everyone.”

“The public doesn’t understand,” Dalgleish said.

“We weren’t planning to shout about it anyway,” Barton said.

“Of course not,” Bletchley said. “The thing is, the country’s had a nasty knock. Dunkirk, and so on. Norway. We can’t afford to do anything that might upset public confidence. This is a time to stand together.”

“Close ranks, you mean,” CH3 said.

“That’s it,” Dalgleish said.

“We’ve got to believe in ourselves,” Bletchley said. “Face the common foe. No room for internal differences at a time like this.”

“You needn’t worry about my chaps,” Barton said.

“It’s not quite as simple as you may think,” Dalgleish said. “I’ve got two other squadrons to look after and it isn’t easy to keep everyone in line and behaving properly when, for instance, they see you chaps going around with the collars cut off your Irvine jackets. Whose bright idea was that?”

“Mine, sir,” CH3 said.

“For heaven’s sake …”

“I agree with him,” Barton said. “They get in the way.”

“You didn’t seem to have any trouble with them in France, Fanny,” Bletchley said.

“We didn’t wear Mae Wests in France, sir.”

CH3 said: “If you put on a parachute and a Mae West you’ve got to put up the collar of the jacket. Then you can’t get it down again. The damn thing sticks up higher than your ears, so when you try to look round you can’t see anything. That’s why we cut them off.”

“My dear chap,” Dalgleish said, “nobody ordered you to wear your Irvine jacket. If you don’t like it, don’t hack it about. Just leave it behind.”

“And freeze to death,” Moran said. “Sometimes it gets a bit cool at twenty thousand feet, you know.”

“Oh, I know. Don’t worry about that. We flew a damn sight higher than that in India. And with open cockpits. But we didn’t find it necessary to deface RAF property, as far as I recall.”

“Perhaps that was because you didn’t have to look behind you,” CH3 said.

“There’s a serious point at issue here, you realize,” Bletchley said. “If we’re going to fight effectively, everyone’s got to do as he’s told. I’ve just seen what you’ve done to your wings, Fanny. Painted the under-surface duck-egg blue. You know you’ve got no authorization for that. Half-black, half-white: that’s the color-scheme.”

“Black and white stinks, sir. We learned that in France. It makes the kites stand out like chess sets.”

“That’s the whole idea!” Dalgleish cried. “How the devil can our ground observers spot you if they can’t see you?”

“We don’t want to be seen, not by anyone,” Moran said, “and especially not by Jerry.”

“But the controllers need the observers,” Bletchley said. “You must accept that.”

“Far be it from me to lay down the law,” Dalgleish said, “but I’ve got a station to run, and it gets very difficult if each squadron decides to go its own sweet way.”

“Why not?” CH3 asked. “As long as it works.”

“We learned a lot in France, sir,” Barton said.

“France was France,” Bletchley declared. “That’s all finished. This is England.”

“Hey!” CH3 said. “I just realized. France wasn’t a real war at all! Just a scruffy little sideshow.”

“I simply cannot overlook the defacing of an entire set of Irvine jackets,” Dalgleish said. “You’ll have to pay for them.”

“That reminds me, sir,” Barton said. “Our back-pay is still heavily in arrears. Is there any chance—”

“Air Ministry’s doing its best,” Bletchley said.

“I had a funny thought a moment ago,” Moran said. “I thought, isn’t it funny that the Luftwaffe has seaplanes that can pick its pilots out of the Channel, and we don’t? That’s a very funny thing, isn’t it?”

“Fighter Command can’t be expected to think of everything,” Bletchley said.

“No?” Moran said. “Jerry did.”

Mary didn’t get up from her chair when Fitz came in. She smiled, or at least she tried to smile. In any case it was so gloomy in the cottage that it didn’t much matter. He kissed her on the cheek and noticed that sour smell again. “How d’you feel?” he asked.

“I was sick.”

“That’s no good.” He moved away. “Or is it? Is this normal?”

“I don’t know, dear. I feel very strange, but then having a baby is a strange experience for me.”

Fitz sat on a couch. “Why are you sitting in the dark?” he asked.

“The bulb’s gone … I couldn’t reach up to change it.”

“Damn. What a bind.” He got up and went to the window. If he changed the bulb he would have to put up the blackout blinds first. Hard enough to do that when there was still some daylight; now it would be murder. “What about food? Had something to eat?”

“Not much. Bit of bread. I didn’t get out to the shops today. Didn’t feel up to it.”

“That’s no good.” Fitz was hungry, starving. He could have eaten in the mess if he’d known she wasn’t going to have a meal ready. “I’d better whip something up, I suppose. What d’you feel like?”

“Lobster. Just lobster and strawberries.”

“Don’t be daft, dear. It’s been a hell of a long day and I’m not in the mood for jokes.”

“I’m sorry. That was the baby speaking. It seems to have an obsession for lobster and strawberries. Can’t think of anything else.”

“Oh … Jesus.” Fitz sat on the windowledge and looked at the heavy black shapes of shrubs in the dusk. The cottage was damp, he could smell it. Not the right place for Mary, not in her condition, but he couldn’t afford anywhere else. He felt angry at himself for getting her into all this, and angry at her for just sitting there when he needed someone to be bright and lively and encouraging. “Look, this is no damn good,” he said. “I mean, God in heaven, we can’t go on living like this.”

Mary said, “It’s been such an awfully long day. So lonely. And now you’re back and I can’t even see you.” He didn’t move, didn’t speak. “Please mend the light, Fitz,” she said. “I want to see you. Please.”

He stood, and stretched. He had an enormous desire to smash something, anything. For a long time he stood in the darkening room and listened to his breathing. Each breath was another second of his life gone, used-up, wasted. It all seemed so stupid, so pointless. Everything was difficult, everything was pointless. That’s what made him angry.

Bodkin Hazel was getting civilized. Now it had a chemical toilet in a little wooden hut on wheels, so the pilots on standby didn’t have to go to the old clubhouse. It also had a larger hut that they used as a crewroom. Barton was in there with CH3 and the new pilots.

“If you fly straight and I get on your tail you’re dead,” CH3 said. “Chances are you won’t even hear my guns.”

“What about back-armor?” Renouf asked.

“Good question. What about cannon? Both the 109 and the 110 carry twin cannon, twenty-millimeter stuff, very nasty. Don’t bet on keeping out the draft with back-armor.”

“If you can hear gunfire,” Barton said, “it’s a hundred to one those guns are being fired at you.”

“That means you’re lucky still to be alive,” CH3 said. “If you can hear him he’s bloody close.”

“Don’t wait,” Barton said. “Don’t look for him. Don’t call for help. Escape.”

“That means break” CH3 said. “Stuff everything in a corner as hard and as fast as you can, and break like hell.”

“Look at this.” Barton tapped a photograph pinned to the wall. It showed two wrecked Hurricanes in a field. “This pair got jumped by 109’s when the squadron was in tight formation. Ass-end Charlies. Nobody else saw anything, nobody else heard anything. Think of that. The kite two lengths behind you gets shot down and you don’t notice a damn thing.”

“If you hear him fire, he must be bloody close,” CH3 said.

“There’s always the mirror, though, isn’t there?” Macfarlane asked.

CH3 said: “If you look in your mirror and see anything interesting like a 109, it’s probably the last thing you’ll ever see.”

“Most of the chaps who get shot down and live to tell the tale say they never even saw the Jerry who did it,” Barton said. “Keep looking behind you. That’s where Jerry likes to be.”

“And it only takes him a couple of seconds to nip behind you,” CH3 said, “so never stop looking for him.”

“Sir,” Steele-Stebbing said to Barton, “isn’t it the task of the wingman to protect one’s tail?”

“Yes, in theory. Maybe he got jumped first. Maybe his radio packed up. Maybe his engine went duff and he’s ten miles back.”

“The point is,” CH3 said, “you can’t assume he’s always going to cover you. When combat starts anything can happen.”

“If you lose him, find somebody else,” Barton said. “Don’t just ponce around the sky on your own.”

“Jerry loves singletons,” CH3 said. “Easy meat.”

“In any case, if you’re in a scrap, never fly straight and level for more than fifteen seconds,” Barton said. “Keep on twisting and turning and dodging, whether you know Jerry’s after you or not.”

“And look behind you,” CH3 said. “You can’t kill him if you can’t see him.”

“Now this young gentleman …” Barton pointed to a photograph of a blazing, falling Spitfire about to hit a wood. “He climbed with the sun behind him, silly boy.”

“It wasn’t the only thing behind him,” CH3 said, “but of course he wasn’t to know that, was he?”

“When you climb, climb toward the sun,” Barton said.

“What if the controller sends you the other way?” Macfarlane asked.

“Sorry, controller, your transmission garbled.”

“All right, suppose the raid is in sight and it’s down-sun. If you climb up-sun that takes you away—”

“Sure,” CH3 told him. “First you get your angels, then you do some damage.”

Barton sniffed. “Yes and no,” he said. “Yes, we go flat-out to make the interception. No, we try not to get killed in the process.”

Macfarlane still wasn’t satisfied. “But that doesn’t mean we actually fly away from the bandits, does it? We might never find them again.”

“Bandits are like buses,” CH3 muttered. “Plenty more along soon.”

“Now hang on there,” Barton declared. “Let’s get this clear. When we get vectored onto a raid, that’s our raid and we make every effort to hit it.”

“Every intelligent effort,” CH3 said.

“Well, for God’s sake, let’s not split hairs,” Barton said to him. “If any of us had any brains we wouldn’t be here now, would we? On the other hand, if you’re going to wait until everything up there is perfect you might as well …” He checked himself before he said something tactless. He could feel his temper slipping. CH3’s insistence on intelligent behavior irritated him. He forced a grin and said to the pilots: “When in doubt, kill a kraut. Simple as that.”

They brightened up, until CH3 added: “But remember: that’s exactly the sort of thing that some bright Geschwader commander is telling his men too, probably right now, and they’ve usually got the advantage of height.”

“Christ, CH3, you’re in a cheerful mood today,” Barton said.

“I just don’t want these guys kidding themselves that what the sector controller tells them is necessarily true,” CH3 said stubbornly. His hands were thrust into his pockets and his shoulders were hunched. “All the controller knows is what he sees on that table in the ops room at Brambledown. Half the time his angels are out by a couple of thousand feet. That’s marvelous, when you—”

“Okay, we all know the system’s not perfect!” Barton picked up his cap and beat some non-existent dust out of it. “It’s still a bloody sight better than anything Jerry’s got.”

“Yes, but the point is …” CH3 began, when the phone rang. Barton took the call. “‘A’ flight’s scrambled,” he announced. “I’m leading,” he told CH3. “You sit this one out.” The door banged as Macfarlane headed the charge. Already, the Merlins were starting to popple and belch. The first engine fired, with a bang like a smash-and-grab, and began roaring.

CH3 leaned against the doorframe and watched the hasty ritual. Mae West on. Parachute on. Groundcrew kneeling to bring the straps together. A lumbering run to the plane, parachute slung under the backside like a cushion. Heave up onto the wing, big swing of the legs to get into the cockpit, settle the parachute in the bucket seat. Groundcrew helping with the safety harness. Helmet on, check oxygen and radio leads, gloves on, quick squint at the instrument panel. All ready to go.

And a touch of panic squeezing the guts, probably. This was always the worst moment. Sitting in the cockpit, waiting and wondering. Remembering. Hoping. Fearing.

It was much better when the leader gave the signal to move, and there were things to do. CH3 saw Barton’s plane taxi out, an airman clinging to one of the wingtips to help it turn. Automatically he glanced at the sky. A fine clear day.

Renouf and Zabarnowski were standing nearby. As the flight got airborne, Zabarnowski said, “All this talk … Waste of time. Flying fighters is very simple. You want to know the secret of success?”

“What?” Renouf asked.

Zabarnowski put his mouth to Renouf’s ear. “Get this close,” he whispered, “and kill the bastard first time.” Renouf recoiled and wiped his ear.

“Your English seems to be improving fast,” CH3 said.

The Pole looked away. “Is dump,” he said.

Fanny Barton kept a vivid memory of this scrap. Some fights printed themselves onto his brain permanently; others erased themselves by their own manic, whirling pointlessness, leaving only a taste of terror, an echo of triumph. Perhaps because the calm weather made everything look so neat at first, perhaps because both sides came at each other in the same way, flying the same formation, Fanny remembered this one clearly.

Everyone saw the 109’s from a distance. There were eight: four pairs in a long, saw-toothed line. When Fanny banked his own saw-toothed line of Hurricanes to complete the interception, the enemy leader matched the move precisely and the two formations curled steeply toward each other. For an instant everyone had a target and everyone was a target. Fourteen sets of guns fired, just a flicker of flame before the two formations met and broke up like sheets of glass smashing each other.

Barton glimpsed planes going in all directions and decided the place to be was on top. A hard-turning climb brought him a fine view of the chaos. A yellow-nosed 109 showed its belly to him and he went after it but it rolled and saw him and slipped away. The R/T was staccato with warnings, curses, questions. A different 109 chased a Hurricane into his vision and he gave it a squirt that made it jump. Then he was through the scrap and out again and he heaved the fighter onto its side in an effort to drag it around and get his sights on an enemy.

The strain grayed-out his vision for a second or two and when the mist cleared there was tracer streaking at him from the beam. A 109 came blinding across his nose, so close that the wash rocked him, and then more tracer chased it and a Hurricane boomed over his head, still firing. Barton glimpsed Cattermole’s letter painted on the side. Cattermole seemed to be locked onto the German: each brief burst of fire knocked more bits off. The 109 hauled itself into a vertical climb. Cattermole angled up and blew it to pieces. Eight Browning machine-guns pounded the cockpit area for three seconds. The fighter came apart. It was like a plastic toy that had been badly assembled. The pieces scattered. No parachute.

Elsewhere, Macfarlane was racing around desperately looking for Cox, whose wingman he was supposed to be, while Cox raced around driving 109’s off Macfarlane’s tail. Steele-Stebbing had long since lost Barton and now was reconciled to death. He had put his long, thin body through such a whirling, bewildering string of violent maneuvers in order to dodge the apparently endless 109’s that his stomach had quit the fight. Vomit was bubbling over his lips, tears of pain were fogging his goggles. A Messerschmitt swam into view and he jabbed his thumb on the firing-button, pouring all his hate and pain and misery at this vile object, and he kept firing and firing until the breechblocks clanked and wheezed and he had no hate left. Miraculously he was still alive. The enemy had vanished.

The enemy had, in fact, been Haducek, and he had vanished not because Steele-Stebbing hit him—all the shots went very wide, and after the first second or so Haducek was hopelessly out of range anyway—but because Haducek’s Hurricane was in a howling dive, chasing an unhappy 109 down to ground level. The 109 was trailing smoke and streamers of fabric. Haducek chased it across the fields and villages of Kent, over the cliffs and beaches, and halfway to France before he gave up. He landed at Bodkin Hazel with little more than fumes in his tanks. There was a nasty mess lying in the middle of the grass which he carefully avoided. Bing Macfarlane had written off another Hurricane.

Hornet squadron got scrambled three more times that day. The first scramble, at Section strength, was recalled almost at once, and the second, also at Section strength, patrolled for an hour without finding anything. When “B” flight was sent up it was early evening and the sky was a beautiful soft blue, like the finest velvet. Flip Moran led a battle-climb to twenty-two thousand feet. The view was stupendous: they could see from the Thames estuary to the Isle of Wight to the Dutch islands and deep into France. They could see the curvature of the earth and a couple of early stars. They could also see a special Dornier 17, always tantalizingly above and ahead. It had to be a special version, probably with bigger engines and better superchargers, because when it grew tired of inspecting southern England and decided to go home, it left “B” flight gasping and straining.

The controller returned them direct to Brambledown. “A” flight was already there, stowing their gear in the lockers.

“Was lousy,” Zabarnowski told Skull.

“No, no,” Moran said. “That’s not the way it was at all. We made a perfect interception, if only the blessed bandit had had the manners to come within range.”

“Is a fat old cow,” Zabarnowski grumbled. “One Spit better than ten lousy cows.”

“On a point of fact,” Cox said stiffly, “I don’t think cows have lice. Not English cows, anyway. Maybe Polish cows are different.”

“Shut up, Jew-boy,” Zabarnowski said. “Stay out of my Poland.”

“I wouldn’t be seen dead in it.”

“Chosen people,” Zabarnowski muttered. “Chosen to stink.”

“Hey!” Moran said. “That’s enough, Zab.”

“I’d sooner be a stinking English Jew than a perfumed Polish ponce,” Cox said.

“Okay, can it, Mother,” CH3 ordered.

“Lousy kike,” Zabarnowski muttered.

“What sort of pansy wears a hairnet in bed?” Cox demanded. “A Polish pansy!”

“Pack it in, the pair of you,” Barton said.

“And silk stockings,” Cox added rebelliously.

Skull closed his notebook. “No actual combat, then,” he said to Moran, when Zabarnowski punched Cox in the head. At once Cattermole hit Zabarnowski a solid thump to the ribs and Haducek attacked Cattermole with a flurry of blows. Cox kicked Haducek in the groin and Barton sprayed the lot of them with a fire extinguisher, working the jet back and forth and up and down while elbows jabbed and fists slammed and the room echoed with rage and profanity in three languages until the whole fight was drenched and the floor was awash. Haducek kept swinging, so Moran kicked his legs from under him. Zabarnowski wiped his hair from his eyes and spat at Cox. Patterson, Fitzgerald and Gordon grabbed the Pole and threw him out of the hut.

“You open your mouth and you’re chopped,” Barton told Cox. He was standing with a foot planted on Haducek’s chest. “Get some towels, Moggy,” he ordered. Renouf reached into his locker and offered a towel. “Is your name Moggy?” Barton roared. Renouf gaped. Cattermole shouldered him aside. The door crashed open and Zabarnowski stormed in.

“I am good Polish Catholic!” he bawled. “Lousy English Jew insult me, insult Catholic Church!”

CH3 had found another extinguisher. “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,” he said, and the jet hit Zabarnowski high in the chest. The Pole opened his mouth and CH3 filled it. Zabarnowski staggered and fell on his backside. CH3 washed him down as he crawled out of the door. End of fight.

Half an hour later they were all on the carpet in Fanny’s office, having large strips torn off them.

Brawling and insulting behavior were bad enough, he told them. If they had been airmen they would have been put on charges and given two weeks’ jankers, scrubbing out the latrines and shoveling coke for the boilers and doubling off to the guardroom for extra parades in full kit every hour on the hour from 6 a.m. to midnight and God help them if a button was dirty.

What made it worse, intolerably worse, was that they were commissioned officers. Supposed to set an example to the men. Who all knew by now that there had been a squalid and stupid punch-up in the locker room. What, Fanny wanted to know, was each of them going to say if an airman was brought before them on a charge of brawling or insulting behavior? What?

But above all (and here Fanny took out his copy of King’s Regulations and banged it on the desk) they were on active service. And they had disobeyed his orders while on active service.

He expanded on that theme at some length and with considerable feeling. Kellaway, listening, noticed that he had become quite fluent since taking over the squadron.

“You may consider yourselves lucky to escape with severe reprimands,” Fanny said. “You two …” He aimed a finger at Cox and Cattermole. “Go and mop up that shambles. I don’t see why the troops should do your dirty work. You two,” he told the others, “stay here.”

“Lunatic,” Cattermole said as they went down the corridor.

“Maniac,” Cox said and kicked him on the leg. Cattermole kicked him back, so Cox knocked his cap off. Cattermole shoulder-charged him into the wall. Cox trod on his cap. A Waaf clerk came out of an office to see what all the noise was about. Cattermole advanced on her, grinning fiercely and gnashing his teeth. “All the better to eat you with, my dear!” he roared. She fled.

“I wish to apologize,” Fanny Barton said. Haducek looked pleased, Zabarnowski was suspicious. “You shouldn’t be flying Hurricanes. It was stupid of me not to realize that long ago. Quite obviously the Hurricane is altogether unsuitable for you. Too big, too heavy, not fast enough. The obvious thing to do is to switch you to Spitfires. Mmm?” He gave them a fast, formal smile.

They were listening intently. So was Kellaway.

“Well, the good news is you’re grounded. No more Hurricanes.” He widened his smile, made it almost congratulatory. “I knew you’d be pleased …” They weren’t looking pleased. “Now it’s just a matter of going through the formalities.” He fished a sheet of paper from his in-tray. “You’re not the only ones, of course. Dozens of chaps are itching to fly Spits. Itching. Personally, I think it’s a bloody awful kite, always going wrong, doesn’t turn anywhere near as tightly as a Hurri, very shaky gun-platform, and it’s got that knock-kneed undercart, all you have to do is run over a small turd and the whole shootingmatch capsizes. Plus, of course, the Spit’s got no stomach for Jerry bullets, stop a couple and you’ve bought it, whereas the Hurricane gobbles ’em up and comes back for more … Anyway … Where was I?”

“Long waiting list for Spits,” Kellaway said.

“Ah, yes. Thank you, adj. So the powers-that-be have made a rule. If you want to transfer to a Spitfire squadron …” Barton consulted the paper. “… you have to score five confirmed kills in a Hurricane first. Yes. Well, I think that’s everything. Once again I’d like to apologize. That’s all.”

They didn’t move. “I have two kills,” Zabarnowski said.

“I have three,” said Haducek.

“No, no.” Barton waved the paper. “It’s quite specific. Five each, not five between you.”

“But how …” Haducek looked thoroughly miserable. “If I am grounded …”

“Haven’t the faintest, old boy. That’s for you to work out. I’ve done all I can, haven’t I?”

“Please,” Zabarnowski said. “I fly Hurricane.”

“No, no, no. You don’t like Hurricane. You like Spitfire. Look, I made a note of it. See?” Barton showed them his scribble on the paper. “You don’t want to fly a Hurricane. You’re getting confused now. It’s the language. Don’t worry, I know what you want.”

“No, no!” Haducek protested. “Hurricane is good, is—”

“Look, I’ll get the adj to type it out for you, okay?” Barton said firmly. “Then you’ll understand. The main thing is you’re grounded.” He picked up the phone. “That’s all,” he told them.

They saluted and went out. As he shut the door, Zabarnowski gave Barton a look of simple murder.

“Bloody good show,” Kellaway said. “It’s about time someone sorted their hash.” He swiveled the piece of paper and read out: “Athlete’s Foot: Instructions for the Treatment of. Most appropriate … Your replacement pilots should be here in the morning, if not tonight. Sergeant-pilots. Volunteer Reservists.”

“Good.” Barton replaced the phone. “The trouble with Zab and Haddy is they’re so much older than the others. What’s Zab? Twenty-five? He’s ancient, he looks like Nim Renouf’s uncle. CH3’s just as old, I know, but he doesn’t look it.”

“He’s beginning to.”

“Is he? He was certainly behaving in a very elderly way this morning.”

“What was he doing?”

“Worrying. Now you come to mention it, he’s lost a bit of weight, hasn’t he?”

“A trifle gaunt, perhaps.”

“He’s certainly not as much fun as he used to be. I used to beable to relax with him and forget everything. Now he makes me feel … what’s the word? Irresponsible.”

“Why? Because you’re not worrying as much as he is?” Kellaway laughed. “Not worrying is half the battle, Fanny.”

“I know, but …” The phone rang and he answered it. “What a bind,” he said. “Yes. No. Thanks.” He hung up. “That was Flip,” he said. “Flash is on his way over. He’s told everyone he’s coming to kill me.”

“Well, just you watch out that he doesn’t try. Last night he went around saying he was going to kill the Secretary of State for Air.”

“And did he?”

“Couldn’t find him. Said the bugger kept dodging him, hiding in the lavatories. Flash got fed-up in the end, went off and played ping-pong.”

“Flash is amazingly keen on killing people nowadays … Anyway, the thing I was saying about Zab and Haddy.” Barton knuckled his eyes, and blinked to get rid of the fireworks. “All that bitching and binding about the kites was beginning to get through. Hanging about the satellite gives too much time to think. Someone says the kites are duff and you sit there looking at the bloody things, wondering if he’s right.”

“Know what you mean,” the adjutant said. “I remember people went in fear and trembling of the Camel for a while. They said it would spin if you looked at it sideways. Definitely couldn’t be aerobatted, that was certain death. So everyone flew it very straight and level, until one day some bright spark took off and stunted his Camel all over the sky with the greatest of ease.”

“End of rumor.”

“End of several Camel pilots first, I’m sorry to say.”

Flash Gordon came in without knocking. “I don’t like this war,” he said. “It doesn’t suit me. Have you got the same thing, only in pink?” He was trailing a cricket bat.

“Your fly’s undone, Flash,” the adjutant said.

“Ah!” Flash said slyly. “Got my secret weapon in there. Show you later, if you’re nice.”

Barton said: “D’you want something?”

Flash became very serious. “What would you do,” he asked, “if you shot down a Jerry and he baled out and landed in the middle of the aerodrome?”

“Take him to the mess and buy him a drink,” Kellaway said promptly. “That’s what we always did.”

“Waste of beer.” Flash flourished the bat.

“Pinch his watch?” Barton suggested.

“What for? It’s bust.”

“Flash,” Kellaway said, “is this a trick question?”

“Certainly not. No trick about it, just plain commonsense. How can you possibly buy the bastard a beer, or pinch his watch, when I’ve just smashed his body to a bloody pulp? I mean, be reasonable.” Flash uttered a soft, scornful laugh.

“Is that what the bat’s for?” Barton asked.

“Watch this.” Flash, looking serious, tapped the floor, and suddenly whirled the bat in a circle, just missing the light fixture and bashing the floor with such power that both his feet came off the ground.

Kellaway and Barton flinched at the blow.

“Shit!” Flash said. “Now look what you’ve made me go and do.” The handle of the bat was badly bent. “You ought to see about that floor, Fanny. It’s damn dangerous.”

“So are you, chum. I got a message you were coming over to shoot me, or something. You’ve really got to stop talking like that, Flash, before you get into trouble.”

Flash said: “I wouldn’t shoot you, Fanny.” Kellaway stared: he could swear there were tears in Gordon’s eyes. “But,” Flash said, reaching inside his open fly, “I can blow you up, and believe me this is dynamite.” He pulled out a letter and tossed it onto the desk.

“Oh, Flash,” Kellaway groaned. “Grow up.”

“It’s from Hermann Goering,” Flash protested. “Is it all right if the Luftwaffe comes over next week? RSVP.”

Barton was reading the letter. “It’s from Sticky Stickwell,” he told the adjutant. “Something to do with bills and money. Bloody awful handwriting.” He stuffed the letter into the envelope and flipped it back. “Buzz off, you berk.”

“If you haven’t got pink,” Flash said, “I might consider mauve.” He went out.

Barton and Kellaway got up and examined the dent in the floor. It was remarkably deep. “That’s enough,” Barton said. “He’s got to be looked at. Get a head-doctor organized, uncle.”

Someone tapped on the door. “Christ!” Barton said. “I’ll never get a bath at this rate. Come in!”

It was Steele-Stebbing. He was carrying his flying-boots and his helmet, holding them very carefully. “May I have a word with you, sir?”

“Make it snappy. I’m starving.”

He shook the boots. The sound of muted slopping was heard. “I wanted you to see the evidence, sir, before I take action. When it was time to leave the satellite this afternoon I found that someone had half-filled my boots with cold tea. I also found that the inside of my helmet had been smeared with jam.”

Kellaway went over and looked into the helmet. “Raspberry,” he reported.

“All right, I’ve seen the evidence,” Barton said. “What’s this about taking action? Are you planning to get an injunction, or something?”

“No sir. I’m planning to hit him.”

Barton tidied up his desk, squaring off the piles of paper and sweeping some odds and ends into a drawer. “I see,” he said. “What with?”

“Well, sir, that’s the problem. I’m quite strong and I did box for my school, so I could simply punch him, very hard, for instance on the nose. That might be enough to discourage him.”

Kellaway sat with his feet up and his pipe going nicely. He was enjoying this curious discussion. Steele-Stebbing sounded as restrained and reasonable as ever, but there was a glint of resolution in his eyes that was new.

“What’s all this got to do with me?” Barton asked.

“If I hit him hard enough, sir, I might break a finger.” Steele-Stebbing went to the window and emptied his boots. “I’d almost certainly break his nose. That would put two pilots temporarily out of action.”

“Ah. Very thoughtful of you.”

“Or I could hit him with something. Flash Gordon’s cricket bat, for example. That would leave me fully operational.”

“No,” Barton said firmly. “Definitely not. Out of the question. You must not, repeat not, bash Flying Officer Cattermole with a cricket bat.”

“Or with anything else,” Kellaway added.

“I quite see that it would inconvenience you, sir,” Steele-Stebbing said, “but he is considerably inconveniencing me, and it’s got to stop.”

“Then find another way. I won’t allow Cattermole to be damaged.”

“Have you any suggestions, sir?”

Barton looked at the adjutant. “Treat it like a military exercise, old boy,” Kellaway advised. “Find his weak spot and exploit it.”

Steele-Stebbing nodded, and went out.

Kellaway said: “I never knew such a man for scruples. He’s got scruples the way I’ve got piles.” Barton laughed. “You wait,” Kellaway said. “One day you won’t find it so funny.”

Next day the squadron flew down to Bodkin Hazel at first light. The sky was a stony gray and there was fog about, but the forecast was for clear weather moving in from the west. The dew was so heavy that the pilots’ boots glistened. They carried their parachutes into the crewroom: if silk got damp it stuck to itself. They sprawled in armchairs, yawned, waited for the cooks to bring tea and coffee. It was the emptiest hour, gutless, neither black night nor full day, and most of them had been on a pub-crawl the previous evening. Conversation was thin. Even Flash Gordon was silent.

Fanny Barton put away the typewritten notes the Ops Officer had given him and looked at his pilots. Not a very dashing lot. Mother Cox was dozing, with his mouth open; Flash was picking at a boil on the back of his neck; Pip was chewing on his nails while he looked at a stain on the wall. Cattermole was gingerly prodding himself in the stomach and trying to belch. Flip Moran was watching Cattermole. The new boys looked as if they’d just finished a hard day’s work. Only Fitz was actually doing anything. He was reading a boy’s comic, the Hotspur. By the strain in his eyes it was hard work.

“Two things,” Barton announced. “Ops tell me there’s a lot of radio traffic going on across the Channel, far more than usual. So we might get some trade at any moment. The other point is Ju-88’s. Jerry’s started sending more and more of them over and we’ve got to be very careful because they look just like Blenheims. What’s the difference?” he asked Renouf; but Renouf, still dozy, could only blink. “Iron Filings?” Barton said.

Steele-Stebbing had the answer: “Junkers 88 has a big, bumpy glass-house, sir. Blenheim’s nose is more streamlined. Also the Blenheim’s got a dorsal gun-turret.”

“Right. And for Christ’s sake make sure any 109 you fire at really is a 109 and not a Hurricane. About a week ago some frightfully keen type in a Spitfire shot down a poor bloody Hurricane from 56 squadron. If any one of you ever does anything like that, he needn’t come back here again.”

“The big difficulty is a tail-chase,” Moran said. “From dead astern the 109 looks very much like a Hurricane so it’s essential to be sure of the differences, which Mr. Macfarlane knows backward, I expect.”

“It’s got those tail-struts, hasn’t it?” Macfarlane said. “The 109 has, I mean.”

“And what if Messerschmitts decide to modify it and remove the tail-struts?” Barton said. “Does that make it a Hurricane?”

“You can always see the radiator scoop under a Hurricane, sir,” Steele-Stebbing said, “whereas the 109 has a relatively smooth belly.”

Hot drinks arrived. “Tomorrow I want this stuff ready when we land,” Barton told the cook, “not fifteen minutes later.” He nodded to CH3. “Over to you,” he said. “Don’t waste your time trying to sell them life insurance, they all look as if they died in the night.”

“Okay. This is a trick question,” CH3 announced. “What is the most dangerous moment in any patrol? Think about it.”

Nobody was in a hurry to answer. Eventually Cox said: “It must be when you run out of ammo.”

“I said any patrol. Including one where you don’t fire your guns.”

“Strikes me the most dangerous time has to be the interception,” Fitzgerald said. “I mean, that’s obvious. Nothing trick about that.”

“Any other offers?”

“It sometimes gets a bit lively in the locker room afterward,” Cattermole said, rubbing his knuckles.

Laughter, jeers, raspberries. The tea and coffee were starting to work.

“Any more?” CH3 said. “Okay. The answer is that any time during a patrol is the most dangerous time. From takeoff to landing you’re liable to get bounced at any moment. Start looking for Jerry as soon as you’re airborne, and don’t stop looking until you’re down again.”

Barton said: “Jerry’s only twenty-thirty miles away. He can pop up anywhere, any time.”

“That’s not fairytales, either,” Flip Moran said. “I was in hospital with a fellah who was about ten seconds from touching down at Manston when he got bounced. He ended up making a three-point landing, only each point was about fifty yards apart.”

“You said it was a catch question,” Macfarlane told CH3. “Where’s the catch?”

“There isn’t one. That’s the catch. The catch is there’s no catch. No rules, no referee. Whatever happens, you get what you deserve. Up there the world is divided into bastards and suckers. Make your choice.”

Macfarlane stared. The telephone shrilled. As Barton reached for it, the scramble klaxon on the control tower began its mechanical bray. “‘A’ flight!” Barton called. CH3 paused at the door. “Patrol Dymchurch, angels ten,” Barton shouted. CH3 waved, and ran.

Macfarlane was twisting his neck to look behind him the instant his wheels were up. CH3 had startled him, frightened him, made him realize that almost everything he had put his trust in was false. Macfarlane had joined the RAF confident that British was best and life in a fighter squadron would be merry and bright, rather like being in the school rugby team the year they won every match, only a damn sight more exciting, of course, with plenty of bloody good scraps and a sporting chance of going out in a burst of glory, which didn’t worry him too much because who wanted to live forever anyway? What bothered him now, as CH3 led the flight eastward, climbing hard, was this horrible fear of being jumped and killed, bang, dead, all over before he knew it. Everyone expected to be attacked, that was reasonable, but somehow Macfarlane had imagined he’d always get a chance: someone would shout a warning on the R/T, or … Or something. But it wasn’t like that at all. The sky was huge and full of risk. A speck of dirt on your windscreen could turn into an enemy fighter in the time it took to look round and back again. A little smear on your goggles might hide the plane that was coming in to kill you.

Macfarlane searched. He quartered the sky and examined it section by section, stretching his neck to look from extreme left rear to extreme right rear, with no reward at the end except to start again. What made it wearying was the utter absence of anything to look at. His eyes were laboring to focus on an object that wasn’t there, and they tired of this thankless drudgery, until Macfarlane caught himself slacking and sudden fright drove him back to hunt the enemy who, given just such a moment of slackness, could kill him dead.

The patrol lasted an hour and a half. The raid they were scrambled to intercept turned back; they were then vectored up and down Kent in search of another raid that also disappeared; finally, as they were running short of fuel, they saw a couple of high flying Dorniers and watched them go. The flight landed without having fired a shot. Macfarlane was so tired that he just sat in his cockpit and let everything relax: body, mind, emotions.

The pedals twitched under his boots and he jerked awake. It was CH3, shaking the rudder. “Bloody dull, wasn’t it?” CH3 said. “Sorry about that. Never mind, it’s only seven o’clock. Plenty of time for business to pick up.” Macfarlane felt slightly sick.

The two sergeant-pilots flew in while the squadron was having breakfast. Their names were Verrier and Brook. Barton allocated one to each flight. As reservists they had accumulated a lot of flying time but this was their first operational posting. Barton told them to stick to their section leader like glue, keep their eyes open, learn fast and do nothing stupid. “I don’t care if you don’t fire your guns for a week,” he said. “Just survive.” They nodded, but he had a feeling they didn’t fully understand.

The sun was up and the sky had cleared. Skylarks sang high above the fields around the aerodrome, and swifts and swallows rocketed over the grass, showing off their split-ass turns. When the pilots came out there was a butterfly resting on the brightly striped canvas of a deckchair. “Get off,” Cattermole ordered. It raised and lowered its brilliant wings, drying them in the sun. “You are trespassing on Air Ministry property,” Cattermole said. “I can have you shot for that.” The butterfly waved its antennae, fine as gold thread. “Please yourself,” Cattermole said, and sat on it. When Cox protested, he said: “It was a German butterfly. I expect it landed by U-boat during the night. You should be grateful. Given half a chance, it would have ripped your throat out. They starve them for days on end, you know. I remember—”

“Okay, settle down,” Barton said.

“Rip your throat out and kick your teeth in,” Cattermole whispered to Cox.

“R/T procedure,” Barton announced.

“Ever counted their feet?” Cattermole hissed.

“Moggy, shut up,” Barton said. “I want to make sure everyone understands and follows the same R/T procedure, otherwise we’ll end up in the clag.”

Flash Gordon raised his hand. Barton nodded. “I’ve been thinking,” Flash said seriously. “The average human adult contains eleven pints of blood. I mean, I know that for a fact. Eleven pints.”

“Seems reasonable. Now the jargon—”

“Yes, but the thing is, Fanny, if you clobber an Me-110 it’s got a crew of two, so that’s twenty-two pints of blood, isn’t it? Double.”

“No doubt about it.”

Flash’s eyes were bright, and he leaned forward in his chair. “Twenty-two pints,” he said, “is over two-and-a-half gallons. That’s a lot of blood, Fanny.”

“It certainly is.”

Flash sat back, looking satisfied. “I thought it was worth mentioning, that’s all. I mean, some of the other chaps might not have realized …” He smiled at Verrier. “Would you have guessed two-and-a-half gallons?” Verrier shook his head.

“Save it, Flash,” Flip Moran said.

“And it’s hot, too,” Flash told him. “It steams when it comes out. I’ve seen it steam. You get a lot of steam off two-and-a-half gallons.”

“Jargon,” Barton said loudly. “Make sure you know it. Speed jargon: liner, buster, gate. Liner means cruising speed, save your fuel. Buster means maximum normal speed. Gate means you pull the tit and put the throttle through the emergency gate. Liner, buster, gate. Don’t forget. Next—”

The scramble klaxon began its bray.

It was “B” flight’s turn. They were up for an hour. Nothing.

Snowball found three raids for them, one off Beachy Head and two between Tonbridge and Maidstone, but the plots all faded and were lost. The sun was climbing, and by the time the flight returned to base Flip Moran’s eyes felt bruised and sticky. “Jesus,” he said to Barton, “I wish Ops wouldn’t do that. Either Jerry was there and we didn’t see him, or he wasn’t and we did all that for nothing.”

“How was …” Barton had to search for the name. “Villiers.”

“Verrier. He was okay. Bit clumsy with his throttle, kept jumping backward and forward. Flash acted peculiar.”

“Yes? how?”

“He began flying inverted. Fitz asked him what he was up to. He said he was having a bit of a rest. He said Jerry couldn’t see him, not with his blue side up, he was invisible.”

“Flash is getting worse. I’m having a trick-cyclist look at him.”

Moran’s heavy face, with its black bar of a mustache, stiffened. “And what good d’you think that will do?” he asked. The question answered itself by its own suppressed anger.

Oh Christ, Barton thought, here we go again. “It’ll give us a specialist medical opinion,” he said, and although he meant to speak calmly the words came out too fast, a parry to Moran’s thrust.

“You can be a damned idiot sometimes, Fanny.” Moran waited while a Hurricane taxied past, bouncing jauntily on its widespread undercarriage. “What is this fellah going to say? Flash is sane? Where does that take you? Or Flash is mad? We know that already. D’you think you can make him sane by chopping him? Or what?”

“How the blazes do I know what he’s going to say?” Barton looked away, trying to force his irritation to subside. “Anyway, I don’t see why you have to be so bloody awkward about it.”

“Flash is in my flight. I’m his flight commander.”

“And I’m in charge of the squadron.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Have you? Good. Because it’s more than a report, it’s a fact. If you can’t live with it—”

“Me? I can live with anything. I lived with the Ram, I lived with Rex, I’ve got the scars to prove it. I got the scars, you got the stripes.”

“You want a squadron, is that it?” Barton had to shout because another Hurricane was taxiing by, but he wanted to shout anyway. “Then why don’t you bloody well say so?”

“What? And deprive you of the pleasure of giving me orders? Don’t be so stupid.”

Barton stopped and watched Moran walk on. Part of him was furious but another part felt deeply sorry for the man. They both knew that Moran would make a lousy squadron commander. His self-pity was a new and unattractive measure of this. And by showing self-pity he had isolated himself even more. Barton had an impulse to go after him and say something to make good, rebuild Moran’s confidence, assure him that he was an excellent flight commander (which he was), that this bickering was stupid. He called: “Hey, Flip!” Maybe the roar of the Hurricane was still too loud. Maybe not. Moran didn’t respond, and Barton wasn’t prepared to ask twice. Instead, he sought out CH3.

“If you were me,” Barton said, “what would you do?”

CH3 sat on his heels and worried about it. “Flip doesn’t really give a damn about Flash seeing this doctor,” he said. “He’s just using it to needle you.”

“But why? What did I ever do to Flip?”

“Dunno. You want me to ask him?”

The honest answer was yes. “No, I can handle it,” Barton said, and walked away. Discussing one flight commander with another made him feel uncomfortable. He couldn’t afford to create even the impression of favoritism. So now Moran’s sourness had made him keep his distance from CH3. Barton felt victimized.

The day became hot, with a breeze so slight that it scarcely moved the windsock. Before noon all the deckchairs had been shifted into the shade of some apple-trees beside the crewroom. There was a faint but constant clatter of reapers and binders in the nearby fields, and horsedrawn wagons rumbled along a lane beyond the perimeter wire. Grasshoppers chirped. The sky was a clear, cornflower-blue overhead, shading to a dusty white at the shimmering horizon. It looked like the start of a long, settled spell.

Half the pilots were playing cricket, using Flash Gordon’s wonky bat and a split tennis ball. The others were dozing in armchairs.

Cox adjusted a cushion.

“By the way, Pip,” he said, “I’m moving in with you tonight, so wash your feet, will you?”

“What’s happening to Haddy?”

“He’s sharing with Zab. The adj has arranged it all, thank God. Very boring, living with a bloke who keeps on saying ‘Is cock-up.’”

“Does Zab really wear silk stockings?” Macfarlane asked. “And a hairnet?”

Cox nodded. “According to Skull it’s not uncommon in Poland. He said some men even use scent and lipstick.”

Groans of disgust and revulsion. “What a lot of fairies!” Macfarlane said. “We don’t want them on our side, do we?”

“Steady on, young Bing,” Cattermole said gently. His eyes were closed and his arms dangled to the grass. “I happen to know that Steele-Stebbing wears camiknickers and plucks his eyebrows.”

“Balls!” Macfarlane said.

Steele-Stebbing was reading the Daily Telegraph. He raised it another inch or so.

“Perhaps,” Cattermole said. “One must give Steele-Stebbing the benefit of the doubt in that area. What is quite certain is that he applies just the merest touch of rouge to his nipples.”

The Daily Telegraph rustled as Steele-Stebbing tightened his grip.

Patterson said: “What a wonderful father you’ll make, Moggy. Cold and hard outside, but underneath it all a heart of pure lead.”

“Father?” Cox said. “Have you ruined some popsy, Mog?”

“Legions,” Cattermole told him, and stretched. “Myriads. Armies of the dear things. I impregnated half the womanhood of France, and I try to bring a little bliss to the local ladies as often as my professional commitments allow. Speaking of regularity …” He levered himself up. “If anyone wants me, I shall be in the library.” He strolled past Steele-Stebbing, snatched his newspaper and set off for the portable lavatory, reading the headlines aloud. Steele-Stebbing leaned back and shut his eyes, but his hands were fists.

It was twenty minutes before Cattermole came out. By then, Steele-Stebbing had gone for a walk. Patterson watched Cattermole drop into a deckchair and sigh with satisfaction. “You really are a shit, aren’t you?” Patterson said.

“I don’t know what makes you say that, Pip. You and I are old pals. We flew under the same bridge, remember?”

“I never flew under the sodding thing,” Patterson muttered. “That’s on your conscience; not mine.”

“What bridge?” Cox asked sharply. “Are you talking about old … What the hell was his name?”

“Dicky Starr,” Patterson mumbled. “Poor bastard.”

“Why, what happened?” Macfarlane asked. But none of them answered, and when he looked at Cattermole, Cattermole stared back.

Lunch came: sausage and mash, with rice pudding. Sector Ops. called up in the middle of lunch and White Section—Cox and Macfarlane—got sent off, only to be recalled before they were out of sight. They landed and sat down again, but Macfarlane could not eat. His ears were straining to hear the faint preliminary click of the Tannoy, or the first ting of the telephone. If someone tapped a plate with a knife, he jumped.

Fanny Barton got a fresh mug of tea and took Flip Moran aside. “I don’t know why I’m drinking this,” he said. “I’ll be bursting in half an hour if we have to go up.”

“Then don’t drink the bloody stuff.”

“Thanks very much.” Barton chucked it away. “You’re a great help, Flip. I don’t need to piss all over myself. You’re always ready to do it for me.” That was supposed to be a light remark, humorous even, something to ease the tension; but when Barton heard the words they sounded more like a complaint. Moran said nothing. “What I mean is, we’ve got to work together,” Barton explained, or tried to explain. “If I’m doing something wrong, for God’s sake tell me.”

“Waste of time.”

“Try.”

Moran heaved a deep breath. “Very well. I didn’t ask for this sprog sergeant you’ve dumped on me. I don’t want him. He’s bloody useless.”

Barton was taken aback. “Wait a minute. Verrier’s no worse than Brook.” Moran looked away. “I don’t get it, Flip,” Barton said. “What d’you want me to do?”

“Get him out of my flight. I’ll take Mother Cox, and your hotshot senior flight commander can have Verrier to play with.”

“But CH3’s already got Brook.”

“Look,” Moran said, “I didn’t ask you to ground Zab. Zab’s a bloody good pilot.” His voice rasped like a file. “I don’t see why I should pay the penalty for your fun and games. It’s—”

“Come on, come on! Be sensible. Zab and Haddy were fucking up the whole squadron. If I—”

“You fucked up this squadron. Not them.”

Barton walked ten paces, turned, walked back again. “I can’t switch Verrier with Cox,” he said. “It’s not on.”

“See? Waste of time,” Moran said. “I told you so.”

“Oh, Christ, Flip,” Barton said. “You’re never happy unless you’re bloody losing, are you?”

“That’s what makes Hornet such a joyous squadron,” Moran said gloomily.

Barton found CH3 again and told him what Moran wanted.

“No,” CH3 said. “That’s not it either. He’s using the Cox-and-Verrier business to needle you some more.”

“He’s asking for trouble, then. What on earth’s wrong with the man?”

“Maybe he’s got twitch.”

“Flip Moran? Twitch? Don’t be ridiculous. He’s strong as a bull.”

An hour later, Sector Ops called and put them on five-minute standby, almost immediately shortened to two-minute standby, which meant being fully dressed, including Mae West and parachute. It was baking hot. For ten minutes everyone dripped sweat and complained. The scramble was almost a relief.

Barton led the squadron. CH3 moved to Yellow Section with Cattermole as his wingman, which meant that Sergeant Brook stayed behind. The flights were staggered, with “B” flight to the rear and slightly up-sun, and the sections were widespread, like a search party. Within ten minutes they were at fifteen thousand feet over Ashford, twenty miles north of Bodkin Hazel, and the controller was warning them that the raid was approaching from the southeast, twenty-plus bandits, heading northwest. Fanny Barton acknowledged. He wriggled his shoulders to loosen his shirt, now sticky with cold sweat, and his glance flickered across the cockpit, taking in the bank of dials and gauges, checking the gunsight was on and the gun-safety was off. He looked up and changed focus.

“Hello, Mango Leader, this is Snowball. Bandits now twenty-five plus.” He sounded a little impatient.

“Okay, Snowball.” Barton wondered what happened to all these phantom plots. Did some other squadron shoot them down, or did they never exist? They couldn’t all be Blenheims or Defiants. It seemed amazingly easy to lose a gaggle of German bombers over England. Half the scrambles failed to lead to an interception. “Yellow Two to Leader,” said Cattermole in the curious light-tenor that VHF produced, and as he spoke, Barton saw them for himself: “Bandits at five o’clock.”

Barton gave Snowball the tally-ho. Snowball wished him luck.

There was absolutely nothing to do except wait. If both formations held their course and speed, the German aircraft would pass the Hurricanes quite soon, thus allowing Fanny to swing his squadron behind them and chop away with a series of stern attacks.

The sprinkle of dots grew thin wings. The crosses made a delicate pattern that grew and put on weight. “Heinkels and Dorniers,” Barton said. “A dozen of each.” He twisted his head and searched the sky on the other side: stupid to watch the right and get jumped from the left. Nothing there. “Black One to Leader, the escort’s arrived, one-one-oh’s, high.” That was Fitz. He sounded matter-of-fact but Barton knew better. Fitz’s heart would be banging away like a boy-scout drum. “Okay,” Barton said.

The bombers were bustling along at a brisk pace. Soon they developed filigree gun barrels and radio masts, insignia, numbers, letters, the shining discs of propellers, yellow spinners, wisps of exhaust smoke fleeing the outthrust engines. For the new pilots it was their first close sight of a German bomber formation and they found it impressively disciplined: neat, tight vics of three, the Dorniers stepped up behind the Heinkels, and all storming across Kent as if they didn’t give a damn who owned it. The older pilots—CH3, Moggy, Flip, Mother, Flash, Pip, Fitz—saw things differently. Most of them were watching the bombers with one eye and the escort with the other. At least twenty Me-110’s, coming on fast.

Barton let the bombers charge past. They were over half a mile to the right of the nearest Hurricane. The top-gunner in a Heinkel fired a few rounds, probably testing his gun. “Buster, buster,” Barton ordered, and opened the throttle wide. “Turning right, turning right, go.” The squadron banked and slid behind the bombers, hit their turbulence and began to bounce. “Going up,” Barton said. “Throttle back.” They eased above the lumpy air and he saw, far away, beyond the leading Heinkels, a solitary Hurricane. Strange. “‘B’ flight hits the right side, ‘A’ flight hits the left,” he said. “Go!”

The German stepped-up formation was intelligent. It offered almost every plane a degree of covering fire from the top-gunners of the rank below and the belly gunners of the rank above. Barton couldn’t avoid them so he gave them a difficult deflection shot. He dived through the slipstream and turned sharply away from the bombers so that when he climbed back at them he was coming at their flank, slanting hard across the German gunsights, forcing them to rush their aim. Red and yellow tracer pulsed out of the Dorniers in fits and starts, like cartoon Morse-code. Barton touched his gun-button four times in five seconds. Each time, he saw a bomber shake, but the vibration was all in his head, trembling from the force of the maneuver and the judder of the guns, and he half-rolled clear and raced a way without knowing if he had scored.

To his surprise, Steele-Stebbing was hard behind him.

Pairs of Hurricanes were bouncing off the raid high and low. Smoke dribbled from a tail-end Dornier. The wheels of another Dornier suddenly swung down. It dropped out of formation and hung fifty feet below the others, nose up, straining for height, failing. Stray shouts and whoops came over the R/T, but the only voice that Barton recognized was Flip Moran’s, cursing his wingman, Verrier. He searched for the Me-110’s and found them still so far away that he called Steele-Stebbing: “Leader to Red Two, stick tight, we’ll make another pass.” But as he began his approach he saw an extraordinary thing.

The lone Hurricane, last seen far ahead of the raid, now charged it head-on. Fire flickered from the nose-guns of the leading Heinkels: too little, too late. At the last instant the Hurricane dropped its right wing and sliced vertically between the bombers. Barton caught flashing glimpses of it as first Heinkels and then Dorniers veered and dodged and swerved. The Hurricane spat itself out of the rear of the shattered formation like a backfire. It was all over before Barton could draw breath. It was the most astonishing thing he had ever seen. A Heinkel came wallowing toward him. He sprayed it and went switchbacking through the disintegrating remains of the raid, stabbing his thumb on the button, until the sky was empty again and he dragged the nose hard toward the south, the sun, the oncoming 110’s.

They came streaming down like skiers off a mountain.

Moran was still swearing at Verrier. It was a waste of breath. Verrier’s radio had stopped several bullets. The same burst had taken out his port aileron and made a mess of his left shoulder. This was not the result of brilliant German shooting: Verrier had bungled his controls—got his revs wrong, put his prop in the wrong pitch, skidded and sidled and nearly stalled the bloody plane—until it was an almost unmissable target. He wasn’t incompetent, just very jumpy. When the attack began, his muscles went rigid and his hands and feet trembled. Everything started coming at him too fast: Moran’s curses and commands, the surging bombers, the belting tracer. He did one thing wrong and that made another thing worse and then the bullets ripped home and everything was agonizingly bad. The wind came raging through his smashed side-windows, caught the blood that was pumping out of his shoulder and gushing down his arm and sprayed it around; and when he looked up he saw a whole new squadron of Me-110’s falling on him. Even Moran had stopped speaking. “Oh, Christ,” he prayed, “please help, please help, please …”

Moran kept trying to chase him, this nineteen-year-old idiot swanning about as if he wanted to get killed; but there were gunners trying to kill Moran, too, and when the 110’s joined in the battle he gave up the chase. Then the bombers started to regroup, counting on their fighters to keep the Hurricanes busy, and the next time Moran saw Verrier he was getting hammered by a pair of 110’s that were crisscrossing behind him and knocking hell out of the Hurricane. Moran fired at long range and one of them sheered away; he closed on the other and hit it as it blasted yet more chunks off Verrier. They were three in a row now, hunter on hunter on victim, and Moran was hunched forward, body strained against his straps, swearing in a harsh scream, obsessed with his kill, so obsessed that he failed to see the 110 that made it four in a row.

He was shot in the legs: maiming, bone-smashing wounds. A cannonshell exploded in front of his face and blinded him. More cannonshells walloped great holes in the instrument panel, the bulkhead, the petrol tank. Fuel gushed over his broken legs. All this in less than a second. One moment Flip Moran was intact, vengeful, furious; the next he was crippled, blinded, awash in petrol. And the next moment he was burning.

The last piece of equipment to fail was his radio. Moran had left his channel open to curse Verrier. Now, everyone in Hornet squadron heard him scream. The Hurricane flew itself, more or less level, for quite a long time, and the flames worked their way quite slowly up his legs. He screamed as he felt for the cockpit release that his eyes could not see, and he screamed as he tried to make his broken legs escape the fire that was eating them. Eventually the Hurricane performed a slow roll, the whole cockpit was soaked in petrol, and Moran’s screaming came to an end when there was no air to breathe and the furnace roasted his face.

Debriefing.

Skull spent his days at Bodkin Hazel now. He took their reports, one at time.

Two definite kills were claimed. Cattermole said he destroyed a Heinkel 111 and CH3 said he shot down a Messerschmitt 110. Macfarlane claimed a probable Dornier and Fitzgerald a probable 110: both planes had last been seen going down with much smoke coming out and large bits falling off. Everyone else bar Steele-Stebbing claimed to have damaged at least one enemy aircraft.

Too bad about Flip. That was a damn bad show. Most of them had seen a burning Hurricane tip over and fall, and they all reckoned then that somebody had bought it. It really was a damn shame. He must have caught a hell of a packet. Someone saw him just before he blew up, and he was fighting like a maniac, an absolute maniac. Then, suddenly, bingo.

Skull, however, had news of Verrier. Miraculously, he had baled out and fallen in the middle of a small aerodrome, a training field. They telephoned Brambledown and Brambledown told Skull. Actually, he hadn’t so much baled out as discovered himself in mid-air when his Hurricane broke in half. He’d landed badly and snapped both ankles and a collarbone, on top of which his left shoulder was a terrible mess. So that’s Verrier, that was.

Bloody good scrap.

Too bad about Flip.

And it was still only three o’clock.

They got scrambled again at ten to five and chased half a dozen Junkers 88’s from Maidstone to Dover without catching them. Patterson got hit in the tail by Dover ack-ack and had to put down at Hawkinge airfield.

Stand-down at eight; return to Brambledown, eight-twenty. Almost the end of a rich, full day.

Kellaway banged on Barton’s bedroom door. “Fanny?” he called. He knew he was in there: he could hear the radio. Somebody’s band was playing Oh, Johnny, very loudly. He banged again and went in. The music blasted at him, so loud that half the notes distorted. The volume must have been turned up full. Barton sat astride a reversed chair, his back to the door. He was reading Picture Post, or at least he was turning the pages. He didn’t look up until Kellaway touched his shoulder, and then he started so sharply that he tore a page.

“Daddy’s asking for you,” Kellaway shouted. Barton looked blankly. Kellaway switched the radio off. “How can you stand that din?” he asked.

“What?” Barton said.

Kellaway tapped his ears.

“Oh,” Barton said. “I’m still a bit deaf, uncle. Altitude, I s’pose. Up and down all day. Engine noise. Ears get a bit fed-up with it.”

“Blow,” Kellaway advised. He pinched his nose and puffed his cheeks. Barton did the same. “Ow!” he exclaimed. He stuck his little finger in his ears and waggled them about. “Bit better … Can you hear a sort of buzz? No? Must be me, then.”

“Aren’t you going to have something to eat, old boy?”

Barton picked up the Picture Post and tried to straighten the torn page. The torn bit kept falling out, so he pulled it off, screwed it up, threw it away. “Who’s going to be ‘B’ flight commander?” he asked.

“You ought to get changed, Fanny.” Barton was still in flying kit. “Have a bit of a wash. Freshen up.”

“Moggy’s the best pilot.”

The adjutant sat on the bed and took out his pipe. “Well,” he said.

“He’s also the biggest shit.”

“No argument there.”

“That leaves Pip, Mother, Fitz and Flash.”

“Pip won’t do. He’s got no oomph, has he? You want a chap with a bit of oomph.”

“Christ, uncle, my ears hurt.” Barton took off his Irvine jacket and sat on the bed. The adjutant began filling his pipe. He was wondering whether to suggest a hot shower, or a quick drink and then a hot shower. Alternatively … The bed started to rock. It was shaking so much that he couldn’t get the tobacco in the bowl. “Listen, I know it’s your bed,” he said, and realized that Barton was crying.

His head was down and his body was bent like a question mark, with his arms hugging his ribs, and the sobs were coming almost faster than his lungs could deliver them. His face had collapsed into the ugliness of misery. Tears did not improve its appearance. Kellaway carefully put his pipe on the bedside table. In all his time in the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force he had seen plenty of men cry. He had never found the sight anything but repugnant. Just when a chap most needed help and sympathy, God made him look like a baboon. “Come on, Fanny, you can’t blame yourself,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault. These things happen in war. Always have, always will. It’s the luck of the draw.” Kellaway didn’t hurry, didn’t put any great stress on the words. He’d been through it before so often. You had to say something, you had to make reassuring noises, but the poor blighter never really took any of it in at first. “Anyway,” Kellaway said, “it could have been worse, couldn’t it? By all reports it was all over pretty quickly. I mean, look at it this way: he went the way he’d have wanted to go. Slam-bang-wallop, over and out. Right?”

Barton raised his contorted, shiny face and said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Flip. Poor old Flip.”

“Oh, balls! Bloody Moran went and bought it. So what?”

“Well, exactly. You mustn’t blame—”

“Shut up about Moran! Who cares? I mean, who gives a tiny damn? Look at that, uncle!”

The adjutant looked at Barton’s Irvine jacket. A short, brown furrow ran across the left side, just below the armpit. “Bullet streak,” he said. Barton had stopped crying. His breathing was getting under control. “Did you just notice this?” Kellaway asked. “When you took it off?” Barton got up and walked to a corner of the room. “Came as a bit of a shock, I expect,” Kellaway said. “I mean, you don’t need a lot of imagination, do you?” Barton bent down and picked up the torn piece of Picture Post. “Same thing happened to me once,” Kellaway said, “only it was the helmet that suffered … Still, a miss is as good as a mile, isn’t it?”

“Don’t talk such fucking rubbish.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Kellaway said. “A miss like this one is in a class of its own.” He tossed the jacket to Barton. “In fact it’s worth a drink. Want a drink?”

“D’you know what Flash Gordon did, uncle?” Barton found a towel and scrubbed his face. “Flash went off on his own and charged straight through a whole gang of Jerry bombers. Head-on. In one end, out the other. Scared them shitless.”

“Goodness me. Sounds very effective.”

“Yes. Trouble is, he disobeyed orders. He should’ve stayed with Fitz, not gone blasting off on his own. What if Fitz got jumped? Flash is a maniac He’s crazy.”

“Well, the specialist is coming to look at him in the morning. By the way, Daddy Dalgleish is very keen to have a word with you.”

“Piss on him. Ask CH3 to sort it out. Say I’m writing letters to next-of-kin.”

“Are you?”

“No fear. I’m off on the spree. It’s time we had a squadron thrash. Go and round up the blokes, uncle. Tell ’em I’ll buy the first round.”

The adjutant gave him a long and thoughtful look. “Now? I mean, you’re feeling okay again?”

“Why the hell shouldn’t I?” Barton asked cheerfully. “It wasn’t my fault he bought it, was it? Come on, get cracking, adj. You’re like frozen treacle.”

CH3 was drinking in the mess when he was called to the phone. “Popsy,” Flash said, and for once he was right. The caller was Jacky Bellamy.

“I want a chance to apologize,” she said. “And I also need your advice.”

“I see.” He looked at all the names and numbers scribbled on the wall. “Look, are you sure this is such a good idea?”

“No, I’m not. And look, you don’t have to meet me if you don’t want to.”

“It’s been a long time.”

“About three months.”

“A lot can happen in three months.”

“Stop dodging. This is a pay phone and I’m out of change. Say yes or no.”

Pause. “No.”

“You bastard.”

“Hey, hey! You didn’t talk like that three months ago.”

“I’ve changed. I’ve turned hard and cold and ruthless and …”

“Is that right? Sounds much more interesting. Okay, where do we meet?”

“Outside the main gate in ten minutes?”

She had a car. They drove a mile or so to a quiet lane, and walked down a long avenue of beech trees. It was dusk, and the air was as warm as milk.

“First off,” she said, “you were right and I was wrong.”

“About what?”

“Everything. Tactics, gunnery, back-armor, all the stuff you said was wrong with the Hurricane. And all I can say in defense is that I went along with the majority vote. Experts always disagree, and there comes a point when … Oh, forget it. I’m making excuses.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I was somewhat wrong too. Turns out there’s nothing much wrong with the Hurricane. It needed sorting out, that’s all.”

“So here we both are. Older and wiser.”

They stopped to watch a pair of squirrels dash along some branches and vanish.

“Anyway, what does it matter?” he said. “It’s all over and done with.”

“It mattered to me. I hate getting anything wrong. I believe in taking pains and double-checking everything twice. I hate being caught out.”

He gave an amused grunt. “So did I, once. Don’t worry, you’ll grow out of it.”

“Stop trying to sound paternal. I’m two years older than you.”

“Are you really?” He cocked his head and studied her face. “Prove it. Say something maternal.”

“Have you got a clean handkerchief?” she asked.

He laughed. “That’s very good,” he said. The more he thought about it, the more he laughed; until she began laughing too. He said: “You just wrote the story of my life.”

“Gee whiz. I must have been inspired, or something.”

He looked away. They walked on. Old beech leaves crunched sweetly underfoot. He said, “Flip Moran bought it this afternoon.”

“Dead?” She reached up to a low-hanging branch and broke off a leaf. “Dumb question … Well, I’m sorry. I really liked Flip.”

“Yes, he had his points.”

“That’s not much of an epitaph. He was worth more than that.”

CH3 shrugged. “Chaps are always getting the chop. It’s not something to get worked up about.” They reached the end of the avenue, and turned. “You said you wanted to ask my advice. What about?”

“Oh, nothing special. Statistics. RAF claims. My boss in the States wants me to check out the figures … Look, why did you do that, just now?”

“What?”

“You know what. One moment you’re actually treating me like a human being, the next moment you’re a hundred miles away, telling me Flip Moran has bought it.”

He said nothing.

“I’ve been kissed before, you know,” she said. “Even a withered old bag like me gets kissed from time to time.”

“Come to that,” he said, “you could have kissed me.”

“Too late now. Anyway, it’s not something to get worked up about, is it?”

They walked in silence to the car.

The Spreadeagle had been an important coaching inn, and it was spacious. The ceiling of the public bar, for instance, was fourteen feet high. To get Flash Gordon’s feet on the ceiling was quite a job.

All the bar tables had been dragged into the middle of the room and stacked in a pyramid. This in itself was not easy, because the pub was crowded with locals and Spitfire pilots and a sprinkling of soldiers, and some of them had been reluctant to give up their tables. But the landlord supported the feet-on-the-ceiling idea. When Barton had walked in and said, “Thirteen pints, please,” the landlord had said, “You must be Hornet squadron,” and it turned out his nephew was Mother Cox’s armorer.

CH3 found a man who could play the piano and he bought him a drink. Singing began. There was a slightly dangerous darts match, Hurricanes versus Spits, with a lot of insults about marksmanship. Zab and Haddy took no part in any of it. They had been ordered to come and now they stood by the fireplace and sneered into their beer. “Jag tycker om det!” Fitzgerald shouted at them from a safe distance, and when they scowled, others shouted it too. Fitzgerald was feeling guilty about not going home to Mary, but orders were orders, weren’t they? So now he shouted twice as loudly, to make the guilt worthwhile.

They all shouted, they all barged about, pinched each other’s hats, threw beermats, sang, bawled catchphrases from radio shows. Skull watched Macfarlane and Brooke stagger and howl with laughter at a joke that Cattermole had told, and he said to CH3: “It’s amazing how very drunk they can get so very quickly, isn’t it?”

“They’re not really drunk. It’s a sort of post-combat autointoxication, I guess.”

“In celebration of life? Affirmation of survival?”

“Christ, no. Nothing so high-falutin’. They’ve been wound up as tight as a fiddle-string all day, so now they make whoopee. These guys could get smashed out of their minds on soda-water.”

“Not that one, apparently.” Skull was looking at Steele-Stebbing, who had just left the piano, having failed to join in the singing because he didn’t know the words, and was now reading a brewer’s calendar.

The landlord, pulling pints as he talked, said to Barton: “Tell you what. I wouldn’t mind some sort of memento or souvenir. You know: something to hang on the wall. You got a squadron plaque, or a photograph or something?”

“No, nothing of that sort, I’m afraid.” The landlord was disappointed. Barton looked around for inspiration. “You could always have our footprints,” he said. “Like they do in Hollywood.”

“That takes cement. I’ve got no cement, have I?”

Barton was looking at the pub ceiling. “Got any soot?” he asked.

“What? You’ll never get up there,” the landlord said.

“Bet you a pint we will.” Barton emptied his glass.

“Hornet boys can get up anywhere,” the adjutant said.

They stacked the pub tables in a three-tiered pyramid. Barton climbed to the top with half a bucket of soot that the landlord had meant for his rhubarb. CH3 handed up a chair. “Right!” Barton shouted. “Now this is a very hazardous mission, bloody dangerous in fact, because as you can see it will take you very close to your operational ceiling.” He pointed upward.

The crowd howled and groaned. “Piss-poor joke!” Cattermole roared. Cushions and beermats flew. Barton drank his beer.

“And because it’s so extremely bloody dangerous,” he declared, “I have decided to call for a volunteer. Where’s Flash?”

Gordon was manhandled up the pyramid. He struck a dramatic pose and cried: “There was a young lady named Buckingham—”

Barton shoved him into the chair. Using an old paint brush he slathered soot onto the soles of his shoes. Gordon swung himself around until his shoulders were resting on the seat of the chair and he pressed his feet on the ceiling, to warm applause. “Now sing a song,” Barton ordered. Gordon, still upside down, sang a verse of Stormy Weather. “Enough!” Barton said. Gordon slid off the chair head-first and rolled down the pyramid into the arms of the crowd, spilling much beer. “Mother Cox!” Barton shouted.

Cox was followed by CH3. He made his mark and sang Trees, and then took over the bucket and ordered Barton up. Barton sang Run, Rabbit. CH3 gave him back the bucket and went down as Patterson came up. One by one the pilots stamped their sooty footprints and sang their upside-down songs until only two were left: Renouf and Steele-Stebbing. As Nim Renouf clambered up, grinning with anticipation, CH3 found Steele-Stebbing at the back of the crowd. “You’re next,” he said.

“I’m afraid I’m not very good at this sort of thing.”

“That’s not possible. Nobody can be bad at it. The worse you are, the better they like it. Got a song ready?”

“I honestly can’t think of anything.” He drank some beer to hide his embarrassment.

CH3 dragged down the glass, and slopped beer. “Are you trying to tell me you’ve never sung a song in all your long and miserable life?”

Steele-Stebbing, mopping his wrists with his handkerchief, showed a tiny flash of anger. “There’s no need to make such a fuss,” he said. “If it makes you any happier I’ll sing The Red Flag.”

“Attaboy.” CH3 drank his beer. “Now get up there and knock ’em dead.”

But when Steele-Stebbing found himself up there with his feet on the ceiling he couldn’t think of the words of The Red Flag, so he sang The Eton Boating Song instead.

To his amazement they all joined in. Hardly anybody knew the words, but they la-la-ed lustily. Then they demanded an encore so he had to sing it again. He could see their mouths opening wide and closing, and their bodies swaying in time with the easy, infectious rhythm, everyone upside down. When they released him he was scarlet in the face, and his heart was walloping furiously. They cheered him as he stumbled down the stacked tables. His back was slapped and his hair was ruffled by cheerful strangers as he made his way to the bar.

“Well done,” the landlord said. “I always liked that tune. Very catchy.” Steele-Stebbing nodded. He discovered that he was grinning. It felt very odd.

Barton was still sitting on the top of the pyramid. His hands and face were more black than white. He was thinking: It’s simple, really. Not Flash. Not Pip. Not Moggy. Not Fitz, because Mary’s about to produce. “Hey, Mother!” he shouted. Cox climbed up and sat beside him. “How would you like to take over ‘B’ flight?” he asked.

Cox stared at him. He gestured theatrically, and sang: “I’d walk a million miles for one of those smiles …” Barton grabbed a handful of soot and smeared it over Cox’s face. Together they sang Mammy. The crowd joined in. Kellaway, Skull and the landlord joined in. Even Steele-Stebbing joined in. In a corner, Cattermole was fighting a Canadian Spitfire pilot who had tried to sabotage the pyramid, but nobody paid any attention to that.

At 6:20 a.m., Group scrambled two sections to patrol Dover-Ramsgate at fifteen thousand feet. Mother Cox led the patrol in Blue Section with Renouf as his number two, plus Pip Patterson and Fitz as Green Section.

They climbed through a screen of ten-tenths cloud at six thousand and found themselves in a skyscape of Alpine purity. The blue above looked freshly scrubbed, the white below rippled like a snowfield to the horizon. Cox inhaled deeply and swelled his chest, partly from pleasure, partly from pride. Hurricanes had always looked good to him: there was something slightly hunched about the fuselage, the way the engine sloped down to the prop, that gave the plane a poised and searching look. These Hurricanes looked even better to him now that he was leading them.

The controller sent them up to eighteen thousand, then to twenty-two thousand. Cox calculated when they were above Dover, and turned north. The cloud was now more than two miles below. It looked as flat and smooth as a bedsheet. It covered the Channel and London and reached far into the North Sea. Blue and Green Sections cruised at a couple of hundred miles an hour and made no visible progress at all. The world was vast and lovely and, apart from four Hurricanes, utterly empty.

After ten minutes, Cox reckoned they were over Ramsgate so he wheeled them around and flew south. It was cold at that height. His legs were getting chilled and stiff, and no matter how he adjusted his scarf, a bitter little draft kept finding his neck. He could see Fitz swinging his arms and beating his fists together while he gripped the stick with his legs. Not for the first time, Cox wondered why nobody had thought to put cockpit heating in the Hurricane.

Now that Snowball had got them up here, it seemed there was nothing to do.

They patrolled up and down for half an hour. Snowball kept in touch, but his transmissions became increasingly scratchy and sometimes they faded altogether. Cox worried: maybe he was drifting out of R/T range. Maybe there were strong winds at this height. Maybe he was getting blown out to sea. He called the others: “Stay awake, keep looking, watch your wingman, acknowledge.” They came back to him in turn: Blue Two, Green Leader, Green Two. He was thinking about fuel, converting gallons into time, time into distance. Snowball called and said something blurred about a bandit. Or maybe several bandits. Cox swore. Snowball had sounded urgent, but what the shit was he urgent about? “Snowball, this is Mango Blue Leader,” he said. “Your transmission garbled, say again please.” Snowball came back with a mouthful of broken biscuits.

“Anybody get any of that?” Cox asked.

“Sure,” Fitz answered. “He said Slush Flush Hush Slush Mush. And I agree with him.”

“Keep your eyes skinned,” Cox warned.

They turned again over Dover, or maybe it was Rotterdam, and steered north. A long way ahead, an aircraft emerged from the cloud and flew south, a tiny blemish traveling over the blanket of white.

Cox called Snowball and reported a bogey at angels eight. Snowball’s reply died of asthma. Cox gave up on Snowball, and wondered whether or not to go down. If they went down it would be a hell of a slog to get up again. The plane was a softly penciled cross that moved.

“Green to Blue,” Patterson said. “Bogey has twin engines.”

Everyone was looking down. Cox stared but he couldn’t see how many engines the damn thing had. He glanced up: left, right, behind. Empty sky. He checked time, speed, fuel; and he thought: Bloody stupid patrol. Dunno where we are, or why, or what that bastard is. He leaned forward and stared. Now he saw the twin engines, pin-heads on the tiny cross.

“Single fin,” Fitz said. “Could be a Ju-88.”

“Could be a Blenheim,” Cox said. “We’ll wait a bit.” Wait for what? he asked himself. There’s bugger-all up here. All the same he repeated his automatic scan. As he searched from left to right he saw Blue Two’s Hurricane drop a wing and lift its nose in a clumsy, sprawling, tail-dragging climb that could never succeed. Before Cox could touch his transmission switch the Hurricane had stalled and gone into a slow spin, flip-flopping down like an autumn leaf.

“Bandits at twelve o’clock!” someone shouted. Cox jerked his head to the front. Sunlight caught a row of prop-discs stuck on razor-thin wings. They magnified with startling speed into four Me-109’s, hurtling toward the Hurricanes at the same height. Before Cox could get his thumb on the gun-button the 109’s broke to their right, changing in a single flick from head-on silhouette to a flaring plan-view. “Tally-ho!” Cox shouted, too late because Fitz and Pip were already giving chase, but the tally-ho was the leader’s privilege and it might never come to him again …

They caught the 109’s quickly, and lost them even more quickly: almost instantly, in fact. For a couple of seconds Cox labored to drag his sights onto the enemy but the enemy drifted sideways amazingly fast, like a gull caught in a gale, and was lost. By now Cox’s Hurricane was steeply canted. The giant hand of centrifugal force pressed him solidly into his seat, and the horizon unreeled itself endlessly down his windscreen. Arms and legs were braced to force the most from the controls: his stomach muscles hardened, he sucked oxygen and gasped, but no matter how he worked he could feel the Hurricane losing its grip. It was drifting outward, skidding on the too-thin air that the German fighters grasped so easily. Cox’s eyes kept flickering toward his mirror. He knew what he was going to see but nevertheless his heart kicked painfully when the 109 edged into view. Its shape trembled furiously from the vibrations of the Hurricane, creating a sense of demoniac rage that brought Cox near to panic: he desperately wanted to jink and dodge, to escape this specter. Guns rattled and tracer raced above his starboard wing: a sighting shot. It was hugely tempting to reverse the turn, slam everything over, flip from one wingtip to the other—the worst possible move: reversing the turn took you clean across the enemy’s sights. Cox hunched himself, held his turn, prayed. Bits flew off his right wing, the plane felt as if it were being kicked by an enormous horse, Cox said to himself This can’t last, and it didn’t. His Hurricane took another vicious kick and flung itself onto its back. Cox snatched the column into his stomach in a yearning for height, but since he was inverted he dived instead. The 109 lost him.

It caught him again, a couple of thousand feet below. Cox pulled the tit and slammed the throttle through the gate but he couldn’t pull away from the Messerschmitt. His feet kept bashing the rudder-pedals, left-right, left-right. Like riding a bike, he thought stupidly; uselessly. Cramp suddenly knotted his right calf and the leg froze with pain. He forced it off the pedal and abandoned it to its agony while the left leg worked double-time. And eternally, it seemed, machine-guns rattled like noisemakers at a football match and tracer streamed around the zigzagging Hurricane. Cox felt bitter about his emergency boost, just when you needed the bloody thing it let you down. As if it heard him think, the Merlin started howling its head off and he remembered guiltily that emergency boost didn’t work above twelve or fourteen thousand. At the same time the controls felt a lot better, much keener, more responsive, so he took a deep breath and got both hands on the stick and pulled hard. The Hurricane bottomed out and bounced like a rubber ball. Just before Cox blacked out he glimpsed the 109, still diving.

When he could think again, his Hurricane was hanging on its prop, screaming and wondering whether to stall. He punched home the tit, throttled back and persuaded the plane to roll onto its back. Blood rushed to his brain and his vision cleared. What he saw was the bunch of 109’s diving and trailing smoke. He rolled level, searched for Hurricanes, and found two, far below him, circling a third. The third was on fire. It was making more smoke than seemed possible from one small aircraft.

By the time Cox descended they had all disappeared into cloud. When he came out below the cloud, the burning Hurricane was about to hit the sea and Nim Renouf was hanging in his parachute, about four minutes away from doing the same thing.

Cox went straight back up, switched to the Mayday channel and transmitted for a fix. Then he went down again, and they watched Renouf make his splash. The Kent coast was about ten miles away. No boats were near. Fuel was low. Cox made a pass over the yellow-and-white blob that was Renouf’s Mae West and face, and took his patrol home.

The doctor was a chubby, friendly, middleaged squadron leader called Hubbard. He had a large yellow notepad and several pencils but he never wrote anything. “And what do you think of the war?” he asked. He shut one eye and cocked his head as if he had put a tremendously tricky question.

“Oh, gosh,” Flash Gordon said. He was in his best uniform, sitting up straight, his eyes wide with interest. “Well, I agree with the Prime Minister, sir. The Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin. That’s what he said, and I think he’s right, don’t you?”

“You’ve seen quite a bit of the war already, haven’t you? Is it what you expected? Tell me your impressions.”

“Mmm.” Flash chewed his lower lip and concentrated hard. “If you ask me, sir, the whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.”

“And personally? How do you respond to the prospect of such bloodshed?”

“If we can stand up to him,” Flash declared, “all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad sunlit uplands.”

“After all,” Hubbard said sensibly, “the German pilots you blow to bits are probably just men like you, aren’t they?”

“But if we fail,” Flash told him, and shook his head grimly, “then the whole world will sink into the abyss of—”

“What I meant was—”

“If I might finish,” Flash said, leaning forward and raising a finger, “because I do think that this is a pretty crucial point: the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister by the lights of perverted science.” He sat back.

Hubbard fiddled with his pencils. “I’m no expert on fighter pilots,” he lied, “but I’m told that sometimes … well, the strain gets a bit much, and then a chap might need a spot of help … Mmm?”

Flash nodded. “I’ll keep a weather eye open, sir,” he said. “Anybody starts acting funny, you’ll be the first to know.”

Fitzgerald and Patterson each claimed a 109. Mother Cox was delighted. He had seen none of their part of the fight, but they told him that while one pair of 109’s concentrated on him (he was shocked to realize that he had never noticed the wingman in the background) the other pair had gone for Nim Renouf, obviously thinking he was easy meat. So Fitz and Pip had chased them off, or tried to, and anyway there was a hell of a scrap. Poor old Nim took a pasting but Fitz and Pip gave the Huns what-for and hit them where it hurt. When last seen they were going down with a great deal of smoke coming out and no hope of getting back to krautland this side of Christmas.

Nobody knew why Renouf suddenly went into a spin.

Skull finished scribbling his combat reports and went to phone Group.

“A” flight got scrambled at 10:15 and flew west along the coast, past Hastings, past Eastbourne, all the time being told to look out for a raid coming in across the Channel. Nothing appeared. They orbited Beachy Head for ten minutes. They were told the raid had turned back. They were to return to base. Halfway home they saw three Spitfires chase a very decrepit Dornier 17 out to sea and shoot it down. They landed after fifty wasted minutes, feeling disgusted. There was a message for Barton to call Brambledown.

It was Squadron Leader Hubbard. “I’ve had a good look at him,” Hubbard said. “He’s a peculiar fellow, isn’t he?”

“I could have told you that. Is he batty, though? That’s the point.”

“We had a long chat. About the war, and killing people, and so on. Not very productive, though. He kept quoting great chunks of Churchill’s speeches. Did he know I was coming to see him?”

Barton thought. Did he? “I suppose he could have guessed,” he said.

Hubbard grunted. “He must have swatted them up. The speeches, that is. I must say he spoke them very well.”

“But is he batty?”

Hubbard sighed. “I can’t go on record as saying that a pilot who quotes Churchill is ipso facto mentally unstable. I mean, a lot of people quote Churchill. On the other hand … Yes, of course, he’s batty. He’s completely off his rocker. If you ask your average fighter pilot what he thinks of the war he shuffles his feet and looks embarrassed and says well they started it, didn’t they? He doesn’t talk about the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister by the lights of perverted science.”

“Flash said that?” The more Barton thought about it, the funnier it seemed.

“I’m sending him back,” Hubbard said. “Keep him away from Downing Street and he should be all right”

Flash landed at Bodkin Hazel before lunch. With him came a new Hurricane flown by a replacement pilot, a naval sub-lieutenant. He had a remarkably smooth, pale face which tapered to a pointed chin. His hair was blond and glossy, his eyes were blue-gray and he seemed never to blink. Everything about him was neat and controlled.

“This is Quirk, sir,” Gordon said to Barton. “He’s a sailor. I swopped him for two bottles of rum.”

Quirk saluted. “Transferred from the Fleet Air Arm, sir,” he said.

“I hope you’ve done an operational conversion course,” Barton said sharply.

“Yes. Fifteen hours on Hurricanes.”

“Fifteen. Bloody hell … Did that include air firing?”

“Only once. I’m afraid they couldn’t spare more than a couple of hundred rounds, so I didn’t learn much.”

“God in heaven!” Barton spun his cap in the air and caught it. “You don’t know one end of a Hurricane from the other.”

“Let me see.” Quirk pointed at his plane. “The sharp end goes first, doesn’t it, sir?”

“I looked up ‘quirk’ in the dictionary,” Gordon said. “It says it means strange and fantastic behavior.”

“What were you flying in the Fleet Air Arm?” Barton asked.

“Stringbags, sir. That is, Swordfish.”

“You don’t mean that funny old biplane, with all the wires? Looks like something left over from the RFC? What does it do, flat-out?”

“The book says a hundred and thirty-odd knots, but frankly that’s rather optimistic. Say a hundred and twenty. Maybe a bit less with the torpedo underneath.”

Barton wasn’t listening. “Fifteen hours … Look, as soon as she’s refueled get back up there and stooge about, put in some practice. Use your guns. Try and shoot down some seagulls. Don’t worry about the bullets. If you see a Jerry, run away. No risks, understand? No heroics. Just … survive.”

“The Jerries are the ones with the crosses on, aren’t they?” Quirk said.

“They are if you see them in time,” Barton said. “If you don’t, then the cross is on you, chum. Incidentally,” he told Gordon, “Nim’s down in the drink. Somewhere off the North Foreland.”

“Oh dear. Poor Nim. You sailors know all about the sea,” Gordon said to Quirk. “Is that bit nice or nasty?”

Quirk shrugged. “What matters is your friend’s build. The fatter you are, the longer you survive.”

“Nim’s not fat. If anything, he’s thin.”

Quirk carefully avoided their eyes. “I’d better check my kite,” he said.

Nim Renouf woke when the cannonshells hit his engine. The crash of explosions made his eyes open and he got jolted further awake as the Hurricane bucked and bounced. Then an acrid stench reached his nose and he coughed himself fully conscious.

The first thing he saw was the altimeter. The hands shot past nine thousand and went spinning toward eight. He looked out of the cockpit and saw nothing but smoke; looked the other side and saw the horizon, also spinning but not so fast. The stink got suddenly worse, choking him, so he heaved on the canopy and amazingly it slid back as smooth as a sled. The air improved. Bullet-strikes pranced along the port wing, then sparkled on the engine, and a plane streaked beneath him, a blur that vanished.

Renouf felt awful. His ears ached, his head ached, his stomach was queasy, and this bloody lunatic airplane wouldn’t stop chucking him about. He got his feet on the pedals but there was no strength in his legs. He grabbed the stick. It slopped about like a spoon in a bowl, broken, useless. Dazzling cloud rushed up and drowned him in its murk.

It was easier to think when there was nothing to see. By the time he fell out of the cloud he knew he had to get out. The sight of the sea was discouraging, but when everything was going horribly wrong another disaster made little difference. Baling out was easy. He unplugged everything in sight and slid over the side.

Hanging under his parachute was wonderfully refreshing and restful. Everything was clean and quiet and comfortable. The sea was only a few hundred feet away when he fully realized what was about to happen to him and he began blowing up his Mae West. It was only half-inflated when he hit the water, awkwardly, and got a mouthful as he went under, a long way under, so far under that his lungs were hurting for air before his head bobbed up. No sky. Just clammy silk everywhere.

He swam clear of the parachute. That took a long time because he was still attached to the harness, but eventually he worked the release and escaped altogether. He trod water while he dragged off his gloves. Then he half-swam while he unzipped his boots and kicked them off. After all that, he had no breath left to finish blowing up his Mae West, but he had to keep swimming or the sodden weight of his Irvine jacket pulled him down.

The sea was much choppier than it looked from above, and the chop had a savage knack of finding his mouth. Ten minutes after the Hurricanes had gone, Nim Renouf was almost exhausted. Without actually deciding to do it, he floated on his back, kicking weakly. That was less tiring. He got some breath back. Once or twice a minute he managed to blow a good puff into his Mae West, until he risked letting his legs fall. The life jacket held his chin clear of the water. He relaxed.

There was nothing to do. He had a whistle, and he blew it once; it sounded puny and pointless. The water was cold. Not stinging-cold, as a bathe in the outdoor pool at his school had been, but numbing-cold: it drained the warmth from his body and left his limbs feeling bloodless. After a while he couldn’t move his legs, but that was all right: why move them anyway? Then, later, his arms hung like a dummy’s, and finally the wet cold reached deep into his body and sucked all the warmth from that. Renouf never saw the fishing boat that saw him. Another five minutes and it wouldn’t have mattered if the skipper had missed him, too. When they laid him on a bunk and stripped off his clothes, his body was colder than the fish in the ship’s hold.

By noon the cloud had rolled away eastward and the sun shone on Bodkin Hazel. Squads of airmen, stripped to the waist, sweated to dig trenches. Other squads filled sandbags and built aircraft bays near the perimeter. Several Fighter Command airfields had been shot-up, planes destroyed. During the morning there were two airraid warnings but nobody stopped work. The sky was rarely empty of aircraft, and once a Junkers 88 flew slap over the aerodrome at two hundred feet, so fast the ack-ack never even fired. Everyone was supposed to carry his gas-mask with him, and the pilots were told to keep their Colt revolvers handy at all times. Skull gave them a short lecture on anti-invasion precautions. “The enemy may try to land troops by glider,” he said, “which is why obstacles are being set up on all open land. If you have to put down on a field or at a strange airfield for any reason, watch out for poles or heaps of rocks or the like. If you make a forced landing anywhere, do not argue with the Home Guard. I have met some of them. They tend to be elderly and short-tempered. Often their aim is poor. Annoy them and they may fire a warning shot that hits you. Are there any questions?”