The MO told Rollo he was discharged, and gave him a small packet of pills. “Benzedrine,” he said. “Only if you go on ops, and then don’t take more than one. Are you familiar with this stuff?”
“Vaguely.”
The MO smiled: a rare sight. “Vague is not the word I’d choose. Benzedrine will make you so alert that you will amaze yourself with your sheer, staggering brilliance. Don’t take Benzedrine lightly. Or vaguely.”
Rollo emerged into the beginnings of a full-scale flap. After days of stand-downs and scrubs, ops were on again. Group wanted 409 to make a maximum effort. An attack by an entire squadron was rare. The Wingco decided to go on this one. Gilchrist was on leave, so he took over C-Charlie. Then his phone rang for the fiftieth time and he learned that Mr. Blazer was now fit to fly. Duff was pleased: a full squadron op, led by the CO! Just the occasion to be preserved on film for a grateful posterity. Always assuming any posterity would be left when this noisy carnage was over. He called Bellamy. “Find a kite for Blazer,” he said. “You know the drill. No plug-uglies, no stutterers, no maniacs.”
Bellamy had plenty of more important things to do. He ran through the list of pilots and eliminated most. He went to the remainder and tried to find a volunteer. He didn’t expect any great enthusiasm and he didn’t get any. As soon as a pilot said, “Personally, I’ve got nothing against the chap …” Bellamy knew what was coming: the other crew members thought Blazer would jinx the trip. Look what had happened to Polly Lomas. Bellamy was running out of names and hope when he saw Silk. “My crew all think he’s a Jonah,” Silk said, “but I don’t give a toss what they think. I’ll take him.”
“Good. Fine.” Bellamy looked him in the eyes and saw a kind of battered tranquility that worried him. “No tricks, Silko. No jokes.”
“I was never more serious in my life,” Silk told him. “As they say in the films.”
They found Rollo in the Mess, ordering a beer. “Forget that,” Bellamy said. “No alcohol before ops. I’ve got you a place in D-Dog tonight.”
Rollo’s stomach muscles clenched. “Lucky me,” he said. He had persuaded himself that he was brave, but now they were rushing him into it and he knew he was frightened of flying. His mouth seemed to be full of saliva. Even his body was betraying him.
“Grab your hat,” Silk said. “We’re doing an NFT.”
“Haven’t got a hat.” Rollo looked around for rescue.
“Night-Flying Test,” Bellamy said.
“I know what it means.” They outnumbered him.
“D’you want a parachute?” Silk asked. “If it doesn’t work, you take it back and they give you another.” He gently steered Rollo out of the room. “Very old joke, that. Past its best.”
Half an hour later, Rollo was sitting behind the main spar, sweating inside his flying clobber, looking at D-Dog shaking as if it was as frightened as he was. The front gunner was sitting beside him, reading a paperback western. Half its cover had been torn off. All that Rollo could see of the title was Gulch. It was like the inside of this Wimpy: slapdash, disorderly, cluttered. Everywhere he looked, bits of equipment were fixed to the sides and the roof. Behind them ran cables, tubes, wires. Even ropes. What were ropes doing in a bomber? The engines went from a roar to a howl. Rollo went from a sitting to a fetal position, hugged his parachute, closed his eyes. He knew D-Dog was moving. By closing his eyes really tightly and curling his toes, he was helping to keep the airplane in one piece. Forget it. Wasted effort. D-Dog was too heavy to take off. He opened his eyes. The bumps got harder. The gunner turned a page. Rollo started counting the seconds. He was going to die, so he was entitled to know exactly how long he’d lived. Then the awful thumping bouncing stopped, the engine note sweetened, and he realized that, for the first time in his life, he was flying.
Soon, the gunner stuffed his book in a pocket and went forward.
Rollo felt proud and ashamed at the same time: proud because he had conquered flight, and ashamed because he knew he should have done it long ago. Kate was right. This was the guts of the film. The rest was just trimmings. D-Dog was the hero. It was up to him to capture the courage.
He climbed over the main spar and stood behind the pilots. The noise was appalling.
After a while, the second pilot, Mallaby, noticed him and showed him where to plug in his intercom lead. At once the awful roar receded to a noise like surf. Then he heard Silk say: “Welcome to the office. That’s Newmarket below.” His voice was thin.
Rollo glanced down. Ah yes. Pretty little toytown. Piece of cake. “I never thought the noise would be such a problem,” he said. Mallaby reached up and turned the intercom switch on Rollo’s oxygen mask. “Bloody noisy, isn’t it?” Rollo said.
“The Pegasus-eighteen engine delivers nine hundred and twenty-five horsepower, and we have two of them, each about six feet from the cockpit. But really, the worst noise comes from the prop tips.” Silk pointed to the shimmering disc just to the left of his head. “They’re about two feet from my ear, at their closest. Spinning awfully fast, too.” He waved at the instrument panel. “One of these dials tells us how fast, I forget which. Second pilot probably knows.”
“Oh, fearfully fast,” Mallaby said.
“But we’re quite safe,” Silk said. “The props hardly ever break. Anyway, Dog’s covered in cloth, so that will protect us.”
Rollo was only half-listening. He was more interested in the way Silk used one hand to hold his oxygen mask over his mouth, in order to speak into his microphone. “I can’t see your lips when you do that,” he said.
“You won’t hear my voice if I don’t.”
“The point is, I don’t see how I can film any chat between you two if half your mouth is covered up.”
“The cockpit’s not a chatty place,” Mallaby said. The intercom accentuated his Australian accent. “And when we go on oxygen you won’t see anything except the eyes.”
“He has wonderfully expressive eyes,” Silk said. “They speak volumes.”
Rollo decided to leave the chat problem until later. “Is it all right if I take a look around the kite?”
Mallaby unstrapped himself and led the way. It was a short tour. Forward, and below the cockpit level, was the bomb aimer’s position, looking down through a window in the floor. Good close-up possibilities here, Rollo thought, provided the scene could be lit. But the front gunner’s position was out of sight, sealed off by a metal bulkhead. Mallaby opened it. The gunner and his guns filled the space, and a gale whistled through slots in the Perspex where the barrels poked out. Poor show. They went back, down the cluttered fuselage, past the navigator at his desk and the wireless op at his set. Essential jobs, but not exciting. The rear gunner was also invisible behind a steel bulkhead. And that was that. There was a bed to sit on. Mallaby returned to his office. Rollo sat on the bed and worried. Sometimes D-Dog flexed slightly, or twisted a little. Normally that would have frightened him. He ignored it. He had all the anxiety he could handle.
Rollo held a post mortem in Squadron Leader Bellamy’s office. Kate and Silk were there; also the Engineer Officer.
Rollo said the difficulties of filming inside D-Dog made it impossible to follow his draft script, or indeed anybody’s script. Dialogue in the cockpit was out of the question. Further back, the nav and the wireless op could make themselves heard, but only if they shouted, and you couldn’t have people shouting all through a film.
“There must be a solution,” Kate said. She was no longer angry with Rollo. He’d been ill, fevered, confused. They were a team again; it was time to behave professionally. “I’ve seen flying films where they have dialogue in the cockpit. Some guy comes in and tells the pilot the radio’s bust and the pilot says do your best. They talk all the time.”
“Not in a Wimpy,” Silk said.
“I couldn’t hear myself speak,” Rollo said. “Those engines just beat your voice to death.”
“Well, that’s what the intercom’s for,” the Engineer Officer said.
“Everybody sounds thin on the intercom,” Rollo complained. “Can’t you make them deeper? More masculine?”
Bellamy had an idea. “Why don’t you forget the voices? Film the op, and then employ a commentator to describe what’s happening.”
Rollo scowled. “Might as well have captions, for Christ’s sake.” Bellamy was offended. He remembered some urgent business, and left.
Kate pointed out that it was intercom dialogue or nothing. Rollo pointed out that he couldn’t shoot film and record sound off the intercom. “Then I’ll do the sound,” she said. “That’s what I’m here for.” They both looked at Silk.
“Suits me,” Silk said. “If that’s what you want.” Now they all looked at the Engineer Officer. “Leave me out of this!” he said. “It’s illegal, it’s dangerous, and I’m going to have a pee.”
While he was out of the room, they made the decision. She wouldn’t be the first woman to go on an op, Silk said. Many a Waaf had been smuggled into a Wimpy by her boyfriend. Everyone knew it happened. As long as nothing went wrong, nobody kicked up a fuss.
The Engineer Officer came back. “We decided against it,” Silk said.
“I knew you would.”
“Next item,” Rollo said. “Oxygen masks.” But there was to be no answer to that problem. The mike was in the mouthpiece of the mask, for obvious reasons. There was nothing to be done about the cramped shape of the cockpit, either, or the impossibility of getting a camera inside the gun turrets. Rollo hated abandoning the guns; they were his only chance of capturing real, close-up, explosive action. “Couldn’t I shoot over the gunner’s shoulder as he lets fly at something?” he pleaded.
“All you’ll get is a lot of dazzle. The turret’s pitch-black.”
“We could fix up a little interior light.”
“No fear. I’m not illuminating my turrets for the benefit of a Jerry night fighter.”
Rollo had intended to ask for brighter lights inside the fuselage, and some tiny spotlights on the pilots’ faces, but he knew when to quit. “I guess I’ll just have to grab whatever I can get,” he said.
“Look on the bright side,” Silk said.
Rollo tried, and failed. “What bright side?”
“Port or starboard, take your pick, over the target. They chuck fireworks up, we chuck fireworks down, and nobody gets a wink of sleep.”
“You might find this useful,” the Engineer Officer said. He gave Kate an empty paint tin. “It’s a long trip.”
“Ah. How kind.”
“Not at all. When necessary, it can be emptied down the flare chute.”
“If you put out our incendiaries,” Silk said, “the crew will never forgive you.”
David Butt’s handwriting was neat and legible. His draft report was quite short. Constance Babington Smith read it; then re-read it.
“If Bomber Command sees this,” she said thoughtfully, “they’ll shoot you.”
He fingered the lobe of his left ear, and did not seem alarmed.
“And they’ll miss you by a mile, if what you claim is true,” she said.
“Fact is fact,” he said.
“Yes, I agree. However, this report is a cookie, isn’t it? And I’m trying to imagine what happens when you drop a cookie on the C-in-C, Bomber Command.”
“Good point. What do you think the response will be?”
“I think that blast waves will rock High Wycombe, shake the corridors at Air Ministry, and play merry hell with the War Cabinet.”
“Quite possibly. It’s all out of my hands.”
For a moment they looked at each other. It was a curious occasion, possibly unique: two youngish, good-looking people, each highly expert but in different fields, each talking quietly and rationally about something which only they knew; something that would affect the course of a world war. “Is there anything more I can do?” she asked.
“I’m hugely obliged to you already. I couldn’t have got this far without the help of your Section. Essentially, mine is a statistical investigation. It all comes down to numbers. I’d be grateful if you would scrutinize my calculations and tell me if I’ve misplaced the decimal point.”
He went for a walk in the grounds. He was dead-heading a rose bush when she came out and gave him the pages. “All correct,” she said.
Butt drove back to London, to his office in the War Cabinet Secretariat. In an hour he had a perfectly typed copy of his report.
He checked it twice, and went down the corridor and knocked on the door of Lord Cherwell, who was his boss and Churchill’s Scientific Adviser. Cherwell had only recently been ennobled. He was better known as Professor Lindemann.
A lot of reports landed on Lindemann’s desk. Long experience had taught him that the pages to look at were the first and the last. The first told you the purpose and the last told you the conclusions.
Page one said that Butt’s report concerned his statistical investigation of RAF bombing of Germany on forty-eight nights between June 2 and July 25, 1941. He had examined one hundred separate raids on twenty-eight different targets. He had studied six hundred and fifty photographs taken during night operations, as well as operational summaries of Intelligence reports, and other information.
Lindemann turned to the conclusions. He raised one eyebrow, but only briefly.
Lindemann was a hard man. He understood flying. For twenty-five years he had studied aeronautics, and that included a spell as a test pilot. Without doubt he was a brilliant scientist, but he combined brilliance with a harsh and intolerant manner. He was often dismissive of other scientists, even contemptuous, if he disagreed with them. Now he gave Butt, who was half his age, the cold stare that might mean anything.
“Mr. Butt,” he said. “So that there may be no doubt in anybody’s mind, least of all the Prime Minister’s … Your principal conclusion is that when Bomber Command attacked a target, two out of three aircraft failed to get within five miles of that target.”
“Average figure for Europe, sir. Not all targets were in Germany.”
“So I see. Targets in France produced better results, you say. Two out of three bombers got within five miles. But over Germany, results were worse. Only one bomber in four got within five miles. Do I understand you correctly? This is what you claim your investigations have found?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And over the Ruhr …” Lindemann leaned back and gazed at the ceiling light for several seconds. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “Over the Ruhr, you say that only one bomber in ten got within five miles of its target.”
“Again, an average figure, sir.”
“Average. So it was sometimes less than one in ten?”
“When the moon was new and haze was thick, the proportion was one in fifteen, sir. Given full moon and no haze, it improved considerably. However, with the increasing intensity of anti-aircraft fire, the proportion worsened. The figures are on page seven, sir.”
“I am to inform the Prime Minister that, for as long as the RAF has been sending aircraft to bomb Germany, three out of four bombers have failed to find—let alone hit—their target. That is what you wish me to say, is it?”
Butt thought fast, and decided that he wasn’t going to be bullied by Lindemann. “I’m not competent to suggest what you should tell the Prime Minister, sir. But I think you should know that the full story of Bomber Command’s effectiveness is worse than those figures indicate.”
Lindemann flicked through the pages. “Over Europe, two out of three bombers fail to reach their target. Over Germany, three out of four. Over the Ruhr, nine out of ten. How can the picture be any worse, Mr. Butt?”
“Sir, my investigation concerned the number of aircraft that were recorded by Bomber Command as having attacked their primary target. But on those raids, Bomber Command sent many aircraft which did not claim to have attacked their targets. I examined one hundred raids. Bomber Command sent a total of just over six thousand aircraft on those raids. Just over two thousand reported that they failed to reach the target, and so they were not included in my study. If we add to my findings this additional one third of all aircraft dispatched—those which, by their own account, did not attack—then the conclusion must be that, of the total aircraft dispatched, only one fifth reached their target. Therefore …” Butt stopped. Lindemann had raised a hand.
“Enough, Mr. Butt. In a nutshell: of every hundred British bombers that took off, twenty bombed the target and eighty failed. That’s what you’re saying.”
Butt thought: You don’t trap me like that. “My brief did not include the actual bombing of the target, sir.”
“If they reached it, why wouldn’t they bomb it?”
“Sir, for the purpose of my investigation, the target area was defined as having a radius of five miles. This amounts to an area of over seventy-five square miles. Any bomb that fell inside that area was considered to have hit the target area.”
“Seventy-five square miles,” Lindemann said. “A very large city.”
“Only Berlin covers such an area, sir.”
“Which means any other target area must consist of … what?”
“Largely of open country, sir.”
“Fields.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Bomber Command has been killing cows.”
Butt hesitated. He knows, anyway, he thought. “And aircrew, sir,” he said.
“Thank you, Mr. Butt. We are all in your debt.”
Butt went out. Lindemann weighed the report in his hand. “High explosive,” he said aloud.
Kate and Rollo attended the briefing. By now they were a familiar presence.
The target was Hanover.
Nobody cheered, but there was a slight feeling of relaxation. It could have been worse. It could have been the Ruhr, or a long haul like Frankfurt or Mannheim. Hanover was only about a hundred miles from the German coast. It meant a long slog across the North Sea, but 409 was accustomed to that.
The briefing followed its usual pattern. It would be a biggish raid: sixty Wellingtons and thirty Hampdens. Hanover contained several factories that were crucial to the German war machine and it was an important communications center. The Aiming Point was the railway station, easily identified because the Masch See, a lake more than a mile long and shaped rather like a Yale key, pointed toward it. The Met man said there was a fifty-fifty risk of some electrical storm activity over the North Sea but it was moving away northwards and should be replaced with clear skies. “The predicted winds …” he announced and waited while they chanted their reply, before he said, “Are southwesterly over Germany, thirty knots, becoming westerly, twenty knots, for your return over the North Sea. No fog is expected.” The Wingco warned them to be ready for heavy light flak and couldn’t understand why they laughed. The group captain told them this was a chance to give Hitler a bloody nose, so strike hard. Good luck. And that was that.
The room emptied, until only Silk and Skull were left. Skull was collecting maps and photographs and Intelligence summaries.
“You remember the lovely Zoë? Langham’s popsy?” Silk said. “You went to one of their parties.”
“No.”
“Oh. Stupid of me. Of course, you weren’t at Kindrickj were you? The thing is, Zoë turned up here last week, looking for me so she said, and that was very enjoyable, up to a point. Now she’s gone back to London, but I can’t get her out of my mind. Maybe I ought to ask her to marry me. What d’you think?”
“Ask her.” Skull rolled up a map and slipped a rubber band around it.
“Trouble is, she’s such a terrible liar.”
“The truth is rationed like margarine nowadays. Was this briefing honest? Are the interrogations honest? Is the man Blazer honest? He lives in a world of make-believe. Are you honest?”
Silk wondered. “Up to a point,” he said. He watched Skull cram papers into a file. Some got torn. “Well, I’d better push off,” he said. “Thanks for the advice.”
“I was lying,” Skull said. “Not that it matters.”
Engines were briefly tested sixty minutes before takeoff. After that, crews had to wait at their airplane. With nothing left to do, it was the worst hour of the day. Most men sat or lay on the grass, saying very little, thinking too much, some wondering how they came to volunteer for such a bitch of a job, and all pushing to the backs of their minds the knowledge that it was a stone-cold certainty someone, maybe not on this squadron, but someone, somewhere, was going to get the chop before tomorrow. It was a long hour that felt like punishment for no offense. Even Silk was subdued. And then, while nobody was looking, the minutes had sneaked by and the first engines fired. None of D-Dog’s crew moved.
After a while, with engines all along dispersal joining in, Rollo asked Silk why he wasn’t starting-up.
“Dog’s last in the queue. I’m not going to waste fuel and risk overheating the engines.”
“Last? I thought everyone took off in alphabetical order.”
“We’re carrying the cookie. The four-thousand-pounder. It makes sense for us to go last.” He stretched and yawned. “Pug Duff would never speak to me again if Dog fell on her face halfway down the flare-path and ruined the grass.” He strolled away.
Rollo went to Kate. She was bundled up in flying gear, all of it scrounged by Silk, and the warmth had made her drowsy. “Wake up,” he said. How could she sleep at a time like this? “We’re carrying the cookie. It’s a bomb as big as a bus.”
“I know. Micky Mallaby told me.”
He found the second pilot admiring the sunset. “This cookie we’ve got on board,” he said. “Why hasn’t everyone got one?”
“Most of the Wimpys haven’t been adapted yet. Their bomb-bays aren’t big enough. Haven’t you seen a cookie? It looks like two big dustbins welded together, end to end.”
“I should have been told. I could have filmed it.”
“Dunno anything about that, mate. Ask Woody. He’s got to drop the bloody thing.”
The crew were drifting toward the bomber. Rollo, now beginning to be excited by the news, intercepted Woodman. “This cookie will make a hell of a bang, won’t it?” he asked. “I mean to say, four thousand pounds of TNT, that’ll blow the railway station to bits, won’t it?”
“If we hit it. A cookie’s not a real bomb. It hasn’t got a tail. It’s got the ballistic properties of a brick shit-house. Might go anywhere. I’ll be pleased if it lands within a mile of the AP.”
Rollo was discouraged, but not for long. When he was sitting next to Kate, behind the main spar, and D-Dog was taxying along the perimeter track, he said: “If I can catch this cookie when it explodes, we could have the perfect climax. It’ll look like the crack of doom.” He was so excited that he forgot to clench his toes when Silk took Dog roaring down the flare-path and, creaking and groaning under its load, into the early night.
There was still some light at four thousand. Rollo leaned into the cockpit and filmed Silk flying Dog. He shot the shimmer of a prop disc and changed focus to get the English coastline, far below. He thought the surf looked like toothpaste and the sea looked like oilskin. Black oilskin. Ten seconds of that was plenty.
Kate was taking a feed from the intercom and playing it straight onto the soundtrack. Rollo persuaded Silk and Mallory to say something technical, so they exchanged a few words about keeping an eye on the cylinder-head temperatures. When they finished, the nav gave Silk a new course: eighty-four degrees. Silk did something to the compass, and told everyone to watch out for night fighters. Rollo was pleased. It all added up to a nice little sequence: D-Dog, off to war.
He had seen the map; he knew that crossing the North Sea would take about two hours. No point in carrying a heavy camera all that way, so he put it in its bag. Already his knees ached slightly, from constant bending in order to soften the bumps and dips of flying. D-Dog was not a perfect platform for a cameraman.
At six thousand, and still climbing, Silk switched on the autopilot. Rollo took great interest. Outside, it was night; the only light in the cockpit came from the dials and gauges, a dim green glow, not enough to let him shoot this scene. Some other time, he thought.
Silk kept his hands on his thighs, and he never stopped checking the instrument panel. “This is just testing,” he told Rollo. “I don’t trust George. George is a treacherous bastard. He’s liable to go haywire, and then if you don’t disengage him fast, he’ll kill you. That’s why we keep a fire ax here.” He pointed to the ax, at the second pilot’s side.
“If George gets the hump, I chop through his hydraulics,” Mallaby said. “Cut his bloody head off.”
“Crikey,” Rollo said. It seemed a feeble comment.
He watched the wheel on the control column turn an inch or so, one way or the other. Sometimes the stick wandered back and forth. The rudder bar was rarely still. “George is a bit restless, isn’t he?” he asked.
“No, that’s Dog. She’s a typical Wimpy, always bending and stretching. It affects the control runs. That’s the cables going out to the wings and back to the tail. Dog twists, the controls move, George corrects. Busy man, George.”
“It’s what makes the Wimpy so tough,” Mallaby said. “She’s all basket-weave. Alloy basketweave. The strength is in the shape. You can’t break her back because she hasn’t got a spine. Bloody clever.”
“But she does fidget,” Silk said. “Isn’t that right, Chubby?”
“Right, Skip,” the rear gunner said. “She likes to wag her tail.”
“She does it to keep you awake.”
“It’s like a fairground ride back here.”
“Chubby’s always on the qui vive,” Silk said to Rollo. “I know because every time he rotates his turret, his guns act as a little rudder and Dog does a little shimmy. And that’s enough of George.” He disengaged the autopilot. “I haven’t got time to do that if we get jumped by a Hun.”
Rollo watched his face. Silk’s eyes were always moving. He had a routine: he looked at the compass; then at the airspeed indicator; at the horizon; at the moon, which was just rising; at the sea; at other instruments, oil pressures, maybe, or fuel gauges, or engine temperatures; then back to the compass again. An endless check. And the op had only just begun. Rollo felt tired. He went back to the rest bed and sat beside Kate. All the interior lights had been dimmed until they were soft sparks in the dark. That must be how Silk wanted it.
He put his mouth close to her ear and shouted: “I could do with some coffee.”
She shouted back: “No coffee until we reach the North Sea on the way home. Otherwise—bad luck.”
Bloody hell, he thought. Already she knows more than me. Soon they climbed above eight thousand and everyone was on oxygen and the camera crew had nothing to do but look at the blackness and endure the bumps and shudders and the taste of wet rubber.
Group Captain Rafferty had a good dinner: brown Windsor soup, lamb stew with roast potatoes and leeks, apple pie and custard. He knew it was going to be a long night. Rafferty had a big body; it needed plenty of fuel. He had a second helping of apple pie.
409 Squadron would still be outward bound, over the North Sea. Rafferty left the Mess and looked at the weather. Ten thousand stars and not one wisp of mist. Good. Don’t let me down tonight, he told the sky, not with a maximum effort in the air. Somewhere near Hanover, five hundred miles away, his opposite number in a Luftwaffe night fighter base was probably looking at the same stars and having similar thoughts. Well, you started it, chum, Rafferty told him. Now watch Bomber Command finish it. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed a shooting star come and go so fast that if you blinked, you missed it. Rafferty wasn’t a poetic man but he thought he’d witnessed something symbolic, if only he could put words to it.
No, that was hopeless. He went indoors and found the adjutant. They went to a quiet corner of the anteroom and played drafts for a shilling a game. Uncle was good at drafts. Not slapdash, but he didn’t brood either. Made his move, liked to attack. Rafferty approved of that. He lost seven shillings, fought back and was a shilling up, and then they decided to have a coffee break. “Bring some for Mr. Skelton too,” Rafferty told the Mess servant. To Uncle he said, “He’s been waiting nearly an hour for us to finish playing. Too well-mannered to interrupt, of course. My compliments to Mr. Skelton,” he said to the servant, “and would he be so kind as to join us.”
Skull sat at their table. He had a large buff envelope. They each made the usual polite remarks. The weather was praised. Coffee came.
Rafferty felt unusually friendly toward Skull. He still regarded him as part of the furniture, like all Intelligence Officers, useful but not essential; somewhere between catering and accounts. However, the man had been plucky enough to go on an op, which meant he’d had a whiff of grapeshot, whatever that might be, so he wasn’t a dead loss. “GreenwelPs Glory,” he said. “Remember that afternoon, Skull? You and your trout flies really bamboozled that dreadful brigadier. Best bit of Intelligence work you’ve done.”
“Thank you, sir. If my best contribution is to recognize trout flies, my efforts here would seem to be wasted.”
“It was a joke, old boy. Uncle was amused. Laugh, Uncle.”
“Ha ha,” the adjutant said. “Ho ho.”
“There you are. Relax, Skull. Loosen your stays.”
“Was this a joke, sir?” Skull took three big photographs from his envelope and spread them on the table. “The Essen raid,” he said. They were night shots, taken by the flash of a flare from a bomber. Written across each of them in red Chinagraph was a single word: Unacceptable.
“Pug Duff’s writing,” the adjutant said.
“What does he mean?” Rafferty asked. “The print’s no good, or he doesn’t like what’s on it?”
“The latter,” Skull said. “I asked him why, and he said they don’t provide a true picture of bombing by 409 and the photographs must not be sent to Group.”
Rafferty put his glasses on and picked up a print. “Where’s the target?” he said. “I can’t see much detail. Is it blurred?”
“The target isn’t there,” Skull said. “There’s no detail on that picture because it’s mostly farmland. Pasture. Some forest.”
Rafferty studied the other two prints. “Plenty of built-up areas here. Flak, too. Are those bomb-bursts?”
“Yes, sir. But not on Essen. This photograph was taken over Dorsten, a small town about twenty miles northeast of Essen. The other shows Solingen, another small town about twenty-five miles south of Essen.”
“And you suspect the worst,” Rafferty said.
“If those three Wellingtons hit Dorsten, Solingen and a field, they didn’t hit Essen, sir, no matter what the CO decides.”
“Don’t rush your fences, old chap,” the adjutant said. He stretched his legs and waggled his feet. “One thing I’ve learned about war is never to assume that anything will work as planned, especially the equipment. How do we know that those cameras did their stuff properly?” He searched for his tobacco pouch. “Maybe the Wimpys bombed Essen but the cameras clicked five minutes too late. A Wimpy can be twenty miles away in five minutes.”
“Or maybe they were five minutes too early,” Rafferty suggested.
The adjutant pointed his pipe at Skull. “Never underestimate the power of the cock-up,” he said.
“On that basis, sir, we might as well disregard all photographs.”
Rafferty gave his most paternal smile. “I wouldn’t lose a moment’s sleep if you did. I’ll tell you what would upset me, Skull, and what I won’t tolerate for an instant, and that’s any chivvying and harassing of a crew because a photograph is at odds with their report. Those boys have been through seventeen different types of hell, all night long, they may have seen their comrades killed, and they don’t deserve to face hostile questioning when what they really need is to have their morale reinforced.”
“You should know that, Skull,” the adjutant said. “It’s, no picnic over Germany, is it?”
“None of that is relevant to the question of accuracy,” Skull insisted. “We can’t award a crew a direct hit on the target because we feel they deserve it, can we? Oh, Christ …” He paused, and took a deep breath. “This is exactly what got me kicked out of Fighter Command.”
“You’re rambling, old chap,” Rafferty said. “It’s that knock on the head you got over Essen.”
“It was a nose-bleed.”
“Have a nap,” the adjutant advised. He was setting up the drafts board. “You’ve been overdoing it again.”
D-Dog was the last Wellington to leave Coney Garth, so by the time she reached the German coast the others had stirred up the defenses. Badger, in Dog’s front turret, had no need to say, “Enemy coast ahead.” Searchlights told that story. But he said it anyway. Being the first to spot landfalls was one of the few rewards of sitting in the coldest place in the aircraft. Silk acknowledged. “Looks like Borkum, skip,” Badger said. His voice was as light as a plowboy’s.
Rollo felt stiff in the limbs and thick in the head. Kate was leaning against him, half-asleep. He saw Woodman get up from the nav’s table and go forward. He shook Kate. They stumbled after Woodman, climbed over the main spar and re-plugged their intercoms. Now the cockpit area was very crowded. Woodman made space for them and pointed down. “See that island? Shaped like a V? That’s Borkum. Good pinpoint. Tells us we’re on track.”
Rollo looked at the altimeter: over thirteen thousand feet. He looked again at Borkum. It was like a collar stud on a carpet. There were searchlights ahead, so the real coastline couldn’t be far away. That might be worth filming. He fetched the camera from his bag, checked that it was loaded, no hairs in the lens, all correct, and by the time he got back to the cockpit the airplane was vibrating brutally. It was like being inside a bass drum on a bandstand.
He waited. Maybe this would pass. It got worse. He put the camera to his eye and everything was a fine blur. The thin sticks of searchlights were fat and fuzzy. He put the camera down and plugged in his intercom. “Why is everything shaking?” he asked.
“I de-synchronized the engines,” Silk said. “They’re not making the same revs. Not speaking the same language.”
“It buggers up Jerry’s sound locators,” Mallaby said.
“De-synch is good for your health,” Silk said.
“It’s shaking the fillings out of my teeth,” Rollo said. “I can’t hold the camera still.”
“Let it shake, then,” Mallaby said. “Shoot the truth.”
Was that a joke? Rollo couldn’t tell. Both pilots were wearing their goggles, so he couldn’t even see their eyes. He gave Kate a thumbs-down. By now Dog was over the mainland and searchlights were swinging briskly, prodding corners of the sky, standing still as if they had lost interest, then suddenly hunting again. The flak was colorful, more like festival celebrations than high explosive. Lights pulsed from the ground, red and yellow, some green; they were in no hurry until their final rush. Dog was above much of this, but plenty of star-shaped explosions reached her level. One of them burst alongside, maybe a hundred yards away, and Dog caught the fringe of the blast and lurched. Silk lost height and swung onto a new course. Rollo got a glimpse of more shellbursts, high up where they would have been. Then Dog was through the coastal belt. Silk pushed up his goggles, and synchronized the engines. They ran as smoothly as sewing machines. Rollo stopped grinding his teeth. But now he could see nothing but night: nothing worth filming.
Kate tapped him on the shoulder and led him back to the nav position. They plugged in and she pointed at Woodman’s map of northern Germany. “Worth a few feet of film?” she said. The map was marked with patches of red, and Woodman had plotted a twisting course to avoid them.
“Defended areas,” Woodman said. “Emden, Oldenburg, Bremen, Osnabruck, and a few Luftwaffe fields here and there. Not a good idea to fly straight to Hanover.”
“Can you say something about that to the pilot?”
“He knows already.”
“Well, tell him anyway.”
Rollo filmed the navigator, full figure, hard at work; then head and shoulders, turning his intercom switch, saying: “Hello, skip. We’d better fly a zigzag course, to miss the places where we know Jerry’s got a lot of flak batteries and searchlights.”
“What a bloody boring idea,” Silk said. “I think I’ll go down and strafe a few hospitals.”
“Don’t worry,” Kate told Woodman. “We can edit that out.”
“Now point at the map,” Rollo said. “Follow the zigzag with your finger. Slowly.” He filmed the navigator’s hand in close-up.
Another little sequence in the can.
Every few minutes, Woodman gave Silk a change of course. Rollo went to the cockpit a couple of times. He saw searchlights in the far distance and what might have been flak twinkling, but he knew it would be a waste of film. A lot of cloud was building up, white as cauliflower in the moonlight. The flak would look like stars and the searchlights would look like cracks in somebody’s blackout. He went back to the bed. His feet were cold and he was afraid to stamp them. The cookie was only inches beneath his boots.
He could feel this opportunity slipping away from him. No chance to film the enemy coast, or the belt of lights and guns behind it. Unable to film the all-important faces of the crew. Not allowed in the gun turrets. What was left? Flak over Hanover: presumably that would be highly filmable, unless Silk desynchronized again. As for the climax, dropping the cookie, he suddenly realized he wouldn’t see it leave Dog, wouldn’t see it fall, might not see it explode if a wing obscured his view. Then what? A long trudge home, also in blackness. Rollo felt cramp in his left calf. His parachute harness was too tight in the crotch. The awful truth came to him: bomber ops were not necessarily exciting. They were endlessly threatening and frightening and difficult, but the drama was all in the danger and the danger was hidden by the night. You had to fly on ops to know the fear of sudden death, and he couldn’t film fear. With everyone wearing oxygen masks, he couldn’t even film the look of fear. He’d drawn a double blank. That was when Chubb, in the rear turret, said: “Fighter behind.”
Silk said, “Which side?”
“Port quarter, a thousand feet below. Five hundred yards away. He’s climbing, in and out of cloud, skip.”
“Wireless op to the astrodome,” Silk said. “Search starboard, Mac”
“On my way, skip.”
Silence for half a minute. Silk had dropped the left wing a bit to give the rear gunner a better view. “Lost him, skip,” Chubb said, and immediately shouted, “Fighter! Turn starboard!” but before Silk could swing the Wellington, Chubb was firing and the harsh chatter of his guns cut through the engine-roar. Then nothing. Rollo stood and cursed. Here was battle, behind closed doors. “He’s buggered off, skip,” Chubb said. “Dived away. I scared him.”
“Where there’s one, there’s two,” Silk said. “Keep searching to starboard, Mac”
Campbell was standing on a box, with his head in the astrodome, just like the dome on top of the flare-path caravan. All it needs is a tiny spotlight on his face, Rollo thought. Make a hell of a shot. Also a hell of a target. Another example of Blazer’s Law of Bomber Ops. If it’s worth filming, you can’t see it.
“Some bastard’s out there, skip,” Campbell said. “Maybe one of ours, maybe not. He’s following us. Starboard quarter.”
“Don’t like it,” Silk said. “We’ll run away and hide.”
He turned toward a sprawling, top-heavy cloudbank. He put the nose down a touch, opened the throttles an inch, and drove into a bleak and gloomy fog. Now he was flying on instruments alone. He sent Campbell back to his radio.
Woodman kept feeding course adjustments. “Twenty-five minutes to target,” he said. Silk thanked him. Kate, lying on the bed and dreaming of hot soup, was impressed by everybody’s calmness. They were as matter-of-fact as if they were delivering coal in Camberwell. Rollo stood and watched the nav draw neat lines and make tidy calculations. There was nothing else to watch. The floor suddenly slanted and he fell to his knees. Kate rolled off the bed. Woodman was grabbing his pencils and maps. In the cockpit, Silk and Mallaby were flung against their straps as the Wimpy plunged into a hole, hit bottom and was kicked sideways. Silk labored and won back some control but she still kept bouncing and plunging. They knew what was wrong. Cumulo-nimbus cloud was full of tortured air. The Met man had predicted a risk of electrical storms over the North Sea. He’d got the risk right but the place wrong: the storms were still over Germany. Lightning flashes were making the cloud bright. The electrical discharge swamped Dog from end to end and filled her with a pale glow. This was St. Elmo’s Fire, and the crew had experienced it before, but never so intensely. A blue flame danced from every external point. The propellers were brilliant with multicolored light; they spun like Catherine wheels. The gunners were looking at flames a yard long sparking between their sights. In the cockpit the instruments were drunk and incapable. That was when lightning struck Dog.
Kate, flat on the floor, was convinced the bang and the flash had broken the Wimpy in half. But when she could see again, Dog was still in one piece, still being bucked and kicked by the cu-nim. Parts of the radio were red-hot and Campbell was beating out a small fire. Just when Rollo’s brain told him he should be filming this, the flow of St. Elmo’s Fire vanished. Silk had flown the bomber out of cloud and into clean air.
He tried to do an intercom check and nobody answered. The intercom was dead. He sent Mallaby to make a tour of Dog. He came back and said everyone was intact. Bruised and scraped, but intact.
Two problems.
The compass was spinning, reversing, chasing its tail. It needed time to recover its wits. And the port engine was surging. Its revs climbed and fell, climbed and fell. The lopsided pull sent Dog wandering about the sky. Silk kept her out of cloud and nursed the engines back to health and harmony. Recovery took many minutes, and Dog lost much height. In the end she was down to six thousand feet, and Silk was lost.
He got unstrapped and slid out of his seat and let Mallaby take the controls. Silk clambered over the spar and had a shouted conference with the navigator. They were off oxygen, so talk was easier. Woodman had tried to keep track of all the twists and turns, but without a compass it was an impossible task. What he needed was a good pinpoint. He went forward. Silk peered at the smoking radio and had a few words with Campbell. Then he spoke to Rollo and Kate.
“Awfully dull, isn’t it?” he bawled. “You should have brought a book.”
Rollo felt useless. He had to do something, so he touched the goggles on Silk’s forehead. “Why wear these?”
“In case we get a brick through the window. Shocking draft.” He went back to his office.
Rollo tried to picture a pilot sitting in the hurricane blast that would rage through a smashed windscreen. His imagination was too good, and he turned it off. The nav hadn’t returned. Rollo could see he wasn’t in the cockpit. It didn’t take long to work out that Woodman must be in the bomb-aimer’s position. No flak, no searchlights, so Dog wasn’t over the target. Woodman was looking for it. The nav was peering through the window, trying to find Hanover. Silk was stooging around Germany, totally lost, and what’s more the gunners couldn’t call him if they saw a fighter, because the intercom was kaput. Rollo was about to tell all this to Kate when he saw that she was being sick into her paint tin. He decided that she didn’t need to know. He gave her his handkerchief, to wipe her face.
The compass settled down and behaved itself. Woodman found a pinpoint. He scrambled up the tunnel from the bomb-aimer’s position and handed Silk a piece of paper with one word on it: Hamelin. Silk shouted, “Pied Piper?” Woodman lip-read and nodded. Mallaby circled, losing height until they were under the lowest cloud. By then Woodman had scribbled:
Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick,
By famous Hanover city;
The river Weser, deep and wide,
Washes its walls on the southern side.
Robert Browning, poet.
Silk read it and smiled. They were looking at a town that fitted the description perfectly. A pair of heavy machine guns started pumping tracer, nowhere near Dog, just red stitches on black cloth. Small garrison in Hamelin, probably. Nothing worth defending. All the rats had gone.
After that it was simple. Hamelin was southwest of Hanover. Precise navigation wasn’t necessary. Soon the flicker of searchlight beams, gun flashes, bomb bursts and fires guided Dog to the target. Mallaby had coaxed her up to eight thousand. That was her limit. Silk took over the controls and tried to bounce her higher, diving a little and then climbing on full power. It usually worked. Not tonight. Not with this great pig of a cookie in her belly, and the port engine not pulling its weight. High above, Wimpys and Hampdens were unloading bombs. If one incendiary fell out of the night and hit a wing, it might burn a hole so big that even a Wimpy couldn’t survive. Best not to think about that. Other trouble was nearer to hand.
Eight thousand was well within the range of light flak. The Hanover searchlights were slicing up the sky. Clouds reflected their beams and turned parts of the night to twilight. Everywhere, tracer crisscrossed in a silent stutter of red and yellow or blue and green. Many shellbursts seemed as harmless as cracker jacks, unless the burst came close enough to create a jagged flash that leaped out of nowhere like an ambush. If you could smell its peppery stink, it was very close. If you could hear the rattle of hot shrapnel on the bomber, it was too close.
Silk’s first reaction when they reached Hanover was that he’d never seen flak so thick and nobody could get through it untouched. Rollo’s first reaction was sheer glee. He filmed everything. The light was excellent. Tracer left the ground so slowly that he had time to select it, focus on it, follow it all the way to its final rush of brilliance past the Wimpy. He filmed the lights on the ground: the blink of flak batteries, the splash of bombs exploding, the ragged shape of burning buildings. This was the pay-off. This made the whole trip worthwhile. It was only when he stopped to reload that he realized the sound was all wrong. There was no sound. All this mayhem was drowned out by the roar of the engines. Every bang was mute. That was no good. He told himself: Dub in bangs.
Woodman was a good bomb-aimer, but without intercom he was helpless, he couldn’t tell his pilot to go left or right or hold steady. He had thrown the switches that gave control of the bombload to the pilot, and now he stood in the cockpit, leaning over Silk’s shoulder, and together they tried to find the railway station. There was some cloud, and a lot of smoke. Maybe the AP was under the smoke. Maybe it didn’t exist any more. He heard an old familiar sound, a bok-bok, something like two halves of a coconut knocking together: heavy flak, not far off. Silk weaved, changed direction, couldn’t go up so he went down, anything to baffle the gunners. But lower was not safer. Soon there were more bok-boks. A searchlight flicked their wingtip and kept going. A poor sodding Hampden was not so lucky. It was pinned in a cone, and kept twisting and writhing but the lights tracked every dive, every turn, while the heavy flak blew holes in the cone and, eventually, in the Hampden.
In the end, Silk dumped the bloody bomb. Smoke was getting worse, some from fires, some perhaps from German smoke generators. He looked at Woodman, and Woodman shrugged. Silk opened the bomb doors. The slipstream hit them and Dog vibrated. Rollo stopped filming. Silk leaned forward and pressed the bomb-release button, and the bomber gave a little leap of relief. Forget the flash, forget the photograph. Shut the bomb doors, open the throttles and piss off out of this madhouse.
The cookie didn’t whistle, Rollo thought. That won’t do. Bombs always whistle in the movies. Dub it in later.
The bomb doors haven’t shut, Silk thought. Dog was still vibrating in the old familiar way. This was turning into a dodgy op. He turned the bomb-door handle again. And again. No joy.
It knocked a good twenty miles an hour off the airspeed. And of course Dog wouldn’t climb an inch with those doors dragging against the slipstream.
Silk cruised slowly over Hanover, while the flak never slackened. At times like this he took encouragement from the bluebottle in the rainstorm. Logically, it should get knocked to the ground. Yet it flew on. How? Because there was always more space between the raindrops. The trick was to find the space. A silly thought. But it took his mind off the storm of high explosive.
He flew straight. If he weaved, it would only take longer to escape. Maybe the German gunners couldn’t believe that any RAF pilot would be so stupid as to fly so low, so slow, so straight; maybe it spoiled their aim. Or maybe the gods of war were tired of D-Dog. Maybe they’d gone off to pull the wings from some other butterfly. Because, amazingly, things got better. Silk left the flak and the searchlights behind him; and Campbell, with nothing to do since his radio went up in flames, found the fault in the intercom. The headphones came alive. Woodman went back to his nav table and worked on a zigzag route to the coast. “New course, skipper,” he said. “Two eight five. That puts us west of the Luftwaffe base at Sulingen.”
“Two eight five. Is that based on the predicted winds?”
“Yes. They were pretty accurate over the North Sea. Spot-on, in fact.”
“The electrical storms are in the wrong place, Woody. Moving north, perhaps, but still over Germany. Predicted winds could be up the creek.”
“They could.” Woodman tidied up the numbers in his latest calculation, lengthening the vertical line of a 4, improving the tail of a 3. “Any suggestions?”
“A pinpoint would be nice. Chubby, Badge: find a nice pinpoint for the nav and he’ll buy you a drink.”
Rollo sat on the bed, beside Kate. Now that the cookie had been dropped and the flak had failed to kill them, he felt a huge sense of anticlimax. The raid had been successful, or at least he supposed so, but what visible difference had it made? For the purposes of his film, none. Maybe the cookie hadn’t exploded. Plenty of dud bombs fell on London. And the job wasn’t finished, there was still the long grind home over the North Sea. He felt useless, physically drained yet mentally dissatisfied. How did these men do it? Hanover wasn’t even a very long trip. Imagine when Berlin was the target. Berlin was almost in Poland, for God’s sake. Thirty ops made a tour, so they said. Nobody should be made to do this thirty times. Yet they were all volunteers. Even so, thirty ops … Thirty chances to get the chop. Why didn’t it drive them mad? Maybe it did, some of them. Maybe anyone who went crackers got shunted off the base before he could infect the rest. Rollo shuddered, partly at the idea, partly from the aching cold, partly because the entire bloody Wimpy was shuddering.
Nothing much happened for half an hour. Kate dozed. Rollo couldn’t rest, he was too cold to feel his feet, his brain was swamped by engine roar, he had no sense of time and not enough energy to look at his watch, and anxiety nagged him. The shots of Hanover were good but they didn’t add up to a film, and he couldn’t see where the rest was coming from.
Silk was not unhappy. He never allowed himself to be happy; that would have interfered with his cockpit routine. But Dog’s fuel tanks were lighter and she was moving faster. Not enough to escape a night fighter, and that was still a risk. He might have a chance to dodge into some clouds, but they were ugly monsters and if one turned out to be cu-nim, Dog with her bomb doors hanging down might not come out the other side.
Then flak began to break out like a skin disease. No searchlights, just flak. Someone down there was good at his job. “Wireless op, fire off flares,” Silk ordered. “Red and yellow.” Campbell moved fast. Within seconds he had the pistol in the flare chute. Red and yellow signals arced into the night.
The flak stopped. Silk counted to twenty. Still no flak. “And for my next trick,” he said.
Rollo pressed his intercom switch. “What was all that about?”
“Trick of the trade. Red and yellow flares used to be the Luftwaffe distress signal. Mind you, it doesn’t always work.”
It didn’t work ten minutes later. Woodman estimated they were near the German coast, and the sudden stabs of searchlights and ripples of flak and colored feelers of tracer suggested he was right. When the distress signal had no effect, Silk told the gunners to fire at the searchlights, and Rollo got some good shots of tracer streaking down from the front guns. Badger claimed to hit a searchlight. It certainly went out. He said, “Bull’s-eye!” Silk said something, but nobody heard him. A shell exploded underneath Dog and the blast hurled the Wellington up and over, until she was standing on a wingtip. Not for long. She was still flying but as she fell, her nose was too high. She stalled and, rather wearily, began to spin.
Silk did what his instructors had told him, years ago: close the throttles, centralize the stick, apply full rudder opposite to the spin, pause, then push the stick forward. The kite will dive and the spin will stop. Total failure. Maybe the controls had been hit. Maybe Wimpys were different. Meanwhile Dog kept rotating, rather ponderously, as if looking for a place to lie down. And kept falling. Several searchlights found her. Now the inside of the fuselage was painted a fierce silver-white. The camera team, the nav, the op, all covered their eyes. Silk and Mallaby were dazzled. Badger and Chubb were still firing. German bullets were punching holes in the fabric. It was a toss-up whether Dog crashed before the flak got her. Silk remembered Langham and the stabilized yaw.
He reached blindly for the throttles, shut the upper engine and opened the lower engine to maximum revs, combat limit, full boost, and commended his soul to Almighty God. The lower engine took command. The upper wing, its engine dragging instead of driving, dropped. The spin was killed. Dog lifted her tail and dived.
That was what Silk believed happened. But what did Silk know? He couldn’t see, he was flying by memory, by instinct, by feel. Maybe another shellburst had kicked the Wimpy out of its spin. Who can tell? Who cares? He harmonized the engines and eased the control column back until long experience told him the aircraft should be more or less level.
One advantage of being dazzled was that he couldn’t see how bad the flak was. By the time he’d got his sight back, the searchlights were losing him. Soon the flak was behind Dog, too.
“New course, skip,” the nav said. “Steer three three zero.”
Silk was surprised to hear from him. He had taken it for granted that half the crew were dead. He made an intercom check and everyone answered except Campbell, the wireless op. “He’s got a bit of steel in the backside,” Woodman reported. “Shell splinter, I expect. He’s on the bed.”
Mallaby left the cockpit to check how badly Campbell was hurt, and found him face-down. Rollo was holding a flashlight. Kate had the first-aid kit and she was scissoring through Campbell’s clothing. Already her hands were slippery with blood. “You’ve done this before,” Mallaby said.
“In the Blitz,” Rollo said. “We helped out, sometimes.”
Campbell’s right buttock had a long, deep cut. Blood was pulsing out of it. She ripped open a dressing and plugged the wound. “Press the edges together,” she told Mallaby. She cut strips of adhesive tape, wiped most of the blood off the buttock, and taped the wound shut. She covered it with a bigger dressing and taped that too. “Does it hurt much?” she asked Campbell.
He nodded once, slowly. His face had no color and his eyes were almost closed. She found the morphine and whacked it into his thigh. “Done,” she said. They covered him with blankets, put his oxygen mask in place, made sure he was breathing steadily.
Mallaby went back to the cockpit. “He’ll live,” he said.
“Any serious damage to the kite?”
“None that I could see, but I couldn’t see much. This torch is on its last legs. It’s black as your hat down the fuselage.”
“Tough old bird, the Wimpy.”
The second crossing of the North Sea was far worse than the first. Flak damage let the slipstream penetrate the fuselage and it bumped its icy blast into every corner. Campbell shivered, even though he seemed asleep. Kate lay alongside him, a barrier against the wind. Rollo sat on the floor. All his joints ached, except his feet. He had no sensation below the ankles. This must be what hell’s waiting room is like, he thought. Nothing to do and total freezing blackness to do it in. His brain was so dull that he altogether forgot the flasks of coffee, until the flashlight roused him and Woodman gave him a steaming mug. The coffee trickled down his gullet and promised better times ahead. Five minutes later his stomach felt as cold as stone again. He remembered the Benzedrine. He swallowed one tablet. It did nothing for his stomach. His feet were still numb.
Silk reckoned they were about halfway across the sea, when the compass developed a nervous tic. “Look,” he said to Mallaby. “I think it’s trying to tell us something.”
The tic became a wild flutter. “Looks like an earthquake, skip,” Mallaby said. “Either that or it’s desperate for a pee.”
The navigator’s master compass was just as bad. “Forget it,” Silk said. “The cloud’s not bad. I can see the North Star now and then. We can’t miss England.” Vibration from the bomb doors put a tremor in his voice that made him sound frail and elderly. But he was right. Silk steered by the North Star and forty minutes later, Badger saw the coast ahead. “Looks like Harwich, skip,” he said. “Bloody great estuary. Yes, Harwich. And there’s Felixstowe.”
“Defended area. Lots of balloons and bad-tempered sailors.” Silk swung the Wimpy to the right and flew parallel to the coast, losing height all the time.
“Orfordness coming up, skip.” Badger’s voice still shook with the vibration, but now it had the confidence of homecoming. “Lighthouse two miles ahead.”
“You should see this, Rollo,” Silk said. “Get it on film. 409 returns in glory. How we navigate to beat the band.”
Rollo got his camera and went forward. His brain was working briskly. All his senses were alert and alive. Benzedrine was doing its stuff.
“We turn left at the lighthouse,” Silk said. “Clever, eh?”
“Too dark for me, I’m afraid.”
“What a shame.” Silk wheeled Dog around the lighthouse and headed inland. “Now, then. In a moment you’ll see the big chimney of the cement factory.” Dog was down to six hundred feet and Rollo felt warmer. “There it is. Smell the smoke? I’d know it anywhere. Here we go … Over the chimney and dead ahead is the sugar beet factory in Bury St. Edmunds. One of my favorite landmarks. Or pinpoints, to be correct. Another delicious smell.” He chatted easily, pointing out church towers and windmills, scarcely visible in the dark, as Suffolk raced beneath. “At the sugar beet factory we find the railway, which forks left for Newmarket.” Silk flew alongside the line. “Nice shiny rails,” he said. “Who needs maps? Now, watch out for the lamps on the railway signals. At the third set of lamps we turn sharp left, and Coney Garth is just beyond a pub called the Lamb and Flag. You can’t miss it.”
“Brilliant,” Rollo said. “Superb.”
“Thanks. You’d better go to your landing position now.”
Rollo sat with his back to the main spar. Kate and Woodman sat beside him. Campbell was strapped to the bed, mask off, face down. The note of the engines changed subtly as Silk entered the landing circuit. That was when Rollo realized that he was not going to die tonight. He had begun to suspect it when he drank the coffee. Benzedrine confirmed it. Now he could relax and enjoy survival.
The nearer Dog got to landing, the less Rollo saw himself as a passenger, mere civilian baggage, and the more he became his true self: a cameraman, a guy who shot movies. This movie was approaching its happy ending. Campbell was wounded, nothing serious, enough to remind the audience that war had its price, just as Rollo had scripted it. Soon this Wimpy would taxi to a halt, the crew would climb down from the nose, weary but triumphant in the usual understated RAF way, and Campbell would be stretchered to a waiting ambulance. He might give a thumbs-up. At the very least he would smile bravely. It would be a hell of a scene. An absolutely crucial, rewarding, clinching moment. Rollo knew he had to have it. Otherwise, everything else was so much preparation without conclusion.
He would have to work fast. No chance of rehearsal. Right first time, or never. But Rollo was good at this, he’d grabbed moments of drama just like it, all through the Blitz. The kind of thing that made other cameramen ask, “Jesus, Rollo, how the hell did you do that?” The kind of shot that got your name in books on the history of the cinema. The big problem was how to leave the airplane before the others did. That was the trick.
There would be lights out there, the headlights of the crew truck, and an ambulance, maybe more. They would have to be aimed at the nose hatch. What about sound? He abandoned sound. Dub in any dialogue later. Maybe cover everything with music. He didn’t need Kate for this, he could move faster alone.
But how to get out before the others? The cockpit area would be blocked by crew members. Rollo stared at the blackness of the fuselage and saw the answer: the rear gunner’s turret. It had a quick exit. When it was swung to the right, it exposed a door on the left. That was how the gunner baled out. Rollo had seen it in daylight when the rear turret was being tested. He wasn’t sure of the details but he knew the idea was right. Tell Chubby to rotate his turret. When Dog stopped, Rollo would dive out through that hole.
As soon as he felt the double bump of Dog’s wheels hitting the flare-path, he took the torch from Woodman’s hands and stood up. Kate shouted. He set off down the fuselage, onto the catwalk that led to the rear turret. The batteries were weak, the beam was dim, and the bulb had worked itself loose. He had to keep shaking the torch to revive it, but even with a healthy torch he was so eager that he probably wouldn’t have seen the hole that flak had blown in the floor. One leg plunged into it and dragged down the rest of his body. The last image his eyes saw was the blurred gleam of flare-path lamps, before his head struck the grass at seventy miles an hour. The impact broke his neck. The tail wheel smashed into his body. Silk felt the small jolt and thought he’d hit a badger, or maybe a big fox. They had been known to wander across the airfield at night.
When he taxied to his place at dispersal, and he completed the after-landing routine, and he led the others down the short wooden ladder from the nose hatch, he asked Kate where Rollo was. She said she assumed he was in the rear turret, filming Chubb by the light of the torch; or something. Already, Dog’s groundcrew had found the hole in the fuselage floor. Soon, they saw strips of flying clothing wrapped around the tail-wheel unit, and that started the search.
The crew followed their familiar routine. Climbed into the truck, drove to interrogation. Clumped into the room and blinked at the light. Drank the coffee with the shot of rum in it. Nobody said anything about Rollo. They were very tired, very glad to be home and alive, and besides, what was there to say? It had been such a freak way to die, you couldn’t really blame the war, it was more like a road accident. Getting the chop in the air over Germany was something everyone was prepared for, even if they never talked about it. Poor old Mac Campbell’s wound wasn’t glorious, but at least his rear end did battle with a chunk of Jerry flak, and now he was in Sick Quarters getting stitched up. Tomorrow they’d all go and visit him and make a lot of bad jokes. But Rollo was in the station mortuary. Nobody would visit him. By all reports, he looked a mess.
Bins asked the usual questions, and Silk let the rest of the crew answer them. Bins wrote fast: good pinpoint at Borkum, night fighter attack, evasion, cu-nim, electrical storm, compass trouble, intercom failed, pinpoint Hamelin, found Hanover. Dog wouldn’t climb, thick smoke over target, estimated the AP, bombed it, bomb doors failed to retract. Campbell mended the intercom, compass mended itself. Reached the coastal belt, got blown ass over teakettle by a near-miss, flew home somehow, God knew how.
“The Wimpy knows how,” Mallaby said. “Tough old kite.”
“And you definitely bombed the target,” Bins said.
“Cookie and incendiaries,” Woodman said. “Definitely.”
“We hit it right on the nose,” Chubb said. “Lovely grub.”
“Well done. Off to your bacon and eggs, chaps.”
“Damned good show,” the group captain said.
They left. Silk remained. He felt grimy, and the rum had not killed the rubbery taste of his oxygen mask. There was a high buzzing in his ears that changed pitch without warning, and then went back to the old note. It was caused by hours of the howl of the propeller tips. None of this was new; it happened after every op. He stayed because the Wingco was there, straddling a chair, chewing on a cold pipe; and Silk felt that someone should say something about Rollo Blazer. He couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t stupidly obvious.
“Hanover took a pasting,” Rafferty said. “Group are very pleased.”
“I don’t suppose Crown Films will be,” Silk said.
“Sod ‘em,” Duff said. “What did they expect?”
“Not our fault,” Bins said. “Bound to be an inquiry, though.”
“Let ’em piss in their hats,” Duff said. “They knew ops were dangerous. That’s why they came here. Inquiry be buggered.”
“You sound as if you enjoyed your trip,” Silk said. “Sir.”
“Compass trouble, like you. All that bloody electricity. Nav got lost, never found Hanover, went to Hamburg instead. Gunners swore it was Bremen, but I knew better. Come on. If we don’t get to the grub soon, some bastard will steal our eggs.”
They walked from the Ops Block. In the east the sky was a soft gray. Birds were waking up and being noisy about it.
“Why can’t they wait for daylight?” Silk said. “What’s so special about flying at night?”
“You didn’t have much to say in there,” Duff said.
“You want to know if our cookie hit the railway station, don’t you? Well, the answer is, God alone knows. God and the station-master. Make a bomb like a dustbin and it’s liable to land anywhere. Same with incendiaries. They fall like confetti.”
“I don’t care. Nobody cares any more. If we keep on bombing the city, then sooner or later we’re bound to hit something valuable.”
“I said that months ago, Pug. It’s nice to know you’ve been paying attention. Langham always reckoned you were my greatest fan.”
“Load of balls.”
“Smallest fan, then. That was his joke. I miss Langham. I don’t miss any other stupid bastard who got the chop. I probably wouldn’t miss you, if you bought it tomorrow. But Langham … what a waste.”
“You’re driveling,” Duff said. “Step it out. I’m hungry.”