Angel, Archangel (6 page)

“The first I knew the thing was coming for us was when the RT bust loose with shouts from the other guys.
I caught something about a plane screaming at us like a bat out of hell.
.
.”

Fleming sat on the edge of his chair and heard how Marello swung his turret round to sweep the sky above the solitary B-17 to be confronted by a small, stubby aircraft, its wings swept back like a swallow in a dive.

“Jeez, it moved so damn fast.
I couldn’t even get a fix on him.
And it kept on diving like it was going to ram us, but then it must’ve passed between the fuselage and the edge of the wing.
The next thing I knew, the number three engine was on fire.
Chuck Deller, the skipper, he did damn well to shut it down and get the extinguishers on, but I never saw the Kraut again.”
The voice tailed off, his head lolled on the pillow.

Fleming’s skin prickled.

“But you’d seen these machines before, hadn’t you?”

The American shook himself slowly.

“Sure, we’d seen ‘em many times.
But not when we were only half an hour from base.”

“About fifty miles from our coast - you’re positive about that?”

Marello fixed his gaze on Fleming.
For a moment the eyes ceased to swim in their sockets.

“Like I told the other guy, when you’re that close to home you start counting the miles off.”

“What happened next?”

The gunner winced as a spasm gripped his body.
The returning pain helped to focus his mind.

“About thirty seconds later, an explosion hit the ship.
Deller was yelling to the two waist gunners to tell him what had happened, but there was no reply, so he told me to go and check out aft.
That Komet must have come back for us ‘cos he left a hole the size of a house in the underside of the Fort that took Lieb with it.”

Fleming had seen the crew roster back in the Bunker.
Liebowitz was the ventral gunner, just about the worst job you could have on a Flying Fortress.
Cramped in a fishbowl slung under the middle of the giant bomber with his face nuzzling the breeches of the twin .5 in Browning machine guns, he was dangerously exposed.

Fleming looked down at his feet, trying to picture the awful scene.
The rocket fighter’s 30 mm cannon must have sliced up through the bomber and evaporated Liebowitz’s turret.
Marello was faced with a gaping gash where once there had been a manned defensive position.

“The two waist gunners, they were dead too .
.
.
but it was the thought of Lieb stuck there in his turret.
.
.
He just never stood a chance.”

When Fleming glanced up from the floor Marello had started to sob softly.
The morphia was wearing off.
Fleming looked around for the duty nurse, but she was nowhere in sight.
Marello had begun to moan.
The low wailing sound

grew as the man relived over and over again the last moments of his ship.
Fleming moved from his chair to the bed and took Marello in his arms, holding him tightly while the spasms brought on by the memory twisted and contorted his body.

Fleming held the gunner as Penny had held him, night after night.
Later, when the pain left him and the nightmares began she still cradled him, until morning broke and he wasn’t in the burning cockpit of the Spitfire, but between the sweat-soaked sheets of their bed in the cottage.

Penny watched him stripped of his dignity, layer by layer.
In the end, there was nothing left of the boy with the public school bravado with whom she had first fallen in love.
He had become a pathetic creature, at times unable to perform even the most basic bodily functions.
That was when the rage began.
God knows how he had summoned the strength for such emotion.
He hated her for witnessing what he had become.

Fleming held Marello tighter and felt the gunner give.

He had never watched a man die.
He had been surrounded by death on the squadron, but it never touched him physically, like this.
When he had been stationed in Italy, an aircraft or two failed to return some days.
That night, the survivors would get drunk and the next day ops continued.
There hadn’t been much time for mourning.

Marello would die a long way from home with no one by his side.
Fleming shuddered.
He had been a whole lot luckier.

His urge to hold Marello had been instinctive, just as hers had been with him.
Yet he had thrown it all back in her face.
He had wanted to retreat, to run away from his image of what he had become.
He knew now that if he had been in the American’s place, frightened and alone, he would never have found the will to live.

Fleming bit his lip as the panic rose again.
All along he thought it had been his own efforts that had pulled him through.
That somehow he had reached into himself and tapped a deep reservoir of strength which had enabled him to claw his way back.

His marriage had been the price of that selfishness.

When he found her, crying in their bedroom one day, his anger had exploded.
She had no right to feel sorry for herself.
No bloody right at all.
He remembered the quarrelling.
Voices raised.
He remembered hitting her, hard.
Watched as she recoiled, put her hand to her face, then stared wide-eyed at the blood on her fingers.
He tried to shut out the picture, but it was no good.

A few days later he started work at the Bunker.
Three months ago.
It seemed longer.

With him in London and Penny commuting between her job at the fighter control station and the cottage, they had seen each other a handful of times since.

Marello convulsed again and Fleming squeezed him gently.
It seemed hours before the nurse returned with a syringe to administer another shot of oblivion.

CHAPTER FOUR

The boozy, smoke-filled atmosphere of the Trocadero Hotel’s Almond Bar hit Penny a few moments after the cacophony of animated voices when Kruze opened the door for her.

Kruze led her towards the bar through a maze of uniforms she had never seen before.
There were men sporting the shoulder flashes of the Polish Air Force and the Norwegian Army.
She picked out snatches of French from the conversation around her and saw American uniforms brushing against the deep blue tunics of the Royal Air Force.
There were girls too, wild and exotic-looking.

To Penny, it seemed as if everyone knew each other, although she knew that could not be so.
The party throbbed with a gaiety she had never experienced before.
She watched one of the girls detach herself from a group and walk across the room, an empty glass held conspicuously in front of her, as she searched for company and a fresh drink.
A Free French officer was the first by her side, much to the annoyance of two British soldiers.
The Frenchman caught Penny looking at him over the girl’s shoulder and winked at her mischievously.
She smiled and waved back.

Kruze, at last at the bar, turned and saw a different woman from the one he had knocked to the ground on the Ministry steps barely an hour before.

“You like this place?”

A song had started up in the corner so she moved closer to him.

“You like this place?”
He was almost shouting in her ear.

She nodded vigorously.
“I love it.
How on earth did you find it?
I thought I knew Shaftesbury Avenue, but I’ve never heard of the Almond Bar, let alone the Trocadero Hotel.”

“Word of mouth stuff.
Unfortunately the jungle telegraph works a little too well.
Last time there were just a few forty-eight-hour passers and some Windmill girls.
Now look at it.”

“Windmill girls?”

Kruze nodded to the woman in the clinging, expensive-looking, evening dress, who now had one arm round the Frenchman and a new drink in her other hand.

“They’re chorus girls from the Windmill Theatre round the corner,” he said.
“Help to liven the place up a bit.
What are you going to drink?
They’ve got just about everything.”

“I’ll have a whisky - a small one; lots of water.”

They made their way over to a corner where it was quieter.
Kruze was about to raise his glass in a toast, but somehow the gesture seemed wrong.
Instead he gazed past her through the window, watching passers-by scuttle out of the wind and the rain in the approaching darkness.

“Suddenly worried that somebody on the squadron might see us here?”

He was surprised at the ease with which she had guessed his thoughts.

“Not for the reason you think.”

“And what might that be?”

“I couldn’t give a light if one of the boys were to round the corner and see me with you.
It’s not as if talking is against the law.
I was thinking of Robert.
And this place.
Somehow the two don’t go together.
Perhaps it was wrong to bring you here.”

“It’s all right,” she smiled.
“Just because Robert might prefer his club, there’s no need for you to feel guilty.”

“How is he?”
The words came before he could stop them.
He didn’t want to talk about her husband, but the picture of him running from his Spitfire at Farnborough suddenly filled his mind.

“I don’t know.
To be honest, Piet, Robert and I see very little of each other these days.”

He sensed her awkwardness.

“Staverton’s a tough old bird,” Kruze said, trying to fill the void.
“He works Robert to the bone.
I expect it must be difficult for him to get away.”

“That wasn’t what I meant,” she said softly.

He looked her in the eyes.
“I didn’t think it was.
I was merely trying to .
.
.”

“I know, thank you.”
She looked back into her glass.
“I don’t think he cares too much about us anymore.”
She shook herself slightly.
“Anyway, enough of that.”

“For what it’s worth, I don’t much like your husband, but he’s damn good at his job, even if he is sometimes a pig to deal with.
But please don’t think I’m trying to stick my nose into things that don’t concern me.
Domestic rows aren’t any of my business.”

“Piet, I’m not talking about a tiff.
I’m divorcing him.”

Kruze faltered.
“Then what were you doing in the Ministry this morning?”

“I wanted to tell him it was over.
No more nights on my own.
No more rows.
I wanted to tell him we both had to let go.”

“And did you?”

She shook her head.
“I resorted to plan B and left a letter at the main desk.
The time for talking to Robert is over.”
She stared into the middle of the room for a moment.
“That’s not exactly true.
I meant to, but I’m afraid I didn’t have the courage to tell him to his face.
So much for the heroine of the Strand.”

“Does he know it’s gone this far?”

“If he doesn’t, things are even worse than I think they are.

“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I should have known better than to ask after that night I came over for dinner.”

“Was it that bad?”

“No, I enjoyed it.”
He smiled.
“I’m not so sure about your friend, Anne Fairhall, though.
We didn’t exactly see eye to eye.
Different cultural backgrounds, you might say.”

“Anne?”
She looked at him for a moment, her head cocked slightly to one side.
“I have to admit now that it was a bit naughty.
When Robert described you as the silent type, I thought I’d ask her over to liven things up a bit.
The only trouble is, she does go on a bit.”

“Silent?
Is that what he said?”

She thought for a moment.
“Not exactly, I think that was my interpretation.
If I remember right, ‘dangerous’ was the actual word he used.
Only he didn’t mean it in a derogatory way, I don’t think.
He said you’re an exceptional pilot, aloof from the rest of the chaps, but loved by the non-commissioned men.
Anyway, I was wrong.
And I’m sorry I subjected you to a whole evening with Anne.
It won’t happen again, I promise.”

She thought about that for a moment.
“I think dinner parties are going to be off the agenda for a while.”

“Have you got somewhere to stay?”

“Yes, thank God.
My sister has let me use her flat for a day or two.
It will allow me some breathing space while I get myself together.
Then I’ll go back to the cottage and keep busy until I go back to work in a few days’ time.
The CO’s been very understanding.
I really don’t want to talk to Robert.
It won’t do either of us any good.”
She let out a deep breath.
“I’m sorry to burden you, Piet.
I’ve fought it for months now, but I just can’t live with him any more.”

Kruze tried not to show his discomfort.
“Time for another drink,” he said.

When he returned with two Scotches, Penny looked composed.

“What now then?”
he asked.

* * * * * * * *

It was shortly after seven o’clock when Fleming emerged from the Underground station and set off on foot for the Ministry.
The cold weather that had prevailed since the beginning of the year had eased a little, although the light rain still made the capital look drab and miserable.
He couldn’t wait to get to the cottage and reckoned with any luck he would be able to catch a train out of the city the following day, Staverton permitting.

He was tired after his visit to Norfolk.
Marello had deeply disturbed him, but today felt like a turning point.
He wanted to go home to explain, to tell Penny it had not all been in vain.
To tell her what a selfish bloody fool he had been all these months, that it had been she who had pulled him through.

A corporal standing guard on the north door of the Ministry scrutinized Fleming’s pass before clearing identification with his department in the Bunker.
While he shuffled from foot to foot waiting for authorization to proceed into the building, he was surprised to see that tape had been criss-crossed over the windows since his departure that morning.

“Rocket, sir,” the corporal said as he stamped the papers.
“It landed just over there in the Strand.”

There hadn’t been a V1 or V2 strike on England for several weeks.
He hoped that this latest attack was not a signal for another missile blitz on London.
With the Russians pressing at the gates of Berlin, he, like many other Londoners, had become complacent about the Germans.

He was reviewing the meeting with Marello.
If the American was right, the Germans had a fighter that could outfly anything in the RAF or USAAF inventory and, what was more, they could bring the air war back to Britain’s doorstep, something they hadn’t been able to do in force for almost five years.

Staverton was often hard to track down amongst the maze of corridors that riddled the huge building.
As one of the select team of technical advisers to the Cabinet, there was no end of senior brass, civil servants and ministers who wanted his time.
In view of the afternoon’s V2 attack, Fleming was surprised to find the AVM at his desk, hunched over some papers.
Staverton did not divert his attention from the small pool of light shed by the lamp as Fleming closed the door behind him, so he coughed lightly.

“Ah, Robert.
Didn’t hear you come in, I’m afraid.
I was a bit wrapped up in the business of this afternoon’s raid.
Doubtless you’ve heard about it - probably even seen the mess in the Strand.”

“I came by Underground, sir.
I didn’t know anything about the attack until I got into the building.
.
.
How many came over?”

“Just two, thank God.
There were about forty casualties at the Home Store and that picture house next door.
The other one fell on a warehouse on the Isle of Dogs.
That one didn’t kill anyone, luckily.
Funny thing, though.
The police discovered that the warehouse had been crammed full of cigarettes, cans of food, stockings, you name it.
All burnt to a crisp now.
Some black marketeer is going to be cursing the Germans tonight.”

“Where did they come from?”
Fleming asked.
“I thought we’d destroyed their missile plants weeks ago.”

“We did; and that was exactly the same question No.
10 put to me earlier this afternoon.
Intelligence reports suggest that this was a one-off.
I heard just before you came in that our people on the Continent have traced the firing position to a small town in southern Denmark.
Apparently some garrison commander decided to loose off his old stock before his position was overrun by our troops.
I told Churchill not to worry about it.
I hope I’m right.”

He was rarely wrong, Fleming thought.

“Now Robert, Norfolk.
How did you get on?”
Staverton gave Fleming a look that suggested he was not interested in the intelligence gathering part of the exercise.
It confirmed Fleming’s suspicion about why he had been sent.

“The Germans have developed a long-range rocket fighter,” Fleming said, not giving an inch.

“You don’t mean you were actually taken in by this gunner’s delusions?
My dear Robert, I only sent you up there to placate a rather hysterical USAAF intelligence officer.”

“I don’t think they were delusions.”

“Let’s hear it then.”

“The gunner had been pretty badly knocked about, that’s true.
And he had been given morphine - he was in a lot of pain.”

“Come on, Robert.
Was it or wasn’t it a 163?
And, more to the point, where was it?”

Fleming sensed that Staverton could see he had survived his brush with the medical profession remarkably well.

“The Flying Fortress was attacked about fifty miles off Blakeney Point on the north Norfolk coast,” Fleming said, determined not to let Staverton get the better of him.
“And I’ll tell you why.
Marello was a very experienced gunner.
He was halfway through his second tour and he’d come up against 163s before, several times, over Germany.
Having been through hell over the target and nursed the aircraft back over the North Sea, they thought they were safe.
And that’s when they were attacked.
He described the aircraft perfectly.
It was a 163, all right.”
He tossed a buff manila folder on Staverton’s desk.
“It’s all in the report.”