Hornet Flight (49 page)

“Oh, no.”

He checked the fuel gauge. “We're running on empty.”

“I don't know what we can do!”

“I'll have to stand on the wing and pour the petrol in directly from the can. It will take two hands—I can't hold a four-gallon can with one hand, it's too heavy.”

“But you won't be able to hold on.”

“You'll have to hold my belt with your left hand.” Karen was strong, but he was not sure she could take his weight if he slipped. However, there was no alternative.

“Then I won't be able to move the control stick.”

“We'll just have to hope you don't need to.”

“All right, but let's gain more altitude.”

He looked around. There was no land in sight.

Karen said, “Warm your hands. Put them under my coat.”

He turned, still kneeling on the seat, and pressed his hands to her waist. Under the fur coat she was wearing a light summer sweater.

“Put them under my sweater. Go on, feel my skin, I don't mind.”

She was hot to his touch.

He kept his hands there as they climbed. Then the engine missed. “We're out of fuel,” Karen said.

The engine caught again, but he knew she was right. “Let's do it,” he said.

She trimmed the aircraft. Harald unscrewed the cap of the four-gallon can, and the tiny cabin filled with the unpleasant smell of petrol, despite the wind blowing in at the broken windows.

The engine missed again and began to falter.

Harald lifted the can. Karen took hold of his belt. “I've got you tight,” she said. “Don't worry.”

He opened the door and put his right foot out. He moved the can to the seat. He put his left foot out, so that he was standing on the wing and leaning inside the cabin. He was absolutely terrified.

He lifted the can and stood upright on the wing. He made the mistake of looking beyond the trailing edge of the wing to the sea below. His stomach lurched with nausea. He almost dropped the can. He closed his eyes, swallowed, and got himself under control.

He opened his eyes, resolving not to look down. He leaned over the petrol inlet. His belt tightened over his stomach as Karen took the strain. He tilted the can.

The constant movement of the aircraft made it impossible to pour straight, but after a few moments he got the knack of compensating. He leaned forward and back, relying on Karen to keep him safe.

The engine continued to misfire for a few seconds, then returned to normal.

He wanted desperately to get back inside, but they needed fuel to reach land. The petrol seemed to flow as slowly as honey. Some blew away in the airflow, and more spilled around the access plate and was wasted, but most of it seemed to go into the pipe.

At last the can was empty. He dropped it into the air and gratefully grabbed the door frame with his left hand. He eased himself back into the cabin and closed the door.

“Look,” said Karen, pointing ahead.

In the far distance, right on the horizon, was a dark shape. It was land.

“Hallelujah,” he said softly.

“Just pray that it's England,” Karen said. “I don't know how far we might have been blown off course.”

It seemed to take a long time, but eventually the dark shape turned green and became a landscape. Then it resolved into a beach, a town with a harbor, an expanse of fields, and a range of hills.

“Let's take a closer look,” Karen said.

They descended to two thousand feet to examine the town.

“I can't tell whether it's France or England,” Harald said. “I've never been to either place.”

“I've been to Paris and London, but neither of them looks like this.”

Harald checked the fuel gauge. “We're going to have to land soon anyway.”

“But we need to know whether we're in enemy territory.”

Harald glanced up through the roof and saw two aircraft. “We're about to find out,” he said. “Look up.”

They both stared at the two small aircraft that were rapidly approaching from the south. As they came closer, Harald stared at their wings, waiting for the markings to become distinct. Would they turn out to be German crosses? Had all this been for nothing?

The aircraft came closer, and Harald saw that they were Spitfires with RAF roundels. This was England.

He let out a whoop of triumph. “We made it!”

The aircraft came closer and flew on either side of the Hornet Moth. Harald could see the pilots, staring at them. Karen said, “I hope they don't think we're enemy spies and shoot us down.”

It was dreadfully possible. Harald tried to think of some way of telling the RAF they were friendly. “Flag of truce,” he said. He pulled off his shirt and pushed it out of the broken window. The white cotton fluttered in the wind.

It seemed to do the trick. One of the Spitfires moved in front of the Hornet Moth and waggled its wings. Karen said, “That means ‘Follow me,' I think. But I haven't got enough fuel.” She looked at the landscape below. “Sea breeze from the east, to judge by the smoke from that farmhouse. I'll come down in that field.” She put the nose down and turned.

Harald looked anxiously at the Spitfires. After a moment they turned and began to circle, but maintained their altitude, as if watching to see what would happen next. Perhaps they had decided that a Hornet Moth could not be much of a threat to the British Empire.

Karen came down to a thousand feet and flew downwind past the field she had chosen. There were no obstructions visible. She turned into the wind for landing. Harald operated the rudder, helping keep the aircraft in a straight line.

When they were twenty feet above the grass, Karen said, “Throttle all the way back, please.” Harald pulled the lever back. She lifted the nose of the aircraft gently with the stick. When it seemed to Harald that they were almost touching the ground, they continued to fly for fifty yards or more. Then there was a bump as the wheels made contact with the earth.

The aircraft slowed down in a few seconds. As it came to a halt, Harald looked through the broken window and saw, just a few yards away, a young man on a bicycle, watching from a pathway alongside the field, staring at them openmouthed.

“I wonder where we are,” Karen said.

Harald called out to the bicyclist. “Hello there!” he said in English. “What is this place?”

The young man looked at him as if he had come from outer space. “Well,” he said at last, “it's not the bloody airport.”

Twenty-four hours after Harald and Karen landed in England, the photographs Harald had taken at the radar station on Sande had been printed, enlarged, and pinned up on one wall of a big room in a grand building in Westminster. Some had been marked with arrows and notes. In the room were three men in RAF uniforms, examining the pictures and talking in low, urgent voices.

Digby Hoare ushered Harald and Karen into the room and closed the door, and the officers turned around. One of them, a tall man with a gray moustache, said, “Hello, Digby.”

“Good morning, Andrew,” Digby said. “This is Air Vice Marshal Sir Andrew Hogg. Sir Andrew, may I present Miss Duchwitz and Mr. Olufsen.”

Hogg shook Karen's left hand, as her right was still in a sling. “You're an exceptionally brave young woman,” he said. He spoke English with a clipped accent that made him sound as if he had something in his mouth, and Harald had to listen hard to understand him. “An experienced pilot would hesitate to cross the North Sea in a Hornet Moth,” Hogg added.

“To tell the truth, I had no idea how dangerous it was when I set off,” she replied.

Hogg turned to Harald. “Digby and I are old friends. He's given me a full report on your debriefing, and frankly I can't tell you how important this information is. But I want you to go over again your theory about how these three pieces of apparatus work together.”

Harald concentrated, retrieving from his memory the English words he needed. He pointed to the general shot he had taken of the three structures. “The large aerial rotates steadily, as if constantly scanning the skies. But the smaller ones tilt up and down and side to side, and it seemed to me they must be tracking aircraft.”

Hogg interrupted him to say to the other two officers, “I sent a radio expert on a reconnaissance flight over the island this morning at dawn. He picked up waves of two point four meters wavelength, presumably emanating from the big Freya, and also fifty-centimeter waves, presumably from the smaller machines, which must be Wurtzburgs.” He turned back to Harald. “Carry on, please.”

“So I guessed that the large machine gives long-range warning of the approach of bombers. Of the smaller machines, one tracks a single bomber, and the other tracks the fighter sent up to attack it. That way, a controller could direct a fighter to the bomber with great accuracy.”

Hogg turned to his colleagues again. “I believe he's right. What do you think?”

One of them said, “I'd still like to know the meaning of
himmelbett.
”

Harald said, “
Himmelbett?
That's the German word for one of those beds . . .”

“A four-poster bed, we call it in English,” Hogg told him. “We've heard that the radar equipment operates in a
himmelbett,
but we don't know what that means.”

“Oh!” said Harald. “I've been wondering how they would organize things. This explains it.”

The room went quiet. “Does it?” said Hogg.

“Well, if you were in charge of German air defense, it would make sense to divide your borders up into blocks of airspace, say five miles wide
and twenty miles deep, and assign a set of three machines to each block . . . or
himmelbett.
”

“You might be right,” Hogg said thoughtfully. “That would give them an almost impenetrable defense.”

“If the bombers fly side by side, yes,” said Harald. “But if you made your RAF pilots fly in line, and sent them all through one single
himmelbett,
the Luftwaffe would be able to track only one bomber, and the others would have a much better chance of getting through.”

Hogg stared at him for a long moment. Then he looked at Digby, and at his two colleagues, then back at Harald.

“Like a stream of bombers,” Harald said, not sure they understood.

The silence stretched out. Harald wondered if there was something wrong with his English. “Do you see what I mean?” he said.

“Oh, yes,” said Hogg at last. “I see exactly what you mean.”

On the following morning Digby drove Harald and Karen out of London to the northeast. After three hours they arrived at a country house that had been commandeered by the air force as officers' quarters. They were each given a small room with a cot, then Digby introduced them to his brother, Bartlett.

In the afternoon they all went with Bart to the nearby RAF station where his squadron was based. Digby had arranged for them to attend the briefing, telling the local commander it was part of a secret intelligence exercise; and no further questions were asked. They listened as the commanding officer explained the new formation the pilots would use for that night's raid—the bomber stream.

Their target was Hamburg.

The same scene was repeated, with different targets, on airfields up and down eastern England. Digby told Harald that more than six hundred bombers would take part in tonight's desperate attempt to draw some of the Luftwaffe's strength back from the Russian front.

The moon rose a few minutes after six o'clock in the evening, and the
twin engines of the Wellingtons began to roar at eight. On the big blackboard in the operations room, takeoff times were noted beside the code letter for each aircraft. Bart was piloting G for George.

As night fell, and the wireless operators reported in from the bombers, their positions were marked on a big map table. The markers moved ever closer to Hamburg. Digby smoked one anxious cigarette after another.

The lead aircraft, C for Charlie, reported that it was under attack from a fighter, then its transmissions stopped. A for Able approached the city, reported heavy flak, and dropped incendiaries to light the target for the bombers following.

When they began to drop their bombs, Harald thought of his Goldstein cousins in Hamburg, and hoped they would be safe. As part of his schoolwork last year he had had to read a novel in English, and he had chosen
War in the Air
by H. G. Wells, which had given him a nightmare vision of a city under attack from the air. He knew this was the only way to defeat the Nazis, but all the same he dreaded what might happen to Monika.

An officer came over to Digby and said in a quiet voice that they had lost radio contact with Bart's aircraft. “It may just be a wireless problem,” he said.

One by one, the bombers called in to report that they were heading back—all but C for Charlie and G for George.

The same officer came over to say, “The rear gunner of F for Freddie saw one of ours go down. He doesn't know which, but I'm afraid it sounds like G for George.”

Digby buried his face in his hands.

The counters representing the aircraft moved back across the map of Europe on the table. Only C and G remained over Hamburg.

Digby made a phone call to London, then said to Harald, “The bomber stream worked. They're estimating a lower level of losses than we've had for a year.”

Karen said, “I hope Bart's all right.”

In the early hours, the bombers began to come back in. Digby went outside, and Karen and Harald joined him, watching the big aircraft land on the runway and disgorge their crews, tired but jubilant.

When the moon went down, they were all back but Charlie and George.

Bart Hoare never did come home.

Harald felt low as he undressed and put on the pajamas Digby had loaned him. He should have been jubilant. He had survived an incredibly dangerous flight, given crucial intelligence to the British, and seen the information save the lives of hundreds of airmen. But the loss of Barty's aircraft, and the grief on Digby's face, reminded Harald of Arne, who had given his life for this, and Poul Kirke, and the other Danes who had been arrested and would almost certainly be executed for their parts in the triumph; and all he could feel was sadness.

He looked out of the window. Dawn was breaking. He drew the flimsy yellow curtains across the little window and got into bed. He lay there, unable to sleep, feeling bad.

After a while Karen came in. She, too, was wearing borrowed pajamas, with the sleeves and the trousers rolled to shorten them. Her face was solemn. Without speaking, she climbed into bed next to him. He held her warm body in his arms. She pressed her face into his shoulder and began to cry. He did not ask why. He felt sure she had been having the same thoughts as he. She cried herself to sleep in his arms.

After a while he drifted into a doze. When he opened his eyes again, the sun was shining through the thin curtains. He gazed in wonderment at the girl in his arms. He had often daydreamed about sleeping with her, but he had never foreseen it quite like this.

He could feel her knees, and one hip that dug into his thigh, and something soft against his chest that he thought might be a breast. He watched her face as she slept, studying her lips, her chin, her reddish eyelashes, her eyebrows. He felt as if his heart would burst with love.

Eventually she opened her eyes. She smiled at him and said, “Hello, my darling.” Then she kissed him.

After a while, they made love.

Three days later, Hermia Mount appeared.

Harald and Karen walked into a pub near the Palace of Westminster, expecting to meet Digby, and there she was, sitting at a table with a gin and tonic in front of her.

“But how did you get home?” Harald asked her. “Last time we saw you, you were hitting Detective Constable Jespersen over the head with your suitcase.”

“There was so much confusion at Kirstenslot that I was able to slip away before anyone noticed me,” Hermia said. “I walked into Copenhagen under cover of darkness and reached the city at sunrise. Then I came out the way I had gone in: Copenhagen to Bornholm by ferry, then a fishing boat across to Sweden, and a plane from Stockholm.”

Karen said, “I'm sure it wasn't as easy as you make it sound.”

Hermia shrugged. “It was nothing compared with your ordeal. What a journey!”

“I'm very proud of you all,” said Digby, though Harald thought, by the fond look on his face, that he was especially proud of Hermia.

Digby looked at his watch. “And now we have an appointment with Winston Churchill.”

An air raid warning sounded as they were crossing Whitehall, so they met the Prime Minister in the underground complex known as the Cabinet War Rooms. Churchill sat at a small desk in a cramped office. On the wall behind him was a large-scale map of Europe. A single bed covered with a green quilt stood against one wall. He was dressed in a chalk-stripe suit and had taken off the jacket, but he looked immaculate.