Piece of Cake (11 page)

Fanny pulled out the next sheet. Another Mickey Mouse had written UP YOUR KILT! forty times. He checked the next. Mickey Mouse again: ARSENAL 3, BLACKPOOL I, was the
answer to everything. Another sheet, same name.
I must not pick my nose in class,
it said, over and over. Only Mother Cox had signed his name and made an attempt to do the test, and most of his answers were blank.

Fanny's hands trembled as he shoved the papers into his locker. There was a heavy stiffness deep in his gut, as if he had swallowed a stone. He knew that this sort of thing could not go on. There had to be a showdown, and soon. One part of him demanded it. Another part dreaded it.

The light at twelve thousand feet was like watered whiskey. “A” flight had climbed through layer after layer of cloud spreading in from the North Sea: ragged, mucky-looking stuff, torn with holes. The last lot lay spread below them now, like all the world's dirty laundry, and the next layer hung gloomily a couple of hundred feet above. Fanny Barton studied it, calculated that the sunlight was too far away to be worth reaching, and decided to stay here, in this cramped and cheerless stretch of air. Training would be more difficult here, and that suited his frame of mind very well.

He put the flight into sections astern, increased speed to just over 250, and warmed them up with a sort of giant slalom, diving and climbing in a snaking series of S-bends. For five minutes he threw the flight about as severely and as unpredictably as he could, seeking to shake the wingmen loose. The formation stretched under the strain but it never broke. Finally, when his legs were beginning to ache and his lungs to gasp, he called for a loop. It carried the flight, inverted, up in to the belly of the top cloud; and as they curved down out of it he saw, with a sideways flicker of his eyes, that Red Two and Three were still more or less where they should be. They might be idiots but they could fly. It made him angrier than ever.

So much for the warm-up. Now for serious training.

At that moment his radio crackled and the Sector controller spoke.

“Jester Red Leader, this is Cowslip. Are you receiving me?”

Barton acknowledged. Cowslip requested his position. Barton thought fast and said they were approximately over Foulness Point. He was guessing but a guess was better than nothing.

For ten seconds the radio was silent. “A” flight cruised along its
dank corridor, going from nowhere to nowhere. Then another crackle.

“Jester Red Leader, this is Cowslip. Ten-plus bandits approaching Thames Estuary. Steer one-five-zero. Make angels five, over.”

Barton was so startled that for a moment he did nothing. The prospect of actual imminent combat with enemy aircraft briefly took his wits away. The radio crackled and he woke up, acknowledged, and led his flight in a steep, diving turn to the southeast, plunging them into the shabby mass of cloud like a blade into a mattress.

As they flashed into clear air again, Cowslip gave him a new course to steer: one-three-zero, and told him of a second hostile force, strength five-plus, following the first. By the time “A” flight was down to seven thousand feet a third raid had been reported, strength fifteen-plus; less than a minute later they were told that a fourth had been detected, this one the biggest of all: over twenty aircraft. Every plot was heading for the Thames Estuary. It was a massive German attack, and it was aimed at London.

The atmosphere at five thousand feet was murky, a moving junkyard of grubby cloud which made even the gaps look somehow stained and dark. To Fanny Barton it was the perfect setting for a fight: already in his imagination he could see Hun bombers blazing in this gloom; and he drove his flight along at a tearing speed, desperately afraid that other squadrons might get there first. The sky was a shifting jumble, some of it stacked high, some of it dumped like rubble, and he searched the gaps in a kind of suppressed frenzy so that when at last he glimpsed the enemy he blinked, and at once they were gone again, lost. But others in the flight had seen them too. “Bandits ahead one mile, Red Leader. Crossing port to starboard, gone into cloud.”

“Okay, I saw them. Jester aircraft, turning starboard, go.” Barton banked steeply and set a course that might—if the bombers flew straight—bring about an interception. The air was more turbulent at this lower level, and the Hurricanes were bucketing about like a fairground ride. Barton had to keep both hands on the control column, which suddenly reminded him (with a lurch of panic) that his gun-button was on “safety.” He thumbed the catch off, took a deep breath to steady his voice, and said: “Jester aircraft:
arm your guns.” He was just in time. As he spoke the bombers slid into view, ahead and above, perfectly silhouetted: three Junkers 88's. They appeared so beautifully, so cleanly, that his lungs expanded for sheer joy. “Attack, attack!” he called. He hauled back on the stick and tasted jubilation as the leader swam steadily bigger and blacker in his sights. Every muscle was tensed to hold the Hurricane steady when he pressed the button, but even so the blaze of fire that raced from his wings made him flinch. His eight guns shaped a long cone of golden destruction. It passed in front of the bomber's nose at first, and then seemed to wash down its fuselage, the tracer sparkling and beading like a magic show, until it slid off the tail and Barton half-rolled away, eager to clear the space so that Yellow Leader coming up behind him could have a crack too. He overdid the maneuver, turned too hard. His vision went foggy. Centrifugal force had sucked blood from his brain, and he wasted long seconds in recovery. When he could see clearly again, far away to his left a bomber was dropping in a long spiral of smoke, a spiral that grew tighter and faster as the smoke grew denser. Well, that was one less Junkers 88 to worry about.

No other plane was in sight. He flew straight and level for a moment, searching. He couldn't believe they had all gone, and yet the sky was vacant. A stuttering crackle caught his attention. It was like a row of toy balloons bring burst. Yellow lights streamed past his cockpit. He was being shot at. He shoved all the controls into a corner and flung the plane onto a wingtip. A blurred shape whizzed past and soared away. His Hurricane clawed its way around the turn and he caught a glimpse of his attacker, a tail-end profile: Messerschmitt 109. Cheeky bugger! Barton gave his plane full bore and chased hard, but the closest he could get was six hundred yards. He shot off the remainder of his ammunition and saw the German vanish into cloud.

He went home.

“Thus your total claim,” Skull said, “is two Junkers 88 bombers definitely destroyed, one severely damaged and probably destroyed, and three Messerschmitt 109 fighters damaged, of which one was possibly destroyed.”

“A” flight had all landed safely, they were in the locker room, and they were thoroughly pleased with themselves.

“Damn good show,” said Stickwell. “Extremely damn good show. Highly extremely very wizard damn good show all round. What?”

The others laughed. Even Fanny Barton smiled, sharing in the general relief and excitement and pride, although he kept his hands in his pockets to hide their shaking. He tried to stop thinking of his kill but his memory would not abandon those three or four lethal seconds; it kept returning again and again, fascinated by the focus of those splendid streams of fire ripping their way down the belly of the bomber. That was the most wonderful thing he had ever done. It had all been so quick, so good, so
right.
His mind was gloating over it, but why not? It was sheer perfection. And the rest of “A” flight had seen him do it. Marvelous. Superb. Exactly what was wanted.

“If only we could have had a crack at the bombers too,” Patterson said. “We'd have polished off Moggy's ‘probable.'”

“He didn't look terribly well after I'd peed all over him,” Cattermole said. “Lots of smoke coming out of the port engine, and so on. Then he vanished into this large black cloud. For all I know he's still there. You could always go back and have a look, Pip.”

“Don't be daft, Moggy. How on earth can I find him if he's inside a cloud?”

“Yes, of course, I never thought of that. He's probably got his eyes closed too. That makes them very hard to see, you know. Devilish cunning, these Huns.”

“It's all right for you jokers,” Dicky Starr said. “You got a bunch of 88's handed to you on a plate, while us mugs in Yellow Section got jumped on. I had to scram so hard I nearly blew up the engine.”

“That's nothing,” Mother Cox said. “When those 109's got behind me I turned so fast I bent my Hurricane's wings.”

“Really?” said Patterson. “Show me.”

“You can't see it now. I turned the other way even faster and bent them back again.”

Loud derisive laughter. Skull, making notes, crossed out his last entry.

Fanny Barton cleared his throat. “Nevertheless, the important
thing is that you did shake off the 109's, you did get into position to fire at them, and you did damage them.”

The three members of Yellow Section nodded.

“Okay. See you all in the mess.” As they went out he added: “Well done.”

Skull sat at the trestle table, putting his combat reports in order. One was dog-eared, and he carefully smoothed the corner.

“What's the matter?” Barton asked. Skull looked up. “You're not exactly sprinting to the phone, are you?” Barton said.

“Ah.” Skull pursed his lips. He was pressing his knees together like a spinster in a short skirt. “I believe the German Messerschmitt 109 fighter has a range of slightly over four hundred miles, thus giving it an operational radius of some two hundred miles.” He tugged his glasses halfway down his nose. “I read it in a book,” he explained.

“I believe you.”

“And I understand that the nearest German airfield is at least four hundred miles away.”

Barton walked over to a window and looked across the aerodrome. The grass was tinged silver by the wind and in the very far distance trees were slowly shaking their heads. “I suppose they must have carried extra long-range tanks, then,” he said. “You know: the disposable kind.”

“Nobody reported seeing anything like that.”

“Well, they wouldn't, would they? The Jerry pilots dropped them before they attacked.”

“Yes, of course.” Skull rolled up the combat reports and scratched his head with them. “It's still a very long way back to Germany, into a strong headwind.”

“Perhaps they came from Holland.”

“Holland is neutral.”

“Well, maybe they took off from an aircraft carrier, then.”

“To the best of my knowledge the German Navy has no aircraft carriers.”

“Oh.” Barton turned from the window. “In that case it looks as if some bright spark has invented a new long-range fighter, doesn't it?”

“Mmm.” Skull unrolled the reports and frowned at them.
“Which means that you were
not
in fact attacked by Messerschmitt 109's—”

“Come with me, Skull,” Barton said. They went out and walked across the grass to Dicky Starr's Hurricane. Barton ducked under the starboard wing and pointed to a slanting row of bulletholes. “That's not dry rot,” he said.

“Indisputable,” Skull said. “I'll go and telephone Group.”

Barton went into the anteroom of the mess with a sheaf of papers in his hand and a clear intention in his head. He was going to hammer “A” flight for their intolerable insolence and shoddy irresponsibility and generally insubordinate behavior in connection with the Anglo-Polish test. That sort of thing went beyond a joke. It was a challenge, a defiance of authority, an act of mutiny.

Well, maybe not quite an act of mutiny, but definitely an instance of serious indiscipline, and a fighter squadron had to have discipline. Above all came discipline.

But when he went through the door Barton was taken aback by the feeling of fierce exhilaration he met. The whole squadron was in fizzing high spirits. The talk everywhere buzzed with enthusiasm and sparkled with laughter. Moke Miller played the piano, badly but cheerfully. Pip Patterson's hands swooped and curved as he recreated part of the air battle. Dicky Starr stood beside him and grinned and nodded vigorously.

Barton paused. He coughed. Nobody paid any attention. He whacked the sheaf of papers against his palm, and called: “‘A' flight!”

It took them several seconds to stop talking. In the silence Moke Miller hit a splayed chord. Several pilots laughed. Barton, looking grimly dutiful, had a moment of fright: he didn't know what to say next. He raised the test papers. The gesture felt theatrical, wrong. “You all know what these are,” he said. That didn't sound right either.

“Citations, sir?” Moggy Cattermole suggested brightly. “We've all won medals, and quite right too! After all we did shoot down a vast number of very nasty Huns. I myself got three—”

Cheers and happy insults drowned his voice.

“I got five,” said Stickwell.

“I got seven,” Mother Cox said, “but I gave a couple to young Dicky because I felt sorry for him.”

“Bilge!” Dicky Starr cried. “Who d'you think lined up three Messerschmitts and put one burst through them all?”

“Me,” Pip said. “I'm so glad someone was watching.”

Starr attacked him with a cushion. Barton stuffed the papers into his pocket: how could anyone criticize them, let alone lambast them, in their moment of victory? As he turned away he thought he saw Stickwell give him a glance of amused contempt, but when he looked again Stickwell's back was turned. A hectic free-for-all was going on, with chairs overturned, cushions flying, and mess servants nimbly removing cups and saucers and glasses.

Barton walked away and sat in a corner. He felt slightly sick; everything was happening too fast; he wasn't sure whether he was leading the squadron or following it. The adjutant dropped into the next chair and put his feet up. “Congratulations, sir,” he said. “Damn fine show.”