Piece of Cake (20 page)

The squadron was echeloned to starboard. “Sections close astern, flights echelon starboard,” Rex ordered. “Go.”

He watched the bomber. It was still boring steadily toward Germany, same speed, same course. When he looked up, Green Section was tucked behind Blue. He knew that Yellow Section must be following Red.

“Aircraft, line astern, go,” he said.

He studied the bomber again, gauging its speed: 140 or 150 mph.

Two lengths to his right, “B” flight was nose-to-tail. Slipstream turbulence jostled them slightly.

“Here we go, then. Number three attack, Number three attack. Turning starboard—go.”

Rex banked right. The bomber disappeared under the Hurricane's nose. He straightened up, glanced back to make sure everyone had done the same, and said: “Aircraft, form vic, go.”

The sections obediently rearranged themselves in arrowheads. The bomber was about a mile ahead. In the vastness of the sky it looked as small as a bird.

“Good. Now, Blue and Green Sections orbit here. Blue and Green only, turning starboard, go.” “B” flight banked and swung away. “Going down,” Rex said. Red section nosed into a gentle dive. Yellow Section throttled back slightly and followed a few hundred yards behind.

“Red Section, fire, go,” said Rex.

The target expanded steadily until its lumbering bulk filled his reflector sight. Rex braced himself.
“Tatta-tatta-tat”
he said under his breath, and immediately ordered: “Red Section, break starboard, go.”

Moggy Cattermole, flying as Red Three, broke starboard and yawned. They had been doing these practice interceptions for nearly forty minutes, each attack as precise and well-drilled as classical ballet, each theoretically ending in success, each bloody boring. He stretched his neck and worked his shoulder-muscles, and watched the bomber trudge along. Yellow Section broke off its mock-attack, and “B” flight descended. The bomber was French, a Bloch 200, thick and hulking, with slabby wings and a fuselage as boxy as a cattletruck. The front gunner sat in a turret like a glass dustbin stuck on the nose. Cattermole could see him clearly. The man was reading a book.

“B” flight closed, and swung away. The squadron re-formed. The Bloch turned north. Rex would let it escape and then he would find it again. Boring. Bloody boring.

Cattermole checked the bank of dials in front of him, searching for trouble. Airspeed indicator, artificial horizon, rate-of-climb
indicator, all normal. Engine RPM, boost gauge, fuel pressure, oil pressure, oil temperature, radiator temperature. Nothing wrong there. Fuel gauges. Magnetic compass. Turn-and-bank indicator. Everything working perfectly.

“Bloody awful British workmanship,” he muttered. He leaned forward and rapped the oil-temperature gauge. The Hurricane wobbled slightly but the needle on the gauge remained steady. “Shoddy,” he said. He sat back and turned the transmission switch on his oxygen mask. “Red Leader from Red Three,” he said. “I've got a hot engine.”

“Check oil temperature, Red Three.”

Cattermole counted silently to three and said: “Boiling oil, Leader.”

He saw Rex looking at him, searching for evidence of failure. “Okay, Red Three, buzz off home,” Rex said.

Immediately Cattermole let his left wing drop to the vertical and he fell away in a long and luxurious plunge. The squadron was high above him, and his airspeed had built to a howling three hundred and fifty miles an hour before he started hauling back on the stick. The controls were stiff against the rush of air, air that resisted them like floodwater, but soon the nose came up and up, and up still more as he held the stick against his stomach, investing all that momentum in a loop. It wasn't the kind of thing you did with an overheating engine, but nobody was likely to notice: Hurricane pilots could see very little directly below them.

Upside down in the top of the loop, Cattermole saw the gloomy forests of Germany floating in the far distance like dark green clouds. Faintly he heard Rex say: “Aircraft, line astern, go.” Then his plane fell out of the loop. He half-rolled and flattened out, and headed northwest. The radio in his Hurricane was tunable. He lost Rex and found some dance music:
Anything Goes.
He joined in, not knowing the words but pom-pom-ing happily.

The bridge over the Moselle at Thionville turned out to be a nasty piece of work. It was modern and concrete, broad enough to carry four lanes of traffic, and not very high. Cattermole circled the town at a thousand feet and studied the central span. It was by far the widest but the curve of the arch was low: the gap seemed as flat as a fried egg. Also there was traffic on the river: barges and things. Straight away Cattermole decided it was impossible.
Damn-fool frogs! No wonder they got their bloody arms chopped off. Serve 'em right.

All the same, having come this far … Might as well stooge down and beat up the place, just to show the frogs who was boss.

Cattermole flew upstream for about a mile and turned. At this angle the bridge looked more like a dam, with no light visible through its spans. He nudged the throttle and eased the stick forward. The Merlin's growl jumped to a roar. He felt a firm shove in the back, and the world below began to rise up and race by, full of living detail: trees that waved, trucks and cars buzzing along the road by the river, smoke blowing from chimneys, swans on the river. The river was ridged with ripples that never moved; it looked as hard as marble. He leveled out at twenty feet and flashed under some power cables almost before he saw them. With four hundred yards to go, the bridge looked very different: light now showed clearly beneath it and the center span reached wide. Without consciously deciding, Cattermole made his decision; damn it all, that's what bridges were for, wasn't it? Especially big ones. With astonishing suddenness the bridge rushed at him, its gray-white bulk turning black against the sky, and it swallowed him. The plane was off-center. He corrected with rudder and stick; but too late: as the bridge spat him out from its racketing gloom his starboard wingtip missed the concrete arch by inches. He rocketed into daylight with his mouth wide open, his eyes staring, a surge of sweat all over his body. A motorised barge was heading straight at him. Both hands snatched the stick into his stomach. The Hurricane seemed to bounce on air and vault over the vessel's masts with a jolt that left his guts seeking his stomach. Cattermole rammed the throttle forward and climbed for safety and sanity and peace, and kept climbing until his mouth had stopped gasping. When he looked down, the barge was still there, angled to the current. It seemed to have collided with the bridge. “That was a remarkably stupid thing to do,” he told it. “People like you shouldn't be allowed out.”

Fifteen minutes later he was making a circuit of the field at Château St. Pierre. He closed the Hurricane's radiator before his final approach and by the time he touched down the engine-temperature gauge was climbing nicely. A few healthy bursts of power while he was taxiing pushed it up several more degrees. He
opened the radiator before his groundcrew reached him and kept the engine running so that they could see the gauge too. It was hot as hell.

The rest of the squadron hadn't returned yet. Cattermole went off to the mess for a beer. He felt he'd earned it.

The mess servants were drawing the heavy velvet curtains in the billiard room, and Rex was chalking his cue. Patterson sprawled on one of the buttoned-leather couches; Stickwell stood in front of the log fire, hands in pockets, toasting his backside. They were all watching Cattermole.

“Blue in the center,” Cattermole said. He stooped and lined up the shot, blinking as he changed focus. There was a neat click of ivory; the blue departed like a faithful messenger and fell obediently into the pocket. “Brilliant,” Cattermole said. He raised his eyes. Micky Marriott, the engineer officer, had come in and was watching. “Tradesmen around the back,” Cattermole said.

“There's nothing wrong with your engine,” Marriott said.

Cattermole walked around the table, extracted the blue and placed it on its spot.

“Your fitter checked it, and the flight sergeant checked it, and then I checked it,” Marriott said. “There's no overheating.”

Cattermole leaned far over the table and casually potted a long red. “Must be a faulty gauge, then,” he said.

“The gauge works perfectly,” Marriott said.

“I think … the pink,” Cattermole decided. But the pink refused to go down. “Thank you very much indeed,” he said to Marriott, not looking at him. “I couldn't have missed it without you.”

Rex came forward and examined the set-up on the table. “Is this something urgent, Micky?” he asked.

“It's not the first time it's happened, sir, that's all. And I take exception to having my lads waste the whole afternoon checking out faults that don't exist.”

Rex selected the red he fancied and sank it with a quick, clean blow. “Funny creatures, airplanes,” he said. “They'll do one thing on the ground and another thing altogether in the sky.”

“Just like women,” Stickwell said. “Princess in the parlor, baggage in the bedroom.” He rattled his small change in his pocket. “True,” he said.

“Have you tested my machine at twelve thousand feet?” Cattermole asked Marriott.

“You know damn well I haven't.”

“Ah, well then.” Cattermole leaned his cue against Stickwell, strolled away, and sat on the couch, thus sitting on Patterson, who let out a yelp of pain. “That's where it was overheating, you see, at twelve thousand. I never said it was overheating in your tatty hangar, did I? Frankly, old boy, what you and your grimy assistants get up to at ground level is neither here nor there. It's what happens in the wide blue yonder that concerns me.” He put a cushion on Patterson's face to stifle the groans.

There was a pause while Rex potted the black.

“Nothing's been changed in your engine,” Marriott said. “It's exactly as it was when you reported it duff. I'll bet you a week's pay it doesn't overheat when you take it up tomorrow.”

“No, you won't,” Rex said. “I'm not having the maintenance of the aircraft turned into a private gamble.”

Marriot chewed at a thumbnail. “In that case, let somebody else fly Cattermole's plane tomorrow,” he said. “Then we'll see.”

Rex took a long time to play an ambitious and complicated three-cushion shot that just failed. “Perhaps,” he said.

Marriott turned and went out. Stickwell strolled over to the table.

“Damned mechanics,” Cattermole said. “Just because they know how to change the oil and top-up the battery, they want to rule the world.”

Rex walked to the fireplace and took his tankard of beer from the mantelpiece. “I'm not concerned about his political ambitions,” he said. “I just wish he'd do something about those appalling fingernails of his. They quite put me off my food.”

Stickwell laughed so much he missed the cue-ball. Patterson, however, did not laugh; and it wasn't only because Cattermole was sitting on him. Come to that, Cattermole was no joke either.

Next morning the trees that fringed the airfield were hidden by the rain. The sky dumped its load so heavily that the spray on the terrace bounced knee-high. The tennis-court was flooded, the driveway became a shallow stream, water trickled under the french
windows and soaked the edge of the carpets. The wind boomed in the chimneys, and the air was much colder.

Marriott came back from the field after breakfast, his gas-cape shining with water. “Go back to bed for a week,” he said. “There's a lake over there you could swim in. I've had double covers put on the Hurricanes: those hangars leak like buggery. It's blowing like a bastard, too.” Rainwater kept dribbling out of his hair and making him blink.

They were all standing in the conservatory, watching the weather wash everything a uniform, blurred gray-green.

“What a shame,” Fitzgerald said. “Just when Moggy was itching to go up and test his engine.”

“No need,” Cattermole said. “Air temperature's down. Can't overheat now. Perfectly safe.”

“I think I'll have a toilet-roll fitted in your cockpit,” Marriott said.

“If you like, old chap. Make it something soft, won't you? We Cattermoles bruise easily.”

“I'll make it sandpaper.”

“I say, Marriott, old boy,” said Stickwell. “What d'you think of that?” He held up his little finger.

Marriott stared, suspiciously. “Looks all right. Why?”

“Nothing. It's just that while you were looking at it, Reilly was pissing over your left foot.”

Marriott glanced down to see the dog uncocking its leg. He stepped back hastily, but Reilly had struck. The conservatory echoed with laughter. Marriott glared at Rex. “For Christ's sake, sir!” he said.

“If you will go around dressed like a lamppost,” Rex said suavely, “you must expect the consequences.”

Cattermole squatted on his haunches and rubbed Reilly behind the ears. He was feeling very satisfied. Nobody had complained about a Hurricane flying under the bridge at Thionville. It looked as if he'd got away with it.

By midmorning the wind had worked itself up to a gale. Rex telephoned Area HQ at Rheims and then summoned the adjutant. “Even the ducks are grounded,” he said. “Who's in line for leave?”

Kellaway found the list. “Sticky Stickwell and Flip Moran.”

“Okay, send them home. And we can start making a dent in these invitations.” He fished about in a tray marked FROG BUMF and pulled out a letter. “The local school, village of Pont-St. Pierre. They want a couple of chaps to go down and address the kids.”

“How about Flash Gordon?”

“Flash? He's awfully young, isn't he? He looks like a schoolboy.”

“Well, he
was
a schoolboy not so long ago. Anyway, he's become very keen lately. He does body-building exercises and takes cold baths and practices with his revolver on the range. He's determined to be the first to shoot down a Hun.”