Back to Battle (41 page)

‘Goddam fly-boys–!’

Kaysor was trying to yell something to Kelly over the din of the engines when there was a tremendous wrench and a bang and Kelly realised he could see pieces of metal flying through the air. There was a yell from up forward and he saw Latimer’s jaw drop in a sudden expression of horror as they felt the bulkhead twisting behind their backs. There was a vicious snap and the tail section lifted into the air and fell back again, and still dazed, Kelly realised that for some reason the pilot’s final trip was ending in disaster. They were crashing, and he was going to die as Ramsay had died.

There was a colossal bang and the sound of tearing metal, and they came to a stop with a jerk that flung him on top of Kaysor. Latimer was rolling in the space between the seats, his feet in the air. Of Boyle he could see no sign. He fought free of the tangle of arms and legs and, seeing an opening surrounded by torn metal, realised in an instant that it was his only chance of life.

He shoved Latimer out of the hole in front of him and fell out after him. He seemed to go on falling forever and landed on his shoulder. Something gave with a crack but he knew he had to get clear and scrambled away on hands and knees. Almost unconsciously he was aware of the tail section of the Liberator lying at an angle to the rest of the machine, the nose dipped to the ground, and a torn stretch of tarmacadam, then there was a violent ‘pouf’ sound and a blast of air lifted him several feet and threw him on to his injured shoulder again as the petrol caught fire.

Violent heat seared his face and he was conscious of a tremendous yellow glare and a new agony in his right leg that he hadn’t noticed before. Struggling away on his knees and one hand through petrol that was dripping to the tarmac and made it look as if it were shimmering, he saw that seven men in addition to himself were scrambling about in the flare of flame. One of them was Latimer, dragging himself along by his elbows, his clothes on fire. He was yelling and looked as though he were blind, and Kelly flung himself at him, beating at the flames with his good hand, crying out at the pain because the petrol caused the flames to stick to his flesh. As fast as he slapped at them they sprang up elsewhere and he realised that Latimer was soaked with petrol. Dragging him from the wreckage, he rolled across him, and as he fell back, gasping, wondering where Boyle was and if he ought to have made sure he’d got clear, too, he heard the sound of engines and the shriek of tyres and brakes. Men were running towards him and he felt someone grab him by the armpits and drag him clear then he was being rolled on the ground in a brutal fashion that caused the broken bones in his shoulder to scrape against each other in agonising fashion. Sand was thrown on him, and it was only then that he realised his own clothing had been on fire.

Hurriedly, the survivors were shoved aboard a truck, several of them with flesh hanging from them in charred strips. They were already heading for the hospital as the ambulances arrived, and dazedly, he noticed that the rest of the aerodrome seemed untouched by the disaster and that planes were still taking off and landing as if nothing had happened, flying unheedingly through the pillar of black smoke that was drifting across the runway.

Bouncing about in the lorry, he stared round, still in shock and only half aware of what had happened. To his surprise, he found that in addition to his broken shoulder there was an appalling gash in his thigh that was pouring blood down his trousers. But the other men in the truck looked like burned toast with here and there a patch of clothing or a jagged strip of khaki or navy with gold buttons clinging by a seam or a collar or a cuff to the blackened flesh.

‘Christ, what happened?’ one of them said, and Kelly was surprised that his voice seemed as normal and unaffected as if nothing had happened.

He began to recognise them at last. Keysor was babbling about the need to inform his wife, and Latimer’s blackened charred face was trying to smile at him.

‘Fire burn, cauldron bubble,’ he said. ‘Macbeth, sir.’

‘Shut up, William,’ Kelly said, struggling to tuck the blanket round him.

Latimer winced with pain, so shocked he didn’t feel the sear of the fire but recoiled from the slightest touch.

Someone gave Kelly an injection as the truck stopped and when he came round he found they’d stripped off his clothing and put his broken shoulder into a hideously uncomfortable splint like an aeroplane’s wing that supported his arm at an angle of ninety degrees from his body. The ward was full of white-garbed nurses, one of whom told him he’d had twenty-seven stitches in his leg. It was in plaster now and covered by a thing like a kitchen fireguard to keep the weight of the bedclothes off it. They seemed to have no doubt that he would survive because after six years of war they could judge exactly what the human frame could stand.

His burns had come chiefly from touching the others and were clearly far from fatal. Kaysor, they said, was likely to die that day. Latimer might survive but they had their doubts. In addition to his terrible burns, he had two broken legs, two broken wrists and several broken ribs, but they weren’t even thinking about those yet.

‘The problem,’ the doctor said, ‘is that when the burns are as bad as this the serum just seeps through the damaged tissue. We’ve tried a lot of things but I’m afraid none of them is really effective yet.’

They knew nothing of anybody called Boyle.

Despite the splintered arm and the cage over his leg, Kelly insisted on having his bed placed next to Latimer’s. Because he was a vice-admiral, they didn’t argue. Latimer was bandaged beyond recognition and was connected to glucose and plasma bottles and was in deep sedation. Later in the day, he came round and looked at Kelly through his only visible eye. His hand moved in a slow floppy movement that rattled the tubes attached to him.

‘What happened to your arm, sir?’ he asked.

‘It’s not my arm,’ Kelly said. ‘It’s my shoulder. I broke it.’

‘That’s buggered up the Pacific, hasn’t it?’

‘A bit.’

‘I’m glad you got out, sir.’

‘I’m glad we both did. We were lucky. It broke in two just about where we were sitting.’

‘How about Boyle?’

‘He doesn’t seem to have made it.’ Kelly sighed. ‘I think you ought to dry up now, William. The nurse’ll be after you.’

Kaysor died soon afterwards and then the others one after another. The doctor gave Kelly pills that eased the pain a little and made him doze, and when he woke up they told him Latimer wasn’t suffering.

He accepted that this meant that Latimer was going to die but not in pain, and he asked if all their wives had been told.

‘They’re on their way now.’

The nurses arrived soon afterwards and a bed was wheeled out.

‘Who’s that?’ Kelly asked.

‘Not Captain Latimer. Go to sleep.’

Soon afterwards he saw the nurse bending over the next bed, touching Latimer here and there gently with her fingers as if to make sure he was alive. There was only the slightest gasp as he died, and even that was almost lost as an aeroplane thundered overhead.

Curiously, it was Verschoyle who was the first to arrive. He appeared at the end of the ward and came slowly towards Kelly, moving cautiously to the bed, his scarred face concerned.

‘Hello, Kelly,’ he said quietly. ‘You all right?’

‘Better than most,’ Kelly said shortly. ‘William Latimer’s dead.’

Verschoyle sat down. ‘Yes, I heard so.’

‘His wife came a few minutes after he went. She walked in expecting to find him alive.’ Kelly paused. ‘Boyle’s wife came, too. I met her first in Russia, you know. She was French. We fished her out of Odessa with her family. Christ–’ Kelly fought to keep the tears back ‘–what a bloody waste! What happened?’

‘They don’t know yet. Charley been?’

‘Not yet. What’s happened to her?’

‘I think there’s been some balls-up somewhere. They told me you were at Burn but I knew you were going to Bourne. Perhaps they told her Burn, too.

‘Poor William,’ Kelly said. ‘All that Shakespeare. What’s going to happen now, James?’

Verschoyle shrugged. ‘Well, it’s obvious you won’t be going to Trincomalee,’ he said. ‘It’ll be six months before you’re right again and by that time the war could be over. We’ve already heard that the Germans are making pacific noises. They’ve all fallen out with each other and they’re all trying to grab themselves a bit of security by posing as someone who wanted peace all the time and wasn’t allowed to because Hitler was on his neck. I don’t think it’ll help ’em much because there seems to be a move afoot to bring the whole bloody lot to trial in front of the German people so they can see their guilt.’

‘Doesn’t mean a thing.’ Kelly moved his hand. ‘If we’d lost, they’d have brought Winston to trial, and, God knows, he didn’t start the war.’

‘You sound low. Fed up about the task force?’

Kelly considered. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘It’ll mean I’ll have a bit of time with Charley, which’ll make a change, because in the whole of my life I’m damned if we’ve spent more than a few consecutive days together. Retirement would be nice.’

Verschoyle smiled. ‘Who said anything about retirement? This business has caused a bit of switching about, of course, but they reckon you’ll be back on the ball in a couple of months, and, knowing you, I reckon they’re right. And, since by the time you’re out the Germans’ll have thrown their hand in, they’re suggesting you for that job Ramsay turned down.’

Kelly stared at the bed cover. ‘Do they really mean it?’ he said.

‘Yes. And you’ll want a deputy, and that’s a job I wouldn’t mind.’

Kelly paused, thinking of Boyle and Latimer. ‘It’s nice to know there’ll still be someone around I know,’ he said slowly. He managed a smile. ‘It’s a long time since we half killed each other fighting.’

Verschoyle smiled back. ‘It was a good scrap,’ he said. ‘You’d never have won if you hadn’t cheated.’

Charley didn’t arrive until the evening.

The nurse was making a brave effort to cheer him up and he didn’t want to be cheered up. He felt as low as he’d ever felt and blasted off at her as she punched his pillows.

‘Look, sir,’ she said finally, ‘you may be very important in your ship, but here you’re just a patient. And it’s time to take your sleeping pills.’

‘I don’t want to go to sleep,’ Kelly snapped. ‘My missis hasn’t been yet.’

‘You’ll be no fun for your wife if you’re in pain, will you? You’ve got third-degree burns on your hands, a broken collar bone and a gash as long as my arm in your thigh.’

He took the pills unwillingly and she went away with such an angry expression he made up his mind to apologise and be particularly nice to her next time.

He lay in bed, glowering at the cage over his leg, waiting for the pills to take effect. Poor Latimer, he thought. It had been a long association and it still seemed bloody sad that all that knowledge had been wasted.

Mentally he was calling the roll of the men he’d known. So few of them had been granted his own luck. A few would reappear eventually from prisoner of war camps, a few would recover their health to be useful again, and life would go on. But he wondered how much anybody really knew of what it had cost. They’d spent the last six years seeing their friends whittled away by attrition and even when it was all over, whenever they heard of another one dying it would be like another wound because a war never ended and the grief was never gone while ever there were survivors.

A movement at the end of the ward caught his attention and he turned his head, somehow half-expecting to see Latimer or Boyle. But Boyle had never appeared and Latimer’s bed had gone, wheeled away in a hurry after he’d died.

It was the nurse and she was frowning and looked ready to do battle. He forestalled her by smiling and apologising to the best of his endeavour. She looked startled.

‘There’s somebody to see you,’ she said.

‘My wife?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, wheel her in!’

‘I don’t know that you deserve it.’

‘I’ll go down on my knees if it’ll help.’

She smoothed his pillow and smiled. ‘Just be quiet and calm down. After all, bed’s not a bad place to be.’

‘It’d be better with you in it.’

She laughed and turned away and when he saw Charley coming slowly down the ward his heart did a flop into his stomach because, somehow, she looked just as she had when she’d visited him in Rosyth after Jutland. She was wearing blue as she had then and, in the same way as then, it made her hair seem darker. She had a paper bag in her hand.

‘Grapes again?’ Kelly asked.

‘Yes.’ She sat beside the bed, her eyes on his face. ‘I don’t think you’re the type for flowers.’

She gave a small hiccuping sob and bent to kiss him. ‘Oh, Kelly,’ she said. ‘I thought at first you were dead.’

‘Well, I’m not. Not by a long way. What kept you?’

‘They sent me to Burn.’

‘Typical bloody staff work! Those buggers get enlarged backsides shining the seats of their chairs! You’d think they’d have managed to get a thing like this right!’

She managed a smile. ‘It doesn’t matter. They apologised. They said there were so many hurt, they had to rope in anybody they could, to do the telephoning.’ She paused. ‘Kelly, I’m so sorry about William and Seamus Boyle.’

He grunted. He’d managed to shove them to the back of his mind to be thought about later when he felt he could bear it.

‘What do they say about you?’

‘Broken collar bone, a gash on my thigh and burns. I did the collarbone diving out of the plane. I must have done the leg inside. The burns aren’t much.’ He frowned because a lump persisted in coming to his throat every time he thought about it and he had to force himself to be brusque and hearty to keep it back. He held up his bandaged hands. ‘This is a damn silly thing to have happen to me, Charley. I can’t make grabs at you.’

She gave him a small sad smile. ‘You’ll not be going to the Pacific now.’

‘No.’ He managed to smile back at her. ‘Verschoyle says they’re going to fix me up with a job at the Admiralty. I shall be home a lot. I hope you can stand it.’