Death Ray (15 page)

We were escorted along the shingle spit by a young soldier with three pips on his shoulders. He made straight for a large hangar. The cold night was crisp and I could taste the saltiness of the sea. Waves rolled in and crashed against the stony shore barely a dozen yards away. The soldier talked incessantly, probably under orders to try and take our minds off matters. ‘We service seaplanes and marine craft here,’ he said, almost as if we were on a school outing to the local museum. ‘This place is pretty famous. Back in ’twenty-nine the Schneider Cup was held here.’

‘The what?’ Freya snapped irritably.

‘High-speed air races, miss. It was reckoned a million people came to watch, lining the shores of the Solent. Britain won with a seaplane called the S-six. It averaged over three hundred miles per hour during the race. It was designed by a man called Reggie Mitchell. He also designed the Supermarine Spitfire.’

On any other day, at any other time, I would have been all ears. At that moment, however, I just wished the fellow would button it!

A man in blue overalls ran out to greet us from a nearby hut. ‘Jolly good. Right on time. I’m Chief Engineer Roberts. She’s ready and waiting for you.’ He stuck two fingers into his mouth and whistled loudly. ‘
Open sesame!
’ he bellowed before turning to me and adding, ‘Just my little joke.’

Slowly the huge hangar door slid open and I gasped. There she was – our Heinkel 115 float plane! Roberts ushered everyone inside. ‘We keep her under lock and
key,’
he remarked. ‘After all, she must remain top secret. We can’t let any old Tom, Dick or Harry see we’ve got her. We took her out of the water as soon as she arrived. She’s been under armed guard ever since.’

The hangar was vast. There were various seaplanes and motorboats undergoing repair and servicing under the bright glare of arc lights, some half dismantled, their engine parts neatly laid out beside gantries and ladders. There was a heavy smell of oil and kerosene, and sounds of hammering and of metal striking metal. It was an amazing sight. The Heinkel had been removed from the water using large wheeled dollies inserted beneath each of her floats. She looked bigger than I remembered. Her wingspan was over seventy feet and she was close to sixty feet long. I recalled that her official maximum speed was over one hundred and eighty miles per hour at about three thousand feet, although I reckoned she could do more. On seeing her dullish grey-green camouflage paint, the black and white crosses on her fuselage and the swastika on her tail fin, Max whistled loudly. ‘
Ach du meine Fresse!
You two can fly this thing?
Mein Gott!
I’m impressed.’

I walked around the plane. The metal of her twin nine-cylinder, nine hundred and sixty horse power radial engines clicked and pinged. She was cooling down. ‘We ran her engines for twenty minutes to make sure everything was OK,’ Roberts called out.

‘And?’ Nils asked.

‘Purrs like a kitten.’ Roberts beamed. ‘And we carried out the modifications you requested, Captain Jacobsen.’

‘What modifications?’ I asked while surveying her sleek lines.

‘We’ve fitted her with IFF.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a very clever system,’ Nils replied. ‘It stands for
Identification Friend or Foe
. As soon as we take off, our radar stations will pick us up. Without IFF they wouldn’t know whose side we’re on. The system is ingenious. There’s a device on board that detects our radar and then transmits its own signal back – a kind of reply, if you like. It tells the radar operators that the blip on their screens is friend, not foe. It should stop Fighter Command from scrambling some Spits to intercept us.’

‘What else have you done with her?’ Loki asked.

‘Well, as we discussed, we’re going to fly in low, to try and squeeze underneath Fritz’s radar. What I didn’t tell you is just how low we’ll be flying.’

‘How low?’ I enquired.

‘About fifty feet.’

‘That’s impossible,’ I said.

Roberts nodded to me. ‘Indeed, under normal circumstances flying that low over the sea is well nigh impossible. Your altimeter isn’t that accurate and it’s easy to get disorientated at night, especially over featureless terrain. One mistake and you’d splash into the briny. But we’ve come up with something.’

I was still trying to get my head round the magnitude of our task, when Roberts headed for the plane’s starboard wing tip. ‘We’ve fixed a lamp in each wing
and
adjusted their beams so that they meet at exactly fifty feet below the plane some hundred yards ahead of her. All you have to do is watch where the beams strike the ground or water and make sure they remain together. That’ll tell you you’re at exactly fifty feet. Think of it simply like a triangle.’ Roberts looked mighty pleased with himself.

‘But won’t the enemy see the lights?’ asked Freya.

The smile faded from Roberts’s lips. ‘I can’t work flipping miracles!’

‘It sounds splendid, Mr Roberts,’ said Nils. ‘Thank you. Loki, as you’ll be in the forward-gun position I want you to keep one eye on the lights. OK?’

Jacques, Amélie, ‘Luc’ and ‘Odette’ were taken to Roberts’s hut while Nils, Loki and I checked over the plane and then watched a dozen brawny men put their shoulders and backs into pushing the dollies out of the hangar, guiding the Heinkel towards a wide slipway. There, all the equipment was loaded before the plane was pushed into the water and tied up. There was just time for checking the latest weather reports, grabbing a cup of piping-hot tea, and worrying about everything that might go wrong, before Nils tapped me on my shoulder and said to everyone, ‘It’s time.’

SCALING A LADDER
fixed between the fuselage and one of the floats, the team boarded. Loki headed for the forward-gun position in the nose of the plane and I made for the cockpit, while Nils ensured the others strapped themselves in properly within the cramped confines of what’s called the ‘crawl way’. I took a deep breath, the strong kerosene fumes and peculiar but distinctive burnt-like odour of electrical stuff filling my lungs, and sat down behind the controls. For a split second I had a flashback. My sister’s one-time boyfriend, Dieter Braun, a Luftwaffe pilot, was sitting next to me just like he had on that day when he took Loki and me for a short flight in this very plane over the fjords back home. He knew I was crazy about flying and had thought it a perfect sixteenth birthday present for me. I’d watched him run through the pre-flight checks and then start her up. Oddly, I had him to thank for making me believe I could fly this plane, although as it turned out Dieter was dangerously two-faced. While he charmed my sister and me, he was simultaneously seeking the maps and photographs that had fallen into my hands. He stopped at nothing to retrieve them. In the end it cost him his life.

Nils arrived and sat in the co-pilot’s seat next to me. ‘OK, Finn?’

I swallowed hard and nodded.

He strapped himself in and we hooked up the radio sets in our flying helmets to the control panel so we could still communicate once the engines were running. He checked Loki had done the same, then turned to me. ‘I’ve grabbed a few hours on her, Finn. All-night flying, too, so we should be fine. We’ll run through the pre-flight checks together. Shout if you think I’ve forgotten anything.’

Nils was asking me! But I knew the drill. Dozens of times in the past I’d helped my father check over his plane before setting off. ‘Flaps and rudder, first,’ I replied hesitantly.

‘Yes, Finn. Flaps and rudder controls first.’

While he checked them, I cast my eyes over the instrument panel: the altimeter, airspeed indicator, oil pressure and temperature gauges. ‘I’ll set the controls for takeoff,’ I said. Reaching forward, I got to work, talking through my actions. ‘Opening throttles and adjusting the carburettor air-intakes to their start positions. Main ignition and magneto switches on … As Roberts has already run the engines the oil temperature is OK. No need to let her warm up.’

‘Good.’ Nils sat back and cracked his knuckles. ‘Port engine first please, Finn.’

I hit the starter switch for the port engine and we both peered out of the cockpit, watching the propeller blades begin to turn amid a loud whine. The engine
spluttered
into life, spewing puffs of black smoke. The blades spun faster and quickly became a blur. Nils adjusted the throttle slightly. A minute later the starboard engine hummed loudly too. Nils slid open the cockpit, stuck an arm out and signalled for the plane to be untied. Then he flipped a switch that looked new to me. ‘That’s the IFF we were talking about, Finn. For God’s sake always make sure it’s on otherwise you’ll have Spits on your tail before you know it. Well, this is it. Next stop France!’

He reached for the throttles and shoved them to their maximum positions. The hum of the engines rose to a whining din and then a frenetic howl. Everything shook and rattled. Slowly we moved forward, away from the slipway, out into the open water. According to the weather reports, the wind was north-westerly, gusting about fifteen knots. We headed away from land and, easing the throttles slightly, Nils used the rudder to turn her into the wind. Then full throttle again. She shook and rocked violently as she smacked and cut through the slight swell. We gathered speed rapidly. The din of her howling engines was ear-splitting. Our ground speed reached forty miles per hour. Then fifty, sixty, seventy. At eighty miles per hour we pulled back our columns. ‘Gently does it,’ I muttered under my breath. The rocking, wallowing and wave-smacking gradually subsided as the plane lifted slightly. Then, like some great bird almost too heavy to fly, she rose clear of the water. The pounding ceased. Everything was suddenly smooth. We were airborne.

Climbing fast, Nils reached forward and made some adjustments. Then he set us on a tight left turn towards the southeast. Checking the compass, I made a note of the time and our airspeed on my copy of our maps.

‘I’m going to take her to five hundred feet, Finn. Let her settle and make sure everything’s OK, and then we’ll drop to fifty feet.’

‘I remember Dieter telling me that at cruising speed we need eighty-five per cent power,’ I said.

‘As we’ll be going in so low we’ll take it nice and steady. We won’t push the engines so hard.’

Levelling off at five hundred feet I gazed out of the cockpit. It was a full moon and there was just a little broken cloud. I could see countless stars, and the sea stretched out before us like a shimmering silk carpet.

‘Everything all right, Loki?’ I said into my mouthpiece.

‘Yeah. When are you going to switch on those lights?’

Nils reached out and flipped a switch. ‘They’re on now. Can you see them?’

I leaned forward and peered at the sea in front and beneath us. There were two barely discernible oval shapes of pale light on the surface, far ahead of us and some distance apart. ‘Here goes,’ said Nils. He throttled back and pushed his control column forward. The plane’s nose dipped and we descended. Keeping one eye on the altimeter and the other on the patches of light beneath us, I saw the ovals gradually move closer together, growing smaller and brighter. It felt like the sea was rising up to swallow us. Instinctively I braced myself.

‘Almost there.’ Loki’s voice crackled through my earphones. ‘That’s it! Fifty feet. Hold her nice and steady.’

Nils levelled the plane. Again I noted the time and our airspeed – ten minutes past eleven and one hundred and fifteen miles per hour. The prevailing wind was at our tail now. I calculated the time to our next change of course, which wouldn’t be until we approached the French coast, and got Nils to check my sums. He nodded approvingly. I set about plotting our position and route on my map.

‘Do you think they’ve picked us up on their radar?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Guess we’ll soon find out, Finn. We’ll either find a Messerschmitt on our tail or have Fritz challenging us on our radio. Fingers crossed though.’

I recalled the hours we’d spent studying the aerial photographs of Rochefort while compiling our flight plan. From what we could see of the structures that were supposedly Fritz’s new-fangled radar system, they looked totally different to the huge tall aerial towers Nils said lay at the heart of our system. All we could make out were some small dish-like objects and rectangular grids arranged in a triangle, although it was hard to tell exactly what shape they were from the angle the photographs had been taken. ‘Are they absolutely sure there’s a radar installation at Rochefort and not something entirely different?’

Nils nodded. ‘Everything seems to point to it. I had a bit of a chat with one of the experts from
Worth
Matravers last time he visited the brigadier at Mulberry House. There’s a theory to explain why our boys are getting intercepted so early once they approach the coast. They think Fritz’s system has three parts: two accurate but short-range devices – one to track our planes and the other their own fighter aircraft; and a single long-range device that they use as an early-warning system. As soon as they see us coming, they get their fighters into the air and wait until we show up on their short-range system. At that point they can track us accurately enough to talk their fighters into intercepting us.’

‘The bastards!’ I shouted into my mouthpiece.

Nils laughed. ‘Don’t underestimate them, Finn. Their
Nachtjagd
is pretty formidable.’

My German was good enough to know he was referring to their night fighting. Unfastening my harness, I turned to look back at the others – lit by the glow of a feeble red lamp, they were sitting quietly with their backs to the fuselage, staring blankly ahead, lost in their own thoughts. ‘Luc’ briefly looked in my direction but, solemn faced, quickly looked away. It wasn’t long now, I realized, and there was no going back. I refastened my harness and pulled the straps tight.

Nils began fiddling with the dials of our radio. Since we were under orders to maintain radio silence I was puzzled. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Adjusting the frequency to see if we can pick up Fritz’s transmissions. If anyone’s up here with us we stand a good chance of hearing them.’