Gold From Crete (11 page)

A million men obeyed his orders; the peace and happiness of thousands of millions unborn, through countless generations to come, depended directly on his decisions. A mistake made now might mean that miserable peasants a hundred years from now would still be slaves; unthinkably it might mean that Britain herself might lapse into slavery. On the other hand, the right plan resolutely carried through, the ingenious device hit upon by good fortune, might shortly spell freedom for millions and the ending of the grim nightmare which encompassed the world.

And despite all this the air marshal was a human being, like the air vice-marshals and the group captains and the wing commanders and Harry Brewer, pettishly snatching off his helmet. The air marshal was a man of flesh and blood - five feet ten of it - only a little bulkier than in his lean youth. There was some grey in the black hair, and wrinkles round the corners of the prominent grey eyes; the wrinkles told only the same story as the rows of bright ribbon on his chest. The healthy pink of his cheeks made him look younger than he was, and for a man of his age he was remarkably agile and lithe, but he was a human being, for all that. He had his good days, and, sometimes, he had his bad; and as his wife called him Sam, which was not his name, one could guess that somewhere in the past there was a human story in that connexion.

Today he looked at the report of the fighter command and narrowed his eyes as he followed up its implications in his mind. Those were the new Messerschmitts, without a doubt, that the 143rd Squadron had seen. The air marshal had a slight personal acquaintance with the squadron leader (although the squadron leader would be amazed to hear that the air marshal remembered it) and knew just how much reliance to place in his judgement; he knew more about the group captains who confirmed what the squadron leader suggested. And there was a message from a Belgian peasant, too, who had seen the new planes on their field, and weeks back there had come a message from a discontented German who worked in a factory, which had given him a good idea of what to expect. The new Messerschmitts were beginning to come off the assembly lines, just as were the new Spitfires which would contend with them.

The air marshal yearned for more knowledge of those Messerschmitts. He wanted to know all about them: their speed and their rate of climb and their fuel endurance and their manoeuvrability; how they behaved in battle and what were their weak spots; especially he wanted to know how they compared with the new Spitfires. Even though the assembly lines were in full swing, even though the machines were coming off them at the rate of over a hundred a week, and some of the arrangements for production, for the manufacture of dyes and the supply of special metals, dated back over a year, there was still the chance that any defect might be made good immediately; and if not, the sooner the business was taken in hand the better. He wanted one of those new Messerschmitts to be gone over carefully by his experts. He would give a good deal of his private fortune - all of it - for the chance to fly one himself.

And he knew, too, that in Germany at that very moment there was someone who was thinking just the same about the new Spitfires. Those Messerschmitts had been displayed over the Belgian coast for the express purpose of challenging battle with the new Spitfires - battle over German territory, where any Messerschmitt that might be brought down would be safe from prying English eyes, and any Spitfire that suffered the same fate could be examined (what was left of it) with painstaking German thoroughness.

No more painstaking than English thoroughness, mused the air marshal. His orders had sent up the new Spitfires to challenge battle over English soil in just the same way, and his orders had kept them from accepting the German challenge. Marjorie Dalziel was one of the people fighting for England whom he did not know at all, but it was through her lips that he had spoken, as if she were some ancient sibyl, the mouthpiece of an Olympic god. It was time the mouthpiece spoke again. The air marshal walked twice up and down his room before he pressed a button on his dictograph and spoke to the air vice-marshal who was his deputy.

‘You’ve seen the report from the 143rd?’ asked the air marshal.

‘Yes.’ The air vice-marshal was a man of few words.

‘Tell ‘em to try again. You know the conditions?’

‘Of course.’ The air vice-marshal was really a little hurt at that, until he suddenly guessed that his impish superior was teasing him, in the hope, this time realized, that he would induce him to use two words where one would have done.

‘Right. See you later,’ said the air marshal, still chuckling as he switched off.

The brain had started an impulse down one of the nerves that radiated from it; at that impulse the mouth would speak and the limb would strike. From the air vice-marshal the impulse travelled to the Air Staff, and from the Air Staff through the group captain, down, down, to the Operations Room and then to the squadron leader, who had the duty of explaining to his pilots what was expected of them.

‘You all understand?’ said the squadron leader, looking round at his subordinates. ‘We want a Messerschmitt, one of those new ones. Dead or alive, but the more alive the better. We’ve got to bring it down over England. And on no account are we to lose one of our planes over Jerry’s country. Anyone can see why.’

They all could, of course; they nodded to show him that they did. Jim Brewer thought what an interesting letter he could write home about all this if it were permissible.

‘I’ve got my own ideas about how it should be done,’ said the squadron leader, briefly, ‘but I’d like to hear what you blokes have to say.’

He looked round at the young English faces, the Belgian and the two Poles, with the names of their countries sewn on the shoulders of their RAF uniforms; the three Yanks sitting together and so far without any indication of their nationality save for the self-evident one of their intonation.

‘If we came down at them out of the sun--’ began Evans, and then stopped as the squadron leader shook his head.

‘They’ve thought of that too,’ said the squadron leader. ‘They’re only up in the mornings. To get between them and the sun means going too far east, right over Belgium. And that’s out of bounds for us. We’d only be playing their game for ‘em if we did that.’

‘If we fought them,’ began Dombrowski the Pole, struggling hard with the difficulties of expressing himself in a foreign language, ‘just on the edge of the sea, we might have a chance to get one of them, to - to--’

‘To cut one of them out, you mean? Force him over this way and then bring him down?’

Dombrowski nodded. But when the squadron leader looked round at the others they shook their heads.

‘Too risky,’ said the squadron leader. ‘We could try it with anyone else, but not with those blokes.’

There was evident agreement among the others who remembered epic battles.

‘We want a decoy,’ said Jim Brewer.

‘Say, listen,’ said Johnny Coe simultaneously.

The squadron leader turned to them.

‘Jim’s got the same idea as me,’ said Johnny Coe.

‘A decoy’s the only way, I think,’ said the squadron leader. ‘Something that’ll get them to forget their orders for a moment.’

‘A couple of bombers!’ said Brown.

The squadron leader shook his head again.

‘There’s only one thing that’ll make those fellows forget their orders. There’s only one temptation big enough. And that’s one of our Spitfires.’

‘That’s right,’ said Johnny Coe, ‘those guys are pretty cagey.’

The squadron leader looked round the ring of faces again. His mind was already made up, but he was only human, and wasted a second looking round, as a man going to be hanged looks up at the blue sky. The jealous tradition of the RAF is that no task is so dangerous as to call for volunteers. Everyone is prepared to do what he is told and conversely everyone in a position of authority must be prepared to do the telling. He had to select the man who would do the job best; only that. No other consideration could enter into the decision. He wanted the most daring and ingenious flier, the man whose actions would be most likely to deceive Jerry, the man whose quick- calculating mind would be able to draw the proper distinction, in the heat of battle, between daring and folly. Nor was his task of selection made any easier by the wide choice that the enormous talent of the 143rd Squadron offered him. He turned to Harry Brewer.

‘You’ll be the lame duck,’ he said.

‘Okay,’ said Harry. ‘I’ll be the lame duck. Or the goat, or what have you. Let’s hear some more.’

‘I was thinking about trying it this way,’ said the squadron leader. He turned to the blackboard behind him with a gesture queerly like that of a schoolmaster lecturing to a class. But there was the difference that in this case the pupils had valuable contributions to make to the debate that followed.

Down in the underground Operations Room things were quiet at present, in this hush before the dawn. There was not a single buzz from the dozens of telephones that brought in the messages from all over the area, from the observers lying back in their armchairs, from the AA batteries, from the aerodromes hidden away in the folds of the earth. The sergeant sat still on their stools; while a battle was in progress they had small enough chance of that. The group captain sat isolated in front of the frosted glass screen, like some minor deity. To Marjorie the simile was a close one, since she knew what thunders he could unleash at a nod of his head. All this elaborate organization, all these telephones and these flashing lights, all these ministering sergeants and section leaders, were designed to enable the group captain to fight his share of the Battle of England, and to implement in his section the will of the major deity in the underground Central Control Room seventy miles away.

Marjorie saw to it that her radio-telephone mouthpiece was clear. She ran through in her mind the new list of code names so that she could use any one of them without hesitation, and settled herself securely in her chair. Try as she would, she could not keep her heart from pumping furiously when her period of duty began, and she knew by experience that she would be bathed in sweat at the end of her four hours, even though she would not have moved from her chair. The yellow light in the ruled square in the upper right-hand corner of the frosted screen meant that German aircraft were manoeuvring again in the P row, as they had done each morning for days past - the Messerschmitts upon which so much attention was riveted.

Now the group captain gave the order that tensed her still more; she heard the sergeant muttering the words into his mouthpiece; she knew that Harry and the other pilots of the 143rd Fighter Squadron were now running across the field to get their planes into the air. With her mental ear she could hear the roar of the engines revving up; she could hear that sound from her billet when she was off duty, and had heard it so often. A phone bell rang and a red light appeared on the screen. Marjorie switched in.

‘Hullo, Embankment Leader. Are you receiving me?’

‘Loud and clear,’ said the squadron leader’s voice. He was ‘Embankment’ today when yesterday he had been ‘Cocoa’. She was ‘Card’ today instead of ‘April’.

‘Bandits in P25,’ said Marjorie.

Buzzers were sounding in several places in the room now. and the group captain was issuing rapid orders. More lights were appearing on the screen as he played his chess game of death.

‘Bandits in P26, at 15,000 feet,’ said Marjorie, watching the screen, ‘Hullo, Embankment Leader. Somerset at 20,000 in O19.’

‘Message received,’ said the squadron leader dryly.

The group captain growled an order.

‘Hullo, Embankment Leader,’ said Marjorie. ‘Carry out operation previously ordered.’

What that meant she had no idea. Now that the battle was really beginning she had steeled herself, and had forced her voice into calm. But this morning duty, with its cold-blooded moves, was far more trying than the whirl and excitement of night duty on the nights when Jerry was raiding, when red, yellow and green lights moved incessantly on the screen, and the white bars of anti-aircraft barrages flashed on and off, and the earth, even down where they were, shook to the fall of bombs and vibration of artillery.

‘Bandits at twelve o’clock.’

That was Harry’s voice. It sounded as if he were keyed up a little more than usual. She had thought the same last night when they met for their evening walk, but of course she had asked no questions.

‘Bandits at twelve o’clock!’

Half the pilots in the formation must have switched over their RTs to ‘send’ to get the news off at once; but Harry had been the first. Marjorie watched the red light move across the screen towards where the yellow light of the Messerschmitts wavered on the boundary of P25 and P26.

‘Hullo, Card,’ said the squadron leader’s voice, ‘Embankment beginning action.’

Red and yellow lights were alongside each other now. Over her receiver Marjorie could hear confused sounds as the din of a myriad engines and propellers crept in. Twice, loud and sharp, she heard the sound of machine guns as pilots switched over to ‘send’ with urgent messages to their fellows.

‘Watch those wise guys astern!’ That was Johnny Coe’s voice.

‘Bandits below!’

‘Keep station, George, damn you.’

It was like hearing football players calling to one another without being able to see the game, but this was a game of life and death. Marjorie had little idea of what was going on. Right at the back of her mind was a recollection of something Harry had told her; that when a Messerschmitt loosed off its cannons it was like the momentary winking of two dull red eyes, visible even in the sunshine of the upper air. Through it all came the staccato orders of the squadron leader; Marjorie’s mental fog cleared a trifle and she began to form a hazy picture of a formal battle, fought at long range with nothing risked and no decision likely. Yet that was not like the squadron leader, nor like the 143rd Fighter Squadron.

‘All right, Harry.’ That was the squadron leader again. ‘You ready to do your stuff?’