Gold From Crete (12 page)

‘All set,’ said Harry’s voice. ‘Say when.’

Marjorie stiffened despite herself.

‘Wait for it,’ said the squadron leader. ‘Jim, keep clear. Let her go, Harry.’

Then there was not a sound for a whole lifetime - for several seconds. Then Harry’s voice again.

‘All right, Jim.’ There was the hint of mirth in Harry’s voice that told Marjorie that he was as keyed up as it was possible for him to be. ‘Keep off my tail. Give Jerry a chance.’

Then someone else’s voice, high-pitched: ‘Oh, God, Harry, look out for yourself.’

Through her receiver Marjorie could hear not merely the rattle of machine guns but the bang of cannons as well.

‘Line ahead and follow me,’ said the squadron leader with the restrained calm that told its own story. ‘Don’t cut it too fine, Harry.’

‘I won’t,’ said Harry’s voice. And then, immediately afterwards, ‘These guys behind me seem annoyed about something.’

That was Harry trying to copy the eternal British characteristic of habitual understatement. He was still speaking, ‘Sorry, Skipper. You’ll have to write off this plane. It was a good--’

The words ended with a bang and a kind of gulp. Marjorie sat shaking in her chair, waiting for the next words but everything was silent for a few moments.

‘Hullo, Card,’ said the squadron leader, ‘Operation unsuccessful. Send the rescue launches out.’

Marjorie found her nails were hurting her palms, and she unclenched her hands with difficulty. But, that done, she rallied. She plugged in and sent the message. She passed the news on automatically to the group captain. She realized she had been breaking the first rule of the radio-telephone operator, which is never to grow interested in the messages she sends and hears. A light came on in the screen.

‘Hullo, Embankment. Bandits at M26. Are you receiving me?’

‘Loud and clear.’

‘Somerset at 20,000 in O22.’

The group captain growled again, the way he usually did.

‘Hullo, Embankment,’ said Marjorie, relaying the order. ‘Come on in now.’

‘Message received,’ said the squadron leader.

The group captain was bringing Somerset and David over into the sector. Marjorie was busy enough transmitting his orders. Even so, she might have found time to think about Harry and wonder whether his voice had stopped because of a hit on his radio-telephone or because - because of something else. She could have wondered whether or not the rescue launches would arrive in time, but she would not allow herself to do so. She finished her four hours of duty still speaking in the calm, disinterested tones which she had so carefully cultivated.

And long before those four hours were over, when the air marshal had hardly returned from his early session of the Big Five, the air vice-marshal addressed him through his dictograph.

‘It’s a washout this time, sir,’ said the air vice-marshal. ‘They wouldn’t be drawn. Someone over there’s being very standoffish about those Messerschmitts. From the squadron leader’s report I should say he did all he could. He lost a plane.’

‘Where did it fall?’ There was sharp anxiety in the air marshal’s voice.

‘The pilot did the right thing. He crashed it in the sea, five miles off the Foreland.’

‘That’s all right, then,’ said the air marshal.

‘The rescue launches picked him up. Slight wound in the leg.’

‘All right.’ In the grim arithmetic of war a good pilot was worth more than two fighter planes; more than two, but not quite as much as three, in the eyes of a female radio-telephone operator or of an Ohio farmer and his wife.

Nobody can trace the causes of events to their ultimate source, just as it is impossible to trace their effects to their final termination. The air marshal had had a fine fresh egg for breakfast that morning, at a time when fresh eggs were lamentably short in England. It may have been that egg which started it; it may have been some look in the eyes of the air marshal’s wife the night before, when he had been able to make enough time to dine with her. It may be foolish to start an investigation into the cause of things as near at hand as that; it might lie much farther back, in some incident in the air marshal’s boyhood. But the fresh egg may serve as a basis for discussion; we can at least try to follow up cause and effect from the air marshal’s breakfast egg to the receipt of a letter by an Ohio farmer.

The memory of that egg still lingered on the air marshal’s palate. He savoured it reminiscently as he listened to the air vice-marshal. It stimulated his robust optimism as well as his imagination. It set his busy mind at work long before the air vice-marshal had finished telling about the rescue launches. He wanted one of the new Messerschmitts more than a miser wants gold, more than a lover longs for his beloved.

‘It’ll have to be a pinprick raid, then,’ said the air marshal.

‘Umm,’ said the air vice-marshal doubtfully.

‘Yes,’ said the air marshal with decision. The air vice-marshal had his uses as an
advocatus diaboli
, as a congenital pessimist, as an envisager of difficulties. But this was not the time for him to function; the breakfast egg told the air marshal so definitely. ‘The orders must go out to those parachute agents immediately. And the War Office’ll have to be told at once; get me the Director of Military Operations. And the Admiralty. Duffy’s the man there; I know he’s only the deputy assistant, but this’ll be his pigeon. No time to lose.’

The air marshal had forgotten the very existence of the breakfast egg as he switched off the dictograph and busied his mind with other details. He had even forgotten the lost Spitfire and the wounded pilot and the recent failure. If it had been a British habit to abandon an enterprise after an initial failure the history of the world would have been different; certainly it would not have been an English-speaking farmer who cultivated that Ohio farm.

Something to the same effect was running through Jim Brewer’s mind that evening as he talked to Marjorie in the black night of a Kentish lane, where no single distant light twinkled through the blackout. He had told her of his dash over to the hospital, and how he had found Harry as perky as usual, with four holes in his right leg and none of them serious, according to Harry.

Marjorie had received the news with sober quiet. These people stood up to punishment all right. It was the example of the fortitude of the little citizens in their bombed streets, the stolid public courage in the face of unprecedented disaster, the national doggedness that did not flinch before the prospect of limitless difficulties, which had converted Brewer into something of a crusader. His motives in coming to fight in the RAF would at first have been hard to analyse; they had included a passion for flying, a vague desire for adventure, possibly a yearning for personal distinction. Now he was a crusader; and the British example had so affected him that he could not possibly say so.

He thought of England as a boxer, hard-hit and still fighting back. England was defending herself with the classic straight left of sea power, with the heavy right hand of an air offensive awaiting its chance. The straight left and pretty footwork were giving her a chance to breathe and regain her strength; a boxer of poorer spirit would have fallen before the terrific battering long before, would have lain down and taken the count.

To continue the analogy, at that rate the Air Staff - Brewer had heard the air marshal’s name, but never thought of him as a personality - was a pinch of grey matter inside the boxer’s skull. And Harry? Harry was nothing more than a fragment of skin which had just been chipped off the boxer’s right knuckle. It was the spirit that counted.

It was hard for those unacquainted with England to realize the quiet heroism which kept her still fighting, and it was quite beyond him to describe it in words; that was why he felt so dissatisfied with his letters home.

The silent night was suddenly filled with the sound of aeroplanes.

‘Ours,’ said Marjorie, after listening for an instant. ‘Long- nosed Blenheims. After the invasion ports again.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Brewer.

He had other ideas, but he was not saying so; not even to Marjorie. Tomorrow’s stunt was most strictly secret. Brewer fancied that the Blenheims had another mission besides dropping bombs. So that Jerry would suspect nothing they would probably drop some, though, while the devoted parachutists sank through the darkness, ready for their mission of preparing the attack. The thought started him thinking again about his own part in tomorrow’s attack; he and Johnny Coe would be the only members of the 143rd Squadron taking part in it.

He tried to analyse the motives of the squadron leader, who had allotted them the duty. Probably he and Johnny were - he had to shake off a growing English habit of self-depreciation - the best stunt fliers left, now that Harry was wounded. On a mission where five hundred lives were going to be risked, it would be quite mad to imperil the final success by choosing inferior fliers for the crowning part of it. But there was more to it than that. With Harry wounded, his section was broken up; it would take time to accustom a new pilot to flying with him and Johnny. The most economical course would be to risk the rest of the section, and in the event of failure to train an entirely new section into the ways of the squadron. Better that than to have two or three sections each with a new pilot in it engaged on the sort of duty that fell to the 143rd.

‘You don’t talk nearly as much as Harry,’ said Marjorie. ‘Is that because you’re the elder brother?’

‘I expect so,’ agreed Brewer.

The horizon was suddenly torn with a brilliant display of coloured lights. There were white flashes reaching up to the sky, and there were sullen red glares that illuminated the faint mist in the distance. Their ears could just catch the jerky rumble of the anti-aircraft guns that were firing at the English bombers.

‘It looks as if they mean business tonight, all right,’ said Marjorie. ‘Of course they always do.’

The last words were added hastily, and it occurred to Brewer that perhaps Marjorie knew something about tomorrow’s stunt. It was very likely that she did, but she certainly would not say a word about it even to him, because for one thing she would not know that he was going to participate in it. To him there was a touch of drama in the situation; that two people as close to each other as he and Marjorie, with a desperate venture before them tomorrow, should not dream of allowing a hint about it to each other, but should confine themselves to discussing trivialities. Air raids, from this point of view, were only trivialities.

‘I suppose Jerry will be coming back at us tonight,’ said Marjorie. ‘I’m going to bed before he does.’

‘That sounds like a good idea,’ he said, and they began to direct their steps down the lane again.

I was thinking of going to visit Harry tomorrow evening,’ said Marjorie. ‘I was hoping that you could come with me.’

‘I’d like to, but I’ve got a date.’

It was not for him to say what kind of date it was; Marjorie could think what she liked.

‘All right,’ said Marjorie, and she said nothing else. Brewer began to make up his mind that he was going to be fortunate in his sister-in-law.

They had reached the door of her billet now, and Marjorie came to a halt.

‘Goodnight,’ said Brewer, taking her hand. ‘Don’t worry about Harry. He’ll be all right.’

He walked on through the village to his quarters, yawning as he did so. The necessity of being up early for patrol had already grained into him the habit of going to bed at an hour which even in Ohio would be deemed early.

Johnny Coe was already in bed and three-quarters asleep in the room they shared. Brewer was careful only to switch on the bed lamp, so as to rouse him as little as possible. Even so, Johnny turned over restlessly, the freckles on his cheek showing in the faint light. Brewer was hardly into his pyjamas before the bedhead light went out abruptly; someone had pulled the master switch and plunged the station into darkness, which meant German bombers in the vicinity.

He got into bed and pulled the covers over himself just as the first roar of a bomb reached his ears, and he composed himself to sleep while the bombers bumbled overhead and the guns opened up. England was in her nightly uproar. Usually at such times he thought of the things he had seen on his visits to London; the burnt-out streets, the craters in the roads, the mothers in the air-raid shelters, the firemen grappling with their tasks, the guns setting the earth ashake. But tonight, despite the current raid, his thoughts were otherwise directed. There was this business of tomorrow to think about. Somewhere there were plans being made and orders being issued; even a pinprick raid called for the most elaborate timing and cooperation between the services. Already there were parachutists seeking out hiding places in Belgium from which they could emerge on the morrow, and he could picture the other arrangements which were being made.

The old analogy of the boxer occurred to him. From the brain the messages were already coursing down an infinity of nerves, tensing the muscles for a feint with the right, ready for a quick blow with the left. The hard-hit boxer was about to hit back; the soldiers and the sailors, the minesweepers and the anti-aircraft, the night fighters and the bombers - if one could only know all that was involved in tomorrow’s raid, one would have a complete view of the Battle of Britain. And the ramifications were so numerous that, just like counting sheep, thinking about them one fell asleep. At least Brewer did - to awake clearheaded in the morning and to turn over with the delicious knowledge that there was no early patrol for him this morning. At this moment of waking that fact bulked larger in his mind than the fact that in the evening he would be in deadly peril.

It was when night fell that the little port woke into sudden activity; until then there had been nothing happening that might be guessed at by a stray German reconnaissance machine. But with the coming of darkness it was different. The lackadaisical major in command put out his cigarette and got to his feet.

‘Time for us to go,’ he said.

Brewer and Johnny Coe rose with him; theirs were the only RAF uniforms among the khaki and the blue. It was only a step from the hotel bar down to the jetty, and they walked slowly, accustoming their eyes to the sudden transition from the lights within to the darkness without. Down the steep street beside them there wound a strange procession. One could not call it ghostly, because it made far more noise than any ghosts could make - the united muffled roar of a thousand motorcycle engines. Yet there was almost nothing to see, for those motorcyclists had been trained to find their way along any road formation, and yet in darkness, without collision.