Once More the Hawks
Once More The Hawks
First published in 1984
© Juliet Harris; House of Stratus 1984-2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of Max Hennessy (John Harris) to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 0755128079 EAN: 9780755128075
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
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John Harris, wrote under his own name and also the pen names of Mark Hebden and Max Hennessy.
He was born in 1916 and educated at Rotherham Grammar School before becoming a journalist on the staff of the local paper. A short period freelancing preceded World War II, during which he served as a corporal attached to the South African Air Force. Moving to the Sheffield Telegraph after the war, he also became known as an accomplished writer and cartoonist. Other ‘part time’ careers followed.
He started writing novels in 1951 and in 1953 had considerable success when his best-selling
The Sea Shall Not Have Them
was filmed. He went on to write many more war and modern adventure novels under his own name, and also some authoritative non-fiction, such as Dunkirk. Using the name Max Hennessy, he wrote some very accomplished historical fiction and as Mark Hebden, the ‘Chief Inspector’ Pel novels which feature a quirky Burgundian policeman.
Harris was a sailor, an airman, a journalist, a travel courier, a cartoonist and a history teacher, who also managed to squeeze in over eighty books. A master of war and crime fiction, his enduring novels are versatile and entertaining.
To Dicken Quinney, the junction of the Rhine and the Mosel at Koblenz had always seemed a point of separation in Germany. North of Koblenz it was harsh; the south belonged to the Black Forest and a softer climate. Staring down from the cockpit of the big American Lockheed 12a at the two rivers, one the jugular vein of Germany, the other heading straight for the heart of its traditional enemy, France, he reflected that of all the European countries, he knew Germany better than any. He had fought in France between 1914 and 1918 but as part of a huge army with only brief contacts with the French people. There had been a spell in Italy during 1918, a spell as attaché in Holland, and a spell in Greece as instructor, until one of the political upsets in that country had changed its policy and he had been withdrawn. But all these appointments had lasted only long enough for him to pick up some of the language and little else, while he had visited Germany many times, firstly as pilot to a newspaper proprietor flying regularly to Berlin, later in the insecure period of the Thirties as attaché at the Embassy. Now, on the verge of retirement from the RAF, he was back again, this time working for a man called Sidney Cotton, who, like himself, had flown 1½ Strutters in France in 1916 and 1917. Tall, bespectacled, ebullient and a well-known figure in aviation, in recent years Cotton had become involved in colour photography and was now selling film in quantity to the Germans. He was selling it in other countries, too, but it was the Germans, with their increasing interest in it, who had long since begun to arouse suspicion among the more probing minds in the RAF.
The gloomy Gothic pile of a ruined castle passed slowly beneath the wing of the Lockheed. Round it, the Rhine turned and twisted like a moving snake. Down there, Dicken reflected, barges were carrying goods from the industrial Ruhr through Holland to the sea, and at the moment, in the heat of the late summer, the Rhine ferries were full of holidaymakers, the German drinking songs filling the night with tunes that sounded almost like military music.
‘Mannheim coming up,’ a voice behind him called out.
His navigator, Frank Babington, recently retired from the RAF as a flight-sergeant and recruited by Cotton for his skill with cameras, was watching the route carefully. As they passed over the double kink in the river at Mainz and Wiesbaden, Dicken could see the haze ahead that indicated the factories for the making of electrical equipment, chemicals and motor cars. He knew Wiesbaden well with its Imperial palace, its state theatre and its wide gardens, and he found himself wondering how many more times he’d be looking down on it from the air, because his time as an active airman was almost finished and he couldn’t imagine himself having the money to possess an aircraft of his own when he left the Service. Despite his record, he was still no more than a wing commander, thanks chiefly to the fact that barring his path to senior rank had always been the implacable form of Cecil Arthur Diplock.
Diplock had married Annys Toshack, the girl Dicken had been in love with in 1914, and joining the Royal Flying Corps late in 1916, had, despite his poor showing as an airman, contrived by the cultivation of the people who mattered, to pass him in rank and now finally sat across his route to promotion. A desk officer at RAF Headquarters, under the patronage of his old wing colonel, now Air Vice-Marshal George Macclesfield St Aubyn, a man of the same breed, he had influenced the whole of Dicken’s career. Dicken’s skill, his knowledge of flying, had meant that he could never hold him back completely, but he had managed to prevent any swift rise, so that now the only alternative seemed to be to retire and seek employment elsewhere.
At the thought, Dicken frowned. His retirement was due within days now and he didn’t look forward to leaving the RAF. The job with Cotton was only a temporary one, replacing one of Cotton’s men who was sick, and he had no one with whom to share his retirement. His wife, Zoë, sister to Diplock’s wife, had died in 1930, and he didn’t fancy growing old alone. But merely flying from one place to another without any purpose seemed an empty pastime. Which was why he was now flying for Cotton.
Because of the growing German threat, even at the time of the Munich agreement when Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, had been obliged to kowtow to the German dictator, since information about German fortifications, airfields and military establishments were necessary while there was still time, Cotton had been recruited by the British government to acquire it by clandestine methods. As the private owner of aircraft and well-known throughout European aviation circles, he had already worked for the French Deuxième Bureau and had finally set up an independent unit of his own. A determined and ingenious man on intimate terms with the senior Nazis in Berlin, he had found a dozen ways of satisfying the requirements, though the official RAF attitude to him – largely conceived, Dicken knew, in the department of Air Vice-Marshal St Aubyn and Group Captain Cecil Arthur Diplock – had always remained one of ambiguity and jealousy.
‘Mannheim below.’ Babington’s voice came again.
Dicken lifted his hand in acknowledgement. He and Babington had flown together many times, in Iraq, India and England, and there was a rapport between them that made them easy companions despite their difference in rank.
‘New airfield down there, sir, by the look of it.’
‘Got it?’
‘Without question.’
Babington’s smile came, a cheerful, confident smile. He trusted Dicken in the way that Dicken trusted him. He had been working with the Cotton organisation for some time and it had been Babington who had involved Dicken in Cotton’s work.
‘It’s a good job, sir,’ he had pointed out. ‘And not without its measure of excitement.’
In that Babington was right because, known only to its crew, to Cotton, and a few others, the belly of the twin-tailed Lockheed contained secret RAF F24 Leica cameras of German manufacture. The sleek all-metal machine had been painted a pale duck-egg green because Cotton had discovered that colour tended to make it invisible from below when flying at height, and the cameras were smuggled aboard in ordinary suitcases covered with travel labels. Holes had been cut for them in the floor of the cabin and three of them, mounted one behind the other – the front one tilted to the right, the rear one to the left, the centre one pointing straight down – could produce overlapping pictures and at a height of 20,000 feet could cover a strip of country ten miles wide.
They were operated by a button under the pilot’s seat which activated a motor that opened secret sliding panels; and the aircraft, maintaining a straight course, aroused no concern in the minds of the suspicious Germans as they built up their installations for the conflict which everybody in Europe knew was on its way. Already the system had been used to photograph Italian installations in the Dodecanese and on the North African coast.
The present trip was officially to fly film to Berlin but Dicken knew that if the Germans found the cameras, they could be treated as spies, and since the film was being sent at a German company’s invitation, there was always the possibility that the Germans suspected what they were up to and they were flying into a trap. In any case, with hostilities likely within the next few weeks or even days, the hazard of being trapped by an outbreak of fighting on a German airfield was a real possibility and, as a precaution, it had been arranged that if things grew worse a telegram would be sent to Dicken in Berlin, saying his mother was ill and urging his return. Similar messages had been arranged for Cotton and others of his men in the danger zone.