Piece of Cake (34 page)

The French bomber crews drove over from Montornet at Rex's invitation to help Hornet squadron celebrate.

After a large and liquid meal, the cultural exchange began. They played Cresta Run, racing each other down the double staircase on brass trays. The winners each drank a pint of beer; the losers drank two pints. Hornet pilots won easily. Montornet challenged them to a rugby match in the smoking-room. They used an inflated Mae West for a ball. Montornet won but lost its CO with concussion. Again the penalty for the losers was to drink two pints to the winners' one. They adjourned to the ballroom, Montornet carrying their commandant on a door which had accidentally come off its hinges when he hit it with his head, and there was a short pause while Stickwell was spectacularly sick into a potted plant. The Frenchmen sang a short patriotic song. Rex then explained the next game, called Tank Corps. An obstacle course of pianos, lamp standards, ornamental urns, potted plants and so on, had been set up so that it circled the room. At opposite ends were two motorbikes. The aim was to catch and hit the bike in front. Pursuit was complicated by a rule that said the pillion passenger had to hold his hands over the driver's eyes and shout instructions in his ear, while everyone else stood in the middle of the room and pelted their opponents' motorbike with tennis balls. That game went particularly well—Moke Miller dislocated a finger, Flip Moran got a black eye, and a Frenchman flattened his nose on the handlebars: much blood—but it ended in a draw when the French bike hit a piano and overturned, losing all its petrol. There being no outright winner, both sides drank two pints of beer. The Frenchmen were singing a brisk hunting song when the adjutant came in with the news that it was snowing heavily. They all went out and threw snowballs. The puddles had frozen, and an orgy of
ice-breaking developed, everyone smashing thin sheets of ice over everyone else's head, the ice shattering loudly and brilliantly in a welter of witless destruction.

Kellaway, Skull and Bletchley watched from the terrace. “Nice to see the boys enjoying themselves,” Bletchley said.

“Is this the standard celebration?” Skull asked.

“It's more or less routine. Why?”

“I just wondered. The German Air Force is supposed to have some fifteen hundred bombers. At this rate, total victory is going to place an enormous strain on the kidneys.”

The ice-smashing had ended and the fliers had formed a tight circle, the squadrons intermixed. They were singing
Yes! We Have No Bananas,
bawling the ridiculous words into the tumbling snow.

“Nothing is impossible at that age,” Kellaway said.

“Oh?” Skull turned up his collar. “Would be it tactless of me to mention the name of Dicky Starr?” he asked.

“They've forgotten all about him, Skull,” the adjutant said. “In fact I doubt if he ever existed.”

“That's sheer mental laziness.”

“Not a bit of it,” Bletchley said. “You don't understand fighter pilots, old boy. The thing is, a good fighter pilot never dies. If Starr died, he obviously wasn't a good fighter pilot. Furthermore, a
bad
fighter pilot is a contradiction in terms, so he couldn't have been a fighter pilot at all. Simple, really.”

“Let's go and have a nightcap,” Kellaway said. Skull was a decent fellow, and jolly good at crossword puzzles, but he would keep complicating things.

Shooting down the Dornier had a settling effect upon Hornet squadron. They had lost their collective virginity, and that was comforting: every other fighter squadron in France had scored a kill long ago: now Hornet had proved itself. Rex was happier. The interception had been immaculate, absolutely classic. It had justified all his training. What's more it had been watched by an air commodore and a war correspondent. What could be better?

At first there had been some discussion of the Dornier's strange behavior. Why had it trundled across the sky and allowed them to attack it so easily? Why hadn't it jinked and dodged, or dived for home, or fired back? Various theories were touted—fuel
shortage, or jammed controls, or the kite was on a photo-recce run, or maybe the rear-gunner was too sick to look out, or it could be that the German skipper was lost and therefore so busy with his maps that he didn't notice a dozen Hurricanes on his tail. Whatever the answer, it now lay thirty feet below a small French field, broken into a million pieces. Soon the pilots stopped wondering. All they remembered was the kill itself: the big black marauding Nazi intruder they had chased and caught and destroyed. The kill glowed in the collective memory of the squadron like a triumphant first night in the memory of a cast of actors. Nothing could spoil it. Nothing else mattered, in comparison.

The November days became shorter and grayer. Rex relaxed his training to give the groundcrews more time for maintenance and modifications. For a few weeks the chateau looked more than ever like a country house full of young men who were old friends: they motored about the countryside, played games, read bits of detective stories, went riding, played Jack Teagarden and The Inkspots and Edith Piaf on the gramophone, took snaps of each other doing silly-ass things, ate too much, occasionally got blotto, played more games. They absorbed CH3 during this period, without discovering much about him. Nobody liked to ask. It was very peculiar having an American, evidently a rich American, in the squadron. If you had somebody with a mild eccentricity—an Honorable, say, or someone who had played rugger for England—you could ask him about it, find out more about the chap. But CH3 was a fullblown Yank. Nobody had ever been to Yankeeland; not even the adj. What sort of question could you ask CH3 that wouldn't make you look a damn-fool? In any case CH3 himself didn't seem to want to talk about it. He was affable and amusing, and if he made no close friends he made no enemies either—apart from Rex, and everyone knew that was just the old man being a bit snooty:

After their first meeting the two Americans saw very little of each other. This was only partly because Jacky Bellamy was often away, driving around Alsace-Lorraine in search of stories. It was mainly because whenever she was in the mess, he was either over at the airfield or in the squash court, thrashing the daylights out of anyone who wanted a game. He was an astonishingly good player, with a drive like a whiplash and a drop-shot as soft as a silk duster. He seemed to drift about the court instead of running,
until mysteriously everything was in his favor and he struck: no luck, no near-miss: a quick, complete kill. It was beautiful and merciless. Yet people liked to play CH3. He put so much of his own talent into the game that some of it rubbed off on them: he made them better players.

Every pilot had his own groundcrew: a fitter for the engine and a rigger for the airframe. CH3 made a point of meeting his ground-crew every day. They got to know him—he always scrutinized the propeller, searching for splinters or cracks in the wooden blade; he liked his cockpit canopy to be spotlessly clean and highly polished; he wore his straps more tightly than most pilots—and he got to know them. Corporal King, his fitter, was balding and moonfaced, a good listener who had nothing to say about anything if it did not involve the Rolls-Royce Merlin aero-engine. His rigger, LAC Todd, was younger, a twenty-five-year-old who looked eighteen: curly red hair, big grin, an afterthought of a nose, narrow shoulders and a neck like celery. Even the smallest overalls looked baggy on him.

The glamour of serving an American pilot excited Todd: it was like working for royalty. When CH3 bicycled into the hangar one afternoon wearing crisp white shorts, a white monogrammed sweater and a royal-blue muffler, Todd was even more impressed:
sporting
royalty. Together they looked over the airplane.

“Seems okay,” CH3 said.

“Yes, sir.”

He squatted and looked at the undersides of the wings. “Who had her painted like this?” One wing was white, the other black.

“Dunno, sir. The kites have always been painted like that. Since before we left England, sir.”

CH3 grunted and got up. “Black and white,” he said. He got on his bicycle. “Just like the whiskey. Very distinctive.” He hooked a pedal up.

“Been playing tennis, sir?” Todd asked.

“Squash.”

“Ah.” Todd nodded. “Good fun, is it, sir?”

“Don't you know what squash is like?”

“Never seen it, sir.”

“Oh.” CH3 made the pedal spin. “Well, you play inside a closed
court. With a racket. You hit the ball against the wall. Sometimes against two or three walls.”

“Sounds complicated.”

“No, it's very easy. You seem pretty fit, you ought to have a go.” They looked at each other: the American calmly assessing, the Englishman frankly admiring. “Would you like a game of squash?”

“Me, I'll try anything, sir. Only I haven't got any proper kit.”

“Borrow mine. Four o'clock tomorrow?” CH3 rode away. “I'll square it with the flight sergeant,” he called.

Todd stood up and watched him disappear into the dusk. He realized that he was breathing more deeply, his chest was out, he felt inches taller. There was nothing left to do but sweep his section of the hangar. He got a broom and swept it as it had never been swept before.

The sky was like a bad water-color, with fuzzy blues leaking into dirty whites that blurred into wet grays. And the colors were always running. Squadron Leader Rex led “A” flight through a sky that was shapeless to start with, and that kept on changing.

In thirty minutes he had seen nothing but this swirling mess. He expected to see nothing. The Area ops officer had spoken of a strong likelihood of enemy intruders entering this sector. It was difficult to understand why Jerry would take the risk. There was damn-all to see.

“Yellow Section, close up,” he said, without having to think about it.

Yellow Section crept forward and edged inwards. The flight hit some turbulence, and all six aircraft bounced and wallowed and came together again.

“Nice and tight, please,” Rex said. “Don't dawdle.”

They reached the limit of their patrol, turned, and came back.

Moggy Cattermole, flying at Red Three, got the frame of his cockpit canopy lined up precisely with Red Leader's propeller disc. Now, if he kept his head quite still, he could hold formation perfectly.

Stickwell, at Red Two, also had his eyes on Rex, but he was thinking about lunch. Steak-and-kidney pie with flaky pastry. Crisp on top and juicily absorbent beneath. Yum.

Yellow Leader was Cox. His head scarcely moved; his eyes flickered from left to right, endlessly checking that Patterson and CH3 were tucked in properly, while he made sure that he himself remained squarely behind Rex's tail. Cox was worrying, in a casual way, about his heart. All the men in Cox's family died of heart attacks before they were sixty. His uncle Bertie had gone like that, only two weeks ago. Cox often worried about the grim, unfair inevitability of this. Sometimes he worried so much that he made his heart thump and race.

Patterson was trying not to think of Dicky Starr, but it was difficult. Sometimes he had a brief fantasy of Starr joining the flight, just turning up from nowhere with a wave and a grin and tacking on. This annoyed Patterson. He was not accustomed to being bothered by his imagination. He wished he could think of something else.

CH3 was searching the sky like a man in a strange city, hunting for street signs.

Rex, as flight commander, saw everything and saw nothing worth seeing: a wandering rubbishtip of dirty cloud. Not surprising: Operations were off their trolley to expect enemy action on a day like this. A silvery Heinkel 111 floated out of one cloud and into another. “Jester aircraft, turning to port, turning to port, go!” Rex said.

They trailed him obediently, a cluster of little fish in a murky stream, while he pursued his estimated interception course. His eyes were opened wide: there was great danger of collision in these conditions. The silvery Heinkel appeared again, in the wrong place, half a mile to his right, flying in the wrong direction along a ragged tunnel of clear air. “Jester aircraft, turning to starboard, turning to starboard, go!” Rex ordered.

He reefed the formation round as hard as he dared, but a vic of three Hurricanes measured about a hundred and twenty feet across. By the time it had wheeled about, the Heinkel was gone. “Damn!” Rex said. Smoke fled his exhausts as he rammed his throttle open.

For sixty seconds they hunted the bomber, speed building as time passed until it was obvious that they were chasing nothing, very rapidly. They burst into a stretch of open sky: empty except for wisps of mist. “Balls,” Rex said crossly. “Okay: back on
course.” He eased the flight into a long half-circle. Halfway through the turn, something glistened. Weak sunlight had found a cockpit canopy. Rex glimpsed, far off, a bulbous-nosed twin-engined plane with a stick-like fuselage.
Dornier 17! Christ Almighty! What is this? International Air Day?

His orders were crisp, brisk, lucid. The flight checked its turn, reversed its bank, and ducked into a dive. The other aircraft was also diving, falling toward cloud cover. Rex braced his feet, flicked off the safety-switch of his gun-button, and enjoyed the pouncing, vibrant howl of the Merlin as it ate up space. “Yellow Three to Leader,” said a voice in his ear. “Four aircraft in the sun. Look like fighters.”

Rex kept his eyes on his target for three, four, five seconds. It had been the American's voice. He jerked his head around, squinted into a hazy dazzle that made his eyes water, found nothing. He turned back and searched for the target but now clusters of melting purple-red blemishes spoiled his vision. He blinked hard. “Anyone see where that Jerry went?” No reply. “Anyone else see those fighters?” More silence. Then he heard the American voice: “Yellow Three to Leader. Four aircraft still in the sun.”

Rex swore to himself. He tried to stare through the fading blemishes and failed. “Leveling out,” he announced. The flight curled out of its dive. Everyone snatched a look into the damp glare of the sun. Nobody spoke.