Piece of Cake (80 page)

At 6:20 a.m., Group scrambled two sections to patrol Dover-Ramsgate at fifteen thousand feet. Mother Cox led the patrol in Blue Section with Renouf as his number two, plus Pip Patterson and Fitz as Green Section.

They climbed through a screen of ten-tenths cloud at six thousand and found themselves in a skyscape of Alpine purity. The blue
above looked freshly scrubbed, the white below rippled like a snowfield to the horizon. Cox inhaled deeply and swelled his chest, partly from pleasure, partly from pride. Hurricanes had always looked good to him: there was something slightly hunched about the fuselage, the way the engine sloped down to the prop, that gave the plane a poised and searching look. These Hurricanes looked even better to him now that he was leading them.

The controller sent them up to eighteen thousand, then to twenty-two thousand. Cox calculated when they were above Dover, and turned north. The cloud was now more than two miles below. It looked as flat and smooth as a bedsheet. It covered the Channel and London and reached far into the North Sea. Blue and Green Sections cruised at a couple of hundred miles an hour and made no visible progress at all. The world was vast and lovely and, apart from four Hurricanes, utterly empty.

After ten minutes, Cox reckoned they were over Ramsgate so he wheeled them around and flew south. It was cold at that height. His legs were getting chilled and stiff, and no matter how he adjusted his scarf, a bitter little draft kept finding his neck. He could see Fitz swinging his arms and beating his fists together while he gripped the stick with his legs. Not for the first time, Cox wondered why nobody had thought to put cockpit heating in the Hurricane.

Now that Snowball had got them up here, it seemed there was nothing to do.

They patrolled up and down for half an hour. Snowball kept in touch, but his transmissions became increasingly scratchy and sometimes they faded altogether. Cox worried: maybe he was drifting out of R/T range. Maybe there were strong winds at this height. Maybe he was getting blown out to sea. He called the others: “Stay awake, keep looking, watch your wingman, acknowledge.” They came back to him in turn: Blue Two, Green Leader, Green Two. He was thinking about fuel, converting gallons into time, time into distance. Snowball called and said something blurred about a bandit. Or maybe several bandits. Cox swore. Snowball had sounded urgent, but what the shit was he urgent about? “Snowball, this is Mango Blue Leader,” he said. “Your transmission garbled, say again please.” Snowball came back with a mouthful of broken biscuits.

“Anybody get any of that?” Cox asked.

“Sure,” Fitz answered. “He said Slush Flush Hush Slush Mush. And I agree with him.”

“Keep your eyes skinned,” Cox warned.

They turned again over Dover, or maybe it was Rotterdam, and steered north. A long way ahead, an aircraft emerged from the cloud and flew south, a tiny blemish traveling over the blanket of white.

Cox called Snowball and reported a bogey at angels eight. Snowball's reply died of asthma. Cox gave up on Snowball, and wondered whether or not to go down. If they went down it would be a hell of a slog to get up again. The plane was a softly penciled cross that moved.

“Green to Blue,” Patterson said. “Bogey has twin engines.”

Everyone was looking down. Cox stared but he couldn't see how many engines the damn thing had. He glanced up: left, right, behind. Empty sky. He checked time, speed, fuel; and he thought:
Bloody stupid patrol. Dunno where we are, or why, or what that bastard is
. He leaned forward and stared. Now he saw the twin engines, pin-heads on the tiny cross.

“Single fin,” Fitz said. “Could be a Ju-88.”

“Could be a Blenheim,” Cox said. “We'll wait a bit.”
Wait for what?
he asked himself.
There's bugger-all up here
. All the same he repeated his automatic scan. As he searched from left to right he saw Blue Two's Hurricane drop a wing and lift its nose in a clumsy, sprawling, tail-dragging climb that could never succeed. Before Cox could touch his transmission switch the Hurricane had stalled and gone into a slow spin, flip-flopping down like an autumn leaf.

“Bandits at twelve o'clock!” someone shouted. Cox jerked his head to the front. Sunlight caught a row of prop-discs stuck on razor-thin wings. They magnified with startling speed into four Me-109's, hurtling toward the Hurricanes at the same height. Before Cox could get his thumb on the gun-button the 109's broke to their right, changing in a single flick from head-on silhouette to a flaring plan-view. “Tally-ho!” Cox shouted, too late because Fitz and Pip were already giving chase, but the tally-ho was the leader's privilege and it might never come to him again …

They caught the 109's quickly, and lost them even more quickly:
almost instantly, in fact. For a couple of seconds Cox labored to drag his sights onto the enemy but the enemy drifted sideways amazingly fast, like a gull caught in a gale, and was lost. By now Cox's Hurricane was steeply canted. The giant hand of centrifugal force pressed him solidly into his seat, and the horizon unreeled itself endlessly down his windscreen. Arms and legs were braced to force the most from the controls: his stomach muscles hardened, he sucked oxygen and gasped, but no matter how he worked he could feel the Hurricane losing its grip. It was drifting outward, skidding on the too-thin air that the German fighters grasped so easily. Cox's eyes kept flickering toward his mirror. He knew what he was going to see but nevertheless his heart kicked painfully when the 109 edged into view. Its shape trembled furiously from the vibrations of the Hurricane, creating a sense of demoniac rage that brought Cox near to panic: he desperately wanted to jink and dodge, to escape this specter. Guns rattled and tracer raced above his starboard wing: a sighting shot. It was hugely tempting to reverse the turn, slam everything over, flip from one wingtip to the other—the worst possible move: reversing the turn took you clean across the enemy's sights. Cox hunched himself, held his turn, prayed. Bits flew off his right wing, the plane felt as if it were being kicked by an enormous horse, Cox said to himself
This can't last,
and it didn't. His Hurricane took another vicious kick and flung itself onto its back. Cox snatched the column into his stomach in a yearning for height, but since he was inverted he dived instead. The 109 lost him.

It caught him again, a couple of thousand feet below. Cox pulled the tit and slammed the throttle through the gate but he couldn't pull away from the Messerschmitt. His feet kept bashing the rudder-pedals, left-right, left-right.
Like riding a bike
, he thought stupidly; uselessly. Cramp suddenly knotted his right calf and the leg froze with pain. He forced it off the pedal and abandoned it to its agony while the left leg worked double-time. And eternally, it seemed, machine-guns rattled like noisemakers at a football match and tracer streamed around the zigzagging Hurricane. Cox felt bitter about his emergency boost, just when you needed the bloody thing it let you down. As if it heard him think, the Merlin started howling its head off and he remembered guiltily that emergency boost didn't work above twelve or fourteen thousand. At the same
time the controls felt a lot better, much keener, more responsive, so he took a deep breath and got both hands on the stick and pulled hard. The Hurricane bottomed out and bounced like a rubber ball. Just before Cox blacked out he glimpsed the 109, still diving.

When he could think again, his Hurricane was hanging on its prop, screaming and wondering whether to stall. He punched home the tit, throttled back and persuaded the plane to roll onto its back. Blood rushed to his brain and his vision cleared. What he saw was the bunch of 109's diving and trailing smoke. He rolled level, searched for Hurricanes, and found two, far below him, circling a third. The third was on fire. It was making more smoke than seemed possible from one small aircraft.

By the time Cox descended they had all disappeared into cloud. When he came out below the cloud, the burning Hurricane was about to hit the sea and Nim Renouf was hanging in his parachute, about four minutes away from doing the same thing.

Cox went straight back up, switched to the Mayday channel and transmitted for a fix. Then he went down again, and they watched Renouf make his splash. The Kent coast was about ten miles away. No boats were near. Fuel was low. Cox made a pass over the yellow-and-white blob that was Renouf's Mae West and face, and took his patrol home.

The doctor was a chubby, friendly, middleaged squadron leader called Hubbard. He had a large yellow notepad and several pencils but he never wrote anything. “And what do you think of the war?” he asked. He shut one eye and cocked his head as if he had put a tremendously tricky question.

“Oh, gosh,” Flash Gordon said. He was in his best uniform, sitting up straight, his eyes wide with interest. “Well, I agree with the Prime Minister, sir. The Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin. That's what he said, and I think he's right, don't you?”

“You've seen quite a bit of the war already, haven't you? Is it what you expected? Tell me your impressions.”

“Mmm.” Flash chewed his lower lip and concentrated hard. “If you ask me, sir, the whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.”

“And personally? How do you respond to the prospect of such bloodshed?”

“If we can stand up to him,” Flash declared, “all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad sunlit uplands.”

“After all,” Hubbard said sensibly, “the German pilots you blow to bits are probably just men like you, aren't they?”

“But if we fail,” Flash told him, and shook his head grimly, “then the whole world will sink into the abyss of—”

“What I meant was—”

“If I might finish,” Flash said, leaning forward and raising a finger, “because I do think that this is a pretty crucial point: the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister by the lights of perverted science.” He sat back.

Hubbard fiddled with his pencils. “I'm no expert on fighter pilots,” he lied, “but I'm told that sometimes … well, the strain gets a bit much, and then a chap might need a spot of help … Mmm?”

Flash nodded. “I'll keep a weather eye open, sir,” he said. “Anybody starts acting funny, you'll be the first to know.”

Fitzgerald and Patterson each claimed a 109. Mother Cox was delighted. He had seen none of their part of the fight, but they told him that while one pair of 109's concentrated on him (he was shocked to realize that he had never noticed the wingman in the background) the other pair had gone for Nim Renouf, obviously thinking he was easy meat. So Fitz and Pip had chased them off, or tried to, and anyway there was a hell of a scrap. Poor old Nim took a pasting but Fitz and Pip gave the Huns what-for and hit them where it hurt. When last seen they were going down with a great deal of smoke coming out and no hope of getting back to krautland this side of Christmas.

Nobody knew why Renouf suddenly went into a spin.

Skull finished scribbling his combat reports and went to phone Group.

“A” flight got scrambled at 10:15 and flew west along the coast, past Hastings, past Eastbourne, all the time being told to look out for a raid coming in across the Channel. Nothing appeared. They orbited Beachy Head for ten minutes. They were told the raid had
turned back. They were to return to base. Halfway home they saw three Spitfires chase a very decrepit Dornier 17 out to sea and shoot it down. They landed after fifty wasted minutes, feeling disgusted. There was a message for Barton to call Brambledown.

It was Squadron Leader Hubbard. “I've had a good look at him,” Hubbard said. “He's a peculiar fellow, isn't he?”

“I could have told you that. Is he batty, though? That's the point.”

“We had a long chat. About the war, and killing people, and so on. Not very productive, though. He kept quoting great chunks of Churchill's speeches. Did he know I was coming to see him?”

Barton thought. Did he? “I suppose he could have guessed,” he said.

Hubbard grunted. “He must have swatted them up. The speeches, that is. I must say he spoke them very well.”

“But is he batty?”

Hubbard sighed. “I can't go on record as saying that a pilot who quotes Churchill is
ipso facto
mentally unstable. I mean, a lot of people quote Churchill. On the other hand … Yes, of course, he's batty. He's completely off his rocker. If you ask your average fighter pilot what he thinks of the war he shuffles his feet and looks embarrassed and says well they started it, didn't they? He doesn't talk about the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister by the lights of perverted science.”

“Flash said that?” The more Barton thought about it, the funnier it seemed.

“I'm sending him back,” Hubbard said. “Keep him away from Downing Street and he should be all right”

Flash landed at Bodkin Hazel before lunch. With him came a new Hurricane flown by a replacement pilot, a naval sub-lieutenant. He had a remarkably smooth, pale face which tapered to a pointed chin. His hair was blond and glossy, his eyes were blue-gray and he seemed never to blink. Everything about him was neat and controlled.

“This is Quirk, sir,” Gordon said to Barton. “He's a sailor. I swopped him for two bottles of rum.”

Quirk saluted. “Transferred from the Fleet Air Arm, sir,” he said.

“I hope you've done an operational conversion course,” Barton said sharply.

“Yes. Fifteen hours on Hurricanes.”

“Fifteen. Bloody hell … Did that include air firing?”

“Only once. I'm afraid they couldn't spare more than a couple of hundred rounds, so I didn't learn much.”

“God in heaven!” Barton spun his cap in the air and caught it. “You don't know one end of a Hurricane from the other.”