Piece of Cake (97 page)

“Even if it hasn't been done?” she said. “Even if the scores are fake?”

“I give up,” he said. “Write it any way you like.”

CH3 went to his room and buckled on his service revolver. The utter fatigue that had overtaken him at breakfast had passed and been replaced by an edgy nervousness. He recognized the feeling: it was his overworked body preparing for another day of scrambles and scraps, death and terror. It was cranking itself up for the usual cruel and extravagant demands of air combat, when the pulse would hammer at double its normal rate, the skin would be drenched in sweat, the lungs would gulp pure oxygen, and the brain would sometimes be starved of blood, sometimes be swamped with
it. Another physical and emotional battering was on the way, and his body didn't like the idea.

He looked around the room. It was anonymous, meaningless. Suppose he didn't come back today. Tomorrow someone else would move in. What difference would his leaving have made? None. What difference would his staying make? None either. Nothing he did would alter the outcome of this war. Jacky Bellamy's clever ideas might even be right, or half-right, or half-wrong, or completely cockeyed. That didn't matter any more. Nothing he did could save Hornet squadron. Since September began, Fighter Command had been losing the equivalent of a squadron a day. That would continue. Hornet squadron would go on living and dying in its own peculiar, random way. The whole exercise was pointless. It wasn't his fight. It wasn't his country. Anyway, he'd done his stint. Everyone said the important thing was to know when to quit. The ones who got the chop were always the ones who never knew when to call it a day.

He went to find Fanny Barton.

Instead he found a couple of airmen who said that Fanny's office had been wrecked by a bomb. They were carrying what was left of his furniture to his new office, formerly a vegetable store. CH3 went with them.

He watched them prop a broken desk on a couple of milk crates, and go out. He picked a battered squash racket out of a cardboard box and tested the strings. The room smelled of potatoes. Dusty sunlight drifted across it. More men came in and put things down. CH3 noticed his sense of edgy nervousness fading. The old exhaustion was creeping back. Even his eyes had stopped trying: the moving figures lapsed into soft focus. One of them asked him something and it wasn't until the man had gone that he understood the question. Not that it mattered. He had no answer.

The door banged open, and he blinked. It was Kellaway, carrying a cracked blackboard and gripping a piece of paper in his teeth. He stood the blackboard on a box and consulted the paper. “Tell Fanny that Micky says the new Hurricanes have been ferried in,” he said, and hitched his trousers as he half-squatted. There was a list of old names on the blackboard and Kellaway began chalking up new ones. “And tell him his replacements are here too,” he said. CH3 followed the movement of the chalk but the scribbles failed to register in his mind: they remained just scribbles. “I expect he'll want to speak to
them soon,” Kellaway muttered. He completed the last name and dotted an i, firmly and finally. His knees cracked as he straightened up. He was halfway to the door when he stopped, uttered a little grunt of annoyance, turned back and looked at the board again. He summoned up some spit and moistened his fingers. He smudged out the name Gordon and went away.

CH3 stared at the ruined lettering until his tears came and made it completely unreadable.

Fanny Barton walked in as CH3 was scrubbing his face with his handkerchief. “Hello!” he said. CH3 could only nod. Barton looked at the blackboard, and went back and closed the door. “It happened about half an hour ago,” he said. “The medics told me what it was, but I wasn't listening all that carefully. Delayed shock, I think they said.”

“It doesn't matter what it was.”

“No, it doesn't, does it?” Barton stooped and studied the ghost name under the smudged chalk.

“You know, Fanny,” CH3 said, “I always thought Flash was different. I thought, they'll never catch him.”

“Funny, isn't it?” Barton licked his fingers and erased the smudge. Better nothing than a ghost. “I suppose there's a Flash in every squadron.” He found a bit of chalk and wrote “CH3” in the gap. “Someone you're convinced is different, and in the end of course he's just like all the rest.”

“Flash wasn't like all the rest. Remember when I nearly murdered him up the apple-tree?”

Barton laughed. CH3 grinned. He began to feel released, elated. The scruffy, potato-smelling room suddenly seemed brighter, more alive. He found himself laughing too. Everything was very, very funny. In the middle of the laughter the door opened and a chubby, middleaged civilian came in. He wore blue overalls and he was holding a telephone. “GPO engineer,” he announced cheerfully. “Where d'you want your phone, guv?” He twirled the lead.

“Where d'you want your phone, Fanny?” CH3 asked.

“Beats me, old boy. You pick a place.”

CH3 took out his revolver and fired at the opposite wall. The bang was enormous. “There,” he said.

“Here, what's the game?” the man said faintly.

“Not there,” Barton said, and fired his revolver at a different wall. Fragments of red brick flew off. “There,” he said.

The engineer turned and bolted. “On second thoughts,” CH3 said, “how about there?” He fired at a corner. “Don't be bloody ridiculous,” Barton told him, and shot a box of books. “That's the place.”

“Wrong.” CH3 aimed at a wastebasket and missed. The bullet sang as it ricocheted off the floor. “You mean there?” Barton asked, and shot the wastebasket. The air stank. CH3 put a bullet into the ceiling and Barton nearly hit a calendar hanging from a nail.

“You win,” CH3 said. “My wrist hurts.”

“You came second,” Barton said. “I'll tell you what. How'd you like to be my senior flight commander?”

CH3 stuffed the gun back in its holster. “It's all a cock-up, isn't it?” he said.

“Of course it's all a cock-up. I could have told you it was all a cock-up. In fact I did tell you but you weren't bloody listening, as usual. Come on. Let's go and find the new boys.”

The adjutant met them as they were going out. “What was all that din?” he asked.

“We were putting up some shelves,” CH3 said, but Kellaway wasn't listening. “You're on twenty-minute standby,” he said. “I'd better organize some sandwiches.”

Two hours later the pilots of Hornet squadron were still lying on the grass, a short sprint from their Hurricanes. Standby time had come down to ten minutes, then to five. Now it was two. They had watched one of the Spitfire squadrons take off and disappear, heading east. A few minutes later the other Spitfire squadron had followed them. The rumble of their engines could still be heard, faintly.

Skull appeared on a bicycle, pedaling hard. “I've been in the ops room,” he said to Barton. “It's the most extraordinary thing. In the last fifteen minutes every squadron in the Group has been scrambled. That's twenty squadrons airborne.”

“And how many raids?”

“One.”

“What? Hey, that's marvelous! Twenty squadrons, at least two hundred kites, all on one raid … We've got the buggers where we want them.” Barton grinned at his pilots, and they grinned back. “For months I've been waiting for the day when woutnumbered
them
, and here it is!” He whooped with glee and threw his hat at the sky.

“How big is the raid?” CH3 asked.

“Oh, it's big. It's—”

“Come on, come on, come on!” Barton kicked the pole that had the telephone attached to it. “What are they waiting for? Everybody else is up. Why not us?”

“You say everyone else is scrambled?” CH3 said. “We're the only reserve? That's damn dangerous, isn't it?”

The telephone rang, and Barton grabbed it. It was the scramble order, and they pounded to their planes.

The controller's instructions were unusually brief.

“Hello Bearskin Leader, this is Trombone,” he said. All the codenames had been changed. “Steer zero-four-five and patrol Lampstand at angels six.”

“Happy to oblige, Trombone,” Barton said, and ran his finger down the codelist of the day. Lampstand was the Isle of Sheppey. Angels six meant angels ten.

He held the squadron in a power climb. After a minute, Trombone raised the angels to eight, which meant twelve.

Barton felt restless; he was always twisting to look and make sure nobody was lagging behind, and then leaning forward to search for the scrap. There must surely be a major scrap ahead, what with twenty squadrons scrambled already. He couldn't imagine what twenty squadrons would look like, all concentrated on one raid.

The voice of his wingman cut in. “What's wrong, Leader?” CH3 said. “Dropped sixpence?” Barton stopped twisting. “Found it,” he said. “Threepenny bit.”

CH3 felt content. Flash Gordon's death had cleansed his emotions: all pettiness had been swept away in that rush of shared grief. By their manic horseplay with revolvers they had briefly held a wake for Flash. Life had saluted death in a suitably random fashion, and now life went on.

Trombone raised the angels again. Now the target height was sixteen thousand. Hornet squadron went onto oxygen. No word about the raid. Barton assumed it was holding its course.

A dun-colored skim of industrial haze covered the Thames estuary. To the right, Kent was a huge green-and-gold thumb stuck into the Channel, and the Channel itself sparkled as if touched
with static electricity. Barton found Ramsgate, out at the end of the thumb, and saw where Manston must be. A year ago he had flown to Manston to apologize to the skipper of a Blenheim squadron. He remembered it quite calmly and evenly. That was the young Fanny Barton, that was. No relation to the old Fanny Barton now leading his squadron to a lovely great scrap, if only they could find the bloody thing.

“Hello, Leader,” CH3 called. “You sure we're in the place of honor?”

“I think we missed a turning somewhere,” Barton said.

“Bloody Spits,” Cox said. “They've gone and scoffed the lot.”

“Bogey at ten o'clock,” Patterson warned.

Far away to the left, a faint bundle of dots could be made out, heading east. Eventually it grew and matured into a hard, tight clump.

“Hurricanes,” Cattermole said. “In their Sunday best.”

The other squadron was using the orthodox, peacetime formation: four vies of three, neatly locked into an arrowhead. The sight made Barton uneasy, and he checked his own aircraft. “Ease out a bit, everyone,” he said.

Patterson, at Blue Two, began to wonder if the Spits really had scoffed the lot. Maybe Hornet squadron had been sent to clean up the leftovers. Maybe there were no leftovers. Patterson welcomed that idea. All the way from Brambledown his stomach muscles had been jumping with fear and tension. Everything about him felt uncomfortable: his mouth ached where his teeth had been knocked out, his legs and feet were ice-cold, his torso was wet with sweat, he needed desperately to pee, his straps were all wrong and the buckle stuck into his ribs. He wanted to get this patrol over as soon as possible.

Alongside Cattermole, Steele-Stebbing was happy about everything except his eyes. He had been up and down so often in the past few weeks that his sinuses had become very sensitive to changes of pressure. Now they felt as if they had been blown up with a bicycle pump, and every other breath sent sparks drifting across his eyeballs. He trained himself to look between and beyond the sparks.

The north Kent coast was not far away when they met a layer of haze.

The other Hurricane squadron was now a mile or so ahead.
Beyond his left wingtip Barton could just make out the Isle of Sheppey. The haze thinned and dissolved and fled away and he saw, crossing his front from right to left about a mile ahead, the first wave of a flood of aircraft. Automatically he counted the bombers in the front rank, doubled it for the second, doubled that for the third and fourth. Forty bombers, close-packed. After them the flood grew stronger, layer stacked on layer, rearing ever upward until the mass was more than a mile high, and that was only the beginning. The flood went on. It was an orderly torrent of aircraft that stretched to the horizon.

Hornet squadron was at sixteen thousand feet, and the pilots could look far down on the lowest layers and then far up at the highest. The enemy darkened the sky. In this colossal wedge there were something like a thousand German bombers and fighters, all making for London.

Barton searched, and found odd flights and sections of Hurricanes and Spitfires darting at the mass. Then he looked ahead and saw the other Hurricane squadron—still as compact as a troop of Household Cavalry—go wheeling into the first stages of a Fighting Area Attack. “Silly sods'll get jumped,” Cox said. Barton checked the sky above. Dropping fast were four Me-109's. He called a warning. No response: the other squadron must be on a different frequency. He ignored it and concentrated on the bomber stream, now coming up fast.

“Okay, Bearskin aircraft,” he said. “In and out fast. Let's chivy the buggers.” As his sections split up to make their separate attacks he glimpsed the four 109's rolling away from two burning Hurricanes at the tail of the formation.

Hornet squadron accomplished quite a bit of chivying before the escort got amongst them. The raiders were so thick that it was like shooting at a parade. This parade shot back, with ten times the firepower. The sky was a moving embroidery of tracer and incendiary and cannonshells.

Cattermole made the first kill.

Steele-Stebbing was Yellow Two and he guarded Cattermole's tail faithfully. Although his stomach was much harder nowadays, his heart pumped like a sprinter's as Cattermole made him do the utmost violence to the Hurricane's controls. But it paid off. A wandering 109 flew straight and level for one second too long and
Cattermole put a burst into its cockpit. The 109 reared. Cattermole plunged under it and Steele-Stebbing followed, dust and fluff swirling up from the cockpit floor. Cattermole jigged to go left, changed his mind and went screaming off to the right. Steele-Stebbing tipped his machine onto its wingtip and the g-forces briefly drained strength from his arms and legs. Cattermole's plane came in view again, chasing a wildly-rocking Dornier. As Steele-Stebbing leveled out a spot of oil flew up and splattered itself on his goggles. He dragged the back of his glove across the goggles and saw a 109 nipping in behind Cattermole. Everyone fired at once: Cattermole hit the Dornier, the 109 hit Cattermole, and Steele-Stebbing missed the 109 but he gave it the fright of its life and it sheered away. Then he heard a faint
thump-thump-thump
that wasn't the pulse in his ears and the instrument panel turned into shattered glass and splintered wood and a small tornado was blasting into the cockpit and his left arm was chopped off at the elbow and blood was squirting all over the canopy.