Piece of Cake (10 page)

Kellaway put his head back. He blew a great plume of smoke at the hanging light and made it rock. “The boys are a bit stale, aren't they? Cooped-up too much, no action. Why not give them a spot of recreation? Fitz has that dinghy of his down at the harbor, and …” He stopped to take a shred of tobacco off his tongue.

“I don't think they're stale. On the contrary, they're half-baked.” Fanny looked at Flip and thought he saw a tinge of hostility in Flip's expression. Again he surprised himself by welcoming this discovery: the act of command provoked tension, and tension could be enjoyable. Well, well. “Right, this is what we'll do. ‘A' flight stays at readiness this morning, ‘B' flight takes over this afternoon. That gives ‘B' flight all morning to get upstairs and learn a thing
or two. Work your flight hard, Flip. I'm sure they'll feel all the better for it.”

Flip stood. He seemed to have something in his left eye. He rubbed it unhurriedly. “What do you want us to practice?” he asked at last.

“What do you need to practice?” Fanny gave him five seconds to answer, and said, “It's up to you, chum. Find their weaknesses and get rid of them. Okay?”

On his way out, Flip paused. “You haven't forgotten the Polish phrasebook,” he said. All expression was carefully ironed out of his voice.

“No.”

“Is there to be an examination?”

“Certainly. I test my lot this morning, you test yours this afternoon.”

“Ah.” Flip nodded several times, and gently closed the door behind him.

Fanny chewed on a pencil, examined the battered end, looked at the adjutant. “Not exactly jumping for joy, is he?” he said.

Kellaway sat comfortably, legs crossed, arms folded, pipe drawing nicely. “Nose out of joint,” he said.

“That's damn silly. He knew I was senior flight commander. What did he expect?”

Kellaway nodded. “Funny chap, young Flip. Too much self-control, maybe. He never allows himself to let rip, does he? Lots of ambition steaming away under the surface, I sometimes think.”

Fanny sniffed. “If he has any ambition to remain a flight commander he'd better buck his ideas up, that's all.”

“Should I know what all this is about?” Skull inquired.

“Oh … nothing serious.” Fanny got up and strolled about the room, scuffing the linoleum. “Some of the fellows don't seem to approve of me as boss of this outfit. Sticky wouldn't say a word to me all day yesterday. Moggy won't miss a chance to make trouble, either.”

“Nothing new there,” Kellaway observed.

“And Mother Cox keeps looking at me as if I might bite his head off.”

“Mother's chop-happy,” Kellaway said. Skull raised one eyebrow. “Scared of the sack,” Kellaway explained.

“Perhaps if you were to reassure everybody on that score,” Skull suggested.

“No fear,” Fanny said. He jumped, grabbed a roof-beam, and hung easily, arms half-bent. “If someone's no good, I'm going to throw him out.” He began doing slow pull-ups. “I'm not here to make the blighters happy,” he added.

“I used to be able to do that, once,” Kellaway said wistfully.

“Some hundred thousand years ago we could all do it quite expertly,” said Skull.

Fanny dropped to the floor and dusted his hands. “Uncle, can you look after this Polish test? Don't ask them everything, just the basic stuff.”

“Sorry, old boy. I've got to attend the inquiry.” Fanny looked blank. The adjutant said: “You know, about what happened to the Ram. Air Ministry inquiry. Starts at ten in the lecture room.”

“Oh.” Fanny had completely forgotten. “Of course. Well, you'd better do it then, Skull.”

“Actually, Skull ought to be there too,” Kellaway said. “I'm attending as a witness, you see, so we need someone to represent the squadron, and obviously you can't go in case of a scramble.”

“Blast. No, I suppose you're right. Hell. I'll just have to test them myself, then. What a bind.”

“Oblige me with a little information about the Ram,” Skull said.

“Fanny's predecessor,” the adjutant said. “Fell out of his Hurricane and broke his neck.”

“Goodness.” This bald statement quite startled Skull. “How tragic.”

“These things happen.”

“I know, but … It must have been a terrible blow.”

“Not really.” Kellaway tapped out his pipe. “More of a snap than a blow. I doubt if he felt a thing.”

“They're not going to like swatting up all that Polish stuff, are they?” Fanny said gloomily. “What am I going to do if they get everything wrong?” There was no answer to that. “Oh well,” he said. “Better get on with it.”

His first problem was finding the Polish stuff so that they could swot it up. Nobody knew where the Air Ministry papers were. Mother Cox thought that Flip Moran had collected them and put
them somewhere. The rest of “A” flight stood or sat around and tried to look concerned. Fanny heard “B” flight taking off, and briefly contemplated going over to the control tower, calling up Moran on the R/T, and getting the information from him. He remembered what Moran had looked and sounded like when last seen: unhelpful. Moran would fiddle with his radio to create a lot of howls and crackles and would then report,
Sorry, your transmission garbled.
Fanny turned away and organized a search.

“A” flight hunted enthusiastically in all the most unlikely places: under the carpets, inside the lavatory cisterns, down the backs of the sofas (Pip Patterson found sixpence and half a bar of chocolate), behind the pictures on the walls. Sticky Stickwell accidentally burst a cushion, and got severely blamed by the others: too severely, Fanny decided, after they had worked it up into a kind of contest in condemnation, and he made them shut up. Mother Cox found a mouse in a broom cupboard, and at once they were all in full chase. The mouse escaped, but not before Moggy had broken a lampstand; which prompted another barrage of blame, until again Fanny had to step in and use his authority.

It was galling. He knew they were playing the fool, he knew he was being mocked. He could feel his temper slipping, and yet he didn't know what else to do. For one thing, it was worrying to have lost all those secret papers, for which the Air Ministry had his signature. He stood in the middle of the mess, clenching his fingers around his thumbs, and saw something sticking out behind a row of bottles on the top shelf above the bar.

“A” flight showed loud astonishment and pleasure at the discovery of the papers. “Never mind all that,” Fanny snapped. “Who searched the bar?”

“Moggy did,” said Sticky.

“Oooh, what a whopper!” Moggy said. “It was you. You know it was you.”

“Never. It must have been Dicky, then.”

“Me? I'm too small, I can't see up there, I—”

“Who was it got the stepladder?” Pip asked. “Someone did. Wasn't it you, Mother?”

“That's right, put the blame on me,” Mother said huffily. “Every time something goes wrong it's always—”

Fanny hammered a glass ashtray on the bar. “Forget it!” he
shouted. “We've found the bloody things. Now let's get to work. Written test at twelve o'clock.”

The rest of the morning was silent except for yawns, sighs, the shuffling of feet and the rustling of paper. At noon, Fanny distributed sheets of foolscap and read out his questions, one by one. Half of them called for the translation of Polish phrases into English; the other half, of English into Polish. There were forty questions in all. He was relieved to see that everyone took the test seriously; indeed they looked quite weary by the time it was finished.

As he was collecting their answers, Kellaway and Skull came in with the members of the panel of inquiry. Fanny stuffed the papers inside his tunic and went over to play host.

During lunch the talk was not of the Ram's accident but of Bomber Command's attacks on German warships in their North Sea bases. This, it seemed, was the only form of air offensive approved by the Cabinet, and the bomber crews had been ordered to take the greatest care to avoid injuring German civilians. Twenty-nine Blenheims and Wellingtons had reached their targets; seven had been shot down. Another formation of bombers had dropped leaflets over Hamburg and Bremen by night.

“Leaflets?” Fanny said. “What are we trying to do: bore them to death?”

“Don't you be so sure,” said one of the visitors. “When I was on the Northwest Frontier we often dropped leaflets. And in Mesopotamia. It was a jolly good way to tell Johnny Arab to behave himself, or else! It worked, too, as often as not. They knew we meant what we said, and they changed their ways.”

“Suppose they didn't,” Skull said. “What then?”

“Oh, we went back and blew them to bits, of course. But they couldn't say they hadn't been warned, d'you see? That was the point. It's very important to follow correct form with these people.”

“Did our bombers sink any
German
ships?” Kellaway inquired.

“I expect we knocked a few of them about a bit,” said the visitor. “The really interesting thing is what happens now. I can't see Jerry letting us have a go at him without him coming over here and having a go at us, can you? Frankly I hope he does, and the sooner the better. Then the Government will have to think again. The gloves'll be off, and we can really hit Jerry where it hurts.”

“So you expect a counter-attack pretty soon?” Fanny said.

“Don't you?” The visitor steered his last potato into the middle of his plate and forked it with a deadly stab. “I think you should.”

The warning increased Fanny's nervousness about leaving Flip Moran in charge while he took “A” flight up. He went to his office and telephoned Group operations room. They had no news. Nothing had changed. The only plots on the table were friendly.

“The weather's begun to close in a bit,” Fanny said. “We've got three-tenths cloud at about five thousand feet here.”

“That will probably thicken. The met men expect six- or seven-tenths by the end of the afternoon. Still fairly high, though. Nothing to worry about.”

Fanny thought:
The sooner I'm up, the sooner I'm down.
“We'll go now,” he said.

“Good for you. I shall watch your perambulations with interest.”

Fanny called the officers' mess, asked for Pip Patterson, and told him to get “A” flight off their backsides and moving because takeoff was in twenty minutes. He also told him to ask Flight Lieutenant Moran to report to the CO's office at once. Then he telephoned the flight sergeant in charge of the ground crews and gave orders for “A” flight's aircraft to be warmed up. He sat back and listened to the silence and realized he had done it all wrong: he should have left the ground crews to Pip, and he should have told Flip to meet him in the locker room, or better yet at his plane. Now he was stuck here, waiting. Blast. Why didn't he
think
first?

Five minutes passed. Fanny was twitching with angry impatience; he could feel his heart thumping as if it were trying to get out. He allowed one more minute, watching the second hand stroll around the face of his watch, and then he set off. He met Flip Moran coming along the corridor: not slowly, but not rapidly, either. “For Christ's sake, Flip,” Fanny said. “Where the hell have you been?”

“I've been in the lavatory, moving my bowels,” Flip said. “That's something we mere humans have to do occasionally.” His voice was dead level.

“Well, you chose a bright bloody time to do it.”

“Is that so?” Flip allowed his eyebrows the smallest flicker. “Had I known you were interested in my bowel movements I would have recorded the size, weight and specific—”

“Don't be so bloody silly. Anyway, I haven't got time to argue about it now.”

“I'm not arguing,” Flip said.

Fanny looked at his watch. Thirteen minutes to takeoff, and the locker room was miles away. He forced himself to be calm. “Listen,” he said. “Two things. First: if there's any kind of flap while we're up,
any
kind, I want to know about it straight away, which means you get on the R/T and tell me. Understood?”

“Even a thick Irishman can understand what that means.”

Fanny felt the sting of sarcasm. “Good. Secondly, I want to know what you were up to with those Polish-language papers. Why the hell did you hide them behind the bar?”

“Hide? I hid nothing. The stuff was left lying all over the mess, so I gathered it up for safe keeping.”

“Too damn safe. We couldn't find it.”

“I don't know why that should be. Everyone saw me give it to the barman.”

Fanny opened his mouth to say
Then why
… But he knew the answer, and looking at Moran he knew that
he
knew it too. Which meant that everyone knew. “A” flight had made an ass of him. He was their squadron commander and they were treating him like some doddering old school-teacher. Jesus Christ Almighty, there was a war on! Did they want to start another?

He turned and walked out of the building, fast. An airman was cycling by. He ordered him off the bicycle, took it and pedaled hard, past the admin block, past the mess, past the stores and the sickbay and the camp cinema, to the huts where the pilots had their locker room. Hurricanes were roaring in the dispersal bays; some were beginning to taxi out. He dropped the bicycle and ran inside. The room was empty. He unbuttoned his tunic with one hand while he rummaged in his locker for a long white sweater. His tunic opened and a bundle of papers splashed to the floor: the Polish test answers. Fanny swore, scrambled them together and was stuffing them into the locker when he noticed something odd about the top sheet. He pulled it out. Every question had been answered with the same short phrase: BALLS TO YOU. Nothing else. BALLS TO YOU, forty times over. He looked for the name at the top. Mickey Mouse.