Piece of Cake (70 page)

“Ah.” Skull found his notes. “Macfarlane's all right. He's a young animal, shallow, easily bored, little imagination, full of self-confidence and aggression. Should do well.”

“Don't like him,” Kellaway said. “Too cocky. Never listens.”

Barton glanced at CH3, who shrugged. “He'll either go to hell in a hurry or he'll make a killing,” he said. “Probably the first.”

“Steele-Stebbing's interesting,” Skull said. “I was an undergraduate with his father. Insufferable man, bloated by ambition. I rather think the son is trying to escape him, which of course is impossible.”

“He got very good marks in training,” Barton said.

“Of course he did,” CH3 said. “He's been on his best behavior ever since he was toilet-trained, and I'll bet that happened bloody early.”

“Renouf?” Barton said.

“Renouf is a mystery.” Skull put his notes away. “Or perhaps a paradox. He's the only one of the three with a mind of his own, and yet he's profoundly uneasy.”

“The little bugger's windy,” Kellaway said. “If you said ‘Boo!' to him he'd turn into a goose.”

Barton said: “Think I should chop him, CH3?”

“Maybe. I don't know. You can't always spot a good fighter pilot on the ground. Look at the last war aces: Mannock, McCudden, Bishop … They weren't the life and soul of the party, were they, uncle?”

“Bit stand-offish, some of them, but then they lived to kill, didn't they? I don't see this little lad living to kill. He looks like one of nature's victims to me.”

“Have we got any of nature's murderers in this squadron?” Barton asked. “Besides Moggy, that is.”

“The Pole and the Czech,” CH3 said at once.

“Oh? What makes you so sure?”

“They said unless they get Spits they'll strangle someone, probably you.”

“You're kidding!” Barton said.

“They told me the same,” Skull said.

“Good God.”

“I'll have a quiet word with them,” the adjutant said. “They obviously don't understand the form.”

They drove in silence for a while.

“Interesting that none of us has mentioned the biggest problem,” Skull remarked. He gave them five seconds to work it out, and said: “Young Gordon.”

“Flash has certainly turned a bit wild and woolly.” Kellaway thumped his bad knee: long journeys made it ache. “Still, he always was peculiar.”

“No, he's more than peculiar,” Skull said. “Have you seen his eyes? He's in a state that many a doctor in the outside world would consider verges on the certifiable.”

“Extraordinary thing,” Kellaway said. “He told me his wife was dead before she was actually killed. I've checked the dates. The poor sod was convinced he'd killed her the day before she actually bought it. I mean, that's enough to drive anyone loopy.”

“Anyway, this isn't the outside world,” Barton said. “And I like Flash. He may be dotty but he's not completely crackers. I mean, he hasn't tried to strangle anyone, has he?”

“The real question is: can he fly?” CH3 asked. “That's all that matters. You don't want a fighter pilot who's completely normal, for Pete's sake. That's what's wrong with Stainless Steel or Iron Filings or whatever his name is. Too well-behaved. Never picks his nose, beats his wife or uses the lavatory while the train is standing in the station. Hopeless.”

“I realize you don't want a pillar of rectitude,” Skull said. “On the other hand, even if he can fly like a bird, do you want a lunatic?”

“Flash isn't a lunatic,” Kellaway said. “He's on the daft side of crackers, I agree, but he's not a lunatic, not yet. Believe me, I've seen plenty.”

“I don't even think he's daft,” Barton said thoughtfully. “He's just a bit … I dunno … potty, that's all.”

CH3 said: “Frankly, I'd put him on the loopy side of potty.”

“Where exactly is that in relation to plumb loco?” Skull asked.

“You've been to the pictures again,” Barton accused.

“The Lone Ranger,” Skull said. “Now there is a thoroughgoing psychopath. Compared to him, Flash is restraint itself.”

Flip Moran and Pip Patterson turned up at Brambledown that same evening. Both had been delayed by missed train connections. They were stiff from travel. Patterson had come from Scotland, Moran from Ulster. Moran had spent twenty-four hours in trains, on the ferry and then in more trains.

They stood round-shouldered and stiff-legged at dispersal and
watched Hurricanes circling the field, until one Hurricane landed and taxied over.

Barton climbed down. “Glad you could make it,” he said. “Micky Marriott's got your new kites ready. Grab some kit and do a test flight.”

“Now?” Moran yawned enormously. “Sweet Jesus, Fanny. Can't it wait till morning?”

“We're on convoy patrol in the morning. Eight o'clock.”

“Christ … I wish I'd stayed at home.”

“Well, that can easily be arranged,” Barton said crisply.

Patterson flinched at the clamor of a klaxon amplified by the Tannoy. After ten seconds the racket stopped, and men were running to distant aircraft. “You want to watch out for that,” Barton said. “If you're in the circuit and you see a white flare, clear off fast before you get mixed up in the scramble.”

“Eight o'clock, eh?” Moran said. “That doesn't leave a lot of time for me to work my flight up to the peak of perfection.”

A white flare banged.

“Times have changed,” Barton said. “It's on-the-job training here.”

A section of Spitfires bustled over the grass, put their noses down and shoved off, engines roaring hungrily.

“Convoy patrol,” Patterson said. “I've never done that. What's it like?”

“Well, it's not much fun,” Barton told him, “but on the other hand it doesn't serve any useful purpose, either. Can you swim?”

“Not much. Why?”

“Come on, Pip,” Moran said. “Let's go upstairs before it gets dark. You know how frightened I am of the dark.”

The waterspouts seemed to freeze at their maximum height for a few seconds. The early morning sun picked them out, as white as heaps of whipped cream. Then they slowly collapsed and dissolved and tumbled into the sea. Between and around them the convoy crawled, and around the convoy the escort destroyers flickered with gunfire.

It was four minutes past eight. Hornet squadron had just seen the convoy. The German bombers finished their attack and climbed into cloud. There was an endless layer of the stuff at three thousand
feet. By the time the Hurricanes were near enough to help, the raid was over. One ship was dead in the water, another was burning, the rest trudged on, and the destroyers all fired at the Hurricanes, which came as no surprise to Fanny Barton. He took his squadron out of their range and flew a wide circle around the convoy.

The patrol lasted an hour and ten minutes. Time passed slowly. They went round and round the convoy in a permanent orbit. The monotony made it deadly. An enemy might slide out of cover at any second. It was seductively easy, as the twenty-ninth orbit merged into the thirtieth, to stop searching the blank and boring sky and look at the interesting ships instead.

After an hour and ten minutes the convoy had traveled fifteen miles while the squadron had flown about two hundred miles. The relief escort had not appeared, but Barton turned for home. He glanced back only once, and saw gun-flashes on the destroyers, shell-bursts in the sky. That might mean the escort had arrived or it might mean something else. He looked away, punched a button on his VHF and asked for a bearing for Brambledown.

The Sector ops officer was a middleaged squadron leader called Wood. He wore the brevet of an Observer and the purple-and-white-striped ribbon of the DFC, both much faded. “Look, old chap,” he said, “I'm the pig-in-the-middle. I can only tell you what the Navy told me, and according to them you chaps were late. Too late to stop a mob of Ju-88's divebombing the convoy and sinking the …” He searched his blotter for the name. “… SS
Benjamin.”

“We weren't late,” Barton said. “We were at the right place at the right time, but the convoy wasn't there. The convoy was late.”

“Um,” Wood said, and scratched the back of his neck with a pencil. “I don't think the Navy will buy that, old boy.”

“I don't give a damn whether they buy it, sell it, or use it to wash their feet in. We were at the right place at the right time.”

“Yes, of course, I'm sure. Too bad about the boat, though.”

“Oh, come on, Woody, don't talk balls. I've been flying convoy patrols ever since Dunkirk. It's a mug's game! Surely for Christ's sake someone in Fighter Command has worked that out by now.”

“Yes?” Wood tapped the pencil on his teeth. “Say on.”

“Well, Jerry's no fool, he knows by now how long our patrols stay up, I mean he's had plenty of chance to find out, hasn't he?
He knows the weak point is the changeover, doesn't he? And this weather's perfect for him, isn't it? Bit of dead reckoning, down through the cloud, there's your convoy smiling up at you in the bomb-sights.”

“Well …” Wood stuck the pencil in his ear. “Are you telling me we can't protect these convoys?”

“Not in the Straits of Dover, we can't. Not with Jerry a short sprint away.”

“Our fighters against his bombers?”

“So what?” Barton swung his flying-boots onto the desk and knocked over a tankard full of pencils. “We're usually too low and we're always too slow. Convoy patrol means stooging about to save fuel. Jerry doesn't worry about fuel. Jerry comes at us like a bat out of hell.”

“Yes.” Wood tried to clench the pencil between his upper lip and his nose. “He would, wouldn't he?”

“If you want to do something useful with that bloody silly thing,” Barton said, “you can cross out all convoy patrols.”

“What—this?” The pencil slipped. Wood caught it and examined it as if he had never seen it before. “Not nearly big enough for that job, I'm afraid,” he said.

Hornet squadron was released until 2 p.m. Barton and the flight commanders used the time to test the new pilots. Barton took off with Renouf.

They climbed to ten thousand feet and went onto oxygen.

“Okay, Red Two, listen,” Barton said. “Your job is to cover my tail. Stay with me. Where I go, you go, understand? If you lose me I'm dead. Right?”

“Right, sir.”

“Not
sir
. Red Leader.”

“Right, Red Leader.”

Barton half-rolled and dived and immediately lost Renouf.

When they came together again, Barton said: “You just got me killed, didn't you? Where the hell were you, Red Two?”

“Sorry, Red Leader. Very sorry.”

“Oh, that's all right, then. I get a gutful of tracer from some Jerry on my tail and you're very sorry, Red Two.”

“Won't happen again, Red Leader.”

Barton chucked his Hurricane onto its right wingtip and charged off. For the next three minutes he dodged and swerved, reared up and stall-turned, threw himself in the odd loop and roll and skid. Renouf was always behind him.

Barton leveled out and got his breath back.

“Okay, Red Two, I'm a dirty great Heinkel. Give me a minute and then come and get me.”

Barton went up a thousand feet and turned and flew west. Renouf had vanished. Barton cruised along, changing direction as the mood seized him, until he began to wonder if Renouf had got himself lost. The sun flickered. It was no more than the tremor of a stray eyelash, but Barton thumbed the safety off his gun-button. A Hurricane swam out of the dazzle, dummied a beam-attack and dipped beneath him. Not bad. Not at all bad.

When they came together, Barton said: “Done any low flying, Red Two?”

“Done a bit, Leader.”

“Okay. You lead this time. As low as you like.”

They landed twenty minutes later. Barton climbed down from the cockpit as his groundcrew got to work, refueling, cleaning the dead bugs off the windscreen, checking. The day was hot. He took off his parachute and dumped it on a wing. One of the fitters was whistling a perky little tune, with lots of trills: in the vast tranquility of the airfield it sounded amazingly neat and clearcut. “What's that?” Barton asked. The fitter looked up, twirling a screwdriver. “That tune,” Barton said.
“Little Sir Echo
, sir,” the fitter said. Barton nodded. “Oh yes,” he said. He rested his head and arms on the wing. Already the metal skin was warm.

Renouf walked up, Irvine jacket unzipped, parachute slung over his shoulder, helmet and mask dangling from his fingers. Barton did not raise his head. He could smell the sweet, crushed grass against the hot tang of the Merlin. “You can fly too low, you know,” he said. “I mean, we all like shaking the apples off the trees, but you were mowing the bloody lawn, weren't you?”

“Yes, sir.” Renouf's overcrowded face was serious but his eyes were bright.

You little bastard
, Barton thought,
you were getting your own back
. He remembered chasing Renouf into a valley that twisted
and narrowed, and he shut his eyes. “All right,” he said. “Tell Macfarlane he's next.”

Steele-Stebbing's face was one great grimace. Partly this was the drag of centrifugal force, partly it was nervousness. His Hurricane was tearing around a small circle in a near-vertical bank and he knew he was forcing it to turn harder than was good for it, so hard that his head and body were jammed immoveable and he could sense the intolerable strain on the aircraft through the awful strain on his muscles.

“Tighter,” CH3 said. “Tighter.”

Steele-Stebbing began to despair. They had been circling like this for an eternity. Five minutes, at least. First to the left, then to the right, then back to the left. He sucked down oxygen and tried to blink away the wandering sparks of light.