Piece of Cake (93 page)

“Then why put the Group ops room underground? And Command ops?”

“God knows.” Bletchley had been up all night, driving from one sector station to another: Biggin Hill, Kenley, Hornchurch, North Weald: checking the damage, counting the casualties, applying every pressure to get the stations fully operational again by daybreak. He had not always been welcome. Morale in some places was less than good. The strain of repeated bombings and strafings was beginning to tell. “There are lots of things they should have done. They should have trained another thousand fighter pilots immediately after Dunkirk, but they didn't, and now we're sending up spotty youths and lunatics left over from Bomber Command. But that's the way it is, so …” He squinted at the blackboard leaning against the broken remains of the tote. “What does that say about Hornet squadron?”

“Airborne ten minutes ago. We've handed them over to Kenley Sector. They've got raid 430 if it doesn't turn back.”

Bletchley found the plaque reading H430 on the table. Fifty plus at angels eighteen. The arrows below it drove deep into the heart of Kent. “Good luck,” he grunted.

The sector controller had just been handed a teleprinter message. “Charming,” he said. “Group have changed the angels code again. Evidently
Luftwaffe
intelligence has cottoned onto our little subterfuge, so from now on we understate height by four thousand, not two. Angels eight now means twelve thousand.”

“That should keep the Hun guessing for a while.”

“Yes.” He blew against the edge of the paper and made a soft whistle. “There's only one problem. The land lines are still down at Bodkin Hazel. This signal won't have got through.”

“Well …” Bletchley had been inventing stop-gap solutions all night. “Get on the R/T and tell Barton … No. Not a good idea. Sorry. The brain's slowing down. Dispatch-rider?”

“He'd take an hour to get there. By that time they might have been scrambled again.” He re-read the signal. “Never mind, I can't think of anything better so a dispatch-rider it'll have to be.” He reached for the telephone.

“Wait a minute,” Bletchley said. “I'll go. I can nip down there in ten minutes in the Tiger Moth. Leave it to me.”

Everything was quiet at Bodkin Hazel when he landed. GPO vans clustered around the control tower. A small steamroller chuntered up and down the middle of the field, flattening the refilled
craters. Groundcrews sat or lay in the shade of the reserve Hurricanes and waited for the squadron to return. Away in the distance, beyond the perimeter wire, a small black car shimmered in the baking heat.

Baggy Bletchley strolled around the three plywood mock-ups, slightly pockmarked by rifle-fire, and wondered what they were for. He turned away and walked toward the tower. After a few yards his digestive system began demanding action. It was accustomed to a regular schedule of bowel movements. That schedule had been disrupted by the constant travel and activity of the past twenty-four hours but enough was enough. Nature called, insistently. He changed direction.

The portable lavatory had been cleaned out since Steele-Stebbing took Cattermole for a ride. It smelled powerfully of pine disinfectant and it was hot. There was no ventilation and the door refused to stay open. Baggy Bletchley was soon sweating and his buttocks stuck to the toilet seat.

His nickname was well-earned. When he was a young lieutenant, Bletchley's testicles hung unusually low; now, with the weight of years, they had dropped even further.

He took a handful of toilet paper and gently raised himself. The seat—stuck to his buttocks—rose with him. Slightly disconcerted, he sat down; but as he did so his testicles swung forward and slipped between the inside of the seat and the outside of the bucket, and he sat on them, which was very painful. His natural reaction was to stand, but now the seat had come unstuck and his testicles were trapped in the gap between seat and bucket. This gap was too narrow to let them be pulled out, and so the more he stood the more they hurt. The pain of standing made him sit; the agony of sitting forced him to stand.

At first he laughed through his tears. What worried him most was the possible embarrassment of being found in this ludicrous situation, squatting, caught by the balls in a mobile bog. After a couple of minutes it wasn't funny: His thighs ached. His stomach muscles were about to give way. He pounded on the wall and shouted. Nobody came. In his sweating, suffering obsession with his dilemma he had failed to hear the air-raid warning.

The ack-ack opened up with a clamor like a hundred drunken blacksmiths. The racket made Bletchley all the more desperate to
escape. He managed to get one hand onto the rim of the bucket and he transferred much of his weight to it. The raiders were Me-110's, charging in from the sea at fifty feet, too low for most of the guns. They made one sweep, one raging, strafing, blinding, swamping attack, and then they were gone. Six 110's totaled twelve machine-guns, firing armor-piercing and incendiary rounds, and twelve cannon, firing explosive shells. The reserve Hurricanes collapsed, ripped apart. Skull's plywood mock-ups flew apart. The crew-room was wrecked, a petrol bowser exploded, and the portable lavatory was bowled over, rolling like a log as it got kicked by repeated bursts of fire.

The squadron landed twenty minutes later. The groundcrews were running alongside the planes as they taxied to a halt. Armorers scrambled onto the wings with belts of ammunition slung around their necks while fitters and riggers leaned into the cockpits to ask about damage. Fresh oxygen bottles were installed. The pilots stayed in their seats. Within fifteen minutes the petrol bowsers were backing away and a last polish was being given to the windscreens. The engines, still hot, fired at once. A white flare climbed from the tower. The squadron took off.

The controller was crisp and clear. “Hello, Popcorn Leader, this is Teacake. Vector one-zero-zero, make angels eight.”

Barton acknowledged. Eight and two was ten, which sounded a bit low, so he stuck on five hundred for luck. The raid came in at twelve thousand, a great mob of Heinkels with a swarm of 109's all around. Hornet squadron was still clawing for height, which suited the escort perfectly. Half of them came down like the wrath of God.

Renouf lost his prop almost immediately and baled out, landing safely. Mother Cox took a burst in the right aileron and fluttered down like a broken butterfly before he too baled out. CH3 and Barton limped home and had to make belly-landings. Flash Gordon's undercarriage collapsed on touchdown and the plane pirouetted on a wingtip. He whacked his head against the gunsight and was carried away with a mask of blood hiding his face.

By now the land lines had been restored. Skull called Bramble-down and reported that only five aircraft were operational, not counting the Tiger Moth. “Is Baggy Bletchley still there?” the controller asked. Skull organized a search.

“We can't go on like this,” Fanny Barton said. “I mean, this is getting bloody silly. Just look at it.”

Cox and CH3 looked at it: a scrapyard of smashed and smoking Hurricanes.

Cattermole came over. “Phillips bought it,” he said. “I'm sure it was Phillips.”

“There you are, you see,” Barton said emptily. “I tell you, it's getting bloody silly. We obviously can't go on like this.”

Cattermole was squinting and blinking into the hazy distance where a tiny black figure shimmered beside a little black car. He began walking. Twenty minutes later he had found a gap in the perimeter wire and was in the lane.

Mary beamed and waved when she saw him coming. “You shouldn't have bothered, honestly,” she said. “I'm fine, I've got everything I need. Still, it's lovely to see you again. And the baby says hello, of course, don't you baby?” She was perched against the back of the car, with her hands touching under her belly.

Cattermole stopped when he was ten feet away. The sweat trickling into his eyes made him blink but his face was untouched by expression. “We want you to go,” he said.

She was puzzled. “Go? It's too early. I can't go yet. Would you like some tea? I could—”

“Go away. Leave here, get out. Go, stay away forever.”

“Oh no, I couldn't do that, love, not yet.” She glanced at the sky. “There's nothing to worry about, you know. I'm fine. I suppose it's natural for you to—”

“Stupid bitch. I don't give a damn about you. I don't want to see you watching me every day. None of us does. You're a jinx, you're a menace. Fitz is dead, he's not coming back.” She began to cry, and that made him move forward. “Get away from here,” he shouted, “or by Christ I'll kill you!” She was still leaning on the car, shaken with sobs, when he hit her, a backhanded swipe across the face which knocked her away. She began pleading, incoherently, the words choking on her sobs. He seized her and dragged her and she screamed with pain. He forced her swollen, trembling body into the driver's seat, shoving and kicking until she was in. “Go!” he bawled, but her fingers couldn't turn the ignition key and he had to do it. The car lurched away. He ran alongside
it, kicking and swearing, until at last it outpaced him and he was left gasping and stumbling in its dusty wake.

“I can get up and down all right,” Fraser said. “It's the bit in between I'm not so sure about.”

He was sitting on a wooden box in a trench behind the remains of the crewroom. Bodkin Hazel had been strafed so often and so suddenly that during an alert nobody sat in deckchairs any more. The trenches had been enlarged and furnished with boxes. Steel helmets were compulsory wear.

“The important thing is to keep looking behind you,” CH3 said. “Watch your tail …” Fraser and the other replacements, Donahue and Jolliff, listened carefully. They had been shunted through their Operational Conversion Unit very briskly indeed.

“And watch the sun,” CH3 went on. His voice had an impatient, hard-driving edge to it. “Nine times out of ten, Jerry's up there in the sun. Never climb
away
from the sun, that's fatal.”

“I'm going for a pee,” Gordon said. He got out of the trench and wandered away until he found Micky Marriott climbing over the carcass of a broken Hurricane, seeking bits to cannibalize. “New boys make me sick,” Gordon said. “They smell like a gents' outfitters. They're all thirteen years old.” He stretched out on a crumpled wing and closed his eyes. “I don't like them and I shan't speak to them.”

“They're not all thirteen. And some of them are brighter than you are.”

“If I were any brighter I'd glow in the dark.” Gordon liked that idea: he smiled.

“You're not as bright as Sherriff, I can tell you that.” Marriott poked his head into a hole in the fuselage. “I saw Sherriff make a century for Derbyshire against Essex a year ago. On a very sticky wicket, too. Sherriff's as bright as they come, believe you me.”

“Sherriff bought it yesterday.”

“Did he?” Marriott pulled his head out. “I haven't had time to catch up with the squadron state, what with one thing and another … Shouldn't you be in the dugout?”

“CH3's making his speech again. Hear him?” They listened for a moment to the insistent voice. “It's all balls,” Gordon said. “They won't remember any of it.”

“Shift over, Flash. I want to get at that panel.”

Gordon rolled off the wing and strolled back to the trench. “And for Christ's sake
never
dive after a single 109,” CH3 was saying.
“If you see one, there's certainly another not far away, and he'll have you.”

“Hitler's invaded,” Gordon said.

“Always check your oxygen before takeoff,” CH3 told them.

“It didn't work,” Gordon said. “There are hundreds of thousands of German corpses washing about in the sea between Folkestone and Dover. I've just been over to have a look.”

“Okay, now let's consider gunnery,” CH3 said.

“The Channel is red with blood as far as the eye can see,” Gordon said. “Our losses were three Home Guards with hernias from throwing handgrenades.”

“Can it, Flash,” CH3 snapped.

“It's not a pretty sight. One of the hernias is
huge.”

Barton thought that CH3 was going to hit Gordon. He touched the American's arm and said: “I want to show you something.” They got out of the trench and walked fifty yards. “What d'you think of this?” Barton asked.

“It's a steamroller. So what?”

“Is it a
good
steamroller?” Barton kicked a wheel. “How much d'you reckon it's worth?”

“For Christ's sake, Fanny. What the hell are we doing talking about machinery?”

“Okay.” Barton sat in the driver's seat. “What d'you want to talk about? Modern art? Skiing? Naked ladies?”

CH3 went to the front roller and peeled pancakes of earth from it. They came off easily and left dark patches on the metal. “Look, all I'm trying to do is give them a better chance,” he said.

“You're giving them so much good advice they're too stuffed to move.”

“There's a lot to learn.”

“And they haven't got time.”

“But that's crazy. When we get scrambled—”

“Of course it's crazy. That's what you've got to accept. What we're doing is crazy. We can't change it so let's relax and enjoy it. It may be a matter of life and death but is that any reason to be so damn grim?”

“I can't help the way I am. I'm responsible for half those guys.”

“So what? I'm responsible for all of them. Do I go around
looking miserable? If you can't relax and enjoy being a flight commander I'll chop you.”

“Oh yeah? And who would you put in my place?”

“Flash Gordon.”

CH3 was staggered: he actually took a pace back. “Flash is nuts,” he said, and his voice was empty, airless. “You'd have to be crazy to do that.”