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Authors: Steven Wilson

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BOOK: Between The Hunters And The Hunted
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Chapter 11
Above the Kattegat, 24 July 1941
 
Cole marveled at how quiet the crew of
N-for-Nancy
was, and how they went about their business as if it were an everyday occurrence to fly into danger. It
was
an everyday occurrence, he reminded himself, and he was one of the men who sent
N-for-Nancy
and her fragile crew into harm's way. He looked out of one of the seven fuselage windows that ran along each side of the aircraft and saw an endless night sky peppered with stars. No storms, the Meteorological Operations division at the base had told them, news that was greeted with a mixture of emotions by the crew. No thunderheads to hide in, no low banks of clouds to run for if things got . . . difficult—“No place to hide, King,” Bunny had said as he made notes in his flight log. “Could be dicey all the way round.” He slapped his flight log closed and said: “Still up for it, I suppose?”
“Yeah,” Cole had said, but he noticed a strange tingling running through his body and he realized that it was anxiety. This was his first time in combat.
He heard the Boulton-Paul turret rotate behind him as Johnny swept the skies for enemy aircraft. Bunny had warned the gunner twice about humming into the intercom. “I can't tell if it's squelch or your own filthy humming, Johnny.”
“It helps steady my nerves, Skipper,” Johnny had said.
“For Christ's sake bring a flask next time. Anything but your tuneless humming.”
Cole had had second thoughts about going to Leka Island when he saw the Hudson MK IV. She was a patchwork quilt of repairs and he knew that even brand-new she looked less like a warplane than the commercial aircraft she was. The addition of the ungainly turret that protruded like some obnoxious growth just forward of the twin-boom tail didn't help her lines any.
Well
, he said to himself ruefully,
you asked for it
.
Cole saw Prentice make his way back along the fuselage.
“Skipper wants you up front,” he said. As they made their way forward, Prentice stopped him. “These are the beam guns,” he said, pointing to the .303 machine guns projecting from small openings on either side of the aircraft. “If we get jumped, you're to take one and I'll take the other. Have you ever fired one of these before?”
“I used to shoot skeet,” Cole said.
“Oh,” Prentice said, a look of disappointment crossing his face. “Well, it's much like skeet except a bit faster and the clay pigeons shoot back. Come on. Skipper's waiting.”
When Cole got to the cockpit, Bunny said, “Pull that jump seat down. It's where the second pilot sits if I buy it.” Cole did as he was ordered and found himself in a slightly lower position than Bunny, nearly blocking the tunnel to the bomb-aimer/navigator's compartment in the nose. A row of dials filled the instrument panel in front of him and an array of throttles and knobs blossomed out of a central instrument console at Bunny's right.
“I don't suppose you know how to fly, do you, King?”
“No,” Cole said, “and I've never fired a machine gun before.”
“My God, is there anything you can do?”
“I'm a pretty good dancer.”
Bunny shot him a glance and shook his head. “What have I gotten myself into?”
“I was just asking myself the same thing.”
“Tell me that you at least believe in good luck,” Bunny said.
“Sorry,” Cole said. “You struck out there, too.”
“My God. A heathen. Here.” He reached inside his coveralls and pulled out the stuffed rabbit. “See this? This is what gets me back to base. When it gets rough, I give her three squeezes. Works every time.” He jammed it back into his pocket.
Cole gazed out the windshield into the star-studded blackness. “How much trouble is this clear sky going to cause us?”
“A bit,” Bunny said.
“What about getting down on the deck?”
“Getting down is a lark, old boy. It's the getting back up that gives me the shivers.”
“Can you do it? I've got to get close to that island.”
“You'll get close. As bloody close as I can manage it without getting us killed. One pass for flares, one pass on the deck. And then we run for Mother. Jerry's seen us come over several times at high altitude, in daylight. My guess is the flak guns are sighted and shells fused for between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand feet, so by the time they react, we'll be halfway home. Unless of course he's got the bloody thing ringed with low-altitude stuff and then that's a different matter.”
“Of course.”
“Of course. Jerry fighters will come tearing after us as soon as the alarm is raised, but I'm counting on the element of surprise to throw them off a bit. Now, King, you must answer a question for me.”
“Okay.”
“What do you expect to find?”
“A battleship,” Cole said. “Or an aircraft carrier.” He watched as Bunny nodded. “You don't seem impressed.”
“I'm a man who's not easily impressed,” he said, but then he turned to Cole. “A bloody battleship? You mean another
Tirpitz
or
Bismarck
? How on earth did you come up with that idea?”
“The size and shape of the mysterious island. It has the relative dimensions of a capital ship. I think that the Germans may even have built themselves an aircraft carrier and they've got it hidden out here. The more I think about it, the more my money's on a battleship.”
“Just one? Doesn't seem sporting of them to build just one for our chaps to sink,” Bunny said.
“I've always been impressed by bravado.”
“I doubt they could build a battleship like that and slip it past us,” Bunny said. “Even if they exiled it to this cheery place.”
“Maybe you're right. Maybe it's nothing or the hulk of a vessel nowhere near completion. It could be a false alarm. But every time you fly near it, all hell breaks loose,” Cole said. “That's got to mean something.”
“Too right about that.”
“Well,” Cole said, “if it means that much to them, it means that much to us.”
“Bunny?” Peter called on the intercom. “Sixty miles out.”
“Can you see anything from there?” Bunny asked Cole.
“No.”
“Go back up to the Astrodome. That'll give you a good view of everything. But when I shout, hop down to the beam guns.”
Cole climbed into the fuselage and situated himself in the Astrodome position, staring at the stars through the clear Plexiglas bubble. It was almost peaceful here, despite the roar of the engines. The white stars glided by overhead, in the distance the sea was black and nearly invisible, and there was nothing to tell him where the horizon lay. It was a far cry from his old classrooms and the bored students who listened to him drone on about the Compromise of 1850 and the Dred Scott Decision. He was alone with his war, his place—with no one to intrude or interfere. “You're a dilettante, Cole,” he remembered being told, and thought, under the guileless stars that looked down on him:
what is a dilettante except an artist in search of an art form?
He felt
N-for-Nancy
slowly change direction and he saw the airplane's nose dip. Bunny's scratchy voice came to him through the intercom.
“All right, King, we're going down. One go-round on the flares at about fifteen hundred feet. Then we swing round and come down on the deck. Look closely because we won't be coming back.”
“You bet,” Cole said. He laughed at himself. His palms were sweating and his tongue seemed too large for his mouth, and his heart beat rapidly, tellingly, through his flight suit. Was it fear or exhilaration? he asked himself; and then he reverted to the scholar by trying to define the difference between the two under these circumstances—or was it an intellectual exercise that he was devising simply to remain calm? He finally resorted to telling himself to shut the fuck up. The mental gymnastics were over.
They were descending faster now, at a much steeper angle, and Cole could see a black shape ahead that blotted out the stars: Leka Island, lifeless and ominous in the night. He felt
N-for-Nancy
bank to the left, saw her right wingtip slowly rise as he steadied himself.
Searchlights came on. They began to sweep the sky, trying to trap
N-for-Nancy
in their long silver tentacles.
Nobody said anything about searchlights
, Cole thought.
This is a surprise
.
“Fancy a little illumination?” Bunny said over the intercom.
“No,” Cole said.
“Mustn't take them too seriously now, King. They're looking up for us. If they look down for us, it's a different story.”
“How much farther?”
“Six or seven minutes, old boy. We're just reaching two thousand feet now. Prentice will chuck the flares out of the bomb bay. We turn around and drop down to two hundred.”
“Is that low enough?” Cole asked.
There was dead silence for a moment. “I say, King. Are you mad?
Nancy
's wingspan is just over sixty-five feet. If we have to turn sharply we'll eat up a good one-third of that two hundred feet. This isn't an exact science, old chum. One little mistake and no one goes home.”
“Two hundred feet is just fine with me,” Cole said.
“Coming up,” Peter said from the nose of the aircraft. “Ready, Prentice?”
“All set, Peter.”
Cole felt the rumble of the bomb bay doors opening and suddenly he was swaddled in frigid air. It swirled madly within the Astrodome, causing his eyes to tear. The roar of the air rushing into the airplane was deafening, the howl of some enraged beast.
N-for-Nancy
shook as her sleek lines were destroyed by the protruding bomb bay doors.
“First one on three, Prentice,” Cole heard Peter say over the intercom. “One, two, three, release.”
He didn't know what to expect, but somehow Cole thought releasing the flare would be much more dramatic than simply words over the intercom. He saw a glint of light just to his left and realized that it was a reflection of the first flare in the Plexiglas dome.
“On three, Prentice,” Peter said again. “One, two, three, release.” The only noise that Cole heard this time was the rumble of the bomb bay doors closing. The stream of cold air lessened and finally disappeared. He watched the searchlights frantically sweep the sky. If those glowing eyes locked
N-for-Nancy
in their gaze, every gun on the island would target them.
“Here we go, chaps,” Bunny said as the aircraft banked.
“Bunny?” Johnny said from the turret. “I don't believe that we're alone up here.”
“Fighters?”
“I can't tell. Sorry, Bunny, but all I see are shapes. Two, I think.”
“It'll be a fine thing if we get caught in the glare of those lights and our own flares,” Peter said.
“I'll try to avoid that just for you, Peter.”
Cole felt
N-for-Nancy
drop suddenly as he twisted around in the cramped quarters of the Astrodome. The flares spread an eerie, cold white light over the scene. It washed back and forth, as the flares swung rhythmically beneath the parachutes, so that shadows grew and shrunk at a fantastic rate. Cole shielded his eyes, trying to cut down the glare from the flares and the searchlights as they glowed along the soft curve of the dome.
They were virtually at sea level now and the strange island that Cole had studied in the quiet of the photo analysis room was just several thousand yards away. With the searchlights behind the island and the slowly falling flares overhead, Cole saw that it was not an island at all but a vast network of camouflage netting suspended on huge pylons that jutted out of the calm, dark waters. But the most startling sight was what lay underneath the netting: nothing.
“King!” Bunny shouted excitedly. “Time to go home.”
Before Cole had a chance to answer, tracers filled the air in front of
N-for-Nancy
, bright streaks of angry light slicing across the sky. They looked like fiery baseballs to Cole, coming right at his head. For the first time he was frightened. But he wasn't satisfied with what he'd seen, either. He wanted another look.
“Take it around again,” he said.
“You bloody fool,” Peter said as shells began to burst around them. “If you want to see it, get out and walk back.”
A shell exploded to Cole's right. The flash and boom were deafening and he felt the aircraft shudder violently. There was another explosion, higher than the first, but he felt the aircraft pushed down. The whole night was lights, noise, and movement—he felt as it he were in a cavern of the surreal.
BOOK: Between The Hunters And The Hunted
2.52Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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