Code Name Verity (6 page)

Maddie was listening for incoming stragglers one afternoon following a battle that hadn't involved the Maidsend Squadron. She nearly fell off her chair when she heard the desperate call that came in on her frequency.

‘Mayday – mayday –'

– Recognisable in English. Or perhaps that was French, ‘M'aidez', help me. The rest of the transmission was in German.

The voice was a boy's voice, young and scared. He broke off each call with a sob. Maddie swallowed – she had no idea where the anguished cries for help were coming from. Maddie called out, ‘Listen – listen!' and switched her headset on to the Tannoy so that everyone could hear, and then she grabbed the telephone.

‘It's Assistant Section Officer Brodatt in the Tower. Can I get directly through to Jenny in Special Duties? All right, Tessa then. Anyone with a screen going. I need an ident on a radio call – '

Everyone crowded round the telephone, reading over Maddie's shoulder as she took notes from the direction finding station, then gasping aloud as the meaning of her notes sank in.

‘Heading straight for Maidsend!'

‘What if it's a bomber?'

‘What if it's still loaded?'

‘What if it's a hoax?'

‘He'd be calling in English if it was a hoax!'

‘Anyone speak German?' shouted the officer in charge of the radio room. Silence.

‘Christ! Brodatt, stay on the 'phone. Davenport, you run to the wireless station, perhaps one of those girls can help. Get me a German-speaker!
Now!
'

Maddie listened with her heart in her mouth, holding her headset to one ear and the telephone to the other, waiting for the girl at the RDF screen to pass her new information.

‘Shhh,' warned the radio officer, leaning over Maddie's shoulder and taking hold of the telephone receiver for her so her right hand was freed up for taking notes. ‘Don't say anything – don't let him know who's listening –'

The door to the radio room banged open and the subordinate Davenport was back, with one of the WAAF wireless operators hard on his heels. Maddie looked up.

The girl was immaculate – not a blue thread out of place, her chignon of long fair hair coiled in regulation neatness two inches above her uniform collar. Maddie recognised her from the canteen and rare social evenings. Queenie, people called her, though she was not the official WAAF Queen Bee (that's what we call the senior administrative officer on the base), nor was it her name. Maddie did not know her real name. Queenie had acquired a certain reputation for being fast and fearless; she sauced superior officers and got away with it, but equally she wouldn't leave a building during an air raid until she'd made sure everyone else was out. Distantly connected to royalty, she was of some rank herself, of privilege rather than experience, a Flight Officer; but she was said to work as diligently at her wireless set as any self-made shop girl. She was pretty, petite and light on her feet, and if there was a Squadron dance on a Saturday night she was the one the pilots went for.

‘Let's have your headset, Brodatt,' said the radio officer. Maddie uncurled the gripping earphones and microphone and passed her headset to the pretty little blonde wireless operator, who adjusted the phones to fit her head.

After a few seconds, Queenie said, ‘He says he's over the English Channel. He's looking for Calais.'

‘But Tessa says he's approaching the coast at Whitstable!'

‘He's in a Heinkel bomber and his crew's been killed and he's lost an engine and he wants to land at Calais.'

They all stared at the wireless operator.

‘You sure we're all talking about the same aircraft?' the radio officer asked dubiously.

‘Tessa,' Maddie said into the telephone, ‘could the German plane be over the Channel?'

Now the whole room held its breath, waiting for Tessa's disembodied reply as, somewhere underneath the chalk cliffs, she sat staring at the green flashes on her screen. Her answer appeared beneath Maddie's scribbling pencil:
Hostile ident, track 187 Maidsend 25 miles, est height 8,500 ft.

‘Why the hell does he think he's over the English Channel?'

‘Oh!' Maddie gave a sudden gasp of understanding and waved at the enormous map of south-east England and north-west France and the Low Countries that covered the wall behind her radio. ‘Look, look – he's come from Suffolk. He's been bombing the coastal bases there. He crossed the mouth of the Thames at its widest point and he thinks he crossed the
Channel
! He's heading straight for Kent and he thinks it's France!'

The chief radio officer gave the wireless operator a command.

‘Answer him.'

‘You'll have to tell me the protocol, sir.'

‘Brodatt, give her the correct protocol.'

Maddie swallowed. There wasn't really any time to hesitate. She said, ‘What did he say he's flying? What kind of aircraft? His bomber?'

The wireless operator said the name in German first and they all looked at her blankly. ‘He-111?' she translated hesitantly.

‘Heinkel He-111 – Any other ID?'

‘A Heinkel He-111. He didn't say.'

‘Just repeat back to him the type of his aircraft, Heinkel He-111. That's an open reply. You press this button before you talk, keep it pressed while you're talking or he won't be able to hear you. Then let go when you're done or he won't be able to reply.'

The chief radio officer clarified, ‘“Heinkel He-111, this is Marck de Calaisis, Calais.” Tell him we are Marck de Calaisis.'

Maddie listened as the wireless operator made her first radio call, in German, as cool and crisp as if she'd been giving radio instructions to Luftwaffe bombers all her life. The Luftwaffe boy's voice responded in a gasp of gratitude, practically weeping with relief.

The wireless operator turned to Maddie.

‘He wants bearings for landing.'

‘Tell him this –' Maddie scribbled numbers and distances on her notepad. ‘Say his ID first, then yours. “Heinkel He-111, this is Calais.” Then runway, wind speed, visibility –' She scribbled notes furiously. The wireless operator stared at the coded abbreviations, then spoke into the headset, giving orders in German with confident calm.

She paused mid-flow and jabbed a perfectly manicured fingernail into the script Maddie had passed to her. She mouthed silently, R27?

‘Runway 27,' Maddie said under her breath. ‘Say “Cleared straight in, Runway 27.” Tell him to dump his leftover bombs in the sea if he's got any, so he doesn't set them off when he lands.'

The whole of the radio room was silent, mesmerised by the sharp, precisely spoken and incomprehensible instructions that the elegant wireless operator rapped out with the careless authority of a headmistress; and the anguished, equally incomprehensible gasped answers of the boy in the ruined plane; and Maddie scribbling directions, and the protocol for giving them, on the diminishing notepad.

‘Here she comes!' breathed the chief radio officer, and everybody excepting Maddie and the wireless operator – whose heads were tied to the telephone and the radio headset – went running to the long window to watch the Heinkel bomber limping into view.

‘When he calls final approach, just pass him the wind speed,' Maddie instructed, scribbling furiously. ‘Eight knots west-south-west, gusting to twelve.'

‘Tell him the fire service is on its way to meet him,' said the radio officer. He clapped one of the other radio operators on the shoulder. ‘Get the engines out there. And an ambulance.'

The black silhouette in the distance grew larger. Then they could hear it, coughing and whining on its single belaboured engine.

‘Christ! He hasn't got the undercarriage down,' gasped the young flying officer called Davenport. ‘This is going to be one hell of a prang.'

But it wasn't. The Heinkel pancaked in neatly on its belly in a shower of grass and turf and came to rest right in front of the control tower, with the fire engines and pumps and an ambulance screaming up to meet it.

Everyone at the window went pelting down the stairs and out to the runway.

Maddie put her headset back on. The two other radio operators were on their feet at the window. Maddie strained to hear what was going on and heard only sirens. Away from the window she could see sky and the windsock at the end of the runway, but not anything immediately below her. A thin thread of curling black smoke drifted up past the window.

Outside at the edge of the runway, Queenie or whatever her name was stood staring at the wreck of the Luftwaffe bomber.

Floundering on its belly, it was like a vast metallic whale spouting smoke instead of seawater. The wireless operator could see, through the shattered Plexiglas of the cockpit, the young pilot desperately trying to free his dead navigator from a torn and bloody helmet. She watched as a swarm of fitters and the fire service team closed in to lift the pilot and the rest of his lifeless crew out of the plane. And she saw the frank relief on the pilot's face turn to bewilderment and apprehension as he was increasingly surrounded by blue uniforms and the stripes and badges of the Royal Air Force.

The chief radio officer at her shoulder tut-tutted under his breath.

‘Poor young Jerry bastard,' he intoned. ‘He won't go home a hero, will he! Must have no sense of direction whatsoever.'

He put a kind hand lightly on the German-speaking wireless operator's shoulder.

‘If you don't mind,' he said apologetically, ‘we could use your help questioning him.'

—

Maddie was going off duty by the time the ambulance men had finished hurriedly patching up the German pilot and brought him into the ground floor office of the control tower. She caught a glimpse of the dazed young man sipping gingerly at a steaming mug while an orderly lit a cigarette for him. They had wrapped him in a blanket, and it was August, but his teeth were still chattering. The pretty blonde wireless operator was perched on the edge of a hard chair at the other side of the room, politely looking away from this shattered and grief-stricken enemy. She was smoking a cigarette of her own as she waited to be given further instruction. She looked just as poised and calm as she had been when she took the headset from Maddie in the radio room, but Maddie could see her casually drilling the back of her chair with one restless, manicured forefinger.

I couldn't have done what she just did, Maddie thought. We'd not have made this catch without her. Never mind speaking German; I couldn't have
faked
it like that, just off the top of my head, no training or anything. Not sure I could manage what she's going to have to do next either. Thank goodness
I
don't speak German.

—

That night Maidsend was raided again. It wasn't anything to do with the captured Heinkel bomber, it was just an ordinary air raid, the Luftwaffe doing their worst to try to destroy British defences. The RAF officers' quarters were blown up (no officers in it at the time), and great big holes gouged out of the runways. The WAAF officers were quartered in the gatehouse lodge at the edge of the estate grounds that the airfield had been built on, and Maddie and her bunkmates were so dead asleep they didn't hear the sirens. They only woke up after the first explosion. They ran through scrub woodland to the nearest shelter in their pyjamas and tin hats, clutching gas masks and ID cards. There was no light to see by except the gunfire and the exploding flames – no street lamps, no cracks of light in any doors or windows, not even the glow of a cigarette end. It was like being in hell, nothing but shadows and jumping flames and fire and stars overhead.

Maddie had grabbed an umbrella. Gas mask, tin hat, ration coupons and an umbrella. Hellfire raining down on her out of the sky and she held it off with a brolly. No one realised she had it of course, until she was struggling to get it in the door of the air-raid shelter.

‘Shut it – shut the damned thing –
leave it
!'

‘I'm not leaving it!' Maddie cried, and managed to wrestle the umbrella inside. The girl behind her pushed and one of the girls ahead of her grabbed her by the arm and pulled, and then they were all trembling in the dark underground with the door shut.

A couple of them had had the sense to grab their cigarettes. They passed them around, parsimoniously sharing. There was not a single lad about – the men were quartered half a mile away on the other side of the airfield and used a different shelter – those that weren't scrambling into aircraft to fight back. The girl with the matches found a candle, and they all settled down for the duration.

‘Bring us that deck of cards, love, let's have a round of rummy.'

‘Rummy! Don't be soft. Poker. We'll play for ciggies. For gosh sakes put that brolly down, Brodatt, are you completely bonkers?'

‘No,' Maddie said very calmly.

They were all crouched on the dirt floor round the playing cards and glowing tobacco ends. It was cosy in perhaps the way you'd be cosy in hell. Something flying low was peppering the runway with machine-gun fire; even buried mostly underground, even a quarter of a mile away, the shelter's iron walls shuddered.

‘Glad I'm not on shift right now!'

‘Pity the poor souls who are.'

‘Can I share your umbrella?'

Maddie looked up. Crouched next to her, in the light of the flickering candle and one oil lamp, was the small German-speaking wireless operator. She was a vision of feminine perfection and heroism even in her WAAF regulation issue men's pyjamas, her fair hair tumbling in a loose plait over one shoulder. Everybody else was shedding hairpins; Queenie's hairpins marched in ordered rank on her pyjama pocket and would not go back in her hair till she was back in bed. With her slender, perfectly manicured fingers she offered Maddie her cigarette.

‘Wish I'd brought a brolly,' she drawled in the plummy, educated tones of the Oxbridge colleges. ‘Super idea! A portable illusion of shelter and safety. Have you room for two?'