Piece of Cake (67 page)

“Bloody good idea,” Cattermole said. “Anyone got a knife?”

That broke the tension, and they laughed. A medical orderly hurried into the tent. While he treated Cattermole they got on with breakfast. Cox said, “D'you think Pip's going to be fit to fly, sir?”

“We'll see.” Barton was getting the hang of command: just because you were asked a question, it didn't mean you had to give an answer. “I don't know what he does to the enemy, but by God he frightens me,” he said, and they laughed some more. When CH3 came back and said that he had put Patterson to bed and left his batman to watch him, Barton thanked him and forgot about Patterson. He didn't actually need Patterson. The squadron was short of Hurricanes. What mattered was making the surviving machines airworthy and getting them back into action, damn fast. Patterson could wait.

The adjutant looked up from his paperwork, saw one of the riggers cycling across the field, and suddenly remembered Flash Gordon.

Flash was in his pajamas, sitting on his camp bed, rubbing the grime from between his toes. “Hello,” he said.

“Sleep well?” Kellaway asked.

“Dreams. Too many dreams.”

“Ah, don't we all?” He sat on the bed. Flash looked ten years older, he thought: pouchy eyes, grim mouth, none of the old fizz. “I've got some news for you,” Kellaway said.

“Ever shot a little old lady, uncle? I must've got about forty of them yesterday. Bit of a walkover, really. They didn't put up much of a fight.” He rubbed an ankle, and got more grime off that.

“Tell me.”

Flash put his elbows on his knees and rested his head in his hands. “I just did,” he said.

Kellaway waited, but Flash had no more to say.

“Well, I only came over to tell you that Micky told me he bumped into your charming wife as he was going out yesterday,” Kellaway said.

“Nicole got here?”

“On a bicycle, apparently. Micky told her you were in Belgium, returning God knows when, and from the way she was talking it
seems quite likely that she decided to head in the same direction. Probably halfway there by now.”

“Unless,” Flash began, and had to stop and swallow a couple of times. “Unless something happened to her.”

“Well … I suppose some of the roads are a bit dangerous now. Still …”

“Anything's possible, uncle. Anything. Christ Almighty …” Flash stood up. “Christ Almighty. That really has put the tin hat on it, that has. Christ Almighty.” His voice had begun to shake.

“I expect she's perfectly safe, old chap.”

“I could have shot her, uncle. Maybe I did. Maybe I did shoot Nicole. They were all just refugees. God knows where they were going.”

“No, no. Chance in a million, old boy. Forget it.”

“I could've shot her. How do you know I didn't?” Flash gripped the tent-pole, squeezing hard. “I mean, Christ Almighty.”

Kellaway tipped his cap back and scratched his head. “Look: Pip's all right,” he said, “and Flip's nearly all right, so I bet Nicole's all right, too.” He knew it wasn't much, but it was the best he could do.

In fact at that moment Nicole was safe and well and in good spirits.

She had walked five miles the previous evening and found a barn with fresh straw to sleep in. She was up at dawn, washed in a cattle trough, and walked another three miles to a village, where she got a breakfast of coffee and bread. She felt good. It was a clear, pleasant day and the walking had given her a sense of accomplishment. Belgium couldn't be far. She was convinced she was doing the right thing. To sit in Mailly-le-Camp while Flash was in Belgium would have been stupid. Boring and pointless and intolerable. Too many people treated the war as an excuse to stop trying. Nicole was a doer. She didn't believe in waiting for someone else to come along and solve your problem.

Then someone came along and helped to solve hers. He was a man on a motorcycle, a medical student trying to get to his home in Valenciennes. He offered her a lift. Valenciennes was just where she wanted to go. They could be there by afternoon.

It was a large machine and he liked to go fast, but the further north they went the worse the traffic became: a blaring confusion
of military vehicles and plodding refugees. About midday the whole weary mess came to a halt. The student took to the grass verge and after a couple of miles they reached the blockage. It was a crossroads, thoroughly cratered and strewn with burning vehicles, dead horses, bits of people. The student stopped to see if he could help, and in the next five minutes the Stukas came back to bomb the crossroads again.

He started his motorcycle and Nicole got on the pillion. They were well away from the crossroads when the first bombs fell, and the road was clear: everyone else had run into the fields. He got the machine into top gear and raced down the crown of the road. Nicole's hair streamed in the wind. She linked her fingers, hugging his body, resting her chin on his shoulder. Her eyes were closed and she took pleasure in the speed and in their escape.

An hour earlier, a couple of empty wine-bottles had rolled off a cart and broken in the road. Nicole never saw them, and the student saw them too late. His front tire was slashed open. The wheel skewed wildly to the left and the machine bucked, catapulting them both ahead. Nicole's eyes opened to show her a bright blur of green and blue, and then the road rushed up and smashed her.

Fanny Barton made CH3 an acting flight commander.

“That's in case I snuff it,” he said. “You haven't got a flight to command right now. Micky Marriott says Fitz's kite has had it. That leaves four: you, me, Moggy and Mother.”

“Flash?” CH3 said.

“Dead loss. Looks like a zombie with a flat battery. He and Pip make a fine pair. What did you make of Pip's moment of madness, by the way?”

“I reckon he's near to cracking up. He needs care.”

“Hmm. I still don't see why he had to be so shitty to Moggy.”

“Well, Moggy's a shit, Fanny. Pip was right: Moggy does like killing people. He's a very nasty piece of work, is Moggy. You don't know how lucky you are to have him.”

Barton looked hard at CH3 to be sure he wasn't joking, and then shouted for Cox and Cattermole.

“We're getting out,” he told them all. “They want us at Berry-au-Bac, nearer where Jerry's broken through the Ardennes. Berry's only about eighty kilometers from here so while we're up we'll go
and look for trouble. We've been given the patrol line Vouziers-Rethel. Tactics are simple. We fly loose and staggered, like yesterday. Keep your heads turning. If you see anything, shout. And if it comes to a scrap, get in close, hammer the buggers and get out fast. Okay? Any problems?”

“I could do with some cash, Fanny,” Cox said. Cattermole sighed, and shook his head. “Well, I'm broke,” Cox protested. “I spent all my francs at that restaurant, and we haven't been paid for a week, and I need toothpaste.”

“Mercenary thug,” Cattermole said.

“You can call me what you like,” Cox said, “just as long as it's understood that I'm only in this for the money.”

“Me too,” CH3 said. “Listen, Mother: I can lend you, say, fifty francs at seventeen and a half percent.”

“Let's go,” Barton said.

“Seventeen and a half,” Cox said as they walked toward the Hurricanes. “Is that good?”

“Good? It's phenomenal,” CH3 said. “I usually charge my friends ten or eleven.”

“You're just saying that to make me feel better.”

“No, I swear it. If they're very rich, maybe even nine.”

“You're all heart, CH3. We really don't deserve you.”

“For anyone who's filthy rich and has a nymphomaniac sister, I may go as far as eight and a half. Do you have a sister, by the way?”

“We've done our best, sir,” a flight sergeant said to Cox. He was blinking with fatigue. “Just don't chuck her about more than you absolutely have to.” Cox nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”

CH3 began counting the patches on Cox's Hurricane, and gave up. “My final offer,” he said. “Twenty-seven percent. I can't honestly charge you any more than that, Mother. I mean, you may be a lousy risk, but you're not a certain failure.”

“I'll think about it,” Cox said. “It's jolly tempting. I really do need toothpaste.” He clambered onto the wing-root. “Have you got any toothpaste?”

“Yes, thanks,” CH3 called as he walked on. “Awfully decent of you to ask, though.”

It was pleasant, cruising at ten thousand feet: sunny but cool. They kept a gap of seventy or eighty yards between aircraft, with
Cox and CH3 always a couple of lengths behind Barton and Cattermole. The blind spot on a Hurricane lay underneath the tail, and this loose formation let each man check the sky directly behind his neighbor.

Before they reached the patrol line, Cattermole called up: “Bandits at one o'clock, slightly high.”

It took Barton five seconds' hard searching before he saw the prickling of dots. He had discussed this sort of situation with CH3, after breakfast. He knew just what to do. They were northeast of him, almost certainly heading west. He led the Hurricanes in a steep climbing turn to the southeast. Within three minutes they had lost sight of the enemy but gained three thousand feet. He turned northeast, still climbing, and had an advantage of at least four thousand feet when he was able to make out the enemy again, the dots fractionally heavier now that they were coming at an angle instead of head-on.

It was midday. The sun was overhead. Barton kept it between him and the enemy. If he could only just make out a clump of bombers, there was a good chance the bombers would fail to see four small fighters hidden in that great dazzling glare.

He was in no hurry. He concentrated on getting his interception right. The others would search the sky and guard his tail.

Once, the bombers altered course, and he had to re-jig his calculations. But after fifteen minutes he could see them below him as clearly as a pattern on a plate: twelve Dornier 17's, in three ranks of four, proceeding stolidly from right to left.

Barton waggled his wings, and fell. Cox fell with him. Cattermole and CH3 waited a couple of seconds, and then dropped after them.

Barton actually saw his own shadow cross the wings of a Dornier as he picked out his target: front row, left. Surprise could never be total, not with three or four pairs of eyes in each bomber, but he was bracing himself and easing the Hurricane out of its dive before the first wild flickers of fire came seeking him, and by then he didn't care. The Dornier swelled and filled his reflector sight to overflowing, looking big and black and as hard as a battleship until his guns ripped across its port wing from engine to body and carved it off. Barton just had time to see the wing crack and start to fold back. Then he dragged the stick into his stomach and bounced back up into the sky. Screwing his head around, he saw streams
of tracer hunting him, and through these fireworks he watched CH3 line up a Dornier from the beam, pour a full-deflection shot into it, and vault the formation before the bomber began streaming fire and smoke.

They regrouped at a safe height. Two bombers were missing, two were falling behind the pack.

“Any damage?” Barton asked.

“Something snapped with a loud crack when I came out of that dive,” Cox reported. “She's shaking like a leaf.”

“No hydraulics,” Cattermole said. “Nasty smell of plumbing in the office.”

“Okay, that's enough for today,” Barton decided. “Back to base.”

They turned and flew to Berry-au-Bac, slowly, so as to spare Cox's fractured airframe. They were over the airfield when he discovered that, like Cattermole, his hydraulic system was useless. No undercarriage. Even hand-cranking failed to move it.

“Scrap the kite, Mother,” Barton said. “Bale out. She's not worth keeping.”

Cox climbed to eight thousand feet, aimed the Hurricane toward Germany, and dived over the side. He had a moment of panic when he couldn't shake his gauntlet off, but eventually he got his fingers on the ring of the rip-cord and tugged hard. The silk blossomed with a smart crack. He hung and watched his Hurricane drone away. Rather a shame. He had liked that kite.

Cattermole opted for a belly-landing, and walked away from it with a bloody nose. The Hurricane was a write-off.

Barton and CH3 landed intact. They gathered to watch Cox drift down, and they were all waiting for him when he landed.

“That was highly successful,” Barton said. “We should do that again, don't you think?”

“Lunch, first,” Cattermole said, nasally. “This is Norman blood, you know,” he told CH3, showing his handkerchief.

“Heavens to Betsy!” CH3 said. “And is that Norman snot mixed up with it?”

A truck came across the field to take them to the mess. But before they could get into it, they had to get under it. Half-a-dozen Junkers 88's blasted over Berry-au-Bac at fifty feet, strafing and bombing. The two surviving Hurricanes collapsed, their legs
smashed sideways, and caught fire. There was enough fuel in the tanks to blow up with a series of crumps that the pilots, crouched on the turf, felt in their palms.

That was the end of Hornet squadron in France. The depots were empty of replacement aircraft. Kellaway, Skull, Gordon, Patterson, and Fitzgerald reached Berry by road that evening. Soon afterward, Baggy Bletchley arrived. “No hard feelings,” he said, “but you are now what is technically classified as ‘useless mouths,' so we're sending you home.”

They went to England the slow and easy way, by boat train. Barton stood on deck with CH3 and watched Dover approach.

“Looking back on it all,” he said, “it didn't exactly work out the way we expected, did it?”

“No.”

“Bloody shambles, really.”

“That about sums it up.”

Barton grunted. His jaw-muscles kept twitching and he was glaring at Dover as if daring it to start a fight. He couldn't wait to get back in the air and blow something to bits.