The Time Pirate (13 page)

It was then up to Lord Hawke, whose ancient family had been friends of the de Villiers for years, to somehow manage to get the entire week's intelligence reports across the channel to the mainland and ultimately to Churchill himself. And do it under the very noses of the horrid Nazis, whose U-boats were everywhere these days!

She found the whole thing all rather exciting, to be honest. After all, for a woman who loved mystery, what on earth could possibly be more full of mystery and excitement than the life of a real live spy?

She was thinking just that, peddling merrily along the coast, when she heard the roar of countless German bombers passing directly over her head. She stopped, climbed off her bicycle, and looked up the underside of the heavy bombers: the red, white, and black swastikas painted on the wings; the bomb bay doors clearly visible in the bellies of the beasts.

It struck her then, like lightning, just how vulnerable her little islands truly were. She could almost see those German bomb bay doors opening slowly, see the silvery bombs come tumbling out, raining death and destruction wherever they fell.

Perhaps Eammon was right, she thought with a shiver. After all, they had no militia. No Home Guard, to speak of.

Perhaps, after all this, they actually
were
defenseless.

· Greybeard Island ·

H
ad she known about it, the Baroness de Villiers would have been much cheered by events taking place at that exact moment just a few miles across the sea from where she now stood beside her bicycle.

A young saboteur was already plotting his own resistance against the inevitable Nazi invasion. Young Nicholas McIver, the would-be saboteur, was seated in the cockpit of a vintage 1914 Sopwith Camel, watching his friend Gunner prepare for his first bombing run of the morning.

Gunner was stepping off the width of Lord Hawke's grassy landing strip. He had a large wooden rain barrel in his hands. When he reached dead center of the strip, he placed it firmly on the ground. He turned the barrel so the bright red swastikas he'd painted on the staves would be visible to his pilot. He looked over at Nick, some fifty yards away, and gave him the thumbs-up signal. Nick flashed Churchill's famous
V
for
Victory
sign, and Gunner marched across the new mown grass to the Camel.

“She's dead center, lad,” Gunner said. “Exactly halfway
down the length of the strip, and smack dab in the middle of it. Are you ready?”

“I was born ready, sir!” Nick said, smiling down at his friend. “Well, don't expect much on your first few runs. It's a tricky business, this aerial bombing. I spent years behind a twelve-inch naval gun, most of them practicing. So, don't expect miracles. Going to take a great deal of trial and error before you become any good at this, y'know?”

“Aye. But we've not much time left according to the BBC last night. The assault could come at any time now.”

Gunner shook his head in agreement. “We're going to be all on our own, y'know.”

“What do you mean, Gunner?”

“I mean I was over to Guernsey just yesterday evening, visiting me mum. There were troop ships in the harbor, Nick. All the British soldiers are leaving.”

“Leaving? I can't believe it!”

“Every last one. Apparently it's been decided in London we're not worth defending. All the British troops are sailing for home on the evening tide.”

Nick regarded his friend for a long, hard moment before he said, “Well, then, nothing for it, is there? I fancy it's going to be up to us, all of us on these islands, to defend ourselves.”

Gunner shook his head in agreement, but there was a mixture of sadness, fear, and anger in his crinkly blue eyes. Farmers and fishermen against battalions of crack Nazi SS units? It was likely to be a a short and very lopsided battle.

“Let's have a last look at your bomb basket, boy,” he said finally, forcing a cheery smile.

Nick reached down and lifted the small wooden peach basket from his lap. It looked to be full of white cotton beanbags.

“How many bags in the basket?”

“I thought I'd start with ten. Do ten runs. See how I do. Then I'll land and we can look at the patterns around the barrel, figure out what I'm doing wrong. Then I'll go back up with ten more sacks and keep going until we get it right.”

“Good thinking. We won't quit until you've dropped ten bags in a row into the heart of the barrel! Ready to start, Cap'n?”

“Ready to start, sir.”

“Fuel on, switches off, throttles closed?”

“Fuel is on, switches are off, throttle is closed.”

“Sucking in,” Gunner said, rotating the blades three times.

“Throttle set?”

“Throttle set!”

“Contact!”

“Contact! Give her a good, strong rip!”

Gunner and Nick had spent many of their previous evenings in a secret upstairs room at the Greybeard Inn. Gunner, the proprietor of the inn, called it his “Armoury” and the room was filled with all manner of weaponry—swords, firearms, small cannons, barrels and barrels of black powder. Battle flags from all nations hung out from the walls. It was one of Nick's favorite places.

While Nick sat at the center table, poring over World War I–era books on the principles of aerial bombardment, Gunner was at his workbench, filling small cotton pouches with lead shot and white flour. Sixteen ounces of shot and one cupful of flour went into each little sack before he stitched it up. This is what they'd practice with.

While Nick had been honing his flying skills night and day, Gunner had been busy making real bombs, too. Sixteen
ounces was the weight of the live bombs he'd been making for Nick over these last weeks. The black one-pounders he'd designed for the young pilot were perfectly round and roughly the size of a large apple. They were filled with an oily liquid called nitroglycerine and surrounded by black gunpowder. Nitroglycerine was an extremely powerful explosive and extremely sensitive to shock. So each of Gunner's bombs was basically a pound of dynamite that would explode on contact with any solid surface.

To test his new weapon, he and Nick had climbed out of the attic window on the fourth floor of Gunner's inn, crawled to the edge of the roof, and Nick had heaved one of the very first bombs produced out onto the seaside rocks. The resulting fiery explosion sent chunks of rock a hundred feet into the air and left a vast hole on the shore where boulders had stood. The blast far exceeded Gunner's wildest expectations, and the huge smile on Nick's face made all the work worthwhile.

But this morning they wouldn't be using real bombs for their practice. They'd be using small sacks of flour.

Gunner pulled down on the propeller, and she fired up instantly. Nick then taxied out toward the barrel, made a quick right turn and firewalled the throttle selector. He was airborne moments later and flew out over Hawke Castle and the sparkling blue sea below. Making a tight left-hand turn, he slowed the aeroplane, lined up at the leading edge of the airstrip, and leveled off at two hundred feet. He adjusted his goggles and concentrated on the approaching target. The barrel was coming up fast.

He grabbed a sack from the basket, held his hand out over the side of the cockpit . . . waited . . . and let it fly.

Looking back down over his right shoulder, he saw a small
puff of white explode on the grass. Miles from the barrel! What? How could that be? He'd been sure he was spot on the target. But he'd overshot the barrel by at least a hundred feet. His drop had obviously been far too late. He banked hard right and went around for another approach.

This time he slowed the aeroplane considerably and dropped his altitude to one hundred fifty feet. He was well aware that he'd be vulnerable to ground fire if he flew his runs this low, but he felt he had to perfect his aim at any altitude.

Gunner watched him come roaring up the strip, saw him waggle his wings once, and saw the little white pouch hit the ground way to the left and about fifty feet shy of the barrel. He'd dropped it too soon. Nick made seven more bombing runs, and all of his drops were wide of the mark. Gunner knew he had one more flour bomb aboard.

He did a slow looping turn out over the sea and got lined up for his approach to the strip early. He kept her dead straight as he approached the barrel, flying right down on the deck at about fifty feet. Gunner saw his right arm extend out of the edge of the cockpit, saw the bag fly . . . and drop right into the center of the barrel.

The boy immediately climbed, did a barrel roll just over the treetops, and circled the field for the downwind leg of his landing. He banked left, straightened out, and began his final approach.

When Nick had parked the Sopwith and walked over to Gunner, he had a sorely disappointed look on his face. He was surprised to see Commander Hobbes standing outside the barn beside his friend.

“Well done, lad, well done, indeed!” Hobbes said, clapping him on the back. “I saw that last one!”

“Only one out of ten, sir, to be honest. Quite a bit more difficult
than I'd imagined. I may not be cut out for a bombardier, after all, looking at that sorry result out there.”

“Practice, practice, practice, Nick. That's all it takes. Now, both of you come inside the barn. I've brought along some equipment I developed in the laboratory that I want to show you.”

Hobbes, a scientific genius if ever there was one, was the Royal Navy's most famous weapons designer. He'd designed the world's first two-man submarine and a dozen other items and weapons the Royal Navy used on destroyers, battleships, and submarines every day. His recent capture, with the help of Nick's sister Kate, of the highly experimental Nazi U-boat U-33 had provided the navy with an untold treasure trove of the latest German technology, including the Crossfire propulsion system.

Inside the barn, Gunner had a lamp burning on his work-table. There were two items on the table. A long metallic tube and a rather large wooden box with brass fixtures.

“What's this?” Nick asked, picking up the metal tube. It was surprisingly light.

“Believe or not, it's lead, Nicholas,” Hobbes said. “I've milled it down to one-sixteenth of an inch, but it should do the job. Without adding too much weight.”

Hobbes took the tube and unrolled it out on the table. It was about four feet long and three feet wide.

“There. That should do very nicely, don't you think?” Hobbes asked, sounding very pleased with himself.

“Do what, sir?” Nick said.

“Why, protect you during your bombing raids, Nick. It's made so that it exactly conforms to the shape of the cockpit floor. And up the sides as well. We'll have to take the seat out and reattach it of course, but that will be no problem.”

“How will it work?”

“It's very thin, I know, but I've invented an entirely new process. It's a thin wafer of titanium sandwiched between two lead sheets. That's made it strong enough to withstand enemy ground fire, should you encounter any. I tested it myself with a German Mauser rifle and a fifty-caliber machine gun just this morning. See those small dents? Dents, not holes, are what one looks for in a bulletproof shield.”

Nick considered the thought of machine-gun rounds thumping just beneath his feet.

“Nelson the strong, Nelson the brave, Nelson the Lord of the Sea.”

As usual, his little prayer bucked him up a bit.

“It's a brilliant idea, if I may say so, Commander,” Gunner said. “I don't know why I didn't think of it myself.”

“Too busy building bombs, I'd say,” Hobbes said with a laugh. “Now. Take a look inside this case of mine.”

He unsnapped two latches and opened the lid.

Nick peered in and had no idea what he was looking at. “What on earth is it, Commander?”

“A camera, Nick, a German camera, as a matter fact, since they make far and away the best lenses. It's a highly modified Leica I designed for aerial surveillance.”