Bomber. Len Deighton

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ aircrew only borrowed them.

      Creaking Door was one of the very first Lancasters ever built. The factory was producing a disastrous two-motor aeroplane and as an emergency measure the designers asked if they could try putting two extra motors on it. The Air Ministry experts said no, the factory ignored them and begged, borrowed and stole bits and pieces in order to try it anyway.

      ‘That’s how the best bombing plane of the war was designed. What a typical pommy fiasco.’

      ‘I told my father that it was a fine example of British engineering genius,’ said Battersby.

      ‘An accident, sport. But she’s a beaut, a real vintage beaut.’

      ‘What remarkable luck,’ said Binty Jones, the mid-upper gunner, looking up from his comic book. ‘We’ll sell her to one of those museum places when we have finished with the clapped-out old wreck.’

      ‘Money, that’s all you dills think about,’ said Digby. ‘I’m talking about art. I’m talking about history. Yes, planes like this will be in museums when the war is over, preserved as a masterpiece of twentieth-century taste and culture and beauty.’

      ‘We all will,’ said Lambert.

      ‘I should have known better than trying to talk seriously to you mob,’ said Digby.

      Next in line along the dispersal was L Love, which was having a new name and symbol painted to surmount the fifteen yellow bombs on its nose: ‘Joe for King’ was now its name. Sergeant Tommy Carter flew ‘Joe for King’. He was a handsome red-haired orphan from Newcastle. After the orphanage he’d become a messenger boy and then a Newcastle policeman until his inspector found him reading Das Kapital.

      ‘What the devil are you doing with that damned rubbish, Constable Carter?’

      ‘It’s for my evening classes, sir. I’ve got Mein Kampf here in my other pocket.’

      ‘Don’t bring that poison into my police station, Constable. Do you understand?’

      ‘I do, Inspector.’

      Two months later he joined the RAF. He had a huge ginger moustache that had originated as a disguise for a scarred lip. He’d encouraged it into the slightly clownish handlebar shape that was fashionable among many aircrew. Tommy Carter thought the RAF was the most marvellous thing that had happened to him, and Joe for King, he said, was the finest Lancaster ever manufactured. The machine was fifteen trips old; Tommy’s crew had done eight of those with the exception of Collins. He was their bomb aimer. Only survivor of a crash landing in February, he’d completed twenty-nine trips. Tonight would be his last before going for a rest.

      The next Lancaster bomber was Z Zebra. It was almost out of sight behind the ash trees of The Warrens, where even in daylight wild rabbits ran across the tarmac pans. Under the shade of Zebra’s wingtips, in the damp-smelling black soil, there were now puff-ball mushrooms for frying and in the autumn delicious blewits in fairy rings and red fly agaric that men said could kill.

      ‘The Volkswagen’, they called Z Zebra. Its skipper was Pilot Officer Cornelius Fleming; newly commissioned, with three hundred and fifty flying hours at training schools, he was a soft-spoken introvert from York, an ex-student of medicine. He had done his elementary flying training in Alberta. Canada’s bright lights and informality were a startling change after blacked-out wartime Britain, and the ease with which he’d got lost flying over the prairie had been a fearful lesson in its dimensions. Three times a week he wrote to Tracy Rybakowski, a girl in Edmonton. After the war he was going back there to marry her and make his fortune, but so far he’d not told his parents. His brief time in medical school had now faded so far into his memories that he couldn’t believe that less than two years ago his ambition was to be only a doctor.

      It came as no surprise to Fleming and his crew to find that as newcomers they’d been assigned to one of the shabbiest aircraft on the Flight. When they’d first climbed into it the interior was littered with old newspapers and oily rags and the Elsan lavatory had not been properly emptied. There was a faint but pervasive smell of sweat, excrement and rotting meat. Fleming had conscripted his whole crew for the cleaning job. Now the plane smelled of fresh oil, metal polish and disinfectant. As Fleming had remarked, now it smelled ‘as clean as a hospital’, but he’d regretted the comparison as soon as he’d made it. Naming the plane ‘The Volkswagen’ had been part of Fleming’s desire to give the dirty old Z Zebra a new image.

      Fleming’s bomb aimer and rear gunner were also officers. All three of them were standing around Fleming’s Austin Seven watching one of the electricians fix into it a length of Air Ministry wiring. The car was undergoing a major overhaul at the expense of His Majesty. The three officers had come to B Flight, with the rest of Zebra’s crew, six weeks ago, but so far they had not flown on an operation. They spent most of their time together and felt estranged from everyone else, for, as Fleming had remarked to Sweet, most of the other flyers of B Flight – including four of Fleming’s own crew – shared the Sergeants’ Mess with their ground-crew counterparts. It sounded like a provincial working man’s club. ‘Think yourself lucky not to be a member of it,’ Sweet had said smiling; ‘the only conversation is speculation, intoxication and fornication. Wait until you go to a Sergeants’ Mess dance, then you’ll get an insight into the great unwashed.’

      Sweet, however, had no time for anything more than passing affability and they seldom saw him. They drifted around B Flight aimlessly. Faith, Hope, and Charity, the sergeants called them. They were creedless bishops, lost in a chapter of rough-tongued Jesuits. They knew that the first three operations by a new crew risked five times the normal casualty rate. They exchanged the litany of technical gen and letters from home and awaited their baptism. It would come tonight.

      A mile or more away across the airfield Sweet could see the nearest of the other Flight’s aircraft, and to the right of it, beyond the bump, the Control Tower. On its roof a Meteorology WAAF officer was reading the instruments in the louvred box. At the south end of the runway there was the Aerodrome Control Post, and behind that the steeple of the thirteenth-century church in Little Warley village. He had a good view from here. He looked back to where the lorry that had brought them back from their weekend was turning round before going back along the main road past the village and entering the main gate empty, with Form 658 correctly signed just as Sweet had fiddled it with the Transport Officer. Near the gap in the fence Flight Sergeant Lambert was saying goodbye to his wife, who was getting a lift to the Safety Equipment Section where she worked.

      ‘Be a good chap, Eric,’ said Sweet. ‘Tell Lambert that I want a word with him. And on second thoughts I think the Bedford had better go back to the MT section straightaway. Can’t be too careful.’

      ‘I’ll tell the driver,’ said Eric.

      ‘And apologize to Mrs Lambert. She’ll have to walk. I really am sorry, tell her.’ When the airman left, Sweet closely examined his face in a wall mirror. He wondered why his skin went red and mottled in the sun instead of bronzed and handsome.

      ‘Take my bike, Ruth,’ said Lambert.

      ‘I can’t ride a bicycle, Sam. Not in this uniform skirt. I’ll walk.’

      ‘You’ll be all right?’

      ‘It’s only a mile. It will do me good.’

      ‘Mr Sweet would like a word with you, Chiefie,’ said the clerk.

      Lambert kissed his wife goodbye. ‘You’ll know where we are going tonight before I shall.’

СКАЧАТЬ