Bomber. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ voodoo objects the brightly painted aircraft defied the enemy, and upon them were painted the little formalized yellow bombs, or symbols of aeroplanes destroyed, that showed how powerful was the magic they could work.

      Lambert had seen enough of the other Lanc. He had got too close for comfort. Lambert moved the control column and adjusted the throttles and pitch control. Creaking Door lifted like a showjumper, leaving the other plane far below. That was better. Even a sneeze from a nervous gunner was enough to send a bomber into violent evasive aerobatics and like most pilots he feared mid-air collision more than flak and night fighters put together.

      Stop climbing. Straight and level while he saw where he was. Six or seven miles away to starboard the countryside lapped around Cambridge, a ramshackle rash of workers’ dwellings and speculators’ suburbia. In its centre, lush with green courts and beflowered backs, the great university, its spires grinning like dragons’ teeth daring the untutored to seek admittance. Beyond this citadel the countryside turned green again and there were more airfields. Below him passed RAF Oakington, Lancasters dotted along its perimeter. Gentle turn. Warley somewhere off to port lost to sight amongst the fenland. He saw the other Lanc turn that way. This was the flying Lambert liked, in the clear light of a fine summer’s day. This was how he’d fancied it would be on the day he’d volunteered.

      Lambert was flying straight and level now. No compass needed, for below him, glinting in the sun like a twenty-mile-long steel needle, was the man-made Bedford River.

      ‘Lambert’s compass, I call it.’ The voice startled Lambert. Kosh Cohen was at his elbow, sitting on Battersby’s folding seat and staring out of the window like a day tripper.

      Lambert smiled.

      ‘You always come over here, Skip,’ said Cohen. ‘Is this where you’re going to live after the war?’

      ‘Perhaps,’ said Lambert. ‘Your toys OK?’

      Cohen nodded.

      ‘Let’s go and get some lunch,’ said Lambert and he let the nose dip. Cohen folded back the seat and returned to his dark curtained booth. Since Lambert was flying by visual landmarks there was little for Cohen to do. He had sorted his maps and given the Gee and H2S the routine test. Although it was notoriously prone to technical failures, he was proud of the top-secret radar set that showed him the ground through fog, mist, cloud or darkness like some god bringing wrath to a sinful Babylon. Only ‘selected crews’ had the new equipment.

      Lambert’s voice came over the intercom asking each crewman if their equipment was in order. Cohen pushed the mask to his mouth to answer yes into the microphone. On his first two operations he had vomited before the aircraft had even crossed the English coast. Apart from the humiliation, it meant that Creaking Door had to lose precious height so that he could clean himself up before clamping the oxygen mask back to his face for the rest of the trip. Now he knew the smell of fear, for it lingered in his face mask and was a constant reminder of the dangers of being too imaginative. He sharpened pencils and prepared the elastic strap that held pencils, rulers and protractors from flying loose during violent evasive action. He looked at the topmost map and read to himself the names of Channel ports. He had passed through them on holiday before the war. He switched his microphone on. ‘Batters,’ said Cohen on impulse. There was no answer for a moment, then the engineer answered, ‘Engineer here, who is it?’

      ‘Kosh, Batters. What mob was your brother in at Dunkirk?’

      There was no reply for some time. Cohen was debating whether to call again when Battersby answered.

      ‘I made that up, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘My brother is in a reserved occupation, an electricity sub-station.’ There was a stunned silence over the crew intercom. Then Battersby said anxiously, ‘You weren’t thinking of telling Mr Sweet?’

      ‘No,’ said Cohen. ‘I wasn’t.’

      Lambert could see Warley Fen straight ahead. The mile-long runways were distinct on the landscape like a black Chinagraph cross scrawled upon a coloured map. Lambert took a quick look round to be sure there were no other aircraft in the circuit. High above them he saw a thin streak of a condensation trail in the upper atmosphere. The aeroplane making it was just a speck.

      ‘Look at him go,’ said Cohen. Lambert guessed he was standing under the astrodome. He was like a kid on an outing whenever they were in the air.

      ‘It’s the Met flight, on his way to look at the weather over our target,’ said Digby.

      They looked up at the dot. ‘With that sort of altitude,’ said Lambert, ‘a man could live for ever.’

      At 32,000 feet the Spitfire had begun to spin a white feathery trail in the thin moist air. The pilot watched the trail in his mirror and put the stick forward. The highly polished Spitfire Mk XI responded with a shallow dive. The altimeter needle moved slowly backwards until, as suddenly as it began, the white trail ended. Immediately the pilot corrected his plane into straight and level flight. This was his optimum safety height for today. No enemy could bounce him from above without leaving a telltale trail. Now he need only watch the air below. He checked the notepad and pencils strapped to his knee for the tenth time. He settled back comfortably and ran a finger round his collar; the cockpit was very warm. Few men had seen the world from this height. Few men knew that it was only a layer cake: a rich-green England base with a layer of light-green ocean on it, then Holland, brownish and flecked with clouds along the coastline. Then the distant horizon, perhaps as far as two hundred miles away, disappearing into white mist like whipped cream. Upon it blue sky was heaped until it could hold no more. To the Ruhr and back would take the Spitfire only ninety-two minutes. He’d have time for a game of tennis before tea.

      In the thirteenth century East Anglian wool merchants had brought back from the Low Countries wealth, brickmakers, architects and a taste for fine Dutch houses. There were many houses as well preserved as Warley Manor, with its distinctive curved gables and fine pantiles. Before the war it had been the home of a Conservative Member of Parliament. Art students had regularly come to sketch it. They had sat on the lawn shaded by the ancient elm trees, and had tea and cucumber sandwiches in the Terrace Room. Now it was the Officers’ Mess of RAF Station Warley Fen. The Terrace Room was furnished with long polished tables. Between the tables white-jacketed airmen moved carefully, setting the lunch plates with white linen napkins and gleaming glassware. Through the folding doors from the anteroom came the cheerful shouts of young commissioned aircrew, and a gramophone record of Al Bowlly was playing gently in the background. The sunlight made patterns on the carpet and the glass doors had been opened to let the tobacco-smoke escape.

      There were sixteen Lancaster bombers at Warley Fen. Each one had a crew of seven. Of these one hundred and twelve operational crewmen, eighty-eight were sergeants. (The Sergeants’ Mess was a series of corrugated iron huts interjoined.)

      The remaining twenty-four flyers were officers; they shared this mess with another forty-eight officers ranging from the Padre to the Dental Officer, plus some WAAF officers like Section Officer Maisie Holroyd. She was a plump thirty-eight-year-old woman who had spent eight years running a cheap ‘meat and two veg’ dining-rooms in Exeter. At Warley Fen she was the Catering Officer and even the people who found the present food unappetizing agreed that she did a better job than any of her male predecessors.

      The non-operational officers were mostly middle-aged. They wore medals from the First World War and inter-war campaign ribbons from Arabia and India and a very high percentage had pilot’s wings on their tunics. Of the twenty-four operational flyers, thirteen were born in Britain. The others were three Canadians, four Australians, two Rhodesians, and two Americans who still had not transferred to the USAAF. Seven officers wore the striped ribbon of the DFC, СКАЧАТЬ