Code Name Verity. Elizabeth E. Wein

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ