Damned Good Show (12 page)

“I could talk for hours about the ballistic properties of the GP bomb,” he said. “Nnn? But what you want to know is precisely how the weapon is fused and armed. Nnn? Child's play. Take a detonator and a pistol. Not a handgun, you understand. Nnn? This pistol is a mechanical device inserted in the weapon. Upon release from the aircraft, the pistol is automatically armed. It contains a striker. On impact with the target, the striker is struck, and it impels by explosion an
initiator cap into the detonator, which initiates a sequence…”

It took him twenty minutes. A chill wind was whipping around the aerodrome. Hands were deep in pockets, tunic collars were turned up, legs were starting to stiffen. “Turning to ballistics …”he said.

“No. Forget ballistics,” Tom Stuart said. “Just tell us what can go wrong with bombs. And what can be done about it.”

Everyone got interested.

“Well, of course, armorers never let anything go wrong, because that would be unthinkable. Nnn? But I've brought along two examples of what
could
theoretically go wrong if …” He pointed to a two-hundred-and-fifty-pounder. “Explosive is awful restless stuff. Awful
curious.
After a few years in a bomb dump it exudes. The word is from the Latin, meaning ‘sweat.' It sweats through the pores of the casing and it crystallizes on the outside.” They edged forward to see. The bomb was coated with brown crystals like Demerara sugar. “The exuded matter can be scraped off. The scrapings are what we call … volatile.” He looked around until he found Silk. “A wee experiment,” he said, and gave Silk a hammer. Everyone fell back. McHarg used a wooden spatula to scrape some crystals off the bomb. He walked away and placed the spatula on the ground. “Give it a wee smack,” he said. Silk bent low, reached sideways, and gave the crystals a gentle tap. The bang sent him sprawling on his backside, and startled everyone except McHarg. He picked up the hammer. “Awful restless wee things,” he said.

“So that's one problem,” Tom Stuart said.

“The other thing is very, very unlikely. We've been issued with what's called the Long Delay pistol.” He showed them one. “For when your bomb does not immediately explode.” He stared at Langham. “Now what would be the point of that?”

“To annoy Jerry's civil defense people,” Langham said. “Bomb goes off hours later.”

“Or maybe sooner. There's a nose fuse that's very sensitive. The German bomb disposal laddies disturb it. Detonation occurs.”

“Tough on them,” Stuart said. “Not us. Until the bomb gets armed, that fuse is harmless.”

“So it is, squadron leader.”

“Then what's the problem?”

“In theory, there's a very remote possibility that the arming device could be activated prematurely, while loading the bomb on the aircraft.
Now, if its Long Delay pistol was set for, say, six hours…”

It was too late for Stuart to stop the discussion. “You're saying it would explode six hours later. Perhaps during flight.”

“In theory. Not on this squadron, of course. My men take every precaution. No risk at all here.”

“Okay, that's enough,” Stuart said. “This lecture's over.”

The crews walked briskly away, glad of the exercise.

“That was a bloody stupid thing to tell them,” Stuart said.

“You asked what could go wrong.”

“And what we could do about it. There's damn all my boys can do about Long Delay pistols except worry. Thank you very bloody much.”

“No mistake will happen here.”

“How d'you know? How d'you know Gurnee's bombs didn't blow him up two days ago, over the North Sea?”

“Gurnee was lost on a shipping strike. Long Delay pistols are never used for a shipping strike. You want detonation on impact.”

“In theory.” Stuart turned and strode away.

A hundred yards away, Silk said, “He picked us out. Did you notice? First me, then you. He was sending a message.”

“What do Long Delay bombs look like?” Langham asked. “Do they look any different?”

“Dunno. And for Christ's sake don't ask
him.
You might put ideas in his stupid head.”

All over Britain the blackout was complete. No streetlights; all bus and train windows painted blue; vehicle headlamps masked so that only a gleam escaped. Shops rapidly sold out of torch batteries. Pedestrians walked blindly through the night, colliding with lampposts, telephone poles, trees, and each other. Also with moving vehicles. There was no change in speed limits, and so twice as many British people were killed on the roads in wartime than in peace. It got worse as the nights grew longer. The war might be phony but the death toll was real.

Tucked away in the calm and quiet of Lincolnshire, where the biggest hazard on the roads was a rocketing pheasant or partridge, RAF Kindrick was relatively safe. Shame about Stubby Gurnee, but replacements soon arrived. Life went on.

Then the teleprinter clattered, and an order came down from Group HQ. With immediate effect, all Hampden aircraft carrying out training flights or air tests would do so with a full bombload, to duplicate operational conditions. It made sense; as Pug Duff pointed out, a crew should train the way it was going to have to fight. Even Langham agreed. He didn't trust Black Mac, he thought the man was capable of hiding delayed-action thunderflashes in the kite, timed to go off at ten thousand feet. That was ludicrous, of course; he wasn't so stupid as to play the fool with his own career. But Langham worried all the same. And he had one final air test to do. It was on the morning of his wedding.

His Hampden was D-Dog. He'd flown Dog for months; she was his, she had no vices, he was proud of her. So were his ground crew. A sergeant rigger had checked the control cables and noticed that
two had stretched slightly. This worried him. Control cables linked the pilot's hands and feet to the control surfaces: to the ailerons in the wings, to the elevators and rudders in the tail. Slack cables took the edge off performance. The sergeant made adjustments.

Strictly speaking, Langham was off duty. Rafferty had given him four days' leave to get married. But Dog was his Hampden and he didn't trust anyone else to do the air test. So after breakfast he lowered himself into the cockpit, with his observer in front and two gunners behind, and slightly less than a ton of bombs beneath.

At once he felt comfortable and confident. He was at home in D-Dog, within easy reach of all the taps and switches. This was the office. It had an old familiar smell of oil and leather.

Earlier, he had walked around the bomber, counted the engines, kicked the tires, manipulated the rudders. Now he went through the pre-flight test sequence, a routine as familiar as shaving. The ground crew were watching, waiting. He switched on the ignition and the starter magneto. He pressed the starter button for the port engine while the ground crew primed its induction system. The propeller kicked and jerked and suddenly spun as the Pegasus roared and belched black exhaust, and the airplane vibrated. The starboard engine started just as easily. He watched and waited for a few seconds. When he was sure they were both firing steadily he switched off the magneto. The ground crew screwed down the priming pump. Now the whole aircraft was pressed against its chocks, eager to go. He did the warm-up checks—hydraulic system, brake pressure—and then tested airscrews and superchargers and magnetos. He opened the throttles until the engines were howling for release, and he checked boost and oil pressure. All was well. He closed the throttles, waved the chocks away, eased the brakes off, and taxied slowly to the end of the runway. Over-eager pilots taxied too fast, got the tail wheel jammed in a rut, ripped holes in the rear end. Not wise.

Now he did the Final Drill. Hydraulic power control: on. Trim tabs: neutral. Mixture: normal. Pitch: fully forward. Fuel: cock settings and contents correct. Flaps: select down eighteen degrees. Superchargers: M ratio. Gills: both cowlings closed.

All okay. He looked again at the wings. The starboard flap often came down faster than the port flap, which made their angles unequal. But not today.

One last and definitely final check. He turned the control wheel
from side to side and watched the ailerons respond. He called the upper gunner on the intercom, and played the rudder bar with his feet. The upper gunner confirmed that the twin rudders and the elevators were moving freely. “Anything behind us?” Langham asked. Once, during Initial Training, he'd seen an airplane take off quite literally in the shadow of another machine that was trying to land. Unforgettable. “Nothing in the sky, skipper,” the gunner said.

Now they could go. It was only an air test, up and down in half an hour, but Langham never took chances with cockpit drills. Killing yourself by bombing a battleship through flak as thick as soup was one thing. Falling out of the sky because you forgot to open or shut a tap was plain foolish.

Control shone a green light.

The brakes came off as the throttles were opened. A Hampden's body looked like a suitcase but it had wings like a buzzard, and at eighty-five miles an hour Langham gave the control column a firm backward pull and D-Dog stopped pounding the grass and rose as if gravity had suddenly quit. The raucous howl softened to a sweet and steady roar. He raised the undercarriage and let the speed build to one hundred and twenty before he began a serious climb. At a thousand feet he raised the flaps. Dog, perfectly balanced, responded to every touch.

Ahead stood Lincoln cathedral, the biggest thing in the county, so Langham flew there.

He knew it well from the outside, because its three soaring Gothic towers made such a splendid landmark, but he'd never been inside. “I'm getting married there this afternoon,” he told his observer, a Rhodesian called Jonty Brown.

“I know. I'm invited.”

“Pity about the weather. I wanted sunshine.”

“Try upstairs.”

At five thousand feet a layer of thin, pearl-gray cloud covered the sky like paint. Langham climbed and burst through it. The sky was Mediterranean blue and the sun scattered its dazzle recklessly. “Good idea, Jonty.”

“Like this every day in Rhodesia.”

“How bloody monotonous.”

He spent ten minutes putting the Hampden through her paces and everything worked until, for no apparent reason, the port engine began losing revs. Nothing else seemed wrong: temperature, oil pressure,
boost were okay. Maybe the revs gauge was faulty. But Dog was swinging slightly to the left. He throttled back the starboard engine. Now Dog swung a little to the right. “Behave yourself, you bitch,” he muttered. He was trimming the rudders, searching for a balance, and losing speed. Port engine revs kept falling.

“Give me a course for base,” he said.

“Dunno, skip,” Jonty said. “It's just an air test, I thought you knew where we were.” Langham swore. Jonty said, “Get below cloud and I'll soon find you a landmark.”

“Sorry to bother you, skipper,” the under gunner said. “There's a Wimpy watching us. Seems very interested.”

Langham swore again. Within a few seconds the Wellington was a wing-length away on the starboard side. Too close. The thing was twice his size; it could eat a Hampden for breakfast. He banked left, a touch too sharply, and corrected the beginnings of a wallow. “The Wimpy's signaling,” Jonty said. A lamp flashed from its astrodome. “Tell them to go to hell,” Langham said. That was when his cockpit became bedlam.

The upper gunner appeared at his shoulder, holding a birdcage. “The pigeons aren't very well, skip,” he said. Two carrier pigeons were, like the bombload, part of Dog's operational baggage. “Look.” He opened the cage door, to give a better view. The birds fluttered and fell over each other. “Get that bloody junk out of here!” Langham roared. The bomber hit a small air pocket and lurched. The gunner stumbled and dropped the cage. The birds escaped and in an instant the cockpit was full of panicking wings and claws and beaks. Langham beat them off with one hand and used the other to turn Dog away from the damn-fool Wellington. It was a lousy turn. He felt through the seat of his pants that Dog disliked it. She was not responding properly. He gave her full rudder. Now she was worse. His ears were full of gabble on the intercom. He searched the panel for the turn-and-slip indicator and couldn't see it for pigeons, wings flapping, feathers flying. One wild sweep of his right arm knocked them aside and they vanished. By now he knew what was wrong. Dog was skidding. Not turning, but skidding. And falling fast.

Well, Langham had got into a skid before, often, and got out of it. That's what controls were for. But not these controls. The ailerons had quit, the elevators were useless, the control column was as floppy as a broken leg. The rudder bar was locked hard to the right.
He got both feet on its left end, and thrust, and it wouldn't budge. Rock solid. Dog sliced through cloud and plunged into gray air, wingtip first, still trying to fly sideways.

Langham forced himself to think. The intercom was silent: they knew he was in trouble. What they didn't know was he had no idea how to get out of it. Dog had her teeth into this downhill skid. The altimeter kept unwinding briskly. He saw it race past three thousand feet. He heard creaks and groans. The airplane wasn't built for this cockeyed maneuver. Two thousand.

A desperate thought wandered into his mind like a lunatic on the run. Steer with the engines. No. With just one engine. His hand went to the starboard throttle, and hesitated. If this was wrong, cancel the wedding. One thousand feet. Against all instinct, he closed the starboard throttle, killed that engine dead, and opened the port throttle, banged it wide open, rammed it to emergency setting. Dog twisted as if kicked. The port engine's savage thrust forced her to straighten out. The rudders unlocked. All the controls came alive. Dog leveled out at two hundred feet, above a stampede of cattle.