Damned Good Show (42 page)

Kate, flat on the floor, was convinced the bang and the flash had broken the Wimpy in half. But when she could see again, Dog was still in one piece, still being bucked and kicked by the cu-nim. Parts of the radio were red-hot and Campbell was beating out a small fire. Just when Rollo's brain told him he should be filming this, the flow of St. Elmo's Fire vanished. Silk had flown the bomber out of cloud and into clean air.

He tried to do an intercom check and nobody answered. The intercom was dead. He sent Mallaby to make a tour of Dog. He came back and said everyone was intact. Bruised and scraped, but intact.

Two problems.

The compass was spinning, reversing, chasing its tail. It needed time to recover its wits. And the port engine was surging. Its revs climbed and fell, climbed and fell. The lopsided pull sent Dog wandering about the sky. Silk kept her out of cloud and nursed the engines back to health and harmony. Recovery took many minutes, and Dog lost much height. In the end she was down to six thousand feet, and Silk was lost.

He got unstrapped and slid out of his seat and let Mallaby take the controls. Silk clambered over the spar and had a shouted conference with the navigator. They were off oxygen, so talk was easier. Woodman had tried to keep track of all the twists and turns, but without a compass it was an impossible task. What he needed was a good pinpoint. He went forward. Silk peered at the smoking radio and had a few words with Campbell. Then he spoke to Rollo and Kate.

“Awfully dull, isn't it?” he bawled. “You should have brought a book.”

Rollo felt useless. He had to do something, so he touched the goggles on Silk's forehead. “Why wear these?”

“In case we get a brick through the window. Shocking draft.” He went back to his office.

Rollo tried to picture a pilot sitting in the hurricane blast that would rage through a smashed windscreen. His imagination was too good, and he turned it off. The nav hadn't returned. Rollo could see he wasn't in the cockpit. It didn't take long to work out that Woodman must be in the bomb-aimer's position. No flak, no searchlights, so Dog wasn't over the target. Woodman was looking for it. The nav was peering through the window, trying to find Hanover. Silk was stooging around Germany, totally lost, and what's more the gunners couldn't call him if they saw a fighter, because the intercom was kaput. Rollo was about to tell all this to Kate when he saw that she was being sick into her paint tin. He decided that she didn't need to know. He gave her his handkerchief, to wipe her face.

The compass settled down and behaved itself. Woodman found a pinpoint. He scrambled up the tunnel from the bomb-aimer's position and handed Silk a piece of paper with one word on it: Hamelin. Silk shouted, “Pied Piper?” Woodman lip-read and nodded. Mallaby circled, losing height until they were under the lowest cloud. By then Woodman had scribbled:

Hamelin Town's in Brunswick,

By famous Hanover city;

The river Weser, deep and wide,

Washes its walls on the southern side.

Robert Browning, poet.

Silk read it and smiled. They were looking at a town that fitted the description perfectly. A pair of heavy machine guns started pumping
tracer, nowhere near Dog, just red stitches on black cloth. Small garrison in Hamelin, probably. Nothing worth defending. All the rats had gone.

After that it was simple. Hamelin was southwest of Hanover. Precise navigation wasn't necessary. Soon the flicker of searchlight beams, gun flashes, bomb bursts and fires guided Dog to the target. Mallaby had coaxed her up to eight thousand. That was her limit. Silk took over the controls and tried to bounce her higher, diving a little and then climbing on full power. It usually worked. Not tonight. Not with this great pig of a cookie in her belly, and the port engine not pulling its weight. High above, Wimpys and Hampdens were unloading bombs. If one incendiary fell out of the night and hit a wing, it might burn a hole so big that even a Wimpy couldn't survive. Best not to think about that. Other trouble was nearer to hand.

Eight thousand was well within the range of light flak. The Hanover searchlights were slicing up the sky. Clouds reflected their beams and turned parts of the night to twilight. Everywhere, tracer crisscrossed in a silent stutter of red and yellow or blue and green. Many shellbursts seemed as harmless as cracker jacks, unless the burst came close enough to create a jagged flash that leaped out of nowhere like an ambush. If you could smell its peppery stink, it was very close. If you could hear the rattle of hot shrapnel on the bomber, it was too close.

Silk's first reaction when they reached Hanover was that he'd never seen flak so thick and nobody could get through it untouched. Rollo's first reaction was sheer glee. He filmed everything. The light was excellent. Tracer left the ground so slowly that he had time to select it, focus on it, follow it all the way to its final rush of brilliance past the Wimpy. He filmed the lights on the ground: the blink of flak batteries, the splash of bombs exploding, the ragged shape of burning buildings. This was the pay-off. This made the whole trip worthwhile. It was only when he stopped to reload that he realized the sound was all wrong. There was no sound. All this mayhem was drowned out by the roar of the engines. Every bang was mute. That was no good. He told himself:
Dub in bangs.

Woodman was a good bomb-aimer, but without intercom he was helpless, he couldn't tell his pilot to go left or right or hold steady. He had thrown the switches that gave control of the bombload to the
pilot, and now he stood in the cockpit, leaning over Silk's shoulder, and together they tried to find the railway station. There was some cloud, and a lot of smoke. Maybe the AP was under the smoke. Maybe it didn't exist any more. He heard an old familiar sound, a
bok-bok
, something like two halves of a coconut knocking together: heavy flak, not far off. Silk weaved, changed direction, couldn't go up so he went down, anything to baffle the gunners. But lower was not safer. Soon there were more
bok-boks.
A searchlight flicked their wingtip and kept going. A poor sodding Hampden was not so lucky. It was pinned in a cone, and kept twisting and writhing but the lights tracked every dive, every turn, while the heavy flak blew holes in the cone and, eventually, in the Hampden.

In the end, Silk dumped the bloody bomb. Smoke was getting worse, some from fires, some perhaps from German smoke generators. He looked at Woodman, and Woodman shrugged. Silk opened the bomb doors. The slipstream hit them and Dog vibrated. Rollo stopped filming. Silk leaned forward and pressed the bomb-release button, and the bomber gave a little leap of relief. Forget the flash, forget the photograph. Shut the bomb doors, open the throttles and piss off out of this madhouse.

The cookie didn't whistle
, Rollo thought.
That won't do. Bombs always whistle in the movies. Dub it in later.

The bomb doors haven't shut
, Silk thought. Dog was still vibrating in the old familiar way. This was turning into a dodgy op. He turned the bomb-door handle again. And again. No joy.

It knocked a good twenty miles an hour off the airspeed. And of course Dog wouldn't climb an inch with those doors dragging against the slipstream.

Silk cruised slowly over Hanover, while the flak never slackened. At times like this he took encouragement from the bluebottle in the rainstorm. Logically, it should get knocked to the ground. Yet it flew on. How? Because there was always more space between the raindrops. The trick was to find the space. A silly thought. But it took his mind off the storm of high explosive.

He flew straight. If he weaved, it would only take longer to escape. Maybe the German gunners couldn't believe that any RAF pilot would be so stupid as to fly so low, so slow, so straight; maybe it spoiled their aim. Or maybe the gods of war were tired of D-Dog. Maybe they'd gone off to pull the wings from some other butterfly.
Because, amazingly, things got better. Silk left the flak and the searchlights behind him; and Campbell, with nothing to do since his radio went up in flames, found the fault in the intercom. The headphones came alive. Woodman went back to his nav table and worked on a zigzag route to the coast. “New course, skipper,” he said. “Two eight five. That puts us west of the Luftwaffe base at Sulingen.”

“Two eight five. Is that based on the predicted winds?”

“Yes. They were pretty accurate over the North Sea. Spot-on, in fact.”

“The electrical storms are in the wrong place, Woody. Moving north, perhaps, but still over Germany. Predicted winds could be up the creek.”

“They could.” Woodman tidied up the numbers in his latest calculation, lengthening the vertical line of a 4, improving the tail of a 3. “Any suggestions?”

“A pinpoint would be nice. Chubby, Badge: find a nice pinpoint for the nav and he'll buy you a drink.”

Rollo sat on the bed, beside Kate. Now that the cookie had been dropped and the flak had failed to kill them, he felt a huge sense of anticlimax. The raid had been successful, or at least he supposed so, but what visible difference had it made? For the purposes of his film, none. Maybe the cookie hadn't exploded. Plenty of dud bombs fell on London. And the job wasn't finished, there was still the long grind home over the North Sea. He felt useless, physically drained yet mentally dissatisfied. How did these men do it? Hanover wasn't even a very long trip. Imagine when Berlin was the target. Berlin was almost in Poland, for God's sake. Thirty ops made a tour, so they said. Nobody should be made to do this thirty times. Yet they were all volunteers. Even so, thirty ops … Thirty chances to get the chop. Why didn't it drive them mad? Maybe it did, some of them. Maybe anyone who went crackers got shunted off the base before he could infect the rest. Rollo shuddered, partly at the idea, partly from the aching cold, partly because the entire bloody Wimpy was shuddering.

Nothing much happened for half an hour. Kate dozed. Rollo couldn't rest, he was too cold to feel his feet, his brain was swamped by engine roar, he had no sense of time and not enough energy to look at his watch, and anxiety nagged him. The shots of Hanover were good but they didn't add up to a film, and he couldn't see where the rest was coming from.

Silk was not unhappy. He never allowed himself to be happy; that would have interfered with his cockpit routine. But Dog's fuel tanks were lighter and she was moving faster. Not enough to escape a night fighter, and that was still a risk. He might have a chance to dodge into some clouds, but they were ugly monsters and if one turned out to be cu-nim, Dog with her bomb doors hanging down might not come out the other side.

Then flak began to break out like a skin disease. No searchlights, just flak. Someone down there was good at his job. “Wireless op, fire off flares,” Silk ordered. “Red and yellow.” Campbell moved fast. Within seconds he had the pistol in the flare chute. Red and yellow signals arced into the night.

The flak stopped. Silk counted to twenty. Still no flak. “And for my next trick,” he said.

Rollo pressed his intercom switch. “What was all that about?”

“Trick of the trade. Red and yellow flares used to be the Luftwaffe distress signal. Mind you, it doesn't always work.”

It didn't work ten minutes later. Woodman estimated they were near the German coast, and the sudden stabs of searchlights and ripples of flak and colored feelers of tracer suggested he was right. When the distress signal had no effect, Silk told the gunners to fire at the searchlights, and Rollo got some good shots of tracer streaking down from the front guns. Badger claimed to hit a searchlight. It certainly went out. He said, “Bull's-eye!” Silk said something, but nobody heard him. A shell exploded underneath Dog and the blast hurled the Wellington up and over, until she was standing on a wingtip. Not for long. She was still flying but as she fell, her nose was too high. She stalled and, rather wearily, began to spin.

Silk did what his instructors had told him, years ago: close the throttles, centralize the stick, apply full rudder opposite to the spin,
pause, then push the stick forward. The kite will dive and the spin will stop. Total failure. Maybe the controls had been hit. Maybe Wimpys were different. Meanwhile Dog kept rotating, rather ponderously, as if looking for a place to lie down. And kept falling. Several searchlights found her. Now the inside of the fuselage was painted a fierce silver-white. The camera team, the nav, the op, all covered their eyes. Silk and Mallaby were dazzled. Badger and Chubb were still firing. German bullets were punching holes in the fabric. It was a toss-up whether Dog crashed before the flak got her. Silk remembered Langham and the stabilized yaw.

He reached blindly for the throttles, shut the upper engine and opened the lower engine to maximum revs, combat limit, full boost, and commended his soul to Almighty God. The lower engine took command. The upper wing, its engine dragging instead of driving, dropped. The spin was killed. Dog lifted her tail and dived.

That was what Silk believed happened. But what did Silk know? He couldn't see, he was flying by memory, by instinct, by feel. Maybe another shellburst had kicked the Wimpy out of its spin. Who can tell? Who cares? He harmonized the engines and eased the control column back until long experience told him the aircraft should be more or less level.

One advantage of being dazzled was that he couldn't see how bad the flak was. By the time he'd got his sight back, the searchlights were losing him. Soon the flak was behind Dog, too.

“New course, skip,” the nav said. “Steer three three zero.”

Silk was surprised to hear from him. He had taken it for granted that half the crew were dead. He made an intercom check and everyone answered except Campbell, the wireless op. “He's got a bit of steel in the backside,” Woodman reported. “Shell splinter, I expect. He's on the bed.”

Mallaby left the cockpit to check how badly Campbell was hurt, and found him face-down. Rollo was holding a flashlight. Kate had the first-aid kit and she was scissoring through Campbell's clothing. Already her hands were slippery with blood. “You've done this before,” Mallaby said.