Goshawk Squadron (22 page)

For a moment, that silenced them. Finlayson threw his cigarette at the model. “The Kaiser's wife could fly rings round us in one of those,” he said.

“Nobody ever killed the enemy by flying rings around him. You kill him with guns, not the airplane. I have always maintained,” Woolley said with ponderous irony, “that the way to avoid a long argument is to shoot the other man before he starts. All you have to do is get up close, keep your temper, and shoot straight. Camels wobble. Spads wobble. Bristols wobble. SE5as do not,” he brought up a long, curling belch, “wobble.” Nobody smiled.

“Now for the second piece of good news.” Woolley went over to the wall map. “The General Staff has at last discovered what fighters are for. They are for fighting. From now on we shall not hang around our side of the Front, waiting for the foe and getting shot down by the French artillery. We shall fly over the German lines, looking for trouble. We shall
fight.
Right? As soon as it's light, my old school chums Finlayson, Richards and Callaghan will come with me and patrol the area Roeux-Riencourt. Rogers will take Dickinson, Gabriel and Dangerfield and patrol Riencourt-Flesquières. Lambert is the lucky one. He goes balloon-busting, with Kimberley and Killion to help.”

“Excuse me,” Lambert muttered. He hurried out, knocking over chairs, and ran to the latrines.

When Lambert found Kimberley and Killion they were out on the field, looking at a map laid on the bottom wing of a plane. The gray light from the east did nothing to improve Lambert's face. “Where are these bloody balloons?” he said.

“Quéant,” said Kimberley. “That's just between—”

“I know, I know.” Lambert leaned against the fuselage and shuddered. “I've seen those sods before, they always keep a few Fokkers lurking at about five thousand. How many are there?”

“Three, yesterday,” Killion said.

“Oh God.” He walked down to the tail and pressed his hands on the rudder, wet with morning mist. “Bloody sausages,” he said. “Bloody lousy murdering sausages. I shall never eat another sausage as long as I live.”

“Come on,” Kimberley said. “We might as well go.” Planes were taking off. Lambert came back, wiping his wet hands on his face.

“You ever been balloon-busting?” he asked. They had not. “Dear mom, it's a bastard,” he said. “They have a ring of anti-aircraft guns all round them. Then they have the ground crews with dozens of machine guns and hundreds of damn rifles, all blazing away. If you get through that you have to give the balloon a good hard squirt to make it burn, and if you do make it burn it goes up with a hell of a whoomph and you still have to get away.”

“Past the big guns, the medium-sized guns and the little guns,” said Kimberley.

“Did I mention the Jerry fighters?”

“Yes.” Killion offered him his flask, but Lambert just closed his eyes. “They let these sausages up pretty high, though, don't they? About a thousand feet, it says here. The ground fire shouldn't be too accurate there—”

Lambert waved a limp hand. “They pull 'em down,” he said, his eyes still closed. “They pull 'em down as soon as they see you coming.”

“They won't see us if we fly low.”

“The observers in the balloons will.”

“Oh,” Killion said. “Um.”

“I'm getting cold,” Kimberley complained. “What d'you want to do?”

“Oh, nuts, I don't know.” Lambert opened his eyes and looked bleakly at the map. “If we go in high the Jerry planes will get us. We have to go in low. I'll bust the balloons, you two split-ass about and distract their attention.”

“What if they pull the balloons down first?” Killion asked.

“Oh, shut up,” Lambert said. He trudged away.

Hugging the ground, dodging clumps of splintered trees, hopping over hedges and walls and old fortified lines, Lambert led Kimberley and Killion so low that they had little opportunity to take their eyes off the terrain and look for balloons. But his reckoning was good: they skimmed the British trench system and raced across the ruptured wastes of no-man's-land exactly opposite the given map reference.

As it happened, the Germans had moved the balloons one thousand yards to the left.

Lambert kept on going and made height as fast as possible, to clear the angry patter of small-arms fire and the explosive stutter of machine guns. At five hundred feet he banked hard and headed for the balloons. Inevitably they were being hauled down, fast. Both of them.

Kimberley and Killion swung out to broaden the attack and confuse the ground fire. Flak blotted the sky ahead, making remote grunting sounds. Lambert's mind registered the presence of aircraft high above, but they were irrelevant. He was studying the nearer balloon, calculating where it would be when he got there. Dimples like heavy rain spotted his wings as stray bullets went through, and then he reached the belt of anti-aircraft fire. The grimy blots grew closer and bigger, sudden thunderclaps made visible, and hurled the little planes from side to side. As Lambert labored to get back on course another blast flung him lopsided. The next pitched him violently upward, or kicked him forward. The controls felt sloppy and disjointed. The explosions made his head hurt. Through the smoke he saw the balloon dropping, its basket swinging wildly. Now he could see the heads of the observers.

Abruptly the flak ceased and he flew into clear air: too near the balloon for the German gunners. The bag was down to five hundred feet. Lambert felt mildly surprised that he had arrived. He lined up the dead center of the target and scored with a long, spiraling burst. The way his bullets plucked at the fat bag was slightly obscene. He kept on firing until he could see each individual rope on the net, then hauled the
nose up and vaulted the balloon, realizing as he did so that if it caught fire now he would be fried.

No flames came. He looked behind: the balloon was still dropping. Kimberley and Killion were prancing about the sky, failing to distract the defenses, and Lambert strayed into a hail of machine-gun fire, splashed with flak. He forced the unhappy plane into an Immelmann turn and dived back on the balloon. From a hundred feet he raked it from side to side and back again. This time he curled away before he could overshoot, and as he kicked the rudder bar across he saw a glowing redness develop. Before he had completed his turn the whole sphere was blazing, and two parachutes were unfolding below it. For a moment Lambert went rigid with horror as it looked as if the fire would fall on top of them; but they drifted clear.

The second balloon was a quarter of a mile off, and by now very close to the ground. Kimberley and Killion made mock-attacks while Lambert dived through the intense machine-gun fire and a screen of flak so dense that he lost sight of his target. Something clouted his left shoulder with a blow that numbed the arm and knocked him across the cockpit. The plane staggered and refused to fly straight; it lurched crab-wise out of one shell-blast and into another. Lambert's eyes went hazy; he felt unconsciousness rising in him like a tide; it drained reluctantly away, and he was through the barrage again.

But now the balloon was in the wrong place … it should be in front … the plane wandered away from it, sluggish and disobedient. Lambert strained to force it back but the controls insisted on turning for home, and so he had to slip past the balloon, all plump and shining gray, soon to be on the ground.

Feeling sick and disgusted, Lambert let the plane lumber over the Front. The bruising flak searched for him again, but he ignored it and eventually it went away. He looked for the other two aircraft.

They were still over German territory, quite high, about
half a mile apart, and heading for home. There was a lot of flak but the Fokkers had gone. As Lambert watched, one SE5a took a hit from a shell and fell sideways. Rich black smoke, like costly velvet, unfurled from its engine. The plane began a slow, spiraling descent which developed into a steep side-slip. Lambert watched it as long as he could, but his own plane was losing height, and he limped over the British lines at fifty feet. High above, the third plane flew home, apparently unconcerned by war, destruction or anything.

Lambert nursed his coughing, shaking aircraft back to the field and thankfully touched down on the first available yard of turf. He cut the engine and felt the tail skid sink, bounce, settle and finally run. There was something odd about the way the plane was rolling; one wheel was broken. Lambert slumped and watched the grass go by and listened to the strut tearing itself apart. The plane juddered to a halt and the undercarriage noisily collapsed. The right wing buckled. Lambert got out and left it all.

Woodruffe came over from his hut and met him. “Are you all right?” the adjutant asked. Lambert showed him his left shoulder. “Something hit me,” he said. He wanted a drink, now it was all over.

“Nothing there, old chap,” the adjutant said. “Not even a hole. What did it feel like?”

“Let's have a drink.” Lambert sat down on the grass and put his head between his knees. “They moved the damn sausages,” he said. “I hate sausages … I feel rotten, Woody. I think …” He lay down and blinked, while the blood roared behind his ears. The adjutant sent a man for whisky.

After a while, Lambert's head stopped roaring and he could see clearly. He saw an SE5a high above, circling and circling. “Why doesn't the silly bugger land?” he asked weakly. Woodruffe helped him drink some Scotch and put him in Rogers' limousine, which a mechanic had brought over. Together they sat and watched the plane circle. After about ten minutes it came down and flew a cautious lap, and
then landed. “Killion,” Woodruffe said. Black fumes were coming off the engine.

They drove over and picked him up. “Where's Kimberley?” Killion asked. He had oil all over his face and hands.

“You should know,” Lambert said. He was lying in the back seat, drinking. “He was right next to you when he got hit.”

Killion climbed into the car. “I couldn't see a damn thing,” he said. “This oil kept blowing back and messing up my goggles, it was all I could do to get home. I must have gotten a splinter in the engine, somewhere.” He spat out of the window. “Filthy-tasting stuff.”

“Well, we got one balloon,” Lambert said. “I hope they're bloody grateful.”

Woolley landed with Finlayson and Richards an hour later; then Rogers came in with Dickinson and Gabriel. Dangerfield was already there, having struggled home with a broken rudder line, probably clipped by shrapnel. Callaghan had made a forced landing in a field, but they had seen him get out. Woolley sent Finlayson off with a truck to lead the driver to Callaghan. Meanwhile, the ground crews refueled, re-armed, and slapped patches on the worst holes. Everyone was fairly pleased: each flight had killed one German and damaged others, and no German planes had crossed the Front on that sector. Woolley went over to the adjutant's office.

Two Frenchmen were sitting, drinking coffee. “And here
is
the Commanding Officer, now, gentlemen,” Woodruffe told them. Everyone stood up. “Did you have a good flight, sir?”

“Where's Lambert?” Woolley demanded.

“I believe he's … resting. In his billet.”

“Get him.”

Woodruffe went into the next room. The Frenchmen sat down. Woolley took off his helmet and vigorously massaged his scalp. He picked a match out of an ashtray and cleaned his fingernails. Something sprang to the floor and he mashed it with a large flying-boot. One of the Frenchmen glanced to see
what it was. “French,” he told them. They looked at each other blankly.

The adjutant came back. “Yes, he
was
resting. These gentlemen, by the way, are from the French police.”

“Did you get the booze? And the scarves?”

“Yes, sir. And two replacements arrive tomorrow.”

“New machines?”

“Well, Corps says six good aircraft should be flown here today.”

“Should?
The first goddam pilot I see sitting on his ass, I'll send him to Corps to shoot a general.”

“Yes sir.” There was a pause while Woolley kicked monotonously against a filing cabinet. Woodruffe indicated the visitors. “They would like to arrest about half the squadron,” he said.

Woolley looked at him. “Don't be fucking stupid,” he said.

“We have warrants,” one of the Frenchmen told him. He unfolded some documents. “Against Captain Dudley Arthur Rogers for manslaughter and conspiracy to defraud. Against Lieutenant George Yates Finlayson for manslaughter, assault and conspiracy to defraud. Against Lieutenant Frank Alan Michael Church for manslaughter, arson, assault, rape and conspiracy to defraud.” His English was good. He riffled the other warrants and put them away.

“Rape?” said Woodruffe. “Not rape, surely. That must be a mistake.”

The man gave a very faint smile. “You might say that the whole affair was a mistake,” he said.

“Get rid of these farts,” Woolley said.