Derek Robinson - Piece of Cake

Cox tramped to the door. “All I can say is, if you’ve got any more truth like that, kindly keep it to yourself, because I personally think we’ve had about as much of it as we can stand.” He slammed the door.

That was the first day Mary Fitzgerald appeared at the end of the airfield.

Farmland surrounded the field on three sides. On the fourth, a narrow lane passed just outside the perimeter wire. There was no hedge. The duty NCO in the control tower noticed a small black car parked beside the lane. It was still there an hour later, so he pointed it out to CH3, who got some binoculars.

The CO was on patrol with Red Section. CH3 went and found the adjutant. They were in the control tower, studying the little car, when Red Section returned. They saw the driver get out of the car and watch the Hurricanes land. “You were right,” Kellaway said. “It’s her.”

“I’d better go and talk to her.”

“Waste of time, old boy. She doesn’t want you, and the chap she does want isn’t likely to turn up. Leave her be.”

“A word about angels,” Barton announced. “Luftwaffe intelligence has started monitoring our controllers’ transmissions. They hear the controller sending us up to angels ten so they pass the word to the raid, the raid nips up to angels twelve and we arrive far too low.”

“Beats me how they make sense of our R/T,” Quirk said. “Half the time it’s unreadable.”

“You have to shout,” Gordon said. “They’re foreigners, remember.”

“Well, from now on we’re going to baffle the buggers,” said Barton. “From now on, stated angels will be minus two. If the controller says angels ten, he really means angels twelve. Angels fifteen means we go up to angels seventeen.”

“I get it,” Gordon said brightly. “That’s very clever, isn’t it? All you have to do is keep adding six.”

“Don’t piss about, Flash,” CH3 said wearily.

“Well, five, then.”

CH3 grabbed him by the arm and neck, forced him to the door of the crewroom and threw him out. In doing so he banged his knuckles on the frame and skinned them. “Dumb lunk,” he grumbled as he sucked his hand.

“Stated angels are minus two, then,” Barton said. “You’ll also have a set of codenames for places. ‘Fishpaste’ means ‘Dover.’ That sort of thing. Jerry’s getting far too smart. He’s sending over spoof raids to get us scrambled and when he knows where we’re going they turn back, and while we’re refueling the real raid appears and catches us knickerless. He’s also coming over at zero feet to bamboozle the tracking stations. Come to that, he’s knocked out a couple of tracking stations so sometimes there are blind spots. I’m telling you all this so you’ll know what the controllers have to put up with. Half the time they’re just guessing, and the other half they’re digging the ops room out of the rubble and tying the telephone lines together in reef-knots.”

“The poor dears,” Cattermole said. “We must take up a collection.”

“Bloody controllers,” Gordon said from the door. “They’re all Huns.” CH3 turned on him with a raised fist. Gordon dodged back.

“Half the scrambles don’t lead to interceptions,” Barton said. “And making an interception doesn’t always mean you get a crack at Jerry. That’s the luck of the draw. Nothing we can do about that. What we can do a hell of a lot about is gunnery.”

He sat and CH3 stood. “This is not a magic death-ray,” he said. He was holding up a Browning salvaged from a wreck. “And these aren’t magic bullets.” He raised a belt of ammunition. “You can hold the enemy in your sights and still miss, for at least five reasons. One is bullet-drop. As soon as it leaves your gun, that bullet starts to fall. The further it goes, the more it falls. Two is bullet-topple. Every bullet wobbles a tiny bit, and the further it goes, the more it wobbles. Three is recoil. Recoil shakes the gun-platform a fraction, and that fraction’s worth ten, twenty, thirty feet when the bullet carries a quarter of a mile. Four is deflection which of course you all know about but how many of you think about the combined effects of deflection and bullet-drop? If the bastard is not only crossing you but also climbing, it’s no damn good aiming ahead of him, you’ve got to figure out how far ahead and above his line-of-flight to put your bullets, on account of they fall faster when you fire upward than when you fire level, right? That was four. Five is harmonization. Harmonize at two hundred yards and the bullet-streams converge at two hundred, and after that they diverge and they keep on diverging as if they can’t stand the sight of each other, which is good news for the enemy if he happens to be four or five hundred yards away.”

“And that” Barton said, “is the range too many of you open fire.”

“Which is why you miss,” CH3 said.

“You saw the film,” Barton said. “Eight hundred yards, in a couple of cases. Eight hundred!”

“Quite absurd,” Flash Gordon said, looking in through a window.

“Beat it!” CH3 cried.

“None of this is new,” Barton said. “You’ve all heard it in umpteen lectures ever since you began flying, but it doesn’t seem to have sunk in. You’ve got to get in close.”

“That’s dangerous,” Gordon said doubtfully.

“Don’t shoot unless you can read the numbers on the fuselage,” CH3 said. “Better yet, get close enough to count the crew.”

“Count their teeth,” Gordon said. “Like buying a horse.”

“Beat it before I kill you,” CH3 told him.

“And always attack from behind if you can,” Barton said. “Stick your nose up his tailpipe. Don’t fart about with fancy deflection shots, leave that to experts like Haddy.”

“This is all a load of cock,” Gordon said. His arms dangled inside the window, his chin rested on the sill and his eyelids drooped goofily. “What’s wrong with the old Area Fighting Attacks, I say? Bloody good fun, they were.”

Fury gripped CH3. It showed in his face: the eyes suddenly widened, the jaws clamped together, the color intensified. Barton saw this and tried to grab his arm but CH3 went out of the hut like a sprinter from his blocks. Gordon had a few yards’ start. Giggling with fear, he dodged behind the wheels of a Hurricane. CH3 plunged after him, tripped over the chocks and fell on his face. By the time he was up, spitting out grass and obscenities, Gordon had escaped. CH3 saw him trying to hide behind some deckchairs and went for him. Barton, watching from the doorway, knew that this was no joke: the chase was too savage, the cursing too vicious.

CH3 caught Gordon as he was scrambling up an apple-tree. He seized him by a foot, yanked at it and twisted it as if he wanted to screw it off. Gordon howled with pain and lashed at him with the other foot. CH3 grabbed that too and was clawing his way up Gordon’s body when Barton and Cox dragged him off.

As suddenly as the rage began, so it ceased. He stood limp and exhausted, ashamed to look anyone in the face. Eventually he walked slowly away. Barton stayed and said: “That’ll teach you not to be such a lunatic, Flash. Come on down.” But Gordon politely refused, and he stayed in the apple-tree until the scramble sounded.

Mary came back again next day. They could see her from dispersal, a small, dark, plump figure standing just beyond the wire. She rarely moved.

The fourth scramble of the day led to a prolonged fight at high level. A squadron of Spitfires had drawn off the escorting 109’s just before the Hurricanes arrived. The bombers were Ju-88’s, fast, capable of being thrown about like a fighter and apparently tough enough to absorb any number of bullets. Hornet squadron chased them all across Kent. Con-trails unfurled neatly, like endless bandages that soon sprawled and wore thin until the sky seemed littered with discarded dressings. The Hurricanes made hit-and-run attacks until they ran out of ammunition. When they withdrew, a couple of bombers were flying on one engine only and more fighters were being scrambled, but the raid reached its target, which was Manston, and bombed it.