A Good Clean Fight (53 page)

“We few,” Skull said. “We happy few.”

“Sure, sure,” Kit said. He was bored with all this talk.

“I had to tell you,” Kellaway said, “because Fanny's too modest.”

“For Christ's sake belt up, Uncle,” Barton said.

“You foxed 'em,” Kellaway said. “He foxed 'em,” he told the others. He saw the doc approach, holding his stomach and wheezing. “You're not fit,” he told him accusingly. “It's not Wednesday. How dare you wear suede boots in the face of the enemy?” He suddenly swung the folding chair at the doc's feet and whacked an ankle. The doc cried in pain and punched the adjutant in the mouth.
Kellaway ended up on his hands and knees, dribbling blood. “Take yourself off to your tent, you loony!” the doc roared. Kellaway crawled a few yards, then got up and walked.

“Was that strictly necessary?” Skull asked. “The poor chap's doolally.”

“That's his bad luck,” the doc growled. “I don't know how to treat insanity. I probably missed that lecture.” He massaged his ankle. “I expect I was drunk or fornicating or playing rugby. Split lips are different, I went to that lecture, I know all about them. I'll do a grand job on his face, you watch. By the way, he knocked over our last bottle of rum, the idiot.”

“Go and sock him one for me,” Barton said. The doc limped away.

“I have to tell you this,” Skull said. “There are two Luftwaffe fields within five minutes' flying time of Bir Dagnish. Abiar bu Seeia is west of it and Mechili is south. There must be at least ten more fields within fifty kilometers to the north.”

“I know. We'll fox 'em.” Barton signaled to his ground crew: start up.

The three pilots set off for their aircraft.

“Look what you've done to the squadron,” Skull said. “This isn't going to win the war.”

“War? What war?” Barton flung his arms out sideways, palms up, and turned in a full circle. “I don't see any war. This is just a bloody good scrap. What's it about? I don't know! And I don't care. I'll fight anyone who fights me.” The Kittyhawk engines were coughing and crackling.

“It's not as simple as that,” Skull said.

“It's
twice
as simple as that,” Barton said, “but you wouldn't understand. Intelligence never understands. Go and cook something, Skull. Make us some nice angel cakes for tea.”

From fifteen thousand feet the long olive-green hump of
the Jebel was soon visible. Hick Hooper gave his neck muscles no rest. He scanned the colossal sky like a young man whose girlfriend is late for a date, never tiring of the search. And in the end, when the hunt paid off, he felt the same lover's jolt of recognition. A flicker of silver glinted high above. “Hornet leader,” he called. “Bandits five o'clock high.” Barton raised a hand. Hick realized the CO had seen them long ago.

The Kittyhawks cruised on, in the formation which the RAF had borrowed from the Luftwaffe, the “finger-four,” so-called because the aircraft made the same pattern as the fingertips of an outstretched hand: Hooper, Barton, Patterson, Carson. Hick could not take his eyes off the enemy. The silver glints were falling, taking shape, growing tiny fins. Peculiar things happened to his body: his toes clenched, his hands prickled, the skin from his scalp to his neck crawled. He was frightened. This was the first time an airplane, several airplanes, five or six, had dropped out of the sky intent on killing him. He took his left hand off the throttle and punched himself in the face. Real pain drove out fear.

Kit Carson was muttering to himself: “Lumberjack, Lumberjack. Razorblade, Razorblade.” They had practiced this maneuver often enough. Me 109s liked to dive, fire, break away, climb. Barton would fly straight and level. When the 109s reached a point four hundred yards behind the formation he would call, “Lumberjack, Lumberjack.” Or “Razorblade, Razorblade.” The first code word meant break hard left, the second meant break hard right. L for left, R for right. Get it wrong and you'd fly smack into another Kitty.

Barton looked up and back and watched the 109s falling like swimmers in an endless swallow-dive. He could make out their camouflage: a spatter of colors called sand and spaghetti. Now he saw the shimmer of prop-discs.
Wait.
Dirty great cannons in the middle of those discs. One shell
could knock a Kitty sideways.
Wait, wait, wait.
His head was pulled hard around to the right.
Wait.
His eyeballs were screwed up as far as they'd go.
Wait.
The trick was to break exactly one second before the enemy fired.
Wait. Wait.
Now! “Razorblade, Razorblade!” he shouted, and threw the machine into a steep right turn.

Everyone went with him. Pip had broken hard a thousand times before, but the bombs under the wings made the Kittyhawk fly like a runaway fairground ride, redoubling the centrifugal force until he felt as if something hideously heavy was being rammed down inside him and trying to thrust his guts out at the other end. But his foggy brain ordered his hands and feet to hold the turn as tight as possible. With those bombs under the wings, it was like trying to run while carrying suitcases. When he straightened out, the formation had completed a circle and the 109s had overshot, just as Barton had known they must. They were dots on the horizon, climbing.

The Kittyhawks pressed on, faster now. The 109s came at them again. Barton left it very late. He saw tracer before he called “Lumberjack, Lumberjack!” Again the 109s overshot, again the Kittyhawks covered more ground before the third attack was made. This time the 109s came down in a long, extended stream, and the last two had time to alter their dive and fire before they hurtled through the circle. It was the briefest of snap shots and they missed.

“Going down,” Barton said. “Follow me, girls.”

It was like Benina all over again. First a shallow dive, then a sight of the target, with its crossed runways looking like old sticking-plaster on the wrinkled terrain, then the nose steadily down and the speed steadily up. The Kittyhawk's controls usually responded to a nudge or a twitch; now they demanded a heavy boot and hard muscle. Gradually the finger-four spread apart. The 109s had vanished. At that speed their controls would have locked solid, as if cast in bronze. Not many 109 pilots had tried to catch
a P-40 in a full-blown power-dive, and those who had tried too hard were so many stains on the desert floor.

Pip Patterson knew everything was wrong, long before Barton spoke. No flak. No tracer. No movement on the ground. Bir Dagnish was empty.

“Do not bomb,” Barton said. “Do
not
bomb. Shit and corruption! Stay with me. We'll scrounge something.”

They leveled out at four hundred feet above the hills, belting north, three hundred and fifty on the clock, black smoke streaming from the exhaust stubs. It was strange to fly over trees and bushes, fields, herds of sheep and goats. Hick even saw birds.

Barton flew with one eye on the Jebel while he read the map strapped to his thigh with the other.

The nearest Luftwaffe fields were on the coast. Apol-lonia, Cirene, El Qubba, Derna, many more. Barton didn't want to go near any of them. The 109 leader must have alerted their defenses. The flak batteries would be waiting to pump their filth all over the sky. But Barton hated to jettison and run home.

The problem solved itself. A road came at them, twisting and curling, a big wide road, a tribute to Italian engineering, and thick with trucks. Barton whooped: the Martuba Bypass! Then it was behind them. He broke hard right and curled left in a wide turn that reversed their course. “Line astern,” he said. “We'll clobber this convoy.”

No need to worry about bomb-skip. Each bomb could skip all it liked: it still ended up on or near a target. Kit Carson, flying last in the line, saw trucks getting blown off the road, exposing their undersides in a curious slow-motion. Trucks charged into ditches and overturned. Trucks burned furiously. Trucks collapsed and skidded broadside into other trucks. It was like a monstrous mechanical temper-tantrum. Kit dropped his bombs and climbed to escape their shock waves.

Scramble klaxons must be blaring on nearby Luftwaffe
fields: Barton had no doubt of that. On the other hand it was difficult to track low-flying intruders over the Jebel. The hills fogged the German radar screens with permanent echoes, and the wadis offered escape routes in various directions. Barton guessed that the defense would expect him to take the shortest way out by flying north, over the Med, where there was no flak and he could wheel right and eventually swing back, behind the Allied lines. He planned to fox them by flying south and going out the same way he came in.

Barton guessed wrong.

The Kittyhawks were attacked as soon as they reached the desert. Four 109s came in on the left flank, firing from such a ridiculous range that Patterson knew the pilots were inexperienced. Their tracer fell away, wasted, as Barton hauled his formation squarely around to face them.
Turn and face, turn and face:
everyone had told Hick to turn and face an attack. They couldn't prepare him for the startling speed of the interception that followed. The 109s flashed past while he was still trying to get his guns on a target. All he could remember was a blur of wings and cockpits and spirals of smoke left by bullets. “Stick with me, Hornet Two,” Barton said. Hick was grateful to follow his leader and guard his tail. That, at least, was simple.

For a while, both formations circled and climbed, winding themselves up to three or four thousand feet. Barton knew the 109s wanted height for their standard attack of dive, hit and run. He wanted height because he reckoned a dive would give the Kittyhawks the lead in the marathon sprint back to LG 250. The 109s would give chase, but a long pursuit deep into the desert would soon discourage them. The 109 was not at its best at ground level. At least that was what he hoped. His earphones filled with the roar of somebody else's cockpit noise. It was Kit Carson. “I'm in the shit, Fanny,” he said. “The engine's overheating. The oil gauge is in the red. Christ, I can smell it!”

“Throttle back, throttle back,” Barton told him; but Kit had already taken so much power off the engine that it was soon waffling along, at little above a stall. The 109s noticed and edged closer. “Can you land?” Barton asked.

“Will they let me?” Kit asked, and laughed. Bloody silly question. Dark smoke was streaming back from the engine.

“Try to land. We'll scare them away.” But the enemy had seen their advantage and were making an attack. For a few seconds the sky was a flurry of twisting, chasing fighters around the one that slid as helplessly as a glider. Most of the 109s missed. One hit. Kit's tailplane was shredded. The Kittyhawk wallowed and skidded drunkenly. “That's it!” Kit shouted. “I'm baling out!”

“Stay near the wreck,” Barton ordered. “We'll come back and get you.”

Kit had never baled out before. He wanted now to do it fast, before the 109s returned and killed him. He released the canopy; it whirled away and bounced off the shattered rudder. The Kittyhawk hated that and threatened to stall. For an instant he panicked. But the Kitty recovered, and he did what he had done countless times. He raced through the ritual of the pilot who lands and gets out: a sequence as automatic and unthinking as unbuttoning his shirt. He unplugged the radio lead and he snapped out the oxygen tube. As one hand released the cockpit-straps, the other hand gave the parachute-harness buckle a quarter-turn clockwise and whacked it against his stomach. The four straps popped out. The Kittyhawk skidded and flung him sideways. Nothing held him secure: he felt naked. He knew what he had done and he shouted his despair. He snatched at the vanishing straps, hoping to shove their ends back in the buckle. Both leg-straps fell to the floor. As he groped for them he felt the shoulder-straps slide down his back, and this time he screamed at the stupidity of it all. The
Kittyhawk lurched and he grabbed the rip cord for no reason at all except it was the only bit of parachute left to grab. Then the aircraft rolled and out he went, snatching at the cord, hoping for a miracle. The silk streamed and blossomed with a soft bang. Kit Carson dropped away from it, still holding the metal ring.

It was four thousand feet to the desert. The empty parachute took more than twenty minutes to wander and drift all the way down. It spread itself a few hundred yards from Kit Carson. Three miles away, the wreck of his Kittyhawk was burning. More than a hundred miles away, Barton, Patterson and Hooper were coming in to land.

Barton told Skull what had happened: the good, the bad, and the inexplicably horrible. “At least we got the Luftwaffe off its backside,” he said.

“I'll tell Wing,” Skull said heavily. “Wing will tell Group, Group will tell HQ, and HQ will tell the whispering grass but the whispering grass won't tell the breeze 'cos the breeze don't need to know. Have I missed anything?”

“Was that meant to be a joke?” Patterson asked. His goggles had scored great rings around his eyes. They made him look fevered.

“I liked Kit,” Skull said. “Kit was a good type.”

“Yes,” Barton said. “Got something tasty for supper?”

Supper was bully-beef stew. Afterward Skull went off to his tent and wound the portable gramophone.

Empty guns, covered with rust,
Where do you talk tonight?
Empty saddles in the old corral
My tears would be dry tonight.
If you'd only say I'm lonely
As you carry my old pal—
Empty saddles in the old corral.

“Maudlin tosh,” the doc said. “I wish he'd break it.”

“I like it,” Barton said. “Catchy tune.”

*   *   *

The second day out from Kufra was not exciting. In the morning a few vehicles bogged down in soft sand and everything came to a halt while shovels and sand-channels were used to ease them onto hard ground. For Lester and Malplacket there was little to see and nothing to do. Corky Gibbon explained how a sun compass worked. It was interesting but Lester couldn't see any headlines in it.