Operation Afterlight, page 10
“Don’t want them, don’t need them. Come on, Kittinger. Stick with me and don’t give your wicket away.”
“I don’t have a bloody clue what’s going on,” a Welsh pilot said as they watched Durban and Kittens walk out to the crease where Barton stood, waiting to bowl the first delivery.
“Join the club, Chapple,” Grant said.
Swinging his arms in big circles, Barton paced out his mark on the slightly damp ground, jogged on the spot, and came charging in for the first ball of the game.
A bouncer. Fast. Spitting off the pitch with venom, racing towards Durban’s face. The Englishman swayed back, barely more than a hand’s breadth, and the ball whistled past the wicketkeeper’s gloves and raced away to the boundary rope.
Barton roared and stared at Durban. He received only a calm half-smile back.
“Four byes,” Grant called to the Aussie selected to track the scoring.
“I know how to keep score, mate.” The man spat on the ground, then scribbled in his notebook.
“Four byes,” Chapple repeated. “What does that mean?”
“Four points for us.”
“Only four you’ll get,” the scorer muttered darkly.
The man wasn’t quite right, though it soon seemed to Grant that the prediction wouldn’t be a million miles off. Durban, looking unflustered despite the speed and hostility of the bowling, hit the next ball for two, blocked out a few and took a single off the last to keep the strike while Finny took over the bowling. Kittens didn’t face a ball until the third over, when he managed a streaky four before his middle stump span through the air, uprooted by a yorker from Barton that was simply too fast for him. Grant hastily explained basic batting technique to each new batsman, then sent them out only to see them traipse back minutes or sometimes seconds later, their wicket gone, looking chastened, horror-struck or just plain terrified. Desveaux and Johansen, the inseparable Canadian crew of Bravo Two, were out for first ball ducks in consecutive deliveries. Tucker, a young navigator from Kent, took a short ball to the shoulder, and spent a few minutes rubbing it and suggesting he was too hurt to continue until his Australian pilot ordered him to stay on. He was out next ball, nicking a Finny delivery to the closest fielder.
Chapple went in at number eight. The Welshman hid his fear well. “Any last pointers?” It sounded like the desperate plea of a condemned man.
“Yeah,” Grant said. “Duck the short ball, watch out for the slower one at your pads. You don’t want to be out LBW, do you?”
“LB what?”
“Leg before wicket. It’s when…” Grant waved him away. “Never mind.”
Chapple lasted two balls. Grant hadn’t even finished putting his own pads on when the Aussies started calling impatiently for him. The Welshman walked sullenly past, muttering unintelligible curses under his breath as he dropped his bat at Grant’s feet.
Grant turned to the nearby Aussies. “What’s the score?”
“You’re losing, mate.”
“We’ll see. What’s the score?”
“Fifty-three,” one said. “Your mate Durban has forty-three. Some lad called extras is the second highest scorer with six.” They both laughed.
Grant ignored them. Picking up the bat, he walked out, flicking his heels to loosen his muscles and swinging the bat from side to side. Durban met him halfway. “Still not a good idea, sir,” Grant said.
“Actually, it’s going rather better than I expected,” Durban said. “Can you hold up an end?”
“I can try.”
“Good. It is definitely too early in the year for cricket, so the pitch isn’t very good. Let’s give ourselves something to bowl at, Johnny. Don’t take any risks. Only play when you have to.”
Barton and Finny had both taken a well-earned break, so the first ball Grant faced was from a tall Aussie Flying Officer by the name of Johnson. It was, predictably, a bouncer, but Johnson lacked the true pace and venom of Barton. Grant hooked it away to the boundary for four.
“That works, too,” Durban said.
A few more balls, and Grant felt his muscles relax. He hadn’t held a bat in three years, but it surprised him how quickly it all came back to him. Double figures came quickly, while at the other end Durban passed fifty without overt celebration and accumulated runs with steady grace. At every opportunity, they would seek quick runs between the wickets. If the batsman hit it ahead of him, it was his call to run or not. If it went behind or square of the batsman, he had to trust the non-striker’s judgement. Either way, there was no hesitation. Each trusted the other.
Suddenly, with no time seeming to pass, fifty-three had become one hundred and three.
“Right, I’ve had enough of this,” Barton said, bringing himself back on to bowl. “Fun’s over, gents.” With a wicked grin, he took his mark and came sprinting in towards Durban, his face red with exertion and anger.
The ball was short, but this time it didn’t rear up like the others. Instead, in a puff of disturbed earth, it kept lower, surprising Durban and slamming into his ribs. The Wing Commander gave a grunt, dropped his bat, and walked off to the side, wincing while the ball ran forgotten to the nearest fielder.
Barton kept running, stopping just short of Durban. “You alright, boss?”
“I’ve had worse.”
The Australian gave a brief nod, though any hint of approval or respect vanished almost instantly from his face. “That was a loosener,” he said, loudly. “Next one will be quicker!” His teammates cheered that, but there was also a ripple of grudging applause when Durban retrieved his bat and took up his guard again.
They didn’t applaud and certainly didn’t cheer when the next ball sailed into the bushes by the church. No bounce. Six runs. Better still, it gave the batsmen a chance to catch their breath while Barton stood with his hands on his hips and six cursing Aussies searched through thorns and mud for the ball.
The fun didn’t last, of course. It never could. Ten minutes later, and to his annoyance, Grant mistimed a pull shot to give Barton his fifth wicket. The Aussie players gathered around their captain to congratulate him, although a couple took the time to shake Durban’s hand first. One hundred and thirty-six runs total, with Durban left stranded on ninety-eight not out.
“It’s not enough,” Grant told him as they walked off.
“We’ll see,” Durban said. “Are you nicely warmed up?”
“I haven’t bowled in three years, skipper.”
“Don’t worry, Johnny. It’s like crashing a bike. You never forget how.”
Grant took a new ball, enjoying the familiar weight and the touch of leather and seams in his hand. As the opening Aussie batsmen walked to the crease, the fielders spread out, watching as Durban called instructions from the wicket-keeper’s position and pointed out their places. They were still too few, of course. That left a lot of gaps, and Grant had little faith that more than a couple of them could catch.
So he took them out of the equation.
His first delivery, eighty-five miles an hour, blew off the cobwebs of three years, slammed into Durban’s keeping gloves with a satisfying thud, and left Finny hopping about the crease in stunned confusion. His second, quicker, clipped the top of the Australian’s off-stump and sent him stumbling off the pitch, swearing loudly.
On the edge of the pitch, he saw Barton in animated conversation with the vicar. “He seems angry about something,” Grant observed.
“He’ll be bloody furious in a few minutes,” Durban said. “Have at them, Johnny.”
And he did. Two more batsmen fell for ducks. Another went for a lucky single. At the other end, Kittens turned out to be a half-decent spinner, and two shell-shocked Aussies got themselves caught out playing ambitious shots, desperately trying to score some runs before they had to face the express pace of Grant again.
Barton brought himself in at number seven and proved a capable tail-end batsman. Just not quite capable enough. He made a gritty fourteen before he was out, plumb LBW to a Grant slower ball but still willing to howl protests at the unfortunate spare Australian pilot officer acting as umpire.
Forty-seven all out.
Back aching from all the congratulatory slaps on it, Grant jogged over to join Durban.
Barton threw down his gloves and stormed towards them. “I thought it odd that the vicar seemed to know you so well. You didn’t tell me you opened the batting for Middlesex before the war.”
“You should always do some research before you challenge an opponent,” Durban said. There was no mocking in his voice. The tone was one of absolute seriousness. “If you had, you’d have known all about me. You might also have heard about Johnny Grant, who took eight for eleven for a Barbados Governor’s XI before he volunteered for the RAF.”
Barton snorted. “My Mum always said I was a fool. I hate proving the old bag right.” He shook Grant’s hand. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, he shook Durban’s. Behind him, the Australian team had formed a line and were busily shaking hands and congratulating their rest of the world counterparts.
“For the record, Don,” Durban said, “what would your training program have looked like if you’d won?”
Barton shrugged. “Low-level training, and probably a run up to the range at Holbeach. I’m a fool, but I’m not stupid. Whatever we’re training for, it’s hardly likely to be easy, is it? So, we train, and we get better, and then we go to work.”
“Bollocks to this,” Finny said, sticking his hands in his pockets. “I’m not shaking their hands. Bloody cheats.”
“Flying Officer Finnegan!” Barton’s roar echoed from the church wall, loud enough to make the vicar jump. “You will shake every one of their bloody hands and twice if they want you to! Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” Finny mumbled.
“Sorry about the noise, vicar,” Barton called. “As for me, boys, these will be the last words you hear from my mouth until this time tomorrow.”
Chapter Thirteen
Norfolk, 17 March
Barton didn’t stay quiet for long, of course. Not once the beers started flowing in the King’s Refuge. Handshakes became pats on the back, then toasts. Within scant minutes, the whole squadron was drinking as one, and the reminiscing about the game seemed to gloss over any mention of who had won or lost. A bloody good afternoon, as Johnson put it, and not even Finny disagreed with that.
Broadley and Jeffries went unmentioned. Not forgotten, but already fading into the past. A squadron had to have a short memory if it was to go on.
Durban put some money behind the bar, checked that Barton was happy to give Grant a lift back, and then left them to it. He drove alone, and quickly. In the tumult in the pub, with the beers flowing and May holding court like she had taken the final wicket herself, few noticed that he hadn’t touched a drop. He never did when he was driving or flying. Even this last year, when the shaking had been getting worse than ever, he’d stuck to that rule.
It was already getting dark when he left the pub, and the rain that had been threatening all day arrived as he passed through the front gates. He parked near his room in the accommodation block, wrestled the protective rain cover into place, and walked through the increasing fury of the spring storm to his office. He had work to do. Much as he didn’t want to go near it, especially after the tiny victory of the afternoon, no one else was going to do it for him.
He wouldn’t have let them, even if they had offered.
After checking he was alone in the building, he closed his office window blinds and locked the door before pouring himself a whisky. Laying down a piece of personalised headed letter paper, he reached for the pen his father had given him the day that he graduated from the RAF College at Cranwell. A long time ago, it seemed. He had lost count of the times he had used that pen for this exact task. It should have become easier with time. It hadn’t. Just got harder with every letter.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Broadley, he wrote. And stopped.
First mistake. He couldn’t remember if Charlie Broadley had two living parents, or if his mother was a widow, or if they had divorced. He opened his desk drawer and checked the man’s file, delivered at his request late that morning by Bony Wright. Both parents alive and still married. Happily, he assumed, unless the news had already reached them in Australia. At least his letter wouldn’t beat the telegram to them, and he didn’t have to be the one to break the news that their only son and heir was dead, his body shattered in the crushing embrace of a crashed Mosquito.
A vision of a different Mosquito’s cockpit flashed across his sight.
He downed his whisky. It burned, good and hot at the back of his throat, sending little explosions of sweat to burst at his temples and neck. He turned back to the letter. It is with deep regret that I must inform you of the death of your son Charles in combat. He let the pen drop from his fingers. It clattered from the desk and fell to the carpet. Stupid. They would already know that from the telegram. That’s if they hadn’t felt the moment of his death from ten thousand miles away, as some swore could happen. Durban had never believed such things. Now he wasn’t so sure.
And in their grief, would they want to be lied to? Charlie Broadley wasn’t dead because some German night fighter pilot was great at his job. Nor had he died because he got unlucky with the random slings and arrows of flak or engine failure. No. Charlie Broadley was dead because his navigator messed up and left them roaming the night sky, terror growing, until the fuel ran out and their time with it.
It was worse than that, too. Charlie Broadley died because Durban had chosen Grant to be his navigator. He’d doomed Broadley to a pointless death the moment he’d left him to pair up with Dougie Jeffries.
Not pointless, he corrected himself. At least, no more pointless than the rest.
Hearing a sound, Durban stopped and listened. Nothing. Just a patrol passing by, or a careless engineer in one of the distant, half-lit hangars. He was alone.
It was one of the fundamental realities of command. He could have his entire squadron in the room, a senior HQ on the telephone, printed and detailed orders in his hand, but in the end, he made the decisions. Only him.
Decisions that could mean success or failure. Life or death. Like which navigator would fly with which pilot.
Reaching for the fallen pen, he gasped as pain plucked at his side. Gingerly, he pulled up the shirt, wincing as he felt scabs tear away with the material. Where the cricket ball had struck him, the skin was already turning mottled black. Combined with the half-healed lacerations from the crash, it made for a dismal sight.
He let the shirt drop, not caring that the reopened wounds would soon discolour it, and reached for more whisky. It was good stuff. Expensive. It deserved a more appreciative audience, but right now it tasted like water. The liquid trembled in the bottle as he held it. Odd, how his hands shook so badly now, but stayed solid as the White Cliffs when he held the controls of his Mosquito.
He poured a double, then added more.
Screwing up the letter, he threw it in the wastepaper bin. It nestled among the half-dozen attempts he had made this morning, when he’d first heard.
Jeffries, he thought. Perhaps Jeffries would be easier. The lad, he remembered, was an orphan. Raised by a maiden aunt. He had to check her name.
Dear Mrs. O’Keefe. I was your son’s commanding officer for the last few days of his brief life. I wish to tell you he died doing his duty to the best of his abilities.
And maybe that was right. The report from the training school said that Jeffries was generally sound but made mistakes. He had got them to the target just fine. Maybe that was the best he could do, and Charlie Broadley had never been destined to come home.
Yes, it wasn’t a lie. But it wasn’t the truth, either.
But the truth is that he killed himself, and took an expert pilot with him, and it should have been me in the cockpit with him, watching the ground rushing up to meet us…
He pushed the letter aside, not even seeing it anymore. He heard the thud as his whisky glass hit the floor, but it vanished in the squeal of tortured metal as the damaged undercarriage gave way and the Mosquito slammed into the runway, filling the night behind with sparks. The urgent stink of burning fuel and rubber and wood filled his nostrils. Clive Lampeter’s body brushed against his as he scrambled past the navigator to the emergency exit hatch, feeling those dead fingers clutching at his overalls, ripping a single startled sob from his lips.
He was alone, he told himself. It didn’t matter.
Alone.
Reaching for another glass, he let the tears come.
Chapter Fourteen
Above England, 18 March
The night’s rain still hung in the air as they climbed out of Charney Breach, giving a vibrant sheen to the patchwork of fields two thousand feet below. Behind them, thick cloud spread unbroken to the sea and beyond to Europe, but in the west a stiff breeze had torn wide swathes from the grey, giving the spring sun leave to tease the earth with the hope of better weather to come.
“Oxford, please,” Durban said simply. They were almost the first words he had spoken all day. The Wing Commander had briefed them all that morning, putting Barton and Kittinger in charge of the day’s training, and even as they tracked west, the rest of the squadron were getting airborne in their two flights for another day of low-level bombing practice. There had been a few muted grumbles in the briefing room, but A Flight’s commander had silenced them with just a tightening of the lips below his moustache.
Grant checked his maps, then gave both a heading and a time estimation. At first, he’d felt worried that Durban was angry with him, but there was no malice in the silence. Instead, the pilot seemed perfectly content simply to enjoy the flight, turning his head from time to time or craning to look down past the spinning props at a passing village or train. As they drew nearer to Oxford, Grant felt a small thrill of satisfaction that his course would take them almost directly over the old and distinguished University buildings at its heart.
“I wanted to thank you, sir,” Grant said. “For sticking up for me yesterday in the Mess.”
