Operation Afterlight, page 11
Durban gave a nod, so slight that it might just have resulted from a slight buffeting of the airframe. He corrected only slightly during the last mile of their approach, bringing them directly over the High Street and Carfax Tower, banking the Mosquito to look down as he did. “Castle Combe next,” he said. “Low level.”
“Yes, sir.” Again, Grant plotted a course, adding a couple of waypoints to avoid high ground. Durban took them down to barely one hundred feet, and lower where the ground allowed it, following the course of the sparkling waters of the Thames for a few miles before breaking away. This low, Grant couldn’t rely on many landmarks. Instead, he concentrated on his timings, noting the impact on their course of each minor change Durban made, seemingly on a whim, to take them over some village or pub or pond. This meant more course corrections, and Grant kept them coming as often as needed.
Durban noted each change of heading and timing with a nod, but said nothing.
Grant made his final calculation, then considered Durban’s calm face. Something wasn’t quite right. The Wing Commander seemed happy enough. Serene, even, controlling the Mosquito with smooth inputs, his face emotionless but for the slightest hint of a smile. But there had to be a reason he had left others in charge of training, and why the rest of the squadron had gone one way while their lone Mosquito went another.
They climbed a little on approach to Castle Combe, and Durban flew a circuit of the town that allowed a better look at the stone buildings that straddled the Bybrook, ripped straight from the pages of some medieval saga. Sometimes, just sometimes, England really was beautiful. Nothing could stop Grant feeling homesick for Barbados, especially when the English weather set in on the flat, featureless terrain that surrounded most RAF airfields, but there were definitely places that made it easier to bear. This entire part of the country was a delight on a day like this, with the sun illuminating some sights while leaving others wreathed in early morning fog, shadowed in mystery.
“Thank you,” Durban said when the slow circuit was complete. “Cornwall, next. Kynance Cove.”
Grant’s stomach lurched, and he knew it wasn’t the dip of the controls that sent them lower again, racing down the slopes of the Cotswolds towards the distant southwest. They had plenty of fuel for the trip, but Cornwall wasn’t on any of their previous training routes, nor did it make sense as a waypoint on the way to somewhere else. It was a long way from anything.
He reeled off a course and took a long breath. “Sir? Is this a test?”
“What do you mean?”
“Because I know Jeffries messed up, and he and I were friends.”
“It’s not a test,” Durban said.
“If you think I need more practice, or—”
“I have complete faith in you, Johnny.”
“Then why this crazy route, sir?”
Durban gave him a sharp look, and Grant knew that he’d overstepped. They flew in silence for another mile, still low, passing over a small tractor. The farmer gave them a cheery wave. At least, Grant thought it was cheery. It might have been an angry shake of the fist. They really were very low.
“Not a test,” Durban said softly. “Today, I just wanted to fly.”
They climbed to fifteen hundred feet as the south coast appeared ahead. Off their port wingtip, the sun glimmered on barrage balloons and the hulls of Royal Navy warships in the great docks at Devonport, but Grant’s course had already steered them clear of the anti-aircraft positions there. German air attacks might have dwindled almost to nothing, but it made no sense to give a gunner the chance to make a terrible mistake. Leaving the docks behind, they flew on until Durban made a sharp left turn, bringing them eastbound just above the sea, with the cliffs to their left.
Grant sat bolt upright as a small bay appeared, the sand beautifully white, starkly contrasting with dark green and red serpentine shades in the rocks and islands that rose from it. Most of all, he stared at the water, clear and blue and glittering. He hadn’t seen water that colour in three years. “It’s like being home,” he gasped.
“Kynance Cove,” Durban said. “There’s nowhere else quite like it. My parents would bring me here as a child. My sisters and I would play on the sand, dare each other to go out to the little islands that you can only see at low tide, then race the sea back in. I’d always stay that bit too long to make sure I won.” He smiled. “Because I’d get so wet and cold, my parents would let me have extra ice cream. They never worked out that was part of the victory.”
In seconds, the cove dwindled behind them. Durban didn’t look back. “Ok, Johnny. Take us home. Quickest route. After lunch, we’ll join the afternoon push to the bombing range.”
“Yes, sir.” Grant hesitated, but curiosity beat back caution. “Did you grow up in Oxford, sir?”
“Castle Combe,” Durban said. “I went to Oxford University.”
He said nothing more, and Grant asked no more questions. He didn’t need to. They completed the rest of the flight in silence, straight and level with no real training value, but then the day’s business hadn’t been about training. No.
It had been about saying goodbye.
It was only after they landed that another thought struck Grant, one that turned a pleasant morning into a thing of horror, and his fond approval of the Wing Commander to terror.
If Durban was saying goodbye, it was because he wasn’t sure he was coming home.
And wherever he expected to go that was so dangerous, Grant would be sat right next to him.
Chapter Fifteen
Norfolk, 21 March
Durban met her outside the HQ and opened her car door for her. A gentleman, or at least well-schooled enough to pretend to be. The young Wing Commander looked more tired than she remembered him, and Lane told him so as she followed him to his office.
“There’s lots to do,” he said. “We’ve been flying three or more sorties a day, navigation, bombing. Low-level flying is physically exhausting, especially at night, but I think we’re getting better. You can hang your coat there.” He pointed to a hook on the back of the door.
“Thank you.” She took off the coat gratefully. The sheepskin-lined collar really was a bit much for this weather, even though the last few days had seemed more like they were returning to winter rather than springing forward. The little white flowers on the windowsill at least brightened the room with a touch of the changing seasons. “Very pretty.”
“One of the WAAF clerks from the air traffic control tower brought them over. They help to blot out the smell of aviation fuel.”
They did, too. She had no interest in flowers and did not know what type they were, but they filled the air with a delightful fragrance. She couldn’t help but detect another faint scent under it, though. Like spilled whisky. She ignored it, just as she ignored the little paroxysm of jealousy at the thought of how long it had been since anyone brought her flowers. “Will they be ready? The squadron, I mean?”
“I hope so.” Durban took a seat behind his desk, offering her one opposite him. “Their navigation skills are up to speed. Bombing accuracy is still a little down from where I’d like it to be, but I can practically guarantee that three out of every four aircraft will hit the target. We normally fly with twelve aircraft, but I have enough crews to push to sixteen by getting the reserve aircraft fully airworthy. That will take time, though.”
“It shouldn’t be necessary,” Lane said. “Not for the first target.” Her chair was comfortable. From the way Durban shifted his position, she guessed his seat didn’t share that quality. That meant he’d likely switched them in anticipation of her arrival. Perhaps he genuinely was a gentleman. She met so few in her line of work.
“It’s still the Hildesheim lab first, then? Do we know when?”
“Tomorrow.”
A pause, a single beat between Durban’s lips opening and the words coming. “Not a problem. What’s your role in this?”
“You obviously don’t work with SOE very often,” she said coolly.
He seemed unfazed, his calm gaze on her. “If you can’t tell me, I understand. I won’t insist, even if I could. But you’re clearly important to this whole thing.” He shrugged. “I’m asking about you, rather than the mission. Consider me intrigued.”
“Intrigued? Where I come from, we’d call that nosy.”
“And where do you come from?”
“We’d call that nosy, too.”
He laughed. “Fair enough. Do you mind if I guess? About your role, not where you’re from. It’s obvious,” he continued without pause, “that you are the expert on this subject. AVM Embry deferred to you, which he doesn’t do for the Chief of the Air Staff himself, and that Commando Major seemed there purely to provide muscle. So that leaves you and the German chap. Stahl?”
She nodded.
“Is he coming?”
“Not yet.”
“You don’t seem cut up over that. Given how that commando put himself between the two of you, it’s clear you’re not friends. You work together, but you’re not happy about it.”
And that, Lane thought, was the understatement of the year. “Wing Commander Durban,” she said deliberately, “I’m thinking you are one of those English gentlemen who is too clever by half.”
“Clever is rarely a word used about me,” Durban said. “But I know that when you find yourself in a hole, you stop digging. As an apology, can I get you a cup of tea?”
“I’d much rather have a tour of the squadron. Particularly the aircraft.”
His eyebrow twitched in surprise, she noted, but he hid it well. “Of course.”
She followed him into the mid-afternoon grey, crossing the road and heading towards the hangars while he pointed out the various components that went into the establishment and running of a front-line squadron. It was impressively complex, but irrelevant. She had precious little interest in the intricacies of air traffic control, and none in where the men spent their time when they weren’t flying. But, because Durban seemed nice and because she admired his enthusiasm, she asked polite questions and made the right noises until he brought her at last to the one thing she did care about.
The aircraft. The machines that would destroy Götterdämmerung.
“This is the Mosquito,” he said, leading her into a hangar where the aircraft stood, proud and solitary, with its tail down and chin raised. It was bigger than she’d expected, with the cockpit towering over them above four huge gun barrels that seemed to peer out with lethal menace. From the two long engines, the propellors reached down almost to the concrete floor.
“You have sixteen of these?”
“Total, yes. This one is mine.” He put his hand on the underside of the fuselage, resting it there while he looked up at the aircraft. “Geoffrey de Havilland’s finest creation. They called him crazy when he designed it, but not anymore. Here. Feel this.”
She thought of saying no. It wasn’t what the aircraft was that interested her; it was what it could do. Despite herself, she reached out and touched the dark green skin of the aircraft. It felt warmer than she’d expected. “That’s not metal.”
“Wood,” Durban said. “She’s built of wood. English ash, Alaska spruce, Canadian birch and fir, even balsa from Ecuador.”
Lane couldn’t quite bring herself to use the female pronoun. It was a machine, nothing more. “Doesn’t that make it flimsy?”
“Not the way they build her. No more so than aluminium, and it’s not like a German twenty-millimetre shell cares what it hits. It will make a right mess either way. But wood makes her light, and a joy to fly. Two Merlin engines, same as you’d find in a Spitfire. Together they make her fast, faster than any German night fighter, as fast as most of their day fighters, especially once you’ve dropped your bombs. Heavier armament, too.” He walked along the side of the aircraft, his fingertips caressing the underside. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
A wave of embarrassment flooded over her as she laughed, then covered her mouth with her hand. She was blushing. She hadn’t done that in years. “I’m sorry,” she said, seeing the confused look on his boyish face. “It’s just that you describe this aircraft like another man might talk about a woman.”
He gave a little snort. “Well, she is the only lady in my life right now. And I don’t think she’ll mind the flattery.”
“No wife to get jealous?”
He shook his head. “This country has enough widows already.”
Matter of fact. He might have been talking about airspeed performance figures or fuel load, not the looming likelihood of his own death.
He beckoned her closer, kneeling to point at the panels beneath the aircraft’s belly.
“There’s the internal bay,” he said. “The bomber variants can carry more bombs, but we have enough to let the Hun know we were there and still strafe secondary targets or tussle with fighters.”
The momentary chill she had felt at the offhand fatalism of his widow remark vanished, replaced by professional interest. This was why she was here. “What types of bombs?”
“High explosive, mostly.”
“The bunker at Hildesheim is underground. Can you get to it with HE?”
“Certainly,” he said. “As long as it’s not too deep. We set a delay on the fuse so that the weapon has time to burrow into the ground a little before it detonates. How far down is this bunker?”
She thought back to the engineering report provided by one of her agents last year. The last report the man had ever sent. The SS had got him the next day, shot him in the head as he tried to evade arrest. Shot dead in front of his own family.
Her sources told her it was Stahl who had pulled the trigger.
She realised Durban was looking up at her, and she took a second to remember his question. Another second, to compose herself. “Not deep,” she said, wondering if he heard the catch in her voice. “It’s mainly for concealment rather than protection. Probably four to six feet.”
“Easy. If you were talking about deep bunkers, proper ones, you would need something bigger, like a Lancaster with the Tallboy that Barnes Wallis came up with. Earthquake bombs,” he added. “They are twenty times the size of the ones we can drop, but that would be overkill for Hildesheim.”
“What about fire?”
“Incendiaries, you mean? We can carry those. No good against a bunker, though.”
She felt a little tightening in her chest and realised she was holding her breath. What she was about to ask skirted close to giving away things that this man wasn’t cleared to know. Not yet. He’d already proved dangerously clever. She needed to know the answer, though. She couldn’t be sure, but by the time this was over, a lot could depend on it. “I’m not talking about starting a fire,” she said carefully. “I’m thinking more if you had to destroy something by fire. Completely. Quickly. So that nothing escaped, and the only thing left was ash.”
He rubbed at his eyes. They were the eyes of a tired old man, she thought, incongruous in that youthful face. The moment passed, though. Careful to avoid cracking his head on the fuselage, he picked a path under the engines and stood by her side, both looking at the Mosquito.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “We could try napalm, I suppose.”
She frowned. “What’s that?”
“Something new. The Americans came up with it a few years back. I’ve never used it, but I know Mosquitoes have dropped it in France. We can carry it right enough, but I’ll have to ask Group to deliver some. I wouldn’t want to use it without practicing first.”
“But what is it?”
“Think of it like a bomb full of petrol and glue,” he said, grimacing. “The petrol ignites when the bomb goes off, creating a fireball in an instant. I read somewhere that we’re talking about nearly two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. That will suck the oxygen right out of the air. Anything that isn’t destroyed by the fireball finds that the gelling agent sticks to it, and it keeps burning much longer than petrol alone would. Are you ok?”
Lane nodded. Her mouth tasted sour, and she wanted to spit to clear the excess saliva. Unclean. That was the word. It wasn’t just the thought of what she might have to order. The worst part was the little thrill of triumph she’d felt when she’d realised this napalm stuff was everything she had hoped for. “These things we do to each other.”
He nodded. “The war will be over soon,” he said. For a moment his hand lifted, moving towards her arm, but then it dropped back by his side. “Being able to look at ourselves in the mirror might take longer.”
She found a smile for him from somewhere, grateful that she didn’t cry easily. “Thank you for showing me your Mosquito,” she said, forcing levity into her voice. “You make a lovely couple.”
“Thank you. We couldn’t be happier.” Suddenly, Durban chuckled. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s head back before I try to talk you into going for a flight with me.”
Together, they walked back from the hangar. They passed several young airmen – they were all young – and Durban returned their salutes, greeting each by name. A few gave her an odd look, as if trying to work out whether her uniform was real or a fancy-dress costume. She doubted they saw many WAAF officers here.
“Hey, boss,” came an Australian voice from one of a group of aircrew stood smoking behind a small building, “when are you giving us a rematch?”
“When the war is over, Steve,” Durban called back.
“When will that be?”
“When you pull your finger out and win it, chap.”
The men laughed and went back to their cigarettes.
“You seem to enjoy your job, Wing Commander Durban,” she said.
“Please call me Andy,” he said. “It has its moments, I’ll admit. You’ll stay the night?”
It took an instant to take in what she’d heard. Another instant more and she stumbled, felt the blood rushing to her cheek, imagined that the aircrew were all staring at her. She looked at Durban and saw his own face reddening.
“Sorry,” he stammered. “Poor word choice. What I mean is that AVM Embry said you’d be remaining at Charney Breach until after the first AFTERLIGHT raid was complete.”
