Operation Afterlight, page 19
The aircraft twitched as the bomb doors dropped open.
Durban reached for the bomb selection switch. He ignored the gunsight and his payload of rockets. Their time would come.
No flak yet. That, too, would be coming. All too soon.
He pulled back and pressed the bomb release. “Flare gone.”
For a second only, darkness endured. Then the night exploded with light far beyond the gentle glow of the moon.
Pathfinders called it Sky Marking. The name was well-chosen. Tumbling from the aircraft before being arrested by the opening parachute, the Target Indication flare burst into life. A new sun in the sky, it stripped the airfield of concealing shadows with the ferocious glow of two hundred and fifty thousand candlepower. Beneath them, the barracks, the runway, the perimeter fence, and the critical horseshoe shapes of the revetments were all laid bare in an instant. Durban saw it all.
But the flare worked both ways.
Grant yelled a warning. Unnecessary. Durban already had the bomb doors closed and the Mosquito racing for the deck.
Not quick enough.
The gunners were good. Even taken by surprise, squinting up into the sudden artificial daylight, they still picked him out in seconds. The first muzzle flashes seemed to appear at once. Four, five, maybe more 20mm guns. All sharing one target. No obvious glow of tracers – the flare saw to that – but Durban didn’t need to see them to know they were there.
The aircraft rocked as black smoke flowered either side of them. A crack of splintering wood echoed in the tight confines of the cockpit.
Down, down, further down, close enough that the grasping branches of the trees at the perimeter of the airfield seemed ready to pluck them from the air. More rounds passed overhead, the Mosquito now too low and too distant for at least some of the anti-aircraft gun emplacements to track.
“I think you pissed them off, sir,” Grant said.
“They will be even more upset in a minute.”
On the distant side of the brightly lit airfield, the next Mosquito raced in. Full throttle. Too fast. The crew was lucky that the gunners, probably expecting only a single night intruder, still focused on Durban. The pilot, whoever he was, didn’t take full advantage. Trailing smoke in their wake, eight rockets streaked from beneath his wings, sending lumps of dirt and grass wheeling into the air fifty or more yards short of the nearest revetment.
“Colt Leader to all callsigns, pick your targets properly,” Durban snapped into his radio. “Take your time, use your sights and correct for the trajectory drop-off.”
“Sorry, Colt Leader.” A Welsh accent.
“Get yourself home, Chapple,” Durban said as the now spent Mosquito raced into the darkness beyond the descending flare’s radiance. “Everyone else, like we practiced.”
The next Mosquito was already inbound. Ignoring the fingers of tracers heading its way, the pilot kept the aircraft perfectly level. Two rockets shot from under the wings. Two seconds to judge the fall, and then six more. The aircraft turned slightly, both to confuse the flak and to avoid the detonations of its own ordnance as five rockets slammed into the protective sandbags and earth around the aircraft. The sixth did the damage.
“Like that?”
“Yes. Thank you, Barto.” Durban glanced at his watch. Only thirty seconds since the flare had ignited, but already the circle of radiance was shrinking rapidly. The 4.5-inch Skymarker burned for up to two minutes, but it wasn’t burn time that was the problem here but its steady descent, the parachute unable to arrest it sufficiently.
Despite the now alert gunners and the sheer volume of cannon shells zipping through the sky above the airfield, the third and fourth Mosquito somehow made their runs unscathed. Sadly, their targets were similarly blessed. The rockets either missed or exploded uselessly against the revetments, their protective bulk taller and thicker than expected. Durban cursed. “All rocket armed callsigns, focus on the barracks. Kittens, put your napalm on the building once the rockets have done their work. Everyone else, focus on the aircraft. Torch them.”
“Roger,” Kittens replied curtly.
“One thousand feet is too low,” Durban told Grant, as the encroaching darkness overtook the barracks building before being briefly repelled by the flash of impacting rockets. “We’ll need to drop the next flare higher.”
Grant’s eyes bulged behind his goggles. “The next one?”
Pulling the Mosquito into a climb, Durban looked across the airfield. Smoke billowed from the barracks building. Flames glowed in the upper windows. Still, the damage was negligible. Worse still, only one of the six Dorniers had been destroyed so far. Lane had made it clear that they would only get one shot at this. If they didn’t get all the targets tonight, the rest would be gone by dawn. Maybe taking the whole of Götterdämmerung with them. That could not be tolerated.
“This isn’t a good idea, sir,” Grant said as they passed one thousand feet.
“Neither was volunteering for the RAF. But you’re here now. Might as well enjoy it.”
A whoosh and a crump, audible even over the screaming engines, drowned out Grant’s response. A second Dornier disappeared, enveloped in an incandescent frenzy of petrol and glue. This time, Durban caught only the briefest impression of the Mosquito responsible before it disappeared into the night, pursued by a swarm of tracer and leaving a thin tendril of smoke in its wake.
The flare settled on the ground. It didn’t sputter and die immediately. He’d seen Lancasters drop on far dimmer markers. But for precision strike, it was all but useless now. “All callsigns hold and wait for the next flare.” Next to him, he saw Grant twitch in his seat. He couldn’t blame him. They were at two thousand feet over a heavily defended and very alert airfield, and Grant’s pilot and commander had just ordered away any other aircraft that might have drawn some fire away from them.
The navigator was right. This wasn’t a good idea.
Durban watched the altimeter hit two thousand feet, opened the bomb doors himself, pushed aside another sudden thought of Lane, and released the second flare.
The guns turned on him instantly, but this time he didn’t rush into the darkness. The view afforded by the igniting flare revealed the exposed topside of a Dornier. An easier shot in a dive than low and level. Far more dangerous, too, but the time for such considerations had long passed. He clicked the rocket salvo switch to on. “Resume attack,” he barked into the radio, then threw the Mosquito into a sixty-degree dive.
The controls writhed in his hands. The world raced towards them. He felt the rockets strain against their mounts, on the verge of being ripped away in the slipstream and probably taking the wings with them, but then his finger was on the firing stud and the rockets were gone and streaming ahead of them. All eight at once. No ranging shot. No need.
He pulled back on the controls. Nothing happened, the flight surfaces barely responding.
You’ve left this too late, he told himself.
What a bloody stupid way to die.
The nose twitched.
He heard Grant groan. Or maybe it was the aircraft itself.
The Dornier exploded, the impact of at least three rockets sending huge chunks of fuselage cartwheeling over the collapsing walls of the shattered revetments.
The nose came up, slowly. Too slowly. Muscles screaming from the effort, he tried to wrench the controls into his chest, into his seat. The burning wreckage of the Dornier filled his vision. Beckoning.
And then it was below the nose, and the smell of burning fuel filled the cockpit, and his eyes blinked to clear the image of the flames from his sight.
“You’re climbing again, sir. Keep the nose down.”
“I can’t see,” Durban said. He blinked furiously. Mottled colours danced across his eyes.
“Nose down ten degrees. More. There. Hold her steady.”
Durban took a deep breath. The night ahead resolved itself into darkness. His eyes watered. He had to restrain his hand from pulling off his goggles and dabbing at them. “Are you okay?”
“Fantastic, boss.” Grant’s grin seemed a little too wide. His eyes, wider still.
“Well played,” Durban said. “Thank you. Did the flak follow us?”
“Are you joking, sir? I reckon they thought we’d crashed.”
“Not this time, Johnny.” He decided not to add that there was plenty of time left for that, and banked back towards the glowing sphere above the airfield.
“Aren’t we heading home? We’re out of rockets.”
“Doesn’t matter. The job needs completing.”
The radio crackled into life. “Colt Leader, this is Bravo Four. Another Dornier down, but we’re hit.”
Durban thought he recognised the man’s voice as Hartley, one of Barton’s friends. The accent was Australian, the fear in each syllable universal. “Good work, Bravo Four. Can you make it home?”
“I reckon so. Might be a near-run thing, though. I think we’re leaking fuel.”
“Divert to a nearer airfield if you have to. Remember to broadcast and let them know you’re coming. Good luck.”
“You too, sir.”
Durban kept them low, circling outside the flare’s light but close enough to watch as another Mosquito came in fast and struck the damaged barracks with napalm. Kittens. Nothing wrong with his aim. Already leaking smoke and fire from several obvious rents in its walls, in an instant the building became a ferocious mass of flames. A funeral pyre for the specially trained pilots.
“Colt Leader to Bravo Leader, fine bowling. Do you have anyone left to strike?”
“Negative, Colt Leader. We’re all done. All revetments struck.”
“Sir!” Grant pointed across the airfield, away from the smoking building, towards the line of hangars away from the main strike route. “I think that’s a Dornier.”
It took Durban’s eyes, still smarting from staring into the fires, several seconds to spot it. He knew instantly that the navigator was right. The aircraft stood alone on a concrete area outside the hangars, its distinctive shape long and spindly, almost insectoid. “Excellent spot. They must have moved it there for maintenance.” He switched to the radio. “Colt Leader to all callsigns, does anyone have ordnance left? Napalm or rockets?”
No reply. Radio silence adopted once more as the Mosquitoes streamed back towards England, each alone in the moon-haunted darkness.
He looked again. In the last dying light of the flare, there was no sign of the specialised containers under the wings. The thought crossed his mind that this could be an ordinary night fighter, just a regular Luftwaffe aircraft assigned to Uelzen like dozens before it. But he couldn’t take that chance.
“We’ll have to take them ourselves,” Durban said.
“Yes, sir,” Grant intoned.
Rolling back in towards the target, Durban pushed the throttles forward. Perhaps the flak crews thought it was over. Perhaps they were reloading. It didn’t matter. No one fired at them as they passed over the burning barracks. Two hundred feet below their wingtip, an amorphous figure stumbled out of the inferno, a small ambulatory flame detached from the greater mass that made it perhaps ten yards before collapsing on the ground.
That, perhaps, was the signal the gunners had been waiting for.
From all sides, tracers hurtled towards them. Durban heard a dull thud, like a leather belt slapping a drum. Grant gasped. Twenty-millimetre shells left glowing streaks in the air either side of the cockpit as he kept the Mosquito howling low over the airfield, letting the Dornier fill the gunsight before firing. Falling rounds stitched a path across the earth until they met the fuselage. Empty of fuel and stripped for engineering work, the aircraft didn’t explode, but the fading light was enough for Durban to see it collapse as heavy shells shattered the undercarriage and sent sparks flying as they slammed into the port engine.
The controls bucked once more in his hands as a shell burst nearby, and then they were clear and out of range and racing westwards.
“That should do it,” Durban said. “Time to plot us a good course for home, Johnny. The bastards might get that thing flying again if they had months, but they don’t.” Whatever the SS planned to do with Götterdämmerung, they would need to do it without their modified aircraft. Or their pilots, he thought with a grim half-smile of satisfaction.
With the airfield now ten miles or more behind and wreathed in darkness but for the glow of the burning barracks, Durban pulled the aircraft into a climb, then frowned as he watched the speed drop. Not a terrible reduction, but more than expected. “Power is down a touch.” He glanced to his left. The port engine ran true, props blurring in the gloom. “The starboard engine may have copped a packet on that last run. Any sign of damage?” He checked the fuel gauge. Half a tank, despite their manoeuvring over the target. More than enough, and no sign of any leaks. The oil temperature and pressure indicators seemed normal. The controls still felt solid, the aircraft handling well despite the reduced climb rate, but something wasn’t right.
Still no response from the navigator. He turned in irritation.
Grant was looking down at his gloved hand, tilting it first one way and then the other, eyes transfixed.
“Johnny, any sign of damage?”
A sharp intake of breath. “Sorry, sir,” Grant mumbled. He turned to the side, away from Durban, to look back at the starboard engine. “It seems ok,” he said after a few seconds, his head seeming to loll against the seat.
The clouds broke above them, and in the sudden moonlight, Durban saw the glistening moisture on the glove, dark against the leather. “Johnny? Are you hit?”
Grant sighed and stared at his hand again. “Yeah, boss,” he breathed. “I think I am.”
Keeping the aircraft climbing with one hand, Durban scanned the cockpit. No sign of any damage, no sound of air whistling through any fissure in the airframe. But there was little mistaking the dark patch spreading on the navigator’s overalls, nor the ragged tears in the material of his yellow life preserver.
“How bad is it?” He regretted the question immediately.
“It doesn’t feel great,” Grant said. “Sorry.”
“Ok, ok,” Durban said. “You’re going to be fine. I’ve seen men come back with far worse, and you’ll have a nice scar to show the girls in Stav. Here’s what you’re going to do, Johnny. You’re going to give me a course for the nearest divert airfield in the UK. Then you’re going to take a field dressing from your pocket, find wherever they’ve pranged you, and shove that dressing in the hole.”
Grant coughed. It sounded weak, but at least there was no whistle or creak from the lungs. “Bearing two-eighty,” he said, without checking his map.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course,” Grant said. “I’m a good navigator.”
“That you are, Johnny.”
They passed fifteen thousand feet, still climbing, Durban keeping the RPM as high as he dared. Grant fumbled for a field dressing and reached inside his overalls, shifting uncomfortably in his seat until he winced.
“I take it you found the spot?”
“One of them, sir. I could really use some morphine if you have it.”
Durban shook his head. “Not yet. I need you to stay awake. Can you do that?”
“Is it an order, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Then I can do it. But can I have a late start tomorrow, please?”
Durban smiled, despite himself. “Yes, you can. I promise.” Behind the navigator, he saw an odd glow. It added the faintest halo to the young man’s head. He felt a sudden chill. “Listen, Johnny, we’re in a bit of a pickle here. I don’t think you soaked up quite all the shrapnel. They hit the right engine. The exhaust flare shield’s gone.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s less than ideal. It’s just a dim glow for now, but that thing is going to be a white-hot beacon soon. Every night fighter in western Europe will see it. I’d take us lower and worry about the flak instead, but I suspect you’ve had quite enough of flak for one night, right?”
“I just want to sleep,” Grant mumbled.
“And you will. When we get home. Right now, I need you looking at your map. You knew where the main night fighter areas are, yes? Then rustle us up a route that avoids them.”
Grant sniffed but sat up taller in his seat. His finger left a dark smudge on the map as he worked.
“Oh, and Johnny?” He checked behind them. Nothing there. Not even the familiar silhouette from another night, another cockpit. “Make sure your route avoids British night fighter bases too, ok?”
They flew on. The black of the night drew closer, darker still, bands of cirrus cloud obscuring the moon. Durban kept the Mosquito’s path unpredictable, not letting it stay straight and level for too long. Changing course to clear the sky behind them and to take advantage of the concealment of cloud. Never straying too far from the headings that Grant gave him. At first, the navigator kept up a steady stream of instructions. With each passing minute, they became less common, the voice fading.
“We’re getting near the coast,” Durban warned him. “That flare shield is like a bloody flashlight now. I’m going to have to drop a little lower to hide in the cloud band over the Channel, but I need you to steer me through the main flak concentrations.”
No response. He looked over. Grant slumped unmoving in his seat. The way Lampeter had.
He reached out and grabbed the navigator by the arm, hard.
“Jesus,” Grant said. “That hurts. I’m here. I’m just resting.”
“You were asleep. Turn your oxygen on full.”
The navigator didn’t move. Durban stretched across and did it for him, then nudged him again, more gently this time. Slowly, Grant’s eyes focused. His eyes flickered to the map, and his hands seemed to gain new strength as he made further calculations. “Three five zero for four minutes,” he said finally. “Then two nine five for twelve. That should see you straight to Charney Breach.”
