Len Deighton 3-Book War Collection Volume 1: Bomber, XPD, Goodbye Mickey Mouse. Len Deighton
take-off in spite of a tyre blow-out. He’d corrected the resultant swing effortlessly and two of the crew didn’t notice anything unusual. His problem would arise on his return.
Creaking Door, S Sweet, The Volkswagen and Joe for King were all within half a mile of each other, with Lambert 2,000 feet above the others, although on this dark night the only person to know that was the radar operator at Ermine who watched the blips slide across his screen. Lambert was as high as the plane would go and the control column was mushy and insensitive in his hands.
High above him, almost touching the stratosphere, he could see long wispy cirrus clouds. At the moment they weren’t lying along the wind direction, but the wind would continue to back until they were. They heralded rain, but Lambert’s interest in the clouds was a more immediate one and warned of a more immediate danger. The clouds glowed white and luminous, spotlit by a bright moon that had not yet appeared over the horizon. Soon it would appear and the sky would lighten and the mantle of night would start to go at the elbows.
The Freya radar warned the smaller, more accurate, Würzburg of the stream’s route. Its three-man crew complained of the cold, as they always did, and tilted the mirror until suddenly four blips – Door, Sweet, The Volkswagen and Joe for King – slid across the hooded radar scope. The number one operator missed three spots of light but held the fourth one and tuned to it. Inside the warm dark plotting-room August held his breath like an angler when the float twitches.
‘Red Würzburg has a contact, sir,’ said Willi Reinecke, ‘in Heinz Emil Four.’ It was as August had predicted. He compared the blue spot of light that marked Löwenherz’s night fighter. It was about ten miles away from the red one. ‘Question: your altitude and bearing, Katze One,’ said August as a double check.
It was Sachs, the radar man in the back seat, who replied. Löwenherz, hearing the call, turned his instrument-panel illumination to minimum and leaned close to the black windscreen. He could hear the wind buffeting the hinges and fixtures.
‘Order: Caruso ten left, Katze One,’ said August. Löwenherz touched the rudder bar. He knew that he must comply with every instruction immediately it was given, for the heavy Junkers with its clumsy aerial array was not much faster than a Lancaster. For the same reason its stalling-speed was higher.
‘It’s a parallel head-on intercept,’ said August. ‘I’ll bring him in slightly to the north of the Tommi.’
‘Announcing: boring cinema,’ said Löwenherz. It was code for poor visibility.
Willi Reinecke gave a little splutter of indignation. ‘They are always complaining.’ He followed the moving points of light across the frosted-glass table, marking their progress with a wax pencil so that the converging courses could be seen. In spite of the dimmed lights August could see that the plotting-room had begun to fill up with off-duty personnel who wanted to see the excitement.
‘Prepare: 180-degree turn,’ said August.
‘That’s clear,’ crackled Löwenherz’s acknowledgement.
‘A starboard turn,’ August explained to Willi. ‘If he turns to port he’ll pass close enough across his front for the Tommi to spot him.’
By now Löwenherz had become a part of the machinery; it was August who was flying the plane.
August looked round the plotting-room at the expectant faces. Some of the men were in overcoats thrown over pyjamas, their hair awry and faces stubbly. They watched him with the godlike and superior impartiality with which spectators judge card games. An orderly elbowed his way through them and came up the steps of the rostrum with a tray of coffee cups. The coffee soon disappeared and he went back to the kitchen for more. August drank his without tasting it. He watched the two coloured lights rushing towards each other. They represented a combined speed of six hundred miles per hour. He knew that a mistake in the timing of Katze One’s turn could cause them to miss the contact. That wasn’t an enjoyable thing for the commanding officer to do for an audience of subordinates.
‘Skip, give me a bit of straight and level for a star shot.’ Kosher Cohen stood under the Perspex astrodome fixing the stars through a sextant. Kosher was one of the few RAF navigators who was skilled in its use. At the navigation school he’d handled it better than his instructor. ‘Where the devil did you learn how to handle one of these, son?’
‘My father’s yacht, sir.’
‘And a bloody comedian to boot. Sit down. Next.’
There wasn’t time for another shot, so he compared his readings with the Gee fix. Four shots with a four-mile-wide cocked hat to show their position. Not bad at all.
Cohen looked at his plotting-chart in the tiny circle of his desk light. To make good his track he drew the wind-speed and direction and calculated their ground-speed from the remaining side of the triangle thus formed. ‘Eleven minutes to the Dutch coast,’ he said. No one answered.
Lambert shifted his behind on the hard parachute pack. The heavy unpowered controls required a lot of physical strength to move them and already he had an ache in his shoulder and the usual pain in his spine. He sat upright to stretch his back and rolled his shoulders. ‘We are within radar range,’ he warned the crew. ‘Keep your eyes peeled for fighters.’
Like all of the bomber stream’s wireless operators, Jimmy Grimm, whose father had a radio shop in Highgate, was tuning his radio to the frequencies between 7050 and 7100 kilocycles trying to find an enemy voice. Then he could transmit a signal on the same frequency to blot out the conversation between controller and fighter pilots. A microphone was fitted into an engine of each bomber especially for this purpose. Suddenly he heard August’s voice.
‘Order: start turning … now.’
‘Turning,’ said Löwenherz.
Jimmy Grimm was excited. ‘I’ve found one of their controllers and a night fighter.’
August Bach’s voice came over the headphones with the same clarity that Löwenherz heard it. ‘Order: steer 097 degrees,’ said August. ‘Announcing: enemy range ten kilometres.’
‘The plane he’s following is on our heading,’ said Cohen.
‘Every plane in the stream is on our heading,’ said Digby. He was full-length in the nose trying to see the Dutch coast.
‘I wish I could understand German better,’ said Jimmy Grimm. ‘That’s the trouble with being a radio ham; in peacetime I used to pick up all sorts of stations and only speak a few words of everything.’
‘While you types are sodding about, some poor bastard is going to get the chop,’ said Digby. ‘Why don’t you jam him?’
‘Perhaps it’s us he’s after,’ said Binty from the mid-upper turret.
‘Can we steer on to 080 degrees just to be sure, Skipper?’ said Cohen.
‘You’re the navigator,’ said Lambert and put the plane into a shallow banking turn.
‘He’s still a long way behind the bomber,’ said Cohen, ‘and the Controller keeps telling him to lose height.’
‘You are still well above him,’ August told Löwenherz; ‘lose another five hundred metres.’
Again Löwenherz touched the control column and the fighter dipped. Beside him the observer had his field-glasses on his lap; the bomber was too far away and the night too dark for there to be a chance of visual contact yet. Behind Löwenherz, facing rearwards, the radar operator was boxed in with so much equipment that he was scarcely able to move. His three radar screens that showed range, altitude position and lateral position were tucked under his right elbow and to see them he had to cock his head on one side like a sparrow. It was useless to look at them yet, for the equipment wouldn’t show the target until they were three thousand metres away.
‘Order: hold it,’ warned August. Löwenherz throttled back.
Flash Gordon was staring through the newly open part of