Читать книгу Len Deighton 3-Book War Collection Volume 1: Bomber, XPD, Goodbye Mickey Mouse - Len Deighton - Страница 29

The bombers were swimming upwards. Ignoring their assigned heights, most pilots that night kept their noses trimmed skywards and let the technical limitations of their machines decide the altitude at which they turned the trim wheels back to normal. Some of the older Stirlings could not get above 11,000 feet. Even the best ones at 18,000 were not above the extreme range of the 8.8-cm flak. The two-motor Wellingtons, however, of even older design, could all do better than this and the best of them, at nearly 24,000 feet, were flying higher than any other planes in the stream.

Lambert had pushed Door to nearly 21,000 feet. Now he trimmed the controls so that the plane was flying ‘hands off’ and turned on the automatic pilot. He felt the elevators kick as it engaged. He had corrected course for the changing wind, so they had crossed the British coast at the prescribed assembly point. In his curtained cabin Kosher watched the shape of the pulses on the scope of the Gee and calculated their position from its map. He pencilled a dot upon his plotting-chart and calculated how much longer it would take until they were over the target. ‘Fifty minutes to TOT,’ he announced. They had entered Luftwaffe fighter grid-square Heinz Emil Four although they had no way of knowing that. Now they were at the front of the bomber stream. That was no great navigational achievement; the stream was an unwieldy slab of bombers flying as much as fifteen miles to either side of the pencilled route. It was timed to be nearly two hundred miles long. So while Creaking Door was over the North Sea the rearmost aircraft was only just taking to the air.

Tonight visibility was poor and only the sound of 2,800 high-performance engines marked their track. Each of those engines required the manufacturing capacity of forty simple car engines. The man-hours spent constructing each four-motor aeroplane would have built almost a mile of Autobahn. The radar and radio equipment alone equalled a million radio sets. The total of hard aluminium amounted to 5,000 tons, or about eleven million saucepans. In cash, at 1943 prices with profits pared to a minimum, each Lancaster cost £42,000. Crew-training averaged out at £10,000 each, at that time more than enough to send the entire crew to Oxford or Cambridge for three years. Add another £13,000 for bombs, fuel, servicing and ground-crew training at bargain prices and each bomber was a public investment of £120,000.

Without including the Oboe Mosquitoes, the nuisance raid on Berlin, the OTU planes dropping leaflets upon Ostend, training flights, transport jobs or any of Coastal Command’s activities, this bombing fleet cost eighty-five million pounds.

Six bombers had already landed – the ‘boomerangs’. Most aircrew hated to abort, for unless they bombed the target the trip didn’t count towards their tour. One Lancaster had got as far as the coast when a radiator leak caused the port inner to disappear in a cloud of steam. A Stirling had a faulty radio and the pilot of a Wellington was suffering from stomach pains. The latter turned back just before the Dutch coast. One Lancaster taking off from an airfield near Lincoln bounced badly enough to smash the undercarriage – one wheel went through a barn roof – and was unable to retract its landing gear when in the air. Its fuel-jettison device failed too. It was still circling its base under orders from Flying Control. When enough of its fuel had been used up to achieve Safe Landing Weight it would try a landing. At Warley Fen, John Munro managed a perfect 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 his rear turret. God, it was cold, but he could see better than he had ever done before. If he bent forward he could almost get his head outside the aircraft. When he rotated the turret the slipstream passing across the barrels of the four Brownings made a gentle screaming sound, like high wind through telephone wires. He kept the turret moving, making the gun muzzles describe little circles as he had practised at gunnery school with pencils in the muzzles. A good gunner could write his name like that. It was a lonely position in the rear turret, especially when night fighters were about, for then chatter on the intercom was forbidden. Flash Gordon and Löwenherz were staring towards each other with all the concentration they could muster, but the night was too dark for either of them to see anything.

Flash heard Cohen order a change of course and watched the clouds slide past the tail.

August watched the red blip change direction on the Seeburg table. Willi marked it with the pencil. ‘He’s turned to port,’ said August. ‘Order: steer fifteen degrees left. He’s very close now.’

‘I think it is us,’ said Cohen. ‘He’s told him to change direction.’

‘Jam him,’ said Lambert urgently. Jimmy Grimm tuned his 1154 transmitter to the 1155 receiver, heard its whistle, sought the silent ‘dead space’ and switched on the microphone that was fixed inside the engine. Lambert banked steeply to change course again.

In the night fighter they were silent. Löwenherz had turned as directed; Mrosek the observer had his field-glasses to his eyes and was scanning each side of the aircraft where the radar did not point. Suddenly Sachs’ radar tube lit up at the end of the range circle: a Tommi at extreme range.

‘We’ve got him,’ said Sachs, trying hard to keep the excitement out of his voice. Suddenly jamming deafened them, so near were they to Jimmy Grimm’s radio transmitter.

‘Just in time,’ said Löwenherz and they tuned the noise to minimum. Löwenherz switched the gun safety-catches to ‘fire’ and a line of red lights appeared on the instrument panel. Suddenly the whole Junkers hit a patch of turbulence. The plane dipped steeply like a horse refusing a fence. A wingtip fell and Löwenherz had to use all his strength to correct the plane’s heading.

‘The Tommi’s slipstream,’ said Löwenherz, but the others knew what it was. The force of it showed how close they were behind the speeding bomber.

‘He’s turning right,’ said Sachs as the blip on his screen started travelling along its base line. ‘He’s turning, keep turning.’ He watched the tube.

‘Level out but keep turning, range still closing. Straighten out, range still closing too fast. Twelve hundred metres.’ Löwenherz followed the turn until when heading almost due south the bomber straightened out and Löwenherz did too. ‘Where do you want him?’ asked Sachs.

‘Slightly starboard.’

‘He’s about seven degrees starboard.’

‘That’s enough, read off the range.’

‘Under one thousand metres, closing slowly.’

Löwenherz wanted to move on to the bomber as slowly as possible, for that would give him the maximum duration of gunfire. ‘Bring me in level with him. I’ll lose height when we get a visual.’

‘It’s still very dark; you’d do better to have him against that bright cirrus.’

‘Very well, bring me in a little below him.’

‘Nine hundred, left a touch. We’re coming in too quickly, Herr Oberleutnant.’

‘I can’t see him.’

‘Still too fast.’

‘Damn, why is he throttling right back?’ Löwenherz reduced his speed until Sachs grunted, ‘That’s in order, Herr Oberleutnant.’

‘Still can’t see him.’

‘We’re very close, five hundred metres.’

‘Got him,’ said Löwenherz, and at the same time Mrosek also gave a yell. Eight yellow dots of exhaust flame pinpricked a horizon across the darkness.

And because all primitive rituals, especially those concerned with death, have their own vocabulary, Löwenherz reported his sighting to Bach with the words ‘Kettle drums, kettle drums’.

‘Lancaster bomber,’ said Mrosek, whose task it was to identify the targets before an attack.

‘You beauty,’ said Löwenherz.

Flash Gordon was a mild man, small in stature, humble in origin and quiet of voice and yet within him was growing a hatred of Binty Jones that he wouldn’t have thought possible. Hardly a day went by without a jibe or a word of sarcasm and now most recent and hurtful of all was Binty’s scorn of his turret modification. If Binty had publicly recognized what a fine idea it was, then the Gunnery Officer might have ordered the turrets of all Squadron planes to be similarly altered. Who knows, it might have been called the ‘Gordon panel’. Invented by a gunner named Gordon, people say he was one of the greatest gunnery experts the Air Force ever had.

Although Flash Gordon never told real lies, he had come to realize that sometimes a white lie can be necessary for the sake of mankind’s progress. If telling a lie was the only way of having an excellent modification incorporated into Warley Fen’s aeroplanes then a lie wouldn’t stand in his way. In ten minutes I’ll do it, he thought, but changed his mind. There would never come a quieter time than now: that fighter scare was over and they were quite alone in the sky.

‘Fighter, fighter. Corkscrew port, go!’ said Flash Gordon. Without bothering to use the sights, he opened fire into the blank darkness. Lambert, obeying instinctively the command that any crew member was empowered to give, flung Creaking Door into a vertical bank and let it drop through the air like a slate.

Binty Jones, not to be outdone by his colleague, also fired his guns. Curves of tracer hosepiped across the sky as Door fell faster than its turrets could turn.

‘My God,’ said Löwenherz as the tracer came towards him. Instinctively he shied away, while Door’s eight exhaust flames tipped vertical and slid out of sight under his nose. The little .303 bullets that the Tommis fired were seldom fatal against the solidly built Junkers, but still Löwenherz found it impossible to fly through them.

‘He’s seen us,’ said Mrosek. Löwenherz swore. He followed the bomber down, trying to bring the flame spots up past the windscreen again, but now that he was higher than the bomber he no longer had the advantage of the moonlit clouds.

Lambert was following the classic manoeuvre of the corkscrew and chanting its litany as he went, to warn the crew: diving port, climbing port, roll, climbing starboard, diving starboard, roll, diving port, climbing port …

Many times Löwenherz had seen such an evasive pattern. Four or five times he had been able to execute identical manoeuvres in formation with his victim and kill him while they danced together. He could not do it this time. For a corkscrew can be executed in such a leisurely fashion that it occupies ten miles of air-space (some pilots corkscrewed like this the whole journey) or it can be the brutal wing-wrenching, back-breaking manoeuvre that Lambert now put into effect.

‘Lost contact,’ said Sachs.

‘My fault,’ said Löwenherz.

The night fighter’s Li C1 airborne radar projected only a narrow cone of signals straight ahead (between 60 and 30 degrees to be precise). Löwenherz waggled his aircraft through a horizon-searching series of manoeuvres. It was no use. He switched on the radio transmitter.

‘Announcement,’ said Löwenherz. ‘Katze One, contact lost.’

‘Katze One,’ said August, his voice still badly marred by the jamming, ‘Order: steer 200 degrees.’ August looked at the plotting-table and saw that the blip that was Creaking Door was at the extreme edge of his sector. ‘He has luck, that Tommi,’ said August. ‘If he’d turned the other way we’d still be able to go after him.’

‘There are plenty more where he came from,’ said Willi.

In Creaking Door Lambert had stopped corkscrewing. His hands were trembling; so that Battersby would not notice he kept a tight grip on the controls. Suddenly the pain in his back and shoulder, unnoticed during the time of danger, returned with new ferocity. ‘Give me a course for Noordwijk, Kos,’ said Lambert.

‘086, Skip,’ said Cohen. Always the perfect navigator, he had been keeping the calculation fresh while waiting for the question.

‘Now do you believe in my clear-vision panel?’ Flash Gordon asked the world at large. He had waited long enough for a word of congratulation or thanks.

‘Bloody good show,’ said Lambert.

‘I don’t believe you saw anything,’ accused Binty Jones.

‘A damn great night fighter, man. In fact, I think I may have hit him.’

‘Balls,’ said Binty. ‘There was nothing there.’

‘Then why were you firing?’ asked Flash. There was no reply. ‘The Gordon clear-view panel, I’m going to call it.’

‘Just an old-fashioned liar with old …’ Binty began the fourth verse of the song.

‘For Christ’s sake belt up, everyone,’ said Lambert.

S Sweet had lost headway by the wind error back at Lowestoft and Door had been turning and corkscrewing over the ocean so that by midnight, German Time, while both Sweet and Lambert were eight miles short of the coastline, Tommy Carter in Joe for King and Fleming in The Volkswagen had reached Noordwijk, turned and were four miles along their final leg for the target. About midway between them – two miles off Noordwijk – Löwenherz was moving back over the sea. Twice he had passed within one hundred yards of Joe for King. For a few seconds his wingtip was only twenty feet from the tailplane of a Halifax but none of the crews had spotted these near-misses and to them the sky seemed vast and empty.

Noordwijk-aan-zee is a holiday resort on the coast of Holland. In 1943 the sand was criss-crossed with barbed wire, and steel spears were hidden in the sea. The hotels had become convalescent homes and military offices and the wide sea-front that in peacetime was crowded with holidaymakers was guarded by armed sentries. The lighthouse stands on the modern esplanade and now its shaded light was switched on while the convoy moved past. The flak-cruiser Held