“Yes, I do.”
“That’s exactly why I’m not going there. Hold your hand out.” Barton scooped up all the bits of paper and flung them into the air. They fluttered down. Some landed on Skull’s head and shoulders. One piece fell on his palm. “What have you got?” Barton asked.
Skull turned it over. “Beda Fomm,” he said.
“Lovely. That’s what we’ll hit.”
“You’re mad,” Skull said. “You’ve gone doolally.”
“Not a bit!” Barton cried cheerfully. “If I don’t know what I’m doing next, how can the enemy possibly know?”
It was late in the afternoon when the three Kittyhawks took off. Barton led them in a circuit and then brought them down in line abreast to beat up the field. Skull, Uncle and the doc stood and watched. It was useless speaking until the thunder had passed and faded to a drone as the formation climbed westward.
“I apologize for breaking your gramophone record,” the doc said. “It was an uncivilized thing to do in the middle of a war.”
“Think nothing of it.”
“You broke ‘Empty Saddles’?” Kellaway said. “Damn clumsy of you. That was Fanny’s favorite.”
“It was a necrophiliac dirge, Uncle. Pretentious, syrupy guff. Even so, I had no right to break it.”
“Don’t concern yourself,” Skull said. “As it happens, I have another copy in my tent.”
“Mother was right,” the doc said. “I should never have left Ireland.”
The choice of Beda Fomm may have been a matter of chance, but to every other aspect of the raid Barton gave the closest possible thought.
Success hinged on timing their arrival just as the last fat slice of sun slid below the horizon. Sunset happened fast in Libya: day turned to night without the long English compromise of dusk. However, at ten thousand feet the Libyan day lasted a little longer: a pilot still saw the rim of the sun when men below him were in darkness.
The Kittyhawks flew northwest from LG 250, climbing hard, and leveled out at twenty thousand feet. At this time of day the average Luftwaffe fighter pilot would be heading for home: the 109, with its knock-kneed undercarriage and its tendency to crab at the moment of touchdown, was not an easy machine to land in the dark. Barton saw a few metallic glints at great distance. They all faded to nothing.
The Kittyhawks cruised watchfully for almost an hour. Over the Jebel they circled while the sun edged lower and lower until it silently collided with the end of the world and seemed to flatten a little on impact. They made one more circuit and then Barton led them down.
Beda Fomm was clear to see. South of Benghazi the coastline bulged out and then in. Beda Fomm sat in the center of that inward curve. Its runways made a distinctive pattern, a slanting cross, as if someone had slammed a rubber stamp on the scruffy countryside. It was a tiny cross, but the last, blazing, horizontal rays of the sun made it shine. Soon it was no longer tiny and it no longer shone, and then it was lost in the gloom as the sun vanished. The Kittyhawks were diving at an ever-steeper angle, picking up speed like skis on ice, plunging into darkness. Barton had slipped into his usual stoic, fatalistic frame of mind. Nothing could be changed, so there was no point in worrying. Patterson was not yet frightened, but knew he soon would be and he dreaded it; meanwhile he was a small god about to blast a small enemy and as always the prospect gave him huge excitement. Hooper, too, was enjoying himself. He felt like the hand guiding a giant firearm. The bombs under the wings were bullets. Soon he would fling them at the target and go. Then flak began exploding and he began to shake. His left thigh trembled violently. He whacked it with his fist, but still it shook.
The flak became a storm. Often the smoke obliterated the ground. Barton stopped looking for Beda Fomm: if all this muck was coming up, the target must be down there. He watched the altimeter unwind and he blinked repeatedly as his Kittyhawk smashed through the tortured, blackened air. A dim familiar pattern took shape below and he bombed it, felt the airplane shift as it lost its load, and heaved the stick into his stomach.
Nobody escaped undamaged.
They flew home as low as possible, only fifty or sixty feet above the desert. This was to baffle the radar, which would be confused by echoes from the dunes, and to hide from the nightfighters. Barton knew how difficult it was to pick out a low-flying aircraft by day, let alone at night. Yet a pair of Mel 10 nightfighters bounced the Kittyhawks, bursting out of the blackness with a thumping, dazzling barrage of fire. The Kittyhawks broke hard toward the attack and for a few seconds there was a cursing chaos of near-collisions. The 110s’ speed carried them many miles away. They hunted doggedly and caught the Kittyhawks again. Patterson took several hits. But Barton kept his little formation down on the deck, they lost the 110s, and eventually they reached LG 250.
It had a flare path, of sorts: tins full of sand soaked with petrol. They gave a feeble outline to the runway.
“You go first, Pip,” Barton said.
“Do my best.”
The ground crew were waiting, armed with axes, pick-handles, fire-extinguishers, metal-cutters, buckets of sand. Patterson made his approach like an accident looking for somewhere to happen: left wing down, nose high, speed falling too fast. Far too fast. He knew all this, but he could do nothing to alter it. What he didn’t know was that only one wheel had come down. The other was stuck. There were cockpit signals to tell the pilot the state of his undercarriage, but Patterson was in no shape to look at cockpit signals.
The airplane fell apart when it hit the ground. Four tons of machinery traveling at well over a hundred and twenty miles an hour is very unforgiving. The Kittyhawk shed its wings, the fuselage screamed and bucketed along until it had snapped off its tailplane, and what was left performed a long, grinding pirouette down the strip, gradually exhausting itself against the unfeeling desert.
The ground crew got Patterson out in a tearing rush. The stench of petrol urged them on. They staggered and stumbled away with him. As the doc knelt in the sand the engine flickered and caught fire with a roar like a trapped animal. “Let it burn,” he said. “I need the light.”
The fire helped Barton and Hooper too. They picked their way between the lumps of wreckage and landed safely.
“Busy night?” the doc said, without looking up from his work.
“We got bounced by some 110s. How is he?”
“If the kite took as much of a beating as the pilot, it’s a miracle he got it down at all.” By now Skull and Kellaway were there too. They all formed a loose circle around the stretcher. A pressure lamp added its pure light to the yellow flames.
“What’s the score?” Patterson asked. He was very hoarse: the crash-landing had flung his head about so violently that he could scarcely swallow.
“Shut up, you. It’s long past your bedtime.”
“I want—”
“Lie still and behave.”
“I want the song.” Patterson looked around until he found Skull. “‘Empty Saddles.’”
“For the love of Christ!” the doc said. He slid a needle into Patterson’s arm. “Is there no taste left in the world? I’m surrounded by the droolings of dross.”
“Dross can’t drool,” Skull said. “Dross is mineral.”
“Play the record,” Barton told Skull.
“He can’t hear it,” the doc said. “He’s out.”
“I don’t care. Play it.”
The stretcher was carried away. They all trudged alongside it. “Where did he get hit?” Hick Hooper asked.
“Right leg, made a mess of his calf. Left hand, two fingers gone. Shell splinters down his left side. Right eye isn’t working. Right shoulder’s dislocated, deep cut on the arm, left leg’s broken, but I think that all happened in the crash. Probably some other damage I’ll discover in due course.”