“Corporal, I wonder if you could do me a favour?”
“I’ll try sir.”
“Could you post a letter for me?”
The corporal shifted nervously.
“I can’t, sir, it’s against base rules.”
“I understand that,” Fleming said, “But it’s only a few words to my wife. If it makes any difference, you can censor it yourself.” He smiled warmly.
The WAAF hesitated, then nodded.
Fleming scribbled a note, sealed it in one of the WAAF’s envelopes and handed it over to her. He dug deep in his pocket and came up with two pennies for the stamp.
“Thank you,” he said, “I’m deeply grateful.” He sprinted for the door.
Outside, he could see the pilot of the Dakota waving him over to the transport. The aircraft was already taxiing to the runway threshold when Fleming was pulled aboard by one of the aircrew kneeling by the open cargo door.
As the DC-3 lumbered into the sky two minutes later, Fleming looked to the west one last time. On a clear day you could probably see Padbury from two thousand feet.
Inside the control tower building, the WAAF shivered as the wind blew through the door by which Fleming had left. She walked over and closed it and sat back at the typewriter. Her husband had been killed just under a year before on the Normandy beaches, but she hadn’t been too upset. She had been having an affair with a GI sergeant for several months by then. She was looking forward to seeing the American later on that evening. He had promised to take her to a show in town.
She had failed to notice the wind lifting Fleming’s envelope and casting it down behind her desk.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The DC-3 rolled to a halt beside a wrecked hangar at the northernmost end of the airfield. Coming in to land, the plane had first been buffeted by the strong crosswind that whipped across the North Sea as they began their descent over the Frisian Islands, and then the rain had come down.
When the pilot finally shut down the engines, Fleming’s battered eardrums took a few seconds to register the new sound. The rain that was being driven against the aircraft’s metal skin sounded like sticks rapping on a kettle-drum.
As a crewman wrestled to open the Dakota’s door, Fleming pulled his greatcoat in tight around his body. The icy blast that hit his face was a chilling welcome to Kettenfeld, an ex-Luftwaffe airfield on the outskirts of Emden. As he jumped down onto the grass, Fleming felt a surge of adrenalin.
A jeep screeched up beside the Dakota. The driver pulled back a canvas flap and shouted against the wind.
“Wing Commander Fleming? I’m Bowman. Jump in.”
The vehicle sped off onto the concrete perimeter road which led to a cluster of buildings on the far side of the field. Bowman, a stocky, balding squadron leader, squinted hard through the windscreen. The wipers were fighting a losing battle against the rain.
From what Fleming could see, Kettenfeld was chaos. Aircraft of all types littered every inch of available space. Fitters, their collars pulled up for protection against the wind and rain, scuttled around their charges, filling empty tanks with fuel, replenishing reserves of oil and hydraulic fluid, checking that rudders and elevators had not iced up.
They passed a recovery team trying to raise the nose of a Havoc whose starboard leg had collapsed as it was being bombed up for a mission. All around, British and American aircraft were landing and taking off, their wings waggling precariously as the pilots fought to keep control in the strong winds.
A week before, Kettenfeld had been in the hands of the Luftwaffe’s NJG 1, a night fighter unit with the hopeless task of intercepting the hundreds of Allied bombers that poured into the German heartland almost every night. At one point, Fleming thought he saw some Junkers 88s parked in a distant corner of the airfield, but they could have been Mosquitoes.
They reached a row of Nissen huts and the brakes squealed as the jeep skidded to a stop.
Bowman pointed to the door of the corrugated iron building and then made a run for it. Fleming was right behind him, but something made him pause by the door. A hundred yards away groundcrew were busy attaching tow lines from troop-carrying gliders to four-engined Halifax tugs. Staverton hadn’t wasted any time. Looking at the gliders, Fleming tried not to think about how many men would die. For a moment he hoped that Bowman’s photographs were not of a 163C, but a trick of the light or an act of deception by the Germans. Then he could rid himself of the whole affair, catch a plane back to England. He shook his head and moved after Bowman.
It was warmer inside, but only just. Bowman led the way down the central corridor and into the office at the far end. The walls were still covered with the regalia of the previous occupants. A recognition chart with the silhouettes of a dozen British and American planes was pinned to one wall and a Luftwaffe squadron photograph tilted at a crazy angle on another. Someone had pushed pieces of newspaper into several bullet-holes that dotted the large iron-framed window, but the draught still forced its way into the room, rustling the papers on Bowman’s desk. Fleming hung his coat up on the back of the door while his companion poured two cups of coffee from the pot which had been gently simmering on the coal-fired stove.
“I’m sorry the weather couldn’t have been a little nicer for you, sir, but then Kettenfeld’s a bloody awful place, I’m afraid. I can’t say I blame Jerry for leaving here in a hurry.”
Fleming put the mug to his lips and sipped the dark, bitter liquid. The coffee burnt his stomach. He hadn’t eaten since the previous evening.
“Would the Germans’ hasty departure explain what looked like some Ju 88s out there?” Fleming gestured with his thumb out the window.
Bowman nodded as he gulped down a mouthful of coffee.
“We found six of them, all pretty much intact. One of them has even got the latest variant of their Lichtenstein radar on board. We’ve been wanting to get our hands on one for months to see how they’ve improved the system.”
“It seems odd the Luftwaffe didn’t destroy them before they left.”
Bowman shrugged.
“I seem to spend the entire bloody time briefing ruddy Army officers about the value of German equipment. The trouble is, their men just look on it as target practice, or a piece of junk that they can vandalize. The EAEU doesn’t mean a thing to them. And as for Montgomery, all he wants to do is get to Berlin as quickly as possible and if that means destroying anything that gets in the way, it’s too bad.”
Bowman was bitter. It was the Russians who had captured all the really good stuff so far. Rocket scientists, aircraft designers, electronics specialists; the Soviets had them all. The British and the Americans had little to show for their efforts. Apart from anything else, it distressed Bowman that few people outside the EAEU appreciated Germany’s military technology, the role it could play in a post-war world. The Russians knew all right.
“In this instance, we were lucky,” Bowman continued. “The Canadians who overran Kettenfeld advanced so quickly that it was all the Germans could do to get their personnel off the base. We found the Ju 88s with their tanks almost dry, so there was no possibility of flying them out and there couldn’t have been time to place demolition charges on them. London radioed this morning to say that a team from Farnborough is on its way over here to fly them back to England. Best of luck to them in these conditions.”
Fleming put his coffee down and pulled out his briefing notes.
“I think,” Fleming said quietly, “that we’re going to have a bit more cooperation from the army over the next few days.”