Fleming pushed the throttle to the stops and slid in behind the tail of the Ju 288, the Luftwaffe’s very latest armed and armoured eye-in-the-sky. Despite its twin boosted Jumo engines, the Mk XVI Spitfire was faster. Fleming watched in wide-mouthed fascination as it grew in his sights. Another fifty yards and he’d have him.
And then it was gone. Fleming had a fleeting impression of ten tons of metal standing on its wing-tip for a split second before spiralling down like a sycamore seed on an autumn wind to the sanctity of the cumulus below. He swore, fighting the needles of panic that jabbed at his skin, then punched the rudder bar and whipped the stick over to the left in a vicious, synchronized action, struggling against the gs as the horizon disappeared. His head locked against the canopy, pressed there by the force of five times gravity as the Spitfire whirled earthwards.
Spiralling.
As he had over Monte Lupo with an FW 190 on his tail.
He fought to remain conscious, to beat the g-induced darkness, his eyes desperately trying to relocate the German aircraft. Must… find it. Must leave the past behind. Through the mist of his grey-out the snow-covered earth and the clouds merged into a dizzying fusion of whiteness, punctuated every revolution of his turn by a flash of blue. Sky..?
The Junkers. There it was, revolving past his cockpit once every half second. Still making for the clouds. Almost there. So was he.
Fleming responded automatically, kicking on opposite rudder and pulling back on the stick. Two more revs and he was out of the spin. His head swam from the effects of the g and his body was damp from the hot flush of sweat that oozed from every pore during his brief plummet earthwards. The sweat of fear, not just physical exertion. Except this time he was going to beat it. He had to or it would consume him, Penny, everything. The remedy was here, in the clouds.
Fleming locked onto the tail of the Junkers, about three hundred yards behind, just as it entered the wall of stratocumulus. He followed, penetrating the cloud as close as he could to his opponent’s entry point.
A moment of thick cloaking mist swirling round the cockpit, then a bright searing flash as he shot out of it into the blue eye of the huge cloud formation. A great glint of silver as the Junkers split-essed away from him, downwards, the sun catching on the thin film of water vapour on its glistening underside, like light reflecting off the belly of a gamefish.
Down again through the great tunnel of steam, keeping the Junkers within the frame of his windshield, tantalizingly close to his sights. And all the time the thought was tumbling through his mind.
It shouldn’t be able to do this. A Junkers shouldn’t bloody well fly like this. How can a man throw a heavy fighter-bomber round the sky without tearing its wings off?
Fleming jinked with the Junkers down a narrow chasm of clear sky, two great white walls either side of him. The enemy aircraft banked into the cloud and disappeared. He felt sick with the exertion, he wanted to turn away, tell Staverton he had lost it.
No. Fight it.
The cloud was patchy, thinning out. The Junkers was split-essing away from him again, down… down, closer to the ground. He followed, levelling out as the Junkers pulled up over the New Forest. He was close now, closing faster. He had the speed.
His opponent knew it too, jinking his way over the contoured tree tops, then going lower as the forest gave way to heathland. A group of ponies scattered as the heavy, icy air was split by the noise of the twin Jumos and the Merlin, the two sounds merging as the Spitfire closed in.
With a monumental effort Fleming inched his thumb along the spade-grip of the stick, seeking the gun-button that would end the madness. The Junkers reared. Too late. He had him.
Then the Junkers dropped everything.
Fleming froze.
Monte Lupo; it was happening again.
It took place in an instant, yet to Fleming it was in excruciating slow-time, a reply of an earlier drama, an earlier battle, one which he had fought in his nightmares ever since. And the ending was always the same. He lost and there was nothing to do about it.
With flaps and wheels down, the Junkers juddered, bucked and slowed to the point of the stall, but it held there, and Fleming could only watch, rigid with fear as the blue belly slid by only feet above his cockpit.
He was dead. The German aircraft was positioned squarely in his mirror. The 20 mm cannon would rip into him any second.
“You’re dead, Wing Commander. I’ve got you on gun-camera. You’ll have to do better than that.” A voice in his head, echoing over and over again, tormenting him.
“I said you’re dead, Robert. Break off.” A sense of waking, coming out of the dream. Yet he was still in a hurtling piece of machinery, real machinery, with real ground whipping past him at 300 mph a few hundred feet below. Real voices…
“Break off, Robert, Goddammit. It’s me, Kruze.” The name burst through his headset.
Kruze… the exercise. Not Italian skies, but English.
He looked over his port wing tip to see the Junkers pull alongside, so close that Kruze was clearly visible in the cockpit. Kruze. It really was him. No nightmare this time, no FW 190, no cannon… As if to reassure him, the RAF roundels stood out proudly where the once stark crosses and swastikas on the 288 had been.
Thick bile rose in Fleming’s throat as the exercise was replayed in his mind. He retched once into his mask, but nothing came up.
“Robert.” Kruze’s anxious face, thirty feet away, matched the tone of his voice. “Robert, for Christ’s sake answer me. Are you all right?”
Fleming nodded once.
“Let’s go home, then. That’s enough for one day.”
The Junkers peeled off towards Farnborough and Fleming banked after it.
Kruze jumped from the wing of the Ju 288 onto the slushy tarmac of the dispersal point. The snow of the previous night had turned to a light drizzle, altering Farnborough, crisp and clean at dawn, to a dirty, wet, miserable place.
Fleming’s Spitfire had rolled to a stop several hundred yards away, parked untidily beside an otherwise immaculate row of test aircraft. Kruze started towards it, but was still a hundred yards away when Fleming emerged from the cockpit, threw his helmet onto the ground, and moved back towards his Nissen hut.
There was no point in pursuing him.
Instead, Kruze set off for the hangar, looking for Sergeant Broyles. Inside the cavernous shed, technicians worked frantically on a dozen different types of aircraft. Most of them were new marks of bombers, fighters and reconnaissance aircraft for the Air Force, but in a far corner were two which would never enter service with the RAF.
The Messerschmitt 110 night fighter stood alongside the spindly, awkward shape of the Fieseler Storch liaison aircraft under the intense gaze of the arc lights. Two fitters were busy in the cockpit of the fighter making last adjustments to the back seat operator’s console where the plots from the Lichtenstein radar were displayed when the Me no went about its work — stalking Bomber Command in the pitch black skies over the Third Reich. It was a bloody good system. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that their boss, Air Vice Marshal Staverton, had got so excited when the news had come through a month ago that Monty’s advancing army had come across an intact unit of the type. Staverton’s message to his team was simple. Find out what makes the thing tick, discover what its vices are and come up with an antidote within a fortnight. Eleven days into the flight test programme — and two hundred-odd downed bombers later — the EAEU had the answer. That same evening a report was on the Air Vice Marshal’s desk and two nights later a jamming system was flown on a thousand-bomber raid to Berlin. Losses were eighty per cent down. Not bad, they’d all thought. Not good enough, Staverton had said bitterly, pointing to Bomber Command’s intervening losses.