“I’d like that very much,” Blessing said shyly.
“Well, lad,” Baird said, “don’t put a rush on it. I don’t have a needle through me nose yet. Now, hop to and get the other blokes from the torpedo shop and we’ll give oakum to the torps before Lord Nelson comes snooping about and finds us deficient. I’d take duty on a trawler before I let Number Two carry the day. Go on, lad.”
Chapter 11
Cole marveled at how quiet the crew of N-for-Nancy was, and how they went about their business as if it were an everyday occurrence to fly into danger. It was an everyday occurrence, he reminded himself, and he was one of the men who sent N-for-Nancy and her fragile crew into harm’s way. He looked out of one of the seven fuselage windows that ran along each side of the aircraft and saw an endless night sky peppered with stars. No storms, the Meteorological Operations division at the base had told them, news that was greeted with a mixture of emotions by the crew. No thunderheads to hide in, no low banks of clouds to run for if things got… difficult — “No place to hide, King,” Bunny had said as he made notes in his flight log. “Could be dicey all the way round.” He slapped his flight log closed and said: “Still up for it, I suppose?”
“Yeah,” Cole had said, but he noticed a strange tingling running through his body and he realized that it was anxiety. This was his first time in combat.
He heard the Boulton-Paul turret rotate behind him as Johnny swept the skies for enemy aircraft. Bunny had warned the gunner twice about humming into the intercom. “I can’t tell if it’s squelch or your own filthy humming, Johnny.”
“It helps steady my nerves, Skipper,” Johnny had said.
“For Christ’s sake bring a flask next time. Anything but your tuneless humming.”
Cole had had second thoughts about going to Leka Island when he saw the Hudson MK IV. She was a patchwork quilt of repairs and he knew that even brand-new she looked less like a warplane than the commercial aircraft she was. The addition of the ungainly turret that protruded like some obnoxious growth just forward of the twin-boom tail didn’t help her lines any. Well, he said to himself ruefully, you asked for it.
Cole saw Prentice make his way back along the fuselage.
“Skipper wants you up front,” he said. As they made their way forward, Prentice stopped him. “These are the beam guns,” he said, pointing to the .303 machine guns projecting from small openings on either side of the aircraft. “If we get jumped, you’re to take one and I’ll take the other. Have you ever fired one of these before?”
“I used to shoot skeet,” Cole said.
“Oh,” Prentice said, a look of disappointment crossing his face. “Well, it’s much like skeet except a bit faster and the clay pigeons shoot back. Come on. Skipper’s waiting.”
When Cole got to the cockpit, Bunny said, “Pull that jump seat down. It’s where the second pilot sits if I buy it.” Cole did as he was ordered and found himself in a slightly lower position than Bunny, nearly blocking the tunnel to the bomb-aimer/navigator’s compartment in the nose. A row of dials filled the instrument panel in front of him and an array of throttles and knobs blossomed out of a central instrument console at Bunny’s right.
“I don’t suppose you know how to fly, do you, King?”
“No,” Cole said, “and I’ve never fired a machine gun before.”
“My God, is there anything you can do?”
“I’m a pretty good dancer.”
Bunny shot him a glance and shook his head. “What have I gotten myself into?”
“I was just asking myself the same thing.”
“Tell me that you at least believe in good luck,” Bunny said.
“Sorry,” Cole said. “You struck out there, too.”
“My God. A heathen. Here.” He reached inside his coveralls and pulled out the stuffed rabbit. “See this? This is what gets me back to base. When it gets rough, I give her three squeezes. Works every time.” He jammed it back into his pocket.
Cole gazed out the windshield into the star-studded blackness. “How much trouble is this clear sky going to cause us?”
“A bit,” Bunny said.
“What about getting down on the deck?”
“Getting down is a lark, old boy. It’s the getting back up that gives me the shivers.”
“Can you do it? I’ve got to get close to that island.”
“You’ll get close. As bloody close as I can manage it without getting us killed. One pass for flares, one pass on the deck. And then we run for Mother. Jerry’s seen us come over several times at high altitude, in daylight. My guess is the flak guns are sighted and shells fused for between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand feet, so by the time they react, we’ll be halfway home. Unless of course he’s got the bloody thing ringed with low-altitude stuff and then that’s a different matter.”
“Of course.”
“Of course. Jerry fighters will come tearing after us as soon as the alarm is raised, but I’m counting on the element of surprise to throw them off a bit. Now, King, you must answer a question for me.”
“Okay.”
“What do you expect to find?”
“A battleship,” Cole said. “Or an aircraft carrier.” He watched as Bunny nodded. “You don’t seem impressed.”
“I’m a man who’s not easily impressed,” he said, but then he turned to Cole. “A bloody battleship? You mean another Tirpitz or Bismarck? How on earth did you come up with that idea?”
“The size and shape of the mysterious island. It has the relative dimensions of a capital ship. I think that the Germans may even have built themselves an aircraft carrier and they’ve got it hidden out here. The more I think about it, the more my money’s on a battleship.”
“Just one? Doesn’t seem sporting of them to build just one for our chaps to sink,” Bunny said.
“I’ve always been impressed by bravado.”
“I doubt they could build a battleship like that and slip it past us,” Bunny said. “Even if they exiled it to this cheery place.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s nothing or the hulk of a vessel nowhere near completion. It could be a false alarm. But every time you fly near it, all hell breaks loose,” Cole said. “That’s got to mean something.”
“Too right about that.”
“Well,” Cole said, “if it means that much to them, it means that much to us.”
“Bunny?” Peter called on the intercom. “Sixty miles out.”
“Can you see anything from there?” Bunny asked Cole.
“No.”
“Go back up to the Astrodome. That’ll give you a good view of everything. But when I shout, hop down to the beam guns.”
Cole climbed into the fuselage and situated himself in the Astrodome position, staring at the stars through the clear Plexiglas bubble. It was almost peaceful here, despite the roar of the engines. The white stars glided by overhead, in the distance the sea was black and nearly invisible, and there was nothing to tell him where the horizon lay. It was a far cry from his old classrooms and the bored students who listened to him drone on about the Compromise of 1850 and the Dred Scott Decision. He was alone with his war, his place — with no one to intrude or interfere. “You’re a dilettante, Cole,” he remembered being told, and thought, under the guileless stars that looked down on him: what is a dilettante except an artist in search of an art form?