N-for-Nancy, a Lockheed Hudson MK IV reconnaissance plane, plummeted three hundred feet in the turbulent, iron-gray skies.
“Jesus Christ, Bunny!” bomb-aimer/navigator Peter Madsen shouted. “Hang on to it!”
Pilot Sergeant Douglas “Bunny” Walker pulled back on the yoke and clawed for the handle next to him that would drop his seat. He knew that in the storm he was certain to be bounced about, regardless of the seat belt, and smash his head on the roof. His hand clamped on the lever and pumped it down. Satisfied that his head was safe, he gripped the yoke attached to the steering column, trying to control the wild yawing and pitching of the aircraft. He drove his feet into the rudder pedals and yanked back on the yoke, fighting the full force of the gale. He felt the tension of the hydraulically assisted control cables through the pedals as they pulled the rudders to the right or left. That was really what flying was about — feeling your airplane: how she responded to the controls, whether she was sloppy or crisp or sluggish. But against this tempest was a pure muscle job — just keep the damned thing from flipping over or going into a stall.
The two 1,050-horsepower Pratt and Whitney Wasp engines barely gave N-for-Nancy enough power to maintain headway in the storm. It was always dirty weather over this miserable stretch of water — ice, sleet, snow, and rain, or a combination of anything always seemed to drive up from somewhere to batter N-for-Nancy so that the crew climbed out of the twin-tailed aircraft with bruised bodies and numbed senses. It was a contest of mind and skill between Bunny and the storm, and the prize was the ugly little Hudson and the four frightened men within her. All of this for a few pictures.
Bunny clamped his oxygen mask close to his mouth so that he could be heard on the intercom above the roar of the wind. “Johnny? See anything?”
Gunner Johnny Thompson, in the Boulton-Paul dorsal turret at the rear of the aircraft, said, “Lightning, Bunny. Very impressive.”
Suddenly a great burst of air slapped the plane and threw it toward the earth. N-for-Nancy fell through the hole in the sky and Bunny struggled to bring it back to altitude. Continuous sheets of ice and rain beat against the windshield so that he was flying virtually blind. His arms ached from fighting the Hudson and he began to curse both the aircraft and the storm softly. “How much farther, Peter? My bloody arms are falling off.”
“Weather Ops said we should have had this for only thirty minutes or so and then clear sailing.”
“Weather Ops is wrong again,” Bunny said. “I’ve been at it for close to an hour.” He could hear things tumbling around inside the aircraft and he was glad that they weren’t carrying anything more than a bomb bay load of cameras. That’s all that they ever carried and frankly, he was getting sick and tired of it. Some genius had pulled them out of Royal Air Force rotation and handed them over to Royal Navy Coastal Command, so all that they did now was run about this disgusting straight and take thousands of pictures. He watched the sky through the maddeningly slow windshield wipers, searching for the slightest hint of clearing. The thick film of rainwater covering the windshield obscured the sky. The wipers should have taken care of it, but they were never designed for gales like this. Bunny was flying deaf, dumb, and blind, he decided, like those little monkeys he had seen at a carnival in Bournemouth. Hear no evil, speak no evil… The yoke tried to jerk itself out of his hands and it became a personal contest again — no longer the plane or the storm, just Bunny Douglas and that bloody yoke that threatened to break his wrists and twist his fingers off — taking a perverse pleasure in revealing that it was no longer an inanimate object; it was alive. See no evil, Bunny thought, completing the triad. N-for-Nancy yawed sharply and Bunny kicked the rudder to bring it back on course.
For God’s sake, Bunny thought, get a grip on yourself. It was fatigue, he knew. When your body gets tired and your mind loses its ability to function, your thoughts wander, float really, and reality and common sense simply disappear.
He felt the yoke begin to relax. They were coming out of the storm. He quickly pumped the seat up so that he could see clearly over the nose of the Hudson. The fourth member of their crew, Radio Operator Prentice Newman, was at his side.
“Wasn’t that a ride, Skipper?” Newman said in a voice that Bunny knew all too well. A man sometimes forced nonchalance into his voice to hide the fear that ate at him.
“Would you like to go back, Prentice?”
“Skipper, no!” Prentice Newman never called Douglas Bunny like the other members of the crew. “It just doesn’t seem right,” he had said.
“Bunny,” Peter called. “I see sunshine ahead. Time to go upstairs?”
“Right you are, Peter. Angels twenty in ten.” Bunny turned to Prentice and jerked his thumb toward the rear of the aircraft. “Go roost now. Things are going to get busy.”
The camouflaged Hudson slipped out of the remaining clouds and began climbing to twenty-thousand feet, as Bunny adjusted the flaps. N-for-Nancy had been lucky. The storm had been poised on the edge of Leka Island and had hidden the plane’s approach from the Germans. Now all that remained was to make three flights over the island, cameras rolling, and run for home. That was all there was to it. Simple as that.
“Keep your eyes open, chaps,” Bunny said. He knew Peter was prone in his bomb-aimer’s position, tracking the approach, ready to open the bomb bay doors and squeeze the tit to start the cameras rolling. He felt the vibration of the Boulton Paul turret revolving to search the skies. It mounted twin 7.7-mm machine guns and Johnny was a fine shot, but the guns were too light and their range was too limited. And the German fighters that flew up to kill them were too fast. N-for-Nancy had to get in and out before the fighters appeared as tiny, lethal specks in the sky.
“Flack’s up,” Bunny said, watching the powdery brown flowers appear in the distance. They were searching for the Hudson, a few odd shots seemingly cast into the sky as if the German antiaircraft crews were going through the motions. But these shots were more than perfunctory — they were exploratory. When the crews found the altitude and range, more little brown flowers would follow, and creep closer to the aircraft. “How are you, Peter? Ready to go?”
“Straight on, Bunny. Just a few seconds more.”
Bunny Walker looked at his watch. They had eighteen minutes from the time that they sighted the target to the arrival of the fighters. Three passes and then they were out.
“Doors open!” Peter said. Bunny heard the soft hum of the door motors. “One, two… three. Shoot,” the bomb-aimer said, and Bunny knew that a dozen cameras were rapidly snapping images of Leka Island.
Suddenly flak exploded a hundred yards to the left of the aircraft. More bursts followed just behind and to the right. Bunny heard shrapnel strike N-for-Nancy. It was the sound of hail falling on a tin roof and on a summer’s day at home would have been nothing more than comforting. But it was not hail and there was nothing comforting about the shrapnel punching holes in N-for-Nancy’s thin aluminum skin. There was vengeance in the dark flowers as they tracked N-for-Nancy across the sky. Bunny felt his beloved plane shudder and the tempo of the flak increased.
“Anyone hit?” he asked.
“Been practicing, haven’t they?” Johnny said.
“I think those chaps mean to kill us, Skipper,” Prentice said. It was a joke but his voice was a little too high pitched and strained, and it quivered noticeably.
“Bring us around, will you, Bunny?” Peter said. “Ready for another run. Stay away from those bloody brown flowers. They make me nervous.”