 6. Bryan was marched to the guardhouse at riflepoint. The whole situation would be laughable, except Bryan could not laugh at a gun. These people were frightened. They'll be arresting seagulls next. German military developments had grow so disturbing that the Air Ministry had seen the need for an early warning system. The first experiments explored plans for detecting the sound of incoming enemy bombers. But filtering out random ambient sounds proved untenable, and, as sound only traveled twice as fast as a fast aircraft, it did not promise all that early of a warning. So the Air Ministry placed England's future in radio waves. Bryan had seen the masts along the coast. The taller ones transmitted radio waves. The shorter ones received the waves as they bounced off any aircraft in their path. An intersecting plot from two receiving stations gave an aeroplane's distance and direction. Bryan never thought the masts might not be able to tell their front sides from their ass ends. They had him at sea! He was not a sea, but apparently the boffins were. He paced his cell. He was surprised to have a mate in detention, an erk, apparently in for drunkenness because Bryan smelled the alcohol before the cell opened to received him. The aircraftman appeared as a lump in a cot, whose first sign of life was a grunt as Bryan paced. The presence of the drunken sod was encouraging. Bryan would be in a solitary cell if he were under serious suspicion of espionage. He told himself that several times. His mate was an old erk, clad in the greasy ill-fitting coveralls of a mechanic. He could not have been here long because his shave was still good. His skin was a weathered, ruddy colour of a kind that runs toward red rather than brown in the sun. His wiry hair was dark copper-gold, graying at the temples, and at the brambling eyebrows. The eyes opened, one sharp green-gray eye and one ruined eye that didn't look like it worked anymore. His voice ground like river stones, "'ullo, sir. What're you 'ere for?" Bryan sat on the other cot, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. "I am the biggest prat in Lincolnshire county." The erk's good eye widened. "Really? They can nab yer for that?" "I am to be hung for visiting a girl in Scotland," Bryan moaned and turned away. He did not want to talk to anyone. Time wore on. Night fell. Outside, the guard changed. Bryan could not recall being this close to tears without being drunk or someone having died. He sniffled. The erk was not drunk enough not to notice, damn him anyway. "There, there, owd bogger. You really think they'd 'ang yer?" Bryan waved his hand as if to erase the thought. Dying was not the point. "They think I'm a spy. I can't --" He tried to steady himself. It was the hour, the loss of Jane, the suspicion that he'd been played for a clot. And the looming fate worse than death. That had only been a phrase before. Physical danger had never held any horror for him. He had declared once that he was afraid of nothing. His grandmother had answered serenely, "One really ought to be afraid of something." He knew terror now. They thought he was a spy. His honour was in the hands of idiots. "Poor bleeder," said the erk. And worse. It just got worse. He was frightened for England. "Those clots won't admit their RDF doesn't work," Bryan blurted. "Christ, they'll have German bombers plotted coming out of Wales! If they see them at all! They'll be too busy intercepting our own interceptors!" The radio masts had originally transmitted on 6 megahertz, but accidental of deliberate interference made the scientists switch to 11.5 megahertz until the spring of '36 when the signals were jammed again. Now they operated on 22 megahertz and Bryan wondered if the Germans weren't fouling the signal again. Or maybe the bloody thing doesn't work and never will. The air exercises Bryan had participated in involving the RDF had been half planned affairs. Nobody had been assigned to play the role of friendly aircraft. Bryan had wondered how they intended to tell the good guys from the bad. Here was the answer: They can't. "Those ogo pogos would fly up their own arses and open fire!" Bryan cried. "Would? Would? They have! All I have ever wanted to do is fly and serve my country. It's what I want most in the world. Now it looks like I'll never fly again." "Then go over to the bleddy 'un, why don't yer?" the erk suggested. "'err 'itler would let you fly for 'im." Bryan leapt to his feet. "You bloody, bloody bastard!" He lunged at the erk, hauled him up and smashed a fist into his face. The sharp ridge of cheekbone split the skin on Bryan's knuckles. Too angry to mind the pain, Bryan coiled back to hit him again. The man seemed to grow in size and strength before Bryan's eyes. He threw Bryan back onto his cot, not before Bryan landed another punch square on the erk's nose. Bryan scrambled to his feet, was repulsed by a powerful thrust. In the back of his incensed mind there nagged an inarticulate inkling that he had somehow been had. That things were not as they seemed. Guards burst in. They took the aircraftman out, blood dripping from his nose. The door slammed, locked. Bryan was alone for the rest of the night. He did not sleep. Early morning Bryan was summoned. He waited under guard on a bench in the corridor outside the interrogation room. He jumped to his feet as officers filed in. There were some big guns among them this time. The ground trembled under Bryan as they walked past. Among them was a wiry-haired, sun-reddened Group Captain with a bruise-purpled cheek and a taped-over broken nose, and a black eye-patch. The other eye was sharp green-brown. O Jesus, I bashed a Group Captain. The Group Captain paused by Bryan in the corridor. Bryan held his breath, saluting, expecting to be hit. "Pilot Officer Catrell," said the Group Captain, his crumbly voice articulate, if congested. "You have given credible testimony against the treason charge and for breach of discipline charge." Bryan blinked. "Am I to be cashiered over that?" "Well, you are not going to hanged. We are returning you to your own base. You'll be up before you CO first thing." He went inside. Bryan lifted his hands to his head, ran his fingers through his sweaty hair. "O God." Tension released and he was suddenly sleepy. He hadn't slept in thirty-six hours. The strain that had been holding him up let go, and he sagged. "Sir!" Group Captain Grayson slowed. Bryan was free again. He ran to catch up the Group Captain in the corridor. "I'm sorry about your nose, sir." "I'm not pressing the bloody nose." "You got me out of this, didn't you." "Nothing of the sort. You know, Catrell, you might learn that what other people take seriously is to be regarded with a certain gravity. You are not the sole judge of what is and is not important. It was not your aircraft, not your air force, not your blasted world. There are a great many people here and then there is you lashing through like a runaway prop." "Yes, sir." "And another thing. Have a care what you say about national security. You don't always know who you're talking to." "Yes, that point was made, sir." Greyson touched his swollen nose gingerly, sniffed very carefully. Bryan winced. "Damned silly cloak and dagger stuff," Greyson growled. "You did get me out of this." "Of course I did, you twit." "Thank you, sir. I'm glad you were there. Really I don't think I could have been taken for a spy unless they wanted to find one very badly." "You have been to Germany, Catrell." "So have a lot of people." "And you must admit you were a little vague as to the details of your Scottish mission." "There was a lady involved." "I gathered." "I'm glad you remember what it was like." Greyson's ruddy face darkened. "Remember! Now see here, Catrell, I'm not dead yet!" "Yes, sir! No, sir!" Greyson the Group Captain looked younger than he had as the untidy erk. Perhaps forty years old, striking in uniform. The eye-patch gave him a roguish air. Regarding women, this one could draw maps of what Bryan still regarded as strange territory. "Grey" Greyson had been a fighter pilot before a bullet had taken his eye. He had one aerial victory from the Great War. His Christian name was Cedrick, but unless you were his mother, you used it at your peril. In a milder growl, Greyson said, "And don't worry, we know the RDF wants work. What was your altitude on your outbound flight?" "Rather low. The ceiling was this high and I was under it." Bryan indicated an inch of daylight between his thumb and forefinger. "About a thousand feet." Greyson nodded, satisfied in a grim way. Said nothing. "What happened?" said Bryan. "Did they recalibrate me off the map?" "No. The Chain Home stations are quite simply blind at that level." "And we stake the defense of England on that thing?" "It is a valid system. The Boffins will sort it out in time." "In time?" The threat sounded suddenly definite. As if a palpable something were at the gates. "You may not have heard, with your pressing business North of the Border, but Hitler has annexed Austria." "But he can't. It's against the Treaty." "Our fault, that. We let him re-arm. That was against the Treaty too. But there it is." Greyson lit a roll-up. Smoke slithered up before the eye patch. "That's not the end of it. Czechoslovakia is next, and everyone knows it." "When do we go in?" "And combat them with what, Catrell? Moral outrage?" "What of the Spitfire? The Ministry placed an order for three hundred and ten of them nearly two years ago." "Yes, well, there's a snag." "What snag?" "Your Spitfires have no wings." "Why?" "Three hundred and ten aeroplanes is a large order. Supermarine contracted out part of the job. The wings, if you must know. The aircraft are built. The wings are not." "Why did they contract out the wings?" "To save time." "Is this a joke?" "I suppose it is. And a very bad one. It also happens to be the truth. A bit complicated, the wings. Do you smoke?" "I think I shall start." Bryan took a drag on the offered roll-up, coughed, passed it back. "What about the Hurricane?" "Turning them out as fast as they can. Six a week now. One of its virtues. The Hurricane is easy to build." Good as the Hurricane was, its speed and size troubled Bryan. The diminutive Messerschmitt 109 held the land speed record. Bryan wanted to fly an aircraft that would slap down a 109. "What about the Messerschmitt?" Its prototype had flown the same time as the Spitfire's. "Now those are easy to build. Those are in full production. And in action. We have a picture of them over Guernica. Of course Franco, Hitler and the rest of that lot deny that our picture was taken in Spain. But the Germans are in there, and so are their Messerschmitts. Spain is the bloody German air force college." Bryan had seen the newsreels, pictures of horror from Spain, the dour voice intoning over images of devastation: This was a city. These were houses like yours. "Is the One-oh-nine any good as a fighter?" Bryan could always hope the Messerschmitt had some fatal flaw he hadn't seen in Berlin. "What is it doing in Spain?" Greyson exhaled a long stream of smoke, like an aeroplane going down. "Eating alive everything else in the sky." Bryan remembered Berlin. He and a brooding German cadet watching the Messerschmitts second prototype fly. There was something of the aircraft in the youth, the youth in the aircraft. Square-shouldered, immaculate, contained. Bryan had asked Paul Ritter what business Germany had building such an aeroplane --any powered aeroplane -- and this was clearly a fighter. "What of the Treaty?" Smoldering dark eyes had not wavered. "The Diktat?" said Paul. "What of it?" "You know you're not supposed to have engines in your aeroplanes." "Do something about it," said Paul Ritter. His eyes were darkest brown like coal. Bryan could not see where the iris ended and the black began, so he was not sure if Paul were looking at him or through him. His face was unlined as in someone who seldom smiled or frowned. Might have been laughing at him for all Bryan knew. Paul had him of course. The time for doing something was past. The Germans had been flouting the Treaty of Versailles for years. And no one had tried to stop them, not even when the first prototype Messerschmitt 109 had flown. It had flown with a Rolls Royce engine. "And what would you do, Herr Catrell, if a gang of foreign countries dictated that England must not put engines in airplanes?" Bryan answered only to himself, Put an engine in the aeroplane, of course. And wondered now if Paul Ritter was one of those monsters making a hell of the Spanish skies. |