CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

When the illuminated glass map had been in use for an hour the lightbulbs, warm varnish and painted metal gave off a smell that mingled with that of floor polish and tense bodies. All Luftwaffe T huts had this same smell when the air battles were at their peak. The smell, the tension and the glare from the Seeburg table combined to give August Bach a dull headache. It always did. When the raids ended early, or when the bomber stream’s return route was over some other sector, he liked to stand outside the door, sniff at the ocean and let the night breeze refresh his tiredness and the darkness rest his eyes. The red blip turned gently and headed towards Utrecht. That was at the extreme eastern range of this sector. August corrected the fighter’s course.

‘He’s getting away,’ said Willi Reinecke. He followed the light dots with his wax pencil. He had traced a twisting record of inexpert attempts to intercept wherever the two lines intertwined. Now the two lines were converging once more and Willi’s pencil hovered, trying to will the fighter on to its quarry.

‘Order: increase speed, Katze Eight,’ urged August.

In the darkness Leutnant Beer was staring ahead, trying to see the target. He glanced enviously to the north where the sky was lighter. If he had them that way he might be able to see them but heading eastwards towards the banks of cumulus that made the horizon ragged and ugly there was little chance of getting the Tommi silhouetted. If any of those fellows had ever been in an aeroplane at night they would have more sympathy than this edgy bad-tempered fool who, just because he could see the red blip clearly upon the table, thought that it must shine clear and visible up here in the sky. It was so lonely here, almost like being at the bottom of the sea with only a distant flicker of light to indicate that the world is awake—or even alive.

On the port quarter there was a battery of ten searchlights that moved aimlessly, slowly changing their abstract patterns from vertical bars to a grey ghost of a pyramid that even as soon as it was built was demolished and became Vs and Xs. A lot of help they were! Beer knew that should he wander near those beams they would try to kill him.

On the starboard quarter, eighty miles away, he could see the target being attacked. Distance had drained all colour from the flares and explosions and from here they were just a steady flickering grey pinpoint.

‘He’ll never catch him now,’ said August in a longsuffering voice. ‘Order: orbit beacon at 6,000 metres.’

He switched Beer off and connected himself to the red Würzburg operator. ‘Give me another Tommi.’

‘Very good, sir. There are still plenty coming.’

Willi Reinecke had long since taken off his jacket and tie and now he stretched his arms in great circling movements that relieved the aches in his limbs. With his battered face, shaggy hair and huge shoulders he looked like a clown acting up for a circus audience. But no one laughed.

‘Is everything all right, Willi?’

Willi nodded, but August knew that all was not well. ‘There’s something wrong?’ Anxiously August looked back at the table and across at the altitude charts. Had he made a fool of himself in front of them all? Had he put that last one in at the wrong altitude and then blamed him for failing to contact? He could see nothing wrong.

‘Don’t act up, Reinecke,’ said August coldly. He knew that something was wrong, but he would not be made a fool of by a subordinate. Not even his second-in-command. Unterfeldwebel Tschol, the senior messenger—a whitehaired old man from Innsbruck—was also looking at August in a way that was quite unlike his usual demeanour.

Willi tried to pull his fingers off his hands and made loud clicks with their joints. ‘It’s the target,’ said Willi finally.

‘The target?…’

‘They marked it precisely as far as we know, although some markers went down over Duisburg. The mist of the Ruhr would make a difference. Perhaps there’s a reason, but could there really be?’

‘What target?’

‘The Tommis are carrying out a precision bombing attack upon Altgarten, sir.’ Now he’d said it.

‘That’s impossible.’

‘An error…winds wrong…a marker aircraft destroyed…equipment damaged.’

‘Altgarten? The whole stream?’

‘I’m afraid so, Herr Oberleutnant.’

August tried to visualize the scene there and for a minute he did not speak. ‘Take over the table, Reinecke.’

‘Sir.’

‘Tschol, tell the telephone switchboard to connect my office phone to this number.’

Tschol took the scrap of paper but stood for a long time before acting upon the instruction. They both knew that he was giving August plenty of time to change his mind about the call. Such a thing was strictly forbidden.

‘In your office?’ said the messenger finally.

‘Yes,’ said August, ‘and they must try the other numbers if there’s no answer from the first one.’

‘It’s a court-martial offence,’ said Gefreiter Orth the telephone operator when he was told to connect the CO to a private phone number in Altgarten. His cunning little eyes glinting as he watched Tschol’s reaction.

‘It had better not be,’ said Unterfeldwebel Tschol.

‘I’ll fiddle it somehow,’ said the operator. ‘I wouldn’t drop the old man into the dirt.’

‘You’d better not,’ said Tschol. ‘If we lost him we might get that old bastard from my last station. You’d be sitting there in best uniform, pressed and clean with a cropped head, just in case some high-ranking snooper called by.’

The telephonist, dressed in vest, shorts and sandals, rubbed his stubbly chin and shuddered at the thought. He looked round at his little sanctum. Pasted upon the wall above the PBX there were a dozen nudes, a pair of baby’s shoes, a crucifix and a warning notice, ‘Feind hoört mit!’ With a caricature of a big-eared Winston Churchill.

Orth was not only the most unsoldierlike man at Ermine, he was its most notorious black-marketeer. It was a well-known fact that when Orth hung the enemy-listening sign on the door it meant that the police were tapping the phones for security purposes.

‘Rotterdam? This is Luftwaffe Signals, Ermine. I want a top-priority connexion to Altgarten, Rheinprovinz. It’s by order of General Christiansen and should not be recorded in the log. If you want details ask Stabsfeldwebel Braun for a written authority. Yes, I’ll wait, but only for a moment.’

The white-haired Tschol bit his lip anxiously. ‘Is he asking this fellow Braun?’

Orth winked. ‘Braun’s one of our people for eggs,’ he explained.

When the phone rang in the cellar Anna-Luisa was half asleep, for the ventilation fans had stopped and the shelter had grown warm and airless.

‘Krefeld exchange here. Will you take an official call routed via Luftwaffe Signals Rotterdam?’

Before she could answer and even amid the crackling of the damaged phone lines she recognized August’s voice. ‘Anna-Luisa. Are you all right?’

‘Perfectly all right, Herr Oberleutnant,’ said Anna-Luisa. She was by now wide awake and guessed that August was running a great risk by calling her. ‘I—that is, Hans and myself are in the shelter of Herr Voss. Work is going on as usual,’ she added to make it sound more official.

‘Work?’ said August. ‘What are you talking about?’

She had been about to say, the air raid is going on but we are safe, but she remembered that it was a punishable offence to reveal that a place had been under air attack until three days afterwards. She knew too that security officials might be monitoring the call.

‘All is in order,’ she said. ‘Everything exactly as I promised you this afternoon.’

‘It will be as we decided,’ agreed August, cautious for the same reasons.

The noise of Sweet’s aeroplane coming across the town at rooftop height was loud enough for Anna-Luisa to hear it even in the depths of Voss’ cellar. There was a great roar as it struck the ground. It fractured into pieces of metal, each one the size and weight of a motor-car, and the pieces bounced across the fields, shaking the ground at each impact.

‘I can’t hear you, Herr Oberleutnant. There’s a scratching noise and your voice is so faint.’

‘It will be as we planned it would.’

‘Will what?’

‘Nothing,’ said August.

‘What did you say after “planned”? You said “It will be as we planned—” then what did you say?’

‘I love you,’ said August desperately and rang off. ‘Thank God,’ he said quietly to himself and he returned to the Seeburg table.

‘We have another,’ said Willi.

August took the microphone and spoke to Beer. ‘Katze Eight. Order: steer 270 for parallel head-on interception. Question: height.’

‘Announcing: height, 4,500 metres,’ said Beer.

August turned to Willi. ‘When will the Tommi start to lose height, Willi?’

‘Any minute,’ said Willi. ‘This one won’t wait for the coast; I feel it.’

‘The coloured-light stuff is Gilze-Riju airfield. Breda beyond it. Fifty miles to the Dutch coast—with this wind, say sixteen minutes.’

‘I’m going to start losing height,’ said Lambert. ‘We’ll put on a bit of speed if we do that.’

Kosher leaned forward and arranged Flanagan the crosseyed doll more comfortably against the windscreen. ‘Can’t have Flan falling over,’ he said.

Lambert had been given the doll before his very first operational trip and it had travelled with him on every sortie. All of the crew firmly believed that to fly without Flanagan would lessen their chances of survival and Lambert had put him under lock and key between trips ever since a gunner from A Flight had borrowed him without asking permission. Lambert noticed that all of the crew would touch the battered doll at some time or other during the trip, although Cohen and Jimmy Grimm would find some rational excuse for doing so rather than admit to being superstitious. Jimmy’s wife had darned Flan’s foot last month and was making him blue velvet trousers.

Kosher returned to his navigation table and Lambert nosed down gently towards the cloud bank.

Willi Reinecke spat loudly upon his hands. August sincerely wished he would not do that—or at least not so loudly—but Reinecke’s father had also done so for luck before starting any job, and in medieval times it had been a necessary defence against the devil. What chance did August stand of preventing Reinecke from doing it? Anyway they could do with some luck, from any source available. Willi pressed the soft tip of his wax pencil upon the light blip to begin the trace. For the second time that night, Creaking Door was to begin a journey across Ermine’s plotting-table.

In the shelter a spellbound Anna-Luisa replaced the phone. Softly she sang her favourite song of the moment. It contained a promise of magic. And love, she knew, was magic.

‘I know that some time there will be a miracle And then a thousand fairytales will come true.

I know that no love so big and wonderful can pass quickly. We both have the same star

And your fate is also mine;

You are far away and yet so far

Because our souls are one;

And that is why there will be a miracle some time

And I know that we’ll see each other again.’