Hunting the Nazi Bomb by Damien Lewis

Author:Damien Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2018-02-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

It was midnight at RAF Wick, where Henneker had established the Freshman ops room. A dense fog of cigarette smoke hung heavy in the air. So too did the tension. The first hint of bad luck and trouble had come in five minutes ago, and it had thrown the place into utter chaos.

Out of the blue a radio message had been received from A for Apple: ‘Glider released in sea.’ In the sea? Henneker could only imagine that the lead tug had been trying to return to base when something had gone terribly wrong.

He tried to scramble aircraft for a search and rescue operation. None were available. Unbeknown to him, this was largely a blessing. Group Captain Cooper’s message had been a deliberate deception, designed to alert Wick to the dire situation without betraying the errant glider’s location. If the Germans were listening in—and they were bound to be—it made sense to try to obfuscate where the Horsa had broken free.

The situation grew more and more confusing. A garbled message was received from B for Baker, asking for a bearing on Wick. It looked as if both tug aircraft were trying to make it back to base. But what of the gliders and the men they carried?

Then … nothing. No further contact could be made with either of the aircraft. Ashen-faced, Henneker could know few of the details of what had happened, but he feared the worst.

At two kilometres of altitude, the ice-encrusted Horsa had broken away from A for Apple without any warning. For the previous few minutes the heavy glider had been thrown about like a toy in a giant’s hands. The grooves in the aircraft’s corrugated metal floor were there to prevent vomit from making it slippery underfoot. But as the Horsa had bucked and twisted and writhed in the grip of the savage turbulence, the Sappers had turned sick with fear.

The Horsa felt like a snowflake in the grip of a blizzard. Then a sharp crack had been heard from forward, as if from a giant gun, and the aircraft had plummeted into freefall. The wooden-walled Horsa went into a violent spin. In the cockpit the pilots, seated side by side, wrestled with all their strength at the controls. To their rear the Sappers gripped their fold-down seats for the hellish bare-knuckle ride into the unknown.

As the Horsa plummeted, from all sides the mountain winds cried out in shrieks and howls. The thin wooden fuselage answered, creaking and groaning horribly as it threatened to tear itself to pieces. The Sappers might be strapped in, but much of their equipment wasn’t. It tumbled around the enclosed space, cannoning off the plywood ribs of the hold and beating out a terrible funeral rhythm.

With the cloud and the darkness thickening, the pilots tried to steer blind for where they guessed the ground had to be. But they were riding a runaway express train, and the cliff was fast approaching. At around 600 metres they tore out of the base of the cloud, and got a glimpse of their surroundings, which were wreathed in fog.

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