Or Even Eagle Flew by Harry Turtledove

Author:Harry Turtledove [Turtledove, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prince of Cats Literary Productions
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

By the time she got to RAF Church Fenton, up in the West Riding of Yorkshire, she’d begun to believe Air Marshal Douglas really had done the worst thing he could to her. It was only 150 miles north of London, but it seemed like 1,500.

The train stopped at Selby, which was still several miles away. Church Fenton was too small to boast a train station. A.E.’s uniform and ten shillings let her hire a bicycle to get her the rest of the way. She wondered whether a car had waited in Selby for Andy, Red, and Shorty.

Church Fenton, when she finally reached it, might have held a thousand people or might not. She had to ask directions to the air base. She barely understood the local dialect, though the people seemed to follow her well enough. They would have heard American accents in the movies, but broad Yorkshire was almost a foreign language to her.

At the air base, which lay northeast of the hamlet, she spotted Red Tobin at once. He was walking across bare grass; A.E. saw no airplanes. His face, which had been gloomy, lit up when he spied her pedaling his way. “What are you doing here?” he said.

She shrugged. “Air Marshal Douglas sent me here.”

“Boy, he really must hate your guts.”

“As a matter of fact, he does.”

Red waved at the empty airstrip. “Here we are, the famous Eagle Squadron. Only thing is, where I come from the eagles have wings. Is it the same with you?”

“Now that you mention it, yes,” A.E. said. “What are we supposed to be doing here, anyway?”

He got down on hands and knees and mimed cropping grass like a sheep. A.E. giggled. Red was always up for doing something crazy. As he bounced to his feet again, he pointed east. “The mouth of the Humber’s that way, where it goes into the North Sea. Lots of shipping coming in and going out. Lots of shipping up and down the coast, too. We’re here to drive off the Jerries if they make trouble. And if we ever get planes, of course.”

“Of course,” she echoed in a hollow voice. Here was Sholto Douglas’s Eagle Squadron, chock full of Americans, stuck in the north end of nowhere to do nothing. “I wish they’d just left us where we were before.”

“Believe you me, you ain’t the only one. But c’mon into the barracks. Got something for you there, speaking of eagles.” Red waved towards a Nissen hut not far away.

“You didn’t even know I was coming.” But A.E. followed him.

When he opened the door at the end, she saw Shorty and Andy playing cards with a couple of men she hadn’t met before. “Look what the cat dragged in,” Red said.

Her friends jumped up to shake her hand and clap her on the back. She got introduced to the others. They’d been scattered through the RAF before being gathered together here. Most of them seemed to have mixed feelings about the whole business, too. “I’d rather be doing something than doing nothing,” one said.

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