Slipstream by Alan Judd

Author:Alan Judd [Judd, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471150630
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

On the raid the next day Frank broke his rule forbidding good luck charms other than his knife and took the lighter, buttoned in his tunic pocket. He was hit before even seeing the target and forced to turn back, which he did with relief and disappointment in equal measures.

The target was an airfield beyond Aumale and the weather, with closed cover at 150 feet, was both good and bad. Good because it kept their long approach hidden from German fighters, bad because flying below 150 feet at 340 mph, with visibility of less than half a mile, meant only a split second to spot a target or avoid danger.

Nevertheless, a low-level approach of thirty to forty minutes towards a heavily defended airfield, even if un-harassed by the Luftwaffe, took its toll on each pilot. Isolated in his cockpit, strapped in, hood down, his future was narrowed to the dense, golden, skywards rain of 20 mm tracer he was approaching at over 160 yards a second. And between every tracer round there would be all the deadly invisibles, fired from guns bristling like serried rows of dragons’ teeth for miles around the target. Crossing those at tree-top height was every pilot’s dread, worse than any dog-fight. All knew that for some at least there would be no way through the wall of flak they were hurtling towards, no future beyond it. The rest of life, with its hopes, anticipations, worries and cares, simply fell away, pointless to think about, as blank and unfocused as the camp cinema screen when the projector failed.

Half-way across the Channel the Dodger wriggled his wings, indicating trouble, then executed a wide homeward turn. Frank envied him. No one wanted to do this raid, although no-one wanted not to be part of it. The Dodger had been part and now would live to fight another day. Typical Dodger, having it both ways.

‘Turning left now.’ Patrick broke radio silence as he rolled and slid beneath Frank, briefly out of sight. They were still ten minutes and thirty seconds from target and would make another turn in three minutes, intended to mislead the Germans as to where they were heading. That was assuming the Germans had located them; with luck, the low cloud, intermittent fog and their low-level approach using hills and woods to shield them from radar would still make for surprise.

Once they were all on the new course, though a few feet higher because the fog in the valleys had thickened, Frank tried to re-enter the daydream he had kept running in the back of his mind since being woken that morning. It was his way of dealing with the approaching flak, that and concentration on details of height, trim, engine revs and location, precisely paralleling Patrick one hundred yards behind and ten yards adrift of his starboard wingtip. He could do this while running a secret mental film of himself digging the colonel’s garden, with the colonel out of sight and Vanessa very much in sight and saying something to him.

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