The Long Drop by Alan White

Author:Alan White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canelo Digital Publishing Ltd
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

It sat squat at the end of the airfield, black as the night around it. A bomber. From close up you could see the paint mottled with green in a shapeless pattern of camouflage. How it would stand out against the night sky, the moon and stars that throw its silhouette over the ground below!

I had picked my men. I made Taffy Andrews a corporal. I offered a sergeant’s stripes to Sam Levine, but he refused them. Harry Landon and Willie Garside were still the fastest men I could find, and Willie could move like a cat at night. Alf Milner came, eager, dependable, and immensely strong. Dodger Bates, the loner, had finally persuaded Fred Pike and Joe Stanhope to talk to him about explosives, and Frank Farleigh could read Morse faster than any man I knew. Nine men. Arthur Sywell qualified, not only because of Fred and Joe, but because he quickly picked up the technical side of the job we had to do. He could crawl silently, and that was a talent worth its weight in gold; he could shoot a bow and arrow, and knew about locks. Ben, of course, but I wouldn’t go without Ben. Captain Peter Derby as my official second-in-command. That was the way the Army liked it.

The Air Force supplied a crew of four, including a despatcher. They also sent a large thermos bottle of coffee and a bottle of brandy, which we left full with the despatcher.

In the hangar before we marched out to the plane, Ben Bolding held our last check. Each man had his own personal weapons, a knife, a bow with twelve arrows all needle sharp, six throwing pins. Each man had his own ration packs, sufficient vitamins and proteins for four days, all condensed, concentrated, dehydrated into a caramel-tasting chewing stick that if you weren’t careful would give you lockjaw. No man had cigarettes or matches. I was carrying cartons I would hand out to the resistance – any man wanting a smoke could apply to me. We all had morphia and the new elastic bandages and tubes of collodion for pasting over superficial wounds. We had the new powder for preventing infection, clips to ‘stitch’ together the open sides of deep wounds. We had no radio. Each of us had a pencil torch. Dodger, Fred and Joe carried the explosive. I carried a spare supply. I also had two pairs of women’s silk knickers. I found them more comfortable to wear than army issue, and they took up no room at all in the bottom of my pack.

Ben had the nylon rope, Peter the signal wire, we all had detonators and fuses, carried in wooden boxes, wrapped in cotton wool, in our inside pockets. We were wearing battledress, gaiters, Innsbrucker boots, jumping jackets that fasten under your crotch. We wore green berets and scorned the tin jumping hats. I had a piece of wire on two toggles fastened round my waist under the battledress sleeve, the sort of thing that before the war was used for cutting slabs of cheese.

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