Descent

Descent

  by Michael Wombat

  Copyright © 2015 Michael Wombat

  Cover photograph and design by Michael Wombat

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express permission of Michael Wombat (contact via Twitter @wombat37). You can lend it to your Mum, though.

  Michael Wombat has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, is purely accidental.

  Contents

  Descent

  Rescue – a bonus story

  Other books by Michael Wombat

  About the author

  Descent

  Behind them the sun was rising. Soon it would pass high enough to be dimmed by the high altostratus ceiling below which they were flying, but for now it bathed their tail with a pink glow. Peter did not like flying in the light of the sun, no matter how rosy. They were too exposed, too obvious. A Lancaster painted to be invisible at night tended to stick out like a sore thumb and become something of a sitting duck after dawn. Peter frowned at his lazy use of cliché, but put it down to exhaustion.

  He had been tempted to add a few thousand feet to their altitude in an attempt to reach the cover of that cloud, but they were pretty close to their operational ceiling already, and ‘D for Doris’ would fly like a brick shithouse at her extreme upper limit, especially with a dicey wing. It was better to maintain control and trust to fate for now.

  “Nigel, how long?” he asked.

  “We’re about an hour out, Skip, bit far north I think,” Nigel squawked through his headset. “Maintain this heading and we’ll hit Blighty somewhere near Scarborough.”

  “Roger. Not long now, chaps. Home for breakfast,” he announced. It had been a long night, and they were all cold, tired and hungry. A few words of encouragement always helped. Or rather, they had helped in the past. This though was Doris’s twenty-ninth operation on this tour of duty. One more mission and they would have earned a well-deserved rest. Twenty-nine journeys through cold, unforgiving air to what feels like a certain death does things to a man. The strain was beginning to tell; the men’s faces haggard and their demeanour jaded. They were stretched tight, exhausted and were all in dire need of leave.

  This night Doris and her crew had been on a comparatively routine Plumduff raid: the bombing of the Elbe U-boat factory in Hamburg. It had gone well, their bombs all hitting the target area. Well, more or less. They had been holed in the port wing by flak as they were climbing away, but the damage was nothing that a half-decent pilot couldn’t handle.

  “Arse-end Charlie here, Skipper.” A squawk through his headphones. “There are three, maybe four, planes—”

  “Aircraft, Fanny. A plane is a wing. The machine to which it is attached is an aircraft.”

  “Sorry, Skip. Three or four aircraft are crossing our tail at about our height. They are some distance away - barely more than specks.”

  “Roger, rear gunner. Bandits?”

  “Can’t tell in this light, Skipper.”

  “Hmm. Who knows, perhaps our escorts have finally managed to find us, eh? Thank you, Fanny, keep your eyes peeled and on them. Let me know if they change their heading.”

  Due to the frantic adrenalin-rushed adjustments to the aeroplane’s trim when the flak had blown a bloody big hole in the wing, followed by a dicey encounter with a searchlight, they had lost contact with the rest of the squadron. This was a common occurrence on night missions, however, and nothing for the crew to worry about. After all, they had achieved their objective and bombed their target. Their sole ambition now was to get home, and England was not an easy country to miss as long as the navigator had his wits about him. Their navigator, Nigel, was a wizard. Peter had moved heaven and earth to get him on Doris’s roster. He’d get them home alright.

  “Upper gunner to pilot.”

  “Go ahead, Zappo.” Their mid-upper gunner was called Witold Szaposznikow. When they first met, Fanny Fanshawe had said that the Pole’s full name sounded like a sneeze and was impossible to pronounce. He had immediately dubbed the amiable, keen-eyed Pole ‘Zappo’. The name had stuck, helped by the Pole's resemblance to Zeppo Marx, the 'not funny one of the Marx Brothers', according to Fanny. As far as Peter was concerned, every Marx sibling was ‘not funny’.

  “Those aircraft crossing our tail are,” Zappo reported, “I am pretty sure to say, Focke-Wulf 190s. There are three of them travelling left to right maybe two thousand feet higher than us, but they are showing no sign of interests.”

  “Splendid. Thank you. Long may that continue.”

  Oh, please let them have an easy flight home. A scrap was the last thing they needed after five hours in a drafty, noisy and, for Fanny and Zappo, unheated bomber. On top of their fatigue, the hole in the port wing, though manageable, did reduce manoeuvrability. Not that they had much of that in the first place compared to the nippy FW190s. The top item on their wish list right now was an uneventful flight home and a greasy breakfast in the NAAFI.

  “Bollocks,” cursed a voice in Peter’s ear.

  “Please moderate your language, Fanny,” he chided. “I know you’re tired but do try to maintain radio procedures.”

  “Those Fockers have turned. They’ve seen us.”

  “Zappo?”

  “They indeed have seen us. I suggest a weave to port so that I too can get a bearing on them if they come straightway in.”

  “Wilco. Turning now. How long before they reach us?”

  “A minute at the most,” reported Fanny, breathlessly. “I’ll let you know when they’re here by shooting my cannon at them loudly.”

  “You awake, Bob?” Bob was the bomb aimer and front gunner, currently sitting at his position beneath Peter’s feet.

  “Wide of eye and bushy of tail, Skip.”

  “Then get ready for a party. Give them hell, gentlemen.”

  “Corkscrew port, Skipper, corkscrew port!” screamed Fanny and opened up with the rear gun, a staccato racket that set the heart pumping rapidly. Almost immediately Zappo too commenced to fire.

  “Look out below, Bob!” a voice screamed in Peter's ear.

  “Damn it, you nippy bastard!” Bob swore, trying in vain to bring his weapon to bear on a FW190 that slipped out from under their nose like greased lightning, angular wings giving it the appearance of a bird of prey.

  Peter flung the control column from left to right in a futile attempt to evade the agile hunters. They were being hit by the German guns, he could feel the vibrations through Doris's frame, but the bullets were so far doing no serious damage.

  “You got him!” someone shouted.

  “Tak!” Zappo crowed, “One down! He is diving, making much smoke.”

  “Good work, chaps! Watch the others!” called Peter, over the cacophony of engine noise and gunfire. He tried to keep Doris weaving and corkscrewing, hauling the control column about in as erratic a fashion as he could manage, but they were like a cumbersome whale compared to the swift German sharks, and more enemy shells pierced Doris’s skin.

  Even through the din of shouts and gunfire Peter heard the SPANG of severed wires, and the Lancaster lurched to starboard. He heaved the stick forward to take the aircraft into a desperate dive.

  There was a soft cough to Peter's right and Jimmy, his flight engineer, slumped forward, half his head splashed across the windscreen. Holes appeared in the perspex and more bullets whipped through the cockpit, narrowly missing Peter. Several voices collided in his ears.

  “Skipper, I—”

&
nbsp; “Aaaaaaaa—”

  “Look out, he's—”

  Boom.

  Peter's world exploded in a whirling mess of flames, black metal, screams and explosions, then he was tumbling through clear air, clouds and horizon and fields wheeling across his vision. He caught a glimpse of Doris arcing towards the ground, her entire front end engulfed in flame. A tiny body, swathed in fire, separated from her fiery death dive and tumbled like a burning rag doll, limbs flailing helplessly. He watched it, fascinated, till it spun out of his vision.

  It had been so quick. He hadn't even had time to attach his parachute to his chest harness. Cruel fate had saved him from being burned to death by miraculously throwing him clear, only to dump him at Angels Twenty without his parachute. It was almost funny. Almost. He ought to be full of panic, yet he felt remarkably calm, and was acutely aware of the sudden cold silence pricking his ears like a needle.

  He looked at the ground, impossibly far below. At this height it was impossible to make out much detail. A patchwork of fields, a small town. Was that silver line down there a river? It curved like a smile, happy at his fate.

  Which country was it down there, anyway? Nigel could have told him. Belgium? No, that was too far south, and they’d been flying for too long still to be over Germany. The Netherlands was the best bet. Somewhere around Drachten, perhaps? To die over Drachten. He liked the alliteration of that. He'd been born in Buckinghamshire and lived in London, so it made a sort of grim alliterative trifecta