It had taken another hour to rig a new antenna, but now it was done and the Leading Telegraphist was warming up the set and checking the tuning. Long-distance HF radio transmissions were as much art as science; the coastal stations that relayed messages to and from Glasgow were far beneath the horizon and to send to them they'd have to bounce the signal off the ionosphere, a little-understood layer of the upper atmosphere that reflected some frequencies. To make it work the length of the antenna had to be roughly matched to the frequency being used, then electrically tuned to get a perfect match; otherwise the signal wouldn't bounce. At least, something like that. The Old Man's understanding of it was vague at best. He decided to stick to what he did understand – his ship.
- X -
The Mosquito NF Mark II levelled off at 20,000 feet and throttled back to cruising speed, heading west into the Atlantic at a steady 250 knots. The pilot loosened his harness and stretched his shoulders. "Well, I'm going to relax for a while," he said to the radar operator, "Is that thing working?"
He didn't get an answer, only a sour look that was just visible in the faint green glow from the radar screen. The radar operator was a Fleet Air Arm officer and he wasn't too happy at being paired up with some RAF hot shot. Orders were orders, though, and he'd been ordered to undergo familiarisation on the new Air Intercept radars. The Navy didn't actually have any yet, so that meant flying right seat in an RAF night fighter. It could have been worse, he supposed. The skipper was a Battle of Britain survivor with a Distinguished Flying Cross and nine kills, so of course he was a typical arrogant Fighter Command arse in a cheap blue uniform, but off duty he was actually a pretty decent chap and even a sailor, in a small way.
- X -
FOR LEVEN RADIO CHECK CLYDESPR SENDS NW
The Old Man read the signal message and winced. He wondered how often that message had been sent, and how much anguish had been caused by the lack of a reply. "Could you acknowledge?" he asked.
"Aye, Sir."
"Good, well done." He pulled his message pad from the pocket of his blood-stained British Warm and laid it on the chart table. The shaded bulb threw just enough light for him to scribble a message. "Send this, will you?"
-X-
FOR CLYDESPR READING YOU FIVE BY FIVE LEVEN SENDS
FOR CLYDESPR ENGAGED SURFACED UBOAT WITH GUNS RECEIVED HIT ON BRIDGE RADAR DESTROYED FOUR DEAD EIGHT INJURED UBOAT BROKE CONTACT TO SOUTH LEVEN SENDS JW
Staff Officer Operations knew she wasn't hiding her relief too well, but she had to stay focused. The pad on her desk was covered with scrawled calculations and she didn't like the results. She looked up. "Seymour!"
"Ma'am?"
"I need the current air sortie list for Coastal Command sector twelve."
"Ma'am, the bomber's 300 miles west of Rockall and…"
"That's good, Seymour, but just get me the list."
-X-
FOR VAMPIRE NINER HMS LEVEN HAS INBOUND CONDOR ETA 0415 REQUIRES URGENT FIGHTER COVER 54 43N 29 39W CAN YOU EXTEND CLYDESPR SENDS NW
"Shit! Hang on…" The pilot gripped the control column between his knees and scribbled some sums on his notepad. "All right, here we go. Send this. Can extend, going buster now, ETA 0410."
The radar operator studied his own chart. "Hang on, skipper, we can't do that. That's 200 miles past our patrol limit. We'll never get back."
"Bollocks. We'll land at Nutts Corner."
"Nutts Corner's shut. Fog."
"Fuck the fog. We've got radar, you can talk me down. Now send it." The pilot pushed the throttles forward to the stops; the rumble of the two Merlin engines climbed to a high-pitched howl. He checked the fuel gauges. The long-range tanks under the wings were empty, so he punched the jettison button and dumped them into the sea. The Mosquito was already through 300 knots and accelerating hard. "Go on, send it!"
The radar operator looked down through the blurred disk of the starboard propeller at the black sea far below. He sighed, and began tapping the Morse key.
CLYDESPR THIS IS VAMPIRE NINER CAN EXTEND GOING BUSTER NOW ETA 0410
-X-
FOR LEVEN CONDOR INBOUND YOUR LOCSTAT ETA 0415 CLOSE UP AA CLYDESPR SENDS NW
-X-
"Sir."
The Leading Telegraphist's voice jolted him wide awake. He was too tired, he knew; he could barely think straight any more. He'd been slumped over the bridge railings with his head in his hands, almost fast asleep. Damn. "What is it, Kelly?"
"Sir, the radio shack is picking up a UHF signal on bearing green 97. They think it's a search radar. Could be the Condor, Sir."
"Thanks, Kelly. Cox! Are the guns all closed up?"
McCasgill, who'd been leaning against the ASDIC hut and looked as tired as he felt himself, answered that question. "All closed up, Sir."
"Good. Kelly, go ask how strong is the signal and how fast it's going up."
Kelly was back inside two minutes. "It's a strong signal, Sir, and it's strengthening slowly."
Damn. That mean the Condor was already close. He lifted his night glasses and looked out to starboard.
- X -
"Okay skipper, he's six miles off our nose at angels two, course 330."
Angels two meant two thousand feet. They were at 17,000. Well, that was no problem. The pilot rolled the Mosquito inverted then pulled back on the stick and rammed the throttles through the boost gate. Maths had never been his best subject at school but, somehow, he could work out these three-dimensional intercept courses in his head. The sleek plane dropped through thirty degrees of nose-down and changed from an aerodynamic object to a ballistic one. The airspeed indicator swung round with terrifying speed. Maximum level speed was 380 knots; now it shot past 400, pushed through 500 then then crept towards 550. The pilot eased the throttles back; gravity could do the work now. The Mosquito plummeted into a black pit.
"Skipper, UHF pings, centred on my screen."
The DH98 Mosquito was probably the most heavily armed fighter plane in the world. Normally the most obvious armament was a battery of four machineguns whose barrels projected out of the nosecone. In fact they were only a fraction of its real firepower, which was just as well; in this NF II version they'd been removed, and replaced with a row of antennas that looked more like cartoon arrowheads than anything warlike. Most of the steel rods that stuck out of the Mosquito's nose were there to transmit searching pulses from its AI radar, but others were sniffing out the electronic signals of German bombers. Now the boffin's box in the nose had both scents. "Good, talk me in."
"Hold dive angle, port three."
The pilot stamped his boot hard on the left rudder pedal; as the airflow speed crept towards the fabled, impossible Mach number his beautiful plane grew hard to control. "Now?"
"Hold course, skipper."
The pilot held his course. Hanging upside down in the straps, he plunged towards the hungry sea. At 8,000 feet the first wave crests became visible in the darkness as foam caught the moonlight. He checked the gunsight, making sure the brightness dial was turned to minimum, then switched it on. The crosshairs lit up a faint green.
- X –
Through the night glasses the Condor was a black dot against a dark grey sky. It was just over three miles away, he guessed, and coming straight at them in a shallow dive. In thirty seconds it would be close enough to have a crack at it with the four-inch guns; thirty seconds after that the Oerlikons could have a go, but by then it would be spraying them with its own weapons – and seconds later the bombs would begin to fall. HMS Leven was running flat out and weaving erratically across the surface of the ocean, but to the Condor, coming in at almost 200 knots, she might as well have been standing still.
The Old Man flipped the switch on the intercom and tersely ordered the four-inch turrets to stand by, then raised the night glasses again. The enemy bomber was visibly larger. Then another black dot appeared, streaking down at incredible speed.
- X -
Tiny glow-worm flickers of light appeared against the dark sea – exhaust stubs. A moment later the pilot's sharp eyes picked out the black silhouette of the Condor. He watched for a moment as it swelled to fill the circle of his gunsight. It was huge but elegant, one of the most attractive of the big pre-war airliners. Oh well, no time to admire it. He altered course slightly until the glowing crosshairs settled on a point fifty feet in front of the Condor's nose, flipped up a spring-loaded cover on his control column, closed one eye and stabbed down firmly with his thumb. The Mosquito shuddered briefly as its cannons erupted into life beneath his feet. Bright flames wreathed the nose and four lines of golden fire speared towards the sea.
He'd timed it perfectly. The burst only lasted a second, but that was long enough for each of the 20mm Hispano guns to fire a dozen shells. The first few streaked down ahead of the Condor, but before its crew had a chance to react the big plane flew right into the stream of destruction. Explosions marched back along the nose, blowing off most of the radar antennas and shredding the alloy skin. The windscreens disintegrated, then shells were punching through the top of the fuselage and exploding inside the flight deck. The pilot was half way through a startled curse when one hit the backrest of his seat and sprayed most of his upper body across the instrument panel. The co-pilot died a fraction of a second later. By the time the Condor's nose started to dip towards the water the Mosquito was already a mile away, its prop wash whipping foam from the crests of the largest waves.
- X -
From the bridge the Condor's death looked graceful right up until the last moments. After the brief burst of fire the bomber seemed to hold its course for a few seconds, then the nose dipped slightly and its gentle dive steepened. As it went down it began a slow roll to the left, but it hadn't completed a quarter turn when the port wingtip hit the sea and all grace vanished in a cartwheeling eruption of spray and debris. The Old Man lowered the night glasses – just in time to see red and green navigation lights begin to flash. The distinctive howl of Rolls-Royce Merlins swelled out of the night and something black raced overhead a hundred feet up. As he turned to follow it the dark shape pulled into a steep climb. Just for a moment he saw the outline of the Mosquito silhouetted against a lighter patch of cloud and then it was gone, the thunder of its engines dying away over the North Atlantic.
- X –
"Good shooting, skipper, but how the hell are we supposed to get home?"
The pilot checked the fuel gauges. The main tanks were just over half full. That was nowhere near enough to get them home; it wouldn't even take them to one of the bases in Northern Ireland, if any were open. He frowned at his chart, then pointed with the tip of his pencil. "There. I think we can make it. Just."
The radar operator scribbled some quick sums on a notepad. "Maybe. It'll be close though. Get rid of the rest of the ammo and save some weight?"
That was a good idea; they'd taken off with 500 rounds for each gun, just over half a ton of ammunition, and the short burst that had killed the Condor had barely put a dent in it. It cost ten shillings a round and the supply officer wouldn't be too happy if he used nearly two thousand of them to shoot down clouds, but then the Mosquito and its radar system had cost close to £25,000 and ditching it in the Atlantic probably wouldn't go down too well, either – although he wasn't likely to be around to worry about that. Oh well. He emptied the guns in a series of long bursts, then checked the altimeter and throttled back. The wooden fighter kept climbing, more gently now. Twenty minutes later he levelled off at 29,000 feet and cut the power almost to idle. It was just under six hundred miles to the coast of County Mayo.
- X -
"It sounds like Vampire Niner made it, ma'am. Nutts Corner just had a complaint from the Irish police. They say a Mosquito landed at a private flying club in Belmullet then took off again heading northeast. It was across the border before the Irish Air Corps could take off, they say, but they're threatening to intercept it if they see it again."
"Good luck to them. Their fastest fighter is only, what, 160 knots slower than it?"
Leading Wren Seymour shrugged. "Apparently they're quite angry, ma'am. It seems the crew broke into the fuel store and clubhouse. The Garda say they stole 150 gallons of petrol and six cases of Guinness."
- X -
The wheels locked down with a pair of solid thuds as the Mosquito descended. The radar operator sighed. "Well, that was exciting. Did we really have to fly all the way from Belmullet at 500 feet?"
"I couldn't go any higher or the bottles would have burst."
"And that's another thing. Those bloody Garda nearly had us. Thirty seconds more and they'd have got that car onto the airstrip and we'd have been stuffed. We already had the fuel; was it really necessary to hang around an extra ten minutes to burgle the clubhouse and fill the bomb bay with beer?"
The landscape below was dark under the blackout. Paisley, just to their right, was invisible. Then suddenly a long rectangle of lights blinked on two miles in front of them – the flare path of Royal Naval Air Station Sanderling. The pilot flicked on the landing lights then turned to the radar operator. "I'm the only fly boy in my family; half the rest of them are in your lot. That was my brother's ship we just saved. I feel like celebrating, and you can't beat free Guinness for that."
"Oh well, if you put it that way, you're quite right. So your brother's serving on a frigate?"
"Sort of. He commands her. And it was my sister in law who sent us out there tonight. She's a watch officer at Clyde SPR."
"Oh." The radar operator was silent until the wheels had bumped on the runway and the Mosquito was taxiing back to the dispersal pan. "So now what?"
"You go get my car and bring her back here. I'll keep the ground crew away from the plane until we've offloaded the fizzy stuff. Then we'll get the paperwork out the way and have a liquid breakfast."
"Aye aye sir." The pilot noted the familiar naval phrase; he'd take that as a compliment. Just to remove any doubt the radar operator went on, "You know, Roger, for an RAF type you're not at all a bad chap."
- X -
Staff Officer Operations uncapped her pen once more. Tiredness was overwhelming her fast now, but in a few minutes Julie Hallam would take over the duty and she'd have twelve blessed hours to sleep. She filled in a final signal message form and called for a signalman. He saluted and took the sheet, glanced down at it and frowned. "What does that mean, Ma'am?"
Second Officer Nancy Walker sagged back in her chair. "Never mind, Keates. Just send it for me."
"Aye aye, Ma'am." He walked towards the radio shack door.
- X -
"FOR LEVEN SWALLOWS AND AMAZONS FOREVER CLYDESPR SENDS NW"
Lieutenant Commander John Walker smiled at the signal, then folded the slip and tucked it into his tunic pocket. Overhead, a Liberator droned out of the brightening sky and eased into a wide orbit above his ship. He turned to Burns. "Your watch, Number One. I'm going below. Call me at sunset." He staggered towards the bridge ladder, turned and cautiously began to descend. At its foot he glanced for a moment towards the sunrise. "And ever," he murmured.
The top of the sun's arc rose above the horizon and bathed HMS Leven in a sudden golden glow. Far to the east, at the same moment, it cleared a line of well-remembered hills and shone on the landing place of a small, wooded island.