Eagles Over Britain (The After Dunkirk Series Book 2) Read online

  Red and Donahue watched.

  Claire grinned broadly. “Gentlemen, I don’t believe you’ve met Paul, our eldest brother.”

  “Your nanny told me where to find you.” Paul glanced at the tall, redheaded pilot. “So, this is the famous Red.”

  “You’ve heard of me?” Red replied, shooting a glance at Claire.

  “Nothing good,” Paul joked as he sat down next to Jeremy. The two brothers jostled each other in jest.

  Donahue, sitting opposite Claire, watched the interaction between the siblings. “This is quite a family you have,” he said.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt what you were saying,” Paul replied. “I’d very much like to hear what air combat is like.”

  Donahue leaned back in his chair. “Hmm. From a pilot’s perspective, it’s hours and hours of boredom on the ground broken up by moments of sheer terror in the skies. Sometimes you’re in a swarm, and then suddenly everyone’s disappeared, and you seem to be the only one up there. Every once in a while, you get to take part in making one of the enemy go down, and that feels good.” He took a breath. “Your fellow pilots become your best friends. You count on them to watch out for you, looking for bandits in those parts of the sky that you can’t see. You do the same for them.

  “When we’re forward and first line, we’re sitting on the ground exaggerating war stories, playing games, sleeping, or whatever, waiting for the phone to ring. When we get the call that sends us aloft, we make a mad dash to our kites. Within two minutes we’re in the air and climbing to our position, guided by the controllers.” He closed his eyes and shook his head slightly. “We’re vastly outnumbered. Thank God for those controllers and that radar.

  “The enemy is trying to get an advantage on us, and of course we’re doing the same, preferring to come at them out of the sun. That’s not always possible, particularly since they’re coming from the east, often at first light.

  “Someone spots specks in the sky—how’s that for alliteration?” He chuckled, and the others joined in light laughter, subdued by fascination. “Those specks rapidly materialize into whatever type of aircraft they are. The Spitfires target fighter escorts, and the Hurricanes go after the bombers. They intend to destroy our airfields and as many of our aircraft as they can, but I suppose that goes without saying.

  “Their fighters are after both Hurricanes and Spitfires. They fly well above their bombers so they can dive on us, and when they do, our squadron leader will call, ‘Tally-ho,’ the order to attack. We separate, and very quickly the battle becomes one of fighter-on-fighter, fighter-on-bomber, or however-many-fighters-on-one...” He took a deep breath. “And of course, you could be the fighter being swarmed. That’s not fun.”

  “So, you’ve seen—” Claire left the question unfinished.

  Donahue locked his eyes on hers. “I’ve seen things I wish I hadn’t. This is going to be a tough war.”

  A waiter brought the food and more ale, breaking the somber mood. “Drink up,” he said, “the good customers of The Bull invite you to be their guests.” To that, they raised their mugs, and soon after belted out verses of “Roll Out the Barrel.”

  “Will my family always be in danger while I reside in comfort?” Claire asked Jeremy and Paul later back at her house. Paul had driven his siblings there in a car he had borrowed for the evening. Donahue had gone back to his unit, and the other three pilots had returned to Hawarden.

  Without waiting for a reply, Claire asked Jeremy, “How on earth did you land in the RAF?”

  “I’ll tell you, but first, let me look in on Timmy.” He tiptoed into the nursery and leaned over the sleeping child, his chest welling with emotion on seeing him. He stroked Timmy’s arms and kissed his forehead, shutting out the memories of the shipwreck and the cries of wounded and dying people struggling to survive the sinking HMT Lancastria.

  Leaving Timmy and closing his door softly, Jeremy found Claire conversing with Paul in the front room.

  “How long can you stay?” Claire asked.

  Paul sighed. “I have terribly urgent reports to read and analyze tomorrow morning.” His sarcastic tone belied what he believed about the urgency of his task.

  “Red will pick me up in a Tiger Moth at a nearby airfield tomorrow in the late afternoon,” Jeremy said. “He reserved a training flight in one for the purpose.”

  Claire and Jeremy walked with Paul back out to the car. Claire looked at him, dismayed. “I wish you didn’t have to leave.” He nodded grimly, set the gear, and drove down the driveway.

  Claire watched him go. Then she brightened and turned to Jeremy. “Timmy and I have you all to ourselves for most of a day,” she exclaimed, her eyes shining. “Timmy will be so happy. He loves to play with you. Now, tell me how you ended up in the RAF.”

  They moved to the living room. Jeremy told her the same things he had said to Major Crockatt about his reasons for choosing to fly. When he had finished, Claire slumped in her seat. “Little brother, you’re breaking my heart. How will we lose you? As a puff of smoke dropping out of the skies or executed as a spy by the Gestapo in France?” She fought back tears. “I have the same worry over Lance and our parents, and about those three pilot friends of yours—four now, with Donahue.” And I usually know before you do when the danger is coming, and where it’s coming from.

  Jeremy tried to comfort her. “You caused quite a stir tonight. I think Red and Donahue were in a dogfight of evil glances and posturing over you.”

  “Oh, stop it,” she retorted, jabbing him. “I don’t have the stomach for that now.”

  18

  July 28, 1940

  RAF Hawarden, United Kingdom

  The Spitfire’s monstrous Rolls Royce Merlin engine roared, the propeller spun to invisibility, and its frame and skin vibrated power. Sitting in the cockpit, Jeremy exulted in the sense of anticipated freedom, only minutes away.

  His eyes roamed the dash, checking the gauges and switches. As he throttled the engine up to taxi, the sleek aircraft seemed poised, ready to bound skyward. He made eye contact with the crewman and gave a quick nod. The man jerked a long rope that yanked the blocks out.

  The Spitfire surged forward, and Jeremy quickly found that he had to hold it back rather than urge it ahead. With a light touch on the ground brakes, he steered to the end of the grass runway, turned into the wind, checked his gauges, switches, and trim, throttled up to power, and released this eager, magnificent creature. It bounded forward and gained speed. The ground raced by beneath them, and sooner than Jeremy could have believed, he raised the nose. The Spitfire sprang into the sky.

  Thrill!! Freedom in a three-dimensional world. Pull the stick back, the nose rises, the Spitfire climbs. Push the throttle forward, the fighter delivers more power with plenty of reserve.

  For the past two days, Jeremy had sat in the cockpit of this fighter reading from a manual, identifying switches, controls, and gauges, and memorizing the performance characteristics, capabilities, and limitations of the aircraft. The manner of training on the aircraft seemed strange and fraught with potential for error, but since it was a single-seater and there was no trainer for it, other options were not available.

  “Get to know the kite,” Eddy had told him as they walked together out to the fighter before the flight. “Do some landings and takeoffs, but don’t overdo it. I told you, we lose a lot of pilots during training, and I’d say most of them tried too much too soon.”

  With that advice in mind, once airborne, Jeremy re-checked the gauges and trim, telling himself to be cautious and go through all the steps. Then, anticipation spread through his arms and legs. He pulled back on the stick, throttled up, and climbed, climbed, climbed. The g-forces gathered, and the controls became stiff and his arms heavy, demanding strength to move them. Only blue sky above. He reached the zenith of a loop, where the pull of gravity matched the power of the aircraft. Far away, the earth appeared through the ceiling of his cockpit, and for just a moment, he floated with the strange sensation of
weightlessness.

  Then the Spitfire dived, and the earth hurtled up, filling the windshield.

  Jeremy eased the stick forward, letting the nose drop as his airspeed accelerated. At the outside of his downward arc, he began to pull back on the stick.

  Sweat beaded on his forehead as the ground rushed toward him. Did I miscalculate? He pulled back more and saw the horizon. It appeared near the top of his windshield and then lowered as he shallowed out of the dive. His airspeed slowed, and he leveled off two hundred feet above the ground.

  Exhilaration! “More!”

  He flew straight and level, the landscape screaming past, until his breath had returned to normal, and then he corkscrewed through the air, watching in wonder as his right wing arced above and then dipped below him. Once more, he looked through the top of his cockpit to see the ground.

  On rotating to upright, straight-and-level flight again, he maneuvered into a few patterns, did some approaches and emergency-abort takeoffs and landings at a nearby practice field, and then climbed again to five thousand feet. There, he banked left, pulled the stick far back, and opened the throttle, entering an increasingly tight turn.

  The g-forces built. His arms and legs felt heavy again. The stick resisted his pull, and he began to feel lightheaded. Then, just as Donahue had said, he heard Eddy’s voice in the back of his mind: “Lean forward, tuck those knees into your chest. Breathe deeply, deliberately.”

  He imagined an ME 109 on his tail and forced the stick back farther with the throttle full open and combat boost applied. He hunched over the stick, pressed his chest against his knees, and held tight. The screaming fighter wound in tighter and tighter circles, whirling above the earth, leaving its vapor trail behind.

  At last, Jeremy conjured a disappearing enemy fighter, broke out of the turn, and leveled his wings. Then, weary but contented, he flew back and landed at Hawarden.

  “You were having fun up there,” Eddy greeted him outside the dispersal hut.

  “You don’t pilot that fighter,” Jeremy blurted, ecstatic, his face flush with enthusiasm. “You strap it on and fly.”

  Eddy eyed him, obviously not happy. “You went beyond what I advised for a first time in the kite, but you’re back in one piece, so we’ll have to call it a good flight.”

  Jeremy peered at him cautiously. “You’re upset with me.”

  “I am bloody well furious at you,” Eddy stormed. “Who the hell do you think you are taking His Majesty’s finest fighter up there and treating it like your personal sports car? You learn those maneuvers for combat, not so you can go up and have a party.”

  “They must be practiced thor—”

  “On my schedule, not yours.”

  “But I had done those maneuvers in the Miles Master.”

  “Which is a different airplane. Different performance characteristics, different emergency procedures. What would you have done if the plane had stalled out at the top of your loop?”

  “I’d have let it gain airspeed, leveled out upright, and tried to re-start.”

  “That sounds good on paper, but you’d be lightheaded from executing the loop and then you’d have to go into a dive while executing a tight turn and a roll almost simultaneously. If you had gone into a spin, that would have been catastrophic. The Spitfire doesn’t do well in spins, particularly at high altitudes. It also loses maneuverability at high speeds because of the air moving laterally across its ailerons. Did you know that?”

  Crestfallen, Jeremy said weakly, “I think I read it.”

  “You read it,” Eddy said sarcastically. “You were damned lucky and showing only minimal skill. Were you even thinking of how you were breathing?”

  Jeremy hung his head.

  “You’re young, in shape, and have some natural ability,” Eddy went on, “and that will get you killed if you go out and try things before we’ve prepared you, despite how little time we have. When we lose student pilots, unfortunately, they take their planes down with them, and we don’t have enough of either planes or pilots now when we need them most, and you go out and jeopardize yourself and the aircraft.”

  He stopped talking and stepped closer to Jeremy with a finger pointed in his face. “If you’re here on a lark, tell me now. I was never fond of the idea of students moving through the course so fast, and you’ve confirmed my concerns.”

  The two men stood in silence, face to face, Eddy with his hands on his hips, and Jeremy with shoulders drooping, looking downcast.

  “You’re grounded,” Eddy said at last.

  Stunned, Jeremy groaned and started to protest.

  “I don’t care to hear your objections, sir. You ignored my advice. You’re out of the air, and you’re going to read manuals and be in one-on-one sessions with me. If I think you’ve learned your lesson, I might let you fly again in three days. If we were in peacetime, I’d recommend your termination from the course. If you join a squadron, they’ll expect a fully trained pilot who’ll operate in a team, not decide on a whim what he ought to be doing. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

  Jeremy threw his head back and rubbed his eyes. “Only one,” he said. “Flight Officer Donahue was right.”

  “Art Donahue?” Eddy’s curiosity was piqued. “About what?”

  “He said that when we were pulling those maneuvers, I’d hear your voice in my head saying, ‘Breathe, breathe. Get those knees into your chest.’ I heard you loud and clear, Flight Sergeant.”

  Eddy stared at him, and then snickered involuntarily. Turning red in the face, he quelled a belt of laughter and subdued a smirk. “I’ll see you at first light,” he said, forcing a stern look. “Be ready for two days of crammed ground-school, and at the end of it, you had better understand what’s been taught.”

  Sitting alone in his room that night, Jeremy tried to recall the last time he had felt so dejected. His mind traveled back to the sinking of the Lancastria when, with Timmy clinging to him in the oil-slicked ocean, he realized that the little boy’s mother would not resurface. Then his memory floated further back to the night he had left the Boulier house in Dunkirk.

  Amélie’s face flashed through his mind. Amélie. He had barely thought of her since arriving back in England and starting flight training. Though she had always been in his mind—she lived there—he had not concentrated his thoughts on her since arriving at Hawarden. She had left the villa in Marseille without saying goodbye, and Fourcade had admonished them not to worry about each other.

  They sent her in harm’s way. Where is she?

  19

  July 30, 1940

  London, England

  The voyage from Marseille had been hard on Amélie. She had arrived only six days ago hardly knowing what to expect. The rendezvous with the submarine south of the city in the Mediterranean had been terrifying. It had occurred in the dead of night; her escorts wore dark clothing and hid their faces; the launch was tiny; the sub surfaced, quiet and ghostly; its presence known only from the sound of compressed air, its location identified by a trade of hooded light-signals; but Amélie had not even seen it until her boat was within yards of it. Spray and the sound of water flowing off its sides had further alerted her to its presence.

  Trusting strangers invisible to her in the dark, she had been lifted out of the launch by strong arms, transferred to the deck of the sub gently bobbing in the calm waters, led to a hatch forward of the conning tower, and let down a vertical ladder into the bowels of the boat. There, a sailor had taken charge of her and led her to another area, through a throng of sweaty men, some in T-shirts, some shirtless, all intensely busy. Whether her guide steered her to the front or rear, she could not say. The air was foul, smelling of grease, sweat, stale coffee, cigarette smoke, and myriad other odors.

  No one paid particular attention to her other than the sailor. “We were expecting you, ma’am. It’s a little crowded in here. We’ll do the best we can for you.”

  The “best” was a bunk that folded down from the hull with curtains
hanging around it. “Our mission is to get you safely to London,” the sailor said. “We won’t be looking for engagements, but if the bad guys spot us, things could get dicey. If that happens, we’ll get warning, and I’ll come stay with you until the danger is past. The captain will come by to say ‘hello’ when he gets a chance after we're underway.”

  In the dim light, Amélie could barely make out his features. He seemed very young, more because of his voice than his looks. He was lanky, maybe blond or just light brown hair, but with a guileless, pleasant smile. “The captain will come see you after we’ve dived and are on course. We know it’s rough down here. We’re used to it. Meanwhile, we have plenty of food, water, coffee, and books. What can I get you?”

  “Maybe some coffee,” Amélie said, glancing up and around her, realizing that she was underwater and about to go deeper.

  The following three days had rivaled those of her flight from Dunkirk. Amid the clatter and the boat’s constant vibration, sleeping and boredom had at first seemed impossibilities. The captain came by as promised, a nice enough man who projected calm, but his eyes could not quite suppress the pressures of navigating a vessel through dark waters in wartime.

  As the hours passed, she acclimated to the tumult, hearing the commands from the control room for “dive,” “left full rudder,” “up fifty feet,” and others that she found completely unintelligible. From changes in the sub’s course and acceleration, she determined in which directions the bow and the stern must be.

  Forever, she would praise the gallantry of the crew. They treated her with respectful humor, taking pains to honor her privacy, and pretending not to notice when she suffered her most embarrassing moments: adding her own contribution to the malodor in the “head.”

  Then she learned that she could sleep and do it soundly. However, when she awakened, she felt only marginally refreshed, with no clue of whether they were in daytime or nighttime.