First kill.
Bosede didn’t try to maneuver. The American who had given him his painfully brief lessons in how to handle the Tomahawk had made that very clear. Don’t hang around to dogfight with biplanes. Dive on them, shoot them up and then climb away to repeat the process on somebody else. The Tomahawk climbs almost 700 feet-per-minute faster than the CR.42; you will be clear of the battle before the Italian pilots can do anything about it.
Bosede did a wingover at the top of his climb and surveyed the chaos underneath. His victim had gone; nothing but a cloud of black smoke to mark its grave in the sky. Another CR.42 was spinning down; smoke and flames poured from its fuselage. A white flower erupted behind it. The Italian pilot had bailed out and was riding his parachute down. A third CR.42 was just a pyre of smoke from the ground. That left the fourth and last. It was heading north, trying to escape from the battlefield. A pair of Tomahawks were already closing in on it. Escape was a faint hope. A little to the west of the battle, the Ro-37 as already trying to escape from the disaster; the Furies had turned and were chasing it.
Bosede pushed his nose down again and went into a long dive that would bring him behind and below the Ro-37. Tracers flashed out from the single gun in the aft cockpit as the Italian pilot tried to evade.
It did him as little good. Bosede’s six machine guns tore into the flimsy biplane. The two crewmen lurched around in their seats. Its crew dead, the Ro-37 peeled over into a long dive that quickly turned into a fatal spin.
Second kill.
The airfield at Buna was only a few minutes away. Bosede knew the way there well. He saw the runway before him and only just remembered to lower his undercarriage before carrying out a neat threepoint landing on the long grass strip. Hoping nobody had noticed the near-goof, he taxied to the hangars before turning off his engine. That was when he saw how the Tomahawk was surrounded by ground crews who had run out to see the new fighters.
Petrus van Bram listened to his story of the fight with something close to amusement. “Do you realize, Pim, that your four fighters shot down 11 CR.42s and three Ro-37s in that dogfight? That’s what we get if we add up all the claims you four are making. And that’s not including the Ro-37 my Furies shot down. A great air victory, I believe?”
Bosede flushed. It was obvious that the air battle had been much more complex than he had realized. But, he was quite sure that it had been his guns that had killed a CR.42 and the Ro-37. His memory of the kills was so clear, so positive.
“Petrus, I….”
van Bram held up his hand. “Pim, we have reports coming in from the Army who watched the battle from the ground. They will confirm your CR.42. They saw it explode in mid-air the way you describe and say only a single Tomahawk attacked it. But there were six aircraft firing on that Ro-37 and nobody can say who really killed it. At best, you have a small part of it. But, I will ask you to forgo that small part and allow me to credit one of the Furies with the kill. It will be very good for their morale after so many weeks of achieving nothing.”
Bosede thought for a second. He knew in his heart that it had been his guns that had brought down the Ro-37, but he could see how a kill would encourage the remaining Fury pilots. He nodded.
van Bram slapped him on the back. “Good man. Get your aircraft ready for a fast take-off. After this day’s work, the SM-79s will be paying us a visit and we would not wish to be caught on the ground like the Rhodesians.”
Back by the hangars, Bosede saw the ground crew reloading his machine guns and fuelling up the Tomahawk. He saw something else; a single red-white-green roundel painted under the cockpit. The crew chief stepped back with a proud grin on his face. He had waited a long time to paint a kill mark on one of the fighters in his care.
“Sergeant, please do something for me. On the nose, paint the name Marijke, please.”
“Your wife, sir?” The sergeant asked the question as he went to get a pot of white paint.
“No. I don’t know where the name came from. It just popped into my mind somehow. As if she was telling me her name herself.”
“We’re running out of time, Your Highness. All the intelligence we are receiving suggests that the Japanese will move on Hong Kong in the very near future. We have a couple of months, at most; perhaps much less than that.”
Princess Suriyothai smiled politely at the businessman who sat before her. The builders of the new office block had done her proud; the facility was complete and as modern as any in the Far East. The new communications system was also being built; the choke point there was the underwater telegraph cable needed to improve the capacity of the link. There were only a limited number of suppliers of such cable and orders for it were placed months in advance.
“I think you have longer than you believe, Simon. The Japanese cannot move on Hong Kong at the moment since they are painfully short of troops. The war in China is already grinding them down as it absorbs more and more of their army. They will move on French Indochina first, since doing so will close off the most important remaining supply line for the Chinese forces.
“They call this force the Indochina Expeditionary Army and it is commanded by Major General Takuma Nishimura. It has as its main element, the Fifth Infantry Division, commanded by Lieutenant General Akihito Nakamura, supported by two independent infantry brigades and a cavalry regiment. The Fifth Infantry Division will need to be detached from that force before the Japanese can contemplate an assault upon Hong Kong. We intend to make sure it cannot be so detached.”
“How do you plan that, Your Highness.” Keswick had his own sources of information; they had reported the quiet mobilization of the Thai Army. Some of the German advisors training that army had also spoken to Keswick; their comments made him realize that The Ambassador’s claims of her army were not exaggerations. His question was curiosity, not doubt.
Suriyothai understood that perfectly.
“We intend to take the southern half of Indochina, all the way to the Mekong. That gives us a strong defensive line and puts our army in a position to dominate the rest of French Indochina. The Japanese will be forced to keep their Indochina Expeditionary Army in place. They will have to bring additional forces down for the seizure of Hong Kong and that will take them time.”
“An ambitious plan, Your Highness. When will you start?”
“In eight weeks. As soon as the Americans have had their feelings soothed.”
“Another ship lost to us.”
Wavell’s voice was heavy with disappointment. HMS Ramillies was in the shipping channel, heading out for Gibraltar and home. She was the latest in a long line of departures. Some ships were heading for their new home port of Gibraltar; others going all the way back to Britain and an uncertain future. The only really good news was that Ramillies would be the last. She had been drydocked in Alexandria for months; that was the only reason she had stayed so long.
“She’s no real loss; her engines are done for. With her in a squadron, we’re hard put to hold 15 knots. She and Royal Sovereign look good on the homeward bound list, though. With Malaya still in Gibraltar and Warspite here, we’re still in business. We haven’t done badly, Archie. I still have a fleet here and it’s a damned good one. And the fleet at Gibraltar is nothing to be sneezed at: a battleship, two really modern cruisers and eight destroyers. We’ve got both ends of the Mediterranean covered; for the moment, anyway.”