It took me the better part of an hour to fix the wires. I was just finishing when a lorry drove up. There was the clatter of metal and the drag of a pipe as they connected the fuel lorry to the tanks in the port-hand wing. The lorry’s engine droned as it began refuelling.
I waited, conscious already of a fugitive, guilty feeling. Footsteps moved round the plane. Rather than be caught crouched nervously in the cockpit of my own machine, I went aft down the fuselage, climbing round the three big elliptical tanks and dropping on to the asphalt. I started to walk away from the plane, but the beam of a torch picked me out and a voice said, ‘Who’s that?’
‘Squadron-Leader Fraser,’ I answered, reverting automatically to my service title. ‘I’ve just been checking over something.’
‘Very good, sir. Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight,’ I answered and went hurriedly across to the terminal building and along the road to the mess. I went up to my room and lay on my bed, trying to read. But I couldn’t concentrate. My hands were trembling. Time dragged by as I lay there chainsmoking. Shortly after seven-thirty the door opened and Westrop poked his head into the room. ‘You coming down to dinner, sir?’
‘May as well,’ I said.
As we went down the echoing corridors and along the cinder paths to the mess, Westrop chattered away incessantly. I wasn’t listening until something he said caught my attention. ‘What’s that about a crash?’ I asked.
‘Remember when we arrived here yesterday — the station commander was talking about a Skymaster that was missing?’ he said. ‘Well, they made a forced landing in Russian territory. I got it from a flight lieutenant who’s just come off duty at Ops. One of our crews sighted the wreck this afternoon. The Russians have Apparently denied all knowledge of it. What do you think happens to crews who get landed in the Russian Zone?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said shortly.
The flight lieutenant said they were probably being held for interrogation. He didn’t seem worried about them. But they might be injured. Do you think the Russians would give them medical treatment, sir? I mean’ — he hesitated — ‘well, I wouldn’t like to have a Russian surgeon operate on me, would you?’
‘No.’
‘What do you think they hope to gain by this sort of thing? Everybody seems convinced they’re not prepared to go to war yet. They’ve stopped buzzing our planes. That seems to prove it. They got scared when they crashed that York. I was talking to an R.E. major this afternoon. He said the trouble was their lines of communication. Their roads are bad and their railways from Russia to Eastern Germany are only single track. But I think it’s more than that, don’t you, sir? I mean, they can’t possibly be as good as us technically. They could never have organised a thing as complicated as the airlift, for instance. And then their planes — they’re still operating machines based on the B 29s they got hold of during the war.’ He went on and on about the Russians until at length I couldn’t stand it any more. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said. ‘I’m sick and tired of the Russians.’
‘Sorry, sir, but-’ He paused uncertainly. ‘It’s just — well, this is my first operational night flight.’
It was only then that I realised he’d been talking because he was nervous. I thought: My God! The poor kid’s scared stiff of the Russians and in a few hours’ time I’m going to order him to jump. It made me feel sick inside. Why wasn’t my crew composed entirely of Fields? I didn’t care about Field. I’d have ordered him to jump over wartime Berlin and not cared a damn. But Tubby and this child….
I forced myself to eat and listened to Westrop’s chatter all through the meal. He had a live, inquiring mind. He already knew that we had to cover seventy miles of the Russian Zone in flying down the Berlin approach corridor. He knew, too, all about Russian interrogation methods — the round-the-clock interrogation under lights, the solitary confinement, the building up of fear in the mind of the victim. ‘They’re no better than the Nazis, are they?’ he said. ‘Only they don’t seem to go as far as physical torture — not against service personnel.’ He paused and then said, ‘I wish we wore uniform. I’m certain, if anything like that happened, we’d be better off if we were in R.A.F. uniform.’
‘You’ll be all right,’ I answered without thinking.
‘Oh, I know we shan’t have to make a forced landing,’ he said quickly, mistaking what had been in my mind. ‘Our servicing is much better than the Yanks’ and-’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that,’ I cut in. ‘Have a cigarette and for God’s sake stop talking about forced landings.’
‘I’m sorry, sir. It was only-’ He took the cigarette. ‘You must think me an awful funk. But it’s odd — I always like to know exactly what I’m facing. It makes it easier, somehow.’
Damn the kid! I’d always felt just like that myself. ‘I’ll see you at the plane at 21.46,’ I said and got quickly to my feet. As I went out of the dining-hall I glanced at my watch. Still an hour to go! I left the mess and walked down to the airfield. The night was cold and frosty, the sky studded with stars. The apron was full of the huddled shapes of aircraft, looking clumsy and unbeautiful on the ground. Trucks were coming and going as the FASO teams worked to load them for the next wave. I leaned on the boundary fence and watched them. I could see my own plane. It was the left-hand one of a line of Tudors. Fuel loading and maintenance crews had completed their work. The planes stood deserted and silent. The minutes dragged slowly by as I stood, chilled to the marrow, trying to brace myself for what I had to do.
The odd thing is I never thought of refusing to cany out my part of the plan. I could have raised technical difficulties and put it off until gradually Saeton lost heart. Many times since I have asked myself why I didn’t do this, and I still don’t really know the answer. I like to think that Saeton’s threat of exposing my identity to the police had nothing to do with it. Certainly the audacity of the thing had appealed to me. Also I believed in Saeton and his engines and the airlift had only served to increase their importance in my eyes. Moreover, my own future was involved. I suppose the truth is that my attitude was a combination of all these things. At any rate, as I stood there on the edge of Wunstorf airfield waiting for zero hour, it never occurred to me not to do it.
At last my watch told me it was nine-fifteen. I went slowly back to the mess. Tubby came in as I was getting into my flying kit. ‘Well, thank God the weather’s cleared,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I wouldn’t want to be talked down by GCA the first time we went in by night.’ GCA is Ground Control Approach, a means of blind landing where the plane lands on instructions from an officer operating radar gear at the edge of the runway.
By nine-fifty we were climbing into the plane. Our take-off time was 22.36 and as I lifted the heavy plane into the starlit night my hands and stomach felt as cold as ice. Tubby was checking the trim of the engines, his hand on the throttle levers. I groped down and found one of my three pairs of wires and touched the ends of them together. The inboard port motor checked. It worked all right. I glanced quickly at Tubby. He had taken his hand from the throttles and was listening, his head on one side. Then he turned to me. ‘Did you hear that engine falter?’ he shouted.
I nodded. ‘Sounded like dirt in the fuel,’ I called back.
He stayed in the same position for a moment, listening. Then his hand went back to the throttles. I glanced at the airspeed indicator and then at my watch. Three-quarters of an hour to Restorf beacon at the entrance of the air corridor.