But all he said was, ‘You’ve dropped those boys into Russian territory.’
‘Well, what of it?’ I demanded hotly. ‘They’ll be ail right. So will Harcourt. And so will we.’
He looked at me then, his face a white mask, the little lines at the corners of his eyes no longer crinkled by laughter. He looked solid, unemotional — like a block of granite. ‘I should have known the sort of person you were when you turned up at Membury like that. Saeton’s a fanatic. I can forgive him. But you’re just a dirty little crook who has-’
He shouldn’t have” said that. It made me mad — part fear, part anger. Damn his bloody high and mighty principles! Was he prepared to die for them? I reached down for the wires. My fingers were trembling and numb with the cold blast of the air that came in through the open doorway aft, but I managed to fasten the clips. The engines died away. The cabin was suddenly silent, a ghostly place of soft-lit dials and our reflections in the windshield. We seemed suddenly cut off from the rest of the world. A white pin-point of light slid over us like a star — our one contact with reality, a plane bound for Berlin.
‘Don’t be a fool, Fraser!’ Tubby’s voice was unnaturally loud in the stillness.
I laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. My nerves were keyed to the pitch of desperation. ‘Either we fly to Membury,’ I said, ‘or we crash.’ My teeth were clenched. It might have been a stranger’s voice. ‘You can jump if you want to,’ I added, nodding towards the rear of the cockpit where the wind whistled.
‘Unfasten those wires!’ he shouted. And when I made no move he said, ‘Get them unfastened and start the motors or I’ll hurt you.’
He was fumbling in the pocket beside his seat and his hand came out holding a heavy spanner. He let go the controls then. The plane dipped and slid away to port. Automatically I grasped the control column and righted her. At the same time he rose in his seat, the spanner lifted in his hand.
I flung myself sideways, lunging out at him. The spanner caught me across the shoulder and my left arm went numb. But I had hold of his flying suit now and was pulling him towards me. He had no room to use the spanner again. And at the same moment the plane dropped sickeningly. We were flung into the aisle and fetched up against the fuel tanks in the fuselage.
For a moment we stood there, locked together, and then he fought to get clear of me, to get back to start the motors again. I was determined he shouldn’t. I’d take him down into the ground rather than fly on to Gatow to be accused of having attempted to take a plane off the airlift. I clutched hold of him, pinning his arms, bracing myself against the tanks. The plane lurched and we were flung between the tanks into the main body of the fuselage where the wind roared in through the open doorway. That lurch flung us against the door to the toilet, breaking us clear of each other. He raised the spanner to strike at me again and I hit him with my fist. The spanner descended, striking my shoulder again. I lashed out again. My fist caught his jaw and his head jerked back against the metal of the fuselage. At the same moment the plane seemed to fall away. We were both flung sideways. Tubby hit the side of the open doorway. I saw his head jerk back as his forehead caught a protruding section of the metal frame. Blood gleamed red in a long gash and his jaw fell slack. Slowly his legs gave under him.
As he fell I started forward. He was falling into the black rectangle of the doorway. I clutched at him, but the plane swung, jerking me back against the toilet door. And in that instant Tubby slid to the floor, his legs slowly disappearing into the black void of the slipstream. For an instant his thick torso lay along the floor, held there by the wind and the tilt of the plane. I could do nothing. I was pinned by the tilt of the plane, forced to stand there and watch as his body began to slide outwards, slowly, like a sack, the outstretched hands making no attempt to hold him. For a second he was there, sliding slowly out across the floor, and then the slip-stream whisked him away and I was alone in the body of the plane with only the gaping doorway and a thin trickle of blood on the steel flooring to show what had happened.
I shook myself, dazed with the horror of it. Then I closed the door and went for’ard. Almost automatically my brain registered the altimeter dial. Height 700. I slipped into the pilot’s seat and with trembling fingers forced the wires apart. The engines roared. I gripped the control column and my feet found the rudder bar. I banked and climbed steeply. The lights of a town showed below me and the snaking course of a river. I felt sick at the thought of what had happened to Tubby. Height two-four. Course eight-five degrees. I must find out what had happened to Tubby.
I made a right, diving turn and levelled out at five hundred feet. I had to find out what had happened to him. If he’d regained consciousness and had been able to pull his parachute release… Surely the cold air would have revived him. God! Don’t let him die, I was sobbing my prayer aloud. I went back along the course of the river, over the lights of the town. A road ran out of it, straight like a piece of tape and white in the moonlight. Then I shut down the engines and put down the flaps. This was the spot where Tubby had fallen. I searched desperately through the windshield. But all I saw was a deserted airfield bordered by pine woods and a huddle of buildings that were no more than empty shells. No sign of a parachute, no comforting mushroom patch of white.
I went back and forth over the area a dozen times.
The aerodrome and the woods and the bomb-shattered buildings stood out clear in the moonlight, but never a sign of the white silk of a parachute.
Tubby was dead and I had killed him.
Dazed and frightened I banked away from the white graveyard scene of the shattered buildings. I took the plane up to 10,000 feet and fled westward across the moon-filled night. Away to the right I could see the lines of planes coming in along the corridor, red and green navigation lights stretching back towards Lubeck. But in a moment they were gone and I was alone, riding the sky, with only the reflection of my face in the windshield for company — nothing of earth but the flat expanse of the Westphalian plain, white like a salt-pan below me.
CHAPTER SIX
There was no problem of navigation to distract my mind on the homeward run. The earth lay like a white map below me. I found the North Sea at Flushing, crossed the southern extremity of it, flying automatically, and just as automatically picked up the Thames estuary, following the curves of the river till it met the Kennet. And all the time I was remembering every detail of what had happened. It seemed such a waste that he should die like that. And all because he’d called me a crook. My face, ghostly in the windshield, seemed to reflect the bitterness of my thoughts.
I had three hours in which to sort the thing out and face it. But I didn’t face it. I know that now. I began that flight hating myself. I ended it by hating Saeton. It was he who had forced me into it. It was he, not I, who was responsible for Tubby’s death. By the time I was over the Kennet I had almost convinced myself of that.
I dropped to a thousand feet in a mood of cold fury, picked up Ramsbury and swung north-east. The trees of Baydon Hill were a dark line and there, suddenly, were the hangars of Membury and, as I swept low over the field, I caught a glimpse of the quarters nestled snugly in their clearing in the woods. All just as I had left it. Nothing changed. Only a man dead and the moon bathing everything in a white unreal light.