I had no need of any flares. I skidded in a tight, vicious turn, dropped flaps and undercarriage, and slammed the machine down on to the runway not caring whether I smashed it up in the violence of my anger.
Saeton was at the hangar and came running out to meet me as I cut the engines. He was waiting for me as I stepped out on to the concrete, his face alive with excitement. ‘Well done, Neil! Magnificent!’ He seized my hand and wrung it.
I flung him off. I couldn’t say anything. The words choked in my throat. He was gazing at the plane, caressing it with his eyes, like a father who has been presented with another son to replace one that has died. My hands clenched with the desire to hit out, to smash the eagerness of his face.
Then he turned and met my gaze. ‘What’s the trouble?’ His hand reached out and caught my arm in a hard, unyielding grip. His voice was urgent, his mood tuned to mine.
I faced him then, my guts screwed up in a right little knot in my belly and my teeth clenched.‘Tubby’s dead,’ I said.
‘Dead?’ His fingers dug into the muscles of my arm and he stared at me hard. Then his grip relaxed. ‘What happened?’ he asked, in a flat tone.
I told him what had happened — how Tubby’s body had slumped unconscious through the fuselage door, how I’d searched the area and found no sign of a parachute. When I had finished he turned and stared at the plane. Then he shook himself. ‘All right. Let’s get the plane into the hangar.’
The plane!’ I heard myself laugh. ‘I tell you, Tubby’s dead.’
‘All right,’ he said angrily. ‘So he’s dead. There’s nothing you or I can do about it.’
‘Diana was at Gatow,’ I told him. ‘She’s working at the Malcolm Club there. I saw her yesterday.’ I was remembering the sudden radiance of her face as she turned and found Tubby standing beside me.
‘What’s Diana got to do with it?’ he asked angrily. ‘She’ll get over it. Now give me a hand with the hangar doors. We’ve got to get this plane under cover right away.’
Anger burst like a torrent inside me. ‘My God! You callous bastard! You don’t care who’s killed so long as you get your bloody engines into the air. Nothing else matters to you. Can’t you understand what’s happened? He was unconscious when he fell through the door. And now he’s lying out there beside a disused airfield in the Russian Zone. He’s dead, and you killed him,’ I screamed. ‘And all you can think about is the plane. You haven’t the decency even to say you’re sorry. He was straight and honest and decent, and you wipe the memory off your mind as though he were no more than-’
He hit me then, across the face with the flat of his hand. ‘Shut your mouth!’ His voice trembled, but it was without anger or violence. ‘It doesn’t occur to you, I suppose, that I was fond of Tubby? He was the nearest I ever had to a friend in my life.’ He said that slowly as though he were explaining something to himself. Then he turned away, his shoulders hunched, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets as though he didn’t trust them in the open. ‘Now come and help me get the hangar doors opened.’
I followed him dully, tears stinging the back of my eyeballs, blurring the white naked brilliance of the scene. He opened the wicket door, undid the bolts of the main doors and between us we slid them back. Moonlight flooded into the hangar, showing it strangely empty. The crashed Tudor was gone. All that remained of it was a jumbled heap of broken metal piled along each side of the hangar walls. And at the far end the bench with its lathes and machine tools stood deserted and silent. The whole place reeked of Tubby. I could see him beside me at that bench, whistling his flat, unending tunes, a grin crinkling his cheerful, sweaty face.
The engines of the plane roared. The vague outline of Saeton’s head showed behind the glass of the windshield as he turned it and taxied into the hangar. Between us we got the doors closed again. ‘We’ll go back to the quarters now,’ he said. ‘You need a drink.’ His hand gripped my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, Neil. I should have let you blow off steam. You’ve had a hell of anight.’
‘I can’t get the memory of Tubby out of my mind,’ I said, more to myself than to him.
We walked through the woods in silence and went into the mess room. Nothing had changed — the same trestle table, the four chairs and the cupboard in the corner. But there were just the two of us now. I stood there, feeling cold and numb. ‘Sit down,’ he said, ‘and I’ll get you a drink.’ He returned in a few minutes with two tumblers of whisky and a bundle of maps. ‘Knock that back,’ he said gently. ‘You’ll feel better then.’
As I drank he shuffled through the maps, picked out one and spread it flat on the table. ‘Now then, where exactly did it happen?’
‘I’d rather not talk about it,’ I said dully.
He nodded. ‘I understand how you feel. But I must get it pin-pointed whilst it’s still vivid in your mind. Now. Here’s Restorf at the entrance to the corridor. How soon did you cut out the engines?’
‘About three minutes after Field had reported that we’d passed the entrance beacon,’ I answered.
‘Field was your navigator?’
‘Yes.’
‘Speed?’
‘About one-sixty knots.’ I put down my tumbler. “What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘Tubby’s dead,’ I said bitterly. ‘He was unconscious when he went through the door. I searched the whole area. There wasn’t any sign of a parachute. There’s nothing we can do.’ I looked at him, the beginnings of a decision forming in my mind. ‘I must give myself up.’
‘What good do you think that will do?’ he demanded harshly.
I shook my head. ‘None.’ My voice was bitter. ‘But I can’t go on like this. Do you know what he called me? He called me a dirty little crook. That’s what started it all.’ I stared down at my drink. ‘He was right, too. That’s what hurt. First the ‘Callahan’ business. Now, this. Saeton, I can’t go on with it. It’d drive me crazy. All the time I’d be thinking-’
‘Stop thinking about yourself,’ he snapped. The vein on the side of his forehead was beginning to throb.
‘We killed him,’ I said dully. ‘Between us, we killed him.’
‘We did nothing of the sort,’ he replied angrily. ‘It was an accident.’
‘He tried to stop me taking the plane. In the eyes of the law it would be-’
‘Damn the law! So you told him what you were doing?’
‘I had to. He came back after the others had jumped.’ I wiped my hand across my eyes. ‘I’ve made up my mind,’ I said. ‘I can’t go on-’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ he cried. And then he leaned towards me, his eyes fixed on mine. ‘You think I’m callous about Tubby’s death, don’t you?’ His gaze dropped slowly to the map and he shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe it’s happened too often before — men going out and not coming back. I had nearly a year in command of a bomber station out in France. I lost fifty-five in that year — just boys I knew who passed through my life and were gone. Maybe I got hardened to it.’ His eyes lifted and fastened on me again. ‘But Tubby wasn’t just a boy I knew. Damn it, we worked together for two years, side-by-side on the same project with the same end in view. When you told me he was dead, I could have killed you. You’ve bungled it, and through your bungling you’ve killed the one man I was really fond of. And now you have the bloody nerve to say you won’t go through with the rest of the plan. Get this into your head, Neil. If you don’t go through with it, you make Tubby’s death utterly pointless. If it was necessary for him to die that a British company should get a world lead in air-freight transport, well and good. But if you’re now going to-’
‘I must tell the police the whole thing,’ I repeated obstinately.
‘Why? Telling the police won’t help. You say Tubby is dead. All right then. He’s dead. But for the love of God let’s see to it that his death was to some purpose.’ He slewed the map round towards me. ‘Now then. You dropped Field and the other fellow about there — correct? What happened then?’
‘I banked away out of the traffic stream,’ I answered, my voice trembling. ‘Then Tubby came back to the cockpit. He knew I was scared of jumps. He came back to make sure I got out. We were at about a thousand feet-’