The I.O. took me up to the first floor. Little placards stood out from the doors of wood-partitioned offices; Flight Lieutenant Symes, Intelligence Officer — white on blue next to Public Relations. The I.O. pushed open the door. ‘Wait here, will you, Fraser. I’ll go down and see if the station commander has come in yet. He usually shows up about this time. Likes to have a look around before breakfast.’ He turned to the medical orderly. ‘You wait here with Mr Fraser, corporal.’ He glanced at me quickly, but his eyes slid away from mine and I went into his office, wondering whether he thought I was going to try and escape. The corporal shut the door as I stood there listening to the I.O.‘s footsteps fading down the wide corridor.
The office was a big one with two windows looking out across the standing and the hangars to the FASO apron still barely visible in the reluctant daylight of that bleak January morning. The arc lamps had been switched off, but runway and perimeter lights still burned, a complicated network of yellow and purple. The Dak was landing now and another Tudor was moving up the perimeter tracks towards the control tower. I could almost hear the pilot calling his number over the R/T, requesting permission from Traffic Control to taxi, and I wondered whether it was Saeton. Beyond the hangars lorries moved in a steady stream from the off-loading platform, moving slowly and positively towards Berlin with their loads of Ruhr coal.
‘Fraser!’
I turned. The door behind me had opened and the I.O. was standing there, holding it open for a short, burly man in a wing commander’s uniform. ‘This is the station commander,’ the I.O. said, closing the door and switching on the light.
‘Sit down, Fraser.’ The station commander nodded to a chair. ‘Glad you got back all right. But I’m sorry about Carter.’ His voice was quiet, impersonal. He placed his cap on the top of a steel filing cabinet and seated himself at the desk. In the naked lights I saw that the beaverboard walls of the office were covered with maps and charts, a kaleidoscope of colour — Russian tanks, Russian planes, survey maps of Berlin, Germany with the air corridors marked in white tape, a huge map of the British Zone dotted with flags bearing squadron numbers and a smaller map of
Eastern Germany covered with chinograph on which had been scribbled in different colours the numbers of Russian units. The whole room was a litter of secret and semi-secret information, most of it relating one way and another to the Russians. ‘Understand you wanted to see me?’ The slight rise of inflection in the station commander’s voice at the end of the sentence was, I knew, my cue. But I hesitated, reluctant to commit myself to a line of approach. ‘Well?’
I gripped hold of the wooden arms of the chair. The walls of the room were beginning to move again. It seemed very hot in there and the lights were blinding. ‘I want a plane, sir. Tonight. Carter’s alive and I’ve got to get him out. We can land at Hollmind. He’s at a farm about three miles from the airfield.’ The words came out in a rush, tumbling incoherently over each other, not a bit as I had intended. ‘It would only take a couple of hours. The airfield’s quite deserted and the runway is sound.’
‘How do you know?’
I stared at him. It sounded like a trap, the way he barked the question at me. His face kept blurring so that I couldn’t see his expression. ‘How do I know?’ I moved my fingers back and forth along the dirt-caked lines of my forehead. ‘I just know,’ I heard myself mumble. ‘I just know. That’s all.’ I straightened my body up. ‘Will you let me have a plane, sir — tonight?’
The door behind me opened and a squadron leader came over to the desk, a thin file in his hand. ‘Here’s the report you wanted, sir.’ The man’s eyes glanced curiously in my direction. ‘I’ve rung for the M.O. and Pierce is in my office now. Shall I let him come up?’
The station commander glanced quickly across at me and then nodded. ‘All right. Any further news about that threat of ack-ack practice in the exit corridor?’
‘No more than we know already, sir. Air Safety Centre have lodged protests, but as far as we’re concerned at the moment the Russians will be firing to 20,000 feet in the exit corridor. I don’t think we’re going to give way.’
‘I should damn well hope not. They’re just bluffing. They know what it means if they start shooting our boys down.’ He gave a long sigh. ‘All right, Freddie. But let me know as soon as you get any news.’ The door closed and the station commander stared for a moment out through the windows to where another freighter was thundering down the runway. He watched it rise, watched it until it disappeared into the low cloud, a small speck carrying an air crew of four headed for base through the exit corridor. His eyes switched slowly to me. ‘Where were we? Oh, yes. You claim Carter is alive.’ He picked up the file his adjutant had brought in, opened it and handed me a slip of paper. ‘Read that, Fraser. It’s the Russian report on your aircraft.’
I took it and held it in my hands, the print blurring into solid, straight lines. I let my hand drop, not bothering to go through it. ‘I know about this,’ I said. ‘It’s completely phoney. It didn’t dive into the ground. And they didn’t find the charred remains of a body. They don’t know anything about the plane — they’re just guessing. The wreckage is strewn for miles around.
‘How do you mean?’ The station commander’s voice was sharp and practical.
I pressed my fingers to my temples. How was I going to make them understand what had really happened? It was quite clear to me — ordinary and straightforward. But as soon as I tried to put it into words I knew it would sound fantastic.
‘I think we’d better do it by questions, sir.’ The I.O.‘s voice seemed oddly remote, yet it rattled in my ears like the sharp, dry sound of a porcupine’s quills. ‘He’s just about dead beat.’
‘All right, Symes. Go ahead.’
I wanted to tell the station commander to let me tell it in my own way, but before I could say anything. the I.O.‘s sharp, insistent voice was saying, ‘You claim Carter is alive, that he’s lying injured at a farmhouse near Hollmind. Hollmind is thirty miles from the point where Westrop and Field jumped. That’s almost ten minutes’ flying time. What happened in those ten minutes? Didn’t Carter jump with the others?’
‘No.’
‘He stayed in the plane with you?’
‘Yes. He knew I didn’t like jumping-’ I was determined now that they should have every detail of the thing. If I told them everything, kept nothing back, they must believe me. ‘We had to jump once before at Membury, when the undercarriage of Saeton’s Tudor jammed; that’s how he knew I was scared. He came back to see me out. Then I got the engines going and started to fly to Membury. He got angry then and-’
‘You mean Gatow, don’t you?’
‘No, Membury.’ I stared at him, trying to force him to understand that I meant Membury. ‘I was taking the Tudor back to Membury. That’s why I took the job with Harcourt. It was all planned. I was to steal a plane from the airlift and-’ My voice trailed away as I saw the look of bewilderment on the station commander’s face. If only they’d let me tell it my own way.
‘I don’t understand this sequence of events at all, Fraser.’ His voice was kindly, but there was an underlying impatience. ‘Go back to where you and Carter are alone in the plane. Westrop and Field had jumped. Who went out next?’
‘Please-’ I implored, ‘let me tell it my own way. When I reached Membury-’
‘Just answer my questions, will you, Fraser?’ The voice was authoritative, commanding — it reminded me of Saeton’s voice. ‘Who jumped next?’
All my muscles seemed rigid with the violence of my need to tell it to them as a straight story. But I couldn’t fight him. I hadn’t the energy. It was so much easier just to answer the questions. ‘Carter,’ I said in a dull voice.