“That was amazing…!” Trumbull breathed softly as he recovered himself and his voice. “Absolutely incredible…!” His sharp but confused mind had suddenly realised the whole of that wild aerial engagement, from first sighting to the destruction of the second Sukhoi, had probably taken less than thirty seconds of actual time.
“Fuckin’ lucky…!” Thorne observed honestly, adrenalin still coursing through his system and making him feel excitement and elation. “If we’d been in the air when they showed up, their missiles would’ve blown us to buggery!” Despite thousands of hours of training and flying fighter aircraft in earlier years, those two jets had been his first real combat kills.
“Can this aircraft fly as fast as those… things?”
“Not quite,” Thorne shook his head, smiling at the thought. “Most this can manage on a good day is about a thousand miles an hour. Those bastards — ‘Flanker’ is their nickname — are good for another four hundred or so more at altitude.”
Fourteen hundred miles an hour, Trumbull thought silently, and there was a pause as the squadron leader chewed that piece of information over in his mind.
“Comms: music — play AC/DC…!” Within a second of Thorne uttering that unintelligible command, the raucous, screeching riffs of an electric guitar issued from the headphones within Trumbull’s helmet. It was a sound he’d never heard the like of in his entire life and could say unequivocally in that moment that he didn’t care for it either, although at the very least the volume was low enough for it to not be completely unbearable. His curiosity regarding the nature of the aircraft he was sitting in and the pilot controlling it wasn’t in any way assuaged as the opening bars of AC/DC’s Back in Black were joined by Brian Johnson’s unmistakeable vocals.
“I think I can hardly wait for this ‘explanation’…” he muttered, wincing, and Thorne wasn’t altogether certain Trumbull had intended him to hear over the music playing.
No shit! He thought dryly with a wry, unseen grin at the truth of that statement, although Trumbull could never have seen the irony of it.
3. Seeds of Doubt
Near the airfield at St. Omer
Northern France
Saturday
June 29, 1940
At the same time that discussion continuing in the skies above England, Antoine and Michelle were sleeping soundly in their beds in the farmhouse across the fields opposite the airstrip near St. Omer. Both slept together soundly in a large feather bed while their youngest sibling, a baby boy of no more than eight months, slept in a crib by the empty bed in the next room.
In the kitchen, their mother, a waif-like woman in her late thirties with long blond hair and narrow features opened the back door to a tall, brooding man of similar age whose thinning dark hair was already greying at the temples. The man was Charles, her brother-in-law.
“You’re late,” she scolded gently, concern on her face.
“The children…?” The man quickly moved inside, taking a bottle of brandy and two glasses from a kitchen cupboard as she locked the door behind him.
“Asleep, of course,” she replied. “Did you make contact?”
“Hercule got a look inside Ritter’s office…” he said as he sat at the kitchen table and poured them both a drink, shaking his head in displeasure over the situation rather than as any kind of answer to that specific question. “He was almost caught…the guards are really tightening up security. They’ve received orders from Fliegerkorps that the unit’s to stand down — they’re to be transferred through one of the training groups for conversion to a new type of aircraft.”
“Another new aircraft…?” The appearance of new aircraft types with the Luftwaffe was becoming almost commonplace over the last few months.
“A new fighter-bomber of some kind; a Messerschmitt ‘Lion’, they’re calling it. It’s nothing we’ve heard of before: Control will want to know about it…we’ll have to radio this one in.”
“What about the ‘Journalist’…?” She queried softly. “He’s due in within the hour — can it not wait until after he’s gone?”
“Not for this one, sister dear…too important…if we miss the time window we’ll have to wait until tomorrow night.”
“There it is again!” The SS corporal observed, one hand resting on the earpiece of his headset. He activated the radio unit’s external speaker and all in the vehicle were suddenly able to hear the erratic bleating of Morse code. “It’s that same coded signal we heard Wednesday night.”
“Can you lock it down this time?” The ranking NCO inquired intently, leaning over the man’s shoulder and watching the dials on the radio direction-finding equipment.
“Let’s see about that shall we, sergeant?” The man began rotating a cogwheel by the RDF unit. This in turn altered the axis of a directional antenna mounted atop a metre-high pole above the armoured car’s rear hull. At first the signal faded out, then returned with greater strength and clarity. “It’s to the west,” he decided. “South-south-west…!”
“Let’s not call this in just yet…” the car commander decided, “…they may be monitoring our signals, which might explain why they always seem to disappear before we can track properly.” He turned his attention to the driver. “Crank this thing up and take us east past the airfield. Let’s see if we can vector in on it.”
There was a loud cough, followed by low growling as the eight-wheeled armoured car’s six-cylinder diesel clattered to life in a cloud of acrid exhaust. Parked near an army checkpoint across the Rue de la Rocade, just a thousand metres or so west of Saint-Martin-au-Laërt (near St. Omer), the vehicle carried the ‘death’s head’ insignia of the 3rd SS Shock Division over a standard grey Wehrmacht paint scheme that was so dark it seemed almost black, particularly at night. The evening itself was similarly lacking in illumination, with low scrub and hedges lining the road on either side, beyond which lay just featureless fields stretching away into the darkness with just the occasional light from farmhouse windows in the distance shining like single stars against the black background.
At thirteen tonnes, the P-7A Puma was substantially heavier even than the P-1 Wiesel (Weasel) light tank, although the P-1 mounted a heavier automatic cannon in its turret by comparison. Unlike the tank however, the armoured car could also carry as many as six troopers in its rear along with the three crewmen that normally operated the vehicle. A total of six men sat inside the hull that evening, that particular vehicle having been converted into a mobile detection unit specifically designed to detect and track down enemy radio transmissions. There’d been numerous radio signals detected in the St. Omer area over the last few weeks and the local military command suspected French Resistance agents were passing information to enemy intelligence services in England. Three of the crew inside the Puma that night were specially-trained signals experts from divisional HQ tasked with locating the source of the transmissions and putting a permanent halt to them.
Following directions from the men in rear hull, the driver engaged the transmission and the armoured car cruised slowly away toward the airfield along the narrow, country lane without just the barest glow from its covered, ‘slitted’ headlights. The Rue de la Rocade intersected with the Route de Boulogne to the south-west, skirting the western boundaries of the St. Omer airfield as it did so. Originally a relatively small installation, plans to install the new 3,000-metre concrete runway that was currently under construction had necessitated the requisition of a great deal of pastoral land in the area between St. Omer, Tatinghem and Wisques, and had also required the permanent closure of the Route de Wisques as it headed north-east between Wisques and Longueness below St. Omer.