Horn lumbered up from the deep chair, carefully keeping the weight off his right foot. He turned to Mrs. McLean and said, “I am apparently going with these gentlemen. Thank you, madam, for your kindness. You and your son”—he turned to McLean—” will be remembered.”
The larger signalman put his arm under the German’s and helped him out of the house. The smiling soldier followed without returning the pistol.
Archie Clark snapped the holster cover shut and said, “I moos say, the Home Guard acted bloody swift this night, wha’ say?” He paused to brush unseen dust from the epaulet straps on his khaki shirt and looked to McLean for approval.
McLean yawned widely, stretched, and clasped his hands behind his neck. “Donna ferget to mention yersel’ in yer report.”
Ignoring the comment, Clark continued, “Migh’ e’en be a promotion in this.”
“Wha’ does a farmer get promoted to?” McLean asked as he winked at his mother. Home Guard promotions were unheard of.
“Good na, General,” Mrs. McLean said, escorting Clark to the door. “And, Archie, thank ye.” She affectionately patted his shoulder as he walked out.
“Wha’ll happen to him, David?” she asked as she bolted the door and turned to her son, who was thoughtfully rocking in the chair and staring at the clock.
“Oh, he’ll go down to the McTavish Pub and yarn how he’s just shot down three or four bombers wi’ his pistol,” McLean replied, anticipating his mother’s hearty laugh.
Not this time. “Nae, nae, no’ Archie. Be serious. Where’ll they take the German?”
“Why, Mama, I do believe ye’ve been charmed,” he said. Seeing the concern which wrinkled her eyes, he continued, “Pe’eps to the Eaglesham jail foor a time. And then into the POW camp near Glasgow.”
“Foor how long?”
“A long time. At least till the end o’ the war. But there’s woon thing foor certain: Horn’ll nae see the Duke o’ Hamilton.”
Douglas Douglas Hamilton, the fourteenth Duke of Hamilton, Marquess of Douglas and Clydesdale, Earl of Angus, Arran, and Lanark, eleventh Duke of Brandon, and on and on, lay on the canvas cot in the whitewashed corridor outside the fighter-command operations room at Turnhouse. Layers of regulation RAF blankets warded off the chill of the Scottish May dawn. He had lain awake most of the night expecting the bell that had rung repeatedly during the previous four nights. Hamilton knew the alarm would sound before sunrise. Germans never did anything in fours, always in threes and fives. They would make it five in a row, and this certainty kept him awake.
For the last four successive nights the thirty-four-year-old duke had patrolled southwest Scotland in his Hurricane. The German bombing runs had been sporadic, without pattern, but with lethal effect. Glasgow and suburbs had been hit, as had the airfields on the firth. The RAF was reeling under the Luftwaffe’s attacks.
Fighter squadrons impressive on command charts were in reality painfully undersupplied and undermanned. Planes were robbed to keep other planes operable. Parts were promised, but rarely arrived. Many of the Hurricanes in Hamilton’s squadron were kept together with bailing wire and curses.
The pilots were chronically fatigued. A night’s sleep was unheard of. Irregular catnaps, gobbled food, and a sense of duty made hazy by tension and uncountable hours in the sky kept the pilots running to their planes at the alarm bell.
Hamilton was pushed not so much by loyalty to the Empire as his desperate desire for revenge. For weeks London and other English cities had been the bombers’ targets, and duty argued for his efforts. Now Scotland too was on fire, and loyalty became a burning. When the alarm bell rang, Hamilton was always first to his plane and first in the air. Rarely did he return with ammunition in the belts. His ground crew was perpetually overworked, because Hamilton’s plane required more service and care than any other at the airfield. The reason: Hamilton flew harder, longer, and with more ferocity than any other pilot in the squadron.
“Sir, wake up.” The controller rounded the corner from the ops room and approached the duke’s cot. His boots echoed in the hallway. “Wake up. It’s urgent.”
“What’s urgent, Corporal?” Hamilton responded without moving in the bed. If it wasn’t the alarm, it wasn’t urgent.
A German pilot has parachuted down near Eaglesham. He’s asked to speak to you.”
Hamilton lifted his head off the pillow to look at the controller, but still didn’t commit himself to leaving the bed. “Corporal, I suggest you mix a little water with it next time.”
“His name is Captain Alfred Horn, and he’s asked to see you personally.”
“I don’t know a Captain Alfred Horn. I don’t know any German pilots, for God’s sake. Can’t this wait, Corporal? It’s four in the morning.”
“No, Sir. The chief wants you at Maryhill Barracks immediately.”
The corporal was not usually this insistent, and Hamilton could see he was not leaving until the duke’s feet were on the ground.
“All right, all right. Get the staff car ready and out front.”
“It’s already there. So’s the driver.”
The efficiency by his subordinates was typical. The Duke of Hamilton had been appointed RAF wing commander at the outbreak of the war. Because he was the premier peer of Scotland, many airmen believed Hamilton would treat the position as an honorarium. They joked that any man who could trace his ancestors back to the thirteenth century must be genetically adept at staying alive long enough to procreate. The duke hadn’t.
His detractors didn’t know him. Hamilton had been in love with flying since age fourteen, when he spent hours watching the British pilots train in their biplanes. At age eighteen he was a skilled pilot. In 1933, as chief pilot on the Houston Everest Expedition, he became the first man to fly over Mount Everest. He had owned several planes before the war and flew them incessantly. He was now respected throughout the RAF as one of the most capable fighter pilots. His origins and reputation commingled and produced a mystique which caused junior officers and airmen to revere him.
Hamilton sat upright on the cot. The tension that had kept him awake did nothing to revitalize him. He was so exhausted he seemed as if in a cloud. The cot pulled at him, begging his return. His feet were a hundred miles away, and the lines of communication were scrambled by fatigue. The duke switched his mind off and began the routine. Feet into the pants already open and in position on the floor. Shirt off the wall hook. Flight jacket. Leather helmet. The helmet was almost strapped when his brain caught and he remembered that a car, not his Hurricane, waited for him. He threw the helmet onto the bed and numbly marched out the ops-room door toward the waiting automobile.
Since the outbreak of the war, Maryhill Barracks had grown from a single barracks to a small encampment of soldiers training for the front. No one considered dropping the name “barracks,” however, because it so aptly described the camp. Everything was single-ply—the walls, paint, blankets, barbed-wire fence, and toilet paper. Maryhill Barracks had been designed to last for the duration of the war, and the Army Architect Corps had great faith in Britain’s war machine. Five seconds after England’s victory, the barracks would crumble to the ground in a fine, forgettable powder.
There was an affinity between the barracks and his stables, thought the Duke of Hamilton as the staff car slid to a stop in front of the Barracks’ headquarters’ door. He stepped out into a knee deep haze of dust churned up by the car’s abrupt halt. The dust was the driver’s last effort to break the land-speed record on the road from Turnhouse to Maryhill Barracks. From the car’s squealing start Hamilton knew he would not catch up on his sleep during the jolting ride. An authority superior to the duke had ordered the driver to get the duke to the barracks as fast as possible. The lane-and-a-half-wide twisting country roads had become a Grand Prix circuit. When Hamilton had ordered the driver to slow, the private had grinned fiendishly and embedded the accelerator pedal even farther into the fire wall. Now it was over, and Hamilton was intact.