sound, like high wind through telephone wires. He kept the turret moving, making the gun muzzles describe little circles as he had practised at gunnery school with pencils in the muzzles. A good gunner could write his name like that. It was a lonely position in the rear turret, especially when night fighters were about, for then chatter on the intercom was forbidden. Flash Gordon and Löwenherz were staring towards each other with all the concentration they could muster, but the night was too dark for either of them to see anything.
Flash heard Cohen order a change of course and watched the clouds slide past the tail.
August watched the red blip change direction on the Seeburg table. Willi marked it with the pencil. ‘He’s turned to port,’ said August. ‘Order: steer fifteen degrees left. He’s very close now.’
‘I think it is us,’ said Cohen. ‘He’s told him to change direction.’
‘Jam him,’ said Lambert urgently. Jimmy Grimm tuned his 1154 transmitter to the 1155 receiver, heard its whistle, sought the silent ‘dead space’ and switched on the microphone that was fixed inside the engine. Lambert banked steeply to change course again.
In the night fighter they were silent. Löwenherz had turned as directed; Mrosek the observer had his field-glasses to his eyes and was scanning each side of the aircraft where the radar did not point. Suddenly Sachs’ radar tube lit up at the end of the range circle: a Tommi at extreme range.
‘We’ve got him,’ said Sachs, trying hard to keep the excitement out of his voice. Suddenly jamming deafened them, so near were they to Jimmy Grimm’s radio transmitter.
‘Just in time,’ said Löwenherz and they tuned the noise to minimum. Löwenherz switched the gun safety-catches to ‘fire’ and a line of red lights appeared on the instrument panel. Suddenly the whole Junkers hit a patch of turbulence. The plane dipped steeply like a horse refusing a fence. A wingtip fell and Löwenherz had to use all his strength to correct the plane’s heading.
‘The Tommi’s slipstream,’ said Löwenherz, but the others knew what it was. The force of it showed how close they were behind the speeding bomber.
‘He’s turning right,’ said Sachs as the blip on his screen started travelling along its base line. ‘He’s turning, keep turning.’ He watched the tube.
‘Level out but keep turning, range still closing. Straighten out, range still closing too fast. Twelve hundred metres.’ Löwenherz followed the turn until when heading almost due south the bomber straightened out and Löwenherz did too. ‘Where do you want him?’ asked Sachs.
‘Slightly starboard.’
‘He’s about seven degrees starboard.’
‘That’s enough, read off the range.’
‘Under one thousand metres, closing slowly.’
Löwenherz wanted to move on to the bomber as slowly as possible, for that would give him the maximum duration of gunfire. ‘Bring me in level with him. I’ll lose height when we get a visual.’
‘It’s still very dark; you’d do better to have him against that bright cirrus.’
‘Very well, bring me in a little below him.’
‘Nine hundred, left a touch. We’re coming in too quickly, Herr Oberleutnant.’
‘I can’t see him.’
‘Still too fast.’
‘Damn, why is he throttling right back?’ Löwenherz reduced his speed until Sachs grunted, ‘That’s in order, Herr Oberleutnant.’
‘Still can’t see him.’
‘We’re very close, five hundred metres.’
‘Got him,’ said Löwenherz, and at the same time Mrosek also gave a yell. Eight yellow dots of exhaust flame pinpricked a horizon across the darkness.
And because all primitive rituals, especially those concerned with death, have their own vocabulary, Löwenherz reported his sighting to Bach with the words ‘Kettle drums, kettle drums’.
‘Lancaster bomber,’ said Mrosek, whose task it was to identify the targets before an attack.
‘You beauty,’ said Löwenherz.
Flash Gordon was a mild man, small in stature, humble in origin and quiet of voice and yet within him was growing a hatred of Binty Jones that he wouldn’t have thought possible. Hardly a day went by without a jibe or a word of sarcasm and now most recent and hurtful of all was Binty’s scorn of his turret modification. If Binty had publicly recognized what a fine idea it was, then the Gunnery Officer might have ordered the turrets of all Squadron planes to be similarly altered. Who knows, it might have been called the ‘Gordon panel’. Invented by a gunner named Gordon, people say he was one of the greatest gunnery experts the Air Force ever had.
Although Flash Gordon never told real lies, he had come to realize that sometimes a white lie can be necessary for the sake of mankind’s progress. If telling a lie was the only way of having an excellent modification incorporated into Warley Fen’s aeroplanes then a lie wouldn’t stand in his way. In ten minutes I’ll do it, he thought, but changed his mind. There would never come a quieter time than now: that fighter scare was over and they were quite alone in the sky.
‘Fighter, fighter. Corkscrew port, go!’ said Flash Gordon. Without bothering to use the sights, he opened fire into the blank darkness. Lambert, obeying instinctively the command that any crew member was empowered to give, flung Creaking Door into a vertical bank and let it drop through the air like a slate.
Binty Jones, not to be outdone by his colleague, also fired his guns. Curves of tracer hosepiped across the sky as Door fell faster than its turrets could turn.
‘My God,’ said Löwenherz as the tracer came towards him. Instinctively he shied away, while Door’s eight exhaust flames tipped vertical and slid out of sight under his nose. The little .303 bullets that the Tommis fired were seldom fatal against the solidly built Junkers, but still Löwenherz found it impossible to fly through them.
‘He’s seen us,’ said Mrosek. Löwenherz swore. He followed the bomber down, trying to bring the flame spots up past the windscreen again, but now that he was higher than the bomber he no longer had the advantage of the moonlit clouds.
Lambert was following the classic manoeuvre of the corkscrew and chanting its litany as he went, to warn the crew: diving port, climbing port, roll, climbing starboard, diving starboard, roll, diving port, climbing port …
Many times Löwenherz had seen such an evasive pattern. Four or five times he had been able to execute identical manoeuvres in formation with his victim and kill him while they danced together. He could not do it this time. For a corkscrew can be executed in such a leisurely fashion that it occupies ten miles of air-space (some pilots corkscrewed like this the whole journey) or it can be the brutal wing-wrenching, back-breaking manoeuvre that Lambert now put into effect.
‘Lost contact,’ said Sachs.
‘My fault,’ said Löwenherz.
The night fighter’s Li C1 airborne radar projected only a narrow cone of signals straight ahead (between 60 and 30 degrees to be precise). Löwenherz waggled his aircraft through a horizon-searching series of manoeuvres. It was no use. He switched on the radio transmitter.
‘Announcement,’ said Löwenherz. ‘Katze One, contact lost.’
‘Katze One,’ said August, his voice still badly marred by the jamming, ‘Order: steer 200 degrees.’ August looked at the plotting-table and saw that the blip that was Creaking Door was at the extreme edge of his sector. ‘He has luck, that Tommi,’ said August. ‘If he’d turned the other way we’d still be able to go after him.’
‘There are plenty more where he came from,’ said Willi.
In Creaking Door Lambert had stopped corkscrewing. His