Eye of the Needle - Ken Follett [125]
“Like what?”
“A U-boat, that’s what.”
“Bollocks,” Smith said. The others merely laughed.
Slim dealt another hand. Smith won this time, but everyone else lost. “I’m a shilling up,” Slim said. “I think I’ll retire to that nice little cottage in Devon. We won’t catch him, of course.”
“The deserter?”
“The prisoner of war.”
“Why not?”
Slim tapped his head. “Use your noddle. When the storm clears we’ll be here and the U-boat will be at the bottom of the bay at the island. So who’ll get there first? The Jerries.”
“So why are we doing it?” Smith said.
“Because the people who are giving the orders are not as sharp as yours truly, Albert Parish. You may laugh!” He dealt another hand. “Place your bets. You’ll see I’m right. What’s that, Smithie, a penny? Gorblimey, don’t go mad. I tell you what, I’ll give odds of five to one we come back from Storm Island empty-handed. Any takers? Ten to one? Eh? Ten to one?”
“No takers,” said Smith. “Deal the cards.”
Slim dealt the cards.
SQUADRON-LEADER Peterkin Blenkinsop (he had tried to shorten Peterkin to Peter but somehow the men always found out) stood ramrod-straight in front of the map and addressed the room. “We fly in formations of three,” he began. “The first three will take off as soon as weather permits. Our target”—he touched the map with a pointer—“is here. Storm Island. On arrival we will circle for twenty minutes at low altitudes, looking for a U-boat. After twenty minutes we return to base.” He paused. “Those of you with a logical turn of mind will by now have deduced that, to achieve continuous cover, the second formation of three aircraft must take off precisely twenty minutes after the first, and so on. Any questions?”
Flying-Officer Longman said, “Sir?”
“Longman?”
“What do we do if we see this U-boat?”
“Strafe it, of course. Drop a few grenades. Cause trouble.”
“But we’re flying fighters, sir—there’s not much we can do to stop a U-boat. That’s a job for battleships, isn’t it?”
Blenkinsop sighed. “As usual, those of you who can think of better ways to win the war are invited to write directly to Mr. Winston Churchill, number 10 Downing Street, London South-West-One. Now, are there any questions, as opposed to stupid criticisms?”
There were no questions.
THE LATER YEARS of the war had produced a different kind of RAF officer, Bloggs thought, as he sat on a soft chair in the scramble room, close to the fire, listening to the rain drumming on the tin roof and intermittently dozing. The Battle of Britain pilots had seemed incorrigibly cheerful, with their undergraduate slang, their perpetual drinking, their tirelessness and their cavalier disregard of the flaming death they faced up to every day. That schoolboy heroism had not been enough to carry them through subsequent years, as the war dragged on in places far from home, and the emphasis shifted from the dashing individuality of aerial dogfighting to the mechanical drudgery of bombing missions. They still drank and talked in jargon but they appeared older, harder, more cynical; there was nothing in them now of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Bloggs recalled what he had done to that poor common-or-garden housebreaker in the police cells at Aberdeen, and he realized, It’s happened to us all.
They were very quiet. They sat all around him: some dozing, like himself; others reading books or playing board games. A bespectacled navigator in a corner was learning Russian.
As Bloggs surveyed the room with half-closed eyes, another pilot came in, and he thought immediately that this one had not been aged by the war. He had an old-fashioned wide grin and fresh face that looked as if it hardly needed shaving more than once a week. He wore his jacket open and carried his