at Marble Arch. The weather had lapsed into rain and fog; pearl-gray murk veiled a warm, sticky, unwarlike London. Umbrella humps crowded the sidewalks. The tall red omnibuses glistened wetly; so did the rubber ponchos of the bobbies. The miraculous summer weather had given the air battle an exalting radiance, but today London wore a dreary peace morning face.
“The spirit at Biggin Hill is damned good,” Pug said.
“Oh, were you there? Yes, no question about spirit! It’s arithmetic that’s bad. Maybe the Fat Boy’s getting low on fighter pilots, too. We are, that’s flat. Perilously low. One doesn’t know the situation on the other side of the hill. One hangs on and hopes.”
The rain trailed off as they drove. After a while the sun hazily shone out on wet endless rows of identical grimy red houses, and sunlight shafted into the car. Tillet said, “Well, our meteorology blokes are on top of their job. They said the bad weather wouldn’t hold, and that Jerry would probably be flying today. Strange, the only decent English summer in a century, and it comes along in the year the Hun attacks from the sky.”
“Is that a good or bad break?”
“It’s to his advantage for locating his target and dropping his bombs. But our interceptors have a better chance of finding him and shooting him down. Given the choice, our chaps would have asked for clear skies.”
He talked of Napoleon’s luck with weather, and cited battles of Charles XII and Wallenstein that had turned on freak storms. Pug enjoyed Tillet’s erudition. He was in no position to challenge any of it, and wondered who was. Tillet appeared to have total knowledge of every battle ever fought, and he could get as annoyed with Xerxes or Caesar for tactical stupidity, as he was with Hermann Goring. About an hour later they came to a town, drove along a canal of very dirty water, and turned off to a compound of sooty buildings surrounded by a high wire fence. A soldier at the gate saluted and let them pass. Pug said, “Where are we?”
“Uxbridge. I believe you wanted to have a look at Group Operations, Number Eleven Fighter Group,” said Tillet.
“Oh, yes.” In three weeks, Tillet had never once mentioned the request and Victor Henry had never repeated it.
A flight lieutenant with a pleasant chubby round face met them. He was a lord, but Tillet clicked the long name out too crisply for Pug to catch it. His lordship conducted them out of the bright sunshine, down and down a long turning stairway into the ground. “One rather expects to encounter a white rabbit, doesn’t one, Captain?” he fluted in Oxonian tones. “Hurrying by consulting its pocket watch, and all that. Nothing here that interesting, I’m afraid.”
They entered a shallow balcony in a small strange theatre. In place of the stage and curtain stood a black wall full of columns of electric bulbs, white except for a single line of red lamps near the top. At the side of the wall was a column of RAF terms for stages of readiness. On the floor below, twenty or so girls in uniform, some wearing headphones on long lines, worked around a large-scale table map of southern England. On either wall, in glassed boxes like radio control booths, men with headphones scrawled at desks. The place had an underground, earth- and-cement smell, and it was quiet and cool.
“Burne-Wilke, here’s your American visitor,” said Tillet.
The blond officer sitting in the middle of the balcony turned, smiling. “Hullo there! Frightfully glad to hear you were coming. Here, sit by me, won’t you?” He shook hands with them. “Nothing much doing yet, but there will be soon. The bad weather’s drifting clear of the Channel, and Jerry’s getting airborne.” Burne-Wilke rubbed his bony pink chin with one hand, giving Pug a quizzical glance. “I say, those aeroplanes you rounded up have proven ever so useful.”
“They can’t play in this league,” Pug said.
“They’re excellent on patrol. They’ve done some smart punishing of invasion barges. The pilots are keen on them.”
Burne-Wilke looked him in the eye. “See here, could you have produced those planes in two days?”
Pug only grinned.
Burne-Wilke shook his head and caressed his wavy hair. “I was sorely tempted to take you up. But you struck me as a chap who might just bring it off, and then we’d have looked proper fools. Hullo, there’s a mutual friend. Didn’t I first meet you with the Tudsburys, in a sweaty Washington receiving line?”
Pamela was walking in to take the place of another girl. She looked up, threw Victor Henry a smile, then got to work, and did not glance his way again.
“This is all fairly clear, isn’t it?” said Burne-Wilke, gesturing toward the map and the wall. “Fighter Command at Stanmore is responsible for air defense, but it lets each group run its own show. Our beat is southeast England. It’s the hot spot, closest to the Germans, and London’s here.” He swept one lean arm toward the wall, straight up and down. “Those six columns of lamps stand for our group’s six fighter control stations. Each vertical row of lights stands for one fighter squadron. All in all, twenty-two squadrons. In theory, we dispose of more than five hundred fighter pilots.” Burne-Wilke wrinkled his lips. “In
Pug was not quite as surprised as he had been at Ventnor. He knew of the system’s existence; but this close view awed him. “Sir, aren’t you talking about a couple of hundred thousand miles of telephone cable? Thousands of lines, a forest of equipment? When did all this spring into being?”
“Oh, we had the plan two years ago. The politicians were aghast at the money, and balked. Right after Munich we got our budget. It’s an ill wind, eh? Hullo, here we go. I believe Jerry’s on his way.”
On the black wall, white lights were starting to jump upward. The young lord at Burne-Wilke’s elbow gave him a telephone. Burne-Wilke talked brisk RAF abracadabra, his eyes moving from the wall to the map table. Then he handed back the telephone. “Yes. Chain Home at Ventnor now reports several attacks forming up or orbiting. Two of them are forty-plus, one sixty-plus.”
Tillet said, “Goring’s been an abysmal donkey, hasn’t he, not to knock out our Chain Home stations? It will prove his historic mistake.”
“Oh, he has tried,” Burne-Wilke said. “It isn’t so easy. Unless one hits a steel tower dead on and blows it to bits, it just whips about like a palm tree in a storm, then steadies down.”
“Well, he should have gone on trying.”
White lights kept moving up the board. An air of business was settling over the operations room, but nobody moved in an excited way, and the hum of voices was low. The air vice-marshal appeared, a spare stern sparse- moustached man, with a sort of family resemblance to General Tillet. He ignored the visitors for a while as he paced, then said hello to Tillet with a surprising warm smile that made him look kind and harmless.
The first lights that leaped to red were in the column of the Biggin Hill control station. Victor Henry saw Pamela glance up at these lights. On the table, where she busily continued to lay arrows and numbered discs with the other girls, a clear picture was forming of four flights of attackers, moving over southern England on different courses. The reports of the telephone talkers on the floor merged into a steady subdued buzz. There was not much chatting in the balcony. Henry sat overwhelmed with spectator-sport fascination, as one by one the red lamps began to come on. Within twenty minutes or so, half the squadrons on the board were blinking red.
“That’s about it,” Burne-Wilke said offhandedly, breaking away from giving rapid orders. “We’ve got almost two hundred planes engaged. The others stand by to cover, when these land to refuel and rearm.”
“Have you ever had red lights across the board?”
Burne-Wilke wrinkled his mouth. “Now and then. It’s not the situation of choice. We have to call on other fighter groups then to cover for us, and just now there’s not much in reserve.”
Far away and high in the blue sky, thought Pug, forcing himself to picture it, planes were now darting and twisting in and out of clouds in a machine joust to the death of German kids and British kids. Youngsters like Warren and Byron. Pamela’s pudgy actor, cold sober on orange squash, up there in his yellow life jacket, flying at several hundred miles an hour, watching his rearview mirror for a square white nose, or squirting his guns at an onrushing airplane with a black cross on it.
