Silent War

when you get up inside them. She moaned and groaned a bit, and occasionally you could feel her shift as our weight transferred from rib to rib. I was pleased that Hudd ignored the body in the library at first. Instead we moved forward, through shafts of light from her fuselage windows. They were surprisingly large for someone brought up on Lancs, like me. There were animals inside, but they weren’t snakes. They were small lizards that darted into the dark as soon as our shadows fell on them. The inside of the aircraft was fairly gutted: I told you appearances can be deceptive. The radios were gone – that was the first shack forward that we came to, and someone had ripped out the navigator’s table and all of the crew seats. It meant that somewhere in a Kurdish house Papa was proudly sitting in the pilot’s seat. Most of the internal wiring had been hacked out and carried away.

Hudd was impressed by the space inside. ‘You could make a fair-sized airliner out of this.’

‘They did that with a few after the war: a row of seats on either side and a corridor between them. I don’t think they caught on.’

‘Where did the bombs go?’

‘Downwards most of the time: mainly over Germany or France.’

‘Ha. Ha. Bloody ha. You know what I mean.’

‘In the bomb bay under us, and in four separate bomb cells in the wings between the inner engines and the fuselage: the main spar took their weight.’

‘I haven’t a clue what that means.’

‘Good: it probably means you were paying attention to all of your other lectures. I thought you were a qualified pilot?’ It was good to get one back.

‘I am, after a fashion – I jest passed up on the lessons in airframe construction. You don’t need to be a vet to ride a horse.’

There was something wrong with that, and I hadn’t liked the way he eyed me up. I asked him, ‘Why are you interested in the bombs anyway? She wasn’t carrying any, as far as I know.’

‘I’m interested in the bomb spaces, sport, because I can’t see no boxes of dosh. Wasn’t that what we came for? Can we get into the bomb bay from here?’

‘I don’t know the Stirling, but there’s bound to be access; probably from those plates on the floor – because the engineer had to release the bombs by hand if they hung up in the racks.’

‘But there are not likely to be any there at present?’

‘If there are, then I’m off. A fused bomb sitting in the heat and cold up here for years is likely to be pretty unstable: not a nice bedfellow. Why don’t we finish our walk around the outside, and see what we can see?’

Hudd’s man was where we’d left him, now sleeping like a baby. He was breathing slowly and regularly and had a quiet smile on his face, which was good. He was also perspiring profusely, which was bad.

Hudd said, ‘Leave him be. He probably needs it.’

We walked around the black bomber on the ground. They say that when an aircraft looked right, it was right. You wouldn’t say that about Frohlich’s Mk III Stirling. She had long spindly legs like a heron, a snub nose like a bulldog, a long thin fuselage and short, fat wide wings. It was as if her four main design components had been borrowed from different airframes and bolted together in somebody’s backyard . . . but before the Lanc and the dear old Hallibag came along, she was considered state-of-the-art. Maybe that’s the right phrase. Maybe Picasso or Roland Penrose had a hand in her somewhere.

‘What an ugly bastard!’ Hudd remarked.

‘Beauty, Hudd, is in the eye of the beholder and not skin-deep.’ Two clichés in one sentence; not bad, Charlie. ‘She could leave more bits in Germany, and still get home, than any other aircraft in the 1940s or since. She is one tough old bag, believe me.’

‘But she had her bad points as well?’

‘She had to fly around mountains, couldn’t carry all that much, and was slow.’

‘But she got here . . .’

‘Yeah she did, didn’t she?’

By that time we’d completed our walk round. The only interesting thing I’d noticed was that the starboard tyre was not only deflated, but there were huge pieces of it missing – cut out and half-inched by whoever had robbed her out in the first place. I wondered what they could possibly make from bits of aircraft tyre.

Hudd asked me, ‘Well?’ He was good at saying well.

‘The bomb doors haven’t been opened.’

I’d tried to slide a knife blade between them and failed. I’ve still got the knife; it sleeps between my mattress and the bed frame. The dirt that I scraped from the junction of the bomb doors was bonded with grease; nothing had been there for a long time.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘They don’t look it. Another part of my brain is saying that if anyone had opened them, what would be the point of closing them again . . . and would they have had the means anyway?’

‘So the stuff could still be here?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘. . . but you thought it, just like me.’

Hudd must have been an optimist. I actually was thinking it unlikely that anyone had left that amount of dough hanging about, so it must have been in boxes in the cabin.

‘If you say so, Hudd.’

‘We got homework to do. Let’s have some grub, get sorted and work out where we’re going to spend the night. Then we can start in at it.’

‘We can sleep inside her if you’re sure there are no snakes . . .’

‘There you go: halfway there already . . .’

Hudd cooked up a stew and brewed a pan of char on a stove no larger than a can of baked beans; it was a remarkable little thing. I decided not