‘He couldn’t keep the last lot down, could he? No point wasting it, so let him sleep instead – it will do him good.’ Will it? I thought. As if he could read my mind, Hudd looked up and added, ‘He’s had as much antivenom as he can take. Any more than that will kill him. All we can do is wait.’ Cheerful bastard, wasn’t he?
As the sun sank beneath the mountain tops, the air cooled quickly. We wrapped Hudd’s man up, and then climbed back in the bus.
Hudd said, ‘The way I see it is that we’ve got to lift all these plates one by one, and look underneath them.’
‘I can’t see how they lift. It might take ages.’
‘You got a better idea, mate?’
‘Up in the office; I might be able to work out how the bomb door release works: it might still work.’
‘I doubt it; it’s not a bloody Volkswagen.’ The evil little Jerry cars were already earning a reputation for reliability and longevity. ‘Look: you go try that, and I’ll get to work down here, but before you do anything get a signal off to Mr Watson. Tell him we found a black bird, but no golden eagles, and keep it short.’
‘Golden eagles?’
‘The Yanks used to put eagles on all their golden dollars.’
‘We’re not looking for golden dollars, Hudd, we’re looking for paper ones . . . and the gold coins were sovereigns, weren’t they, not dollars?’
‘So it’s a mixed metaphor, Charlie: stop being so literal. He give you a code pad?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Then get on with it: we got an hour o’ daylight at least, if we’re lucky.’
I set my dinky radio up not far from Hudd’s man, and ran the copper aerial up to one of the massive propeller blades. That way the whole of Frohlich’s monster would become my aerial – the resulting signal would probably burst Watson’s eardrums. Hudd’s man stirred just as I was packing it down again.
I walked across to him, and squatted down. ‘How you feeling?’
‘Better, but crook. Those little bastards pack quite a punch.’ He showed me his bitten hand. It was swollen and mottled dark-red in places. ‘I’m thirsty.’ I gave him a drink before I climbed back inside the aircraft. The last thing he said before he closed his eyes again, was, ‘This is silly.’
Hudd still hadn’t got into the bomb bay by the time we quit at dark. I had identified the bomb-door release handle, and a heavy-duty cable leading from it. There was also a hydraulic line, but in the half-light I couldn’t see if that was associated with the gear for the bomb doors. I skinned my knuckles half a dozen times before it became too dark, swore, and gave up. If I’d expected Hudd to be sullen or downcast at our failures I was wrong. We made a fire with dried thick grass, and wood from scrubby bushes no higher than it. The tree wood popped and sparked in the flames. Hudd said it was juniper. He sat across the fire and told tales of his service in Malaya and Indo-China. Most of the tales were funny and ribald, almost as if he thought soldiering was a way of extracting as much fun out of life as possible.
The stew tasted the same, though, and his man managed a couple of mouthfuls. His temperature had dropped, but he shivered for Australia, no matter how much we swaddled him in all the stuff we had. Late on we scuffed the fire out, and loaded our gear into Frohlich’s Stirling. We had a sleeping sack each: thin canvas cotton treated on the inside with a rubber solution: once you were inside and buttoned up none of your body heat escaped.
Hudd’s man groaned as we loaded him into his. We played that kids’ game, Sardines, sleeping side by side and touching, with Hudd’s man in the middle . . . stretched out on the plates which had so far defeated us. The wind got up a bit; the airframe creaked and groaned, and but for the roar of four engines, and the fingers of searchlights probing the night skies, I could have been back over Germany.
Chapter Nineteen
Just a closer walk with thee
I woke in a cold dawn, put a hand out of my sack but pulled it back quickly after contact with the aircraft’s cold, damp flank. Hudd was snoring. I thought his man was breathing more peacefully. He stirred as I pulled away from them to get up, and gave me a quiet smile. For a moment he looked as innocent as a schoolboy.
I took a leak over the twin tail-wheels for luck, just as we used to on the squadron. It’s one of those memories that make you smile. Then I walked round the old bitch a couple of times, flinging my arms around my body to warm myself up and get rid of the stiffness from sleeping on a hard surface. I wouldn’t have noticed that when I was sixteen. Then I stood underneath her crew compartment in the nose, and imagined the cables and lines running down from the bomb-door release, and how they crawled through the airframe to the hydraulic rams against the doors. Then I collected scraps of old wood and dried grasses, and started a fire under the high port wing, and climbed back inside to search for breakfast makings in the pouches.
Hudd, squatting a couple of feet from his man, turned and said, ‘You should have told me. Given me a shake.’
‘Told you what?’
‘That Freddy was gone.’
I knelt by Hudd’s man, who was indeed quite dead. He looked peaceful, but
