‘You got enough yet?’ Pickles clicked.
‘Fine. Ready to go when you are.’
He slowed us to about sixty knots again as we recovered the trailing aerial. Again I had that odd feeling of hanging motionless above the island. Then he put us into a gentle side-slip – but only for half a minute or so – and we dropped down, and round towards the West. The sun was overhead, and those bloody mountains were somewhere in front of us. I had the feeling it was going to be a long day.
‘The trouble is the fuel tanks,’ Wilf clicked. ‘They’re in the wings – close to the roots.’ Just up above my head, he meant. ‘They’re self-sealing of course, but if the GCs have a crack at us, it’s what they’re aiming for.’
‘Do they catch fire?’
Click. ‘Sometimes, Charlie.’
‘What then?’
‘I’m supposed to side-slip to keep the flames from the cockpit.’
Click. ‘Does that work?’
‘Not always.’
‘What then?’
Click. ‘We ditch the doors, and jump for it.’
‘We have parachutes?’
‘Nah, they’re fer cissies. You’re in the army now.’
Where did they find these people?
Over a small village in the Cedar valley an hour later I began to understand what the army was up against. From above it looked like the village that Warboys had taken us into. That wasn’t all that surprising. After an hour of flying over them, I realized that most of them looked the same. I guessed that anyone who lived in the Troodos spent most of his income supporting a bleeding great local church.
Wilf had handed me a map marked with areas from which the EOKA radios had previously been thought to be active. The army intercept vans – all four of them – had been deployed around the foothills of the Troodos for me. The idea was that they would triangulate on anything I picked up from the plane, so that we could plot a map of exact locations, and send patrols in to switch them off.
The village was called Agios something – they were all called Agios something – and Wilf spiralled us gently out of the clear blue sky above the church.
Unexpectedly, the church fought back.
Well, the half-dozen guys on its roof did. Luckily for us they had no automatic weapons, but the rifle and pistol fire were bad enough. They didn’t start until we were about five hundred feet above them, and at that height it was like flying into light flak. Two bullets went through the cabin. One careered off the bracing spar above my head, and exited out of the side window with a snap. Showers of Plexiglas shards. I probably screamed. I know that Pickles did.
He skidded us sideways in the air. I still don’t know if it was a brilliant bit of flying or pure funk. Our horrible little aircraft staggered away, clawing for height like a cat trapped in a cage. By then, of course, I was looking down at the church, over the tail . . . and was surprised by the grenade. I put it down to the errant ambition of an oversexed teenager: teenagers are the same the world over.
I suppose that it is theoretically possible to bring down an aircraft with a hand-thrown grenade. But it would take a hefty throw, and for the fates to be well and truly on your side. His fates had deserted him that day. Maybe Godfrey Evans could have managed a throw like that, but my little grenadier didn’t stand a chance. It’s a horrible bloody feeling to see blokes shooting at you, and to be unable to do anything except duck. It’s even worse when they start to chuck bombs at you.
I saw the little matchstick man throw something up at us. At first I thought it was a stone, hurled in frustration. Then within microseconds I knew it was a Mills bomb. He simply forgot to wait long enough before he threw the damned thing: he just chucked it, and threw himself flat on the walkway around the church roof. Ten seconds later the grenade returned to sender – it fell back alongside him, of course. I saw one of the gunmen give it a quick look, then take a header over the side. Under the circumstances it’s a decision I would have agreed with.
Then the grenade exploded. And the church roof fell in. I lost sight of the building immediately because we were on our side, and hanging from our straps. That was because of the updraft, or because Pickles had an idle moment, and was trying to see what the airframe would put up with before it fell to bits. When I had my bearings again we were up at a thousand feet, the church roof had caved in completely, and there were small fires inside the building: God was having a very bad day. A dust cloud hung in the air above it like the demon in a Dennis Wheatley story. There were two bodies spreadeagled in the square – and people were running from their houses with buckets. I put the earphones back on, and did a quick sweep.
‘Their radio’s gone very quiet,’ I told Wilf.
He laughed: quietly at first, and then like the Laughing Policeman. Eventually he clicked and said, ‘Balls. You know who’s going to get the blame for this, don’t you? The papers will say we bombed a church.’
‘They
