Tilting The Balance (19 page)

He glanced down at his watch. “Bloody hell,” he muttered, and then, because that didn’t have enough kick, “Gevalt.” Hardly more than a minute had gone by since the air raid warning began.

In that minute, Bruntingthorpe had been turned upside down. Craters pocked the runway. One of the bombs had struck an airplane in spite of the camouflaged revetment in which it huddled. A column of greasy black smoke rose into the cloudy sky.

Goldfarb looked around. “Oh, bloody fucking hell,” he said. The Nissen hut where he’d been studying how to fit a radar into the Meteor jet fighter was just a piece of rubble. Part of the curved roof of corrugated galvanized iron had been blown fifty feet away.

The radarman scrambled out of the trench and dashed toward the Nissen hut, which was beginning to burn. “Group Captain Hippie!” he shouted, and then called in turn the names of the other men with whom he’d been working. A dreadful fear that he would hear no reply rose in him.

Then, one by one, the heads of the
RAF
officers popped up out of the trench close by the hut. Only the top of Hippie’s cap was visible; be really was very short. “That you, Goldfarb?” he called. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, sir,” Goldfarb said. “Are you?”

“Quite, thanks,” Hippie answered, scrambling out spryly. He looked around at the hut, shook his head. “There’s a good deal of work up in smoke. I’m glad we salvaged what we did.” As the other officers got out, he waved Goldfarb over to see what he meant.

The bottom of the slit trench was covered with manila folders and the papers that had spilled out of them. Goldfarb stared from them to Hippie and back again. “You – all of you – stopped to grab papers when the air raid alarm went off?”

“Well, the work upon which we are engaged here is of considerable importance, don’t you think?” Hippie murmured, as if he hadn’t imagined doing anything but what he’d done. He probably hadn’t. Had Goldfarb been in the Nissen hut with the others, the only thing he would have thought about was getting to cover as fast as he could.

Groundcrew men had already emerged from their shelters. They swept and pushed chunks of tarmac off onto the winter-brown grass to either side of the newly hit runways, or else tossed them into the craters the bombs had made. Others started dragging up lengths of pierced steel planking material to put over the holes until they could make more permanent repairs.

Flight Lieutenant Kennan pointed toward the burning aircraft. “I do hope that’s not one of our Pioneers.”

“Not in that revetment, sir.” Flight Officer Roundbush shook his head. “It’s only a Hurricane.”

“Only a Hurricane?” Kennan looked scandalized; he’d flown one during the Battle of Britain. “Basil, if it weren’t for Hurricanes, you’d have had to trim that mustache of yours down to a toothbrush and start learning German. The Spitfires grabbed the glory – they look like such thoroughbreds, after all – but Hurricanes did more of the work.”

Roundbush’s hand went protectively to the bushy blond growth on his upper lip. “I beg your pardon, sir. Had I realized the Hurricane stood between my mustache and war’s desolation, I should have spoken of it with more respect – even if it is as obsolete as a Sopwith Camel these days.”

If possible, Kennan looked even more affronted, not least because Roundbush was in essence right. Indeed, against the Lizards a Sopwith Camel might have been of more use than a Hurricane, simply because it contained very little metal and so was hard for radar to pick up.

Before Kennan could return to the verbal charge,

Group Captain Hippie said, “Maurice, Basil, that’s quite enough.” They shuffled their feet like a couple of abashed schoolboys.

Wing Commander Peary jumped back down into the trench, started rummaging through file folders. “Oh, capital,” he said a minute later. “We didn’t lose the drawings for the installation of the multifrequency radar in the Meteor fuselage.”

At the same time as Goldfarb breathed a silent sigh of relief, Basil Roundbush said, “I had to save those. David would have smote me hip and thigh if I’d left them behind.”

“Hen,” Goldfarb said. He wondered if Roundbush was using that pseudo-Biblical language to mock his Jewishness. Probably not, he decided. Roundbush made fun of everything on general principles.

“Shall we gather up our goods and see who will give us a temporary home?” Hippie said. “We shan’t have a hut of our own for a while now.”

Planes were taking off and landing on the damaged runways by that afternoon. By then, Goldfarb and the
RAF
officers were back at work in a borrowed corner of the meteorological crew’s Nissen hut. The inside of one of the temporary buildings was so much like that of another that for a few minutes at a time Goldfarb was able to forget he wasn’t where he had been.

The telephone rang. One of the weathermen picked it up, then held it out to Hippie. “Call for you, Group Captain.”

“Thank you.” The jet engine specialist took the phone, said, “Hippie here.” He listened for a couple of minutes, then said, “Oh, that’s first-rate. Yes, we’ll be looking forward to receiving it. Tomorrow morning some time, you say? Yes, that will do splendidly. Thanks so much, for calling. Goodbye.”

“What was that in aid of?” Wing Commander Peary asked.

“There may be some justice in the world after all, Julian,” Hippie answered. “One of the Lizard jets which strafed this base was later brought down by antiaircraft fire north of Leicester. The aircraft did not burn upon impact, and damage was less extensive than in most other cases where we have been fortunate enough to strike a blow against the Lizards. An engine and the radar will be sent here for our examination.”

“That’s wonderful,” Goldfarb exclaimed; his words were partly drowned by similar ones from the other members of his team and from the meteorologists as well.

“What happened to the pilot?” Basil Roundbush’ asked, adding, “Nothing good, I hope.”

“I was told he used one of the Lizards’ exploding seats to get free of the aircraft, but he has been captured by Home Guards,” Hippie answered. “Perhaps it might be wise for me to seek to have him placed here so we can draw on his knowledge of the parts of his aircraft once he gains some command of English.”

“I’ve heard the Lizards sing like birds once they get to the point where they can talk,” Roundbush said. “They’re supposed to be even worse than the Italians for that. It’s odd, if you ask me.”

Maurice Kennan walked into the trap: “Why’s that?”

“Because they all come with stiff upper lips, of course.” Roundbush grinned.

“You’re one of the brightest Britain has to offer?” Kennan said, groaning. “God save us all.”

Goldfarb groaned, too – Basil Roundbush would have been disappointed if he hadn’t – but he was also smiling. He’d seen this kind of chaffing at the radar station in Dover at the height of the Battle of Britain, and then again with the Lancaster crew testing airborne radar. It made men work better together, lessened their friction against one another. Some, like Group Captain Hippie, didn’t need such social lubrication, but most mere mortals did.

They labored on until well past eight, trying to make up for time lost to the Lizard raid. They didn’t catch up; Goldfarb spent most of his time looking for the papers he needed, and didn’t always find them. The other four men, being more concerned with engines than radar, had grabbed those file folders first and his as an afterthought When Fred Hippie yawned and stood up from his stool, that was a signal for everyone else to knock off, too: if he’d had enough, they didn’t need to be ashamed to show they were worn. Goldfarb felt it in the shoulders and in the small of the back.

Hippie, a man of uncommon rectitude, headed for the refectory and then, presumably, for his cot-

such, at least, was his usual habit. Goldfarb, though, had had a bellyful – in both the literal and figurative senses of the word – of the food the
RAF
kitchens turned out. After a while, stewed meat (when there was meat), soya links, stewed potatoes and cabbage, dumplings the size, shape, and consistency of billiard balls, and stewed prunes got to be too much.

He climbed onto his bicycle and headed for nearby Bruntingthorpe. Nor was he surprised to hear the rattling squeak of another bicycle’s imperfectly oiled chain right behind him. Looking back over his shoulder in the darkness would have been an invitation to go straight over the handlebars. Instead, he called, “A Friend In Need-”

Basil Roundbush’s chuckle came ahead to him. The flight officer finished the catch phrase:” – is a friend indeed.”

A few minutes later, they both pulled up in front of A Friend In Need, the only pub Bruntingthorpe boasted. Without the
RAF
aerodrome just outside the hamlet, the place would not have had enough customers to stay open. As things were, it flourished. So did the fish-and-chips shop next door, though Goldfarb fought shy of that one because of the big tins of lard that showed up in its refuse bins. He was not nearly so rigid in his Orthodox faith as his parents, but eating chips fried in pig’s fat was more than he could stomach.

“Two pints of bitter,” Roundbush called. The publican poured them from his pitcher, passed them across the bar in exchange for silver. Roundbush raised his pint pot in salute to Goldfarb. “Confusion to the Lizards!”

They both drained their pints. The beer was not what it had been before the war. After the first or second pint, though, you stopped noticing. Following immemorial custom, Goldfarb bought the second round. “No confusion to us tomorrow, when they fetch the damaged goods,” he declared. He said no more, not off the base.

“I’ll drink to that, by God!” Roundbush said, and proved it “The more we can learn about how they do what they do, the better our chance of keeping them from doing it”

The innkeeper leaned across the waxed oak surface of the bar. “I’ve still got half a roasted capon in the back room, lads,” he said in a confidential voice. “Four and six, if you’re interested The slap of coins on the bar gave his sentence its end punctuation. “Light meat or dark?” Goldfarb asked when the bird appeared: as an officer, Roundbush had the right to choose.

“I fancy breasts more than legs,” Roundbush answered, and added, after the perfect tiny pause, “and I like light meat better, too.”

So did Goldfarb, but he ate the dark without complaint; it was vastly better than anything they made back at the aerodrome. The two
RAF
men each bought another round. Then, regretfully, they rode back to the base. Keeping bicycles on a steady course seemed complicated after four pints of even bad bitter.

The headache Goldfarb had the next morning told him he probably shouldn’t have drunk the last one. Basil Roundbush looked disgustingly fresh. Goldfarb did his best to keep Group Captain Hippie from noticing he was hung over. He thought he succeeded, and got help because no one was working at his best, not only because of yesterday’s raid, but also because everyone was looking forward to examining the wreckage from the Lizard plane.

Said wreckage did not arrive until nearly eleven, which put everyone, even the patient, mild-mannered Hippie, on edge. When it finally happened, though, the arrival was a portent: the fragments came to Bruntingthorpe aboard a pair of 6×6
GMC
trucks.

The big rumbling American machines seemed to Goldfarb almost as great a prodigy as the cargo they bore. Next to them, the British lorries he was used to were awkward makeshifts, timid and underpowered. If the Lizards hadn’t come, thousands of these broad-shouldered bruisers would have been hauling men and equipment all around England. As it was, only the earliest handful of arrivals were working here. The Yanks had more urgent use for the rest on their own side of the Atlantic.

That a couple of the precious American lorries had been entrusted with their present cargo spoke volumes about how important the
RAF
reckoned it. The lorries also boasted winches, which helped get the pieces out of the cargo compartments: radar and engine, especially the latter, were too heavy for convenient manhandling.

“We have to get these under cover as quickly as we can,” Hippie said. “We don’t want Lizard reconnaissance aircraft noting that we’re trying to learn their secrets.”

Even as he spoke, men from the groundcrew were draping camouflage netting over the wreckage. Before long, it looked pretty much like meadow from above. Goldfarb said, “They’ll expect us to rebuild the Nissen hut they wrecked yesterday. When we do, it might be worthwhile to move this gear into it. That way, the Lizards won’t be able to tell we have it.”

“Very good suggestion, David,” Hippie said, beaming. “I expect we’ll do that as soon as we have the opportunity. Yet no matter how quickly they can run up a Nissen hut, we shan’t wait for them. I want to attack these beasts as rapidly as possible, as I’m certain you do also.”

There Hippie was right. Even though it was gloomy under the netting, Goldfarb got to work right away. The Lizard plane must have come down on its belly rather than nose first, a happy accident that had indeed kept it from being too badly smashed up. Part of the streamlined nose assembly remained in place in front of the parabolic radar antenna.

The antenna itself had escaped crumpling. It was smaller than Goldfarb had expected; for that matter, the whole unit was smaller than he’d expected. The Lizards had mounted it in front of their pilot – that was obvious. It was good design; Goldfarb wished the set that would go into the Meteor was small enough to imitate it.

Some of the sheet metal around the radar had torn. Peering through a gap, Goldfarb saw bundles of wires with bright-colored insulation. Coded somehow, he thought, wishing he knew which color meant what.

Even wrecked, the finish of the Lizard aircraft was very fine. Welds were smooth and flat, rivets countersunk so their heads lay flush with the metal skin. Even tugging with pliers at a tear in the metal to widen it so he could reach inside felt like tampering to Goldfarb.

Behind the radar antenna lay the magnetron; he recognized the curved shape of its housing. It was the last piece of apparatus he did recognize. Things that looked like screws held it to the rest of the unit. They did not, however, have conventional heads. Instead of openings for a flat-blade or Phillips-head screwdriver, they had square cavities sunk into the centers of the heads.