Flight of Eagles. Jack Higgins

      ‘Heard you were in the drink, sir. Good to see you back,’ a pilot officer called Hartley said. ‘There’s a group captain waiting to see you.’

      Harry opened the door to his small office and found West of the false leg sitting behind his desk. ‘What a surprise, sir. Congratulations on your promotion.’

      ‘You’ve done well, Kelso. Anxious couple of hours when we heard where you were, but all’s well that ends well. Congratulations to you too. Your promotion to flight lieutenant has been confirmed. Also, another DFC.’

      Harry went to the cupboard, found whisky and two glasses. ‘Shall we toast each other, sir?’

      ‘Excellent idea.’

      Harry poured. ‘Are we winning?’

      ‘Not at the moment.’ West swallowed his drink. ‘We will in the end. America will have to come in, but we must hang on. I need you for a day or so. I see you’ve only got five Hurricanes operational. Flying Officer Kenny can hold the fort. You’ll be back tomorrow night.’

      ‘May I ask what this is about, sir?’

      ‘I remembered from your records that you flew an ME109 in Finland. Well, we’ve got one at Downfield north of London. Pilot had a bad oil leak and decided to land instead of jump. Tried to set fire to the thing, but a Home Guard unit was close by.’

      ‘That’s quite a catch, sir.’

      ‘Yes, well, be a good chap. Have a quick shower and change and we’ll be on our way.’

      Downfield was another installation that had been a flying club before the war. There was only one landing strip, a control tower, two hangars. The place was surrounded by barbed wire, RAF guards on the gate. The 109 was on the apron outside one of the hangars. Two staff cars were parked nearby and three RAF and two Army officers were examining the plane. A Luftwaffe lieutenant, no more than twenty, stood close by, his uniform crumpled. Two RAF guards with rifles watched him.

      Harry walked straight up to the lieutenant and held out his hand. ‘Rotten luck,’ he said in German. ‘Lucky you got down in one piece.’

      ‘Good God, are you German?’

      ‘My mother is.’ Harry gave him a cigarette and a light and took one himself.

      The older army officer was a brigadier with the red tabs of staff. He had an engagingly ugly face, white hair and wore steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked about sixty-five.

      ‘Dougal Munro. What excellent German, Flight Lieutenant.’

      ‘Well, it would be,’ Harry told him.

      ‘My aide, Jack Carter.’

      Carter was a captain in the Green Howards and wore a ribbon for the Military Cross. He leaned on a walking stick, for, as Harry discovered a long time later, he’d left a leg at Dunkirk.

      The senior of the three Air Force officers was, like West, a group captain. ‘Look, I don’t know what’s going on, Teddy,’ he said to West. ‘Who on earth is this officer? I mean, why the delay? Dowding wants an evaluation of this plane as soon as possible.’

      ‘He’ll get it. Flight Lieutenant Kelso has flown it in combat.’

      ‘Good God, where?’

      ‘He flew for the Finns. Gladiators, Hurricanes and 109s.’ West turned to Harry. ‘Give your opinion to Group Captain Green.’

      ‘Excellent plane, sir. Marginally better than a Hurricane and certainly as good as a Spitfire.’

      ‘Show them,’ West said. ‘Five minutes only. We don’t want to get you shot down.’

      Kelso went up to 3000 feet, banked, looped, beat up the airfield at 300 feet, turned into the wind and landed. He taxied towards them and got out.

      ‘As I said, sir,’ he told Green. ‘Excellent plane. Mind you, the Hurricane is the best gun platform in the business and, at the end of the day, it usually comes down to the pilot.’

      Green turned and said lamely to West, ‘Very interesting, Teddy. I think I’d like a written evaluation from this officer.’

      ‘Consider it done.’

      Green and his two officers went to their staff car and drove away. Munro held out his hand. ‘You’re a very interesting young man.’ He nodded to West. ‘Many thanks, Group Captain.’

      He went to his car, Carter limping after him. As they settled in the back, he said, ‘Everything you can find out about him, everything, Jack.’

      ‘Leave it to me, sir.’

      Harry gave the German pilot a packet of cigarettes. ‘Good luck.’

      The guards took the boy away and West said, ‘I know a country pub near here where we can get a great black-market meal and you can write that report for me.’

      ‘Sounds good to me.’ They got in the car and as the driver drove away, Harry lit a cigarette from his spare pack. ‘I asked you were we winning and you said not at the moment. What do we need?’

      ‘A miracle.’

      ‘They’re a bit hard to find these days.’

      But then it happened. London was accidentally bombed by a single Dornier, the RAF retaliated against Berlin, and from 7 September, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to turn on London. It was the beginning of the Blitz and gave the RAF time to repair its damaged fighter bases in the South of England.

      In a café in Le Touquet, Dolfo Galland was playing jazz on the piano and smoking a cigar when Max came in and sat at the end of the bar.

      ‘That’s it, Dolfo. The rest is just a matter of time. We had the Tommies beaten and our glorious Führer has just thrown it all away. So what happens now?’

      ‘We get drunk,’ Dolfo Galland told him. ‘And then we go back to work, play the game to the end.’

      5

      The Blitz on London, the carnage it caused, was so terrible that the red glow in the sky at night could be seen by Luftwaffe planes taking off in France, and by day, the sky seemed full of bombers, the contrails crisscrossing the horizon of hundreds of RAF and Luftwaffe planes fighting it out.

      The Knight’s Cross was awarded to those who shot down more than twenty planes. Galland already had it, plus the Oak Leaves for a second award. Max got the Cross on 10 September, although by then he’d taken care of at least thirty planes.

      Harry and Hawk Squadron engaged in all the battles, six or seven sorties a day, flying to the point of exhaustion and taking heavy losses. It finally reached a point where he was the only surviving member of the original squadron. And then came the final huge battles of 15 September: 400 Luftwaffe fighters over the South of England and London against 300 Spitfires and Hurricanes.

      In a strange way, nobody won. The Channel was still disputed territory and the Blitz on London and other cities continued, although mainly by night. Hitler’s grandiose scheme for the invasion of England, Operation Sealion, had to be scrapped, but Britain was still left standing alone, and the Führer could now turn his attention to Russia.

      In Berlin in early November, it was raining hard as Heinrich Himmler got out of his car and entered Gestapo headquarters in Prinz Albrechtstrasse. A flurry of movement from guards and office staff followed him as he passed through to his office dressed in his black Reichsführer SS dress uniform. He wore his usual silver pince-nez and his face was as enigmatic as ever, as he went up the marble stairs to his suite of offices, where his secretary, a middle-aged woman in the uniform of an SS auxiliary, stood up.

      ‘Good morning, Reichsführer.’

      ‘Find Sturmbannführer Hartmann for me.’

      ‘Certainly, Reichsführer.’

      Himmler went into