"Well," Schaffer said consideringly, "I really think it would help." He grinned at Harrod, who grinned back almost cheerfully. Even Carraciola"s lips twitched in the beginnings of a smile. The release of tension within that frozen fuselage was almost palpable.
"Well, well, time I earned my wing-commander"s pay while you stripling pilots sit and gaze in rapt admiration." Carpenter studied his watch. "Two fifteen. Time we changed places."
Both men unhooked their safety belts and awkwardly changed over. Carpenter fastidiously adjusted the right-hand seat"s back rest until it was exactly right for him, manoeuvred his parachute to its position of maximum comfort, fastened his seat-belt, unhooked and adjusted on his head a combined earphones and microphone set and made a switch.
"Sergeant Johnson?" Carpenter never bothered with the regulation call-up formalities. "Are you awake?"
Back in the navigator"s tiny and extremely uncomfortable recess, Sergeant Johnson was very much awake. He had been awake for hours. He was bent over a glowing greenish radar screen, his eyes leaving it only to make rapid reference to the charts, an Ordnance map, a picture and a duplicate compa.s.s, altimeter and air-speed indicator. He reached for the switch by his side.
"I"m awake, sir."
"If you fly us into the side of the Weissspitze," Carpenter said threateningly, "I"ll have you reduced to aircraftman. Aircraftman second cla.s.s, Johnson."
"I wouldn"t like that. I make it nine minutes, sir."
"For once we"re agreed on something. So do I." Carpenter switched off, slid open the starboard screen and peered out. Although there was just the faintest wash of moonlight in the night sky, visibility might as well have been zero. It was a greyly opaque world, a blind world, with nothing to be seen but the thinly driving snow. He withdrew his head, brushed away the snow from his huge moustache, closed the screen, looked regretfully at his pipe and carefully put it away in his pocket.
For Tremayne, the stowage of the pipe was the final proof that the Wing Commander was clearing the decks for action. He said unhappily: "A bit dicey, isn"t it, sir? Locating the Weissspitze in this lot, I mean?"
"Dicey?" Carpenter sounded almost jovial. "Dicey? I don"t see why? It"s as big as a mountain. In fact, it is a mountain. We can"t miss it, my dear boy."
"That"s what I mean." He paused, a pause with more meaning in it. "And this plateau on the Weissspitze that we have to drop them on. Only three hundred yards wide, sir. Mountain above it, cliff below it. And those adiabatic mountain winds, or whatever you call them, blowing in any old unpredictable direction. A fraction to the south and we"ll hit the mountain, a fraction to the north and they"ll fall down that whacking great cliff and like as not all break their necks. Three hundred yards!"
"What do you want?" Carpenter demanded expansively. "Heathrow Airport? Three hundred yards? All the room in the world, my boy. We land this old crate on runways a tenth of that width."
"Yes, sir. I"ve always found runway landing lights a great help, sir. At seven thousand feet up the side of the Weissspitze--"
He broke off as a buzzer rang. Carpenter made a switch.
"Johnson?"
"Yes, sir." Johnson was huddled more closely than ever over his radar screen where the revolving scanner-line had picked up a white spot immediately to the right of centre of the screen. "I have it, sir. Right where it should be." He looked away from the screen and made a quick check on the compa.s.s. "Course oh-nine-three, sir."
"Good lad." Carpenter smiled at Tremayne, made a tiny course alteration and began to whistle softly to himself. "Have a look out your window, laddie. My moustache is beginning to get all waterlogged."
Tremayne opened his window, strained his head as far as possible, but still there was only this grey and featureless opacity. He withdrew his head, silently shook it.
"No matter. It must be there somewhere," Carpenter said reasonably. He spoke into the intercom. "Sergeant? Five minutes. Hook up."
"Hook up!" The sergeant air-gunner repeated the order to the seven men standing in line along the starboard side of the fuselage. "Five minutes."
Silently they clipped their parachute snap catches on to the overhead wire, the sergeant air-gunner carefully checking each catch. Nearest the door and first man to jump was Sergeant Harrod. Behind him stood Lieutenant Schaffer whose experiences with the OSS had made him by far the most experienced parachutist of the group and whose unenviable task it was to keep an eye on Harrod. He was followed by Carraciola, then Smith--as leader he preferred to be in the middle of the group--then Christiansen, Thomas and Torrance-Smythe. Behind Torrance-Smythe two young aircraftmen stood ready to slide packaged equipment and parachutes along the wire and heave them out as swiftly as possible after the last man had jumped. The sergeant air-gunner took up position by the door. The tension was back in the air again.
Twenty-five feet forward of where they were standing, Carpenter slid open his side screen for the fifth time in as many minutes. The now downward drooping moustache had lost much of its splendid panache but the Wing Commander had obviously decided that there were more urgent considerations in life than waterlogged moustaches. He was wearing goggles now, continuously brushing away snow and moisture with a chamois leather, but the view ahead--or lack of view remained obstinately the same, still that greyly driving snow looming out of and vanishing into that greyly impenetrable opacity, still nothingness. He closed the screen.
A call-up buzzer rang. Carpenter made a switch, listened, nodded.
"Three minutes," he said to Tremayne. "Oh-nine-two."
Tremayne made the necessary minute course adjustment. He no longer looked through the side-screen, he no longer even looked at the screen ahead of him. His whole being was concentrated upon flying that big bomber, his all-exclusive attention, his total concentration, on three things only: the compa.s.s, the altimeter, and Carpenter. A degree too far to the south and the Lancaster would crash into the side of the Weissspitze: a couple of hundred feet too low and the same thing would happen : a missed signal from Carpenter and the mission was over before it had begun. The young, the absurdly young face was expressionless, the body immobile as he piloted the Lancaster with a hair-trigger precision that he had never before achieved. Only his eyes moved, in a regular, rhythmic, unvarying pattern; the compa.s.s, the altimeter, Carpenter, the compa.s.s, the altimeter, Carpenter: and never longer than a second on each.
Again Carpenter slid open his side-screen and peered out. Again he had the same reward, the opacity, the grey nothingness. With his head still outside he lifted his left hand, palm downwards, and made a forward motion. Instantly Tremayne"s hand fell on the throttle levers and eased them forward. The roar of the big engines died away to a more muted thunder.
Carpenter withdrew his head. If he was concerned, no trace of it showed in his face. He resumed his soft whistling, calmly, almost leisurely, scanned the instrument panel, then turned his head to Tremayne. He said conversationally :
"When you were in flying school, ever hear tell of a strange phenomenon known as stalling speed?"
Tremayne started, glanced hurriedly at the instrument panel and quickly gave a fraction more power to the engines. Carpenter smiled, looked at his watch and pressed a buzzer twice.
The bell rang above the head of the sergeant air-gunner standing by the fuselage door. He looked at the tense, expectant faces before him and nodded.
"Two minutes, gentlemen."
He eased the door a few inches to test whether it was moving freely. With the door only fractionally open the suddenly deepened roar from the engines was startling but nowhere nearly as dismaying as the snow-laden gust of icy wind that whistled into the fuselage. The parachutists exchanged carefully expressionless glances, glances correctly interpreted by the sergeant who closed the door and nodded again.
"I agree, gentlemen. No night for man nor beast."
Wing Commander Carpenter, his head once again poked through the side-screen, didn"t think so either. Five seconds" exposure to that arctic wind and driving snow and your face was full of- porcupine quills: fifteen seconds and the totally numbed skin conveyed no sensation at all, it was when you withdrew you head and waited for the exquisite pain of returning circulation that the fun really started: but this time Carpenter was determined not to withdraw his head until he had complete justification for doing so: and the only justification would be the sighting of the Weissspitze. Mechanically, industriously, he rubbed the chamois leather across his goggles, stared unblinkingly into the greyly swirling gloom and hoped that he saw the Weissspitze before the Weissspitze saw him.
Inside, Tremayne"s eyes continued on their rhythmic, unvarying pattern of movement: the compa.s.s, the altimeter, Carpenter, the compa.s.s, the altimeter, Carpenter. But now his gaze was resting fractionally longer on Carpenter each time, waiting for the sudden signal that would galvanise him into throwing the big Lancaster into a violent bank to port, the only avoiding action they could possibly take. Carpenter"s left hand was moving, but he wasn"t giving any signal, the fingers of his left hand were drumming gently on his knee. This, Tremayne suddenly and incredulously realised, was probably the highest state of excitement that Carpenter was capable of achieving.
Ten seconds pa.s.sed. Five. And another five. Tremayne was conscious that, even in that ice-cold cabin, the sweat was pouring down his face. The urge to pull the bomber away to the left, to avoid the shattering, annihilating collision that could be only seconds away now, was almost overpowering.
He was aware of a fear, a fear bordering on a reason-abdicating panic, such as he had never previously guessed at, let alone experienced. And then he became aware of something else. The drumming of Carpenter"s left fingers had abruptly ceased.
Carpenter had it now. It was more imagined than real, more guessed at than seen, but he had it now. Then gradually, almost imperceptibly, ahead and a little to the right of the direction of flight, he became aware of something more solidly tangible than wishful thinking beginning to materialise out of the nothingness. And then, suddenly, it wasn"t materialising any more, it was solidly, unmistakably there, the smooth, unbroken side of an almost vertically towering mountain soaring up at a dizzy 80- until it vanished in the grey darkness above. Carpenter withdrew his head, leaving the screen open this time, and pressed his head-switch.
"Sergeant Johnson?" The words came out stiffly, mechanically, not because of any crisis of emotion that the Wing Commander was pa.s.sing through but because his entire face, lips included, was so frozen that he could no longer articulate properly.
"Sir?" Johnson"s voice over the intercom was disembodied, empty, but even the metallic impersonality of that single word could not disguise the bow-taut tension behind it.
Carpenter said: "I think Flying Officer Johnson a much nicer name."
"Sir?"
"Relax. I have it. You can go back to sleep." He switched off, took a quick look through the side-screen, reached up and touched an overhead switch.
Above the starboard door in the fuselage, a red light came on. The sergeant air-gunner laid his hand on the door.
"One minute, gentlemen." He jerked the door wide open, securing it on its standing latch, and a miniature blizzard howled into the belly of the Lancaster. "When the red light turns green--"
He left the sentence unfinished, partly because those few words were crystal clear in themselves, partly because he had to shout so loudly to make himself heard over the combined roar of wind and engines that any superfluity of words was only that much wasted effort.
No one else said anything, mainly because of the near impossibility of making oneself heard. In any event, the parachutists" silently exchanged glances conveyed more eloquently than words the very obvious thought that was in the minds of all of them: if it was like that inside, what the h.e.l.l was it like outside? At a gesture from the sergeant, they moved up in line to the open door, Sergeant Harrod in the lead. On his face was the expression of a Christian martyr meeting his first and last lion.
The Lancaster, like some great black pterodactyl from out of the primeval past, roared on through the driving snow alongside the smoothly precipitous side of the Weissspitze. That sheer wall of ice-encrusted rock seemed very close indeed. Tremayne was convinced that it was impossibly close. He stared through the still open screen by Carpenter"s head and would have sworn that the starboard wing-tip must be brushing the side of the mountain. Tremayne could still feel the sweat that bathed his face but his lips were as dry as ashes. He licked them, surrept.i.tiously, so that Carpenter would not see him, but it didn"t do any good at all: as dry as ashes they remained.
Sergeant Harrod"s lips weren"t dry, but that was only because his face was taking the full brunt of the horizontally driving snowstorm that lashed along the bomber"s fuselage. Otherwise, he shared Tremayne"s sentiments and apprehensions to a very marked degree. He stood in the doorway, gripping the fuselage on each side to hold him in position against the gale of wind, his storm-lashed face showing no fear, just a peculiarly resigned expression. His eyes were turned to the left, looking forward with an almost hypnotised fixity at that point in s.p.a.ce where it seemed that at any second now the starboard wing-tip must strike against the Weissspitze.