In the Balance полностью

Bagnall could not have agreed more. Despite machine gun turrets all over the aircraft, the Lancaster had always been at a dreadful disadvantage against enemy fighters; evasion beat the blazes out of combat. The knowledge made bomber aircrew cautious, and made them view swaggering, aggressive fighter pilots as not quite right in the head.

From back in the bomb bay, David Goldfarb said, “I ought to be able to communicate directly with the fighter aircraft rather than relaying through the radioman.”

“That’s a good notion, Goldfarb,” Bagnall said. “Jot it down; maybe they’ll be able to use it on the Mark 2.” And maybe, if we keep on being luckier than we deserve, we’ll live to try out the Mark 2, he added to himself. He didn’t need to say it aloud; Goldfarb had known what the odds were when he volunteered for this mission.

Bagnall wiped the inside of the curved Perspex window in front of him with a piece of chamois cloth. Nothing much to see out there, not even the exhaust flames from other bombers ahead, above, below, and to either side-reassuring reminders one was not going into danger all alone. Now there was only night, night and the endless throb of the four Merlins. Consciously reminded of the engines, the flight engineer flicked his eyes over the gauges in front of him. Mechanically, all was well.

“I have enemy aircraft,” Goldfarb exclaimed. Back in the bomb bay, he couldn’t see even the night, just the tracks of electrons across a phosphor-coated screen. But his machine vision reached farther than Bagnall’s eyes. “I say again, I have enemy aircraft. Heading 177, distance thirty-five miles and closing, speed 505.”

Ted Lane passed that word on to the Mosquitoes that lurked far above the radar-carrying Lancaster. The twin-engine planes not only had the highest operational ceiling of any British fighters, they were also, with their wooden skins and skeletons, harder for radar to acquire.

“Rockets away from the Lizard aircraft,” Goldfarb yelped. “Bearing-straight for us. Speed-too bloody fast for my machine here.”

“Shut it down,” Embry ordered. He threw the Lanc into a violent, corkscrewing dive that made Bagnall glad for the straps that held him in his seat. His stomach felt a couple of thousand feet behind the aircraft. He gulped, wishing he hadn’t had greasy fish and chips less than an hour before the mission started.

An excited yell from Joe Simpkin in the tail gunner’s turret echoed in his headset. The gunner added, “One of those rockets flew through where we used to be.”

“Well, by God,” Ken Embry said softly. The pilot, who made a point of never letting anything impress him, added, “Who would have thought the boffins could actually get one right?”

“I’m rather glad they did,” Bagnall said, stressing his broad “a”s to show he also took such miracles for granted. The engineers down on the ground had been confident the Lizards would attack a radar-carrying aircraft with the same radar-homing rockets they’d used to wreck the British ground stations. Turn off the radar and what would they have to home on? Nothing, Down on the ground, it all seemed as inexorably logical as a geometric proof. The boffins, however, didn’t have to test their theories in person. That was what’ aircrews were for.

“Shall I start it up again?” Goldfarb asked over the intercom. “No, better not, not quite yet,” Embry said after a moment’s thought.

“It does us no good if it isn’t running,” the radarman said plaintively.

It does us no bloody good if it gets us shot down, either, Bagnall thought. But that wasn’t fair, and he knew it. For someone whose only time in the air had been practicing for this mission, Goldfarb was doing fine. And not only was it natural for him to want to play with his toy, he had a point. A radar set that had to shut down as soon as action started to keep from being destroyed was better than no radar set at all, but not much. Along with letting Goldfarb talk directly with the fighters his radar directed, the boffins would have to come up with a way to let him keep the set operating without getting it and its aircraft blown out of the sky.

Ted Lane let out an ear-piercing Red Indian whoop. “A Mosquito just took out one of their planes. Bounced him from above, almost head-on-couldn’t very well come up on him from behind, could he, what with the Lizards’ being the faster aircraft. Says he saw the enemy break up in midair, and then he was diving for the deck for all he was worth.”

Everyone in the Lancaster cheered. Then Ken Embry said, “What about the rest of the Mosquitoes?”