The Crew Read Online Free Page A

to stop Hitler.
We must be free or die. Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.
    He wished Mum could understand, but the only thing she could really see was that she might lose him. He knew that would be hard because he was all she had, but it couldn’t be helped. She’d never said a cross word when he’d gone off to the recruiting office and lied to them about his age, but he’d heard her crying in her bedroom and he’d felt very bad about it.
    It was dark now – darkness and engine noise and vibration, all around him. The skipper’s voice spoke suddenly in his ears: ‘Pilot to rear gunner. OK back there, Charlie?’
    He pressed his mike switch down carefully, still not easy with speaking out over the intercom. ‘OK, skipper.’
    He went on searching the night skies.
    They dropped the mines in what Van hoped were the waters off St Nazaire, Stew letting them go at three-second intervals. For once Piers had sounded sure about their position, but that might not mean a damn thing. There was no flak and no enemy fighters; nobody seemed to be taking any notice of them at all. He had a feeling that it was never going to be this easy again.
    They flew back over the Channel and crossed the English coast at what should have been Portsmouth but was probably somewhere else, because later they turned out to be at least fifty miles off course. Piers was frightfully sorry about it, as usual, and eventually got them back to Beningby after a circular tour of Lincolnshire. Van managed a reasonable landing with only a couple of bounces, and they were ferried back from dispersal in the crew bus. He sat in front beside the WAAF driver, a jolly, red-cheeked girl who made bright conversation about the weather as though they were taking a pleasure drive out in the country. Apparently it was going to be a nice day, or what passed for one. The smell of dew-damp grass reached him pleasantly through the half-open window. He wondered just exactly where they had dropped the mines.
    Catherine saw the sprog crew come into the debriefing room. All the other crews had already gone off for their breakfast and for a while she’d been afraid that they’d bought it on their first op. She watched them gather round a table: two pilot officers and five sergeants. They’d yet to do a really dicey trip, so they hadn’t that dazed look she knew so well. That would come later. A fairly typical crew, except that someone had told her the pilot was an American. He’d be the tall fair one with the wings, chewing gum. The other officer, also fair-haired and wearing a navigator’s badge, looked very English and very anxious. The bomb aimer was a stocky, aggressive Australian in the royal blue of the RAAF, and the flight engineer with the reddish hair and dour expression was probably Scottish. The two gunners were the smallest and youngest-looking of the crew, one of them scarcely more than a boy. The wireless operator, a big man, was obviously considerably older than the rest.
    They were behaving like most crews at the start of their tour: like a group of virtual strangers with nothing much in common. Because it was their first op, they would try to answer all the de-briefing questions conscientiously in every detail. Later, they’d learn to rattle through it as quickly as possible and escape to their eggs and bacon and their sleep. If they lasted that long. Some said the first op was the diciest of all, and they’d survived it. Still, it had only been St Nazaire.
    She watched them lighting cigarettes and drinking their cocoa. The wireless op was filling a pipe and poking at it with a match, the Aussie bomb aimer tipping back his chair perilously on its hind legs. Shewatched the navigator lean forward earnestly to answer a question from the intelligence officer, the dark-haired gunner speak up with a cheeky grin and the very young-looking gunner smother a tired yawn. Then the skipper glanced across