The Restless Sea

Around him, the world seems different, as if he is looking through a prism: the objects are crystal clear yet haloed with coloured light. He blinks and shakes his head, trying to clear the outlines that are seeping into a haze. The piercing echo of the blast is beginning to subside in his ears, but the sounds are still distorted. There are groans coming through the blown-out window next to him. He struggles to his feet and squints into the yawning hole. There is glass and splintered furniture and smashed crockery everywhere, dust settling over it like snow. He cannot locate the source of the moaning.

Jack tells Betsy to wait where she is. He takes off his coat and lays it over the windowsill where jagged glass still sticks up from the wooden frame. He climbs carefully into the house. The pictures have been blown clean off the walls, and a large dining table has been thrown on its side, and now he sees there is a man sitting on the floor next to it. Jack stops, unsure whether to climb straight back out. The man is ghostly pale, covered in dust. He appears unharmed, but confused: ‘Have you seen her?’ he keeps saying. ‘Have you seen her?’

There is no sign of anyone else.

Jack stands there for a moment. Behind him the torn curtains flutter and flap in the breeze. It is the perfect opportunity to grab something, before the man comes to his senses. Jack’s eyes flicker across the room. He is quick to recognise the objects of value. He snatches up a bent photograph frame and a twisted silver candlestick.

On the floor, the man is still moaning as he starts to dig into the pile of plaster and brick with his bare hands. Jack knows he could recover at any moment. He starts to back away, towards the window, clutching his loot in one hand. At the sound of glass crunching beneath Jack’s feet, the man suddenly stops digging and stares up at Jack with eyes large as saucers. Jack is ready to run, every muscle tense. But the man doesn’t seem to be able to see anything through the tears that are making dark tracks down his pale cheeks. ‘I know she’s here,’ he says. ‘Have you seen her?’ And he turns back to his scrabbling in the debris.

Jack is almost out of there. He allows himself one last glance around the place, in case he’s missed anything. It is then that he spots the headscarf. It is hidden from the man on the floor by the great broken back of the dining table. The horror hits him like a blow to the chest. The scarf has the same pattern as his mother’s favourite one. He cannot help taking a step forward. His eye picks out the arm, the legs, the body of a woman who, apart from a light dusting of ash, seems untouched, as if sleeping peacefully among the ruins. His gaze is drawn back to the familiar headscarf, the sprinkling of pale flowers on a blue background. It is exactly the same as his mother’s, except the pale flowers of this one are being swallowed up by the dark stain that is spreading, and he knows that the head beneath it is crushed and that this woman will never get up.

The man has noticed the look on Jack’s face. He has stopped digging and is staring at Jack again. ‘She’s here,’ he says. ‘I know she is …’

Jack tries to swallow, to clear his throat, but the words choke with the dust in his mouth. The man turns back, attacking the rubble even more frantically, and Jack wants to reach out to stop him, and he crouches down and puts a hand on the man’s shoulder, but the man carries on scratching, and Jack can see that the rubble is turning black and the man’s fingers are turning black, and Jack realises it is blood: the man’s hands are bleeding as he scrapes and scratches at the rubble. And Jack wants to say sorry, sorry for the body in the rubble, sorry for taking the picture frame and the candlestick, but he just doesn’t know how.

Suddenly, bizarrely, there is a knock at the front door, and a voice calls out, ‘Mr Knightley? Mrs Knightley?’ Jack stands as an ARP warden comes into the room. She too is smeared with dirt and dust. ‘Mr Knightley?’ She peers into the gloom, shines her torch across the ruins of the house until the beam lands on Jack, dusty and wild, a scavenger on the prowl.

‘Who are you?’ she asks. Then, spotting the silver still clutched in his hand: ‘Put those down! How dare you …?’

‘I was going to …’ but Jack’s voice tails off. There’s no point in explaining. He is what he is. He does not have the kind of bravery or even the kind of words it takes to turn a life around.

‘Get out!’ she is saying. ‘Go on! Out, you animal!’ He dodges her blows, and scrambles to the window, dropping the frame and the candlestick as he climbs back out the way he came in, his cheeks burning with humiliation. He shakes his coat out and grabs hold of Betsy’s small hand, and they’re off again. He suddenly has an urgent desire to reach home.

Jack tries not to look at the things that loom out of the night. Is that an arm or a foot? An ARP warden picks it up. His eyes have a faraway look, as if he’s trying not to see it either. Jack blinks, and through the swirling clouds he sees Tommy – or it might be Vince – rifling through the outer garments of a legless piece of flesh. How has he never noticed this horror before? He closes his eyes, and the broken body of the woman, her head crushed in his mother’s scarf, swims there. When he looks again, there is a lady without any skirt or shoes or stockings on. She is stumbling along the road, naked from the waist down, her charred skin lit by the flames of a thousand fires. And there, behind her, is Stoog, and he is rattling the bent and broken doors, searching high and low for whatever he can lay his hands on. Jack trips on, over a baby squashed and pulped in the gutter; beneath a bare tree, its branches adorned with limbs instead of leaves. And all the time the jangling bells of the fire engines and the crunching of the rubble underfoot and the cries for help and the dust filling their lungs so that he is choking on death.

Jack squeezes Betsy’s hand tighter, pulling her on. They are nearly at Southwark Park Road when they catch sight of Stoog and the others again. Stoog is grinning. He has got what looks like a haunch of meat and some new boots. The other boys’ bags are full, and they are carrying things too: Jack glimpses a stiff chicken, its feathers dull, its neck thin and long, a pair of gentleman’s silk dressing gowns.

The all-clear siren is sounding, calling out across the city that the danger has passed. All over London people will be coming out of their shelters, wondering what they will find.

‘What you got?’ says Stoog.

Jack shakes his head.

‘Nothing? But …’

Jack holds up his hand. ‘Don’t,’ he says. A terrible, morbid feeling has settled in his bones.

Stoog grins disdainfully and moves off. The other boys follow. Their faces are speckled with grime; they are camouflaged soldiers fighting their own battles. They melt away into the war-torn city before anyone can ask questions. Jack watches them go and is filled with disgust at what they have all become.

He and Betsy make their way home. Ash floats through the air, settling in their hair. Small flames still burn around them: wisps of light in the dark. The fires cast a creepy guttering light across Jack’s broken neighbourhood. The high street is unrecognisable. Walls are missing. You can see right in to people’s bedrooms. Clothes flap across the ground. Twisted metal lies everywhere. The moon is reflected in a mirror on someone’s wall. A bed half hangs from a first storey.

The pub on the corner that marks where they turn for their road is a furnace, flames burning in every window. Clouds of black smoke billow from the roof into the sky. There are fire wardens everywhere, clutching their stirrup pumps, aiming their hoses at innumerable streaks of flame. Boys and girls younger than Jack, many of whom he knows, fill buckets of water for them. Others race around with wheelbarrows full of sand, which they tip on the flames. Girl Guides in their blue uniforms soothe the injured and carry water and blankets to the shell-shocked.

They almost stumble into a deep crater halfway down their neighbouring street. Jack starts to jog. Broken glass crunches and crackles beneath his feet. Betsy runs to keep up. But it is all right. The houses at their end are untouched. Their home is still there. The front door is still on its hinges.

His mother is behind it, chewing her lip. ‘Where have you been?’ she shouts as soon as they fall into the hall.

Jack hesitates for a moment. The relief that surges through him is quickly replaced by defensiveness. ‘Down the Underground,’ he says. No need to look at Betsy. She will always back him up. But their mother doesn’t question them; that they are here and alive is enough. She kneels down and opens her arms and clings to them in the dark.

Outside, sirens still scream and bells still ring. The clean-up will continue all night. Inside, the three of them slump on the floor. Betsy is a ghost, her face and clothes so pale with ash, the dribble of dried blood a dark scar across her forehead.

Their mother leans her head back against the wall, a knot of exhaustion. ‘Enough is enough,’ she says. She picks something out of Betsy’s hair. She does not catch Jack’s eye. ‘It’s just us left,’ she says.

‘Don’t say it.’ Jack clenches his fists.

‘They’re gone. Both of them. They’re not coming back.’ There has been no news of his dad or Walt. They did not return with the men from Dunkirk.

‘You don’t know that for sure,’ says Jack.

‘I do.’

They stare at each other.

‘There’s a special train leaving in the morning. Another round of evacuations. I’ve booked her on it.’ She doesn’t need to carry on. Jack’s shoulders sag. He cannot fight any more. His mother is right. He cannot keep his sister safe. No one left in this smouldering city is safe.

Betsy’s eyes widen as the news sinks in. She shakes her head and inches back towards the door. ‘You promised,’ she says. Jack cannot stand the accusation in her voice, her eyes. He stops her, clasping her tightly, smoothing her smoky hair, filled with the dust of the dead. He feels her knobbly shoulders shiver beneath his sore hands, and he feels the piece of glass from Cherry Garden Pier burning like a hot coal in his pocket.

They wake early to the scratch of metal on rubble as London clears away debris on top of debris. Jack’s mother dresses Betsy in her only coat. Her shoes are so threadbare now that Jack shoves some cardboard into them to cover up the holes. He can barely look at his mother. He can barely look at himself.

His mother has written ‘Betsy Sullivan, Drummond Road, London SE17’ on a large white label. She ties it to Betsy’s coat, as if she’s a piece of lost luggage. ‘I’ve done you lunch, my love,’ she says. Her voice is almost a whisper. A tremor runs through it, but she has no more tears to cry. ‘Jam sandwiches. And I made your favourite biscuits.’ She has used their week’s ration of butter and sugar for these instead of the stale bread she usually tries to get away with.

Betsy holds the bag with her food in it. Jack holds her little suitcase. His sister has been polished and scrubbed. She looks as tidy as if she is off to church. His vision blurs for a moment. Then he clears his throat. He must be strong for her. He takes her hand. Their mother hovers in the background. ‘Right, you,’ he says, struggling to force the words out as they scratch and catch in his throat. ‘Let’s go.’

They pass walls teetering on the edge of collapse, hosepipes and buckets of sand, burning gas pipes, curtains flapping in the wind in buildings that look like dolls’ houses with their fronts left open. They pass the posters telling mothers to send their children away, people who look like they haven’t slept for weeks. They look out for live wires, particularly where the streets are waterlogged. Everywhere there is the smell of sewage, and wet, charred wood.

At Paddington Station, Betsy is pushed and pulled into one of the many groups of children. They all have the same wide, staring eyes. Some of them are crying. Betsy bites her lip and swallows, but she won’t cry. Jack feels his heart break. It actually breaks in two right there. He stands next to his mother. He feels her coldness. She is their mother, but she’s a shell. She steps forward towards her daughter. ‘Betsy love, I’m sure you’ll be back by …’ She cannot finish her sentence. The word ‘Christmas’ is too gay and bright and precious to exist at this moment. She tries to bend down and kiss Betsy’s pale cheek, but she is split from her by the ample figure of a buxom woman in a tweed suit.

‘Where are they going?’ Jack asks the woman, who is checking off a list.

‘We’ll tell you when they get there,’ she says, without looking up.

Jack smacks her clipboard, making a sharp sound. Now he’s got her attention. ‘Tell me now,’ he says.

‘You’ll find out in due course,’ she says, glancing at him as her lip curls. She is not intimidated. ‘Now hurry along. You’re only making it more difficult for your sister.’ She is right. He can see that Betsy’s bottom lip is quivering. He lets her usher Betsy towards a group of children who are then herded down the platform by more women in tweed suits. Betsy doesn’t even turn to wave goodbye, she just lets herself be carried away on the tide of other bewildered children. The battered gas mask box bumps against the back of her legs.

His vision blurs as she is ushered up into the train. The platform is an empty space, devoid of life as he is devoid of feeling. His fingers close over Betsy’s piece of glass, and he feels the familiar rage trickle into his bloodstream. The woman with the clipboard is still here, ticking things off her list. He grabs hold of the top of her arm. ‘You can’t just send them off and not know where they’re going,’ he says, his voice rising. ‘You wouldn’t do it to your own kids …’ He wants to crush her. He feels so impotent. The woman struggles to shake herself free, but Jack won’t let go, and she makes a strangled yelp for help, and suddenly there are people descending on him from all sides, and his mother cries out and there is a policeman, his helmet bobbing above everyone’s heads, his buttons a neat, shiny row down his front, and Jack’s mother has a hold on the policeman and they are talking and pointing, and Jack’s rage turns to fear. Would his mother turn him in? She has sent her only daughter away. Perhaps she will do the same to him. And he cannot take it any longer – the relentless inevitability of it all.

Jack does not stop running until he reaches Carl’s door. He hammers and hammers, and eventually it opens, a narrow crack through which Mr Mills is peering. The man is not happy to see him, but Carl is there in the corridor, and he whispers quietly to his father, who eventually moves aside.

Jack does not care that his eyes are red and his grubby face is streaked with tears. He reaches out to Carl. ‘Can I come?’ he asks. ‘Can I still come with you?’

And Carl pulls him inside, where it is bright and warm and he feels the weight of his friend’s arm across his shoulder.

CHAPTER 3
Charlie

Charlie braces himself against the heavy swell. The Atlantic Ocean stretches mile after choppy mile in every direction – every crinkle in every wave could hide a U-boat. The first British ship was sunk out here in the North-western Approaches, just hours after Chamberlain’s radio broadcast, and not much later than the sleeper train was pulling away from London towards Inverness all those days ago. It was an unarmed passenger ship, torpedoed as the evening meal was being served.

He scans the flight deck, flat apart from the island with its shiny black pom-pom guns. What a sight an aircraft carrier is! She carries the might of fifteen hundred men and more than fifty folded planes anywhere in the world, transporting them safely in her enormous belly like a battle-ready whale.

Charlie steadies himself again: even a ship this size bounces like a cork on these waves. The planes are being brought up on the lifts from below. This is what he’s been waiting for. No more exams. This is the real thing. Squadron 843’s stumpy Blackburn Skuas appear first. He scratches his head and runs his fingers through his hair. He’s glad he’s not flying one of these new fighter planes. Give him a good old-fashioned bi-plane and an open cockpit any day.

He shakes his legs and arms out to get the circulation going. His sheepskin-lined clothes are warm but cumbersome. He smiles to himself as he remembers target training. He has always been a good shot. Calm and steady, like his plane. And she may be slow, but boy, does she respond to his touch. He can make her do whatever he wants with the lightest pressure from his hands and feet. They can swoop and climb, turn and stop, bank, dive, soar, roll, loop the loop … although that’s a court martial, of course – if you’re caught.

‘Either you’re young and brilliant or young and stupid,’ one of his instructors had said.

‘A little bit of all three, I suspect, sir,’ he’d answered, grinning. But he isn’t. The one thing you can’t call Charlie is stupid. He’s sensible, and he can assess a situation in a split second. He knows what he’s capable of and he knows what his plane’s capable of. That’s why the training was a doddle.

‘Thinking about a pretty lady again, boyo?’ says Mole, his words whipped away by the wind.

‘You could say that,’ says Charlie. And actually, he has allowed himself to think of the girl from the train, but not out here on the flight deck. Here, he needs to focus. He slips his arms into the Mae West, wriggling to make it more comfortable on his shoulders. ‘Bloody thing,’ he says. ‘Too many damn straps and buckles and safety clips.’

‘Mind your language in front of young Billy the Kid,’ says Mole. He nods at the boy standing next to them. Bill is actually a little older than Charlie, but he seems younger without Charlie’s breezy self-confidence. He is their TAG. The plane’s telegraphist–air gunner. He is quiet and respectful. But then, he is only a lower-deck rating. He is also perpetually unflustered. Important if you find yourself in a sticky situation.

Bill smiles and makes a gesture like firing a gun with his hands, before he slips on his leather gloves.

‘Come on, Billy. Let’s do this,’ says Mole. The Welshman has taken the Kid under his wing. He takes everyone under his wing. He’s an astute observer, and has a gift for making people feel at ease. Both traits useful when you’re the navigator in a cockpit flying at almost two thousand feet.

The fleet has received a distress call from an unarmed and lonely cargo ship two hundred miles away. It is being chased by a German submarine. It is too far for the fleet’s ships to get there quickly, but the pilots will.

The airmen were immediately at the ready. They are always at the ready, whether they are standing by in the ready room or writing letters in the wardroom or asleep in their cabins. The flight deck crew indicate that the Skuas are good to go. Charlie says a silent prayer for them. There is ribbing in the wardroom about Charlie’s squadron’s old Stringbags, but out here on the wind-lashed flight deck, there is nothing but respect for each other.

Charlie shivers: part anticipation, part wind chill. There is no dread: this is what it’s all about. At last he can put the training into practice.

‘Number four crew, stand by to scramble!’

Charlie nods at Frank and Paddy – the other two squadron pilots – and their crew. The Fairey Swordfish have been run into place. They rise and fall at the far end of the ship. The flight deck crew unfurl their wings as the airmen lumber towards them like bears in their thick boots and Irvin jackets – but in a moment they too will be weightless, as graceful as the most delicate of insects.

Charlie can see the bombs strapped in racks beneath their plane. Mole and Billy disappear behind her wing and haul themselves up into the cockpit. Charlie nods at Tugger, solid and windswept on the deck. He reaches for the handholds, climbing up above the wheel, over the wing and into the front of the cockpit. He hands Tugger the crank handle, sits down on the parachute, clips himself in, yanks his goggles down, pulls his harness tight, starts his cockpit checks.

Tugger, his large body squeezed between a strut and the body of the plane, fits the handle into its hole and starts to turn, slowly at first, then faster. Danny, wedged further down, helps him. Through the howl of the wind Charlie hears the whizz of the motor. Tugger and Danny wind, faster and faster. Their arms become a blur. Charlie gets ready with the throttle, mixture, switches, trim. He can tell from the sound that it’s time to flick her into life.

With a cough and a splutter, the propeller starts to rotate. The men still crank. The smoke from the plane’s engine belches out and is whisked away on the wind. The propeller is a spinning blur, just the paint on its tips visible, a yellow circle. Tugger and Danny can finally stop. They jump down on to the deck. Tugger runs around the wing to the rudder. Danny does the same on the other side. They lie on the struts beneath the tail fin, holding the plane steady as Charlie does his final checks. The legs of their overalls ripple and flap in the slipstream. The engine warms up to a throaty roar. Tugger and Danny can feel she’s ready. They glance back at Charlie. Thumbs up. As one, they run to the wheels. The chocks are away. Charlie is free.

The deck stretches out in front of him. Beyond the deck, the sky and the ocean. The ship is head to wind, ready for take-off. The sound of wind and machine is thick in his ears now, and Mole’s voice, through the rubber Gosport tube that links them together. ‘Steer two six zero.’

‘Roger, two six zero.’

Charlie opens the throttle and the Swordfish answers with a growl. He checks the revs, the pressure, the temperature. He gives the thumbs-up to the flight deck crew, and they’re away, the world slipping past faster and faster, the wheels bumping. And then all is clear and smooth and they are dropping off the end of the ship and up, up into the sky.

‘Steer two one zero,’ says Mole in his ear.

‘Roger, two one zero,’ he replies.

Charlie has perfected his deck take-off, but every flight is like the first. The sky opens up before him as the ship disappears behind until it is a dot among the shifting waves. It is beautiful. Breathtaking. Nerve-wracking. Exhilarating. It is like nothing else in the world. The sea sparkles miles below. He fancies he sees the curve of the globe. He trusts his plane implicitly, as he trusts Mac and the Kid, Tugger and Danny, almost more than he trusts himself.

Mole starts to hum some ditty down the tube, Charlie catching parts of the tune before they are snatched away on the slipstream. The observer is always singing as he scratches away with his pencils and compass on the charts. Charlie has no idea how he manages to balance the boards and the rubbers and all the other paraphernalia, since he isn’t really sitting down at all. It is only Charlie who gets a proper seat. The others perch on nothing more than a cross bar.

It is an hour’s flight to the merchant ship. Nothing to do but enjoy it. He uncricks his neck, rolls his shoulders to loosen them up as much as he can in the cramped seat. The sky is a patchwork of dark and light. Visibility is good. The sun breaks out, and Charlie could be four years old again – on his first flight: there’s the same roar of the wind, the rumble of the plane – and him, weightless, soaring into the endless sky, his father behind him, beaming with pride, his mother’s face receding way, way below, creased with worry. His thoughts drift to the girl he met on the train. Olivia. Perhaps he could bring her up here one day. She is the kind of girl his mother would have approved of. Or at least, he thinks she is. He remembers his mother talking about families, and how she hoped that one day he would meet the right person, like she had. She had laughed, imagining herself as a grandmother. In his memory, they are stretched out on a picnic rug on the beach. His father must have been swimming in the sea. The air is warm, and he is lying looking up at her, and she is stroking his head, her curly hair a hazy halo of gold around her smiling face. He is not sure whether the memory is true or false. It feels real, but he must have been only five or six. The year before they both died.

Mole has stopped humming. ‘Dead ahead.’ The words bring Charlie back to the present. As usual, the observer’s calculations are spot on, and already they are closing in on the merchant ship. Charlie pushes all thoughts from his mind. The world shrinks. As they approach, one of the Skuas flies past them, back towards the carrier. ‘Must be low on fuel,’ Mole yells down his ear. Charlie nods, concentrating. Ahead, he sees another Skua wheel around like an angry seabird. He sees the tiny bombs fall and the plumes of smoke and spray as shrapnel bursts from the sea where they land. It swoops in low – too low – next to the ship. As the mess clears, he can see that the plane is in trouble: smoke trails from its nose. Damaged by its own bomb, it splashes into the sea.

‘Bugger,’ says Charlie. ‘Where’s that U-boat?’ All he can see is the merchant ship, a long and low smudge on the sea, her drab sides a dusky contrast to the red ensign that flutters at her stern. She is hove to, rocking in the waves.

‘Must have dived,’ says Mole.

Charlie loops around the merchant ship. He needs to assess the situation as quickly as he can. It looks as though some of the crew are still on the ship. But the ship’s lifeboats are in the water – and full of crew waving at them frantically. There is a lot of debris around them, some of it from the plane that just crashed. But another plane is missing. Did that go down too? There are two yellow life jackets – the missing airmen? – swimming towards the merchant ship; a third bobs inertly on the waves. Charlie has swung the plane right back out to sea. He works the port rudder and they turn towards the ship again. They must be eight hundred yards away when, ‘There! There!’ Mole suddenly yells.

The submarine is rising. Its conning tower and gun break the surface first as water cascades off its back. Charlie’s heart thumps. This is not a dummy run with pretend bombs. It’s the real thing. He swallows. His mouth is suddenly dry. Time moves slowly. Second by second. His thoughts are clear as a reflection in a puddle on a still day.

It’s all in the timing. He drops the plane lower over the water. Closer and closer. The submarine lies alongside the merchant ship, sleek and black. Wait, wait. Wait. Now! Charlie presses the button, and, as they pass over, the Kid starts to fire, clack-clack-clack, manoeuvring the gun into position. There is a thud that resonates in their chests as the bomb Charlie released explodes, and spray spatters the back of the plane.

Mole cranes his neck to see behind. ‘Good shot, boyo,’ he shouts. ‘It’s dived again. Won’t go far. It’s Germans on the ship. Five of them. Must have boarded before we got here.’ Charlie knows the Germans will take whatever provisions and information – and British – they can and then scuttle the ship with their torpedoes.

He circles again. He can see the life jackets have reached the ship and are being hauled out of the water. The third life jacket still bobs near to where he first spotted it. The Kid keeps his finger on the trigger as he swings the gun back and forth, always ready. Sure enough, the U-boat resurfaces. Charlie goes in for the attack. This is their last bomb. He needs to make it count. Five hundred yards. His hand is on the button. ‘Steady, boy,’ says Mole. Four hundred yards. Three hundred. He presses the button. The charge dislodges from its bracket. Another thud resonates through their bodies and seawater spurts into the air as the bomb explodes. They can’t see anything through the smoke and the froth.

‘Spot on!’ says Mole.

‘Thanks for the shower,’ says the Kid.

‘You were beginning to smell.’

‘That’s it. We’re all out,’ says Charlie.

The sub is on the surface again. The German crew are scrambling to get off the captured ship and back to their submarine. There is a kerfuffle, and the British airmen leap off the ship and into the water, yellow blobs in the dark sea.

The Kid yells from behind, ‘Take us in closer, Charlie. Let me have a go.’ But Charlie doesn’t dare. It’s a mess down there. The submarine is trying to pick up her German crew, who in turn are trying to grab the British men from the water. Training doesn’t prepare you for this.

Mole is in his ear. ‘Here comes back-up, boyo.’

Frank and Paddy are here at last. But too late: the greedy shark has swallowed its German crew and its British prize. Charlie is relieved that he doesn’t have any more bombs to drop. He doesn’t want to make that decision. Frank and Paddy go in for the kill. But the submarine sinks back into the ocean with its catch. As a final goodbye it sends its own torpedo to take out the merchant ship. Charlie spots the track of the missile under the water but there is nothing he can do. The merchant ship flinches, spewing black smoke up into the air. Her back is broken, and, as dark clouds cascade into the sky, she too sinks deep into the sea.

It is as if she were never there.

Mole doesn’t sing on the way back to the carrier. There is just the sound of the air rushing past, and the hum and rattle of their aeroplane. Charlie has kept his crew and his plane safe, but seeing a ship die leaves a bitter taste in their mouths. He tries not to dwell on the captured airmen, men whose hands he grasped only moments ago on the flight deck, who will either never wake again, or find themselves in an enemy camp.