Mosquito Squadron by Robert Jackson Read Free Book Online Page B

Mosquitos. I repeat, watch out for Mosquitos!’
    In God’s name, he swore, why hadn’t the controllers woken up to what was happening? The speed of the targets should have alerted them. Those bloody infernal Mosquitos! There would be no more than a dozen of them, dashing across the north German coast at widely-spaced intervals, dropping their tinfoil bundles and creating as much confusion as possible.
    Shooting down a Mosquito was a rare achievement, even in daylight, and by night Richter knew that it would be virtually impossible, with no radar aids to guide him to a likely target. It took him only a split second to reach a decision. Pressing the transmit button again, he called:
    ‘All Elbe aircraft, this is Elbe One. Return to base. I repeat, return to base.’
    Swinging the Messerschmitt round fiercely, he pointed its nose down through the cloud and set course for the airfield. Visual navigation was not easy, for the blackout was complete and waterways showed up only faintly in the featureless dark, but when he judged that he was close to home he radioed the aerodrome controller and told him to light the flarepath. He picked it out moments later, a tiny cluster of pearls in the blackness ahead and slightly off to the left.
    Richter touched down, followed by other fighters at short intervals, and taxied towards the flight hut, switching off his engine. Flight Sergeant Handke came running out and the pilot issued rapid orders, telling him to have the aircrafts’ fuel tanks topped up immediately. Then Richter sprinted into the hut and rang the duty controller, cutting short the beginning of a protest about the squadron’s early return to base.
    ‘To hell with that! You’ve got fighters stooging around up there, chasing a few blasted Mosquitos. Damn it, man, can’t you see what the Tommies are up to? There’s an attack on the way in, and they’ve timed it so that most of our aircraft will be on the ground refuelling when they arrive. For God’s sake, get somebody to recall them, now! Otherwise it’ll be too late.’
    For most of them, it was. During the next hour, several more Mosquitos sped over German territory keeping the defences in a state of constant alert. Richter, and one or two other enterprising squadron commanders, kept their units on the ground, but many more fighters took off in a fruitless search for the elusive British intruders.
    When the heavy bombers finally did come, there were more than two hundred of them, and their target was the important railway marshalling yards at Hamm. The bombers crossed the Dutch coast near the island of Ameland and then made a long feint into Germany, penetrating deeply in the direction of Bielefeld before swinging south-westwards towards their real target.
    Richter, who had held his fighters on the ground until the very last moment and then once again assembled them over beacon ‘Erica’, made contact with the head of the bomber stream near the little town of Warendorf. It was pure luck that brought him to a target. Circling blindly into the darkness, a few thousand feet above the cloud layer, he suddenly sighted a broad pool of diffused light a few miles to the north and realized that he was looking at a cone of searchlights, shining on the cloud base, He headed for the spot at full throttle, and as he approached he saw flak start to come up, bursting in orange pricks of light just above the cloud. Then he saw something else: a dull red spot, crawling slowly across the sky a little to one side of the flak concentration.
    Puzzled, he steered towards it, losing a few hundred feet of height until he was below the level of the curious object and skipping just above the cloud tops.
    Whatever the thing was, he was overhauling it rapidly. It seemed to float towards him and he throttled back slightly. It appeared to be stationary now, which indicated that he was astern of it, and he kept pace with it for half a minute, striving to identify it.
    Then, cursing himself for a