Once More the Hawks Read Free Page B

You’d better disappear while you can.’
    ‘What about you, Knägges? What will you do?’
    Udet frowned. ‘There’s a lot to do,’ he said. ‘Too much for old Knägges.’ His frown deepened. ‘Dicken, tell your people that all our dive bomber units have been re-equipped with Stukas. They’re rugged aircraft. They’re accurate and can pinpoint their targets. We have a lot of them and they’ll be difficult to stop because their crews learned their job in the Spanish Civil War. They come down like a cartload of bricks. Wie ein Klavier aus dem fünfsten Stock . Like a piano falling from a fifth-floor window. What have you got?’
    Not much, Dicken thought. The heavy bombers the RAF was banking on weren’t yet ready and so far there wasn’t much else. Even the Cooper bombs that were still being used might as well have been made by the Dundee marmalade factory of the same name for all the use they were. Since their puff went upwards, they were more danger to the crew which dropped them than to their intended victim.
    ‘Oh, we’ve got a few,’ he said.
    ‘Hawker Harts?’
    Dicken gave the German a quick look. Nazi intelligence was known to be good and it was true that up to February that year dive bomber training was still being carried out in the old adapted biplanes. They could achieve good groupings but the pilots had to cheat by going as low as they dared, a habit that might exact a nasty penalty under war conditions.
    Another cable arrived later that evening, indicating that ‘Mother’s health’ was failing rapidly, but when they drove out to Tempelhof the following morning they found it impossible to unearth anyone who could give the authority to let them leave, while the officials they approached were noticeably hostile.
    ‘The VIP treatment’s beginning to wear a bit thin,’ Babington commented.
    Would anybody miss him if he didn’t make it, Dicken wondered. There was no one dependent on him, no one who would be concerned if he failed to appear.
    As he thought about his dead wife, he frowned. His had never been an easy marriage, because Zoë Toshack, as she had always preferred to call herself rather than use her married name, had been an airwoman very nearly in the same class as Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson. Nearly, but never quite, and her last desperate attempt to reach the ranks of the immortals had been her undoing. Dicken had learned of her death while in India. As if it were a token of atonement for the years of misery she had caused him, with the exception of the house at Deane in Sussex where she had been born, she had left him all her wealth. He still hadn’t managed to touch it.
    As he thought of his wife, he began to wonder what had happened to Marie-Gabrielle Aubrey. He had met her first in Italy in 1918 when she was nine years old and childishly eager to marry him. At the time he had thought he was in love with her older sister, but the sister had married an American and Marie-Gabrielle, turning up in Rezhanistan where Dicken had been sent to organise the evacuation of a besieged Legation staff, had coolly informed him that she still hoped to marry him. Because he was still married to Zoë Toshack, he hadn’t even thought seriously about her suggestion, though he’d not been unaware of her beauty, intelligence and courage. After the siege he’d discovered that the wife who didn’t want him was dead and that the girl who did had vanished, and he had never since been able to track her down.
    He tried to brush the thoughts away but they refused to go. He still had a house which he had acquired for Zoë at Lensbury near Northolt. They had lived in it together for a matter of weeks only, then, while he had gone to Iraq, Zoë had disappeared to the States. They had never occupied it again, meeting only in hotels while the house was let to Service couples forced to live the usual gypsy life in other people’s houses, the husband always disappearing to the ends of the earth while his