Piece of Cake by Derek Robinson Page B

arguing,” Flip said.
    Fanny looked at his watch. Thirteen minutes to takeoff, and the locker room was miles away. He forced himself to be calm. “Listen,” he said. “Two things. First: if there’s any kind of flap while we’re up,
any
kind, I want to know about it straight away, which means you get on the R/T and tell me. Understood?”
    â€œEven a thick Irishman can understand what that means.”
    Fanny felt the sting of sarcasm. “Good. Secondly, I want to know what you were up to with those Polish-language papers. Why the hell did you hide them behind the bar?”
    â€œHide? I hid nothing. The stuff was left lying all over the mess, so I gathered it up for safe keeping.”
    â€œToo damn safe. We couldn’t find it.”
    â€œI don’t know why that should be. Everyone saw me give it to the barman.”
    Fanny opened his mouth to say
Then why
… But he knew the answer, and looking at Moran he knew that
he
knew it too. Which meant that everyone knew. “A” flight had made an ass of him. He was their squadron commander and they were treating him like some doddering old school-teacher. Jesus Christ Almighty, there was a war on! Did they want to start another?
    He turned and walked out of the building, fast. An airman was cycling by. He ordered him off the bicycle, took it and pedaled hard, past the admin block, past the mess, past the stores and the sickbay and the camp cinema, to the huts where the pilots had their locker room. Hurricanes were roaring in the dispersal bays; some were beginning to taxi out. He dropped the bicycle and ran inside. The room was empty. He unbuttoned his tunic with one hand while he rummaged in his locker for a long white sweater. His tunic opened and a bundle of papers splashed to the floor: the Polish test answers. Fanny swore, scrambled them together and was stuffing them into the locker when he noticed something odd about the top sheet. He pulled it out. Every question had been answered with the same short phrase: BALLS TO YOU. Nothing else. BALLS TO YOU, forty times over. He looked for the name at the top. Mickey Mouse.
    Fanny pulled out the next sheet. Another Mickey Mouse had written UP YOUR KILT! forty times. He checked the next. Mickey Mouse again: ARSENAL 3, BLACKPOOL I, was theanswer to everything. Another sheet, same name.
I must not pick my nose in class,
it said, over and over. Only Mother Cox had signed his name and made an attempt to do the test, and most of his answers were blank.
    Fanny’s hands trembled as he shoved the papers into his locker. There was a heavy stiffness deep in his gut, as if he had swallowed a stone. He knew that this sort of thing could not go on. There had to be a showdown, and soon. One part of him demanded it. Another part dreaded it.
    The light at twelve thousand feet was like watered whiskey. “A” flight had climbed through layer after layer of cloud spreading in from the North Sea: ragged, mucky-looking stuff, torn with holes. The last lot lay spread below them now, like all the world’s dirty laundry, and the next layer hung gloomily a couple of hundred feet above. Fanny Barton studied it, calculated that the sunlight was too far away to be worth reaching, and decided to stay here, in this cramped and cheerless stretch of air. Training would be more difficult here, and that suited his frame of mind very well.
    He put the flight into sections astern, increased speed to just over 250, and warmed them up with a sort of giant slalom, diving and climbing in a snaking series of S-bends. For five minutes he threw the flight about as severely and as unpredictably as he could, seeking to shake the wingmen loose. The formation stretched under the strain but it never broke. Finally, when his legs were beginning to ache and his lungs to gasp, he called for a loop. It carried the flight, inverted, up in to the belly of the top cloud; and as they curved down out of it he saw, with a