The Romanov succession

In his imagination he could see the Spitfires and Messerschmitts in the twilight wheeling among the barrage blimps; the Heinkels in ponderous formation lining up for London and the Hawks and Spitfires trying to get at them before they could drop their sticks of bombs through the swaying beams of the searchlights.

There was a break in the static and Johnson said, “Sorry, I’ve got to change the frequency and get landing instructions.”

Spaight said, “You’ve got to hand it to those bastards.”

They were dropping across the mountains of Scotland in slowly fading twilight; the hillsides were indeterminate, dark and heavy. The B-17 thundered lower between the ranges and finally he saw the lights of the runway through the perspex. The bomber descended toward them like a climber on a sliding rope.

The runway was rough; the plane bounced and pitched along the center stripe between the cannister lights. A small van came shooting onto the gravel and curved in to intercept, running fast down the edge of the runway with a big FOLLOW ME sign across its rear doors, Turning on its tail wheel the bomber went along slowly after the van, unwieldy and awkward on the ground. Pappy Johnson was complaining into his radio: “This runway’s got a surface like a goddamn waffle. This Jesus shit airfield wouldn’t get certification from the civil air board of the corruptest county in Mississippi!”

The FOLLOW ME van circled to indicate their parking place and Johnson cut the engines. It was dusk now and the tower was carping in a crisp Scottish voice: “Let’s get the rest of the wee birds down now, lads-we want to switch off these lights, don’t we now.”

He inched painfully to the hatch and lowered himself by his arms. The leg had gone very stiff. Ground crewmen climbed into the bomber and Pappy Johnson stopped by the running board of the van to look back at it the way he might have looked at a woman.

The driver gave a palm-out salute. He saw to their seating and drove them down the gravel strip and decanted them beside a wooden hangar, and sped away to meet the next plane.

Felix was there with his compact movie-actorish looks and his readiness to laugh or spill tears or burst into rages; he emerged from the hangar in an immaculate white uniform his tailor must have worked around the clock to build.

Alex saluted him. It made Felix grin like a schoolboy. “Welcome to the toy shop, Alex.”

“Where’s our headquarters?”

Felix indicated the decrepit hangar behind him. “Right here, I’m afraid. Well then come in, all of you. My God that’s a big ugly monster of an aircraft.” He turned around with a casual wave that drew them all inside and walked through a small door cut into the hangar’s great sliding gate. Over his shoulder he added, “I’ve got Sergei off in search of billets for you and your friends.”

Alex suppressed a smile. Felix was playing the game to the hilt: he’d already taken over. They’d given him a new role-leader of men-and it looked as if it was the role Prince Felix had been waiting for all his life.

2

Black felt curtains overhung the hangar’s few small windows; the high naked lighting within was harsh even though the building was so huge that the farther corners were in shadow. “It used to be a service shop for aircraft on North Sea rescue patrol,” Felix told them. “They’ve moved most of that over to Scapa Flow now. It’s obsolete and cobwebby but it’s ours.”

The room wasn’t far short of an acre in dimension. Vertical steel supports sprouted from the cracked concrete floor here and there; the ceiling was a skeleton of metal and the roof above it was an arched tunnel of corrugated steel gone rusty in patches so that it looked like camouflage paint. Without the clutter of aircraft for which it had been designed the floor space looked infinite; the scale was intimidating, it dwarfed them all.

In the front corner a plywood partition seven feet high marked off an office that might have been used by the maintenance director at one time; it had an open doorway and Alex could see the end of a desk within. The remainder of the huge room was undivided except by the eight steel pillars-two-foot-square I-beams, the sort they built bridges out of.

It had been Vassily Devenko who’d obtained the use of it and he must have done a good deal of very fast talking because even if they’d intended to abandon the building they’d have wanted to demolish it for scrap.

Along the south wall under the blackout-draped windows were stacked dozens of wooden crates with consignment bills-of-lading taped to them. Two men in English uniforms with slung rifles stood sleepily near the door; they were not Englishmen, they were White Russians; Alex recognized them both from Finland. When they saw his face they both stiffened almost imperceptibly-the gesture of coming to attention; he nodded to them both as he went by them.

He made introductions; he said to Pappy Johnson, “Prince Felix is the man you’re going to train to drop the lump of sugar into the cup of coffee. He’s our lead pilot.”