No Life of Their Own And Other Stories

A Hero Must Not Die

Even as he started his dive, Flying Officer Fred Douglas felt no apprehension. Everything, he was sure, was in control. But just to be sure he shoved the Spit’s nose down and rammed the throttle up the rack.

Less than two thousand feet below, his brother, Bob Douglas, was screaming down toward the Dover cliffs, with a Messerschmitt howling on his tail.

But climbing up the sky, straight toward the diving pair, his guns hammering steel into the underside of a second Messerschmitt, was Flight Lieutenant Richard Grant.

Fred Douglas watched his air speed indicator crowd the pin as the plane settled into the downward plunge, but even then he knew there’d be no need of hm. All Grant had to do was to kick right rudder and blast the diving Jerry with his guns.

The three of them worked like a team, the two brothers and the flight lieutenant. One of them occasionally got into a jam, as Bob had now, but whenever that happened one of the others was always there with flaming guns.

Bob had saved Grant’s life twice, once at Dunkerque when a Jerry got on his tail, again at Calais when three M.E.’s ganged him. Today Grant would get Bob out of a jam. And probably tomorrow Grant himself would be in a tight spot, with one of the others hurtling in to help him.

Only once had any of them failed the other. That had been the time Grant was shot down in France. But it had worked out all right, after all, for a week later a destroyer picked the flight leader up, out in the channel, trying to row a stolen boat to England.

The Merlin was a shriek of whistling sound and Fred Douglas saw he was gaining on the Messerschmitt, but knew he’d be too late to get in on the kill. It was just that he wanted to be sure … wanted to be there if anything went wrong, if he might be needed.

Within split seconds Grant would kick the rudder and the diving Nazi would slam head-on into a spate of steel.

Bob’s ship flashed past Grant’s plane and now the way was clear for the flight lieutenant.

“Take him, Grant!” Fred shrieked into the flap mike, but the flight leader’s ship did not deviate from course. The Brownings spat, but not at the diving Nazi. They still were trained on the second Messerschmitt which even then was beginning to wobble.

Cold terror gripped Fred Douglas’ throat as he realized Grant was not going to intervene, that he was more intent upon making sure of that second M.E. than he was of aiding Bob.

And in that second of terror, the diving Jerry was past the flight leader’s ship and Fred Douglas knew the job was up to him, knew there was little chance of his getting there in time.

His hand leaped to the emergency boost and jerked out the knob. Responding, the Merlin’s howl rose to a piercing scream and the bottom seemed to drop out of the sky as the British fighter literally hurled itself upon the Messerschmitt.

Finger hovering over the electric firing button, Douglas bent to the ring sight, had the Nazi centered in it … but the range was still too long, although the Spitfire was eating up the sky.

The blue smoke of burning cordite whipped back from the Messerschmitt and bits of tattered metal leaped from Bob’s Spitfire. More metal flew at another burst and then a wing slowly crumpled.

Fingers of steel were gripping Douglas’ throat and through his mind spun a string of pictures from the past. Pictures of him and Bob. Fishing on the old creek … their first long pants … their first party … the old car they had bought and patched up so it would run … the Christmases at home …

Bob’s Spitfire was beginning to slideslip and Fred shrieked at it.

“Jump, Bob! Get out of there!”

But no figure hurtled from the crippled ship. Blue smoke still streamed from the Jerry’s guns. The Merlin sang its song of hate … and the Brownings waited.

Then Douglas squeezed the firing button, but even as he did he saw a gout of flame leap out of the sky, saw his brother’s Spitfire streaking for the channel, a blazing funeral pyre.

For a single instant his brain went red with grief and anger and black with terrible hate. His finger tightened on the firing button, almost as if he could squeeze more rounds per second out of the yammering guns.

Bits of metal were flying once again, but this time German metal. Bullets from the eight Brownings literally were chewing the Messerschmitt to bits … slicing off the metal skin, slamming into the fuselage, smashing into the cockpit, ripping at the engine.

And still Douglas held the button on, curses in his throat, red vengeance flaring in his brain.

One of the Jerry’s wings was going now, folding up, hammered apart by the savagery of the Brownings. That bouncing thing in the cockpit was the Nazi pilot, rocked by the impact of the bullets spewing from the Spitfire’s guns.

Suddenly the Messerschmitt was tumbling crazily, black smoke pouring from the cowling. The Brownings ran empty. Far below a second thinning trail of smoke drifted in the air.

Douglas eased back on the stick hauling the Spitfire out of its dive. Suddenly, now that the action was over, his body felt limp and beaten and his mind was sick … sick with the realization that Bob was gone. Dead in a flaming ship over the English channel. Dead because Flight Lieutenant Richard Grant had failed his unwritten pact. All he had to do was kick the rudder and slam home the firing button. Had he done that, Bob would have gone on living.

There could be no question that Grant had seen Bob and the pursuing Nazi. If there only could be … but there wasn’t. The hard truth remained that Grant had failed his trust, had failed to aid the man who twice had saved his life.

Douglas edged the Spitfire upward. There were other Jerries up there. Jerries to be killed. Jerries to help wipe clean the score. But even as he put the ship into a climb he remembered the ammo-belts were empty.

He leveled off, swinging the ship around for home. And just then a storm of steel struck as a lurking Messerschmitt pounced upon him. In one fractional bit of time the instruments were gone as if some giant hand had smashed them. Oil sprayed into the cockpit, covering his goggles, blinding him. The Merlin stuttered and coughed and the ship slid-slipped dangerously.

Above him the Messerschmitt howled in mockery and then a silence swept upon him as the Merlin choked and died.

Instinctively, Douglas tried to roll the ship over on its back. That was the easiest way, the only practical way, to bail out of a fighter. But there was no response to the controls.

Smoke rolled from the cowling and from outside came the high, thin whistle of the atmosphere against the plunging ship.

Desperately, Douglas fought the controls. They were hopelessly jammed. For a moment panic assailed him, a panic born of the whistling shriek that told him he was dashing to his death.

Dense smoke streamed over the hatch, cutting off his vision. Some of it curled back through the broken instrument board and stung his eyes and nose. He heard the crunch of glass as his foot crushed the goggles where he had brushed them on the floor.

Flame surged back from the dead engine and bit into his flesh. The Spitfire began to spin. Furiously Douglas fought back the hatch, clawed savagely to get clear of the plane. Streamers of flame whipped at him and the lurching spin hurled him back into the pit.

Fire lashed back fiercely and the smoke turned the sunlight into night. Athrob with pain, blinded, with all sense of time and direction lost, Douglas scrambled desperately, trying to get through the hatch. The plane lurched suddenly and he was free … free and falling. Seared fingers found the parachute ring and jerked. He wondered dimly if the fire might not have damaged the straps, but a moment later the silk caught hold and he was dangling, floating down.

For the first time, he realized he couldn’t see. His eyes seemed to be puffed shut. His hands and face were flaming balls of fire and when he tried to talk, he couldn’t, for his lips were wrong and his throat was too dry to work.

Three months later the hospital released him as cured and perhaps the hospital knew what it was about. His hands no longer were clenched talons, held in closed-fist positions by seared muscle and flesh. His face was whole again except for a few scars that in time would disappear.

But hands and face weren’t all there was to it, Douglas thought, brooding in a corner of the mess over a double brandy. Three were other things the doctors couldn’t know about. For instance, the things that happened to a man’s brain when he has seen his brother shot down in flames, when he himself is trapped in a blazing plane.

He hadn’t slowed up. He was still bringing down the Jerries. He was still, he knew, as good a pilot as ever. But the doubt that he was as good a fighter as ever was creeping in upon him. The old dash and daring was gone. He no longer took those chances he had taken in the old days. Now he found himself fighting a grim and cautious fight, efficient and calculating … but cautious. Someday that caution would be the end of him. Someday when he needed to take a chance, he wouldn’t take it …

They talked about him a little, he suspected, when he wasn’t about when he was out of hearing.

The door to the briefing room swung open and Flight Lieutenant Grant came in.

“Hi, Grant,” yelled one of them, “come over and have one.”

“Who was that cutie you had last night?” yelled another.

“You chaps are off the beam,” said Grant. “I was in quarters last night.”

“You mean you weren’t down to London?”

“That,” Grant said, “is exactly what I mean.”

Douglas grimaced. Grant was popular. Fifty-three Jerries to his credit … probably the actual toll was even greater, for that was only the official score. The younger men, especially, looked up to him. He was an old-timer, an ace, one of those deadly fighting men who lived a charmed life.

Douglas wiped the scene at the bar from his mind, stared into the brandy glass, his memory leaping back to the day above the channel, the day Bob’s machine streaked for the cliffs of Dover. Again he felt his own ship diving, felt the terror rising in him, was reaching for the emergency boost …

Boots tramped across the floor and Douglas looked up. Grant, glass in hand, stood before him.

“I want to talk to you, Douglas,” he said.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” Douglas replied, quietly. “I have to talk to you up in the air. That’s quite enough.”

Grant flushed but held his ground. “We once were friends.”

“We aren’t any more,” Douglas stated flatly.

“You’re eating out your heart,” Grant told him. “You have to break it up.”

“Is that as fight leader?” asked Douglas. “Afraid I’m endangering someone else? Hinting my flying’s not so good?”

“Lord, no,” said Grant. “It’s merely as a friend. I hate to watch what’s happening to you.”

“In that case,” Douglas declared, “you’re concerning yourself with something that’s none of your damn business.”

Grant turned, but Douglas halted him.

“Did I hear you say you were in quarters last night?”

“Why, yes,” said Grant, “perhaps you did.”

Douglas said nothing.

“Why do you ask?”

“Impulse,” Douglas explained. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have. You see, I knew you weren’t.”

“Just why do you hate me?” Grant demanded. “I know the general reasons, of course, although I don’t agree with them. But what is the basic reason?”

“You worked too hard at your career,” said Douglas. “You thought too much about piling up the score. You were so busy getting that … twenty-eight, wasn’t it? … Jerry, that you couldn’t help a friend.”

“I explained about that,” protested Grant.

“You forget I saw it,” Douglas snapped.

“Look, Douglas, I like you … in spite of all you say, the way you act. I asked that you be reassigned to the flight.”

“Anytime you care to ask that I be reassigned again,” said Douglas, “it’ll be agreeable.”

The fields of Holland were green and gold, with little canal ribbons running through them. The sweep was almost over and the R.A.F. was flying home again, leaving behind a trail of blasted ruin.

Douglas settled comfortably down to the job of piloting the Hurricane across the channel and back to base. There had been little excitement. With the Jerries busy in Russia, there was seldom much excitement these days.

Grant flew ahead and to his right was Shorty Cave. Above and behind roared the other flights that had made the sweep.

Douglas’ earphones barked a single word. “Tallyhoo!” Grant’s voice.

Douglas started, the shout jerking him to swift attention.

Diving at them, straight out of the sun, were the roaring shapes of M.E. 110’s. How many there were, Douglas could not be sure, for there was no time to count. The Jerries had been waiting for them, lurking high up in the blue. Now they were shrieking down for a hit and run attack.

Douglas hauled back the stick, threw his ship into a climb. A black shape flickered across his line of vision and he pressed the firing button, but the Nazi was going too fast and the tracer missed. It had, at the best, been a snap shot.

Guns were hammering now as the Nazi planes slashed into the British formation. Smoke bloomed out in the sky and a ship was screaming down.

A Messerschmitt dived at him and Douglas swung his Hurricane over in a tight loop. The tracer caught his wing tip and then the Nazi was past. A second later, loop completed, Douglas was on his tail.

The M.E. was trying to pull out of the dive and Douglas found his brain clicking coolly, calculating … like a man sitting at a chess board, planning his attack many moves ahead.

That was the thing that terrified him at times when he sat with his brandy back at base. A smart way to fight, perhaps, but someday it would get him in a jam. No more recklessness, no more fire, no more enthusiasm. Just a grim playing of something that added up to no more than a deadly game.

He hauled back the stick deliberately to match the Messerschmitt’s maneuver. The Jerry came into the ring sight, started to cross it, pulling out of the dive. Bullets slashed into the wing of the Hurricane as the Nazi rear gunner got his weapon into action.

Then the Messerschmitt hatch was in sight and Douglas opened with his guns. A short burst … four seconds, no more, but enough to fill the cockpit and gunnery position with screaming steel.

The Messerschmitt wobbled and skipped, heeled over, side-slipped and fell. It was always like that, Douglas thought. Take no chances, hold the guns until the correct moment, then put the bullets where they counted.

But someday. Perhaps, someday …

He shivered as he hauled the Hurricane around, sent it zooming into the blue. There were no more Messerschmitts in sight. The Hurricanes and Blenheims were reforming.

It had, Douglas told himself, been another typical Nazi hit-and-run affair, with the Jerries diving, hoping to gain by the element of surprise, and then streaking away before the British fighters could get in their licks.

He tilted the ship and looked over the side and as he did his heart skipped a beat. Far below a Hurricane was gliding down to earth, engine apparently dead, for Douglas could not see the slow swirl of the prop gleaming in the sun.

No parachute. That meant the pilot was taking a chance on riding the crippled ship to earth. Faster that way … if you lived. More time to get into hiding before a Nazi patrol swooped down.

A new sound came … the sound of a diving ship. Douglas stared upward, saw the Messerschmitt storming down the sky … straight at the gliding Hurricane. A vulture swooping on a wounded helpless victim.

With a curse of rage, Douglas slid his ship around on its wing, started a plunge that would intercept the diving M.E.

He half expected the Nazi to veer off and try to make a getaway, but the ship came on.

Once again his brain was clicking … like well-oiled wheels functioning mechanically. Figuring out the angle of attack, trying to anticipate what the Messerschmitt pilot would do, keeping the Hurricane aimed at that hypothetical sector of space where it would intercept the Jerry.

Like avenging meteors, the two machines bellowed down the sky, overhauling the gliding Hurricane.

Once the Jerry sees I’m going to block his play, the brain was clicking, he’ll pull out and try to get me from above. So the thing to do is to anticipate him.

Douglas sucked in his breath, watched with narrowed eyes, measuring the distance, hand clutching the stick.

The Messerschmitt suddenly snapped upward and as it did, Douglas shoved the throttle to the last notch. With mere yards to spare, he sent the Hurricane hurtling under the belly of the Messerschmitt, jerked back the stick, drove his machine into a sharp climb. The Merlin screamed in rage, swishing the ship around in a tight loop. For a sickening second, the plane hung upside down and in that instant, the upward roaring Jerry climbed into the ring sight. Douglas squeezed the button and ahead of him the Messerschmitt shuddered and stalled, swung over and headed for earth with smoke streaming from the motor.

With throttle full out, Douglas slanted his ship after the gliding Hurricane.

A voice was shouting in his earphones, a voice he recognized.

“Douglas, you damn fool, go back. Thanks for what you did, but you can’t do any more.”

“Grant, there’s a field down there,” Douglas yelled. “Mush her in. I’ll be right behind you. Then we’re getting out of here.”

“You’re mad,” Grant protested. “It can’t be done. Get back, I tell you. It’ll only mean the two of us instead of one. Go back. That’s an order.”

“To hell with orders. I’m coming after you. You’re going home with me. Lashed to a wing …” He laughed. “Not dignified. But what the hell. We can’t lose a man like you.”

Grant was raging now. “I’ll have you up for insubordination.”

Douglas chuckled savagely. “Insubordination for what? For stopping you from making another grandstand play? Like the time you did before. Coming home in a boat.”

Deliberately he reached out and jerked out the earphone plug.

Grant’s ship just cleared the trees at the edge of the field, was pancaking toward the meadow. It struck and bounced, bounced again, threatening to nose over, then rolled to a stop.

Douglas brought his Hurricane down in a smooth landing, taxied swiftly toward the other ship.

Quickly he reached up and hauled back the hatch, leaped nimbly to the wing and hopped to the ground.

“Stay where you are!” snapped a voice and as he wheeled he saw Grant standing at the end of the wing, a Webley in his hand.

“One move,” said the flight lieutenant, “and I will let you have it.”

Douglas stared, wide-eyed, not understanding.

“You’re crazy,” he gasped. “Put that damn thing up. You’re going back with me.”

Grant laughed … a vicious laugh.

“That’s where you’re mistaken, Douglas. I’m not going back and neither are you.”

“You aren’t serious, Grant.”

“Never more serious in my life, my British friend.”

Silence hung between them … an awkward silence.

“So,” Douglas said finally, “that is how it is.”

Grant nodded, tight-lipped. “Clever wasn’t it. And you English pigs never once suspected.”

“Clever,” said Douglas bitterly. “Yes, terribly clever. How many of your Nazi friends have you shot down? Over fifty, isn’t it?”

“If I hadn’t, someone else would have,” Grant declared. “And, after all, what are a few lives more or less? Those I shot down would have gone gladly to their death had they but known.”

He chuckled. “There’s something else … something for you to think about behind the barbed wire of your prison camp. When my mission here is over, I shall go back again. As I did before. And I shall be a great English hero …”

“You’ll go back to do it all over again?” asked Douglas calmly.

“That’s right,” replied Grant. “Over and over and the English will never know. For do I not shoot down the Nazis right and left?”

“That,” declared Douglas, “is about the lowest form of treachery I can think of.”

“Not treachery,” said Grant. “I am serving the fuehrer.”

The flight lieutenant motioned with the muzzle of his pistol.

“And now let us get going.”

In answer, Douglas stooped and hurled himself under the wing of the plane. Grant shouted and the Webley cracked, the bullet whining viciously as it ricocheted off the ship’s metal skin.

Rolling to get full protection of the wing, Douglas scrambled to his knees, hauling his Webley from the pocket of his flying togs. Another shot rang out and a bullet chugged into the ground not more than three feet from where he knelt.

Silence then … a long, terrifying silence. He could see nothing of Grant, not even his legs moving about. The man, he knew, must be stalking him. The short hairs rose at the nape of his neck, bristling with an atavistic fear.

If only he could see something … if only he could stand up and shoot it out! Anything but the sense of being trapped … of knowing that out there somewhere in the field a man was deliberately maneuvering himself into position to send a bullet through him.

Carefully he inched himself closer to the body of the plane, straining his eyes, listening intently. A mumbling roar came to his ears … the beating of a far-off motor.

So there he was, he told himself, hunkered beneath the plane, waiting for Grant to get into position … waiting until the one-time flight lieutenant could send a bullet through his brain. There wasn’t much, he admitted, that he could do about it. The meadow was flat as the top of a table. If he showed himself, Grant would see him and start shooting. For a moment he considered a swift break, an attempt to get back into the cockpit of the Hurricane and be off, but he rejected it almost as soon as he thought of it. He preferred waiting here, waiting for the break that might never come. His fist tightened on the Webley. If he could just locate Grant!

It had been foolish to have gotten himself into such a mess. It was not, he admitted to himself, all through a desire to save Grant from falling into German hands.

That, of course, had been the first impulse … to save a fellow flier from capture. Funny that such a thought should have come to him unquestioningly when he knew … and Grant knew … that he hated the flight lieutenant. Hated with good cause.

But even at that, in the face of Grant’s orders to turn back, he might have pulled off and continued on to England, had not the ludicrousness of bringing Grant home, lashed to the Hurricane’s wing, occurred to him. The idea of spiking another possible hero-stunt like crossing the channel in a stolen boat had been too much to resist.

Such a thing, he knew, was possible, although rather tough on the wing rider. But that would have been giving Grant something that would be good for him … something to deflate the ego of a career-fighter.

The mumbling roar he had heard was growing louder now … louder and closer … until he knew it was a plane, the deep-voiced thrumming of a Messerschmitt. And it was coming toward the field.

He waited, crouched, wondering. Now it was above the trees at the edge of the field … coming in at possibly no more than a hundred feet above the ground.

Suddenly guns snickered and their first burst was followed by a scream of terror.

Leaping from under the wing, Douglas stood in astonishment. Grant was racing for the trees on the other side of the field, yelling, waving his arms, while all about him little puffs of white dust were dancing in the sunlight. With a blast of thunder the plane roared over, not more than fifty feet above the Hurricane, guns bellowing.

Frozen in his tracks, Douglas watched the tableau out there in the field. For a moment it seemed as if time stood still while the scene was etched upon his brain … the running man, the puffs of dust as the bullets from the Messerschmitt sprayed the ground, the tall trees looking on, the short yellow grass baking in the sun.

Then time took up again and Grant was stumbling. Stumbling while the jets of dust still flickered all around. He struck the ground, rose to his knees and crawled, then fell again and did not rise.

The Messerschmitt, with what seemed a scream of triumph, climbed over the edge of trees and howled into the sky. Circling, it swung back and roared toward the field again. Douglas quickly ducked out of sight as it skimmed over, riding on one wing, so the pilot could survey the squatting Hurricanes.

Probably, Douglas told himself, the Nazi was looking for him, for the other British pilot. For that was what Grant must have seemed … no more than a stranded Britisher … an enemy who was fair game. The man in the Messerschmitt could not possibly have known who Grant was. And after all, it added up to a sort of grim retribution. Grant, who had killed scores of his countrymen in the skies of England and along the coast, had been the quarry of his compatriot.

Douglas waited until the drone of the Messerschmitt had faded away, then ran across the field.

Grant, he saw, was dead, face downward, hands clutching at the yellow grass. Swiftly his hands felt through the pockets, found a small notebook and a sheaf of papers.

Squatting there, he leafed hurriedly through his find. The book, he saw, was filled with notes … closely written notes. What had seemed to a sheaf of papers was a map.

He whistled softly as he unfolded it. A map of the British Isles, showing hundreds of R.A.F. stations, a plain sign guide for an attempt to knock out the British air arm.

Studying it, he shuddered as he realized what such a map, in German hands, would mean. With that map, the Luftwaffe could deal a terrible blow to the R.A.F. That far-flung system of small bases, decentralizing the nation’s aerial forces, was it best insurance against a death smash by the Nazi fleet. Without the map it would take Goering’s tribe half a hundred years to hunt out and destroy, one by one, all those bases.

But with the map …

Douglas jerked his head up sharply. The Messerschmitt was coming back again!

The mutter rose into a hum and the hum became a roar. Stuffing the map into his pocket, Douglas sprinted for the Hurricane. Let that Messerschmitt catch him in the open and there’d be two dead men lying in the field.

Breath whistling in his throat, heart pounding furiously, he made the plane, scrambled into the cockpit and slammed the throttle up the rack. The idling prop swelled into a swirl of noise and power. The ship leaped forward and Douglas hauled back viciously on the stick.

The M.E.’s motors were a yell of hate behind him even as he cleared the treetops. He hunched his shoulders, expecting a hail of steel, almost feeling the breath of the Jerry’s guns upon him.

The guns whipped out … too late. He felt the thud of bullets smack into his ship, but he was in a steep climb now, moving out of range. Grimly he held the Hurricane’s nose almost straight up, watching the altimeter climb. Below him, he knew, the Messerschmitt must be climbing to get him. He snapped one quick look over the side, saw the Nazi ship off to his right. Giving the Hurricane the last notch on the rack, he looped and dived. With a wild yell of exultation, he snapped the ship straight at the Messerschmitt.

His finger touched the firing button and the Brownings yapped. Metal flew in showers from one of the M.E.’s wings. Trees were rushing up at him and he yanked the stick. The Hurricane groaned and whipped around just above the branches.

A storm of tracers slapped into the fuselage and he laughed wildly as he looped again and came down upon the Jerry.

There was no miss this time … no futile chewing of wings. He saw splintered glass flying as the Brownings raked the cockpit of the ship below him.

It wasn’t until he was far above the field and headed west that he realized his brain had failed to tick. There had been no calculation, no aversion to taking chances, no grimness. It was like the old days when he and Bob and Grant had battled at Dunkerque. He had fought by pure instinct alone, had downed his plane almost in the treetops.

He touched his pockets, heard the crinkling of the map when his fingers touched it.

Intelligence would be glad to see that map and hear his story. Intelligence undoubtedly would do something about it … for Grant could not have been the only one, there must have been others. Probably those had been the ones Grant had been sneaking off to London to see. Maybe the girl the boys had kidded him about back in the mess might be one of them.

But Intelligence was close-mouthed and the squadron would never know. And that was best, for Grant was a hero … and right now Britain needed all the heroes it could get … alive or dead.

His own report? That wasn’t hard to figure out. He could see it now:

“Flight Lieutenant Richard Grant met his death heroically, attempting to ride a crippled ship to earth.”