Luciano’s Luck

‘I’ll think about it.’ Eisenhower glanced at his watch. ‘And now you must excuse me. This is the time of day when the telephone lines start hotting up to Washington. I talk to the President most days. He likes to be kept informed.’

‘I’ll go then, sir.’

Carter got up, put on his cap and saluted. Eisenhower acknowledged the salute perfunctorily, already busy with papers again, and Carter walked to the door.

As he got it open, Eisenhower called, ‘I’d like you back here at eleven.’

Carter turned in surprise. ‘You mean eleven tonight, General?’

‘That’s it, Major,’ Eisenhower replied without looking up.

Carter closed the door, paused, then crossed the hall to the entrance and went down the steps to his jeep. He climbed in beside the driver and glanced at his watch. It was just after six. Almost five hours to kill.

‘Where to now, sir?’ asked the driver, a private first class who looked at most sixteen year of age.

‘Do you know the RAF base at Maison Blanche?’

‘Sure do, Major. About an hour and a half from here.’

‘Fine,’ Carter said. ‘Take me there.’

The Douglas DC3, the famous Dakota, was probably the most successful general transport plane ever built, but the one which Wing Commander Harvey Grant was bringing back from Malta to his base at Maison Blanche just before dark had definitely seen better days.

Not that it was in any sense his regular plane. The old Dakota did a milk run to Malta and back three times a week with medical supplies. The duty pilot had been taken ill that morning, and as there was no replacement readily available, Grant had seized the opportunity to vacate the Squadron Commander’s desk and do the flight himself. Which was very much contrary to regulations, for Grant had been forbidden any further operational flying by the Air Officer Commanding Middle East Theatre himself only six weeks previously.

He sat at the controls now, alone and happy, whistling tunelessly between his teeth, the two supply sergeants forming his crew asleep in the rear.

Harvey Grant was twenty-six, a small man whose dark eyes seemed perpetually full of life. Son of a wheat farmer in Parker, Iowa, the greatest influence on his life had been his father’s younger brother, Templeton Grant, who had flown with the Royal Flying Corps in France.

At an early age, Grant learnt that you always watched the sun and never crossed the line alone under 10,000 feet. He soloed at sixteen, thanks to his uncle’s tuition, then moved on to Harvard to study law, more to please his father than anything eke. He was at the Sorbonne in Paris when war broke out, and promptly joined the RAF.

He was shot down twice piloting Hurricanes and had eleven German fighters to his credit before the Battle of Britain was over. He’d then transferred to Bomber Command, completing a tour in Wellingtons, a second in Lancasters, by which time he was a Squadron Leader with a DSO and two DFC’s to his name.

After that had come his posting to 138 (Special Duties) Squadron at Tempsford, the famous Moon Squadron that specialized in dropping agents into ocupied Europe or picking them up again, as the occasion required.

Grant had flown over thirty such missions from Tempsford before being promoted and posted to Maison Blanche to handle the same kind of work, flying black-painted Halifaxes from the Algerian mainland to Sardinia, Sicily and Italy.

But all that was behind him. Now he was officially grounded. Too valuable to risk losing, that’s what the AOC had said, although in Grant’s opinion, it was simply another manoeuvre on the part of the American Army Air Corps to force him to transfer, a fate he was determined to avoid.

He was south-west of Pantellaria just before dusk, a quarter-moon touching the clouds with a pale luminosity, when a roaring filled the night. The Dakota bucked wildly so that it took everything Grant had to hold her as a dark shadow banked away to port.

He recognized it at once, a Junkers 88, one of those apparently clumsy, black, twin-engined planes festooned with strange radar aerials that had proved so devastating in their attacks on RAF bombers engaged on night raids over Europe. And he didn’t have a thing to fight with except skill, for the Dakota carried no kind of armament.

The cabin door swung open behind him and the two supply sergeants peered in.

‘Hang on!’ Grant said. ‘I’m going to see if I can make him do something stupid.’

He went down fast and was aware of the Junkers, turning and coming in fast, firing his cannon too soon, his speed so excessive that he had to bank to port to avoid collision.

Which was exactly what Grant was counting on. He kept on going down, was at six hundred feet when the Junkers came in on his tail. This time the Dakota staggered under the impact of cannon shell. The Junkers curved away to starboard again and appeared to take up station.

‘Come on, you bastard! Come on!’ Grant said softly.

Behind him one of the sergeants appeared, blood on his face where a splinter had caught him. ‘Johnson’s bought it.’

‘Okay,’ Grant said. ‘He’s coming in again so get down on your face and hang on.’

He was no more than five hundred feet above the waves as the Junkers came in for the kill, judging his speed perfectly now, sliding in on the Dakota’s tail, opening up with more cannon shell. As the aircraft started to shudder under their impact, Grant dropped his flaps.

The Dakota seemed to stop in mid-air. The pilot of the Junkers banked steeply to starboard to avoid a collision and, with no space left to work in at such a speed, kept right on going, ploughing straight into the sea.

Grant, depressed, walked towards the officers’ mess at Maison Blanche, his flying boots drubbing on the tarmac. He kept thinking of the way that Junkers had gone in, imagining the men inside. That was no good at all. He started up the steps to the mess and found Harry Carter standing at the top.

‘Harry!’ Grant said in delight. ‘I heard you were in hospital in Cairo.’

‘Not any more,’ Carter told him. ‘I had business with the man himself at dar el Ouad and as I have an hour or two to spare, I thought I’d see how you were getting on.’

On the two occasions that Carter had dropped by parachute into Sicily, Grant had flown the plane, which was something of a bond.

‘Feel like a drink?’ he asked.

‘Not really. Let’s take a walk.’

They moved towards the hangars. Carter said, ‘I hear you got another one this evening.’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘And you’re supposed to be grounded.’

‘Damn nonsense. I had to see Air Marshal Sloane a few weeks ago on squadron business and he said I had a muscle twitching in my right cheek. Insisted I had a medical and the bastards stood me down.’

He was angry and it showed. Carter said, ‘We can win the war without you, Harvey, but only just.’ He put a hand on the American’s shoulder for a moment. ‘What’s wrong? What’s really wrong?’

‘I keep thinking about the men in that Junkers this evening,’ Grant said. ‘I don’t know how to explain this, Harry, but for the first time it was as if it was me. Does that make any kind of sense?’

‘Perfectly,’ Carter told him. ‘It means that the doctor who stood you down knew what he was talking about.’

Grant said, ‘And what about you? Are you going back over there again?’

‘I shouldn’t think it’s likely.’

‘And a good thing, too.’ They were passing a hangar in which ground crew worked under floodlights repairing a badly damaged Halifax. Half the tail plane was missing and the rear gunner’s compartment shattered. ‘Rear gunner and navigator both killed on a supply drop to Sicily two nights ago. The Luftwaffe really do have things their own way over there, Harry. We’ve lost four planes in ten days, all shot down, and in each case the agents they were to drop were still inside. If you asked me to fly you in again, I’d give us no better than an even chance of reaching the target and dropping you.’

‘Oh, well,’ Carter said. ‘Someone else can worry about that one.’

They had reached the end of the main hangar and he saw, to his surprise, a Junkers 88 night fighter standing there in the gloom, RAF rondels painted on the fuselage and wings.

‘What’s this, for God’s sake?’