decided that, by luck or judgement, the unknown Lieutenant Morse had chosen a fine machine. Mickey Mouse II responded to every touch of the controls and had that extra agility the Mustang has when its main tank is more than half empty.
He pulled back the stick and eased up into the overcast. A few wisps of dirty cotton wool slid over the wings, then suddenly the cockpit was dark. The wet rain cloud swirled off the wing tips in curly vortices but the Merlin gave no cough or hesitation. It drank the wet cloud without complaint. Contented, Farebrother dropped out of the lower side of the stratus in time to see the crossed runways of Steeple Thaxted just ahead of him. He levelled off and slow-rolled to a flipper turn that gave turning force to the elevators. Then he went higher, banked steeply, and came back. This time he dived upon the field to gain speed enough for a loop. As she came up to the top of the loop, belly touching the underside of the stratus, he rolled her out and snaked away, tearing little pieces from the underside of the cloud base.
He had their attention now. Men had come out of the big black hangars, and others stood in groups on the parade ground. There was a crowd outside the mess tents and Farebrother saw their mess kits glint in the dull light as he made a low run across the field. There were people in the village streets too, and some cars had pulled off the road so the drivers could watch. Farebrother wondered whether Colonel Dan and the Exec were among the men standing in the rain outside the Operations Building.
By now he had enough confidence in the plane to move lower. He made another pass—this time so low that he had to ease her up to clear the control tower, and only just made it. The men working there threw themselves onto the wet ground, and on his next run he saw pools of spilled white paint that made big spiders on the black tarmac. He went between the hangars that time, and did a perfect eight-point roll across the field. For a finale he half-rolled to buzz the runway, holding her inverted until the engine screamed for fuel, and then split-essed in for a landing that put her down as soft as a caress.
If Farebrother was expecting a round of applause as he got out of the plane, he was disappointed. Apart from the amiable Sergeant Gill, who helped him unstrap, there was no one in sight. ‘Everything okay, sir?’ said Gill, deadpan.
‘You’d better change the plugs, Sergeant,’ said Farebrother. He noticed that Gill had put on a waterproof coat, but his face and trousers were wet with rain.
‘She’s due for a change. But I figured she’d be okay for a familiarization flight,’ Gill said in his Texan drawl.
‘You were quite right, Sergeant Gill.’
‘You can leave the chute there. I’ll get one of the boys to take it back.’
Gill walked back to the dispersal hut with Farebrother. There was a primitive kitchen there and some coffee was ready in the percolator. Without asking, Gill poured coffee for the pilot.
‘She’s a good ship, and well looked after.’
‘She’s not mine,’ said Gill. ‘I’m crew chief for Kibitzer just across the other side of the hardstand. That one belongs to a crew chief named Kruger.’
‘But he allows Lieutenant Morse to fly it once in a while?’
‘That’s about the way it is,’ said Gill without smiling.
‘Well, I hope Kruger and Lieutenant Morse won’t mind my borrowing their ship.’
‘Lieutenant Morse won’t mind—Mickey Mouse they call him—and he’s mighty rough with airplanes. He says planes are like women, they’ve got to be beaten regularly, he says.’ Gill still didn’t smile.
Farebrother offered his cigarettes, but Gill shook his head. ‘Kruger, he won’t mind too much,’ said Gill. ‘It don’t do an airplane any good to be standing around in this kind of weather unused.’ He took off his hat and looked at it carefully. ‘Colonel Dan now, that’s something else again. Last pilot who flew across the field…I mean a couple of hundred feet clear of the roofs, not your kind of daisy-cutting—Colonel Dan roasted him. He was up before the commanding general—got an official reprimand and was fined three hundred bucks. Then the Colonel sent him back to the US of A.’
‘Thanks for telling me, Sergeant.’
‘If Colonel Dan gets mad, he gets mad real quick, and you’ll find out real quick too.’ He wiped the rain from his face. ‘If you ain’t heard from him by the time you’ve unpacked, you ain’t going to hear.’
Farebrother nodded and drank his coffee.
Sergeant Gill looked Farebrother up and down before deciding to give him his opinion. ‘I don’t reckon you’ll hear a thing, sir. See, we’re real short of pilots right now, and I don’t think Colonel Dan’s gonna be sending any pilot anywhere else. Especially an officer who’s got such a good feel for a ship that needs a change of spark plugs.’ He looked at Farebrother and gave a small grin.
‘I sure hope you’re right, Sergeant Gill,’ said Farebrother. And in fact he was.
3 Staff Sergeant Harold E. Boyer
Captain Farebrother’s flying demonstration that day passed into legend. Some said that the men on duty at Steeple Thaxted exaggerated their descriptions of the flight in order to score over those who were on pass, but such attempts to belittle Farebrother’s aerobaties could only be made by those who hadn’t been present. And Farebrother’s critics were confuted by the fact that Staff Sergeant Harry Boyer said it was the greatest display of flying he’d ever seen. ‘Jesus! No plane ever made me hit the dirt before that. Not even out in the Islands before the war when some of the officers were cutting up in front of their girls.’
Harry Boyer was, by common consent, the most experienced airman on the base. He’d strapped into their rickety biplanes nervous young lieutenants who were now wearing stars in the Pentagon. And no matter what aircraft type was mentioned, Harry Boyer had painted it, sewn its fabric, and probably hitched a ride in it.
Harry Boyer not only told of ‘Farebrother’s buzz job’, as it became known, he gave a realistic impression of it that required both hands and considerable sound effects. The end of the show came when Boyer gave his fruity impression of Tex Gill drawling, ‘Everything okay, sir?’ and then, in Farebrother’s prim New England accent, ‘You’d better change the plugs, Sergeant.’
So popular was Boyer’s re-enactment of the flight that when he performed his party piece at the 1969 reunion of the 220th Fighter Group Association, a dozen men crowding round him missed the exotic dancer.
Staff Sergeant Boyer’s reputation as a mimic was, however, nothing compared to his renown as the organizer of crap games. Men came from the Bomb Group at Narrowbridge to gamble on Boyer’s dice, and on several occasions officers turned up from the 91st BG at Bassing-bourn. It was his crap game that got Boyer into trouble with the Exec.
Although Boyer and the Exec had carried on a long, bitter and byzantine struggle, the sergeant’s activities had never been seriously curtailed. But whenever it leaked out that some really big all-night game with four-figure stakes had taken place, Boyer frequently found himself mysteriously assigned to extra duties. So it was that Staff Sergeant Boyer had found himself in charge of the detail painting the control tower that day.
At the end of Farebrother’s hair-raising beat-up, Boyer looked over to the Operations Building,
