Читать книгу Code Name Verity онлайн | страница 45

‘Get up, girl!’ she ordered. ‘I won’t have this. I’m your superior officer giving orders now. Get up, Brodatt. If you’re scared do something. See if you can make this gun work. Get moving!’

‘The shell needs loading first,’ the gunner whispered, lifting a finger to point. ‘The Prime Minister don’t like girls firing guns.’

‘Bother the Prime Minister!’ exclaimed the superior officer. ‘Load the damned gun, Brodatt.’

Maddie, nothing if not mechanically minded and trained to react positively to orders from people in authority, clawed her way up the gun.

‘That slip of a lass’ll never shift that shell,’ croaked the gunner. ‘Weighs 30 pounds, that does.’

Maddie wasn’t listening. She was reckoning. After a minute’s rational thought and with strength that she later couldn’t explain, she loaded the shell.

Queenie worked frantically over the fallen gunner trying to plug the holes in his chest and stomach. Maddie did not watch. After some time Queenie took her by the shoulders and showed her how to aim.

‘You’ve got to anticipate – it’s like shooting birds, you have to fire a little ahead of where they’ll be next –’

‘Shoot a lot of birds, do you?’ Maddie gasped, anger and fear making her peevish about the other girl’s seemingly limitless talents.

‘I was born in the middle of a grouse moor on the opening day of the shooting season! I could fire a gun before I could read! But this poxy thing is just a wee bit bigger than a Diana air rifle, and I don’t know how it works, so we have to do it together. Like yesterday, all right?’ She gave a sudden gasp and asked anxiously, ‘That’s not one of our planes, is it?’

‘Can’t you tell?’

‘Not really.’

Maddie relented.

‘It’s a Messerschmitt 109.’

‘Well, clobber it! Point this way – now wait till he comes back, he doesn’t know this station’s still operational – just wait.’

Maddie waited. Queenie was right: doing something, focusing, took away the fear.

‘Now go!’

The blast momentarily blinded them both. They did not see what happened. Maddie swore, afterwards, that the plane did not go down in a ball of flame until it had made at least two more passes over the runway. But no one else ever claimed to have shot down that Me-109 (oh, how many aircraft I know after all!), and God knows the fighter pilots were a competitive lot of bean counters. So that kill – I expect the Luftwaffe also call it a kill when someone shoots down a plane, like deer – was credited to two off-duty WAAF officers working together at an unmanned gun station.