"An air-raid siren," Harold Smith breathed.
And at that the first German bombs began dropping on London's Hyde Park.
Chapter 9
Colonel E. C. T. Bexton of Her Majesty's Royal Air Force was single-handedly responsible for permitting the first planes of the modern London blitzkrieg to cross over England and drop their payloads unmolested. He allowed this horror to be perpetrated against one of history's most famous cities because he refused to believe the word of a simple potato farmer.
His precise words were: "I will not scramble one of Her Majesty's elite RAF squadrons because some obviously pissed-to-the-gills toothless old git sees cabbage crates flying in across the briny. Tell him to take an aspirin and have a lie down."
Hanging up the phone, Colonel Bexton attempted to resume his work on next week's flight schedules. He had barely brought pen back to paper before the phone resumed its persistent squawking. Placing the pen on his desk with exaggerated patience, he reached for the receiver.
"Colonel Bexton's office. Bexton here," he announced to the party on the other end.
"Listen to me, you fool! There are German bombers flying in an attack formation toward London." Slender fingers tensed on the receiver.
"Who is this?" the colonel demanded. Though it was the same voice as before, he hadn't bothered to ask the clearly agitated man's name.
"I am Edmund Carter," the man explained with as much patience as time allowed. "I am a research scientist at the Jodrell Bank Experimental Station in Cheshire-"
"Jodrell Bank?" Bexton interrupted. "Aren't you supposed to be looking for little green men? I would have thought German warplanes would be a bit too terrestrial for your lot."
"We were alerted to this by a local farmer," the voice explained.
"Ah, yes," Bexton sympathized, "the poor old sot who still thinks he's seeing monkeys on the ceiling. You sound like a sensible chap, Carter. Surprised a man of science would be taken in by a boozer with one foot in the past and the other in the Boar's Head Tavern."
"I saw them!" Carter yelled. "My entire team saw them. We are tracking them as we speak."
"And what have you been drinking, Carter?" the colonel asked thinly.
"Let me talk to your superior officer."
"Oh, no," Bexton said, bristling. "You won't make me a laughingstock. Your old friend is merely reliving the war, Carter. Now I suggest that you and your colleagues over there in Cheshire spend more time in the heavens and less time in the pubs."
He slapped the phone down in the cradle.
If this was meant as some sort of prank, that should put a stop to it once and for all.
When the phone rang a third time several minutes later, Colonel Bexton lost what little reserves of patience he had left.
"Bexton!" he snapped into the receiver.
His face grew pale as the nasal voice of his immediate superior outlined the situation. This time the instant he hung up the phone, Colonel E. C. T. Bexton was placing an emergency call down the defense chain of command.
Per Bexton's order, a squadron of eight British Aerospace Harriers took off from a base in the London suburb of Croydon less than six minutes later. From what he later learned, it was already too late.
Chapter 10
The first aerial bombs ripped through the neatly trimmed lawns of Hyde Park Gardens, spraying the cars and people on the streets and roadways with clods of rich black English soil.
The crowd on the sidewalk around Smith and his wife had panicked the instant they realized the significance of the high-pitched whistling sounds of the falling bombs, which were audible over the blare of the air-raid siren.
Crowds of people were running in every direction. Smith pulled his wife into the relative safety of a stone overhang in the doorway of an old storefront. "Harold!" Maude Smith shouted in terror.
He gripped her arm.
"We have to get to the Underground," Smith stressed, referring to the subway system beneath London.
It wouldn't be safe for them to try at the moment. The crowd was too unruly, the people too frantic. Smith watched for the initial mob of running men and women to thin.
As he waited, the bombers grew closer.
Smith was as surprised by the look of the planes as by the attack itself. They all appeared to be surplus World War I and II aircraft. By the looks of it, they were all in perfect working order. He had counted more than a dozen of the planes as they flew in. The aircraft remained clustered tightly together. Even with so few of them, the sky seemed thick with menacing shapes from his past.
Screaming down out of the midafternoon sky, one plane-Smith saw now that it was a Messerschmitt-buzzed the building across the street. It opened fire with a set of wing-mounted machine guns.
The staccato gunfire was deafening. Bullets ripped into the glass and brick of the building's uppermost stories. Shattered glass and chunks of brick and mortar exploded outward, falling like hail to the street below.
The plane looked as though its forward momentum would surely slam it into the side of the building. But at the last minute the pilot cut his angle sharply. With a whine of engines, the plane did a rolling maneuver away from the building back out over the street. It soared back up into the air, dropping a dozen screeching bombs as it did so.
They impacted in the street among the gnarl of small British cars. A BMW near Smith became an explosion of flame and metal, its hood flipping up as the shell struck its mark.
Mrs. Smith screamed.
They couldn't wait any longer. As the crowd continued to break around them, as the planes continued to disgorge bombs from their bellies, Smith hustled his wife from the protective archway.
Like leaves dropped into a raging spring river, they were immediately caught up in the stream of people flooding for the nearest entry to the London Underground.
Mrs Smith clung to her husband's arm both for support and in fear. Face hard, Smith did his best to keep her safe from the panicked, shoving masses as they moved along the sidewalk.
Fear rippled palpably through the crowd. Someone had shut off the air-raid siren. The sounds of dropping bombs could be heard both nearby and from farther away. One struck very closely, pelting the crowd with bits of tar and dirt. And something else.
Blood spattered the faces of some of the nearer pedestrians. Smith saw that he and his wife had been lucky. They were in the center of the crowd and were thus shielded from the heaviest flying shrapnel. Screams of agony erupted around them as the whine of the attacking plane's engine faded away.
As they ran, Smith saw one man with a streak of crimson flowing down the side of his head. A woman-presumably a wife or girlfriend-was trying to staunch the flow of blood with a strip of cloth as the crowd continued to race forward.
Some people had fallen, bloodied, to the pavement. The panicked mob trampled over them. Smith saw the mouth of the Underground over the bobbing heads before him. They had only a few yards to go.
A new sound caught his attention. It was heavier than that of the other planes. The noise from the older aircraft was more of a whining complaint. This sound was a ferocious, thick rumble that rattled the buildings around them and shook the ground beneath their feet.
A huge shadow passed above them. Still moving, some, including Smith, cast wary glances at the sky. There were more planes above London now. They had roared into view seemingly with the purpose of avenging angels. Smith saw that they were RAF Harriers.
Without hesitation, the newer planes opened fire on the German attackers.
The crowd had dragged the Smiths to the stairs leading down into the bowels of the British subway system. Smith guided his wife's hand to the metal railing. She hurried down the stairs away from him, so concerned with finding safety that she was oblivious to the fact that she was now alone. No matter. She would be safe.
Smith pushed flat against the wall of the subway stairwell, pausing briefly to look up at the dogfight above the skies of London. People jostled him as they bustled down the stone stairs.