McCarthy's iPhone rang. He picked it up and realized it no longer worked, an no-one could be ringing him on it. He dropped it as though it was white hot.
It kept on ringing.
He pressed the green 'Accept', on the screen. A voice growled at the other end. "How d'yer like it? How d'yer like my Sweet Revenge"
He threw the iPhone at the wall...
and woke up screaming...
What the fuck was he supposed to do, now? The Second World War was won by a cripple, a depressive alcoholic and a paranoid mass murderer. Now only the paranoid mass murderer remained, and he was weeks away from inking the deal of the century with the other paranoid mass murderer.
Churchill hadn't been in parliament for seventeen years, and Vera Lynn stood a better chance of forming a war cabinet than he or Churchill did.
Who the hell was John N Garner, anyway? And why is he President of the USA, and not Roosevelt?
If you want to save the world from the scourge of National Socialism, you send the Israeli Air Force back in time, or a handful of ICBMs, not a one-eighth Jewish internet millionaire with three poxy warbirds, the wings of which are likely to fall off if you try and dogfight a 109 in them.
<
Still, might be able to add a genuine 109E to the collection>
OH GROW UP MCCARTHY, YOU USELESS TOERAG!The French are going to cave, Chamberlain is going to quit, Halifax will negotiate a peace, Mosley will form a Government of National Salvation while rimming Hitler, and anyone even remotely Jew-ish will be shipped off to Treblinka to become industrial pollution and lampshades and your precious Sea Fury, Mustang and Venom will be handed over to Willy Messerschmitt, Kurt Tank et al to shred the Red Army to pieces.
"Today Germany, tomorrow the world!"
McCarthy sat down, eating his breakfast and tried to work out how much fuel he would need to fly the Passion Wagon* from the UK to the USA.
Well, Ed Shipley did it in Miss Velma, going the other way.
357th Fighter Group, Leiston, Suffolk, 1944, flown by Capt Charles Weaver. There was a knock at the door. McCarthy answered it.
"Good morning, I do hope I'm not disturbing you" said a man in a dog collar
"No, not at all. Come in"
"I'm Reverend Percy. It's a lot bigger than I thought it was. Your house, I mean"
"<As the actress said to the Bishop> I'm Alex McCarthy. Is Percy your Christian name, or surname?"
"Its my surname. Well, I always like to welcome new arrivals to the village - "
"And exhort them to join the flock?"
"Well - "
"I believe all gods are man made. In fact I know they are. I worship gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. if anything"
"I see. Are you an academic, Mr McCarthy?"
"I'm a pilot"
"You didn't seem the type"
"Didn't I. So I'm a new resident, am I?"
"Great Chesterford is close knit community, Mr McCarthy. You have been the subject of much speculation"
"Really. How long has this house been here, Reverend?"
"Erm..."
"I know when this house was built. What was here, on this site, before this house?"
"I, er, can't..."
"Your God, Jehovah, Adonai, the big I AM - can he send human beings, and inanimate objects back in time?"
" He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end."
"Is that a yes or a no? This is The Times newspaper for Tuesday, 9th May 1939. Printed recently. Not yellowed. Yet also I have the The Times newspaper, dated Tuesday May 5th, 2015. Colour pictures. All the news on the front pages. Adverts for products you have never heard of. Coverage of an election that hasn't be called, featuring politicians of whom you have not heard. You can't have two Tuesdays within four days of each other."
"I think you have been the victim of an elaborate hoax, Mr McCarthy."
"You ain't kidding"
The man of the cloth and the man of the air backed nervously away from each other.
~
McCarthy had hoped the RAF would beat a path to his door. Not a bit of it. He'd heard nothing back from Fedden. An RAF plane, something that looked like a turretless Defiant, had flown over Bentwaters. Dressed in a high visibilty jacket, he'd waved at the pilot, who flew on. A snub nosed Blenheim Mk I had done the same, while McCarthy was driving the ERF avtur tanker to the HAS. Time for a bit of free advertising. He fuelled the Venom for an engine test and forty five minutes flying time.
Time to wake up the neighbours, wake up England. McCarthy did all the pre-flight checks, including the tyre pressure. He climbed into the wooden pod that housed the pilot, the cockpit, and the de Havilland Ghost Mk 48, and strapped himself in. Once the checklist was complete he pressed the cartridge starter
BANG!
A large black cloud shot out the fuselage pod. About 2 feet of orange burning kerosene shot of the Ghost engine. Birds flew from the trees. The explosion was heard as far away as RAF Martlesham Heath, on the other side of the River Deben, which sent up a Blenheim IF to investigate.
This was normal procedure for a de Havilland Venom.
A high pitched whine was emitted as the Ghost engine spooled up.
McCarthy taxied the jet, testing the engine at various power settings, before taxying to the end of the runway. It rolled down the runway, the nosewheel lifted off the concrete, and leapt into the air. The Venom was over Martlesham Heath before the Blenheim had even taken off. Several startled RAF airmen looked up in stunned shock as the Venom flew overhead. McCarthy was oblivious to its presence. He tuned the VHF radio to 120.625.
“Stansted Intermediate, this is Golf-Delta-Hotel-Sierra-Sierra, just departed from Echo-Golf-Victor-Juliet, am at FL 1, over”
“Kerssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhh”
He retuned the radio 121.500, Distress and Diversion.
“Kerssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhh”
“Just me then. Climbing to FL two-five, over”, he added superfluously. No-one to talk to, no-one to squawk to.
Before long he was at 25000ft over the North Sea. The pressure cabin was working. He pushed the nose down, pulling the stick back every time the IAS read 500 knots. Don't take Sara too near to her VNE
He was back down over the Suffolk coast – and all the old visual navigation cues – the grotesquely ugly Adastral Park, the Container port at Felixstowe, and the ferry port at Harwich, and the reactor complex at Sizewell, or EG-R217 as was known to aviators – were all gone. Sizewell was built on the site of the 357th Fighter Group
He was however, being picked up by the RDF station at Bawdsey, who lost the return as he flew inland. He wasn't going to risk navigating over the sea, not without GPS. At least at cruising speed, at 20000ft, he was unlikely to collide with anything
He flew the Venom over the familiar, but smaller Ipswich, Colchester and Chelmsford – the latter resembled a large village rather than a small town. The urban sprawl of Basildon, where he had spent the first nine years of his life was gone completely, leaving only the clustered villages of Laindon, Pitsea and Basildon itself. Let's hope it stays that way, he thought. He could see the 'Fortune of War' pub, was still there where the High Road met the A127. The London-Tilbury-Southend 'misery line' was still there.
At least there was the tower on Pitsea Mount, and Thameshaven oil refinery, to use as reference points. The creeks and pools glistened in the morning sun. McCarthy made a ninety degree turn West, over the Thames, and lost height.
There were no navigation hazards ahead [no One Canada Square, no Shard, no Swiss Re building, no Tower 42, no airliners in a holding pattern over Romford]. Docklands was full of ships, not bankers. The tallest building he could see was St Pauls Cathedral, so no lower than 400 feet till I'm past that, (he thought). As he flew over Rotherhithe he could see people looking up. He pushed the nose down and Tower Bridge and the Tower of London shot past below.
He pointed the nose of the Venom towards Waterloo station, and pushed the throttle lever forward, checking the jet pipe temperature, and the fuel levels in the port and starboard tank.
People screamed and ran as the jet fighter flew over St Thomas' Hospital, Westminster Bridge, The Palace of Westminster and Buckingham Palace. McCarthy flew on, oblivious to their panic.
Over the Serpentine McCarthy pulled the stick back, and turned 110 degrees North, heading towards the unchanged green space of Hampstead Heath, then King George V Reservoir, then the Lee Valley. He sighted three aircraft flying in vee formation. He approached them from astern.
Hurricanes.
They had the codes 'JH' on their fuselage.What unit is that?
Finally, they noticed him.
They banked towards him. He wondered if they were armed. He wasn't going to chance it. He pushed the throttle forward, acclerated, climbed and left the Hurris behind.
McCarthy found the A10/Ermine Street, and followed it towards Royston. He turned east and pushed the nose down again.
The A505 led inevitably to Duxford. If the American Air Museum had been there, he would have ploughed straight into it. Three Dark Earth/Dark Green Spitfires climbed out. He passed below them. He could just make out the letters “WZ” on their fuselage. 19 Squadron.
Channelling the spirit of Ray Hanna, McCarthy flew at thirty feet over the grass airfield, past the familiar double bay Belfast hangars
Very different to how it used to be...or will be...or may be.The flight from Duxford to Bentwaters he could do in his sleep, he'd done it so many times in the Passion Wagon, RCN157 and Cardinal Richerthanyou. He landed back at Bentwaters after thirty-five minutes flying.
~
The law of unintended consequences
In London, the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Kingsley Wood, was in the mood to deprive someone of their supply. He had just been carpeted by the Prime Minister. Air Chief Marshal Cyril Newall, Chief of the Air Staff, knew for a fact he was in similar treatment. An aeroplane had flown over Metropolitan London, over the Palace of Westminster and Buckingham Palace - for pity's sake – and the RAF could do nothing. It had flown over two RAF aerodromes, and encountered three RAF fighters!
“The press are in uproar, Newall, the public are tense and agitated, and we've spent all this money on aeroplanes and radiolocation and whatnot, and all of it was no use at all! You've campaigned for all this spending on fighters, and when they are needed.....nothing”
“The aircraft was far too fast for our aircraft to catch, Secretary of State, we tracked it on RDF but lost it as it flew inland. There is no inland RDF coverage”
“How fast was this – thing – supposedly going?”
“At least four-hundred knots, four-hundred and sixty miles-an-hour - "
"Good God, Man!"
" - There's not a plane in the world that could have caught it, except perhaps - ”
“Except what?”
“The German Me 109R. Or He112U”
“So it was the Hun after all?”
“Possibly, though the Luftwaffe have no twin-boom pusher-type aircraft. That we know of. The chaps at Flight and Aeroplane are equally mystified. They called us to ask us what it was, just as we called them to see if they had any ideas - the best they could come up with is the American XP-38
"So you've no idea what it was, and your fighters cannot catch up after it. Godammit man, if we have to make and official complaint to the German embassy, we need to know – von Dirksen will run rings round us otherwise.”
“Chamberlain wants a sacrifice he can announce to Parliament to fend them off. Retire Dowding, fire whoever is in charge of the defence of London...”
“Leigh-Mallory, sir.”
“or move him to another department.
<
Army Cooperation,> thought Newall
"Dowding goes. Either he goes, or you do, Newall”[/font][/size]