Or did I play a part?
I don’t know.
I really don’t.
But what I am becoming crushingly convinced of is that it doesn’t matter.
‘The chutes didn’t do any good, did they?’ I say to Tim.
‘They might have,’ he says. ‘The boys could have bailed over Frankfurt, taken their chances on the ground. But I was in a bad way, I’d never have survived the fall, and they knew that.’ His eyes brim. ‘Somehow, Rob and Ames gotour fires out, and us away. We turned back to England still a mission short of our full tour, with one engine running, failing electrics, and all our bombs and incendiaries jammed in our bay doors.’
‘They’re not releasing,’ said Robbie, his voice crackling over the weak connection. He’d broughtMabel’s Furyback to England, but was still some distance away: close enough to radio, but not nearly close enough for Iris to be able to hear the plane’s engines, or see its lights blinking through the thick fog.
They’d been trying to jettison their bombs all the way home. Robbie had ordered Jacob, Ames, Gus, Danny and Henry to bail out whilst they’d still been over France, but they’d refused to abandon him and Tim, and, with little fuel left, they’d now sunk too low for their chutes to have enough time to open up and save them. Robbie couldn’t take them low enough to chance a jump, not with all their bombs ready to detonate at a touch; even if they survived the fall, the plane would explode within a second, obliterating them, and who knew who else on the ground.
Their only hope was to try again to offload their bombs over the water so that Robbie could attempt to bringMabel’s Furyinto land.
They had enough fuel remaining for one last go.
And what if that doesn’t work?
Iris hadn’t asked Robbie that.
She knew the answer.
They all knew the answer.
And maybe, on a calmer, clearer night, he and the boys might have a slim hope of surviving a leap into the water.
But the November seas were high, the temperature perishingly cold, and no patrol boat would be able to find them in this visibility.
Not quickly enough.
So, no, she didn’t waste their time – their racing, disappearing time – by asking him that foolish question.
She had only one thing she needed to say to him.
Do it the first chance you have, Prim had told her.
Don’t cheat him of happiness.
‘Robbie,’ she said, gripping her hands into fists, fighting her panic, her grief, ‘can you still hear me?’
Her earpiece fizzed with static.
‘Robbie?’
Nothing.
‘Robbie, please … ’
‘Iris,’ he said, his voice travelling to her from his pitch-black cockpit, much fainter now. ‘I hear you. Can you hear me? Iris?’
‘I hear you,’ she said, and not risking so much as a pause for another breath, let their secret go. ‘You’re going to be a father, Robbie.’ Tears burned her eyes, her throat. ‘We’re having a baby, so you have to come home.’
More crackling.
Had he heard?
