Officer of the Court

Book by Mesce Jr Bill

Icarus

“Bloody asinine,” declared Flight Lieutenant Lucian “Paddy” Donlay.

“Eh? What’s that? Blathering to yerself? First sign yer round the bend, mate, blathering to yerself.” The diagnosis, delivered in a curt, unsympathetic Scots burr, was courtesy of Flight Lieutenant Alec “Taffy” Macnee.

Paddy Donlay peeped out the gap in the upturned collar of his fleece-lined Irvine flight jacket. “I said,” and it emerged in his wry Dubliner’s brogue, “bloody asinine!” Unsaid was whether he meant asinine Taffy Macnee, or the asinine venture upon which Macnee had currently propelled them. The pair were shivering in a canvas-topped jeep that Macnee was wrestling through the ruts of the frozen mud track that curled out of the Bay of Firth and along the shoreline of Orkney Mainland.

Burrowed inside leather and fleece, Donlay could still hear what passed — in Macnee — for a laugh: a brief, gruff barking. “Har! What’s bloody asinine was me thinking some soft Irish lass — ” and here Macnee pinched Donlay’s wind-reddened cheek “ — had the stomach for exploration. The guts, if you will. Ya see, this is an expedition! An adventure! And all history knows there’s no great explorers wi’ an Irish name on ‘em, Christian or otherwise. Remember; it was a gentleman carried the name Scott who trekked to the South Pole.”

“Scott was an Englishman,” Donlay told him.

“Aye, but his name was Scott!” shot back Taffy. “Must be a clansman’s blood in ‘im somewhere.”

“Yer right, there was no Irishman nonsensical enough to freeze his arse off with yer Mr. Scott,” retorted Paddy. “‘Cause even some Sligo sot on his worst night’d have enough sense to find his way home. Unlike yer Mr. Scott.”

At first glance, they seemed an odd coupling: Taffy Macnee, the scion of an Uplands Scots laird who could trace the family title back fourteen generations, and Paddy Donlay, whose sole knowledge of his lineage was that his Da and his Da’s Da both died coughing up coal dust before they turned fifty. Yet in August of 1940 they were serving side by side in a Hurricane squadron flying out of Manston, the Kingdom’s most forward spear point during the Battle of Britain. The skies over that part of Kent grew so heavily combated by the two vying air armies that the Luftwaffe would come to call it “Hell’s Corner.”

Macnee had come to the war out of patriotic fervor, Donlay for nothing more noble than an appetite for a good punch-up. It took only a short time for their respective views to deteriorate to something more primal: they fought simply to stay alive. After ten weeks of flying against the German bombers and fighters of Luftflotte 2, not only were both the only survivors of their squadron’s original twelve-man roster: they were fair on their way to being the sole survivors of the squadron’s second generation.

They had begun as strangers; they ended the Blitz as brothers. They had fought together and survived together; short of a blood tie, nothing brings two men closer. And, having shared the strain of vaulting into the sky six or seven times a day against an enemy regularly outnumbering them several to one, living on coffee and Benzedrine in lieu of rest, they also crumbled together.

Macnee snapped suddenly one October day, so battle-fatigued he tried to land his Hurricane without remembering to lower his landing gear. As his riggers attempted to pry him from the wreckage, he apologized for crashing the aeroplane, then fell into uncontrollable sobs, bawling “I’m sorry” over and over until he collapsed in exhaustion.

Donlay’s crack-up lacked that single dramatic catharsis. Nightly, he woke his barracks mates with screams as he violently tossed himself about his bunk, trying to save the flying mates he’d already lost, and to dodge the Messerschmitts which, not content to joust with him in the autumnal skies over Kent, now pursued him into his nightmares.

After the losses suffered during the Blitz, the RAF could ill afford to debit off even pilots as spent as Taffy Macnee and Paddy Donlay. They were transferred to Coastal Command, and assigned to the air station in the Orkneys flying a Short Sunderland (Macnee in the left-hand seat; Donlay as copilot) out of the Bay of Firth on the less stressful routine of antisubmarine patrol.

Each day, Macnee and Donlay piloted their bulky flying boat on a leisurely patrol route, sometimes protectively circling over a passing convoy. If they saw a U-boat, they would alert the convoy escorts, and, if the opportunity presented itself, would descend on the submarine to rake it with the eight guns that earned the Sunderland the sobriquet “Flying Porcupine.”

These patrols devolved into rather tedious exercises as convoy protection grew more effective (by summer ‘43, the German submarine fleet had been crippled to the point where it’d been withdrawn from the North Atlantic). Macnee and Donlay often spent hours each day floating over empty sea. Their only spark of excitement was the occasional spotting in the far distance of an FW-200 Condor out of the German fields in Norway, trolling for Allied convoys en route to Murmansk. To break the numbing drudgery of their patrol, Macnee would, over Donlay’s objections, sometimes tilt the Sunderland in the FW’s direction, though the more prudent German, once spotting them, would turn about straight for home.

Come winter, the boredom factor multiplied. The incessant foul weather whirled in off the North Atlantic to the west and the North Sea to the east, grounding aircraft. With the Home Fleet anchored in Scapa Flow, there were more servicemen about Orkney Mainland than inhabitants, so there was little in the way of social diversion beyond the usual bunkroom entertainments. Such tedium explains why either Macnee or Donlay would even contemplate the Scot’s ludicrous proposal of an expedition and adventure.

Macnee’s father, the laird, had honored his son’s birthday two weeks previous by ordering him from Harrods an elegant Purdy shotgun. Macnee thought it such an object of beauty he was constantly brandishing the thing about to anyone he could corner. He would hold forth on the proud Purdy tradition, the weapon’s exquisite balance, lovingly caress the polished walnut grips, and go on about how many coats of shellac it took to bring out the luster of the wood, flashing the brass butt plate upon which Daddy had had his son’s name elaborately engraved beneath the family coat of arms.

“The way he touches her up ain’t natcheral,” Donlay complained to his mates. “Mate,” he would declare to Macnee, “ya need yerself a woman.”

Macnee got it into his head to christen the Purdy by potting some of the local fowl. He suggested a drive round the headland west of the bay toward the Atlantic side of the island, where he remembered seeing a colony of gulls. They’d spotted them often enough from the Sunderland; in fact, more than once they’d had to fly extreme evasive maneuvers to keep from running through the cloud of birds. This gave the two flyers even more incentive to pop off a few.

“Perhaps we can bring one down for dinner,” the Scot suggested. “A wee variety in the mess, eh?”

Donlay grimaced. “I seen ‘em birds down the bay eatin’ the navy garbage.”

“You heard o’ grouse?” Macnee retorted. “Ptarmigan? Any o’ you Celtic louts ever heard of squab, for the good Christ’s sake? All they are is some kind or ‘nother of pigeon.”

Donlay shook his head stubbornly. “I thought we were talkin’ seagulls.”

“A seagull is just the ocean-going version of a pigeon.”

“They’re nothin’ like a pigeon!”

“Well, no, ya silly git, they’re not related. Of course it’s not the same kind o’ bird! I’m speaking thematically.”

Still, after three days grounded by gales, Donlay had to agree with Macnee that any activity would be a welcome change from the Officers Mess. As the first gust of a shivering salt gale shook the jeep, however, the Irishman came to consider his agreeing to the escapade second only to his enlistment in the RAF as one of the major mistakes of his life.

The sky that day was a bleak, dark gray; the roiling overcast threatened snow or icy rain. The canvas top and sides of the jeep popped and cracked under a vicious thirty-knot wind.

“P’raps another day might be more in order,” Donlay suggested. His teeth were chattering so hard he could scarcely get the words out.

“Problem is you Irish ladies are soft.” Macnee wrestled with the wheel against not only the road but the buffeting winds.

“Oh, yeah,” Donlay retorted. “We’re all soft. Everyone knows Dublin’s right balmy this time o’ year.”

They drove past the cottages of Stromness. The lighted windows sparked visions in Paddy Donlay of snug, shawled locals clustered round peat stoves, taking lulling nips of Highland Park whiskey. “I s’pose the fine likes of a titled gentleman like yerself might consider the natives dead primitive,” declared Paddy, “but they do seem to have sense enough to be inside today.”

Macnee considered a response, could think of nothing particularly marked of wit, so placed his tongue between chapped lips and blew a vigorous raspberry.

“Quoting from the great Scots literary masters, eh?” taunted Donlay.

Not far past Stromness, Macnee pulled the jeep to a halt atop a low rise that looked down across the shingle beach to the surf. H...