The Levelling Read online

  The Levelling

  The Levelling

  William Mitchell

  Copyright William Mitchell, 2019

  www.wmfiction.com

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this work may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission.

  For Emma, Thomas and Phoebe.

  OVERFLIGHT

  1955:

  Callsign Baker Six Two crossed into Germany twenty miles west of Bremerhaven, ten thousand feet up, cruising at just under the speed of sound. The ground beneath them was like the sea they’d just crossed, flat, grey and featureless, but in the sky to the east a band of orange hovered over the horizon as the first rays of sunrise were filtered by layers of early morning cloud.

  Howard Shale checked the instruments, a ritual he performed every ten seconds when flying at this speed. Height and velocity were good, fuel state was good, and engine temperatures were all in the green as the twin Tamar turbojets pushed the two-seat de Havilland Vulture to near-sonic speeds. He was about to ask Teddy for a course update, but as ever Teddy seemed to read his mind from the back seat.

  “Next waypoint in four minutes,” Teddy’s voice came over the intercom. “Heading one-seven-zero to Bremen then one-five-five to Hannover. Time on target fifteen minutes.”

  Howard checked the tactical display in the centre of the console. It had only been installed in Vultures as part of the previous year’s upgrades, but already it had become indispensable. Like the glowing green radar screens that the ground controllers used, but filled with text and numerical data fed from one of the new in-flight computing machines the boffins at Farnborough had cooked up, it told him everything he needed to know about the airspace and terrain in front of him. He turned left slightly, taking up the heading Teddy had indicated, and saw the waypoint vectors dutifully lining up on the display.

  Four minutes later they were over the city of Bremen, though like all points on this route it was now a city in name only. The outlines of the roads and larger buildings were still visible if one looked for them, but the sea of undergrowth and foliage that now stretched from the coast to the country’s interior hid everything else. The pale light of sunrise was just starting to pick out the higher treetops, and the river that ran through where the city had once stood was like a line of black.

  Howard turned south-east toward Hannover.

  “Seven minutes to waypoint two, then another four to the target,” Teddy said.

  “Time to warm up the pointer?” Howard said.

  “Agreed. Activating now.”

  Howard saw the engine instruments twitch as the generators suddenly had an increased load dropped on them. The pointing device, another piece of wizardry the Farnborough techies had concocted, was now bringing its inner workings to life, ready to make its magic rays. At the same time the television camera that sat alongside it was being cooled, increasing its sensitivity to the ultra-red light it was designed to pick up.

  “Pointing device enabled,” Teddy said. “Five minutes to waypoint.”

  “You seeing anything down there?”

  “Some villages along the river, a few more inland. Remains of a few bonfires in the clearings. Nothing industrial though.”

  “Okay, keep your eyes peeled to the front. Reconnaissance said the source was ten miles east of the river.”

  Daylight blossomed as they covered the intervening distance, bringing structure to the scene below. The overgrown wasteland stretched ahead of them relentlessly, with the remains of Hannover just about visible through the trees. Howard followed the line of the old railway tracks and saw the shape of the central station and its surrounding roads, but the smaller streets were now lost in the greenery. It was amazing how quickly the vegetation had reclaimed the ruins; just ten years had passed since the war had ended, but the levelling that had followed had left the way open for nature to take over. Howard had used the station as a landmark back in ’43 and ’44, but now nothing beyond the immediate centre was discernible.

  He turned them further to the east, the final turn toward the target. If the previous day’s reconnaissance was still valid, they’d see what they were looking for within minutes.

  “There it is,” Teddy said. “I’ve got it on scope now.”

  Howard could see it too with his own eyes—a plume of smoke rising from the shell of a wrecked building.

  “It’s hot,” Teddy said, “and big. Whatever’s in there is running at almost four hundred degrees. Some kind of steam engine or boiler. Definitely industrial. Looks like someone’s cut back a clearing and is trying to get what’s in there running again.”

  “Any idea what it is?”

  “This was a manufacturing zone on the charts. Could be a smelting plant, or a metal works. Factory of some kind maybe.”

  “Not something we want to leave standing,” Howard said.

  “I’ll second that,” Teddy said. “Priming the bombs.” Then, after a few seconds’ pause, “Bombs ready.”

  Howard took them toward the smoke plume and slightly to the side, so he wouldn’t lose sight of it under the aircraft’s nose. Teddy kept him informed of what he was seeing on the ultra-red scope as the distance to the target decreased, before announcing “Pointing device centred, ready to drop.”

  “You are free to release,” Howard said.

  “Bomb one away,” Teddy said, “and two.”

  Howard felt the aircraft roll one way then the other as the bombs separated from the left and right wing stations. It lifted slightly too as the weight was released, but he’d dropped enough of these things that he could compensate just by instinct.

  “Trajectories have converged, bombs on glide slope,” Teddy said. Right now the pointing device would be firing its magic spotlight at the building beneath them, not quite the death ray its inventors had allegedly been trying to create, but dead straight and pencil-thin nonetheless, illuminating the building with a pinpoint of light that the homing eye in the nose of each bomb could steer itself towards.

  “Five seconds to impact,” Teddy said, then after the specified interval, “Bullseye.”

  Howard saw the flash of detonation, and saw the walls of the building, already wrecked and roofless, caving inward. It was over within seconds.

  “Successful attack, recorded on scope at zero seven eighteen hours,” Teddy said. “I’ll log the damage now so we’re ready for immediate debriefing.”

  “Back in time for tea and medals,” Howard said.

  “Lunch at the Fox would do,” said Teddy.

  Howard smiled in amusement, then looked back at the burning ruin. “For Amy,” he said to himself, the amusement replaced by grim satisfaction. Then he turned them back toward the north-west, and the northern fringes of the vast wilderness that lay where Britain’s greatest enemy had once stood.

  The plan had been called “The Pastoralisation of Germany” when its originators had dreamt it up toward the end of the war. Once put into effect, it had simply been called “The Levelling.” The aim had been clear: twice in one century was enough; never again would Germany be allowed to wreak such destruction across an entire continent, or indeed the world. And so, in 1945, the process had begun: every major German town, city or population centre had been razed to the ground—with due warning given to the inhabitants of course—in order to turn the entire country into a nation of subsistence farmers.

  In one fell swoop Germany had gone from 1945 to 1445.

  There had been loss of life of course, despite the efforts to empty the cities before destroying them, and the famine and plagues of those first few years were in many ways inevitable. But the Department of German Affairs in Whitehall had estimated that it would take just five years for the
population to settle out at a level the land could support, and so far they’d been proved right. And now squadrons like Howard and Teddy’s were charged with enforcing the Levelling, making sure no resurgence of the threat was possible. The rules were simple: no machinery, no heavy industry or factories, nothing more substantial than a blacksmith’s forge could be allowed to stand.

  People from the villages still tried of course, despite the ban, but nothing could be hidden from the heat cameras that the Gloster Meteors and Peverelles carried, and if anything was seen, the bomb load of the Vultures would not be far behind.

  They were halfway back to the coast when a long-range transmission came in from ground control back in England. The voice part simply gave their callsign—“Baker Six Two”—and the words “Priority retask,” but the voice transmission was only part of the story.

  “What now?” Teddy said, exasperation in his voice, but even though Howard couldn’t see him he knew that Teddy would be reading the decoder display in the back seat instrument panel, watching as the stream of enciphered numbers and letters coming over the airwaves was turned back into readable text.

  “Secondary target,” Teddy read out, “Seventy miles south of here. The coordinates are somewhere this side of Bielefeld.”

  “You can get us there?” Howard said, trying to picture the location in his mind.

  “Yes, we’ll be all right. Turn to heading two-two-zero, I’ll work out the time line on the way.”

  They turned back to the south and carried on in silence, prospects of a quick flight home and a pub lunch evaporating the further they went. The forested land ahead of them was even more featureless; this must have been farmland once, or open countryside. Occasional clearings marked the positions of villages, tumbledown houses built of wood and thatch, each village arranged round a central fire pit. Usually there would be people visible too, villagers standing gawping as eight tons of steel and aluminium flew over at six hundred knots, but this time there was no one to be seen.

  Then Howard and Teddy crossed the inland reaches of the Weser, the same waterway they’d followed out of Bremen, and saw the land that lay beyond. And that was when Howard saw the most peculiar sight he’d ever seen from the air.

  “What in God’s name is that?” he said.

  “Now that is curious,” Teddy replied.

  There was a hillside ahead of them with a clearing cut into it, but unlike the crude circles the locals built their hovels in, this one was huge, and intricate. The shape divided and turned back on itself repeatedly as it sprawled over the hillside, as if tracing out a symbol of some kind, something neither Chinese nor Arabic but somehow reminiscent of both. Howard had never seen anything like it in his life, but it still gave him the chills.

  “Anything on the scope?” he said.

  “There are people in there,” Teddy said, “Hundreds of them.”

  Howard squinted down into the gloom between the trees. Teddy had the heat camera to his advantage; Howard however could see nothing.

  “I’m going lower,” Howard said, and prepared to push the nose down.

  “No, don’t,” Teddy said. There was something in his voice, something that almost sounded like fear.

  “Why not?”

  “Just—I don’t like it, something’s not right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s the way they’re all—my God, what are they doing?”

  “Teddy, what are you seeing?” Howard said. He was still maintaining altitude, but they were about to overfly the clearing. He turned to the side so they could circle it at height.

  “My God, those people, they’re not even—”

  Then every instrument on Howard’s console went berserk, needles and indicators swinging from high to low and back again. The aircraft lurched upwards, then dropped, as if the laws of aeronautics that kept it airborne had suddenly lost all reason.

  “Teddy, get the check sheet for in-flight restart. Teddy? Can you hear me?”

  There was no answer from the back seat, but Howard didn’t have time to push the question further. He was still struggling to regain control of the aircraft; if he could get them straight and level, and heading vaguely northwards, that would do for now.

  Then Teddy spoke again. “I can still see them,” he said. “Oh no, oh dear God no, she’s down there, she’s down there.”

  “Who’s down there? What’s going on?”

  Teddy was whimpering incoherently; Howard had never heard anything like it in his life. By now he’d managed to put the hillside behind them, but keeping the aircraft straight was taking all his concentration.

  Then Howard’s ears were filled with screaming; whatever was happening in the back seat, it had reduced Teddy to insanity. Teddy was shrieking and thrashing, screaming the word “No!” again and again, then “Don’t make me see her!” before screaming again as if in agony or terror.

  “See what? Teddy, get a grip of yourself! What’s happening back there?”

  But Teddy was incapable of responding. Howard had only heard screaming like that twice in his life, once when another Lancaster in his formation had gone down burning with its radio still live, another time when he’d seen a captured Messerschmitt rocket plane being ground tested and the High-Test Peroxide tank had leaked into the cockpit, dissolving the pilot alive.

  Howard ripped the headphone cable from its socket, but he could still hear the screams, and could feel Teddy flailing despite the six feet of aircraft superstructure that lay between them. He desperately scanned the instruments, looking for any sign of a cockpit fire, or an oxygen malfunction, anything that might explain what was happening, but Teddy’s frenzy showed no sign of abating. Howard flew north, finally in control of the aircraft’s motion, and headed for the coast.

  He flew the way back using the palm-sized emergency chart in the front cockpit, crossing the coast of England somewhere over Suffolk. He had to navigate back to base following landmarks by eye—luckily the conditions were clear—but without a navigator to help him he took a longer route than usual. He was putting out Mayday calls the whole way, but so far there was no response. The radio seemed to be in order, but his emergency calls were going unheeded. Nonetheless he repeated the situation over and over—navigator incapacitated, returning to base, medical assistance required on landing—in the hope that someone would hear. Teddy was no longer screaming, but with his headphones plugged back in Howard could hear him jabbering incoherently, occasionally becoming agitated again before sliding back into delirium.

  As he approached the airfield Howard switched frequencies to the base’s own air traffic service. Then, finally, he did get a response.

  “Baker Six Two, cleared for approach and landing, runway zero two with immediate taxi to the OSA.”

  “Control, say again? Taxi to OSA? I have no munitions malfunctions but require immediate medical assistance for Squadron Leader Dawlish.”

  “Baker Six Two, I repeat, your orders are to taxi to the OSA.”

  That was all he could get out of them, meaningless as it sounded. The OSA was the Ordnance Safety Area, a remote corner of the airfield where aircraft would head if they were forced to land with bombs that had been primed but had failed to separate. It was as far from any other structure—and the help that Teddy required—as it was possible to get.

  Howard was now on final approach. He briefly considered taxiing straight to the operations building, the closest bit of tarmac to where any medics would likely turn up, but if he did then he’d be on a court martial by the end of the day. Like thousands of military personnel before him, he had to assume, for right or for wrong, that incomprehensible orders were being given for a reason.

  He landed halfway down the runway, way past his optimum touch-down point. With Teddy still jabbering in his ears it was a wonder he hadn’t crashed altogether. Reluctantly he steered onto the left hand taxiway, then headed to the fifty yard square of tarmac that formed the OSA.

  There were vehicles there, army tr
ucks, but he didn’t recognise the unit markings, and they weren’t from the base’s own protection force. He stopped short of them then began the process to shut down the aircraft’s systems, watching the gauges carefully so that the engines’ pressure readings would never outpace the rpm as they spooled down. As a result, he had his head down in the cockpit when the troops climbed out of the trucks and surrounded the aircraft, and it was only when he looked up again that he saw over a dozen rifles aimed at the cockpit. Some were aimed at him, some were aimed at the back seat, at Teddy.

  “What the hell?” he said, but one of the troops had already stepped forward and activated the canopy latch. The glass tunnel that had housed him and Teddy for the last four hours slid back on its pneumatic rails, exposing them to the cold East Anglia air. Another two soldiers came forward with the wheeled ladder that was used to access both crew seats. They fitted it in place against the attachment points just below the canopy frame, then stood back.

  “Get out now please, Squadron Leader Shale.”

  Howard disconnected his oxygen hose and began to unstrap. Every instinct in his body was telling him not to comply, that they had no right to do this and order him around at gunpoint, but he knew that if he dissented, and it turned out they were acting for a good reason, he would be in trouble beyond his worst imaginings. So he clambered out of the cockpit and onto the ledge at the top of the ladder. And that was when he saw Teddy.

  Teddy was alive, but barely recognisable as human, let alone as himself. His face was caved in, his nose and mouth obliterated amongst a mass of blood and bruising, and his eyes, wide open despite the devastation around them, were contorted in abject terror. He was rocking back and forth in his seat, having seemingly screamed himself into exhaustion, and the instrument panels and fixtures around him had all been destroyed, glass smashed and metal dented, the once delicate instruments dripping with blood and pulverised flesh. He must have hit his head against the panel until his skull broke in order to have done that much damage, both to it and to himself.