Folks,

Dux:

You lucky devil. I do believe that if you fell into an open sewer you'd come up with a gold watch in both hands. All the better for me...I may still get that fiver one day.

Say, one of you reasonably sober chaps should help Dux repair that floor. No telling what might climb through that during the night. I was down in those dank and dark archives myself briefly this evening looking for a story by C51 and I wondered what had happened to Fritz. Later on I was chatting up a WREN from the Provost's office. She told me Fritz was being transferred to a POW camp in the Outback of Australia. After his tryst with Olga it seems he dragged himself to the authorities, gave himself up as a downed 110 pilot and tearfully begged to be locked behind bars for his own safety. Olga seems to be on the loose tonight and in search of prey. Which means we should all pray.

Speaking of prayer...we can only pray that sometime soon our prodigal pal C51 will have the opportunity to post a new story that is as good as this one, which was his first.

FIRST SORTIE
By: Canuck51
HWH (continued)
Pg. 19
09-02-2002

Ross' head was filled with the sensations within the micro cosmos that was his cockpit. After all this was his first sortie and everything was still quite new to him. The powerful whine of the Merlin engine, the smell of the fuel, the cool air on his face. And the feel of the controls that he grasped rather too tightly. Only hours ago he would have re-written the book on how it could all be done. Just a few weeks ago when his girl had tearfully kissed him goodbye and begged him to return safely, he had thought her quite silly. He glanced at her picture taped to the control panel.

He felt somewhat differently all of a sudden. He was largely oblivious to the vista of patchwork fields that passed beneath him, the azure and cotton through which he floated, and only slightly more aware of the friendlies that surrounded him. In his mind he summoned up the words of experience that the older lads had given him in the previous days. The words he had pretended he didn't need to hear. Older lads. Some would never see 25. The radio in his ears startled him with a sharp:"BANDITS" and snapped him into the present moment. Before he could quite fathom the situation his mates had dispersed in every direction leaving Ross to scan the skies on his own for prey and predator.

Awkwardly at first and then with growing confidence he banked and dove, weaving through the expanse of sky chasing fleeting shapes, even firing a few rounds of ammunition that dispersed into space, no real threat to anyone. Again the radio startled him by blurting out his own name:
"ROSS, BEHIND YOU". A quick glance in the mirror revealed a sleek grey shape bearing down on him, freezing him for what seemed an eternity, and very nearly was, as it rendered him by its mere presence unable to move his hands or feet. "BEHIND YOU ROSS".

This time he reacted only just in time as cannon shells burst past him. Hardly aware of what he was doing, he rolled over, dove steeply, banked, rose again, praying to shake his nemesis from his tail. As he glanced around, he once again took a breath as he watched in near disbelief as the one who would have ended his world burst into flames, victor turned victim at the hands of Ross' flesh and blood guardian angel. The elation that he had expected to feel at the downing of the foe turned out to be only a deep sense of awe.

The fray was soon ended, the squadron regrouped intact, and the flight home made short by the repeated re-enactment of the events of Ross' first encounter with the enemy. His airplane now safely landed, the engine silenced, he jumped onto the sacred earth and stared into the face of his "guardian angel". He realized that he looked at things a little differently now. He had wanted to succeed, to make history or at least to make an impression. To not make a fool of himself. Now he knew that the goal was just to survive and fight again another day. And he had succeeded.
"Thanks mate, I owe you one". "Right then, Ross, the beers are on you".