Avenger Read Online Free PDF Page A

over only six months of the summer of '40, the Canadians had racked up eighty-eight confirmed kills, sixty-seven in the Battle of Britain alone. But they had lost seventeen pilots, the KIAs (killed in action), and all but three were Canucks.
    Fifty-five years later Steve Edmond rose from his office desk and crossed once again, as he had done so many times down the years, to the photo on the wall. It did not contain all the men he had flown with; some had been dead before others arrived. But it showed the seventeen Canadians at Duxford one hot and cloudless day in late August at the height of the battle.
    Almost all gone. Most of them KIA during the war. The faces of boys from nineteen to twenty-two stared out, vital, cheerful, expectant, on the threshold of life, yet mostly never destined to see it.
    He peered closer. Benzie, flying on his wingtip, shot down and killed over the Thames estuary on 7 September, two weeks after the photo. Solanders, the boy from Newfoundland, dead the next day.
    Johnny Latta and Willie McKnight, standing side by side, would die wingtip to wingtip somewhere over the Bay of Biscay in January 1941.
    "You were the best of us all, Willie," murmured the old man. McKnight was the first ace and double ace, the 'natural': nine confirmed kills in his first seventeen days of combat, twenty-one air victories when he died, ten months after his first mission, aged just twenty-one.
    Steve Edmond had survived to become fairly old and extremely rich, certainly the biggest mining magnate in Ontario. But all through the years he had kept the photo on the wall, when he lived in a shack with a pick for company, when he made his first million dollars, when (especially when) Forbes magazine pronounced him a billionaire.
    He kept it to remind him of the terrible fragility of that thing we call life. Often, looking back, he wondered how he survived. Shot down the first time, he had been in hospital when 242 Squadron left in December 1941 for the Far East. When he was fit again, he was posted to Training Command.
    Chafing at the bit, bombarding higher authority with requests to fly combat again, he had finally been granted his wish in time for the Normandy landings, flying the new Typhoon ground-attack fighter-bomber, very fast and very powerful, a fearsome tank-killer.
    The second time he was shot down was near Remagen as the Americans stormed across the Rhine. He was among a dozen British Typhoons giving them cover in the advance. A direct hit in the engine gave him a few seconds to gain height, lose the canopy and throw himself out of the doomed aeroplane before it blew up.
    The jump was low and the landing hard, breaking both legs. He lay in a daze of pain in the snow, dimly aware of round steel helmets running towards him, more keenly aware that the
    Germans had a particular loathing of Typhoons and the people he had been blowing apart were an SS-Panzer division, not known for their tolerance.
    A muffled figure stopped and stared down at him. A voice said, "Well look here." He let out his pent breath in relief. Few of Adolf's finest spoke with a Mississippi drawl.
    The Americans got him back across the Rhine dazed with morphine and he was flown home to England. When the legs were properly set, he was judged to be blocking up a bed needed for fresh in comers from the front, so he was sent to a convalescent home on the South Coast, there to hobble around until repatriation to Canada.
    He enjoyed Dilbury Manor, a rambling Tudor pile steeped in history, with lawns like the green baize of a pool table and some pretty nurses. He was twenty-five that spring and carried the rank of Wing Commander.
    Rooms were allocated at one per two officers, but it was a week before his room-mate arrived. He was about the same age, American, and wore no uniform. His left arm and shoulder had been smashed up in a gunfight in Northern Italy. That meant covert ops, behind enemy lines. Special Forces.
    "Hi," said the newcomer, "Peter Lucas. You