Glide Path [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONEFlying Officer Alan Bishop found it singularly peaceful on this tiny metal platform a hundred feet above the North Sea. The fact that Adolf Hitler was undoubtedly preparing some sort of mischief over there on the Continent, and that it was his duty to watch out for it, seemed quite irrelevant on such a warm autumn afternoon. Nothing moved in the whole expanse of sea and sky; even the big concave dish of the radar scanner had ceased its restless searching and was staring straight toward Holland. If it did i.tart to spin, Alan would have to move smartly; it was not very praaical to share the platform with a whirling ten-foot saucer standing on its rim.Below him, the rest of the station appeared equally relaxed. But this, Alan knew, was an illusion. In the wooden hut at the base of the tower, Sergeant Campbell was attacking a defective wave monitor with liberal doses of solder and profanity. Over there inside that mysterious barbed-wire enclosure, Flight Lieutenant Hicks, Royal New Zealand Air Force, was assembling his Gee installation - whatever that might be. F/0 Bishop resented the existence of any radar device that was secret to him, but all his attempts to winkle information out of Hicks had been whoUy unsuccessful. At least, he consoled himself, by the look of the antenna arrays it was only old-fashioned meter-wave-length stuff, so it couldn't be very interesting.There were probably fifty people hard at work within a hundred yards of him, but the only signs of life were the bored Service Policeman on duty at the main gate and a Woman's Auxiliary Air Force operator doing some voluntary gardening on the skimpy flower bed around the Orderly Room. At least, Alan assumed it was voluntary; the WAAF Commanding Officer had not, as far as he knew, started doling out horticultural exercises to criminous airwomen.9