A moment later, Bernard’s voice came over the silent intercom, “Uh-roger. Still with us.” Hal let his breath out in a long sigh.
A short time later, the ship again hit prop-wash from the group ahead and lurched violently, and again Hal was shot through with fear. The long fall over the channel would live with him forever. It ate into his brain like acid, making him weak and nauseous each time the ship lurched. But he was trapped. There was no place to run and no turning back. O’Reilly would see to that. There was nothing he could do but sweat and fight back the nausea of fear. He wondered if he was the only one. It was the one thing no warrior ever asked another. Each man was left to wonder alone if he was the only coward.
O’Reilly managed to hold their formation on the group leader during a long sweeping curve that took them in from the Baltic Sea over the North German coast. They reached the Initial Point north and west of the Malchiner See and began to swing around on the bomb heading that would keep them clear of Peenemunde, the German’s heavily defended aircraft and missile test site. Hal set his Bomb Rack Selector Switches, then peered ahead, looking for the distant target. In the bright sunshine, it was easy to spot. The groups leading the long column had already reached it, and, at the junction of the blue sky and the brown earth, an ominous black cloud from a barrage of exploding flak was spreading. And on the ground, a gray mushroom of bomb bursts slowly sprouted like cancer, enveloping factories, houses, and fields. Their group completed the turn at the I.P. and leveled out on the bomb run, and O’Reilly edged their low squadron up closer to the Lead squadron.
“We’re dropping on the group lead,” he reminded Hal. “But you better be ready to take over if you have to.”
Ahead of them, the group leader opened his bomb bay doors, and Hal switched their doors open. Without clutching into the autopilot, Hal entered the last of the data into his bombsight and aligned the crosshairs on the target that was already obscured by the bomb bursts from the groups ahead. Now, if the group leader and his deputy got shot down, he could take over in seconds.
He looked up from the sight’s eyepiece and was startled to see that the black cloud of exploding flak was now discernible as a boiling mass of smoke shot through with bursts of red. Hal watched in horrified fascination as group after group edged inexorably toward the cloud, then disappeared into its dark interior, only to emerge a moment later on the far side and glide serenely on toward the distant waters of the Baltic. But not all. Two more B-17s plunged from the darkness of the cloud and plummeted toward the ground in long dives, one of them wrapped in flames. Another big bomber spun lazily, throwing off parts of its stabilizer and wings as it fell, its four propellers beating the air in a futile effort to ward off its inevitable destruction. On the ground far below individual columns of black smoke marked the funeral bier of bombers that had already crashed, while orange bursts of impacting B-17’s were pinpoints of doom. And the airy void was mushroomed with drifting parachutes.
It was beautiful, and it was horrible, a painting by a mad genius . . . the victorious and the vanquished . . . the lucky and the dead.
As his plane was drawn inexorably toward the cloud as though by an awful force, Hal’s mouth grew increasingly dry and hot. Then they too plunged into the darkness, and the ship humped and rolled as the black bursts spewed from fiery mouths that attempted to kill them.
Hal lifted the safety cover and put his finger on the bomb release switch and waited, his eyes locked on the bomb bay of the group leader. When the group lead dropped his bombs, every ship in the group would drop at the same instant, producing a compact bomb pattern. If the group bombardier was good, every bomb would impact the target. But if he made a mistake, they had made the terrible journey for nothing. For the group bombardier, it was a heavy responsibility that Hal was not sure he ever wanted to assume.
While he anxiously waited, he glanced down at the bombs from other groups exploding far below. Men were down there, too. Men who were creating this horror of exploding flak shells. And there were other men down there in that bomb-blasted refinery going through a hell a thousand times worse than his own. Down there, the walls were caving in, and the floor was erupting in a lethal rain of cement and steel. And fire was curling over the wreckage and licking at the flesh of the men trapped inside. Down there were men with dark curly hair and young women wearing caps of gold cloth who would die because of him.
He saw it clearly, and he knew he could not add to it, and his hands began to tremble, and his head felt as though it was filled with fire.
Caplinger was yelling over the intercom that they had lost three ships and that another was on fire when a voice cut in, screaming with a high-pitched urgency. “No! I can’t! I can’t do it!”
“Who the hell is that?” O’Reilly shouted. “Caplinger, shut up!”
Caplinger’s voice stopped abruptly, but the strange voice continued without stopping. “I can’t do it. I can’t do it.”
“Bailey? What’s wrong? What the hell is it?”
“They’re dying! Jesus Christ, what’s the matter with you? Can’t you see? They’re dying? We’ve got to stop. We’ve got to!”
“Cossel!” O’Reilly screamed. “See what the hell’s wrong. Bailey! Move your ass! Get on that sight.”
The number three engine suddenly erupted with a shattering blast of oil and smoke. The plane had been porpoising through the heavy concentration of flak, and now it shook with a vibration that threatened to tear the engines loose. O’Reilly stopped talking to fight the controls, cutting the ignition and fuel to the crippled engine while Fox pressed the feathering switch and closed the cowl flaps. As the giant propeller stalled and twisted to full feather, the ship stopped vibrating, but the other three engines were forced into a deeper roar to hold the ship in formation. Cossel had started to move up to Hal, but the sudden lurch had thrown him against the navigation table. And all the time, Hal’s high-pitched voice screamed incoherently in the intercom and echoed in his ears.
“Hal.” Cossel yelled over the intercom, “Settle down. Settle down.”
Fox’s voice cut in. “There go the leads.”
“Bailey.” O’Reilly snapped. “Hit the salvo.”
Hal half rose in the seat. “I can’t. I can’t do it!”
O’Reilly’s voice broke in. “Cossel, hit the God-damned salvo. Quick.”
Cossel shoved Hal aside and reached for the bomb control switch. No! He couldn’t! He must not reach it!
Hal grabbed Cossel’s hand and held it away with all his strength. He came off the seat, still clutching Cossel’s arm, and they thrashed to the floor, tearing loose heated suit and intercom connections. Neither of them felt the ship lurch as O’Reilly pulled the emergency bomb salvo handle in the cockpit, and the bombs let go. Hal was still struggling to hold onto Cossel’s arm, his oxygen-starved lungs gasping for air when a soft, pleasant blackness engulfed him.
CHAPTER 17
Hal drifted out of the darkness, reluctantly. Cossel was bending over him, holding Hal’s oxygen mask in place. Hal reached up and held the mask himself and sat up.
Cossel pulled aside his mask and leaned close and shouted. “You all right?”
Hal nodded. Cossel took one more close look at Hal’s eyes, then went back to his table and began taking readings with the drift meter.
Hal sat quietly, feeling the tremor of the airplane. He looked around the familiar confines of the nose compartment, at Cossel working at his navigation, at the passage leading to the pilot’s compartment, at the shrapnel hole, at the bombing panel, at the bombsight, and beyond the Plexiglas to the clear air and distant towering clouds, and he was more afraid than he had ever been. He knew that he would soon have to face O’Reilly and then Luke.
When he moved back into his seat behind the bombsight, he could see no sign of the rest of the formation, only the blue sky and the mottled earth of Germany. A distant
line of cumulonimbus clouds marked a cold front.
The prop of the damaged engine was still feathered, and smoke was pouring from the number four engine. Even O’Reilly, with all his skill, had found it impossible to keep their crippled plane with the rest of the formation, and they had slowly drifted behind. They were down to fifteen thousand feet, and although now they were in no danger, a lone bomber would be a sitting duck if the Luftwaffe spotted them.
Hal plugged in his earphones, but there was none of the usual intercom chatter. Instead, the line seemed to be charged with electric tension as though every member of the crew was holding his breath.
When they reached a cold front, they passed between the towering walls of a cloud canyon, which dwarfed the plane and made their feeling of total isolation complete. With the huge cloud walls closing in and the dark shadow of the earth far below, there was a feeling of eerie isolation, a sense of impending disaster. The canyon narrowed, and they plunged into the darkness of a shadowy cloud tunnel, then burst out into the bright sunshine. Osborne broke the thick silence. “Bandits,” he said quietly. “Six o’clock low.”
They were ME-109’s, nine of them; they came arrowing up from the ground. Up. Up. Past the bomber, where they took up a position above and behind. Waiting. Silhouetted against the mass of billowing clouds, looking over the big crippled bird with the insolence of a pack of wolves sniffing the wind before making their kill. When they were satisfied that the wounded bomber was indeed unprotected by escorting fighters, they eased into a queue.
Hal watched out of the port window, fascinated by the chilling beauty of the scene. It was hard to believe that within the next thirty seconds, they could all be dead.
He swung down the reticule sight for his turret guns and slewed them to firing position. But could he fire? He remembered the last time he had fired a gun at a living thing.
In the fields behind Fairview, where they curved up into the Sierra foothills, Luke and his dad had occasionally taken him deer or rabbit hunting when he was in his early teens. But he had never liked it. The idea of shooting a deer had not appealed to him, and the one time, under his father’s guidance, he had shot a rabbit, it had sickened him. The rabbit had not died instantly but had jerked and twitched until his father had stomped on its head with the heel of his heavy boot. Hal turned aside and threw up, and both Luke and his dad laughed and said he would get used to it. Instead, he had never gone hunting again.
But this was different. Now he was the rabbit, and they were the hunters, and there was something coldly impersonal about shooting at the darting machines with their invisible pilots. This was self-defense against an enemy who would be trying desperately to kill all of them.
Then Caplinger shouted on the intercom, “Here they come!”
One by one, the German fighters put their noses down and bored in on the bomber in a long, sweeping pursuit curve, the experienced pilots throttling back to improve their aim and time on target. Sparks played along the leading edge of their wings as they triggered their guns, and the bomber shuddered with the impact of exploding 20mm shells. Then the B-17 vibrated like the tail of an angry rattlesnake as every gunner who could bring his guns to bear opened up, hurling a cone of fire at the fighters as they made their pass and dived under the bomber.
The intercom was alive with a constant chatter of voices: “. . . seven o’clock . . . seven o’clock high . . . watch it! Watch it! . . . I hit him . . . I saw smoke . . . You see that, Polazzo? . . . under . . . under . . . look out . . . six o’clock . . . Osborne . . . got it . . . got it . . . you mother . . . three o’clock . . . coming in . . . five o’clock . . . look out . . . hey . . . got you, you bastard . . . coming under, Bailey . . . Jesus . . . God damn stabilizer’s a sieve . . . six o’clock high . . . Bailey! Bailey! They’re coming under! Two o’clock!”
Cossel opened up with a cheek gun, and its hammering roar startled Hal. The sound, so close behind him, seemed to be inside his head, and his nostrils were filled with the acrid odor of burnt cordite.
He had just looked into the reticules of the gunsight when he saw them . . . flashing streaks moving at almost three hundred miles per hour, sweeping close past the bomber at the end of their pursuit curve and banking up and away. He got his sights lined up on the third ship of the queue of attackers, and seemingly of their own accord the twin .50s in the chin stuttered in a long burst. He didn’t wait to see whether he had scored a hit but quickly slued the guns onto a new target and triggered off a short burst. This time he saw a piece of the fighter’s vertical stabilizer shatter, and the fighter yawed crazily before it rolled into a split-S and dived for safety. He felt a sudden thrill of satisfaction. “Come on! Come on, you bastards!” he muttered over and over.
A 20mm shell hit their left wing, blowing away most of the aileron and flaps. Another ripped away a chunk of the wingtip. A third smashed into the right wing near its root, tearing away hydraulic lines and spewing oil over the wing and fuselage.
“God-damn-it,” Osborne yelled. “I’ve got oil all over my port. I can’t see a damn thing.”
“Shoot anyway,” Caplinger shouted. “They’re all over the fuckin’ place.”
Suddenly it was quiet as the fighters passed out of range and formed at two o’clock high for another pass. The silence was like a prayer. They were still alive—a miracle. The three engines were still churning. The big bird, although badly wounded, was still steady as a rock. Nobody could believe it.
“Here they come,” Caplinger shouted. “Come on. Come on, you bastards!”
Savagely Hal twisted the handles on the gunsight, and the twin .50s slued down and to the left where he expected the German fighters to sweep past after their attack. “Come on, you bastards. Come on! Come on!”
Again, the intercom came alive. The big B-17, already trembling with the vibration of its guns firing, shuddered and staggered as though it had run into an invisible wall as a burst of cannon fire raked the fuselage, blasting away skin and stringers and control cables.
Suddenly the bomber bucked violently, and, at the same time, a voice rose in a scream, “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” There was no mistaking the meaning.
“Caplinger,” O’Reilly shouted. “Is that you?”
His only reply was a shuddering moan.
“Caplinger.” It was O’Reilly’s voice, overriding the chatter. “Caplinger. Answer me.”
O’Reilly’s voice was from another place another time. Hal was lost in the battle, sweating with exertion, straining for a glimpse of the arrowing fighters in the split second they were in range, struggling to line up the sight of the chin turret, thrilling to the roar of the twin 50s, yelling with fury when the enemy sped out of range.
As he swung the guns to search for another target, Hal was dimly conscious that the bomber was again staggered by cannon fire. On the intercom, voices were screaming, but he hardly heard them. There was no fear. There was only fury. Everything was forgotten except the duel between himself and the fighters. “Now I’ve got you, you son-of-a-bitch . . . get in there . . . get in the little white lines . . . there! There! . . . a little more . . . now . . . take it! . . . take it! . . . Yeeahhh! . . . Yeeaaahhh! . . . Yeeeaaahhh!” He was screaming into his oxygen mask! Firing! Firing! Time after time, attempting to destroy the fleeting shadows that flicked past.
Abruptly the Plexiglas of the bomber’s nose exploded in a rush of air and splintering fragments, and Hal was hurled back in a jarring fall that tore away his oxygen mask. Everything that was not secured in the nose compartment—the navigation maps and charts, Hal’s notebooks and papers—were plastered against the rear bulkhead, the dangling hoses and cords whipping in an icy blast.
Hal groped for his parachute, but the torrent of icy wind made his eyes water, and he was unable to locate it. He searched frantically for the chest pack, clawing at the floor. Then his fingers touched the rough canvas cover, a
nd he dragged it to him with a choking sob. He had turned to fight his way toward the escape hatch when he felt Cossel’s arms grab him from behind. He struggled to free himself, and the chute slipped from his grasp, and he fought to retrieve it, thrusting with all his strength against the pinioning arms. He managed to wrench one arm free, and he grabbed the chute by the release ring and tried to pull it to him. He heard Cossel shouting something that was whipped away by the biting wind. Then his arms were wrenched violently, pulling the ring loose from the chute, and the white nylon spilled into the wind and immediately plastered against the rear bulkhead.
Hal stared dumbly at the D-ring clutched in his hand and at the spilled chute, and the fear drained from him to be replaced by a numb resignation. Without the chute, he was dead. Somehow, instead of sending him into a blind panic, the hopelessness of the situation made him calm. At that moment, he was not afraid to die.
Suddenly Hal noticed that the ship had stopped trembling. Everything seemed strangely hushed. Then he saw why. Outside, the world was a snowy, unmoving wilderness. Fog! To escape the fighters, O’Reilly had plunged into one of the towering nimbus clouds!
Hal stared in stunned surprise while the wind coming through the shattered nose beat a wet spray over him. Then he almost shouted with joy! It was over! He was going to live!
Or was he? They had to come out of the cloud cover sooner or later. And the killers would be waiting. They would sweep in to finish the job, and with them would come the fear. Without a parachute, there was no escape!
Suddenly he began shaking with indignation. It wasn’t fair that a man who had prepared himself should not be allowed to die. Soon he would have to go through it all again.
As though reading his mind, the B-17 gave a violent lurch and staggered as though struck by a giant hand. Hal and Cossel were slammed to the floor, then immediately hurled against the wall. Oh God! They were being hit again. The ship was coming apart!
Rush to Glory Page 25
