Hal’s intercom connection had been torn loose, and now Cossel braced himself and put his face close to Hal’s ear and shouted, “Cumulonimbus drafts. Hang on!”
Cumulonimbus! The word struck terror into the heart of every flier. Inside one of the towering clouds, up and downdrafts, sometimes existing side by side, could reach hundreds of miles per hour. They could easily tear an airplane to shreds. And the structure of their airplane was badly weakened from its fall over the Channel and hits from shrapnel, cannon, and machinegun fire. But there was no escape. Even if he had a parachute, bailing out into the violence of the white mist would be suicide.
Strangely, he almost wanted to laugh. What the shit difference did it make? If the cloud didn’t kill them, the German fighters would.
And with the thought, the awful numb feeling returned. And something else. Disgust. Why was God doing this to him . . . to them? When he had been certain he was going to die, he had not been afraid. But then . . . then had come a glimmer of hope. Life had been dangled before him like a wonderful bauble. Now it had been yanked away. God-damn-it! If you want me to die, do it! Do it!
Hal gritted his teeth and braced himself, waiting for the inevitable, as the turbulent winds tore at the plane, tossing it up and slamming it down and shaking it as a dog worries a bone. More than once, the B-17 shivered up on one wing and threatened to go over on its back, and, despite his resignation, Hal’s stomach tied itself in convulsive knots. His eyes centered on the altimeter on the bombardier’s control panel, and he watched in fascinated horror as the needle spiraled from ten thousand feet down to six and then soared back up to twelve and all the time the big bird shuddered and shook violently while the cold, moist wind whipped in through the shattered nose and the temperature gauge maintained a constant ten below zero. Within minutes every stationary thing in the compartment was glazed with a glittering sheath of ice. Damn! Now he was going to freeze to death.
Bracing himself, Hal found his heated suit connection and managed to plug it in and turn it up to full heat. But it wasn’t enough, and soon his teeth were chattering.
He saw that Cossel, braced against his desk, was also suffering, and he shouted, “We’ve got to plug that hole.”
Timing his moves to the swings and surges of the plane, he worked his way to the rear of the compartment. Holding on with one hand, he wadded the spilled chute into a windblown bundle. Holding it grimly, he pulled himself back to the nose, where he tried to plug the huge hole in the Plexiglas.
Cossel came to help, and together they fought the icy wind and the pitching, lurching ship. They had to hang on with all their strength to keep from pitching through the shattered nose as the plane floundered in the white tempest. But they managed to stuff most of the chute in the hole, fastening it in place with the shroud lines, cutting the gale-force wind down to an icy breeze.
But ice was also building up on the wings of the struggling plane, and the upsurges were never quite equal to the downdrafts. Each roller-coaster plunge drove the heavy ship closer to the ground. At two thousand feet, they were spewed from the base of the towering cloud into the shadowy light of late afternoon. Below them was the death-gray water of the English Channel. Now his parachute wouldn’t do him any good anyway. Any person forced to plunge into the icy waters would not last more than five minutes. It would be better to die from the fall.
Then Hal lifted his head. Impossible. The three engines were still roaring; the wings were still on; the bird was holding steady, the wings shedding ice in the warmer air of the lower altitude.
Oh Jesus! Was it possible they were going to live? Hal put his forehead against the cold metal of the wall and breathed a silent prayer. Funny. Only minutes ago, he had been cursing God. Now he was thanking him. He could not promise God that he would never curse him again. But he could promise that it would never be for the same reason.
It was warmer now inside the nose compartment, and the ice began to melt. Water trickled along the walls and floor, and the wind, keening in around the plugged hole, rippled rivulets of water back in long streamers.
Cossel motioned to Hal to hook his intercom back up. After he did so, he heard O’Reilly’s voice, “Bailey, you son-of-a-bitch. Where the hell are you?”
Hal hesitated, then pressed his push-to-talk button. “This is Bailey.”
“Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling you for a half-hour.”
Cossel broke in. “We’ve been busy. We used Bailey’s chute to plug up the hole in the nose.”
“His chute?” There was a brief pause while O’Reilly digested the situation. “Okay. Bailey, I think Caplinger’s dead. Go back and see.”
“Yes, sir,” Hal said. He did not want to go. He remembered Adel and how he had looked. He dreaded having to go through that again. But maybe Caplinger wasn’t dead. Maybe he was only wounded. Dying. He forced himself to move.
The mid-section was badly shot up. Edging along the narrow catwalk in the bomb bay, Hal could see light through several jagged holes, and the interior braces and struts were chipped and scarred. The radio room floor was covered with rivet heads and strewn radio parts, and the fuselage was rent with holes through which the wind moaned in shrill fury. A twenty-millimeter shell had hit the radio’s Transmitter Tuning Units and blown them into a tangle of wreckage. By some miracle, Bernard had not been touched, and he was fiddling with the dangling pieces in dazed disbelief.
Hal went past him and into the waist section. Willy Osborne had come up out of the ball turret and was talking to Pitman and the chief. They had broken open their sack of candy and cookies and were sitting on the floor eating, trying to ignore the cold wind that blasted through the waist windows as well as a sieve of holes in the bomber’s skin. The chief’s face and flight jacket were spattered with drying blood that continued to drip from a bandage he had tied around his head.
Hal pointed to the bandage and shouted above the wind, “You all right?”
The chief looked at Hal as though he had been asked a very dumb question; he was still alive, wasn’t he? In his usual flat, unemotional tone, he said, “It ain’t much. Just a crease.”
Hal stared at him for a second, wondering whether the chief would sound the same if the bullet had gone all the way through his head. But his eyes were clear, and he seemed to be all right. Besides, what could he have done?
Then Hal noticed that Pitman was using his left hand to munch on a frozen Milky Way while his blood-soaked right arm rested in his lap at an odd angle. “What about you?”
Pitman glanced at the impassive face of the chief. His face was pale, and sweat beaded his skin. He looked as though he was on the verge of passing out, but he tried to echo the chief’s flat tones as he said, “I’m okay. We got the bleeding stopped.”
“I could give you a morphine shot.”
“Don’t need it.”
Hal stood helplessly, staring at them. Were they really that brave? How would they react if they had to face their ordeal alone, without the peer pressure that demanded a show of bravery? Would the chief still retain the stoicism that his image required? And would Pitman crack without the presence of the chief and Osborne? At least that was one advantage of fighting in the company of other men. They could draw strength from one another . . . if it were strength. Without the incentive of peer pressure, perhaps none of them would even be here. Perhaps there would not even be a war.
His thoughts were interrupted by Osborne, who looked at Pitman and shook his head. “You’re out of it. Damn! Some guys have all the luck.” And Pitman grinned, almost sheepishly.
“What about Caplinger?” Hal asked, and both men sobered.
“He’s dead,” Osborne said. “I crawled back there, and he looked dead to me.”
Again, Hal hesitated. The fact that Osborne had been back to check and had found the tail gunner dead should be enough. He was spared looking
at more blood, more violent death. But suppose Osborne was wrong . . .
“I’ll take a look.” He crawled into the narrow passage leading past the tail wheel back to the gunner’s section. Here the plane had received its worse strafing, and the skin and metal stringers were torn and splintered. Caplinger was lying on the floor, crumpled back away from his guns and the bullet-torn windows.
“Caplinger,” Hal called, but the still form did not stir. Hal crawled closer. Then he was suddenly sick. It was impossible to tell which bullet had killed the tail gunner because Caplinger’s body was slashed and shattered, the floor slippery with blood. A piece of shrapnel had hit the tail gunner in the side of the head and turned that side of his face into a featureless raw red mass. Hal turned and crawled back to the waist.
In the pilot’s compartment, he paused to tap O’Reilly on the shoulder, and the Irishman turned a hard, sweat-streaked face toward him. “Caplinger’s dead,” Hal said.
O’Reilly nodded and went back to fighting the slack controls of the crippled plane. Hal crawled back into the nose section and met Cossel’s inquiring eyes. “He’s dead,” he repeated. “The chief and Pitmen are hurt, but they’ll make it.”
Hal’s fingers were numb and unfeeling as he hooked up his heated suit and the intercom. Then he sat on the floor and leaned his head back against the cold metal of the wall and closed his eyes. He was incredibly weary. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t move. He was numb, and he wanted to stay that way. He wanted to fly on and on over the heaving gray sea forever. He knew what would be waiting for him on the land.
“We’ll be coming up on the coast in a few minutes,” Cossel’s voice said in his earphones. “See if you can get me a fix when we do.”
Hal wiped a hand across his face. “Okay.”
He found his briefcase and thumbed a map of England out and tried to focus his attention. With almost the entire nose obscured by the billowing chute, he was forced to turn to the small side windows for a forward view of the sea and the faint lines of the English coast. They came upon the land, and the throbbing engines lifted them high enough to clear the cliffs and the trees. As they flew across the land, skimming trees and hurdling streams and farms, Hal called out landmarks to Cossel, and the navigator sweated over his equipment to plot a continuous series of fixes that marked their course, past Norwich and Thetford and Cambridge, until they penetrated the haze of dusk near Thorpewood. The other airplanes of the 401st had long since returned, and O’Reilly did not bother to fly the normal landing pattern, choosing to make a straight-in run. They were barely clearing the trees when off to the right O’Reilly spotted the two yellow lights marking the end of the runway. He flipped the big plane into a sliding turn, chopped the power, and the wheels screeched on the concrete.
“Should I fire a red flare?” Polazzo asked.
“Never mind,” O’Reilly answered. “I told the tower.”
“Pitman and the chief were hit,” Hal told him.
“Okay,” O’Reilly said, “Fire the damned flare.”
Sergeant Klein, the crew chief, met them on the hardstand. He stared at the B-17 incredulously, shaking his head. “I gave you guys up,” he said. “What the hell have you done to my airplane?”
‘O’Reilly’s “Mongrel House” would never fly again. The number three engine spattered the concrete with a mixture of oil and gasoline-like blood, and smoke oozed from the feathered number four. The twisted spars and bolt-torn wing roots allowed the wings to sag until the tips were less than a yard off the ground. In addition to the 20mm damage to the wings, half the vertical stabilizer and chunks of the horizontal stabilizers were gone, chewed away as though attacked by a school of angry sharks. The remainder of the fuselage and empennage was honeycombed with jagged slashes and gaping holes. At the midsection, just aft of the bomb bay, the fuselage’s back was broken. The white parachute had spilled from the hole in the shattered nose and was trailing on the ground like a froth of vomit.
“Have it ready in an hour,” O’Reilly told the dismayed crew chief without smiling. “We’re going back and teach them a lesson.”
As they walked away, Hal looked back and then stopped. Chief Gorno and Pitman were already in the ambulance, and the ambulance crew was lifting out a limp, canvas-wrapped bundle. It looked no different than those bodies he had seen under the canvas in London. Like them, it did not move or complain or try to be anything more than it was. It was just there. It was final.
He turned and followed the others.
In the briefing room, O’Reilly and his crew were greeted as though they had returned from the dead. Most of the crews had finished their briefing and departed for the mess hall, but those remaining swarmed around O’Reilly and Fox.
Luke pushed through the crowd. “Where the hell have you been? We gave you up an hour ago.”
“We figured you’d had it, O’Reilly,” Colonel Sutton said. “We should have known better.”
O’Reilly threw him a languid salute. “Sir, I regret to report that one of your aircraft is missing.”
“Missing?”
“That’s right, mon ami, missing a tail and a nose and both wings. What’s left has a lot of brown spots.”
The gathering of airmen laughed and went back to their briefings. Hal did not smile. His admiration for the Irishman had vanished. How could he make jokes when Caplinger was filling out a canvas body bag? He either had no sense of compassion, or he didn’t care. Either way, Hal despised him.
O’Reilly led the way to a vacant briefing table, and they sat down. Luke came over to sit with them. Major Deering sat down and took out a notebook and pencil.
“I saw you come in,” Luke said. “Damned good job, O’Reilly. You’ll get a DFC for this.”
“Just what I need,” O’Reilly said. “I got a commando in London who loves DFCs.”
“What about me, major, sir?” Fox asked. “I’m the one who really did all the work. You should have seen me up there. I was fighting Germans with one hand and flying with the other and evading flak with the other and . . .”
“I’ll kiss you on both cheeks,” Luke said with a grin. “Just like a French General.”
“General, hell,” Fox growled. “Make it a French tomato, and you can keep your friggin’ medal.”
“All the bombs get away all right?” Major Deering asked.
O’Reilly looked at Hal before he replied. “Why don’t you ask the bombardier?”
Luke stopped smiling and turned to face Hal. “What about it, kid?”
Hal couldn’t meet his eyes. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “I didn’t drop them.”
“Well, you didn’t bring them back. That’s for damn sure.”
“O’Reilly salvoed them.”
“O’Reilly? Where the hell were you?”
“I . . .” Hal hesitated, then choked out, “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t drop them.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Luke rose from the bench. “You screwed up?”
“I suppose you could call it that,” Hal answered. “I did try. I was ready to drop, but when I thought of the people down there, I . . . couldn’t do it.”
Luke held the pose, his hands flat on the top of the table, his face contorted. Somehow, he was able to control himself, and he slowly sat down again. “Is that all?” he said. “You sure you didn’t shoot up any of our own planes?”
“He damned near did,” Fox said. “We were jumped by fighters on the way back. He went ape and tried to bail out.”
Hal glanced at Cossel, but the navigator almost imperceptibly shook his head. O’Reilly saw and added, “Cossel didn’t say anything. We know what happened.”
Luke gripped the edge of the table until the knuckles were white. His eyes, when he turned them from O’Reilly to Hal, were sunken points of anger. “I want to see you in my office right
after chow. Understood?”
“Yes,” Hal said. “Understood.”
Luke got up and walked out of the room. Major Deering cleared his throat and asked, “What’s this about fighters?”
O’Reilly told him about the mission from the beginning, including the fact that Hal had done a damned good job in the bomb bay when they had been in trouble from the prop wash.
“In fact,” he said, and there was a note of genuine respect in his voice, “I was going to recommend him for an air medal.”
“You still can,” Major Deering said.
“I could. But after what happened on the bomb run, he can cut his medals out of a can.”
“You don’t need me for this, do you?” Hal asked.
Major Deering shook his head. “No. I guess not.”
Hal got up and walked out into the gathering darkness, where the distant sound of engines on the flight line pounded on his nerves. He walked back to the barracks, past the warm sounds of laughter coming from the mess hall, and the night closed in on him.
CHAPTER 18
The barracks were deserted, dim. Hal moved down the aisle past the silent bunks, past the pot-bellied stoves to his bunk, where he lay down and tried to analyze what was happening to him.
He had never liked flying, even though there was a majesty in skimming the air, a sense of wonder at being able to look down upon the earth. Until now, only God had that privilege. But there had also been the knowledge that he was only a man, and a man could fall, thousands of feet, clawing for purchase that would never come—one of man’s worst nightmares.
Now the fear had gone beyond primordial. Now the fear centered on the reason behind the flight; the knowledge that he was in the sky with a planeload of bombs . . . his bombs, bombs to mangle machines and buildings and men. But was that why he had been unable to drop the bombs? After all, didn’t the people down there deserve killing? Weren’t they the same people who had displayed no compunctions about killing innocent people throughout Europe and Africa? Weren’t they even now on a rampage of destruction? Hadn’t they killed Caplinger?
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