Rush to Glory

by Robert L Hecker

  Maybe she was resigned, as he was. He wasn’t afraid? Not anymore. It was as though something inside him had died. After he had decided to fly, he had moved beyond fear into a stoic fatalism. He was prepared for death. It was not a pleasant feeling. But it was better than fear. So why were his hands trembling?

  O’Reilly grinned and said, “Gets worse, doesn’t it, Bailey? Just wait until we warm up the engines.”

  For a moment, Hal forgot about the mission. Why couldn’t O’Reilly lay off? “Look, O’Reilly,” he said, his voice tight. “I’ve had enough of you and your stupid remarks.”

  “Me? Bull shit!” O’Reilly shot back. “You’re the one with the problem.”

  “Yeah? Well, it’s my problem. So, get off my back.”

  O’Reilly’s eyes narrowed. “Okay, Bailey. We’ll settle this after the mission. Think about it.” He picked up the rest of his flying gear and moved away down the corridor to join Luke and Betty Axley, who were the center of a group of fliers. O’Reilly looked back at Hal and said something, and they laughed. All except Betty Axley.

  Hal bent down to pull on his flying boots and discovered that his hands were still shaking. But now it was due to anger. He would show them; he would show all of them.

  He started to his feet and turned toward the group at the stove, his fists clenched, but Cossel moved up quickly and took him by the arm. “Hey, take it easy.”

  Hal tried to twist his arm loose. “He wants to fight. All right. I’ll kill the bastard. I’ll kill him.”

  Cossel twisted Hal around until he forced Hal to look at his face. “That’s right,” he said, his voice low and intense. “Get mad. Mad enough to kill. And stay that way. That’s what he wants, don’t you see? He’ll ride you like he’s got spurs. He’ll call you every damn name he can think of. And if he has to, he’ll beat the crap out of you. But you’ll stay mad, killing mad. Now do you understand, you stupid bastard?”

  Hal stared at Cossel, in bewilderment. Then he backed off, shaking his head. “You shouldn’t have told me,” he said. “You shouldn’t have told me.”

  “I couldn’t let you get in a fight right now. Besides, it wouldn’t have lasted the whole mission. O’Reilly can’t keep bugging you forever. It loses its edge after a while.”

  “Maybe he could. I’ve seen him work. I just never thought it could work on me.”

  Hal sat down on the hard, wooden bench stretched between the lockers and looked at O’Reilly. The Irishman was laughing, telling some risqué joke that had the others holding their sides. The man was a master. The smooth talk, the needling, the brashness, even belligerence were weapons that O’Reilly used to make the other men forget their fear.

  “Amazing,” he whispered. “He uses everything.”

  Cossel nodded. “Whatever works. There’s only one thing he hasn’t been able to use, and that’s sex. But I think he’d try that if we ever get a scared fag in the outfit.”

  Hal looked toward O’Reilly again. “Does he ever turn it off? I mean . . . what’s he really like?”

  Cossel grinned. “Who knows? But I’ll tell you this. What I said in the mess hall about him being sick a couple of times himself wasn’t just a lot of bull.”

  “I’m glad you told me,” Hal said. “And you’re right about being mad. It wouldn’t have lasted.”

  “That’s what I figured. Now you’ve got something to think about that’ll keep your mind occupied a lot longer.”

  “Oh? What?”

  “You’ve got O’Reilly.”

  Cossel turned away, and Hal finished putting on his flying clothing and went out under the stars. Instead of waiting for the truck, he elected to walk to their ship. He wanted to think. Betty Axley and O’Reilly. Funny. They were both doing the same thing, each in his own way. And Cossel? Maybe not as deliberately. But it was there. And in the process, they were taking their minds off the beast. My God. It was the oldest law in existence. In helping others, you helped yourself. But you couldn’t let yourself think of it that way. It had to be selfless, or it was rotten, a mockery. Which was it for O’Reilly? Was he doing it for the others? Or for himself? Did he even know?

  Hal laughed grimly. Cossel was right. Now he had the O’Reilly enigma to occupy his mind.

  Their new airplane was a virgin B-17G, as yet unnamed. Chief Gorno, who had a bandage around his head beneath his flight helmet, introduced Hal to the new tail gunner and the new waist gunner.

  The tail gunner’s name was Jose Ortiz, and he was from Albuquerque, New Mexico. He said he was eighteen, but he looked younger. He had deep mahogany skin as though he had spent a lot of time in the sun. This was his first mission, and he seemed cool enough, although once Hal saw him lift a small crucifix suspended from a chain around his neck and press it quickly to his lips.

  The new waist gunner was a tall, slender kid with acne and big hands. His name was Clifford MacGruder. He had a strident voice with a hard New England twang. His nervousness took the form of repeated questions that were getting on Chief Gorno’s nerves, even though the chief answered every question patiently.

  When O’Reilly and Luke approached with Betty Axley and introduced her, the gunners looked at her skeptically. After O’Reilly and the chief helped her pick out a flak suit and she went into the plane via the waist door, Bernard said to Hal, “Excuse me, sir. But how come they didn’t send a man?”

  “She’s experienced. She’s been on missions with the RAF.”

  “Shit,” Chief Gorno said. “No man would be stupid enough to set foot in a B-17.”

  MacGruder said, “Yeah? What about us?”

  “We don’t count. We’ve got to go.”

  “Yeah,” Willy Osborne said, “but ain’t women supposed to be bad luck?”

  The chief spat disgustedly. “That’s on a ship.”

  Ortiz said, “We call this a ship.”

  “Not me,” Polazzo said, shouldering one of his .50 caliber guns. “I call it a flying coffin.”

  Ortiz’s eyes grew big. “Oh,” he said.

  Polazzo looked at the chief and winked. They were veterans. They could pretend that it was all a game, even though they knew that, inside, each of them was fighting a dark knot of fear.

  The preflight went off smoothly. The oily metal skin of the bombs felt icy to Hal’s hands as he checked to see that each 500-pounder hung properly on its stainless-steel release shackle. The oxygen system was charged, 425 psi, ready for use, and the gunners had plenty of ammunition.

  He was running a preflight on the bombsight when Betty Axley, encumbered by a heated suit, Mae West, and parachute harness, struggled down through the narrow passage from the cockpit and into the nose section. She paused for a moment to watch Cossel, who was checking the Gee box.

  “I see you use the British navigation system, too,” she said. “I thought in daylight you’d use pilotage.”

  “Mostly a combination,” Cossel said. “We use the Gee box and radio fixes until daylight. Then we confirm with radio fixes, pilotage, and D.R. When we’re out of accurate Gee range, it’s almost all radio and D.R.”

  “Not pilotage?”

  “If we can see the ground. Weather obscures it most of the time.”

  She moved up beside Hal and knelt to watch him check the bombsight. “So that’s the famous Mark-Fifteen Norden bombsight.”

  “That’s it,” he said curtly.

  She looked up from the bombsight. “What is it? Are you angry?”

  “Angry? No, of course not.” But he was. It took all his will power to keep from lashing out at her.

  But she would not let it alone. “I told you I was going to fly on one of your missions.”

  She shouldn’t have said it. She shouldn’t have come down to the greenhouse. His rage exploded like an eruption of lava. “Why today? Why the hell today? I told you I wa
s going to fly. You don’t have to hold my damn hand. Get back up there with O’Reilly. That’s where you want to be anyway.”

  She stared at him, stricken. Then her lips tightened. “Very well.” She straightened and went back into the passageway.

  Hal saw Cossel looking at him. “Bailey,” Cossel said. “You are a real jerk. She likes you.”

  Hal choked back a retort. What business was it of his? He stared at Cossel long enough for him to get the message, then turned back to his preflight. But as he worked his way through the checklist, he thought about what Cossel had said. Was it possible that Betty had chosen to fly in the lead ship only because she wanted to be with him, not because she wanted to check up on him? If so, he was a jerk.

  But he would never know for sure. After the way he had spouted off, she surely would never speak to him again. Once again, he had driven away someone he cared for.

  For once, all checkouts went smoothly. Usually, the predawn coldness was sparkled by several gritty voices cursing at cold, unyielding metal or a recalcitrant gauge or indicator. But this time, the air was quiet. Even so, there was an ominous quality in the perfection, as though the ship itself sensed that there was something different about this mission. But none of the crewmen voiced the thought. It was as though talking would break the spell of good luck. It would be broken soon enough.

  The engine-start flare went up, and the silent darkness was shattered by the sharp bark of B-17 engines that quickly settled into a pervasive roar. Then one-by-one, their engines belched into life.

  It was Willy Osborne who challenged the mood. He was singing “The Night That Paddy Murphy Died” over the intercom when they finally struggled off the runway and climbed into the rendezvous position over the Northampton Buncher beacon. But nobody joined in, and soon, Willy’s voice trailed into silence.

  It took almost an hour of Cossel sweating over the Gee box and radio compass while constantly calling directions to Luke before the group’s forty-eight B-17s, and the three spares were all more or less tucked in their proper slots, and they fired the flare to tell the group they were easing out of the assembly zone to join the column at the coast. Luke and Cossel jockeyed the 401st into their slot in the division column, and they began the long climb for altitude. It was clear over the channel, and Hal could see where the blue water widened into the North Sea. Far in the distance, rimming the coast of Holland like a wreath, a line of towering cumulonimbus clouds reached up as though to bar their way.

  The intercom clicked, and O’Reilly’s voice drawled, “Cossel, ol’ boy, how high would you estimate those nimbos?”

  There was an answering click. “Thirty thousand, at least.”

  “I’ll bet some of the bastards’ll hit fifty,” Luke said.

  “We’ll have to find ourselves a corridor.”

  “The hell with them clouds,” Polazzo’s voice said. “The only corridor we want is that flak corridor.”

  “We’ll have to follow the column,” Cossel said. “They’ll probably stick to the flak corridor as close as they can.”

  “If we get in the clouds,” Luke said, “we’re gonna scatter to hell and gone.”

  They passed over the English Channel at ten thousand feet, and Hal went back to pull the safety pins on the bombs. As he worked his way through the cockpit, he saw that Betty Axley was standing between the pilot and co-pilot seats behind the center pedestal. Her oxygen mask was plugged into the top gunner’s selector, which meant that Polazzo would have to use his turret cylinders. With the A-9A selector, they should be good for three hours. Hal made a mental note to keep close tabs on the engineer to make sure he recharged periodically from the main system.

  At thirteen thousand feet, they test-fired their guns, put on their flak suits, and went on oxygen. At eighteen thousand feet, the four big props boring into the subzero air began throwing vapor off their whirling tips. They passed over the Belgian coast at twenty-two thousand feet trailing thick contrails, but the clouds ahead loomed above them. The lead group found a passage between the white giants and, like bats entering a cave, group after group of Fortresses disappeared into the wall of clouds.

  Then it was the 401st’s turn, and they followed the column between towering walls of solid white that were marbled with rifts of ominous darkness. The Forts in the group ahead of them were dwarfed by the massive walls of the deep cloud canyon. And beyond them were smaller dots of the other groups who, obediently, were following the division column down the narrowing passage. From time to time, Forts on the edge of their group would scrape the walls of the canyon, plunging the outermost B-17s into the solid-appearing whiteness until they re-emerged when the canyon widened.

  Cossel came up to crouch beside Hal, who was staring at the strange sight. He said on the intercom, “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “You should put this in your poem.”

  “Never mind the friggin’ poems,” Luke said. “Keep your eye on that group ahead of us. Ortiz, how’re the rest of ’em making out back there?”

  “They’re pretty well strung out, sir.”

  Luke cursed. “O’Reilly, hit the VHF and tell ’em to close it up.”

  “Be glad to, Mr. Bailey, sir. However, you are no doubt aware that the general in charge of this safari will no doubt be monitoring the VHF, and I do believe he will not take kindly to breaking radio silence.”

  “Screw the general.” Luke had forgotten that Betty Axley could hear him.

  “If that is the order, major, sir, I’ll be leaving you at the border. I don’t want my career screwed up.”

  There was a brief pause as Luke evaluated O’Reilly’s hint that breaking radio silence could jeopardize his career. “Okay,” he said. “Don’t identify yourself. He won’t know who it is.”

  “Neither will the rest of the group.”

  “Just tell the bastards to close it up. Let everybody hear it. Every group in the column’s strung out like a bunch of friggin’ ducks.”

  “Roger, sir. If you will excuse me a moment.”

  The intercom went dead, and Hal knew O’Reilly was talking on the VHF and that every plane in the sky could hear him calling for the ships to close it up. But the command was useless. Ahead of them, the canyon pinched down to a solid front, and the groups plunged into the sheer white walls and vanished. To avoid collisions, every plane widened the formation until there was no protection of massed firepower, leaving the individual planes sitting ducks for a fighter attack.

  “There goes the primary,” Cossel said. “We’ll never be able to hit it now.”

  “The hell we won’t,” Luke snarled. “O’Reilly, tell my men to close it up.”

  “Shall I identify?”

  “Yeah, go ahead. There’s so damned much jabber on the VHF we’ll be lucky if any of them hear us.”

  “Uh-roger.”

  “Ortiz, keep your eyes open.”

  “Uh-roger, sir.”

  “That goes for the rest of you, too. I’m gonna see if we can get through this stuff without losing our formation.”

  Hal glanced at the altimeter. The needle indicated twenty-seven thousand. They would have to level out soon. With a full bomb load and most of their full gas capacity remaining, the heavy Forts would not be able to go much higher, and the cloud masses still towered high above them.

  “I just got a flash, mon capitaine,” O’Reilly said. “We’re to hit the secondary.”

  Luke’s answer was flat. “Crap.” He would have to be mad as hell. A big story on the BBC about how he heroically led his group against one of the most difficult targets in the ETO would give his career a tremendous boost. Instead, the weather was knocking him out of the box.

  “You want me to plot a course to the secondary?” Cossel asked.

  Luke did not answer, and O’Reilly laughed. “Why, Cossel, old clod, are you implying tha
t you know where we are?” With a pretty girl looking over his shoulder, O’Reilly was in top form.

  “I’ll bet you ten bucks I can give you our position within half a mile.”

  “I’ll take that,” O’Reilly answered. “Would you mind stepping out to make sure?”

  “Shut up,” Luke said. “Ortiz, can you still see the group?”

  “Most of them, sir. The clouds seem to be thinning out a little.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I thought. We’ll hit the primary.”

  “Alone?” Willy Osborne’s voice echoed his alarm, and Hal could picture him in the ball turret, trapped between the earth and the sky. He was always alone. Strange that he should be the one to voice the question everyone else was thinking.

  “Somebody else’ll be there,” Luke said. “They can’t all be chicken.”

  “Cock-a-doodle-do,” Bernard said. “Let’s hit that little ol’ railroad out in the boondocks.”

  There was a pause. Hal could almost read his brother’s mind. Luke was thinking of a way to voice his command that would most impress Betty Axley. “If we can hit those rail-yards,” he said, “We could save a lot of lives. Those guys on the ground are depending on us.”

  “Screw the jerks on the ground,” Willy Osborne said.

  “Osborne,” Luke snapped. “Shut up.”

  “Something else, fearless leader, sir,” O’Reilly said. “The reason they called off the primary was because the wind has shifted. With this weather front, the only way you can get in is upwind.”

  “That wind is well over a hundred knots,” Cossel said. “We can’t sit over the Ruhr like a flock of gooney birds.”

  The intercom was silent for a moment. Then Luke’s voice grated through. “Ortiz, we’re breaking out of this stuff. Keep your eye on our guys. If anybody breaks off, let me know.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Bailey,” O’Reilly said, “I always thought you were a crazy bastard, but this time you’ve completely lost your mind.