Rush to Glory

by Robert L Hecker

  “Bernard, take a look back there.”

  A moment later, Bernard answered, excitement in his voice. “The chief and the new guy are dead, and the ball turret’s gone, tore clean away. It’s gone. There ain’t nothin’ . . .”

  “So, it’s gone,” Luke interrupted. “Get back to your radio.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bernard answered, and was silent.

  “Ortiz,” Cossel said. “You all right?”

  “Yes,” Ortiz answered. He sounded ill. “I’m all right. My oxygen’s out, though. I’m on a walk-around bottle.”

  “You’d better come up here,” Hal told him, “Before that bottle gives out.”

  But Luke countermanded, “Stay in the waist. Use the chief’s oxygen connection.”

  Ortiz hesitated, then answered, “I . . . can’t do that.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “The new guy . . . MacGruder. He’s all over the place.”

  There was a pause before Luke said, “Okay, come up here. We aren’t going to get any fighters in this.”

  Hal was about to turn back to the bombsight’s optics when the big ship shuddered again and yawed violently to the right. The surging movement was accompanied by a rising whine from the number four engine and a mounting vibration that threatened to shake the plane’s wings loose.

  “Cut it!” Luke screamed. “Cut it?”

  “I’ve got it.” O’Reilly’s voice was calm, and Hal felt the autopilot go off, and the wings started back up to a level position.

  “What is it?” Bernard yelled from the radio room. “What is it?”

  “Relax,” O’Reilly answered. “Runaway prop. We’ve got it.”

  The engine coughed and gushed smoke and oil, and the propeller wind-milled. Then it twisted into full feather and stopped.

  “You ready for the autopilot again, Bailey?” O’Reilly asked.

  The violent maneuver had toppled the gyroscope in the bombsight, and Hal fought to cage it and bring it back to stability. “No, God-damn-it!” he shouted. “Those bastards tumbled my gyro.” To his surprise, O’Reilly laughed.

  “Tumbled your gyro,” O’Reilly said. “Hot damn. You Baileys have got a perverted sense of humor.”

  Hal was working frantically to bring the bombsight back to an even keel. He knew the drop point could not be more than seconds away. He had to get the crosshairs back on the target quickly or the entire mission, Fox and the men they had lost, would be for nothing. But the heavy plane was still shuddering and bucking violently, and the gyro rolled and banged against its housing.

  “How much longer?” Luke shouted, and Hal thought he detected a new note in his brother’s voice, something he had never heard before. But he did not have time to decide what it was. He had finally cornered the elusive gyro. “I’ve got it,” he said. “I’ve got it.”

  “All right,” Luke shouted. “Drop the damn bombs, and let’s get out of here.”

  Hal quickly adjusted the leveling bubbles. He bent over the sight and spun the rate knob to pick up the target, praying they had not already passed the release point. Thank God for the slow ground speed. It suddenly dawned on him what he had said, and he almost chuckled. Any slower, and they would be dead.

  He found the target and quickly adjusted the rate and course knobs until the crosshairs were riding directly on the railroad marshaling yards. He sneaked a quick look at the moving indices; he had roughly five seconds.

  Another violent flak burst shook the plane, and he almost lost the target. He had just time to swing the crosshairs back on target when the indices clicked, and the ship lurched upward.

  “Bombs are gone,” he said as automatically he caged the gyro, and it occurred to him it was the first time he had voiced the bombardier’s traditional chant in combat. On the other two missions he had been . . . had been what? And what had he been this time?

  “You’ve got it,” he said and unclutched the azimuth gyro. The plane lifted its right wing high in a hard-left turn as Luke wheeled, leading the remaining planes of the group off the upwind heading. Hal quickly closed the bomb bay doors to cut down their drag. Now that he had time to think, he wondered why he had not been paralyzed by fear. This run had been worse, much worse than the others, but he had not been afraid. Why was that? Because of Luke? O’Reilly? Or was it because Betty was on board?

  And why hadn’t he thought of the people on the ground? He couldn’t be certain every bomb would be on target, not on a bomb run like this. But he had forgotten about that. What was it Cossel had told him? That O’Reilly would be riding him hard, trying to keep him angry. And he had been angry. But it had not been O’Reilly who had made him angry enough to forget. It had been Luke and what he had done to the group, the men he had taken to their deaths.

  “Look at that!” Luke’s voice was filled with elation. “We hit the fuckin’ target?”

  By pressing his forehead against the cold Plexiglas of the left window, Hal could look down and back, and he could see a pall of smoke and dust rising from the railroad marshaling yards where the bombs had hit. But there seemed to be pitifully few. Looking up, he saw the reason. Except for the dense black bursts of flak, the sky above was empty. The high squadron was gone! All of them. In the Low, only four ships were left. He couldn’t see behind to check his squadron, but both wingmen had disappeared. And even as he watched, one of the low squadron Fortresses lost its right wing to a black burst and heeled over sharply in a screaming dive toward the earth.

  He reached for the push-to-talk button. He had to say something to Luke. He was not certain what the words would be, but he had to articulate the emotion that clogged his throat. His hand never reached the switch. Something exploded against the side of his head, and he slipped into a moving, swirling blackness.

  CHAPTER 23

  Hal was not sure whether it was the intense pain or the penetrating sound that brought him back to consciousness. Slowly he became aware that the sound was the drumming roar of engines. He tried to open his eyes, but the sliver of light intensified the burning agony in his head.

  What the hell had happened? He had been hit, knocked unconscious. By rights, he should be dead. They should all be dead. But the sound told him that he was still in the ship and it was still in the air. And it was flying smoothly. Smoothly? They had to be out of the flak. And alive.

  The relief that surged through him was like a charge of adrenaline. They were going to make it!

  The joy died abruptly. How badly was he hurt? Paralyzed? Perhaps even now bleeding to death.

  He forced his eyes open, fighting the pain. He was lying behind his chair on the floor of the nose compartment with his legs tangled in his mike cord and oxygen hose. An icy wind screamed in through a dozen holes in the nose Plexiglas. There was blood on the floor and the bombsight—his blood.

  Gritting his teeth, he worked his way into a sitting position. At least, he wasn’t paralyzed.

  His hand touched his steel helmet, and he picked it up. There was a ragged hole in the back where a piece of shrapnel had struck. He pulled the glove off his right hand and felt the back of his head. It was sticky with blood; his leather helmet split from neck to crown. But the bleeding had stopped.

  He quickly checked for other wounds. There were none, although there were several small pieces of flak embedded in his flak vest.

  It was the thought of the others that helped him fight mounting nausea. Cossel? Why hadn’t Cossel tried to help him?

  He turned to look and saw the reason. Cossel was dead; his body slumped over the navigation table, his face and chest covered with blood from a gaping wound just above the top of his flak jacket. Oh God. Why Cossel? Why not him? Nothing made sense.

  Hal glanced at the altimeter. Nine thousand feet. No wonder he was cold. Working slowly and painfully, he plugged in his headed suit and turned the rheost
at up full. Nothing. Either the system was out, or his suit was out.

  Looking out the side window, he saw that both the number one and four engines were feathered. Then his heart seemed to stop. The number three engine was trailing a stream of black smoke. Fire. They could blow up at any instant.

  Suddenly his fear escalated! Betty! Oh Jesus! What had happened to Betty?

  He hooked up his intercom and found the push-to-talk button. “O’Reilly? Luke?” There was no answer. Then he realized there had been no click in his ears when he had pushed the button. The intercom was as dead as his heated suit.

  He disconnected his lines and turned to go aft to the pilot’s compartment. But the sight of Cossel made him stop. He would have to push by the navigator’s still form, and he wasn’t sure he could do it. Looking beyond Cossel, he could see where several large pieces of shrapnel had smashed through the side of the nose opposite the navigator’s table. The bulkhead separating the pilot’s compartment from the nose compartment was ripped as though by giant claws. By concentrating on the damage, he was able to edge by Cossel’s body.

  But he couldn’t forget that Cossel had a wife and a son and that in a few short days when they received the dreaded telegram, there would be agony in their lives. She would be very much in love with Cossel. Knowing the man, he knew that. What would she say if she knew why he had died? Not with glory as it should have been, but because many years before, a woman had produced a son who was determined to be a hero at any cost.

  He peeled off his flak suit and, carrying his chest pack chute, worked his way through the passage to the cockpit. The first thing he saw was Polazzo. The engineer was lying on the platform of the gun turret, his eyes fixed and cold, a thin film of ice giving them life-like glints. His turret guns were pointed straight to heaven.

  The shell that had killed him had exploded just off the right side and blown a football-size hole in the fuselage near the top turret. It must have been right over Betty Axley’s head.

  Oh, my God! Betty? Where was she? Her body should be in the cramped area behind the seats, next to Polazzo’s. But it wasn’t. Oh, sweet Jesus. Maybe she wasn’t dead.

  A new thought shot through him like ice. Could she have bailed out? Could they have all bailed out? Why else would the plane be on autopilot?

  He heaved himself up from the passageway into the cockpit and sighed with relief. Both pilots were in their seats. Except that the window next to O’Reilly was shattered and the Irishman’s head was slumped forward, his head lolling with the motion of the plane, his body held in a sitting position by his shoulder harness. Oh no! Not O’Reilly! Not O’Reilly!

  “Jesus Christ! I thought you were dead!”

  It was Luke. He was twisted around in the left seat, staring at Hal in disbelief.

  Hal stood up, his feet straddling the well between the pilot and co-pilot seats.

  “Where is Betty Axley? Is she all right?”

  Luke nodded. “The intercom’s out. She went back to make sure everybody got out.”

  “Got out?”

  “It looked like we weren’t gonna make it. I told them to bail out.”

  “What about now?”

  “We’ve got a chance. We’re someplace over Holland.”

  Did they have a chance? Even if they didn’t get jumped by fighters, it was a long way to England over the North Sea. If they had to ditch, the chances of being picked up by British Air-Sea Rescue would be low to nil.

  But what was the alternative? They would never make it south to the Allied lines in France. And if they landed in Holland, they would spend the rest of the war in a German prisoner of war camp.

  Hal stared out the window at the smoking number three engine. “We can’t make it across the channel on one engine. Maybe we’d better land.”

  Luke shook his head. “To hell with that. We can make it.”

  “Why take the chance? If we have to ditch, we won’t last five minutes.”

  “It’s better than sitting out the war in some friggin’ stalag.”

  Hal looked at O’Reilly and felt terrible despair. Was anything on earth worth the price of the O’Reillys and the Cossels? Freedom? It was easy to think, so when you were not looking at the body of a friend. Now he was not so sure.

  “It’s better than being dead,” he told Luke.

  Luke shook his head. “Not for me.” For a fleeting second, Hal thought that Luke was going to smile as he added, “You and Axley better bail out. No point in you taking chances.”

  That seemed like the best idea. If Luke was determined to risk his own life by trying to nurse the plane more than a hundred miles across the North Sea, there was little point in dying with him.

  And yet, why was Luke so anxious to get back? There was a good chance he would get court-martialed for disobeying orders and hitting the primary unless he could convince them that he had not received the order, that his radio had been knocked out.

  Except that there were witnesses who could tell them differently. But not if the witnesses bailed out!

  “No,” he said. “I think Betty should, but I’ll take my chances.”

  “Don’t be stupid. You’ve got a good chance of being dead.”

  “You’re going to wish I was.”

  “Yeah? How do you figure?”

  “How many ships did we lose?”

  “What the hell difference does that make? We clobbered those marshaling yards.”

  “What difference does it make? All those men. For nothing. So, you could be a damn hero.”

  Luke turned his head to study Hal. “What the hell is wrong with you? You finally do a good job, and you act like you’ve committed a crime. Well, God-damn-it, it wasn’t a crime. Hell, they’ll give us a medal. My Purple Heart’s gonna be worth two jumps in grade before I’m through.”

  “You were hit?” Hal asked, and some of the anger went out of him.

  Luke smiled. “You’re friggin’ A.” He half-turned in the seat to show Hal the upper left side of his chest. There was a ragged hole through the flying jacket, the heated vest, and the shirt beneath. The jacket was smeared with dried blood.

  “How bad is it?” Hal asked, and the sympathy in his voice disgusted him.

  “Just bad enough,” Luke answered. He picked a jagged, six-inch piece of shrapnel from his lap and held it so he could admire its deadly perfection. “This is gonna make a hell of a souvenir.”

  Hal took off his gloves, and while Luke held the controls of the plane with his right hand, Hal gently pulled the rough edges of the bloody material aside to expose a rough, bloody gash in the fleshy part of Luke’s chest. The blood had dried and clotted, but the wound did not look deep or dangerous.

  “How about that?” Luke said. “You know what they’ll say back in headquarters? A leader with guts. Takes everything his men take. You an’ your damn stories about disobeying orders. I’ll put this” . . .he tapped his torn chest . . . “up against any friggin’ thing you got to say. I laid my life on the line with the rest of ’em. They got it. I didn’t.”

  Hal looked up at his brother. “I’m still going to tell them.”

  “Go ahead.” And Luke smiled again. “Who do you think they’re gonna believe?”

  “After they check the radio? Me.”

  Luke glanced up at the command radio, which was in the ceiling of the cockpit. The hole from the shrapnel that had kill Polazzo had not touched the radio. “Yeah? Well, we’ll see.” But there was doubt in his voice.

  “So, I’m not going to bail out. If Betty Axley wants to go, that’s up to her. But I go where you go.”

  Hal turned to go aft. He had to find Betty and explain the situation. But Luke reached back and grabbed his shoulder. “You open your yap an’ I’ll slap you with a court-martial.”

  “I haven’t done anything.”


  “With your record? I’ll get you for something.”

  Hal shook his head. “That won’t work anymore, Luke. After this . . . I don’t care what happens to me. It’s you I’ve got to stop.”

  “You son of a . . .”

  Hal wrenched free of his brother’s grip. “I’m going to find Betty. I’ll be back.”

  He stepped over Polazzo and worked his way along the catwalk through the empty bomb bay and pushed open the door to the radio room. It was deserted. There were several shrapnel holes in the walls but no evidence of blood. Bernard had been okay when he bailed out.

  Before he opened the door to the waist section, Hal steeled himself for what he would find. He knew that the chief and MacGruder were dead, and death by shrapnel was bound to be gruesome

  But there was no way he could have prepared himself for the carnage he saw as he stooped to go through the small door. MacGruder had been hit in the head, and the walls and ceiling of the waist section were spattered with blood and a viscous gray matter. What was left of his head was a pulp-like mass hanging out of his jacket.

  Chief Gorno was sprawled against the wall in a partial sitting position. His hands, covered with icy blood, were hanging limply. He had died pressing them against a massive wound in his chest where shrapnel had struck with such force that it had shredded his flak vest.

  On the floor was a gaping hole where the ball turret had been. The waist exit door was missing. Bernard must have jettisoned it to bail out. It Ortiz was alive; he had gone with him.

  So, where was Betty? Had she also jumped?

  He stepped inside the waist section and straightened. Then he saw her. She was huddled against the bulkhead next to the radio room door, her eyes wide and staring. Over the throb of the engines, he could hear her making small moaning sounds.