B for Buster

by Iain Lawrence

  I couldn’t sit still. I tingled all over with the excitement of flying, and I sat up and lay down and sat up again.

  Lofty and Pop went walking around Buster, tugging at the trimming tabs, patting at the wheels. Sergeant Piper went with them, his hands in his pockets, talking like a car salesman about every little thing. The three of them bent down to look at the tail wheel, and I saw a flash of silver at Pop’s throat. He was wearing a crucifix that I hadn’t seen before.

  It was for luck, I thought. He wasn’t the only one who carried something with him. Little Ratty had a rabbit’s foot that he had brought from the States. He had hung it round his neck for his very first flight, on the Canadian prairies, in one of the canary-colored trainers we knew as Yellow Perils. He had never climbed into an aircraft without it. Will had a picture of a girl tucked in his helmet. We all knew she was his wife, and we all knew he kept her picture there, though he was always very secret about the way he slipped it into place before a flight. Simon, somewhere, had a white handkerchief that smelled very faintly of perfume. Buzz carried nothing with him, yet he never flew without a charm, and he was busy digging in the grass now to find one.

  I had a ray gun. It was just a ring—a kid’s silly ring— such a stupid thing to carry that nobody knew I had it. It was buttoned in my tunic pocket, and it would stay there until I was alone in the darkness, bent over my desk where no one could watch me.

  Only Lofty had no lucky charm, and no belief that he needed one. He had smiled at the stinky handkerchief, and chuckled at the rabbit’s foot, and he certainly would have howled at my ray-gun ring. It wasn’t stuff like that, he’d said, that had kept us alive through our training, while so many others had bought the farm. “You don’t need luck,” he’d told us. “You’ve got me.”

  I patted my pocket. The ring was still there.

  “Hey!” cried Buzz, suddenly sitting up. “I found one.” He held up his trophy, a tiny four-leafed clover.

  Ratty applauded; Will made a wolf-call whistle. Buzz wedged the clover into his flying glove, up to the tip of his trigger finger. By the end of the flight it would be a green smudge, like a bug squashed on his skin.

  We spent half an hour loafing around on the grass before Lofty signed the 700. Then we climbed aboard for another half hour of waiting in the kite. The sun had warmed the black metal, and Buster was oven-hot. I sweated in just my jacket and my trousers, and pitied the gunners bundled in their leather coveralls. At seventeen thousand feet their sweat would freeze into ice. So would Lofty’s. He was such a great guy that he kept the hot-air outlet aimed down toward me and Simon instead of at himself. I would always be warm.

  Gilbert squawked. I rapped on the box, but he squawked even louder. Then Simon shouted at me, “Why’s that bird throwing a wobbly? If he doesn’t shut up, he’ll come a gutser.”

  I didn’t know exactly what Simon meant, but it sounded awful. I banged on the box and told the pigeon to be quiet. It bashed around, then settled down. And through my window I watched the darkness close in. The other bombers stretched away in staggered rows. The closest one was E for Eagle, and I could see the pilot in his cockpit, a black dot against a sky that wasn’t much lighter. Sergeant Piper and the other erks stood around their trolley. They leaned back with their arms crossed, digging their toes at the grass. They looked bored and impatient, like people waiting too long for a bus.

  Then at last we got the word. It started at Bomber Command in High Wycombe, filtered down to Group, down to the squadron, and at last to the airmen.

  Lofty cleared his throat. “Right. Let’s get this bus in the air,” he said.

  CHAPTER 6

  “SWITCH TO GROUND.” That was Lofty, his voice coming through the intercom.

  “Switch to ground,” said Pop.

  “Landing gear locked.”

  They ran through their checklist, the old guy sounding bored. He had been a mechanic long before the war began, and he still had that slow, mechanical way of thinking.

  The erks bustled below me. Others wheeled the trolley into place, then stretched out the cable to plug into the fuselage. Every moment brought us closer to the op, and every moment was harder to wait. Other bombers were being readied in just the same way at just the same time—dozens and dozens and dozens of them—at every airfield in every county in all of England. But it seemed that the entire air force, from Bomber Harris down to the lowest erk, had only one task right then—to get old B for Buster airborne.

  “Master switches on. Tanks one and three, switches on,” said Lofty.

  “Switches on,” echoed Pop.

  “Propeller fully up. Gills open.”

  A pair of erks walked the first propeller around, grabbing the blade tips to roll the engine over.

  “Ignition, number one,” said Lofty. “Booster on. Coils on.”

  The outer engine whined. The propeller blades turned and stopped, turned again, then spun in a blur as the engine caught. Number two was started, three and four, and they ran in a ragged, shaking roar until Lofty got them synchronized. He backed the throttles to let the engines idle.

  “Compass set to on,” said Lofty. “Ground battery disconnected. Switch to flight.”

  Our lights came on, gleaming on the ground. Along the row of bombers, others sparkled red and green and white.

  “Door closed,” said Pop. “Ready to taxi.”

  “Roger that. Switch on, clutch in, gyro out,” said Lofty. “Right, let’s go.”

  Will passed by my station on his way to the cockpit, and I looked up to watch him lower the second dickey seat and settle in at Lofty’s side. He would work the throttles and the pitch levers, letting Lofty put all his strength into the rudders and the column. I heard a rasping sound below me, and saw an erk come running out from the wheel, dragging a chock on its bit of rope. The engines quickened, and we rumbled forward.

  Lofty steered a weaving path along the perimeter, then swung quickly onto the runway with a burst from the starboard inner. We rocked forward as the brakes went on.

  There was still a chance we wouldn’t be flying. At any moment the op could be canceled, the bombers sent back to dispersal. Hurry up, I said under my breath. Just get us off the ground.

  “Elevator tabs, two divisions,” said Lofty. “Rudder neutral. Fuel cocks, Pop?”

  “All switches set,” said Pop.

  “Flaps down thirty. Gills open one-third.”

  We waited for the flare. My stomach churned from excitement.

  “Hang on,” said Lofty. “Full throttles, Will.”

  The engines howled. Buster shuddered and lurched forward, veering to the left. For a moment I clutched my belts, but Lofty got us straightened out, and the ground blurred below my window, faster and faster.

  “Throttles locked,” said Lofty.

  “Okay,” said Will. He started calling out the speed. “Forty knots. Fifty knots,” he said. “Sixty knots, Skipper.”

  The tail came up. “Oo-oop,” said Ratty. No one laughed; we’d heard the joke on every training flight since April.

  “Seventy knots. Eighty,” said Will. “Ninety knots, Skipper.”

  B for Buster hurtled down the runway, the engines at a high pitch, the metal vibrating, the wheels thundering on the tarmac.

  “Ninety-five. One hundred, Skipper.”

  “Are we there yet?” asked Ratty.

  And all the thunder and the shaking stopped. We were flying, the ground below us falling away. The end of the runway went by, and then dark fields split by a silvery web of old stone fences.

  “Climbing speed,” said Lofty.

  “Okay, Skipper.”

  “Flaps up ten.”

  “Flaps up, okay,” said Will.

  “Wheels locked. Undercarriage up.”

  “Okay, Skipper.”

  Hydraulic motors hummed. Buster, half-alive, cranked up her wheels and her flaps. Her four-engined heart beat loudly and fast from the effort of hauling herself from the ground. Then the undercarriage thudded into
place, and the wind whistled through the canopies.

  “Cruising speed,” said Lofty.

  The engines settled to a steady, hurried thrum. The huge Halifax leaned in a turn, the nose high, the deck and my table slanting steeply. I had to lunge to catch my pencil as it rolled toward the edge, and I saw the pigeon in its box, its head poking through the round hole in the flap. Will came down from his perch on the folding seat and poked me in the side. He pointed up with his thumb, telling me to look.

  I twisted backward in my seat. Peering up through the passage, I saw Lofty there—his whole right side— his leg thrust toward the rudders, his arm reaching for the column. I saw, very dimly, the bottom of his cap brim and the bulge of his oxygen mask. He had his pipe in his mouth, jammed in the rubber.

  Will leaned down. He pried up my helmet flap and bellowed in my ear. “Good old Lofty, eh?” Then he went smiling to his bombsight.

  “Skipper, your course is two-one-oh,” said the navigator through the intercom.

  “Two-one-oh, roger,” said Lofty. We tilted farther.

  It was wonderful to fly. I felt sorry for the erks, and for everyone else who labored on the ground—for all the farmers and the villagers and the people in the cities who had never slipped those bonds of earth. Flying was the one thing that had brought all of us together, that kept us apart from the poor slobs below. I was better than them. I was an airman, a flier, a rover of the air.

  “It’s a beautiful night,” said Will, in his place again at the bow. Surrounded by glass, lying flat on his stomach, he could feel that he was flying. “There’s kites all around us, all turning and weaving. I can only see their navigation lights, and they look like hordes of fireflies. And there’s moonlight on the river, and stars floating. It looks magical. As though the Milky Way has fallen on the ground.”

  “Gee, all I see’s a river,” said Ratty.

  “And there’s a farmhouse, a chink of light between the blackout curtains. It’s the only thing on the ground, and it looks so lonely, one light in all the dark and nothing. It looks like God’s house, that’s what it’s like.” Will was a poet. It was why we sometimes called him Shakespeare. He wrote things down but hardly ever showed them to anyone, and never read them aloud. “We’re going to pass right over it,” he said, “and— there—I can look right down the chimney and see the fire in the hearth. Just an instant. Just a glimpse.”

  I set the frequencies on my wireless. I fitted the screwdriver into the slot and turned it back and forth to match the numbers on my flimsy. It was a chore I had done so often, on so many flights, that I found it hard to believe that I was doing it now on the way to Germany, astride a belly full of bombs. Then I grinned inside my mask to think that I was already on the battlefield, fighting in the boundless world of Superman and Buck Rogers, on a fabulous field that stretched in all directions and rose from the earth to the heavens. I imagined the people below turning their faces to the sky, telling each other, “Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane. It’s—the Kakabeka Kid!”

  I tightened my curtain. I leaned into my corner and, hunched by my desk, pulled the ray-gun ring from my pocket. It was a crummy thing that didn’t shoot rays, or anything else. But it stood for the Space Patrol and all my heroes, and I always felt a tingle when I put it on. When I was small I had worn it on my thumb, and I’d had to clench my fist to keep it from falling off. Now it barely squeezed onto my little finger. I had owned that ring for years and years.

  “Skipper, steer one-five-six,” said Simon.

  “Roger. One-five-six,” answered Lofty.

  We joined with fifty other bombers and all flew south together. Our lights went out, and those of the others, and we traveled through the blackness. I drew the curtain round my desk and covered up my window. The little goosenecked lamp made a pool of light on the wireless.

  “Seven thousand feet,” said Lofty.

  The plane shivered as we passed through someone’s slipstream. The engines quickened for a moment, then settled back to their steady drone.

  “Twelve minutes to the coast,” said Simon.

  “Roger,” answered Lofty.

  We passed ten thousand feet. “Oxygen, boys,” said Lofty. I tightened my mask and connected to the system. The air had a taste of rubber, but I thought of it as the breath of Buster.

  “Hey, Kakky, how’s the bird?” asked Simon.

  I didn’t bother to look; I knew that he’d be lying like a lump on his belly, maybe sleeping and maybe not. No matter how high we flew, it didn’t seem to bother the pigeon. At eleven thousand feet, a man would conk out in a minute or two, but pigeons kept breathing at twice that height. I hadn’t known it at first. On one of our training exercises, at fifteen thousand feet over the North Sea I had shone my torch into the pigeon box and seen the bird standing up. I’d shouted, “Holy smokes, the pigeon’s awake!”

  Simon laughed again now. I aimed my tiny ray gun at him through the curtain.

  I couldn’t listen to the wireless and the intercom at the same time. I kept switching back and forth between them, listening on the wireless for any recalls or news about wind shifts, then catching bits of talk on the intercom.

  “Crossing the coast,” said Will. “There’s the surf. A silver thread.”

  I turned off my lamp and peered out through the little window. I could see nothing down there, but I didn’t like the thought of empty water. It would be so cold, so dark and heaving.

  “Okay to test the guns, Skipper?” That was Buzz, his voice sounding excited.

  “Roger. Blast away, boys.”

  I heard the whine of the powered turrets, and I felt the hammer of the guns. The bit of sky that I could see lit up with bursts of tracer curving off in all directions. It was sudden and short, and then there was only the darkness again. But the flashes glowed on my eyelids, sparkling white and orange every time I blinked.

  We carried on across the Channel with the engines booming. I couldn’t see very far ahead, not at all behind or straight below. I didn’t like looking out at nothing but a black emptiness, so I covered the window again, switched on the light, and sat and waited. I looked up at the rudder cables and the hoses, then down at the deck, imagining the bombs nested in their bay below it. To my side, by the window, the paint didn’t exactly match where two metal plates met at a riveted joint. I touched the place, wondering which bit was new and which was old, and then what had happened on Buster the night that a dead man landed the plane. I thought of the voice I had heard, or imagined, calling out for the course for home. Then the same coldness touched me again, and I knew it had been a mistake to start thinking like that.

  My intercom crackled. “Searchlights ahead.”

  “I see them, Will,” said Lofty.

  “Flak now. Just starting up.”

  Lofty didn’t answer. There were two clicks from his intercom, and we droned along toward the enemy coast, jinking left and right, now dropping fifty feet, now rising so much more. Lofty never used the autopilot; he kept us moving through an empty sky the way a rabbit flits from hole to hummock to dodge the hawks above it.

  “It’s beautiful, really,” said Will. “Terrible, but beautiful.” He sounded dreamy and wondering. “It’s like a fence of light, like rows of swords all waving back and forth. The flak is bursting high—big orange balls—and the tracers are flying through it. They look like flaming onions, all right. It’s quite a show. It’s— Oh, Geez, someone bought it there. A ball of fire, like a meteor.”

  I had to see for myself. I put my head through the curtains and looked toward the nose. Simon was shrouded at his desk; I couldn’t see him at all. Will was stretched out atop his Perspex, above a glow of light, as though he flew along like Superman. The searchlights swung, the tracers soared, and the flak puffed in sudden, scattered bursts, as though they had blown holes right through the night to show the day behind it. It was like watching, all at once and from up above, all the fireworks that I had ever seen, and watching them in silence. Our own
engines drowned out all the sound. But there was nothing beautiful there; my first look at the enemy scared me half to death.

  The searchlights weren’t at all like the ones we’d seen at London. Those had turned and reeled like dancers, but these jabbed at the dark; they hunted through it. They seemed alive, and cruel.

  I saw the bomber going down—or another. It passed across the Perspex with its streaming tail of fire. For a moment it glowed in the searchlights, and I saw that one wing was sheared off in the middle. A parachute blossomed from an upper hatch, then wrapped itself around the tail, and a little speck of a man squirmed and writhed on the end of the cords, dragged behind the bomber. Wrapped in flame, the Halifax went hurtling toward the ground, pulling that poor doomed man behind it.

  “Unsynchronizing,” said Lofty. He fiddled with his levers to set the engines at a ragged roar. The single deafening note became a fluttering oom-ba-oom that was meant to fool the lights that sought us out by sound.

  Then I heard the flak—or felt it—faint, hard pops that ripped the air apart. I was too scared to look away. The lights seemed to slide toward us, spreading out and stretching higher. We jinked along, up and down, left and right, but straight toward a wall of light, and it didn’t seem possible that we could fly right through it. The Perspex bubble glowed a silver white, and the colors of the flak washed across the panes. They flickered on the metal walls, orange tongues like a fire catching.

  I gripped the edges of my desk. I was absolutely terrified.

  The flak knocked us sideways. It hammered us down and tossed us up. The kite reeked of exploded shells as we lurched through shattered air. Everyone was shouting all at once, and poor old Buster groaned and rattled.

  Then suddenly everything was quiet. We were back in the darkness, in our cloak of night. I thought hours had passed, but it had been only moments. We had crossed just one belt of flak. We weren’t even close to the target.

  CHAPTER 7