THE OP PASSED LIKE a nightmare, in a series of visions that were too frightening to be real. Now we were growling through the darkness, now being hurled across the sky. With Buster tipped on its side, I looked through my little window, three miles down at the valley of the Ruhr. I saw smoke in the moonlight, oozing along over factories and buildings, across a silver ribbon of the river. I saw target markers tumbling in a cascade of crimson and green. And everywhere were the searchlights, weaving back and forth, flailing across the sky like the legs of a terrified spider.
They didn’t seem at all like beams of light. They were solid things that would knock us from the sky if they touched us. They were the death rays that even Superman was scared of.
“Ten minutes to the target,” said Simon.
“Roger.”
A band of searchlights guarded Düsseldorf, slashing at us with those white-hot rays. And from their middle rose a single blue one that never moved, that stood erect like a column in the air. The night fighters would be swarming toward it, wheeling round that pillar of light.
“Hello, hello. The welcome wagon’s here,” said Lofty. A light washed over us. I heard a shell go whistling by and the whump of another exploding ahead. I smelled the powder, and felt the kite shiver as we flew through the shattered air.
“Bomb doors open,” said Lofty.
The whistle of air that was always with us became a terrible scream. I huddled in my little space, with my eyes closed and my teeth locked.
“She’s all yours, Shakespeare,” said Lofty.
“Okay, Skipper.”
Here we go, I thought. For the next minute and a half we could do nothing but fly straight across the target at a steady speed and a constant height. Forget the searchlights; forget the flak and the fighters; just put the bombs on the target or the op wouldn’t count.
I couldn’t stop shivering. I held my head and closed my eyes, and with every lurch and shake of the plane I was afraid that something had hit us, that our wing was shearing off. I kept thinking of that man snagged to his falling machine, and I was certain that the same thing would happen to me. Yet Will sounded nearly as calm as Lofty. He lay on his glass floor, looking straight down at the searchlights, straight into the gun barrels, but there wasn’t a hint of fear in his voice. “Left, left,” he said. Then, “Right a bit. Steady, Skipper. Steaaaady.”
I wanted to get out of that machine. I felt that I had to get out before it was too late.
“Left, left.”
Flak exploded beside us, then above us. A terrifying rattle sprayed across the fuselage, and I screamed into the intercom, “We’re hit! We’re hit!”
Ratty shouted, “Where?” and Buzz cried, “Corkscrew. Go!” Then Lofty hollered, “Shut up! Everyone shut up!” He said, “It’s just cartridges. Empty cartridges.” They were spewing from the turrets of the bombers up above us.
“Steady,” said Will. “Left, left. Steady now. Steaaaady.”
There were bombers all around us, covering acres of the sky. I prayed that one of them would get the chop instead of us—that all of them would get the chop so long as we were safe.
Lofty clicked on. “Kid, get ready with the flash.”
“Roger, Skipper.” My hands fumbled with the buckles and connections. My legs wobbled as I climbed to the cockpit. I closed my eyes and groped through it, not wanting to see all of the sky through those greenhouse windows. I stepped down toward the flare chute and bumped right into Buzz’s legs. His shoulders were above me, his head in his turret.
When I got to the chute I plugged myself back into the oxygen and intercom. I took a flare from the holder, and waited for Will.
Come on, come on, I thought. The fuselage was a horrible place to sit out the minutes. A dark and lonely tunnel, it stretched back to the tail, where a door led to Ratty’s rear turret. The coldness ran right to my blood and my bones. I was afraid that my fingers would freeze, and that I wouldn’t be able to drop the flash at the right time. When the bombs fell away they would start our camera running. If I released the flash too soon or too late, it wouldn’t light up the ground for the picture. I was afraid that if I messed up, we would have to do the op all over again. Come on, Will.
I listened to his voice guiding us on. I opened the chute, and heard air whistle through it. Come on.
“Bombs gone!” he cried at last.
B for Buster leapt up a hundred feet. Lightened from the load, the enormous thing floated up like a feather on a breath of air. But still we flew straight along as our bombs hurtled down. I held the flare in the mouth of the chute and started counting the seconds. When I got to eight I dropped the flash and slammed the little door.
“There’s flares popping off all over,” said Will. “Great explosions on the ground. They look like boils at first, then they shatter into pus. There’s a clot of smoke ten thousand feet high.”
The air buffeted against us. I felt the blasts of the bombs, as though fists pummeled at the wings. The airframe creaked, then banged, and I was certain that the old bus was about to crack open. But at last we tilted to the left, and went down in a spiraling dive.
“Bomb doors closed,” said Lofty.
I staggered back to my wireless to send the signal that we’d bombed the target. This time I dared a glance from the cockpit. I looked down at a land of fire and smoke, and saw that the peaceful place we’d come to had been turned to a horror. The stream of kites was still passing the target, the bombs still bursting.
When I plugged in at my desk Ratty was babbling through the intercom. “Look at it burn,” he said. “Wheezy jeezy, look at it, will you? We gave it a pasting, eh? We plastered that place. No lie.”
I saw him in my mind, glowing red from the fires on the ground, a little demon hunched in his ball of glass. Helmeted and masked, plugged into air and heat, he was a part of the plane. We all were. Buster kept us breathing and Buster kept us talking. We were only the nerves of a metal monster.
But we had leveled out, and were flying for home. I breathed again, and smiled again, and blinked out tears that came for no reason except that I was still alive. I tuned in England on the wireless and tapped out a message on the key. Somewhere miles and miles away, in a little room with lights and people, someone listened to my dots and dashes and put a tick on a bit of paper to count another load of bombs.
“Skipper, your course is zero-zero-niner,” said Simon. It came out “noiner” in his Australian accent.
We flew toward home. There was flak near the border, and again at the coast, but it didn’t seem so bad anymore. I just trembled and sweated until it was past. And then the Channel seemed almost friendly.
Ratty told a long joke about two farmers and a nun. Buzz thought about his crossword clues. “Hey, is there another word for an orange?” he asked.
We started descending before we crossed the English coast. Gilbert poked his head from his box, blinking around with his stupid eyes. I felt a twinge of guilt to think how I’d promised to look after him but hadn’t given him a thought. So I got out my water bottle and gave him a drink in his little tin. Then I unbuttoned my mask, took a sandwich from my bag, and shared tiny bits of the bread.
Will saw distant combats—brief spurts of tracer—but no fighters came on our tail. I ate an orange and a chocolate bar as the gunners kept their watch. Our engines droning, we slipped along above fields and cities, over the little Yorkshire farms. And we landed well before the sun was up.
Our flaps were down, our undercarriage locked. Will, in the second dickey seat again, called out the height and speed as Lofty kept us aiming for the flare path.
“Sixty feet, one-ten,” said Will. “Fifty feet, one hundred.”
We flitted past the pigeon loft.
“Forty feet, one hundred.”
“Throttles back,” said Lofty.
The wheels shrieked once as they touched the runway, then hummed along the ground. The nose came up and the tail wheel settled. We coasted past the tower, past the offices, and swung hard right ont
o the taxi strip.
The erks were waiting where we’d left them, as though they hadn’t moved in the hours we’d been gone, or as if those hours were really only seconds. With big sweeps of their arms they guided Lofty into place, then threw down the chocks and swarmed around the bomber. One of them found a shrapnel hole pierced right through the wing, and they all rushed over to see for themselves. They shook their fists toward us as they grinned from ear to ear.
Lofty and Pop shut down the engines, and the silence was amazing. We rose from our places, stretching our shoulders and necks. I took the pigeon box and followed Simon through the bomber, over the struts and out through the door where we’d entered.
The air was magnificent, so cool and fresh. It tingled on my face where the rubber mask had turned my skin all hot and clammy. I tore off my helmet and shook the sweat from my hair, and it was the most wonderful thing in the world to be standing on grass again. Lofty and Pop went for their circuit round Buster, nodding and pointing for the erks, and the rest of us settled on the ground, sitting on our parachutes because there was thick and beautiful dew on the grass. The ones who smoked got out their cigarettes again.
“Well, that’s one,” said Ratty. “Twenty-nine to go.”
He didn’t exactly laugh; no one did. They grunted at him, and someone threw an orange. But all my joy in being alive suddenly ended with Ratty’s words. We had flown one op, just one crummy op, and I couldn’t imagine going through the same thing over and over again for twenty-nine more.
It had seemed so easy at first. Even that morning it had been a lark. Fly thirty ops and take a rest. Fly thirty more if you like. Or move to something else, and then go home with a row of gongs across your chest. I had seen myself going home the hero, waving the flag and selling war bonds. I’d thought I would barrel-roll my Spit across Quebec and Ontario, and fight off the girls who would clamor around me. Well, so much for that. Already my dream was shattered, my hopes destroyed. They didn’t give out gongs for being afraid.
The bombers taxied past us, nose to tail, like a parade of elephants. We watched them emerge from the dark and slide back into it, and there was the smell of exhaust and the throaty sound of engines. But the place beside ours, where E for Eagle had started, stayed empty. The erks there stood in an awkward-looking group, like the only boys at a dance who had no partners to be with. They looked up at the stars, then kicked the grass and shuffled back and forth.
They were still there when the truck stopped to give us a lift across the field. By then they were looking at their watches, and their shoulders were starting to slump.
Nobody talked very much as we rode across to the huts. Lofty and the rest went in for their guzzle of eggs and bacon. I carried the pigeon box and followed the smell of birds down toward the tower where old Bert was waiting with his trolley. There was already a stack of the yellow boxes on it.
“’Allo, sir,” he said. He even saluted. “Did you ’ave a good op, sir?”
I wasn’t sure what to tell him, but I didn’t want a pigeoneer to know how scared I’d been.
“Wasn’t too bad, was it, sir?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
“Glad to ’ear it, sir.” He beamed at me, then took the box and hoisted it close to his face, the hinged end open. He made a kissing noise, and Gilbert’s head came out through the flap. They touched each other, lips to beak, the bird and the pigeoneer. “And ’ow was Gibby, sir? Not a problem, was ’e?”
“No.”
“Never is. Not this one.” Bert clucked his tongue. “Pretty Gibby.” He smacked his kisses again, and the bird stretched out its neck. It warbled in its throat with a funny little cry that I had never heard before from any bird.
“I know, I know,” said Bert. He piled the box on the trolley, gave the bird a little tickle, then eased its head through the flap and closed the door. He turned to me. “Lots of searchlights, sir? Flak was ’eavy?”
I tried to make a joke. “He told you that, I guess.”
“In ’is little way,” said Bert. “Yes, sir. If Gibby comes ’ome uneasy, singing ’is little worry song, I know it’s been tough on ’im, sir.”
“I was a little bit scared,” I told him.
“No shame in that, I’m sure,” said Bert. “The first op scares the willies out of people. For some blokes it’s too much. They see the flak and the fires, and they never get over it. The pigeons are the same way, sir. I’ve seen some go bonkers their first time up.”
I felt a great relief just then. If even old Bert knew that ops were terrifying, maybe there was nothing wrong with me.
No other wireless operators were coming with their boxes, so I didn’t mind lingering for a while, in the dark, with the filthy pigeoneer. I moved toward the trolley, hoping to find a place to sit, and nearly stepped on a pigeon that was loose on the ground. It startled me with its sudden flurry of wings, and went whistling past my face to perch on the pigeoneer’s shoulder.
“Ah, Percy,” said Bert. “Poor old chap; ’e’s probably been standing at attention down there all this time, ’oping we would see ’im.”
I leaned back on the boxes. “Do you always let him fly around?”
“At night I do,” said Bert. “Safe enough at night. ’E’s my little pet, old Percy.”
The pigeon cooed, a happy sound.
“Is everyone ’ome, sir?” asked Bert.
I shook my head, and his face went pale. “Who’s missing, sir?”
“E for Eagle isn’t back,” I told him.
“No!” He actually staggered sideways. Percy fluttered away, flying a circuit and bump to land again in the same spot. “Not that one, sir. There must be some mistake. That’s Jesse, sir. Twenty ops. Twenty ops, sir.”
I was surprised that Bert knew any of the fliers. I said, “Was he a good pilot?”
“Not the pilot, sir. The pigeon! Jesse Owens, fast as fire, sir. Nearly as fast as Percy. That black Morris that races about, that little car? Jesse can outrun it, sir. Like it was standing still. Jesse can—” His big, square face collapsed. “Could,” he said. “Jesse could.”
His fists suddenly clenched. “You bastard!” he screamed. “Don’t you see what you’re doing? Don’t you care?”
“Who are you shouting at?” I asked.
“At ’im!” Bert pointed at the air. “The man upstairs!”
He was so big that he scared me. He was like the giant in my old storybooks, gentle one moment, fierce as God the next.
Just as suddenly, he was himself again. He hung his head, flicked a white spiral of droppings from his sleeve, and sighed. “I’d better be off, sir,” he said. “Before they ’ear me down in High Wycombe. I’ll get the pigeons ’ome. Get my letter written. I always write to the breeder, sir, when a pigeon gets the chop.” He saluted again, and slouched off to the front of his trolley. “You ’ave a good sleep, sir,” he told me.
I started back toward the huts, but Bert was still talking. “I’m going to fly them tomorrow,” he said. “Would you like to come, sir?”
He caught me by surprise. If Lofty or Will had asked me that, I would have had to be wary, careful to make sure that I could fit into whatever we did or wherever we went. But with the pigeoneer, I found, I didn’t have to worry about being so young. I just smiled and told him I would. “I’d like that a lot,” I said. “Thank you.”
We moved apart, but Bert kept talking, his voice growing louder with every step. “That is, of course, if you’re not on, sir. If you’re on, then it’s off.” He laughed. “Do you see what I mean, sir?”
“Yes!” I shouted. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be flying the next night as well. I started to run, at first to get away from Bert, and then to get away from the fear that came surging through me. I ran and ran, until the patter of my shoes was like a hammering of guns. It wasn’t even morning yet, and the last thing I wanted was to climb into Buster again before the day was finished. I needed rest, I thought; I needed sleep.
But first came debriefing. We sat in a little room and told the Chair Force everything we’d seen. After that, I had a tuck-in of eggs, and when I finally got into bed I found that I couldn’t sleep at all. At the other end of the hut, an airman tossed and muttered in his bed. Then he cried out, piercingly and loud. And I saw him bolt upright in his bed, his arms flailing.
It was Donny Lee.
CHAPTER 8
WHEN I WAS STILL in school I read a story about a boy who had to choose between two doors. Behind one of them was a beautiful princess who would love him forever. Behind the other was a tiger who would kill him.
I didn’t remember anything else about the story, only those two doors and the boy’s terror as he stepped forward to open one of them. But in the morning, at breakfast, I knew exactly how he felt.
I stared at my plate and waited for the loudspeaker to come on, for that English WAAF to tell me if I would fly or not. It was strange, but I dreaded that moment more than I dreaded the flying.
Ratty was tucking in as though he didn’t have a care in the world. He was talking to Buzz at the same time, in a voice louder than anyone else’s. Bits of brussels sprouts bubbled round his teeth as he talked about his home, a little farm in the dust bowl, and how he had watched it blow away in a cloud of soil when he was six years old. “All that smoke we saw last night?” he said. “It was just like that. No lie. I saw that smoke, and I thought of the Krauts watching their houses blow away.”
He laughed as he stuffed his mouth full of potatoes. “We moved into a cardboard box. No lie. We did. My folks and three kids, we lived in a shack made out of cardboard.”
“I guess you could sell that to the Krauts just now,” said Buzz.
“Yeah, I guess! No lie,” shouted Ratty.
For once I wasn’t the one who drew attention, the one who got the frowning faces turned toward him. But Ratty, of course, didn’t even notice. “None of you guys lived in a goddamned box,” he said. “I could put my finger through the wall. I could pick up my whole friggin’ house.”
“Could you shut your flap?” asked Lofty.
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