B for Buster

by Iain Lawrence

  CHAPTER 14

  WE GOT BACK TO the airfield on Friday night, the twenty-third of July. In the nine days we’d been gone, the world had changed. The Russians were advancing in the east; the Germans were nearly beaten in Sicily; and the war was closing in on Germany. But the Four-Forty-Two was just as we’d left it.

  We went straight on to ops on Saturday. The target was Hamburg, far to the east of Happy Valley, nearly a hundred miles inland from the sea. The skies would be clear, the moon in its last quarter, and it didn’t seem like the sort of night for a jaunt across Germany. It was night fighter weather, perfect for them.

  But Uncle Joe told us not to worry about fighters. He brought a cardboard box onto the stage, and set it down by the lectern. “This is top secret,” he said. “Top, top secret.” He nudged the box with his toe. “The boffins have come up with something that will make the German radar useless.”

  We all leaned forward as Uncle Joe knelt down and opened the box. It had been our wildest dream that the scientists would invent a gadget to stop the night fighters from homing in on the bomber stream.

  “This is code-named Window,” said Uncle Joe, reaching into the box.

  I was certain, for a moment, that he would pull out a ray gun, and that it would look just like the tiny one that I wore on my finger. But all he lifted up was a wad of paper. Packing, I thought. It was just packing.

  “Window,” he said, holding the paper as high as he could. He let it fall, and the wad separated into shining strips that glistened as they drifted down. They were bright and shiny, covered in a metal foil. Suddenly, the hut was so silent that I actually heard those bits of paper settle on the stage. Then Ratty whispered to me, “They’ve gotta be joking.”

  “The German radar will see the Window,” said Uncle Joe. “It will see so much Window that it will be blinded to anything else. Their fighters will end up chasing bits of paper.”

  I liked the thought of that; it seemed like a Buck Rogers sort of trick. Our giant Halifaxes, crammed with bombs, would be invisible.

  Out at dispersal that evening, it took Buzz nearly five minutes to find his lucky clover. He crawled all over the grass, with his bottom high in the air. Ratty said he looked like a big old bloodhound sniffing around. But everyone was happy when he plucked that clover and held it up for all of us to see.

  “What are you going to do in the winter?” asked Simon.

  Buzz just frowned at him.

  “When there aren’t any clovers, you dill.”

  “Jeez,” said Buzz. “Jeez, I hadn’t thought of that.” We climbed into the kite well before sunset. It was so far to Hamburg that we had to leave in the daylight and let the darkness overtake us.

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

  The first engine started, and the rest followed. I had the strongest urge to get up and get out of the kite. I had felt the same thing on every op, but never so powerfully. I buckled my belt and cinched the strap, just to keep myself from running away.

  “Doors locked,” said Pop. “Ready to taxi.”

  And then it was too late. I was trapped. I was trapped for eight hours, and I shook like a leaf.

  We taxied to the runway and took off, climbing straight toward the sun.

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

  “One-six-five. Roger,” answered Lofty, and we banked around in our circle. We gathered with the others in our squadron, then with more bombers from other squadrons, then into the stream that stretched a hundred miles. And we headed out across the sea. It was a Goodwood, a maximum effort.

  I was in charge of the Window. It was my job to chuck it out of the kite a bundle at a time, down the flare chute where I dropped the photoflash. I sat in the fuselage, by the entry door, just behind Buzz. Every minute over the North Sea, I took a bundle from the box and sent it down the chute, imagining the paper being ripped by our slipstream into a glittering cloud.

  I did it a hundred times, maybe, before my hands brushed together and I realized that my ray-gun ring was gone. I searched through the Window box, across my desk, along the floor. I went frantically through every corner, but the ring was really gone. I thought of it falling behind us, still spinning down. How long would it take for that bit of plastic to fall three miles? Then I thought of it landing in the Channel, the tiny splash it would make as it hit that cold, dark water.

  “It’s just a ring,” I told myself. “Just a stupid plastic ring.” But I felt such a dread at its loss that I curled up on the floor until Buzz, looking down, asked through the intercom if I was all right.

  Lofty snapped at me. “Come on, Kak. Keep awake.”

  I dumped another lot of paper, and another as we flew along. We followed the Elbe into Germany, and bombed Hamburg when we got there. We gave it such a pasting that forever after we would say that each city we wiped away had been Hamburgerized.

  There wasn’t a single night fighter all the way to the target. The Window did fool the radar, but I wished it had fooled the flak instead. High over the Elbe, I hung on to the chute as Buster rocked and lurched through the blasts. Ratty started firing at searchlights, and his ammunition rattled out of the boxes above me, through the feed tracks that led to the tail.

  In the darkness I wished for my little window. It was more frightening to see nothing at all, and it seemed that hours and hours went by before Will started guiding us on our bombing run. Then our belly opened and our bombs spilled out, and part of my fear fell away with them at the thought that we would soon turn for home. I counted the seconds, dropped the photo flare, then moved forward to send my signal. I didn’t bother with an oxygen bottle; it was only a few steps to the wireless. But when I reached the cockpit I stopped.

  All the glass and all the controls glowed with a dull red light. Even Lofty glowed, in his helmet and mask. His pipe jutted out from the rubber, and an ember seemed to burn in the empty bowl.

  I just stood there, stunned by what I saw. The whole earth was burning, and great clouds of smoke—glowing red and yellow—billowed up ten thousand feet. Bombers crossed through it, little dark arrows darting across the clouds and the fire. Some headed east and others west, and the searchlights swung and crossed from every side. The tracers curved, the flak was bursting everywhere, and I felt giddy to see it, to be standing there above it all. It was terrifying, but it was wonderful, too. In the darkness of the night, below the speckled band of the Milky Way, the flames were truly beautiful. They raged so hot and fast that I could see streets and buildings. I watched the colors change from red to orange, and saw the white bursts of bombs flicker like lightning through the clouds of smoke. I felt as though I was hurtling through space above a planet made of fire.

  Lofty pulled me down beside him. He plugged me into the oxygen and the intercom. “Lend us a hand here,” he said.

  His glove was hot and slick as he took my wrist and guided my hand to the column. He was soaked with sweat, and right away I saw why. The column seemed to weigh a ton as I pulled against it. I could hardly believe the pressure there, or the strength that Lofty had needed to keep us flying. Together we pulled and pushed, wallowing through air that churned like the white river below Kakabeka Falls.

  I had never really seen our battleground before, and I was amazed by the hugeness of it, and the smallness of us. I watched the blasts that made Buster roll and tip. I felt the cold and the rush of the flak, and I heard the wind shrieking through the canopy as we circled back for home. I saw the gigantic fire in a tidy grid of city blocks, and it made me think of London and how the ground had shaken. Then, for the first time, I thought about the people below us. I imagined them scurrying from the flames, crowding into the shelters. But I didn’t feel sorry for them. I only wanted to get them before they got me.

  Lofty caught his breath, then sent me down to the wireless. “Send your signal, Kid.”

  I let go of the column. I braced one hand on the canopy and reached out to unplug my oxygen. My hand was on the
hose when something below me exploded.

  There was an enormous bang, a glare of light. A shock ran through the airframe, and Buster tipped on her side. I nearly fell down the passage before the nose went down, throwing me against the glass.

  I lay there, my arms stretched out, staring straight at the fires and searchlights. I heard the panes creak and snap. Down and down we went as Lofty tugged at the column. The intercom was full of shouts. “Shutting down number two,” said Pop.

  Buster fell three thousand feet before Lofty straightened her out. The pipe bounced in his mouth like a bug’s antenna.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “She went crazy,” said Lofty.

  Then Pop came on. “Skipper, we lost an airscrew.” “Nah, it isn’t lost,” Simon said in his Australian shout. “I can see it stuck right here in the side of the bloody kite.”

  It had sheared through the fuselage right where I should have been sitting. It had hacked through my seat and into my desk, and it should have shredded me into strips as thin as Window.

  I went down and looked at it, the hub still stuck in Buster’ s side, the twisted propeller blades still shaking as they stretched across my little space. Buster’s skin was bent inward. The pigeon box was dented, and Gilbert thrashed inside. His head poked out, then a wing, then a tail. He battered himself around as though a cat had been shut in there with him. My chair was hacked and twisted, the scraps of leather fluttering in the wind that screeched through the punctured hole. I looked at it all, and fainted, crumpling to the deck.

  I wasn’t out for long. We were still over Germany when I woke up. Will was sitting on the deck, cradling my head in his lap. He was holding an oxygen bottle over my nose and mouth, and I could feel his fingers stroking at my helmet, moving backward again and again.

  That was the last straw for me. There was nothing in the world, I told myself, that would ever get me into a kite again.

  All the way home I lay on the deck, thinking of what I could do. I remembered Donny Lee telling me that if I ever wanted out, I could talk to Uncle Joe. “Uncle Joe will understand,” he’d said. So as soon as we landed—the moment we were out of the kite—I let Gilbert loose to fly home, and I dashed off to find the CO.

  I fidgeted and bit my fingernails as I planned the things I’d say to Uncle Joe. I talked it out, half aloud, what I would tell him and what he would answer. I cocked my head to the left and muttered something, then cocked it to the right and answered for him. I imagined him calling me a coward. “You’ve got no moral fiber, boy,” he said. And I didn’t have the courage, in the end, to go into the office. I collected my dented pigeon box and went down to the loft instead.

  Bert was there, feeding suet treats to the birds that had gone to Hamburg. Percy fluttered from his shoulder and landed on mine, and the moment I took him in my hands I felt almost peaceful.

  It was the first time I had been to the loft since the day before my leave. I breathed the barnyard smell and looked around, and felt that I was home. I saw that Bert had put my postcard on the wall above the feed bags. I felt a bit embarrassed to think that he hadn’t liked it enough to keep it in his room. But he saw me looking and said, “Thank you for the picture, sir. I put it up for the birds to see.”

  “You would like Trafalgar Square,” I said.

  “I know it well, sir,” said Bert. “In the first bit of the war I lived near the Square for a while.”

  It was rare for him to tell me anything about himself. But he quickly turned away and went back to his pigeons and his suet. He said, “It must have been ’ard, sir. A difficult op. The way they’re twitching, sir.”

  They didn’t look any different to me. I couldn’t tell which had been on ops, and I couldn’t see the lonely one anywhere. The mass of birds swarmed at my feet. “Where’s Ollie’s wife?” I asked.

  “Oh,” said Bert, “I wish you ’adn’t asked me that, sir. You never should ’ave asked me that.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “She died, sir. While you were down in London.” He blinked at the suet he was holding. “She wasted away, sir. And the babies, too. They both passed on.” He sniffed loudly, then used his fingers for a handkerchief. “I buried them all together, sir, the mother and her babies.”

  I was sorry they’d died, but more sorry for Bert. He kept his back toward me as he sniffed and nearly sobbed. “I think you’d better go now, sir,” he said. “You might be flying tomorrow. There’s bound to be ops.”

  He was only partly right. Three of our kites went off to bomb Essen, but Buster wasn’t among them. She couldn’t have gotten off the ground with a slingshot. The erks had wheeled her into a hangar and were working round the clock to patch her latest wounds. Like a gang of dirty, cursing surgeons, they slaved with an urgency that made us guess there was something big in the wind.

  That feeling built up as the following day, the twenty-sixth of July, passed without ops. Ratty begged the old airscrew from the erks, and he hauled it into the mess, such a twisted bit of metal that every sergeant wanted to hear the story about it. Ratty was happy to keep telling the tale, as long as mugs of beer were planted near his elbows. He said he could probably stay drunk for a week. But the next morning we were on. Another Goodwood.

  It was Hamburg again.

  Even Lofty went pale at the news—Lofty, who wasn’t really scared of anything. He drew in his breath when the curtain opened to show the red ribbons twisting down to Hamburg. Seven hundred kites were going, nearly every crate that Bomber Command could put in the air.

  But I just couldn’t do it. The moment I saw those ribbons, I knew I couldn’t go back to Hamburg.

  I turned to Lofty, in the middle of the briefing. “Buster isn’t ready,” I said. I whispered at him, harshly. “We can’t go if Buster’s not ready.”

  “Shut up, Kak,” he said.

  I tugged his sleeve. “But, Lofty.”

  “Shut up, will you?”

  He turned away, crossing his legs. So I looked to Pop, on my other side, and told him, “We can’t go. We can’t go to Hamburg.”

  The old guy patted my knee. “Shush, shush,” he whispered. “I don’t think we’ll be going, Kid.”

  But the erks did. They promised us, as though they thought it such a favor, that they would do their best. “Touch and go,” said Sergeant Piper. “That’s how I see it. You’ll have to taxi from the hangar. Yes, you’ll have to taxi right from here. But Buster should be ready.”

  I had never spent an evening in such horror. Anyplace but Hamburg, I told myself. Anyplace but there. I couldn’t go back to that burning city, to the solid flak and the searchlights. I couldn’t go back without my ray-gun ring, that stupid, stupid ring. If I didn’t have that, I was Captain Marvel without his powers, just a regular boy with nothing to save me.

  For hours I hung around the hangar, listening to the hammering. I imagined they were building a scaffold, a gallows, in there. Whenever Sergeant Piper came out, I pestered him to tear the flare chute apart and see if there wasn’t something in it.

  “Like what?” he snapped when he was sick of the sight of me. “Something like what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Then how can I look?” he asked. “How can I look for nothing?”

  I grabbed him as he turned away. “My ray gun,” I said desperately. “My ray-gun ring.”

  He laughed. “Do I look like a wet nurse, boy? Is that what I look like? Go on; leave us alone.”

  I went to Lofty, hoping he would help. I was sure he would take one look at me and say, “Oh, Kid, you’re sick. You can’t go flying.” But he didn’t notice how I sweated, how I trembled. He was sitting on his bed, writing a letter, and was neither startled nor worried to see me. He smiled. “Hi, Kid,” he said.

  His pipe was in his teeth, and he seemed as calm as the padre who spent his days sitting in the sun. It was the closest I’d ever seen him to the way he must have been before the war. Perched on the side of his bed, the paper on
his lap, he might have been a shoe salesman again, getting ready to slip a pair of oxfords on my feet.

  “I’m writing to my dad,” he said. “Telling him that . . . Sorry, you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  He was embarrassed. “Being an orphan and all.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said stupidly. I’d almost forgotten that he thought I was an orphan.

  “Well, anyway.” He folded his sheet of paper. “Listen, Kid. About the briefing. I’m sorry I binded you.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “You’re a good guy, Kak. I guess I never told you that.”

  I knew then that he was getting ready to die. He was saying so long to his dad, and apologizing for things that bothered him. But he didn’t look frightened, or even very sad. I didn’t know how he could settle down so calmly to put everything in order.

  “Lofty?” I said.

  “Yes?”

  I meant to tell him everything, all my lies and all my fears. I knew he might laugh, but I didn’t care anymore. I was sure that I would sob and weep, but even that didn’t bother me. I just didn’t know how to tell him, or where to start, so I blurted out, “I lost my lucky ring!”

  It was worse than I’d feared. He did laugh, just a giggle at first, then more and more, until it exploded out of him. He had to take his pipe from his mouth and wipe at his eyes. “Your lucky ring,” he said, and started off again.

  “It’s true,” I told him. “I dropped it down the flare chute, I think. But Sergeant Piper won’t go looking. Oh, I hate him, Lofty.”

  He couldn’t have ever laughed harder at Buster Keaton or Laurel and Hardy. He laughed like a crazy man. And I sat there on the bed, my insides shaking themselves apart. It was true, I thought: my moral fiber was unraveling.

  Lofty finally gathered himself together. Tears were smudged across his cheeks. “Your lucky ring,” he said. “Look what it’s got us. Shot up and shot at and damn nearly killed. Kakky, if that’s what’s been bringing us our luck, you should have thrown it away after the first op.”