by Tim Hawken
“This is my friend Marlowe,” I said.
Smithy stuck his hand inside the car.
“Pleased to meet you, my Nubian friend. I’m Smithy,” he said, shaking Marlowe’s hand.
He looked behind Marlowe into the back seat where The Perceptionist was sitting. Smithy jumped back slightly, startled by the multi-eyed elemental’s appearance.
“Oh, sorry,” he said. “I’ve never seen the likes of you around before. What are you?”
The Perceptionist turned toward Smithy.
“I am seeking perfection,” he answered.
Smithy looked from The Perceptionist, to me, then back again.
“Well, mate,” he said. “I’m sorry to say you’re looking in a hell of a place for that. There’s nothing but flawed old men and rusty planes here. I can show you my helicopter if you like, though. It’s quite nice.”
“It’s okay,” I said in Smithy’s ear. “They’re just dropping me off.”
“Oh,” he said, a little disappointed. “Alright then, nice to meet you both. Anyone who is associated with Michael is fine with me. I’m sorry I pointed my gun at your beautiful car. You’re welcome back any time you like.”
Marlowe looked at Smithy and smiled.
“Thank you, Mr Smith. I hope to see you another time. You too, Michael.” With that he wound up the window and rolled away. I waved as they pulled out of the airfield, wondering if I ever would truly cross paths with them again.
I turned to Smithy. “Shall we?” I asked, pointing toward his office.
“Do you take milk and sugar?” he asked.
We entered his office. It was decorated with old war memorabilia, flags and photos of vintage aircraft. Smithy led me around behind his desk and into the back room. It was a cozy space, with two soft seats and a coffee table arranged in the middle. He walked over to a stove in the corner and clicked it on, putting a black, iron-cast kettle on the flames to heat.
“You’d think water would come ready boiled in Hell wouldn’t you?” He winked at me, arranging two cups as I took a seat. “So how have you really been, Michael? Last time we parted you were on a mission that involved that father of lies, Asmodeus. I hope you managed to stay out of his sticky web?”
His directness caught me a little off-guard. Unsure what to say, I looked around the room. He stood there, waiting for me to answer. The silence hung in the room, pushing me to fill it with something.
“Not quite,” I finally said. “The trouble I mentioned earlier is partly to do with him. But I think it’s better if I start from the beginning.”
He raised his bushy white eyebrows.
“Sounds like this should be quite a yarn! Is this a two or a three biscuit story?” he asked, rattling a jar of shortbreads.
His jovial tone dimmed the nervous edge of what I was about to tell him. If I was going to preach about truth to demons, I would need to start by hiding nothing from those I called friends. I would tell him everything.
“Better bring the whole jar,” I said.
FIFTEEN
I’D SPOKEN FOR CLOSE TO FOUR HOURS straight by the time I finished. Smithy had not interrupted once. He did not judge. He did not offer opinion. He listened and occasionally made a fresh cup of tea. Once we’d arrived at the present point he sat back in his chair and exhaled loudly, staring into space.
“You know,” he said after a few moments of silence, “I’ve done some horrible things in my life. You may not know it to look at me, but I was an evil man and I deserve to be here.”
I started to interrupt but he held his hand up to silence me.
“Nothing you have done is worse, so I cannot condemn you. In fact I commend your honesty. I will follow you, Michael. I’ll fight with you into the depths of Hell if it means you will get your love back. We all have something to gain by the destruction of Asmodeus. But you need to promise me something.”
I looked at him openly, tears almost brimming in my eyes at his blind acceptance of my faults and ills.
“Name it.”
He started to say something, but a roaring gush of heat rushed into the room. The Fires of Guilt were upon us.
I watched helplessly as Smithy collapsed back into his chair and started lurching in agony. I knew the golden light of rationality protected me from the torment, but my friend was wailing and crying before me. He was screaming incomprehensible apologies. I decided to do something about it. If I could be free of these visions, then so could Smithy. Gathering as many golden lights of knowledge around my palm as I could, I thrust my hand into his chest, protecting his heart. Without warning, I was blown clear of his body and the world caved in about me.
******
“We’re at an altitude of ten thousand feet and climbing,” I said, turning the dials and adjusting the controls in front of me. “Are you okay back there?”
My crew all voiced in the affirmative.
“A-OK, Captain Smithy,” the rear-gunner, Allan replied last. He was a green one, baby faced and fresh out of the academy. He was the only soldier on board I hadn’t flown with yet. There was no way he was eighteen. But then I’d lied about my age when I had first joined up in World War I. That was a long time ago and many battles had been fought and won for freedom since then. Today would be no different. Our target was Hamburg. As part of Operation Gomorrah we’d been pummelling the city relentlessly for the best part of a week. We were cleansing the evil Nazi regime from an unjust land. If the people of Germany wanted to support a monster Fuhrer like Hitler, then they deserved the end that our bombs delivered. This would be our final run to rain fire on the Nazis’ heads. The young sprite in the back would be fine with me at the deck. The belly of our four-engine Halifax was packed full of incendiary bombs, designed to burn rather than explode.
With the engines purring smoothly around us, we levelled out at twenty thousand feet. My navigator, Jack, tracked our course to the city. He was a brute of a man, crass and hot tempered, but he was one hell of a navigator. It wasn’t like we needed him tonight though. There were almost six hundred bombers in formation ahead, leading the way. They spread toward the horizon and out of sight. We trailed in their jet stream, with another hundred or more planes behind. Even in the dark of night it was easy to see. A full moon hovered like a silver balloon above the clouds at our feet.
The half hour flight went by in what felt like a few heartbeats. As we approached from the north-east, we increased our speed. The other planes far ahead had already begun to dart downward. The hum of our engines turned to a roar as we surged ahead. My heart started to beat faster. Just like that, it was time for battle.
We burst down through the clouds. I could see pillars of smoke rising up from the burning debris that was once one of the proudest cities in Germany. The metropolis was a sea of flames. A line of fire crept backward in a widening v from the initial target in the center of the city. Bombers swept down, dropping their load of death before pulling up again. I could hear the rattle of Browning machine guns echoing up to us. Sparks of light flew from some planes as they shot more lead down to the ground. Against the burning red of the city, I could easily make out a handful of German Nightfighter jets below. Their odd-shaped, scaffold nose was easy to distinguish from those of our planes. They were engaged with a large group of Stirling Bombers. I swept to the side to avoid the fracas. The boys would handle them.
“Keep a close watch at the tail, Allan,” I said loudly through the mic. “Those Nightfighters always attack from below and behind. They try to creep up on you like the spiders they are.”
The whooshing sound of fire, dropping bombs and clattering guns reverberated all around. I kept altitude as German flak started to explode just below. We were now in the thick of the black smoke, which carried up the stink of burning human flesh. I set focus to find an untouched target. There! Just past the fires.
“Gunners, ready!”I yelled.
“Ready,” I heard.
“Bombs ready!”
“Ready!”
“Let’s wipe out these Nazi swine!” Jack spat next to me.
I pushed forward fast. We wound up to top speed, almost three hundred miles an hour. The city blurred below as I headed toward an untouched area, just past the boundary of the fires.
I narrowed my eyes to see through the thickening smoke. The heat of the inferno below warmed the metal cabin of the plane, so that sweat was dropping off my nose.
I could see a clean building up ahead. That would be ours.
Suddenly, from above, a deep thud sounded. With a crack, the controls were wrenched from my hands and we dropped down.
“Shells!” Jack screamed next to me. “What did you do? We’re hit!”
I grabbed at the flailing joystick in front of me, and hauled it up. There was little effect. Our rapid descent threw me back against my jump seat. Smoke began to billow inside the cabin.
“Parachutes on!” I yelled, wrestling for control of the Halifax. “Jump! Jump!”
Straining my arms, I levelled the plane just enough. Jack unbuckled himself next to me.
“Go!” I yelled. “Go!” His thick-chested body moved out of sight behind me, I hoped to exit the plane. The ground was approaching at terminal velocity.
“I’m stuck! The turret’s jammed!” I heard a voice in my headphones. It was Allan’s panic stricken voice. I couldn’t answer. All I could do was try to slow our descent. I clenched the controls tighter and did my best to save us.
I tried to pull up. We kept dropping. With the nose up and tail dragging, we careened downward. I tried all I could to slow us but the ground raced up to meet us. A split second before the bone-jarring impact, I wrenched back on the controls. Our tail hit first, smacking into a heaped pile of charred bricks. The force of the impact whipped the nose of the plane down, tearing the fuselage in two. I heard Allan screaming through my headphones. The back of the plane came whirling past the front, whacking the side of the cockpit hard as it went. Strapped tightly in my seat I was spun around. Smoke, fire and metal whirled in my vision. My legs and arms rag-dolled, my head whiplashed. The side of my helmet cracked into something, the noise screeching into my ears. For a moment things went black, but I refused to go under. I blinked and held onto consciousness.
Abruptly, everything rattled to a halt.
The thump of bombs dropping around the city still sounded in the distance. After the terrifying noise of the crash, it sounded like a faint heartbeat. My ears were ringing. I reached up to my face. My nose was bleeding slightly. I looked down. My legs were fine. My body was whole. I had a deep gash in the top of my right hand, but that was all. It was a miracle I was alive. I should be in pieces! I thought. I was sitting in what was once my cockpit. The roof was caved in to just a few inches above my head. The windows had been blown out, and shards of glass lay scattered all around me.
Ahead, through the crumpled windows I could see the wreckage of the back half of the plane. Red gore dripped from within what was left of the twisted cabin. There wasn’t even a whole body left of my crewmen. I hoped some had gotten out. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to cry. Instead I fumbled with shaking hands and unclasped myself from the pilot’s seat.
Wriggling forward carefully, I squeezed out through the gap in front of me. Slowly I clambered to the ground. My boots crunched down on uneven rubble.
There was relative silence around me. My brain felt numb. The world seemed dull, like it was coming to me through a plastic filter. I looked up to the skies. The clouds were illuminated with the red fires from the city. Hundreds of British bombers roared overhead. I could see German Wilde Sau fighters swooping down from above them. They normally attacked from below! That was why we were taken so off guard. I tried to shake the shock from my system. I needed to think. Where was I going to go? What was my next move?
I limped over to the back end of the plane to search for survivors. All I could see was blood. Almost gagging, I climbed back toward the tail turret where Allan was stationed. As I neared I could see his face, clear of dirt.
“Allan,” I said in a hoarse whisper. “Are you alright?” I moved closer. There was no life in his face. Allan’s dead eyes looked to me with terror. He was just a kid. I reached out and pushed his eyelids down. I would have said a prayer, but it didn’t seem that God was anywhere near us. I looked at his face. In the sleep of death, he looked even younger. There is no justice in this world, I thought.
I heard a dragging noise from outside of the plane. I whirled around and peered out. My bleeding right hand dropped instinctively to my hip, where my standard-issue revolver was. My grip on its handle loosened once I saw the source of the noise. It was a young blonde girl, maybe twelve years of age. She struggled to drag the body of a limp woman through the destruction. She had the woman by the armpits and was pulling her slowly over the burnt ground.
I stepped out of the plane into sight.
She looked up at me with glassy eyes. “Bitte helfen,” she said in German. “Please help.”
Mentally I knew this was the enemy, but instinctively I saw two flesh and blood humans in trouble. I scrambled down to where she was. I knelt down and took the woman from the girl’s hands, laying her on the ground. From the smell and look of the woman’s body, it was clear to me that she was dead. I looked back up to the girl who was squatting at the woman’s head, stroking her hair.
“I’m sorry,” I managed in broken German. “Dead.”
Her bottom lip started to quiver and her eyes dropped down, back to the woman who was probably her mother. I reached out to the girl and pulled her into my chest, hugging her. She started to cry into me. I just held her, looking around dumbly at the chaos our planes had caused. The little girl shook in my arms, until finally her crying subsided. She then pushed herself back away and stood up. She pulled a handkerchief out of her grubby dress and went to wipe her face, but before she did she looked down at my hand.
“Wehtun,” she said, pointing at it. The blood from the gash was dripping off my fingertips onto the ground.
The girl quickly took the handkerchief in her hand and wrapped it over the wound, holding it tightly. I smiled at her.
As she smiled back, there was a gunshot to the side of us. Blood misted into the air. The girl’s smile turned to a look of shock. She looked down at her side, where a bloody wound seeped. All color drained from her face and she collapsed into my arms. I held her, looking into her ashen face, which was covered in soot. I shook her, fumbling to cover the wound in her side. The blood flooded around my fingers.
“Little girl. Little girl,” I said pathetically.
I was unable to say her name. I didn’t know what it was. She looked up at me questioningly. With one last bubbling gasp she closed her eyes, dead.
In a daze I looked over to where the gunshot had sounded. My navigator, Jack stood there with a smoking pistol in his hands. He smiled at me gruesomely.
“One less Nazi swine in the world.”
I looked back down to the girl. She wasn’t a Nazi, she was a child caught up in an old man’s war. Numbness enveloped my body. Was this what we had become? Child killers?
I stood up slowly. Letting the girl’s body fall, I faced Jack. I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t call my body to action. I just stood there, staring at him mutely.
“Smithy!” Jack said, his voice coming at me from far away. “Are you alright, man? That crash must have rattled your brain. We’ve got to get out of here. We’re in enemy territory. It’s kill or be killed. We have to go!”
I stayed where I was and looked back down at the girl’s body, which had fallen on top of her mother’s. I watched as blood flowed out of her body and made the black ground even darker. The blood started to seep toward me, the puddle of it touching the toes of my boots.
I felt a tug at my arm. It was Jack. “We’ve got to go, Captain!” he said. “None of the others got out. It’s just us. We’ll head back to the edge of the fires and follow the creep-back line out of the city. Come on!”
He pulled me a
gain and my feet clumsily moved, one over the other. I hazily followed him, past the wreckage of our plane, over a mound of broken bricks and into a long, deserted street. Down the far end, I could see the blaze of fire burning brightly. We crept towards it together, hugging the shadows of buildings to the side of the street, walking towards hell on earth.
As we approached the carnage, I could see people frantically moving in and out of what was left of the buildings. They scurried through the inferno, carrying possessions or bodies. Men ran with buckets of water, trying to quench the flames in vain. They were yelling in German. I couldn’t understand their words. Jack pushed me into a dark crevice in the wall to avoid being seen. We watched as a team of men passed buckets to each other, dousing the buildings so that the fires wouldn’t spread. One man, covered in ash, threw a large spray of water onto what appeared to be a pile of mud in front of him. As the steam hissed I could smell the stench of burning hair and skin. It wasn’t mud. It was people. The fog in my brain began to lift, seeing clearly all of the horrors around me. Women ran from the flames, trying to group their families together through the roaring fire. Some ran past our hiding place bundling children away from the terror zone. One crying woman who passed at a quick walk was talking to a bundle in her arms, seemingly reassuring it. I glanced as she hurried by, only to see she was holding the body of her dead baby.
I almost gasped, but stopped myself lest we be discovered. I have been a fool, I thought. I had sat, up in my plane and dropped bombs on these people who I knew nothing about. I’d been separated by the distance of air into believing what I was doing was right. I’d believed I was holding up an ideal of freedom. Now I saw the reality, right in front of me. I knew in my heart we’d been terribly mistaken. This wasn’t an evil race; they were men and women just like us, with families and lovers. I saw no soldiers, only men trying to save their homes. The only oppression I saw was the oppression of our attack. How many others were there like this? Every mission I had flown over the years would have caused the same devastation.
