Fata Morgana

by Steven R. Boyett

  Martin was layered up in thermals, wool uniform, leather trousers and fleece-lined jacket. Lined gloves stuffed in a pocket. He stood a moment and took it all in: Jeeps speeding crews to bombers, crewmen jabbering, trucks grinding through gears as they drove from the equipment shed for last-minute adjustments and repairs. Sounds of banging metal and tense laughter from inside the bombers.

  Vestiges of night still lay upon the field. The sun a bad rumor at the horizon and dew blanketing the airfield. Tendrils of mist out near the fields, grassy mulch bordering the runways. A distant church spire.

  The B-17F Fata Morgana was covered with dew that sparkled like a coat of diamond dust. It was as utilitarian as an aircraft could get. No comforts, no amenities. The cabin was not pressurized or heated. Interior ribs and metalwork were all exposed. There was barely even a floor—lengths of planking, and a bare metal catwalk to get across the bomb bay. The B-17 had not been built to deliver men, it had been built to deliver bombs. The men were provided what they needed to allow the aircraft to accomplish this and get back, and not one thing more.

  And yet every man who flew in one loved her. Found a beauty in her aggressive form and purely functional design. A grace, even. They would fly in her, fight in her, bleed in her, curse her, even die in her. But they would never truly hate her. Any enmity a man expressed toward his bomber masked a profound disappointment, and was grudgingly given only after being insistently earned.

  But unlike every other bomber here, the Fata Morgana was new. She was not patched or re-welded. She had never been shot at. Had never taken flak. Never burned an engine, blown a tire, dropped a bomb. She had yet to cross some remorseless boundary the other heavy bombers traversed like grim commuters, was not consecrated by the sacrament of blood and fear the other bombers wore like ghostly vestments.

  Wen glanced at Martin as he came around the B-17 with Case. Maybe the flight engineer thought Martin was working up his nerve to climb aboard. Martin didn’t really care. There would be no other time to take this moment in.

  Finally he took a deep breath and lowered his chest chute and heavy .50-cal barrels to the ground, and he approached the ball turret that would be his home for most of the mission. The yard-wide sphere protruding from the belly of the bomber would hold a small man, barely. Not a small man and a parachute. Not even a small man in a full flak jacket. It had the best view in the house, and over pretty country it was awe-inspiring. In the middle of exploding flak and closing fighters and streaking tracer rounds it was terrifying beyond the telling.

  Martin sat on the concrete with his legs on either side of the turret and made sure the brake was not engaged, then turned the ball until the ammo-can cover faced him. He unfastened it and checked the two belt feeds. They looked like a madman’s roadmap, but his trained eye saw that they’d been loaded correctly. He sealed the cover and then screwed the heavy twin machine-gun bores into the gun assembly and rocked them on their cradle to be sure they were secure. Above him he heard Garrett and Everett banging around inside the bomber, joking and swearing and giving each other hell.

  Martin glanced back to see Wen standing with his hands on his hips, watching him set up. Martin held his gaze and Wen nodded approval, then turned to talk to Case. The two men ducked under the fuselage to enter the aircraft from the opened bomb bay.

  Martin spun the turret again until the hatch faced him. He undogged it and swung it down and saw that a lineman had placed a flak vest on the hard seat like some kind of Army elf. Martin checked the electrical cables and fuses, then backed out of the cramped space and sealed it up just as a crowded jeep drove up and slowed down to let Captain Farley, Lieutenant Broben, Sergeant Mullen, and Sergeant Plavitz hop off. They had just come from the storage shed after the mission briefing, and they wore their flight suits and mae wests and carried their parachute packs. The jeep sped off to the next bird in the line.

  Farley gave Martin a two-fingered wave and set down his parachute. “All right,” he called. “Everybody out of the pool.”

  Shorty, Wen, Garrett, Everett, and Francis came out of the bomber from different exits and gathered around Farley under the wing. “What’s the word, cap?” Wen asked.

  Farley surveyed his crew. “We’re bombing a munitions plant in Zennhausen. Eastern Germany.”

  Garrett socked a palm with a fist. Everett held a hand out to him like an expectant bellhop. Garrett scowled and pulled out a wellworn fiver from his pocket. He held it by the middle and moved it up and down to flap it reluctantly into Everett’s hand. Everett kissed it and tucked it into a pocket.

  “Listen to the rest,” Farley told Everett, “and you might even get to spend that.” He nodded at Plavitz, and the navigator removed a recon map from his accordion case and unrolled it on the concrete hardstand. He weighted it with stones and a .50-caliber shell. The crew squatted to study it. All of them were smoking, except for Martin.

  “Intelligence says Zennhausen’s a major munitions factory,” Farley continued. “Reinforced concrete, dispersed production. A rail line runs close by it. Good news is, it’s not a heavily populated area. No schools, no civilian neighborhoods nearby.” He pointed at the map. “We’ll meet up with a flight group from the Hundred and Second Bomber Group out of Covent St. George off the coast near Norwich. We’ll head northeast and come in across the north coast of Holland. From there we turn east and thread the needle between Bremen and Hanover. Those cities are heavily fortified, so we can expect flak.”

  “When can’t we?” Garrett asked.

  Farley pointed again. “We turn due south just east of Brunswick and drop on the target in a north-south line.”

  “What’ll they have waiting for us at the target?” Martin asked.

  “It’s heavily defended,” Farley said. “Eighty-eights and probably some one-oh-fives. Luftwaffe bases are here, here, and here.” He tapped the map. “So they’ll be dancing at this party, too.”

  “The weather’s nice, though,” said Plavitz. He smiled thinly. “So that’s something.”

  “This is a pretty big facility covering a lot of ground,” Farley continued. “Our flight group’s carrying M44 thousand-pound concussion bombs. The boys from the Hundred and Second are carrying M17 incendiary clusters. They’ll drop ten seconds after we do. The idea is to crack it open and then light it up.” Farley surveyed the faces before him. None of what they were hearing was news, but it never got any easier to hear. Their thoughtful nods masked anxiety and fear. Farley would have had serious doubts about anyone who wasn’t fearful of what they were about to do. “Any questions?” he asked.

  They shook their heads, pulling on cigarettes and staring down at the map of the country over which they would find their reckoning.

  “All right, then,” said Farley. “Let’s get on the bus and go to school.”

  Plavitz moved the weights off the map and rolled it up again.

  Farley waited until the others had climbed into the bomber. Then he reached up and patted the fuselage just under the painting of the graceful figure flying prone. The drop-shadowed script of her name. The metal cold and damp in the early morning.

  “Don’t let me down, gorgeous,” Farley whispered.

  He wiped his damp palm on his jacket and then picked up his kit and ducked down to enter his new aircraft from the opened bomb bay.

  three

  The operations officer stepped onto the platform surrounding the tower and surveyed the thrumming airfield. The bombers rested on their hardstands with their engines idling, their combined rumble a veldt of waiting lions he felt deep in his chest. The drone of a vast engine of destruction. At least a hundred and fifty ground crew clustered near the operations building, sitting on the damp grass or watching on their bicycles.

  The operations officer raised high a stubby M8 flare pistol and fired. A bright flare arced out into the misty morning—the soup, the pilots called it. Immediately the rumbling became a collective roar as engines throttled up. Ground crew yanked chocks from wheels, and brie
f shrieks sounded all across the airfield as brakes were released and two dozen bombers began to creep out onto the taxiway.

  The operations officer thought about how odd it was that creatures built for flight so often looked ungainly on the ground. He glanced once more at the ground crews who would be sweating it out as they waited for their airplanes to return. A few of the men crossed themselves. He had heard that the waiting was as hard as the going. He wondered how that could possibly be true.

  *

  The crewmen all sat straight when the brakes squealed and the Fata Morgana lurched into motion. In the cockpit Farley craned to see Case Miller signaling directions from the mushy ground beside the runway, from which a Flying Fortress took off every thirty seconds. As if the airfield were some kind of factory that spat out laden bombers.

  Farley inched the B-17 along the winding taxiway until finally he turned onto the runway. He scooted back into his seat and buckled himself in. Ahead of them the Smoke ’Em Up lumbered down the runway and picked up speed.

  Broben lit a Lucky and kissed his lucky Zippo and tucked it away again. “Let’s go, boys,” he called out over the interphone. “Those Nazis aren’t gonna bomb themselves.”

  Farley pulled up the brake and walked the throttle forward till the tachometers showed the engines at takeoff speed. The sound of it was all you could hear. The aircraft shuddered like a racehorse at the gate. As if eager to regain the sky.

  Up ahead the Smoke ’Em Up lifted off. Farley let off the brake and the bomber surged forward. It always seemed to take forever to pick up speed. The fuselage shook and the outside world crept by. Then suddenly it was hurtling past and you were running out of runway.

  Broben called out speed and RPM. At 80 Farley gave her some down elevator and brought the tail up off the runway. At 110 he eased back the yoke. The bomber lifted and the shaking calmed and the world filled with the resonant thrum of four powerful Wright Cyclone radial engines.

  “Wheels up,” Farley ordered.

  Broben flicked back the wheel switch guard and flipped the toggle. “Wheels up,” he confirmed when the gear indicators went off.

  Below them England and the world they knew all dropped away. The Mission had begun.

  *

  The bomber group slowly formed up and gained altitude as it headed north to the assembly point just off the coast at Northampton. At his navigator’s table in the nose, Plavitz continually consulted his charts and tables, compass and notepad, checking them against landmarks that revealed themselves through the haze below, and reported position to Farley at regular intervals. In short sessions between calculations he pulled out his sticks and drummed the edge of his wooden worktable. If it bothered Boney, the stoic bombardier never said so.

  Boney got permission to arm the bombs, and he left Plavitz drumming in his imaginary swing band and went through the crawlway, gangly form unfolding like an accordion hatrack in the lower pit and stepping around the upper turret stand to stoop into the bomb bay. It was a tight fit. On the narrow catwalk between the V-shaped bomb racks he hooked up his safety line and held a grab line and pulled the cardboard tags that were sandwiched between the fuses and the bombs in their slanting racks. Eight thousand-pounders, four in each rack. Boney yanked the arming pin from the back of each bomb.

  The catwalk between the bomb racks was nine inches wide, and the bomb bay doors above which Boney balanced his spindly frame would not hold a man’s weight. If he fell on them without his safety line hooked up he would go right through. For all the expression on Boney’s face he might as well have been playing checkers.

  *

  In the cramped radio compartment behind the bomb bay Shorty sat on his swivel chair before the radio stack, listening for transmissions from the lead bomber and scanning for the Armed Services Radio station. Taped to the opened and secured door was a hand-lettered sign: Shorty’s Shack: on the air.

  Shorty frowned at the crackling static. He cupped a hand against his headset and tried the Axis frequencies, but there was nothing all across the band.

  *

  In the waist, behind the radio compartment, Garrett and Everett checked their Browning machine guns and ammo boxes. The gun ports were offset so that the two gunners stood side by side while firing. The two big men had worked together enough that they didn’t knock each other down when shooting back at enemy fighters, but they still got in each other’s way, yelling and giving one another thirty kinds of hell.

  *

  Between the waist gunners and the little radio compartment, Martin knelt before the ball turret assembly bulging from the floor and fitted a Z-shaped crank into its slot. He hand-cranked the ball until the twin .50s were pointed straight down and the tiny hatch slid into view. He set the brake and turned and tapped Everett on the shoulder and pointed down. Wind through the gun ports, along with the vibration and drone of four twelve-hundred-horsepower engines, made normal conversation nearly impossible. Everett nodded and stepped closer to the turret.

  Martin opened the hatch and looked down into the unbelievably small space. Two miles below, the dark English Channel sparkled through the plexiglas. The last time Martin had climbed into a ball turret was on the Ill Wind.

  Everett took hold of the hatch while Martin knelt and reached into the turret and engaged the power clutch by feel. He stood again and nodded at Everett, then climbed down and fitted himself in. His knees were up by his shoulders and he was looking straight down at the English Channel. His position similar to a drowned man floating face-down on the surface. He hooked up his safety strap and yelled an okay. Everett patted his back and said, “Give ’em hell, chief,” then sealed the hatch and thumped the turret. The closed hatch was now the upper part of Martin’s seat, the only reinforced armor he would have.

  Martin plugged in his interphone and put on his oxygen mask and checked the flow indicator. Smell of stale air and rubber. He hung the mask back up and powered up the turret and dialed the interphone to inter. “Ball gunner checking in,” he said.

  Captain Farley’s voice came over his earphones. “I read you, Martin. How’s the weather down there?”

  Martin glanced out the left windows. “Fog’s burning off along the coast,” he said. “Clear and sunny over the Channel. Nice day to bomb Germans.”

  “Roger that. Put her through her paces and keep me posted.”

  Martin grabbed the controls and pulled back. The turret pitched until he sat upright and the guns were level and facing the rear of the bomber. He checked the rotation: Hands left, and he swiveled right; hands right, and he swung left. The English coastline spun below.

  *

  Francis sat on his narrow saddle seat in the tail gunner position with his head sticking up into the angular canopy and watched the world recede before him. He was shoehorned into the back end of the bomber behind the rear wheel, nearly as isolated from the rest of the crew as Martin, and a lot less mobile. He could swivel his twin .50-caliber machine guns, and that was about it. He couldn’t see where the bomber was going, or the ground directly below. He’d be able to see German fighters coming at them from the side, but he could only shoot at the ones coming in from behind. Lately those Luftwaffe pilots had taken to head-on charges, and knowing that was going on up front while he sat wedged-in here gave Francis an awful itch between his shoulder blades. It was a heck of a place to find yourself when you had never even seen an airplane till you joined up. He couldn’t scratch his own foot if he wanted to.

  He got permission to clear his guns. He aimed down and pressed both fire buttons. Loud chuddering drowned out the engine roar behind him, and bright tracer rounds streaked out as Francis swung the barrels left-to-right.

  *

  In the ball turret Martin heard Farley’s okay to clear guns. He bent forward and crossed his arms to grab the metal rings to either side of his legs. He yanked them and heard the guns charge in front of him. He rotated to three o’clock, tilted toward the water, and fired a quick burst. Tracer rounds drew glowing lines towa
rd the water.

  Martin nodded, and then relaxed as best a man could inside an armed beachball with nothing but ten thousand feet of air between himself and the ground. He considered the length of the bomber before and behind him. The spectacular view. Himself inside a bubble pinched off from the world.

  Memories of the Ill Wind flooded in, and Martin fought to steady his breathing. He fumbled past layers of thick clothing and fished out the leather medicine bag he wore on a thong around his neck. He held it under his nose and closed his eyes and breathed in deep. Whatever smell it used to hold was long gone. Now it only smelled like Martin Proud Horse.

  *

  Farley continually checked the instruments as the bomber climbed. At ten thousand feet he told the crew to put on their oxygen masks and check their flight suit connectors. The unpressurized cabin was already very cold. It would get much colder by the time they reached twenty thousand feet. A bare hand lost meat if it touched metal at forty-below. Twenty thousand feet wasn’t very far, when you thought about it. Less than four miles. On the ground you could run it in thirty minutes, drive it in three. But go that far straight up and you might as well be on another planet—one where human beings did not belong.

  Farley checked in with Plavitz and made minor course corrections as the navigator advised. Come nine a.m. they were right on the money at the assembly point. They met up with the bombers from the Hundred and Second Group out of Covent St. George and began the long, tedious, and nerve-wracking process of forming up into staggered echelons as the group turned east and began to climb. From here through the bomb run they would maintain this formation, wingtip to wingtip. It was dangerous and exhausting flying, but it made for tighter and more accurate bomb patterns, and concentrated the gunners’ firepower while decreasing the chance that they would shoot other bombers in the formation. It also made it easier for German artillery to kill two birds with one shell, and for Luftwaffe pilots to create maximum damage with one good strafing run. But bombing missions weren’t about getting men back safely. Bombing missions were about dropping bombs.