Fata Morgana

by Steven R. Boyett

  Ten minutes after the bombers began forming up, Boney reported incoming fighter planes at ten o’clock. The bomb group had picked up their little friends, a squadron of P-47 Thunderbolts that would escort them halfway across Holland—the farthest the fighters’ fuel tanks would allow. Soon the front-heavy fighters swarmed like gnats around the bomber echelons, passing close enough that you could clearly see the pilots’ goggled faces. The single-seat airplanes seemed small next to the Flying Fortresses, but they had a massive Pratt & Whitney R2800 power plant, and what wasn’t engine on those things was gun.

  Farley was happy to see them. Plenty of missions had proceeded after weather or some snafu prevented an escort squadron from meeting up with a bomb group, and the results could be pretty ugly.

  A lot of bomber pilots swore that flyboys were arrogant and lazy country clubbers who didn’t have a taste for the real war, but the truth was that many bomber pilots flew their heavy birds because they had washed out of fighter training. Farley had not. He could have gone on to be a fighter pilot—had even been urged to—but for some reason he had wanted to fly bombers. Perhaps because he had been smitten with the B-17 from the moment he first saw the Y1B-17 prototype in a newsreel. Big and ugly and beautiful and graceful and aggressive all at once. Farley had been seventeen, and even though he’d been an unusual combination of bookish studies and athletic competition—he was captain of both the debate club and the swim team at his high school in Los Angeles—he had a hankering to fly. When the silver bomber with the striped tail flew across the big screen on the Movietone News at the Orpheum Theater, Joe Farley had thought, I’m gonna fly one of those.

  And five years later here he was. But the world above which he now flew his brand-new B-17F was not the world in which he had first wanted to. Careful what you wish for, his father often said.

  Farley glanced out the window past Broben. Fata Morgana was number-two bomber in the lead echelon, just behind and off the left wing of Wrecking Crew, the group leader. Steady Eddie Harris was a good pilot with a first-class crew who’d go to the mat for him. He never took foolish chances and he delivered the goods. More than that, Eddie brought his crews back. A pilot could goose-egg every bombing run, but if he brought his crew back every time, they’d swear he was God’s own aviator.

  Farley adjusted the trim and tightened up his position. He nodded in satisfaction.

  “So how do you like the new crate?” said Broben.

  “I think we’ve got a lot better ride than our last one,” Farley replied. In fact he’d known it the second she took to the air. You could talk about response time and climb rates and a hatful of numbers, but the truth could not be said in words or math, and it was something he’d never remotely felt flying the Voice. A kind of kinship. The Fata Morgana was never going to handle like a sports car, but she wasn’t a wrestling match, either.

  The temperature gauge showed -30° Fahrenheit. Farley snugged his gloves and nodded at Broben, and Jerry got on the horn. “Let me hear you, fellas,” he said.

  The crew reported in, everything okay. Boney had the best forward view, in the bomber’s station below and ahead of Farley and Broben, and he reported coastline ahead.

  “That’d be Holland,” said Plavitz. “Right on time.”

  “Hey, Shorty,” came Garrett’s voice, “where’s the music?”

  “There’s some kind of magnetic disturbance in the ionosphere,” said Shorty. “Even the static sounds funny.”

  “I love it when he talks dirty,” said Everett.

  “It means we’re a little under the weather, ya know,” Shorty said.

  “Gosh,” said Francis, “he sounds just like Jack Benny on the headphones.”

  “Golly jeepers,” said Broben, making fun of Francis’ homespun talk, “who’da thought we’d get to bomb Germany with a gosh-wow Hollywood celebrity?”

  “Don’t encourage him,” said Plavitz.

  The bomber droned on over Holland. Still no antiaircraft fire. Farley checked the instruments, his position in the formation, the group’s position on the map, the fighter escort. He scanned the clear sky for enemy aircraft.

  “No one up here but us chickens,” Broben said.

  Farley nodded. He reached down and dialed up the suit heat and then knocked spit from his oxygen mask before it could freeze and block the on-demand valve.

  “Shorty, isn’t there anything we can listen to?” Everett pleaded. “I’m about ready to cheer for Axis Sally.”

  Farley muted his throat mike. “Sometimes,” he told Broben, “I find out more about our mission from her than I do from our briefings.”

  Broben nodded. “I don’t know how they do it. I’d sure like five minutes alone with whoever that dame gets her information from.”

  “I hear they’ve got one out in the Pacific islands, too. Tokyo Rose.”

  “You know how I know we’re gonna win this war?” Broben asked.

  “Because we’re right and we’ve got God on our side?”

  “Shit. We’re gonna win because they play our records. Nobody plays theirs.”

  “Well, you can only listen to Wagner so many times.”

  Broben squinted. “You sure talk smart for an iron jockey.”

  “I prefer to think of myself as a philosopher on wings.”

  Broben cracked up.

  *

  Just past the German border their fighter escort had to turn back. The Thunderbolts waggled their wings and peeled off to head due west, canopies flashing in the noonday sun. Farley was sorry to see them go. Supposedly the Army was working on a long-range fighter. He wished they’d hurry up about it.

  With the fighters gone the mood changed in the bomber. Everybody knew they were on their own now. Next crew check there were no wisecracks, no jokes. Just “Navigator checking in,” “Bombardier here,” and the rest. Germany lay below them now and they had to get across most of it to reach their target.

  A thought made Farley frown. He thumbed the “talk” button again. “Pilot to radio operator. Have you caught any ship-to-ship?”

  “Frying bacon across the dial. It’s been radio silence since we were over France, anyway.”

  “Roger, Shorty. Keep me posted if anything changes.”

  “Will do.”

  Everett’s voice came on the interphone. “Anybody heard any new jokes? Since there’s no music or anything.”

  “I got one,” said Francis. He started to tell the one about the German paratroopers, but everyone yelled the punchline—Zat vass ze pilot!—before he got two lines in. “Gee whiz,” he complained, “a fella can’t get two shakes in with you guys.”

  “We better be nice to Francis, or he won’t go to the next war with us,” said Garrett.

  “Anyone want to read a letter from his girlfriend?” Everett persisted. “Tell a good story? I’m dying here.”

  “Martin has a story I think we all want to hear,” said Broben.

  Farley looked at him sharply.

  “I do?” said Martin.

  “Sure you do,” said Broben. “The guy who made it off the Ill Wind has to have a story.”

  “Beechnut was on the Ill Wind?” Everett asked.

  “I heard they were all dead on board,” said Plavitz.

  “I heard that was all bunk,” said Garrett.

  “Why don’t we let the guy who was there tell it?” asked Broben.

  Farley muted his mike. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m giving him a chance to come clean. Anything goes wrong today and these guys find out our belly gunner was on the Ill Wind, they’ll eat him alive. And they’ll blame you for putting a jonah in the crew.”

  “There’s not much to tell,” said Martin. “The bomber got shot up pretty bad and I jumped. The end.”

  “Ill Wind,” said Francis. “Ill Wind. Say, wasn’t that the ghost ship that landed in Jordan Abbey? Man, that story gave me the willies.”

  “ That’s where I heard that name!” said Shorty. “Holy jumping—
You were on the ghost bomber, Beech—um, Martin? No fooling?”

  The engines droned for a while before Martin’s voice came over the interphone again. “Yeah, I was belly gunner on her last mission.”

  “Well come on, chief, spill it,” said Garrett. “Everything I heard about that crate sounds like stuff we told around the campfire to scare the bejeezus out of each other.”

  Shorty made a sound like a creaking door. “Vell-kum to Inner Sanctum,” he said.

  “Can it,” said Farley. He scowled at Broben. “How bout it, Martin?” he asked. “We’ve all heard a bunch of different stories about it. You want to set the record straight?”

  Droning engines filled the long pause.

  “I’ll set a record, all right,” Martin finally said. “But it’ll be anything but straight.”

  four:

  the ball gunner’s tale

  It was my eighth mission on the Ill Wind. We were bombing a big marshaling yard in Pleitzhaven, lots of oil and materiel, some troop transport. We’d hit it twice before, and the Germans always seemed to get it fixed up pretty quick.

  The mission was a little bigger than the runs we’d made before, four squadrons carrying five-hundreds. It’s a short run, right by Holland on the German border, but the Germans had it staked out. You could have mapped our route from the flak alone, just about. We took an awful pounding but we made the IP okay and dropped when the lead bomber dropped.

  So the eggs are whistling down below me and dropping from the formation all around. They’re right on the Aiming Point and it looks like they’re going to mess up that railyard pretty good.

  The bomb bay doors close in front of me, and Captain Ryan banks us down and picks up speed to run us under their ak-ak bursts, and then bam, we take a huge hit on the right side. I thought it was a 105 shell, so I swing around to look for damage. I think I’m gonna see the tail falling off, a broken wing or something, but there’s not a mark on her.

  Next thing I know it’s raining B-17s all around me. I realize the Germans have moved their eighty-eights a lot closer to the railyard this time out, and they’re firing almost straight up from the Aiming Point. Some of their shells set off the bombs that just got dropped, and some of those went off right under the bomb bays and gutted those B-17s like fish. It was awful. I only saw a couple of parachutes. Mostly the bombers just broke apart and fell. We lost about a third of the squadron in less than a minute.

  We turned out and got past the flak line and leveled off. We’d just re-formed about ten minutes later when the entire Luftwaffe showed up. There were more bandits than I ever saw at one time before. Me-109s, Focke-Wulf 190s. They didn’t engage right away. They paced us out of firing range and then pulled ahead of us. When they were about a mile in front they turned and came at us head-on. They were wing-to-wing in groups of three and four, and they didn’t start shooting till they saw the whites of our eyes. I could see them coming, but they were level with us and I couldn’t shoot up at them. The only guy who could fire on them was the bombardier, up front, and he just had a thirty-cal, like Boney. That must have been scary as hell. They’re coming in side by side, and they’re close enough throw rocks at before they start firing, and even if you shoot the pilot his plane’s probably going to plow right into you. Take you and your whole ship with him to Valhalla, or wherever. The very last couple of seconds they would open up with those twin .30 cannons. They sounded like a freight train going up a hill.

  So this 190 comes in from one o’clock level and opens fire and then rolls off. He’s still firing as he goes by. I could feel it stitching down the whole length of the hull, front to back. He’s so close I think he’d have clipped us if he hadn’t rolled. I had his whole silhouette not fifty feet away from me and I turned and fired, but he was already gone.

  They came in one more time like that. This time the captain turned us away before they broke. It gave the navigator and the top turret a shot, but I wasn’t expecting the turn and I missed by a mile when the fighter came by.

  They peeled off after that. Two suicide charges at every Fortress coming off the bombing run, unload their thirties in a five-second burst, and then gone. They did some serious damage.

  My interphone was out and I had no idea what the situation was inside the bomber. The engines weren’t smoking up but the right stabilizer was chewed up something awful. You could see the tail waggling; the captain was having to zigzag to go forward. I’m hitting the talk button and saying, “Ball gunner checking in, anybody read me?” There’s nothing. If it’s just my connection, they’ll know next time the captain calls a crew check. If it’s the whole interphone, someone’ll bang on the ball and I’ll bang back.

  So I sit tight and do my job. I’ve got about ten seconds of ammo left and I keep my eyes peeled in case those bandits come back. Pleitzhaven was burning behind us. Two more Fortresses went down, but I couldn’t make out which ones. I counted eight parachutes. That’s the most helpless feeling in the world, watching that.

  After a couple minutes it’s pretty clear the Ill Wind ’s in trouble. The tail waggle’s gotten worse, and every once in a while the right wing dips like she wants to roll.

  Number Two engine cut out just as we got out over the North Atlantic. You could feel the drag trying to turn us, but the captain got the prop feathered and it wasn’t as bad. But now we’re out over the water and we’re flying slower and losing altitude.

  Well, that engine quitting made up my mind. I had to see what was going on upstairs. I could always get back in the turret if I had to, but I sure as hell couldn’t always get out. So I rolled the guns straight down and I undid the hatch—and it wouldn’t move. I checked the latches and stood into it and felt it give. Well, if it’ll move, it’ll open. The only place I can brace is the footrests, but at this point I don’t give a damn about screwing up the range pedal, so I put my weight into it, and the hatch comes up and all this red just comes dripping down all over me. For a second I start to lose my noodle. Then I realize the hydraulics have been hit, and it’s fluid leaking everywhere. But then I think that can’t be right, either, because I was just moving the turret around like a carnival ride, no problem.

  Something slides off the hatch as I stand up. I’m facing the back of the bomber, and the first thing I see is a line of holes big as dimes along the fuselage. There’s light coming in and they’re whistling loud as hell. There’s a loud roar from up front and a lot of wind rushing through the cabin.

  Then I see the blood. It’s on the sides, the floor, the ribs. Like someone threw balloons full of red paint. There’s a pile of rags up against a bulkhead and I realize it’s Charlie Gower, one of our waist gunners. He’s frozen solid and the blood everywhere is just red ice.

  The bomber jerks and I catch myself on the hatchway, and that’s when I see Eugene Walker, our other waist gunner. He must have been firing at the bandit as it came by, because he’s shot in the chest. It knocked him back on top of the ball turret, and he’s what was blocking my hatch. I’ve got his blood all over me and I feel like I’m gonna pass out, and I realize I’ve got to plug into an air tank pronto.

  I pretty much fall into the radio room, and Bob Murray’s dead at his table with his head on his arm like he’s taking a nap. The line of bulletholes runs down the hull right beside him.

  I plug into a walkaround and haul it back with me to check on the tail gunner. Past the rear wheel I can see Cantrell on his saddle at the tail gun, so I slide up a little more and I’m looking up at him and his face is blue. There’s frost on his eyelashes but not a scratch on him I can see. I think his oxygen feed got cut.

  I don’t know why, but that gave me the creepy crawlies more than Charlie or Eugene. I guess because Cantrell never even had a clue. He just nodded off. Some people say that’s better, and maybe it is. But I still want to be there when it happens.

  I slid out of the tail and went up front. There was a lot of wind coming through the ship and it was loud as hell. The whole thing was shaking and shud
dering. I got through the bomb bay and saw J.D. there on the floor. He was our flight engineer. Looked like he’d been standing behind the cockpit seats and fell backward and hit his head.

  What had probably knocked him off was a hole a yard wide on the left side, near the pilot seat. The wind coming through was so strong I could barely stand up. Captain Ryan and Pepper Thompson were still up there in the cockpit, so I crawled into the nose. Louie Stoddard, our bombardier, was laying up against the plexi, and Ferguson was on the floor by his navigator station. Both of them just shredded. It was awful.

  There was nothing I could do, so I backed out of there and climbed up to the cockpit. You could barely hold on, the air was so strong coming through the flak hole. Pepper Thompson had the wheel and he was staring straight ahead. Captain Ryan was just staring.

  I yelled out to the captain, but no one could’ve heard me with all that wind blasting. I leaned down to yell in his ear and I saw that he wasn’t even there from the waist down. The flak had just cut him in half. His seat was shredded and there was blood and foam everywhere. So it had to be Pepper Thompson who’d cut the feed to Number Two engine and feathered the prop. We called him Pepper because he poured Tabasco sauce on everything he ate. He was really struggling with the controls and I just stood there for a second. I didn’t know if he even knew I was there. I wasn’t sure what to do. Finally I put a hand on his shoulder. He nodded but he didn’t look back or take his hands off the wheel. I yelled at him that everybody was dead. He just nodded again and said something.

  I leaned in close so I could hear him, and that’s when I saw about ten inches of metal sticking up out of his right side just as I felt his lips move against my ear. “We’re all dead,” he said.

  I swear to god the hair stood up on the back of my head. I’ve had nightmares about it. His lips moving on my ear. That voice like it didn’t even have any breath, telling me We’re all dead.