*
Another Messerschmitt drew up beside their left wing. The Morgana was bracketed by fighters now.
“I tried to make a life there,” Yone told Farley. “But they were never going to trust me. I would always be the stranger. Then one day I heard a sound I had not for two long years. And you landed right in front of me. I thought, God has given me a way back.”
Their escorts tightened their formation.
“I only meant to take a parachute and jump out once we were back. Even that was painful to consider. Because all of you had accepted me. The day you arrived you made me part of your crew. It would be a betrayal when I deserted. But I would be back where I belonged, and so would you. It was an honorable solution.”
Farley saw an airfield in the distance now. All his options narrowed to a point. His future a stockade or a bullet.
“So what changed?” His voice was thick.
“Everything,” Yone said. “Everything changed. Yesterday I was only a man trying to go home. Today I am a man chosen to bring back victory.”
“It’s just a bomber.”
Yone barked a laugh. “Your aircraft? That thinking is the reason why you missed your opportunity, captain. I was brought to that world so that I could be given something incredible. As you were brought for me to bring it back. Our paths have been set by a force much greater than ourselves.”
Farley glanced up at him with a look of wondering contempt. “You think God told you to do this?”
Yone was quiet so long that Farley thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he pulled an object from a pocket and held it out. “Something like a god,” he said.
Beneath a gelatinous coating was an object the size of a quarter and shaped like a mushroom or a rounded top. It shimmered and blurred as if it were not entirely there.
Farley looked from the locus to Yone’s triumphant face. “What have you done?”
Yone looked puzzled. “I have found an end to this terrible war. A way to save millions of lives.”
“Yone. Listen to me. That thing’s not a god. It’s a weapon. An intelligent weapon. It’s using you to bring itself back. It’s making itself exist.”
Yone shook his head. “You see only enemies and loyalties. You would rather fight your war than yield to a power that brings peace. The power to prevent the future we have seen.”
A river roared in Farley’s ears. He closed his eyes. “You’ve just caused the future we saw. The thing that ends the world in fifty years is in your goddamn hand.”
“The thing that ends the war,” Yone corrected. He smiled at the dampered locus in his hand. “You think I have not—”
The Messerschmitt in front of them exploded.
Both men flinched, and then the Typhon slid by like a passing battleship. The mottled belly gashed and bleeding fluid, the torn lengths staple-stitched and puckered divots rough-patched. Spindly repair drones clung to its savaged underside like ticks, methodically repairing even as the insane machine flowed by.
Yone gaped at it in mortal dread. “No,” he said.
The Typhon rolled right and shed a dandruff of flailing repair drones. Farley glimpsed the seed-shaped weapon pod beneath the raked right wing, the sleek fury of the fearsome head as the unrelenting construct tore its damaged way across the contested German sky.
Farley looked up at Yone. “It’s been guarding that thing you’re holding for two hundred years,” he said. “Did you think it would just let you fly away with it?” he said.
And Broben bolted upright in his copilot seat and pulled a steel plate from a flak-jacket pocket. He twisted around and rammed the plate into Yone’s face. The blunt metal cracked the palate bone above Yone’s upper teeth. His head snapped back and the headset cord tore from its jack and blood sprayed from his nose and mouth. His arms flailed and the gun went off. Wind hissed through the sudden hole in the top of the cockpit as Yone fell back into the lower pit—where Garrett knelt behind the bomb bay bulkhead, aiming his own service .45.
Garrett rushed to Yone and yanked him up and brought the small man’s arms up into a full nelson. Broben dropped the metal plate and wrenched the pistol from Yone’s hand. Farley glanced down at the steel plate and saw a flattened .45 slug in a dimple near the top.
Garrett turned Yone around and pinned him against the bulkhead and jammed his pistol up against Yone’s eye. “Why’d you do it?” he yelled into Yone’s bleeding face. “Why would you do this?”
Yone tried to say something and blood bubbled from his mouth.
“He’s a Luftwaffe pilot,” Broben said.
“He’s a Nazi?” Garrett slammed Yone’s head into the back of the copilot seat. “You’re a stinking Nazi?”
A roaring wind tore into the bomber as the bomb bay doors swung open behind them.
*
“Captain!” Francis yelled in Farley’s headset. “That vulture’s back, it’s blowing everything out of the sky!”
“Some details would be nice,” Farley said automatically as he brought the landing gear back up.
“Three miles back, seven o’clock level and coming back around. It’s not flying so good, but holy jeez it’s fast.”
Farley turned ten degrees left and shoved the wheel hard forward. The Morgana dove. Dead ahead two miles away a massive column of smoke roiled above a cluster of low buildings. The munitions plant they had dropped on only minutes and a week ago.
A desperate idea formed.
“Come on, girl,” Farley told his bomber.
*
From the radio room’s opened doorway Everett and Shorty and Wen watched Garrett lurch toward the opened bomb bay. Yone hung bleeding from him like an untied butcher’s apron.
The bomber nosed into a sudden dive and everybody grabbed what they could grab.
Yone began to struggle, and Broben climbed down and helped Garrett dead-carry him to the bomb bay entrance, fighting against the deafening wind and diving aircraft. Broben looked down through the opened bomb bay doors at a treelined road eight thousand feet below. He let go of Yone’s legs and patted the writhing man’s chest. “Auf Wiedersehen, Johann!” he yelled, and moved aside.
A voice cut through the raging wind. “Wait! Wait! ”
Broben looked back to see Boney’s lanky form unfold from the crawlway. He cradled a yard-long metal cylinder and struggled toward them. Broben saw a cotter pin in the top of it and recognized the fuse booster Farley had asked Boney to pull from the jammed bomb in case they had to blow the ship. Somehow he had hidden it where even Wen and his repair drones had not found it.
The bombardier raised the heavy cylinder high and pulled the collar of Yone’s stretch armor and shoved the cylinder down the front. He looked Yone in the eye and yanked out the cotter pin.
Garrett heaved Yone out onto the little platform that led to the catwalk and dangled the bleeding man above a mile and a half of empty air. Yone kicked and screamed.
Boney leaned into the entryway and set a hand on Garrett’s shoulder. “Not yet!” he said.
Garrett looked back in disbelief. Yone twisted in his grip and Garrett shook him like a terrier with a rat.
Boney squinted past the big man at the countryside sliding past below. He seemed to be performing some internal calculation. He closed his eyes and held up three gloved fingers and silently counted off, three, two, one, and then he opened his eyes and pointed. “Now,” he said.
Garrett let go. Yone dropped screaming from the bomb bay and shot back in the slipstream.
Broben cupped his hands to his mouth. “Take that back to Hitler, you Nazi fuck,” he yelled.
*
Farley plunged toward the climbing pillars of smoke. The engines strained, the airframe shook, the rushing wind sang off the wings. Farley’s senses filled the metal and the bomber spoke to him in a language of rudder and flap and engine.
The smoke column towered before the diving bomber like a warning from a wrathful god. Craters clustered around the damaged factory at its base.
“It’s on us cap it’s right behind us!” Francis yelled in Farley’s ears. “That cannon on its wing is lighting up I think it’s—”
Farley pulled the yoke with all his might. His nose came up. The blood drained from his head. His wings creaked like cracking timbers. Red lace webbed his vision.
Hold on. Hold on.
*
In the shaking belly turret Martin hung like a bug in amber and watched the munitions factory grow before him with terrifying speed. They were going too fast and getting very low, and Martin couldn’t see how they could pull out of the dive.
The bomb bay doors swung down in front of him. The crew was going to bail! They would leave him bolted in this metal coffin while the captain slammed the ship into the target and pulled the chasing Typhon with it.
Martin was about to yell for them to get him out when someone dropped out of the bomb bay and shot back under the turret. Martin swung around to look for a parachute—and saw the Typhon two hundred yards behind them. Wings swept and planed head straining forward. Beneath one wing the weapon pod sparked deep within the barrel, then blazed.
The falling man was scooped into that white-hot bore.
A jet of flame erupted from the rail-gun core.
The weapon pod exploded in a swell of light.
A giant’s hand pressed Martin down. His vision clouded as the horizontal stabilizers bowed. The turret strained within its socket. The captain was trying to pull the Morgana out of the dive.
Too late, thought Martin as they screamed toward the cratered ground.
He set a gloved hand on the lump of medicine bag beneath his flight suit and watched the thunderbird die.
A chain of explosions erupted across the Typhon’s engulfed body. One delta wing tore off and spun away. The Typhon slanted and began to fall. A stump grew where the wing had broken off. It thickened, extended, and burned. The Typhon plunged blazing like a thing cast out of Heaven, furiously altering its structure to find some ideal form, to claw its way up from the abyss. Crowned by fire now the planed head swept from side to side as if in denial.
The Flying Fortress shot into the pillar of smoke and then shot out again, coiling billows following and treetops whipping past two hundred feet below. In its wake the burning Fury sank into the welling smoke and struck the damaged weapons plant. The building detonated and a ring of shockwave spread across the landscape like a pond ripple. A brilliant hemisphere swelled out from the blast. The smoke column coalesced into a curling boil.
The overpressure wave caressed the bomber as she climbed above the German countryside.
*
Farley kept her climbing and turned northwest. “Pilot to tail gunner,” he said, remotely glad to hear that his voice did not betray his pounding heart. “What’s the status on the target?”
“What target?” Francis came back. “The Typhon hit it like a rocket and blew it into next week. Jiminy Christmas, you couldn’t fill your pockets with what’s left.”
Farley took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Crewmen yelling and cheering in his ears. Hands firm on the wheel. This moment. This moment.
He opened his eyes and looked out at the seamless blue. The round sun. The unbounded dome of real sky.
*
Broben climbed back into the right-hand chair. “They’re going apeshit back there,” he said as he slipped on his headset. He held up the connector and squinted at the exposed wire where it had been yanked out of the jack. He snorted, then plugged it in anyway and turned to Farley.
The captain was staring blankly out the window. Broben stayed quiet until Farley blinked and then looked at his copilot like someone just waking up. “Anything unusual?” he asked.
Broben raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
“Right,” said Farley. “Sorry.”
The bomber climbed the German sky.
“They’ll be back at their posts in a minute,” Broben said.
Farley nodded absently. “I know they will.”
Broben surveyed the instruments. “Engines are running a little cold,” he said.
“Wen said they would.”
Broben let the deep drone play another minute. Then he said, still studying the gauges, “She’s something, huh, Joe.”
A sad smile ghosted Farley’s face. “More than I could have imagined.”
“Um, captain?” came over the interphone. “Tail gunner here.”
Farley frowned. “Pilot here,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“Sir, we’re not—I mean, we.…”
“Jesus, Francis, spit it out,” said Broben.
“Well—we’re not surrendering anymore, are we?”
Farley and Broben gaped at each other. Then Broben put a hand over his face and started laughing.
Farley shook his head in wonder. “That’s a negative, Francis,” he replied, and looked forward again. “We’re not surrendering anymore.”
forty-two
Here’s where I’m supposed to say that we limped back all shot up and dangling pieces, with one working engine that was running on fumes, and I had to belly her in because the gear wouldn’t lower and Martin was stuck in the ball turret. That’s the big Hollywood ending. But it wasn’t like that. We had some hull damage from the 109s and flak, but nothing important had been knocked out. The engines purred like kittens and we had plenty of fuel left, because they were a lot more efficient than they had been.
Rochester, Wen’s repair bug, wouldn’t power up again. Wen wanted us to bring the thing back to England so we could take it apart and figure out how to make more of them, but I nixed that idea. We were going to have enough problems explaining things as it was. I made him throw Rochester out over the Channel. I swear to god, he teared up. A guy who wouldn’t cry at his mother’s funeral, unless her coffin had a screw loose. But that was Wen.
Once we were out over Holland the crew started trading stories about what had happened after we broke through, and we pieced it all together. I thought they’d just thrown Yone out of the bomber, and my last-ditch power dive was what had put the Typhon into the target. Martin set that straight. He was the only one who saw the whole thing, so we all got to hear another crazy story from him on the ride back.
Then we talked about what we should do when we got back. The idea of telling what really happened didn’t even come up. We’d have been grounded, hounded, and Section Eighted. They’d have thrown away the key. But some crews had to have seen us suddenly heading the other way as the formation came out of the run, like we’d hung a U. We had to account for that. We figured a lot of bombers had been affected by the vortex, so we cooked up a story that our electrics went haywire and I lost my bearings and the wheels went down by themselves.
We arrived back at Thurgood right on the heels of the stragglers from that mission. I couldn’t believe it. Goodnight, Sweetheart had blown a tire when she touched down, and they hadn’t cleared her off the runway yet. I had to circle around and come in again.
It turned out we didn’t have to tell our fib about an electrical storm. We’d been seen going the other way after the bombing run, all right. But everybody’d figured we’d cleared a bomb jam and gone around for another run on the target. That kind of thing wasn’t unheard of, but it’s still a crazy thing to do. The eighty-eights have your altitude dialed in by then, and if you don’t kiss your ship goodbye you’re almost certainly going to lose some crew. I’d heard of men who wouldn’t fly with pilots who’d gone around again on a target.
So they locked me in a room and grilled me about it for half a day. I reckoned I was going to be court-martialed for being a damned idiot. Instead they did something else they do to damned idiots: They awarded me the Silver Star. Gave it to the whole crew.
The Stars and Stripes made a lot of hay over the story, and the papers back home got hold of it and we were flavor of the week. The Little Bomber that Could. We took some heat from the other crews, because no one likes a damn hero, but mostly we just did our job and it all blew over—unt
il some reporter noticed that we were going out on missions and all of us were coming back, and he wrote an article about that. The No-Hitter, he called it.
We used that idea to keep people from poking around the Morgana. It’s bad luck to talk to a pitcher who’s throwing a no-hitter, and nobody wants to be the one who brings breaks the lucky streak of a bomber crew. We flew fifteen more missions and we didn’t lose a man.
Don’t go thinking any of this was a picnic. We weren’t bulletproof, bombproof, flak-proof, or anything-proof. But we had an edge. I can’t explain it any better than that. We had the Morgana.
The hardest part was not sharing what we had with the other crews. Bombers went down because we kept a zipped lip. Crews got killed, or spent the rest of the war in prison camps. It ate at us. But we’d all seen where this war would lead if we weren’t careful—and maybe even if we were—and letting that happen was a whole lot worse. It got us through the war, I think. Plus, we’d all been through something nobody else had, not even other crews who’d seen terrible action, and we couldn’t tell anyone about it. We only had each other. The Morgana got us through the missions, but we got each other through the war.
The double shot of the Little Bomber that Could and the No-Hitter was the kind of story people at home liked to hear, so the Army put us on a big morale-boosting bond tour. Brass bands, dancing girls, flybys, speeches, the whole nine yards. Plavitz got to meet Glenn Miller at one of those, not long before Miller went missing in England. Told him that “King Porter Stomp” was his favorite band tune. Miller just looked puzzled and said, “Sorry, I don’t know it.” We ribbed Plavitz for a solid week about that.
And Shorty met Jack Benny! It was at a USO show, and Shorty did his Benny imitation in front of him. Benny loved it, and he cooked up a bit with Shorty where Benny did his act, and said he’d met some guy backstage who sounded almost as good as him. And Shorty walks out and stands right next to Benny in the exact same pose, hand on his cheek and everything, and says, “Almost?” The crowd ate it up. So Benny demanded a showdown and put it to a vote, and Shorty won. It was hilarious. Benny told him to look him up in Hollywood after he killed Hitler.
Fata Morgana Page 32
