The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  White straightened in his seat, then put his feet back on his pedals and his hands on the control wheel. He suddenly felt bone tired, and shook himself, scanning the instrument panel. ‘I have to log this one as pilot, to keep our US Air Force handlers happy that we’re not just treating this as some kind of lark.’

  ‘Righto, skipper. On your mark.’

  ‘She’s mine.’ White took over, immediately feeling the aircraft bucking against him, giving leeway to the controls until he could feel his way into the soul of the beast. He glanced right and saw Parker’s hand reach up to the fast-feathering switches above the windscreen, waiting to see that the pilot was in control of the aircraft before making any adjustments to the propellers. The trim came out perfectly this time, slightly nose-heavy, but the plane yawed a few degrees to starboard and Parker pushed up the switches to feather the propellers on the port side. ‘A north-easterly wind is picking up,’ he said to White. ‘We’re low enough now to be affected by the surface wind, and you can see it ruffling the sea.’ The aircraft came back to level, and the compass wobbled around the thirty-degree mark. White played with the throttles, listening above the din for the harmonious sound of all four engines in sync, while Parker tapped the propeller pitch levers to maintain the same rpm. White glanced at him. He was good. He knew Parker had done nearly two tours as flight engineer on a Lancaster, and had that special knack of reading a pilot and his relationship with his aircraft. He felt a surge of confidence. Whatever lay ahead of them, in the Pacific and beyond, he knew he could meld the new men into his crew. Their survival was what counted, in this confined, ear-splitting beast where they lived only in the present, where all that mattered was the sheer fact of being alive.

  The navigator tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Five minutes to target, skipper.’

  ‘Right. Dropping to two hundred feet.’

  He felt his pulse quicken. He nosed the aircraft down, coming level again a minute later. It was rougher now, more turbulent over the denser air, like driving across cobbles, as if they were riding the waves themselves. He felt the tail shake that could indicate imminent stall, but he knew it was just buffeting as the slipstream at low altitude corkscrewed around the tail planes. Most of the crew had no proper seats or safety harnesses, another of the less endearing features of the Liberator. A sudden impact could be fatal to any of them. He peered out of the port window at the whitecaps, now alarmingly close, and then glanced up at the long narrow wing. That was the one thing about the Liberator that really frightened him. They were sound, reliable machines, with greater range than the Lancaster or Flying Fortress, and had been quickly adopted by RAF Coastal Command as long-range anti-submarine planes. But they were not amphibious like the other mainstays of Coastal Command, the Catalina and the Sunderland, and they had very poor ditching characteristics: high wings, a big tub belly, and a nose that collapsed on impact if the pilot failed to trim the aircraft so that the tail was down, not always possible in the circumstances of an emergency landing. He gripped the control wheel hard. They could not ditch, and at this altitude they could not bail out. He focused hard, reminding himself. This was a training mission. Nobody was shooting at them. They would be all right.

  The bomb-aimer’s voice crackled on the intercom. ‘Should I open bomb-bay doors, skip?’

  ‘Roger that. Open bomb-bay doors.’ He heard the hydraulics as the doors swung open, then felt more buffeting as the open doors increased the drag. The din inside the fuselage was even more pulverizing. They were carrying three two-thousand-pound depth charges, shaped like oil drums. The charges were normally used against deeply submerged submarines, but these ones were pressure-fused to blow at a depth of only thirty feet and represented a revolution in thinking about anti-ship warfare. The bombs and torpedoes that had been the standard anti-ship weapons of the war impacted against the armour-plated sides and superstructure of ships, whereas depth charges might be dropped to explode beneath the vulnerable lower hull. The bomb-aimer had trained with 617 Squadron, using the bouncing bombs that had been deployed on the famous dambuster raid, and they were going to try the same technique against the target, with the charges spinning anticlockwise so that when they hit the side of the hull, the traction of the spin would carry them under the keel to explode. That was the theory, anyway. It had never been tried before on a ship. Privately White thought that it was a game devised to keep an experienced crew amused before they went on to the real business in the Pacific in the days to come.

  Parker reached over to the top of the instrument panel between them and tapped the compass housing. ‘The gyro’s gone on the blink.’

  White remembered what the briefing officer had told them, and then tapped the housing himself. ‘It must be the magnetic disturbance near the fault line north of San Salvador that they talked about. At least it shows we’re in the right place.’ He squinted at the sun, noting its position between the metal frames of the cockpit window. ‘We’re going to have to fly by dead reckoning. Everyone, eyes peeled for the target now. It should be coming up in a few minutes. Bomb-aimer, take position. Gunners, cock weapons. After we’ve dropped our charges, I’m going to come round so you can have some target practice on whatever’s left of that minesweeper.’

  ‘Have some fun, you mean, sir,’ Brown’s voice crackled in.

  ‘Whatever you say, Charles.’ White smiled wryly to himself, then took a deep breath. Without the compass, he felt like an ancient mariner on an unknown ocean, as if the beast he was riding were on some unseen current in the air that would take them inexorably to their destination. Instinctively he looked for the only talisman he had ever carried, a little metal butterfly pendant he had been given by his eight-year-old daughter on leave after his first tour. He had told her how on a daylight raid his aircraft had risen above the clouds into the brilliant sunshine, and how the clouds had seemed as white as angels’ wings, as if he were being conveyed directly to heaven without death. What he did not tell her was how the clouds were peppered with the burst of flak, how other aircraft were falling burning all round him, and how the Tallboys they dropped through the orange and red skymarkers to the unseen target below had shaken and rippled those white clouds with their blast, sending up black clouds that curled and billowed through the white as if the fires of hell had broken through to heaven itself. His wife had said they would pray every night for those angels to cleave a path ahead of him through the bullets and the shrapnel so that he would return safely to them. After that last mission, he had gone back to his aircraft to retrieve the butterfly, but on the way he had seen the new pilot, a fresh-faced boy who could not have been more than nineteen, who would be flying into the reach of death even in those final days and would need all the luck he could get. As he passed him, the boy had smiled, saying nothing but waving him a breezy salute, and in that moment, White felt as if he had transferred all that was within him to the future. He had left the butterfly pinned to the instrument panel of his Lancaster, the only place that seemed right for it. Now he looked below the gyro compass to where he was so used to seeing it, and remembered his final night of leave two weeks ago, when he had left his wife and daughter asleep in their cottage before the long flight to Nassau. The butterfly had kept him safe. But soon he would need a new talisman, for a new war.

  Another voice crackled on the intercom. It was the forward gunner, crouched behind the twin fifty-calibre Browning machine guns in the nose turret above the bomb-aimer. ‘Skipper, you’re not going to like this. There’s a submarine dead ahead, just surfaced. It’s about a mile away, just before that lighter patch of sea that must be the edge of the reef. It seems to be heading west, directly into the reef. There must be a passage through.’

  White groaned. Christ. There were supposed to be no vessels in the live-fire zone. The last thing they wanted was a sub commander reporting them for rattling his boat. He straightened up for a better view over the protuberant nose turret, and then pressed the rudder pedal so that that aircraft yawed slightly to port. He s
quinted hard at the horizon, seeing only the whitecaps, remembering the forward gunner’s exceptional eyesight. Then he saw the sub, about five degrees to starboard, a dark sliver on the water below the horizon. Their target vessel was still not visible, presumably just out of sight beyond. What was a sub doing here? The zone designation had only been put in place two weeks ago, and it was just possible that a sub returning from a long patrol might have failed to pick up the warning. But it didn’t make sense. The war in the Atlantic had been over for weeks, and there had been no need for subs to remain submerged and out of radio contact. He would be over it in less than a minute. He had to make a snap decision. They would abort until the sub was well away, and come round again. Rather than let the sub commander report him first, he would radio the sighting back to Nassau now. He pressed the intercom against his face to try to exclude the throbbing of the engines. ‘Can anyone make out the type?’

  Parker loosened his harness and raised himself up from the co-pilot’s seat, gazing through a pair of binoculars. ‘Well, it’s not a Type VII U-boat. The conning tower’s too big.’

  ‘We’re not going to be seeing U-boats, Bill. The war’s over,’ White said.

  ‘Sorry, skip. I did my first ops in Coastal Command; that’s what the word submarine means to me. I think this one must be American.’

  ‘All right. Navigator and wireless operator, I want a position fix and I want it radioed through to Nassau now. We’ll send a follow-up message when we see the sub’s recognition code as we fly over it. There’ll be hell to pay, but we’ll let the station commander sort that out with the US Navy.’

  The wireless operator came on. ‘I can’t get through, sir. Electromagnetic interference. Must be the same problem that’s affecting the compass.’

  White groaned again. ‘All right. Navigator, what’s your estimate for the position of the sub?’

  The navigator rattled off the co-ordinates, and White repeated them under his breath, keeping them running through his head. He could see the conning tower of the submarine clearly now, and the wake where it had surfaced from deep water and was now slowing over a shallow section of reef.

  ‘It’s one of those blue holes, skipper,’ the forward gunner said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean the sub’s heading towards one of those blue holes in the reef, about two sub’s lengths ahead of it. You can see the dark patch in the water now. It’s a really big one, about twice the distance across of the sub.’

  White stared at the scene. What the hell was going on?

  The co-pilot still had his binoculars trained ahead. ‘There’s something not right here. That’s not an American sub. My last bombing op was over the U-boat pens at Valentin on the Baltic, so I think I know what I’m looking at. Now that I can see the conning tower, there’s no question about it. That’s a German Type XXI U-boat.’

  A U-boat. White’s mind raced. He knew that much of the surviving U-boat fleet had been destroyed in the bombing, or scuttled by their crews after the surrender. But the Type XXI was more advanced than any Allied submarine, and there would have been a scramble by the Allies to capture intact vessels. It could be one of those, recommissioned as an American or British boat. If only they could make radio contact. But there were other possibilities. There had been rumours of U-boats in the final days of the war sneaking away from Baltic and Norwegian ports carrying high-ranking Nazis and their loot to secret destinations in Latin America. Or this could be a maverick captain, a fanatical Nazi who had refused to accept the surrender and was still fighting the war on his own terms. White felt a chill down his spine. It was too late to pull away, to keep out of range. They were committed now.

  ‘Sir!’ the forward gunner yelled. ‘They’re manning guns!’

  White froze. He stared at the sub, now less than a thousand metres ahead. He tried to remember the Type XXI specs. There would be two turrets on the conning tower with twin 2cm flak guns. This sub also had a forward deck mounting, probably the standard 10.5cm gun. A single hit from that could blow the Liberator apart. And there would by machine guns, MG-42s, mounted on the conning tower railing. He squinted against the sun. The barrels of the deck gun and the turrets on the conning tower should have been clearly visible, but were not. In an instant he realized why. They were aimed directly at them. He saw flashes like a Morse code signalling lamp, and then red streaks of tracer that zipped past the cockpit.

  ‘Sir! They’re shooting!’

  They would be over the sub in seconds. He could take evasive action, try to corkscrew away, or he could go in for the attack.

  ‘Open fire!’ he yelled. ‘Bomb-aimer, on my mark!’

  ‘Drop to one hundred and fifty feet!’ the bomb-aimer yelled.

  The twin Brownings in the nose turret opened up in a deafening cacophony as the plane plummeted, sending tracer rounds hosing towards the submarine in a great undulating wave. The plane lurched sideways, and he heard the ripping and drumming sounds of bullets from the submarine impacting somewhere on the port wing. He fought to bring the aircraft back to level, using the forward gunner’s tracer rounds like guiding lights to keep the plane on target. He saw where the Brownings had found their mark, splattering against the hull casing of the submarine and then into figures around the deck gun, who crumpled and were blown backwards into the sea. Three hundred yards now.

  ‘Steady, skip, steady,’ the bomb-aimer said. ‘Bombs gone!’

  The plane lurched upwards three times as the depth charges dropped at one-second intervals, spinning away to hit the sea and bounce towards the submarine. White wrestled to maintain pitch as the centre of gravity in the aircraft went haywire. Seconds later they were over the submarine, and the tail gunner opened up with his quadruple Brownings. White struggled to keep the aircraft from pitching and yawing, regaining the nose-heavy pitch but failing to stop the sideways slippage. Something was badly wrong. Then he remembered the ripping sounds from the wing. He glanced to port, and at that moment a succession of three enormous concussions pulsed through the aircraft, forcing him to look back to the controls. ‘Bull’s-eye, skipper!’ the rear gunner yelled. ‘She’s still firing her deck gun, but the third charge blew off the bow and she’s going down into that blue hole. I could swear she fired a torpedo. The other two charges detonated against the side of the hole, and it’s collapsing around the sub.’

  White barely registered what he had heard. With the Brownings silent, he could hear the engines properly now, a discordant vibration that throbbed and grated in his ears, echoing off the water. He looked to confirm what he had seen a moment ago. The port wing beyond the outer engine was shredded and the propeller was a mess, windmilling and breaking up. The engine was on fire. He knew what that terrible noise was. Other pilots who had survived bailing out from a stricken bomber had tried to describe it to him.

  It was the aircraft’s death rattle.

  He quickly shut down the engine and pressed the fire extinguisher, but it was still burning. He gunned the inner port engine to compensate and banked the aircraft with the dead engine high, but the plane began to slew round. The sea was terrifyingly close now, the whitecaps less than a hundred feet below. They were losing altitude, and there was nothing he could do about it. He dared not open the throttles of the other engines to try to climb, as that would only increase the yaw and they would end up cartwheeling into the sea. He had no choice but to ditch. He switched off the turbo superchargers and throttled down the other three engines. He looked at the airspeed. A hundred and thirty knots. That much was good: safe landing speed. At the last moment he would heave on the control column to pull the front of the aircraft upwards, trimming it backwards to avoid the fragile nose and cockpit impacting with the sea and disintegrating.

  ‘The port wing fuel tank is on fire!’ It was the rear gunner, screaming. White watched a large round from the submarine’s deck gun fly by, nearly spent at this range and clearly visible. Then he turned and saw the huge eruption of black smoke and flame now spewing
out of the port outer engine cowling. With sickening certainty he knew that it must be licking round the rear fuselage, engulfing the tail. He remembered his vow to do everything he could to save the rear gunner. If he pitched the plane backwards into the sea, he might douse the turret in time. There was still a chance. He needed as much weight as possible aft. ‘Prepare for ditching!’ he yelled. ‘Everyone clear the nose, move aft!’ He remembered what the training officer at Nassau had told him about ditching in the sea, to repeat the co-ordinates on the intercom so that crew who survived could use the radio in the life rafts to relay their position. He switched the intercom to emergency call. He had been repeating the numbers under his breath since the navigator had told him, and now he did so loudly, insistently, over and over again: 242446 north, 742799 west. 242446 north, 742799 west.

  Suddenly he felt a violent hammer blow, saw a red flash and then heard nothing at all, just a ringing in his ears. He looked to the right. The co-pilot was still strapped in his seat, but there was a mangled mess where his head and upper body had been. A gaping hole in the side of the cockpit extended below. White looked down, only able to move in slow motion, as if time itself had slowed down. The waves flashed by beneath the co-pilot’s feet. He reached out his hand slowly to touch the flecks of foam, to feel the warmth of the sea. He would go swimming when they got back, would strip off his battledress and life jacket and swim down, far into the depths, exuberant at having survived. He knew now he could let go, at last. The war was over.

  He stared down in front of his own seat, and saw his legs hanging over the open hole, ragged bloody stumps with shattered white bone sticking out. He pursed his lips. It was another design glitch of the Liberator. It needed armour plating under the pedals. He would talk to them about that too when he got back.

  He felt himself falling forward. The plane was pitching down. He would need to do something about that, pretty damn soon. His head felt terribly heavy now, but he looked up and saw the place below the compass where he had kept the little metal butterfly in his Lancaster. He saw the butterfly again, and he smiled. His angels would look after him. He would be safe.