The Last Mission

by William Kennedy

  “Oh…God! Oh, that’s wonderful, Stella. Don’t stop. Just keep doing it. A little higher…just a little higher. Oh, that’s beautiful. I love you, Stella. I really do.”

  Jimmy was never going to teach anyone how to fly, but he was a fountain of knowledge on the subject of survival. He knew, for example, how to get coal for the tin-can stove that glowed in the center of our Quonset hut, supposedly spreading heat over the half walls that defined our quarters. Our ration was one bucket a day, which would keep the stove and the flue pipe warm for about four hours. We needed four buckets a day just to survive. He let the housing sergeant hitch a ride in the Stunner on one of the safer missions, and in return had three extra buckets of coal delivered each morning like clockwork that would have been the envy of a milkman.

  Brombeck also liked fresh vegetables that, due to English food rationing, had become extinct. For another ride, a different sergeant provided a gallon can of petrol every Monday. Jimmy traded it to the farmer whose fields were at the foot of our runways for fresh produce.

  As a result of my assignment as his copilot, I could feel reasonably safe. The Stunner, once in the air, buried itself behind the group ahead, with other bombers covering us on all sides. I was quite comfortable living in the warmest hut at Whittingbridge, immune to scurvy or bad teeth because of my diet supplement. I was grateful that Lieutenant Brombeck had drawn the short match, leaving Captain Callihan to pick a more experienced right-seat pilot.

  I began to understand that Jimmy might have rigged the drawing when he began mentioning the creative opportunities presented by my assignment as community-affairs officer. I had an open pass to town that, he suggested, allowed me to scope out the best-looking young women in the neighborhood. There was a fortune to be made in setting up dates for our young men, and my position gave me a desk in the command building, a renovated farmhouse close to the control tower. Working so close to the group staff, it ought to be a cinch to trade dating introductions for some of the milk runs, and that would let us skip a few of the trips to Germany.

  “What you need to do, Marron,” he whispered to me while we were inspecting a few minor repairs to our plane, “is create some sort of community crisis. Something that takes you into town and keeps you there. Something big, so you’ll have to ask another officer to assist you. I mean, you can’t keep the whole village smiling all by yourself.”

  We had been posted for a mission the next morning. The rumor mill had it that we were going deep into Germany, where we’d have to spend at least an hour without any fighter escort. I had more important things to worry about than community relations when I was summoned to the ops building. I had just settled into my chair when Detective Sergeant Browning stepped in off the porch.

  He apologized for the heavy weather, allowing cheerfully that tomorrow promised to be warm and sunny. That killed off my hopes that the mission might be canceled because of poor visibility. Then he praised the courage of the American flyers, which made me feel like a traitor for hoping that we’d be told to stand down. He was getting into the problems with the local crops when I cut him short. “Detective Sergeant, I have a meeting with my crew in just a few minutes. Was there something particular that you wanted to discuss?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact there is, if you could spare me just a moment or two.” He took wire-framed eyeglasses from one pocket and vertically folded typed pages from another pocket.

  “I’m making inquiries into the death of a young woman. Her name is Mary Brock.” He slipped a snapshot onto my desk. “A reasonable likeness, even though it was taken a few years ago.”

  The picture was of a very attractive woman with well-cut hair, nice makeup, and what appeared to be the collar of a tailored suit. Quite clearly, she wasn’t a farmer’s wife.

  “Lovely,” I said. “What happened to her?” I pushed the photo back, but Browning didn’t pick it up.

  “Found in a bombed-out building on the east edge of Norwich. She had been dead for some time, unnoticed because she was buried in the wreckage. Local children found her, actually.”

  “That’s awful,” I said. I explained that I had been attached to the group for less than a month, which made me sound more capable than if I had said I’d only left training a month earlier. “I didn’t know Norwich had been bombed.”

  “Not intentionally,” he assured me. “At least not recently. A German on some kind of mission just happened to be overhead when he cleared his bomb racks.”

  I nodded sympathetically. “Even more tragic that her death was a meaningless accident.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t an accident. We’re quite certain that she was murdered. Made to look as if she was caught in a bomb blast, and if she were found a year from now, that would be the obvious conclusion.”

  The word murdered had gotten my attention. At home, it was a tabloid word. I had never heard it spoken seriously.

  “The coroner was able to fix the time of death, give or take a few days. She died weeks after the building was destroyed.”

  I glanced from Browning to the woman’s photo on my desk. He already knew who she was, so he certainly wasn’t looking for help with her identity. I looked deliberately at my watch, taking enough time to make sure that he noticed. “Much as I’d like to be helpful…” I began, pushing up from my chair.

  “We’re checking with individuals who were close to her at the time of her death,” Browning said, without stirring from his seat. “One of them was an American flyer, apparently based in the area.”

  I settled back down. “You suspect she was killed by an American flyer?”

  “Oh, no,” Browning said as if that were the farthest thing from his mind. “Much too early to suspect anyone. But we would like to talk to the American she was seen with.”

  I picked up the photo. “You want me to circulate this and see if anyone remembers being with her?”

  “That would certainly be helpful,” he answered enthusiastically, but he still made no move to get up from his chair. “Of course, if the individual was in some way involved in her death, he’d hardly want to admit that he had been with her…”

  I took another long look at my watch.

  “What might be better,” Browning went on, “would be to have someone who saw the American glance through photos of your officers.”

  “Officers?”

  “Well, yes. The young woman who saw the American with Miss Brock noted the cap and the uniform. I thought that since it’s just officers, it should be a manageable number. Perhaps some afternoon I could bring the young woman by.”

  “As you know, Detective Sergeant, there are a dozen American bases within a bicycle ride. There are officers at all of them. You could be talking about a couple thousand men.”

  He nodded. “True. It’s a discouraging prospect, but then we really can’t ignore a murder just because the odds are daunting, can we?”

  I was about to tell him that our commanding officers certainly wouldn’t throw open the base records on a wild goose chase, but I remembered that Colonel Mast’s only requirement of me was that an angry Brit never get as far as his office. Browning struck me as a persistent old bureaucrat with all the time in the world. He wasn’t going to take no from a junior officer.

  “I’ll have to check with my superiors,” I told him. “Records like these are classified, and they may want something a bit more substantial before they make them available.”

  “Just the photographs,” he corrected. “I’m hoping to be able to narrow it down to one record.”

  I rose, forced a smile, and held out my hand. Browning gathered up his coat and papers and found that he didn’t have a free hand to offer.

  “I think we may be able to work something out,” I told him. “In any event, I’ll get back to you within a few days.”

  He crowded everything into one hand and began searching his pockets with the other. “That’s very…kind…of you,” he said, spacing the words to fill the time it took him to locate his card. He pressed
it into my outstretched hand. “Very kind indeed.”

  The next morning we took off through a heavy cloud cover and flew into hell. One of the group’s planes had its landing gear collapse during takeoff, which closed down our longest runway, moving us onto a runway that was six hundred feet shorter and costing us our headwind. Another stalled during climbout and bellied down into a vegetable field. Then two more collided in midair while we were forming up near the coastline. We were down four planes and two crews before we even reached the Channel.

  We were over cloud cover until we were well into France, then the weather cleared, exposing us to a constant line of flak that seemed to lie right along our course line. For a full hour we were under ground fire that knocked out five planes and tore holes through a dozen others. One round seemed to explode just under our right wing, throwing us into a bank that almost became a spin. When Brombeck got us back to level, we heard that fragments had cut through the waist gunner’s position, killing one of our crew. Jimmy ordered our radioman to take over the waist gun, which left us one gun short in the dorsal position.

  Then the fighters came, pouncing on us, minutes after we crossed into Germany. They were 109s and twin-engined 110s, attacking at their leisure out of the sun. With each pass, two or three more of our guys would spin out, trailing dark smoke as they went into their death dives. Our gunners were sharp, and they made the Germans pay a price. Several of the fighters, mostly the cumbersome 110s, exploded as they passed through our squadron, but the exchange wasn’t even. The fighters had one or two men aboard. The B-17s that went down were taking ten-man crews.

  When we steadied up on our bomb run, the flak was so heavy that it sounded like rain bouncing off the Stunner, then more fighters came up until they were as thick as flies.

  “Bombs away,” came over the mission frequency, and the lead plane shot off a flare to mark the spot. Jimmy was holding us steady, the engineer touching up the engines, when a fighter dove right at our nose. The slugs came through just under the windscreen, without breaking the glass. They didn’t make much more noise than the flak that was rattling against us. Jimmy screamed and slumped against the control yoke, and Stunning Stella began to dive. I dragged back on the yoke, and the engineer pulled Jimmy back into his seat. I got her level just as we reached the drop point and felt us jump up as our bombardier gave us the “bombs away” signal. Only then could I look over at Jimmy Brombeck.

  He had been hit in the legs by shots that had blown out the bottom of the instrument panel. I couldn’t tell how many times, because his trouser legs were already soaked through from the knees down. I reached across and unlocked his harness. “Get him on the floor!” I screamed to the engineer. I was holding the yoke with one hand and trying to pull Jimmy out of the seat with the other. The engineer wrestled him across the throttles, setting our engines off wildly, and down into the narrow space beneath the flight deck. His shattered legs were thrust forward into the navigator’s compartment.

  Both the navigator and the bombardier abandoned their guns and began first aid on Brombeck. The engineer crouched behind the throttles, straightening out the engines. With everyone occupied, the Stunner had no guns forward and none on top, and the fighters were grouping up for another pass while the bombers were occupied with their turn away from the target. I had just taken over my first command, and the prospects were that we wouldn’t still be in the air when the mission was heading back home.

  “He’s shot through both legs,” the navigator told me. They had cut through Brombeck’s heated flight suit and cut the legs off his pants. The bombardier had tied a tourniquet around each of Jimmy’s thighs, and the navigator was pressing down on dressings he had gotten from the first-aid kit to try and stop the bleeding.

  The fighters were formed up above us, beginning to peel off into their dives. I eased the Stunner back, taking off altitude until I was hiding under the plane that had been behind us. I figured they had guns pointing up and we didn’t.

  “Brombeck! Where the hell are you going?” It was Colonel Mast’s voice over the squadron frequency. “Get back in position!”

  I kept easing under the plane ahead, hoping to hell he didn’t get hit, because if he did he would fall into us. “Brombeck!” There was icy rage in Mast’s voice, more frightening than the guns of any German fighter. He wanted us out in the clear, adding to the total defensive firepower of the squadron. Without any firepower, I wanted us hidden, but I was too busy trying to fly the plane alone, from the wrong seat. This wasn’t the time for explanations.

  The fighters flashed by us, one of them belching flames from its engine as it passed off our left wing. Every gunner in the squadron claimed credit for the hit. A second later we were rocked by a cannon’s explosion under our tail. We began pitching like a porpoise, bringing me momentarily eyeball to eyeball with the belly gunner of the B-17 we were hiding under. But then we were out of our turn, steadying up on our course back to Norwich.

  The German fighters were running out ahead of us, getting ready for a head-on attack. I called down to the bombardier, telling him to leave Brombeck with the navigator and man the guns on our nose. Then I pushed out from under the other B-17 and eased back into our formation position.

  “Brombeck!” Mast’s voice bellowed, with his rage scarcely controlled. “Hold position, goddamn it!” Our squadron was formed up on Stunning Stella. When I moved, they had to adjust, but I was back out in the clear, where our nose gun could do some good.

  I put the flight engineer back up in the top turret. The engines were in sync, and we could use his gun firing forward, and then the Germans were back on us, flashing through our formation. I saw a 109 hit when it was still a good way off. There was a blast ahead, with a flash of fire that had to be the fuel on one of our Fortresses. Then another German fighter exploded, and still another veered up ahead of a trail of black smoke.

  Suddenly, as if it had appeared out of nowhere, there was a twin-engined 110 dead ahead. Its guns were flashing, and I could see the smoke coming out of the gun turrets of the bomber that I had ducked under. I heard our top turret open up, and then the chatter of our chin guns. It seemed like minutes, but it was only a fraction of a second before the German plane shook. One of its engines turned into a fireball. It flipped onto its side and the other wing broke lose.

  The plane ahead plunged into the burning debris and collided head-on with the body of the fighter. The fighter’s wing, still carrying an engine, was cartwheeling directly at us. There was no time for maneuver. All I could do was close my eyes.

  There were thuds and metallic sounds as pieces of the Me-110 fighter hit our wings and propellers. We shuddered and yawed. When I forced my eyes open, we were still flying. The problem was that we were moving straight into the wreckage of the B-17 ahead.

  The German fighter’s fuselage had caved in the bomber’s nose. Another part of the attacking fighter had cut her tail off, along with a piece of her stabilizer. She was rolling to the right, where the Stunner’s right wing would carve into her. Instinctively, I twisted the wheel to the right, throwing us into a bank. The stricken Fortress drifted by above us, while we began turning across the oncoming squadron. I swung the wheel to the left and we straightened out, the doomed B-17 diving past our tail.

  The deafening chaos was terrifying, with cannon rounds exploding around us, aircraft colliding, and the streaking tracer bullets flashing by in a gigantic lottery in which the lives of young Americans and Germans were chips. Piloting skills were meaningless. Turn away from one plane and you were probably going to hit another. Marksmanship was pointless. With planes flashing past one another at four-hundred-mile-per-hour closing speeds, there was no time to figure a lead angle or catch up with your tracers. All you could do was make sure you were clear of your own planes and then close the triggers.

  As soon as the fighters turned away, the gunners on the ground resumed firing. The flak was everywhere, exploding randomly, setting up asymmetrical patterns of hot shards. Pure luck w
as the only determinant of which planes twisted out and burned in their own fuel and which planes kept flying.

  The Stunner was lucky. When the flak thinned, we were still in the air, with all four engines humming as if they were being tested in the factory. When our escort fighters picked us up over France and the Germans turned away, we were still in formation, snuggled up behind the last survivor in the group ahead.

  The flight engineer dropped down from the top turret, checked the throttles and the engine readings, and then shook his head in amazement. He slipped silently into the pilot’s seat. We didn’t say a word to one another all the way across the Channel.

  We made our turn over Norwich Cathedral and came in low over the dairy farms as we lined up our runway. The engineer dropped the gear and worked the throttles. The bombardier released a flare so an ambulance would meet us at the end of the runway. I set her down perfectly and let her run off some speed before I used the brakes.

  From the cockpit I could see Colonel Mast running toward us. I slipped out of the seat and dropped out of the nose hatch seconds after Brombeck’s stretcher had been passed down.

  “Where’s Brombeck?” Mast was shouting as soon as he was close enough to be heard. He looked nearly mad, almost as if intent on killing Jimmy the second he appeared.

  “He’s right there, Colonel,” I snapped, twisting my head toward the stretcher that was being strapped across the back of a jeep. My fist was clenched, ready to smash into his mouth as soon as he was close enough.

  Mast pulled to a stop. He watched while the gunner’s body was handed out through the left gun bay. His face contorted, as if he was having a stroke, and then his chest and shoulders sagged. His anger drained.

  “You bring her back, Marron?”