Authors: Jim Shepard
The Channel eased brightly beneath them and he could see the bulge of East Anglia receding beyond
Paper Doll
's huge tail. He could not make out any evidence of their expected fighter escort. He imagined hundreds of Luftwaffe pilots over Holland and northwestern Germany scrambling for their sleek monsters, and clouds of silhouettes from his aircraft spotter charts rising to meet him, Plexiglas canopies glittering over the fuselages with the heartlessness of the eyes of insects.
He double-checked the seal on his oxygen mask, the heavy gloves giving him little feel for what he was doing. Lewis and Piacenti were clearing and testing the guns, and the plane shook, and already he could pick up the ugly cordite smell through his mask. He felt the tremor of Snowberry firing beneath him, and cleared his own guns, pointed away from the aircraft above, and squeezed the thumb triggers on the hand grips that controlled the azimuth and elevation of the guns, and the twin fifty calibers on either side bucked and fired visible tracers with a lazy, drooping sweep. Then everything was silent against the steady background of engines and slipstream. Smoke puffs trailed from the guns of
Boom Town
and
Geezil II.
He swung the turret around at medium speed, the gun barrels tracking the horizon smoothly. The ease of the electronically operated controls reminded him of a ride at a fair. Track the Jerries, five cents, he thought.
“Shouldn't we turn back?” Piacenti called in. “My gun's not working.”
“What do you care?” Lewis said. “When do you ever do anything with it?”
They rendezvoused with their expected escort, RAF Spitfires. The Spitfires waggled their wings out of range to show off their markings before approaching, a precaution against trigger-happy Yanks. They roared ahead to the front of the formation, their razored contrail streams like scratches on the ice of the sky.
They continued to ride. The altocumulus and cirrus high above them were sheeted and pebbled like the silvery lining of a shell. His electric suit and sheepskin jacket and pants kept him unevenly warm, but the air was bitterest winter, 40 below zero at altitude. Bryant worried about his suit shorting out from sweat or urine and had heard enough frostbite stories. The air came in blasts through the openings for the gun barrels, and for comfort's sake he found himself turning away from
Paper Doll
's nose. His eyes and temples ached under the goggles and strap.
The interphone crackled and Snowberry's voice came over low, singing. “I'm dreaming of a White Christmas,” he crooned. Contrails began to unfurl from the bombers above them like long streams of white spun sugar, or cottony bandages unrolling endlessly from the engines. They reminded him of enormous wakes from motorboats. The effect with a large bomber group was spectacular. The spectacle was lamentable, considering their position. “When we're up that high and putting out that kind of contrail signature, I think Rommel in North Africa can see us coming,” Gabriel had once told him glumly. Ice had formed on the upper seal of Bryant's mask, and there were smallish crystals on his goggles. “Where the treetops glisten/And children listen,” Snowberry sang.
“Can it,” Gabriel said.
Bryant struggled with his mask. It was dark and cold and smelled heavily of rubber, and condensation inside it was dripping down his neck and freezing. He thought of the water freezing in the rubber hose, of oxygen starvation, and his hands shook. Every so often Cooper called them to check in, for that reason. It was Lewis's private terror that in the tail he'd only be reached too late.
They were over the Dutch coast. There were little thumps and pings occasionally, and Bryant watched smallish clouds with interest as they appeared and drifted backward through the formations.
“It'll be easier over the target,” Eddy said over the interphone. “Without these little clouds.”
“Little clouds, my butt,” Gabriel said. “That's flak, you idiot.”
Bryant gave a start. They could feel the delicate musical sound of the light shrapnel. The plane lurched and straightened out.
“That one s.o.b.,” Lewis said. “He's set up right at the end of the Zuyder Zee. I can see his flashes.”
A burst shook
Geezil II
above them, the ship rocking and sideslipping.
“He is hot,” Lewis said. “Dick Ott used to call him Daniel Boone. Up yours, pal.” They could hear him chatter his guns out at the ground below, uselessly.
There was a minor commotion.
“Piacenti's sick,” Ball commented. “We put it in a box, and left it in the bomb bay.”
“War is hell,” Snowberry said. “They shoulda thought about this when they invaded Poland.”
“What's the matter,
Duce?
” Lewis asked. “Nervous in the service?”
The plane lurched again dramatically and Bryant felt a momentary terror that they'd been hit. “Wop Barf Kayoes Ack Ack,” Lewis said. “What a story.”
The Dutch coast was disappearing behind them and Bryant was beginning to feel a good deal more excited and frightened. Wherever their fighter escort had been, it was around now turning back.
“âYou fiddle with my shrimp and then you turn me down,'” Lewis sang. “âYou know I can't do nothin' till my shrimp's unwound.'”
“All right, can it,” Gabriel said. “I mean it.”
Bryant could see the cirrus clouds as ice crystals at this height, rippled and thin and extending for hundreds of miles. Around the tail the flight's white contrail streams converged in a vanishing point like a burst of illumination.
“God a mighty,” he murmured. He felt a peculiar and foolish excitement and a pride in where he was and what he felt was about to happen.
Hirsch called in their position quietly. They were now all looking for fighters, 540 men in 54 airplanes. Bryant swiveled the turret slowly, searching through the polished perspex for the dots. He tried to concentrate, fighting the cold and the plane's shaking and the erratic ghost flecks from the defects of his own eye. He tested a speck's integrity by immediately shifting his eye; if the speck shifted with it, it was phony, a momentary unreliability. Bad peepers, Lewis said, killed more people than bad anything else.
Bryant slipped a flight glove off, and touched the gun triggers lightly. The cold metal seared him and he jerked his hand back and fumbled with his glove. He went on watching, his fingers burning with a steady and painful pulse. Cooper called another oxygen check. While they ran through it, each station calling in, Bryant sang to himself the lyrics of “Paper Doll” as some sort of talisman.
Lucky Me!
and
Milk Run
had closed on either side and wallowed nearer, wingtips already alarmingly close to
Paper Doll's.
He could see the dorsal gunner in
Lucky Me!
peering up to the east, a bunched scarf flashing white beneath his chin. They were closing the combat box, making it tighter to concentrate the defensive fire. Above him
Geezil II
floated down closer, the bubble of its ball turret still rotating slowly.
“Bandits! Bandits!” Lewis called. “Comin' through past me! What the Christ are you guys lookin' at?”
Two planes at two o'clock, someone else yelled. Four at two-thirty.
Bryant swiveled the turret around to the front right, his guns tracking over the outboard Wright Cyclone, and six or eight fighters flashed by underwing, gone before he could register them.
The flak was everywhere around them, billowing in round puffs with strings of larger shrapnel trailing downward like legs. He was sweating, he realized, spinning the guns in an attempt to follow the action, his ears filled with bandits being called in and curses.
He spun to face front and angled the guns up to catch an echelon of four fighters coming down across and through the flight, their wings winking light even at that distance. They began taking on features instantaneously and he could see colors, insignia, letters, radio masts, yellow noses, then they flashed pastâMe-109's, he understood. He turned the turret again, his gloves light on the controls, and a fighter leaped at him like an apparition, impossibly close, shocking him immobile, and was gone. Its squared wing seemed to have passed through his turret. The burnt powder smell was thick even through the oxygen mask: everyone else was firing, and
Paper Doll
was trembling with the power of the recoils. A Messerschmitt spiraled by the nose with pieces tumbling back from its wings.
The air burst right before them, it seemed, just above Hirsch and Eddy in the nose, and he could see red fire within the black cauliflower shape and the air jarred like water in a bowl. The shrapnel rang over the plane like someone hitting it with steel pipes and Bryant shook on his sling until the world came back to level in a long slow sway. He found himself looking through the Plexiglas at another echelon coming around again and finally came to, in some way, and swept his guns around and up and framed in the glass of his gunsight a fighter's blinking wings as it grew toward him. The fighter was shooting at them, he could see, and the hits sounded around him like thunder and hail on his father's tin shed, and he became aware of Gabriel screaming at him over the interphone to open up, for somebody to check on Bryant. The German's tracers flipped and curved by and he hunched his shoulders in the turret instinctively. His thumbs squeezed and the guns deafened him and wrenched with recoil, and tracer streams wove out and toward the fighter which was already gone, flashing its half-S curve beneath them to loop back for another pass. He could hear and feel Snowberry below firing after him, and Lewis.
One Fortress from the flight was trailing smoke from two engines, and falling back. He couldn't identify it, and didn't have time. Even at that distance he saw holes stitch by magic in a line across the wing and upper fuselage, and the plane staggered in the air. Its gear fell, and it sheared away and slipped beneath his line of sight.
Another echelon came through, and everyone fired forward, Snowberry's and Eddy's and his own tracers braiding and coiling out toward the fighters, and he raced the turret around firing as they roared past in an attempt to track them.
He swept the turret the opposite way, feeling overloaded, overwhelmed. On the interphone Cooper called out bandits reforming ahead, Piacenti tracked one for Lewis, Ball was yelling something. Snowberry said, “My parents'll kill me. I get killed now, my parents'll kill me.”
A parachute went diagonally by, the man pulled at a crazy angle by the squadron's prop wash.
Cooper and Hirsch announced the start of the initial point of the bomb run. From there to the main point of impact they'd be on automatic pilot, coupled to Eddy's Norden bombsight, flying straight and level. The usual comparison was to metal ducks in a fairground gallery. Ahead of them the flak was concentrated into a barrage box in the area the flak gunners knew the formation would have to fly through. Bryant had heard it referred to as iron cumulus and now he saw it. The shells were all exploding at the same altitudeâtheir altitudeâand the detonations merged to form a low black anvil. The first planes of the flight were already pushing into it and he stared in wonder at their apparent survival even as the bursts approached and surrounded
Paper Doll.
The plane shook and stayed level. The bursts were everywhere. They seemed to be standing still, not moving at all. The fighters had sheared off to let the flak take over. Eddy continually called Steady, Steady, until Bryant wanted to kill him. Beneath him he could hear Snowberry firing his guns in rage and frustration at flak gunners 20,000 feet below. Above him the bomb bay doors of
Geezil II
and
Boom Town
were opening, the inside racks and dark bomb shapes slowly becoming visible. He could hear the doors below him swinging open as well and felt the extra drag on the ship.
A burst over the tail blinded him and tore away metal in finger-like strips. He found himself refocusing on the now tattered vertical stabilizer and he heard someone yelling they were hit over the interphone. “It's Lewis! It's Lewis!” Snowberry yelled. “Lewis is hit!”
“I'm hit,” Lewis said.
“What do you want me to do?” Gabriel said. “Park it? Somebody check him out.”
Bryant slipped from his seat, trying to get stable footing below.
“Bombs away,” Eddy called. The plane bucked upward from the release of the weight, and Bryant found himself on his side.
“Bombs're gone, it's all yours, Lieutenant,” Eddy said, and the plane lurched as Gabriel retook flying control and wrenched it out of its level path, and Bryant fell again, onto his hands and knees. He struggled back through the catwalk over the open bomb bay to the radio room, and then to the waist position, leaning against the severity of the plane's bank, past a curious Ball, and stopped when Piacenti emerged from the hatchway to the tail and made an open palm and thumbs up.
Back in the dorsal seat he reconnected his interphone to a flood of voices. Cooper told Lewis to hang on, they'd be home soon.
“I'm fine,” Lewis said. “Just doing my best to bleed to death back here.”
The fighters were back on the return flight, but in diminished numbers and intensity, it seemed to Bryant. Two spiraled through the formation just above him in perfect choreography, flashing their powder blue undersides and black crosses at him before looping out of sight.
What pilots these Germans were! He tracked and fired at them like someone throwing stones at sparrows. Even as he fired he felt reduced by their elusiveness and invulnerability, and found the impersonal nature of their menace unsettling and fascinating. They concentrated on the rear of the flight, and he fired industriously and fruitlessly at a few echelons streaking past until Eddy reported fighter escort coming back to meet them and the last Germans wove away behind them and dipped into clouds and were gone, leaving the horizon beyond their contrails clean, the sky bare.