Authors: Jim Shepard
“You better get back to the radio room,” Lewis said. “You're the only gun on top, now.”
“Yep,” Bean said.
They racketed on in the white fog. “Keep going, cloud,” Gabriel said.
“But stop before the ground,” Cooper said.
Then the clouds were gone and green hillsides were coming up at them. They rose and soared over one, registering the successive images: the spilled stones of some fence mending, bright green clover in the sunlight, an open-mouthed boy with a staff.
They dipped and followed the land, a high-banked stream and tall blue firs going by. “Well, we got a nose open like a funnel and two engines out and enough holes in us to make a watering can and if our airspeed drops any more we'll be taxiing home, but I don't see anybody behind us and I think we slickered 'em,” Gabriel crowed. “Lewis? See anything?”
Lewis was silent. Then he said, “Not yet.”
“You guys can come off oxygen,” Gabriel said. “In case you didn't know.”
Bryant pulled off his mask. The cold air streamed over his mouth and cheeks and nose like home. The hillsides and thickets rolled and pleated beneath them, bright with clarity in the sunlight,
Paper Doll
towing its shadow across the landscape. They were close enough to see the gravel on hillside trails and paths weaving beneath them and the cool, bottle green depths of a shaded pool overhung with thick trees. A white and black goat on an outcropping watched them come and ducked awkwardly, leaning backward on its haunches and keeping its front legs straight.
“It feels good to be off oxygen,” Gabriel said.
Bryant said, “The lieutenant can say that again.”
“I think I know what I'm doing,” Gabriel said. “I'm going by the sun.”
They'd begun following a stream, slipping lower as the cool spruce and fir tips rose past Bryant's position, the steeply banked forest blurring by, and Bryant watched as the blue and white water unreeled beneath him, changing features and speeds, rocks, Whitewater, snags, clear cul de sacs, and around a bend he was over a fisherman, a big leather rucksack at his hip, ripples drifting outward from his legs, his thin rod the wisp of a line.
The stream banks narrowed and drew together and a fir branch whistled by his turret. Others slapped and grated their wingtips, and Gabriel gave a northerner's version of a Rebel yell. A huge fir rose from a grassy bend and they lurched upward, the sound of the branches on their starboard wing like someone crushing kindling. “Whoa, Nellie,” Gabriel called. The stream opened out dramatically into a river, the water silver and smooth beneath, and they turned with it to the north, the prop wash from the lowered outboard engine fluttering the surface of the water. They roared by over a sailboat, collapsing the sail, and past docks and swimming floats, the white figures bobbing or pointing in shock as they careened past. They passed a humped yellow-green bank edged with willows and he could see picnickers and the red and white squares of blankets dotted with food and drink and that same crescent of lawn and remembered Robin, and swung his barrels harmlessly at everyone who pointed or ran.
Gabriel ducked still lower, and Bryant sped along in his glass ball twenty or so feet above the waves, catching a faint mist of spray kicked up by the props. Something rang faintly on the fuselage but he'd seen no one on shore fire anything. A woman on a float directly below them capsized as they thundered over. A small red dog ran to the water's edge and threw himself in.
“Oh God,” Gabriel said, and ahead of them the river opened out into some sort of inland port, and there were two long gray ships in their path, the decks busy with superstructure and the tiny figures of running men, and delicate barreled guns swinging about to face them.
“It's the German
Navy
, for Chrissakes!” Gabriel said, and yanked the plane into a hard bank just as the naval guns opened fire with theatrical booms and huge geysers erupted around and behind them. He banked them the opposite way, trapped into going right over the ships, and as they spanned the distance Bryant sighted along the superstructure and opened up, able to watch in the river surface his hits skip and spray upward across the bow and along the deck, a crew member leaping and pedaling an invisible bicycle into the water. The ships' guns thundered and then they were over,
Paper Doll
jerking and someone screaming on the interphone, and Bryant spun the turret and kept firing, the naval guns turning slowly to retrack, Lewis's twin fifties clattering now, too, fountaining water around the ships. They banked away from the river and were skimming farmland, scaring livestock.
Gabriel was sobbing and cursing. After a moment they heard another voice on the same line, and Bean said, “They got Cooper. It came in the same hole the other shell made.”
Gabriel was still crying. “God, I just bent over to get the trim tab,” he said. “God, I just bent over.”
“I'm going to stay up here with him,” Bean said.
“Are you sure he's dead?” Lewis said.
“He's a mess,” Bean said. “He's all over the steering column.” His voice was flat and high with shock.
Ahead jumbled shapes and lines rose from the landscape and converged.
“Town! A town!” Bryant said. “You see it?”
Gabriel and Bean took them down the main street at full throttle. Wagons swerved from the road and collided. A woman cleaning windows toppled outward and he flashed past and missed what happened to her. The huge wings filled the street with shadow from side to side and the sense of power was exhilarating, the greatest rush of adrenaline of all. They went by a pack of dogs turning over onto their backs in supplication, a railroad crossing, three boys on bicycles all wearing red, gaping.
Lewis was firing back down the center of the street. Bryant began firing, too, for Cooper, turning his guns this way and that and ripping up the windows and housefronts in long ravaging bursts. An elderly and fat man with tiny glasses glinting white emerged ahead with a long rifle and lifted it to them, and he slewed the turret ever so slightly and triggered a burst and folded the fat man in half, his arms waving from a puff of red mist.
They were out of the town but still over the main road, the telegraph wires below looping up and descending with each pole, and there were hedges and then an expanse of tarmac with white numbers and aircraft, camouflaged in gray and green and marked with black crosses.
“We're over an airfield! We're over an airfield!” Lewis cried, the first to understand, in the tail. “Get us out of here!”
Gabriel and Bean banked them sharply to the left and Bryant could see spinning away thirty feet below airfield personnel running in all directions, flak batteries swiveling uselessly around as they tried to get the barrels low enough. A Fiesler Storch, a single-engined observation plane as delicate and awkward as a chicken, with a huge ribbed window along its side, turned violently away from them, apparently in its landing pattern, and as it swung behind them Lewis opened fire, his tracer streams lashing across its length. It dove immediately into the ground and exploded and its engine went shooting up over a little hill into some trees.
There were more fields of tan and green lines of cultivation spanning quickly away behind them and he hoped they were safely away from it but Lewis called, “Trouble. Bryant, get out of there, and get to Bean's gun.”
Gabriel was steady enough now that Bean was able to come all the way back and help Bryant out of the ball. With the hatch sprung he unfolded painfully out into the waist and flexed and rubbed parts of his legs as he scrambled back to the radio room and Bean's gun.
Closing fast behind them from above was a black Dornier 217, a night fighter, maybe, clearly all the airfield had around with everything else out intercepting the returning bomber stream.
“Let it close, let it close,” Lewis said. “I'm dangling my guns.”
The Dornier started firing early and inaccuratelyâfilled with trainees, Bryant registeredâand it closed in until the faceted Plexiglas nose filled his gunsight and he let fly. Lewis had opened up with his twin fifties as well and the three streams of tracers hesitated and flexed and then converged across the Dornier and disintegrated it, the wings and tiny pieces spinning end over end after them as if continuing pursuit.
“We did it!” Bryant called. “We did it!”
“Me-110's!” Bean called. “Head on. Treetop level.”
The hits smashed into them along their entire length from wingtip to wingtip, it seemed, and Bryant fired as they flashed beside one another over his position, their bellies pale gray and then gone. Lewis did not fire. Bryant could see them hesitate, and then not bank around.
“They're not coming after us,” he called in. “I think they're out of gas.” It was, he realized, probably the only reason they'd been returning to the field.
The interphone sputtered and gasped.
“What happened?” Lewis said, his voice faint.
Gabriel chattered and snorted as if he was trying to clear something from his throat. Bean said, “Bobby, you better get up here. Some control wires are flapping around behind me.”
They were hydraulic lines. He found them fluttering and whipsawing right beside his turret, back behind Cooper's seat. He could make out Gabriel's head but did not want to see Bean or what was left of Cooper. The hydraulic fluid which allowed operation of the brakes and flaps was slipping away, streaming yellow and thick from the broken lines. He pinched the feeder tubes shut with pliers, and needed more fluid to keep the pressure in the system up. He broke into the flight rations behind Gabriel's seat, and found a can of apricot juice. He used that. He wrapped the pinched areas with electrical tape.
“Don't use the brakes or flaps until the very end,” he called to the cockpit, to whoever was flying.
The hydraulic fluid had leaked through his hacked jacket to his bandage, and stung. He looked back down the catwalk toward the radio room, empty, and the waist with Snowberry beyond. His mind unclouded like washed glass, the pain stinging and clear in his arm, and he understood that they weren't getting back, that this had been more malevolent than they could have imagined, and that he had been, finally, adequate, sort of, with no one to see.
Lewis's final words struck him and he called Lewis, but no one answered. He climbed back through the bomb bay, through the radio room, past Snowberry, who seemed drowsing as he went by, boots splayed out like a lazy hillbilly.
There was a hatchway to the tail and he crawled into it on his hands and knees, squeezing forward past the assembly for the raised tail wheel. The flexing sheets of steel in the huge hollow tail above him echoed and lightly boomed with a drum-like sound in the wind. The cables along the narrow fuselage were severed, and he was relievedâthe interphone was out, and the wind streamed through jagged holes generated from the head-on attacks. In the darkness his gloved hand slipped on ice except that part of the ice was sticky and he knew it was frozen and coagulating blood. He could see light beyond the armored headrest and the glass was smashed outward, sharp-edged and spread with crystals of blood. “Lewis,” he said. “Lewis.”
There were shell cases everywhere, in some parts six inches deep. The sighting glass on the machine guns was shot out. The ammunition boxes were torn and splintered. There were holes through the seat back, from the Me-110's head-on pass, he knew, and Lewis's head was back against the headrest but his middle had been destroyed and thrown forward all over the guns he had held.
Bryant had to back out, without turning around, and he was crying, his gloves smeared and gummy with blood, his head down and his rear edging tentatively back until he was out of the hatchway at the end of the waist, curled against the door, crying.
He pulled himself over to Snowberry, who looked on without expression as his head jiggled with the plane's motion. He lowered his face close and Snowberry looked into his eyes and bubbled some blood from his mouth. He was white and an eye drifted. He reached up and squeezed Bryant's nose feebly. Bryant understood he was dying. He opened the box of flight rations left for the waist and found an Oh Henry! He held it close to Snowberry's face and unwrapped it, holding the pebbled bar up for him to see. He broke it in two, and let Snowberry inhale the sugar smell. He put half in Snowberry's mouth. He put the rest in Snowberry's hand, and sat with him. Snowberry gave a little artificial grin, showing teeth.
Bean peered close to Snowberry and then tapped Bryant to get up, gesturing toward the waist guns. He picked up the flight rations, puffing, and threw them out the escape hatch. He unslung the right waist gun from its mount and cleared an ammo belt and threw that out as well.
Bryant understood that they were lightening the load and stood and fumbled with the other gun. Bean threw out tool boxes and ammo boxes, and started work on the support housing for the ball turret itself. The ball could be jettisoned and was safer off in a rough landing.
He led Bryant by the hand away from Snowberry to the radio room. Bryant watched him broadcast an alert to British Air Sea Rescue. He saw ocean waves outside the small side window. He helped Bean heft the stacks of transmitters and receivers and tuners back to the waist, and they heaved them out. It took three trips. When they left the radio room, the red warning light was on, signaling them to destroy the radio.
In the cockpit when they returned, the air was unbelievable on the broken open side, Cooper's side. Gabriel was talking to himself. He told himself that the hydraulics were inoperative and most of the electricals were burned out. He said the inverter was shot and the trim tabs jammed. He said they were losing altitude and their airspeed was way too high. He said they should get Snowberry, because they were going to put it down in the Channel. He saw Bryant crying and he waved him violently away. “A lot of good that does,” he said, nearly hysterical. “A lot of good that does.”