Farley’s head turned like a man watching a tennis match as he eyed the instruments and the Wrecking Crew in front of them just off the right wing. The lead B-17 shook with the artillery shells’ concussion, and Farley saw that she had already taken hits along her left side.
Garrett and Everett were hunkered down in the waist. Enemy fighters would not engage around the flak pattern, and there was little for the gunners to do but ride it out. Outside the thin skin of the bomber was the sound of battling Titans, mindless fury bent on their destruction.
A hunk of jagged metal punched through the hull by Everett’s right boot, ricocheted off a ceiling spar, and shot out the window on the other side not a foot from Garrett’s head. Neither gunner even saw it.
Someone screamed in Farley’s headphones. It sounded like Shorty, and Farley was about to order Garrett to the radio room when Shorty’s voice came on the interphone.
“Radio operator here. I’m all right. I got some kind of awful static on the radio. Felt like someone stabbed me in the ear.”
“Roger,” said Farley. “Navigator?”
“Two minutes to the IP,” Plavitz said immediately. “The flak’s so thick I’m losing ground markers.”
“Bombardier?”
“I’m having trouble adjusting the bombsight,” Boney reported. “The gyros are acting funny.”
“Well, you better unfunny ’em. I need to hand this crate over to you in about a minute.”
“Working on it.”
A shell burst by their right side and knocked forty-eight thousand pounds of laden bomber to the left like a bathtub duck.
Broben sat up straight and said, simply, “Joe.”
Farley glanced at his copilot and his copilot was looking wide-eyed out the right window.
“They lost the tail,” Broben said woodenly.
Just ahead and to the right the Wrecking Crew’s nose lifted and the massive Fortress planed up into the wind. Farley saw what was coming and yanked back on the yoke and turned the control wheel to ten o’clock and prayed he’d acted fast enough.
The Wrecking Crew went tail-down. The enormous metal cross of her hung in the air in front of them, then dropped. Farley had time to see the on-end bomber sliding back toward them before the Morgana responded to his maneuver and lifted up and banked left, taking the plunging bomber out of view and leaving him gritting his teeth and white-knuckling the wheel as he waited to feel an impact.
In the ball turret Martin hung in the midst of exploding flak shells and watched the Wrecking Crew take a direct hit from an 88 shell that sheared off the left elevator and half the vertical stabilizer. The tail immediately dropped and kept dropping. The crippled fortress stood in cross section above and ahead of the Fata Morgana, then dropped toward her flight path.
“No,” said Martin. “No no no no.”
The Morgana’s nose lifted and the bomber veered left and Martin hung within an impossible panorama of a Flying Fortress crucified in the air before him. He sped toward it like a suicidal bird toward a building. The mortally wounded bomber grew larger as it slid down the sky, grew and dropped until Martin saw red smeared across the cockpit window, dropped below the Fata Morgana as Martin pitched his turret until he stared straight down into the front bubble not thirty feet away, stared down at the bombardier pinned to the bubble by the plummeting craft, close enough to see the certain knowledge in the doomed man’s face as the massive bomber dropped down tailfirst like a sinking ocean liner corkscrewing to the bottom twenty thousand lethal feet below. Down until the Wrecking Crew was swallowed by the lighting clouds of detonating flak that had destroyed her.
There were no parachutes.
“Plavitz, get us back on the run.” Farley glanced over to see how Broben was holding up and Broben looked back. Ashen-faced but okay. “Boney, you’re lead bombardier now,” Farley said. “Are we on or not?”
“The gyros won’t spin.” As ever, Boney sounded as if he could have been taking down a phone message. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Boney—”
“Switching to manual,” said Boney. “Give me the aircraft.”
“Hold on. Plavitz?”
“My compass looks like a roulette wheel,” said Plavitz. “I got no landmarks to go by in this chimney.”
“I don’t care if you have to drop crumbs. Get us back on the run.” Farley muted his mike and glanced at Broben. “Could the Germans be doing this?”
“Knock out the compass, the radio, and the gyros?” Broben shook his head. “Brother, if they can do that, then we’re all screwed.”
“Navigator to pilot,” Plavitz broke in. “Right ten degrees.”
Farley repeated the instructions and turned the bomber. The flak grew thicker as they neared the target. The ship rocked with the concussions and the shrapnel slammed the hull.
Broben glanced at the altimeter. “Up five hundred,” he said.
Farley pulled back on the yoke. Bright red flash of bursting shell outside. The left window starred but held. Farley tried not to flinch. Flinching wouldn’t do any good. You couldn’t evade this, you couldn’t outrun this. You sat there and you took it.
“The formation’s following us,” Francis reported from the tail gunner position. “B-17 going down at six o’clock. She’s on fire. I see three parachutes. Four. I think it’s the Dollar Short.”
“Left five,” said Plavitz.
“Left five, roger,” said Farley.
“You’re on rails, captain,” the navigator said.
Farley hit the automatic pilot and flipped the controls to the bombardier station. “Pilot to bombardier. You have the aircraft, Boney.”
“Bombardier to pilot. I have the aircraft,” Boney confirmed.
In the top turret Wen saw a bomber in the flight group take a direct hit on the Number Four engine. The bomber veered, narrowly missing the front Fortress in its echelon, and dove.
“B-17 hit at six o’clock,” he said. “They’ve lost their Number Four.”
“Copilot to flight engineer. Which bomber, Wen?”
“Can’t see. She’s under control but the engine’s on fire. They’re off the run for sure. I’m heading to the bomb bay to monitor the drop.” Wen hooked his oxygen line to a walkaround tank and climbed down.
At his navigator’s table behind Boney, Plavitz looked out through the two square ports on the left side of the nose. Engines One and Two looked good. He strained to see the ground through the veil of flak smoke. Plavitz made out wooded countryside … low white concrete buildings and straight gray service roads … a railroad line to the right. He looked down at his recon map and thumbed his throat mike. “Holy moly,” he said, “we’re right on the button.”
Timpani rumbled all around them. The Morgana shuddered.