They shook their heads, pulling on cigarettes and staring down at the map of the country over which they would find their reckoning.
“All right, then,” said Farley. “Let’s get on the bus and go to school.”
Plavitz moved the weights off the map and rolled it up again.
Farley waited until the others had climbed into the bomber. Then he reached up and patted the fuselage just under the painting of the graceful figure flying prone. The drop-shadowed script of her name. The metal cold and damp in the early morning.
“Don’t let me down, gorgeous,” Farley whispered.
He wiped his damp palm on his jacket and then picked up his kit and ducked down to enter his new aircraft from the opened bomb bay.
THREE
The operations officer stepped onto the platform surrounding the tower and surveyed the thrumming airfield. The bombers rested on their hardstands with their engines idling, their combined rumble a veldt of waiting lions he felt deep in his chest. The drone of a vast engine of destruction. At least a hundred and fifty ground crew clustered near the operations building, sitting on the damp grass or watching on their bicycles.
The operations officer raised high a stubby M8 flare pistol and fired. A bright flare arced out into the misty morning—the soup, the pilots called it. Immediately the rumbling became a collective roar as engines throttled up. Ground crew yanked chocks from wheels, and brief shrieks sounded all across the airfield as brakes were released and two dozen bombers began to creep out onto the taxiway.
The operations officer thought about how odd it was that creatures built for flight so often looked ungainly on the ground. He glanced once more at the ground crews who would be sweating it out as they waited for their airplanes to return. A few of the men crossed themselves. He had heard that the waiting was as hard as the going. He wondered how that could possibly be true.
The crewmen all sat straight when the brakes squealed and the Fata Morgana lurched into motion. In the cockpit Farley craned to see Case Miller signaling directions from the mushy ground beside the runway, from which a Flying Fortress took off every thirty seconds. As if the airfield were some kind of factory that spat out laden bombers.
Farley inched the B-17 along the winding taxiway until finally he turned onto the runway. He scooted back into his seat and buckled himself in. Ahead of them the Smoke ’Em Up lumbered down the runway and picked up speed.
Broben lit a Lucky and kissed his lucky Zippo and tucked it away again. “Let’s go, boys,” he called out over the interphone. “Those Nazis aren’t gonna bomb themselves.”
Farley pulled up the brake and walked the throttle forward till the tachometers showed the engines at takeoff speed. The sound of it was all you could hear. The aircraft shuddered like a racehorse at the gate. As if eager to regain the sky.
Up ahead the Smoke ’Em Up lifted off. Farley let off the brake and the bomber surged forward. It always seemed to take forever to pick up speed. The fuselage shook and the outside world crept by. Then suddenly it was hurtling past and you were running out of runway.
Broben called out speed and RPM. At 80 Farley gave her some down elevator and brought the tail up off the runway. At 110 he eased back the yoke. The bomber lifted and the shaking calmed and the world filled with the resonant thrum of four powerful Wright Cyclone radial engines.
“Wheels up,” Farley ordered.
Broben flicked back the wheel switch guard and flipped the toggle. “Wheels up,” he confirmed when the gear indicators went off.
Below them England and the world they knew all dropped away. The Mission had begun.
The bomber group slowly formed up and gained altitude as it headed north to the assembly point just off the coast at Northampton. At his navigator’s table in the nose, Plavitz continually consulted his charts and tables, compass and notepad, checking them against landmarks that revealed themselves through the haze below, and reported position to Farley at regular intervals. In short sessions between calculations he pulled out his sticks and drummed the edge of his wooden worktable. If it bothered Boney, the stoic bombardier never said so.
Boney got permission to arm the bombs, and he left Plavitz drumming in his imaginary swing band and went through the crawlway, gangly form unfolding like an accordion hatrack in the lower pit and stepping around the upper turret stand to stoop into the bomb bay. It was a tight fit. On the narrow catwalk between the V-shaped bomb racks he hooked up his safety line and held a grab line and pulled the cardboard tags that were sandwiched between the fuses and the bombs in their slanting racks. Eight thousand-pounders, four in each rack. Boney yanked the arming pin from the back of each bomb.
The catwalk between the bomb racks was nine inches wide, and the bomb bay doors above which Boney balanced his spindly frame would not hold a man’s weight. If he fell on them without his safety line hooked up he would go right through. For all the expression on Boney’s face he might as well have been playing checkers.
In the cramped radio compartment behind the bomb bay Shorty sat on his swivel chair before the radio stack, listening for transmissions from the lead bomber and scanning for the Armed Services Radio station. Taped to the opened and secured door was a hand-lettered sign: Shorty’s Shack: on the air.
Shorty frowned at the crackling static. He cupped a hand against his headset and tried the Axis frequencies, but there was nothing all across the band.
In the waist, behind the radio compartment, Garrett and Everett checked their Browning machine guns and ammo boxes. The gun ports were offset so that the two gunners stood side by side while firing. The two big men had worked together enough that they didn’t knock each other down when shooting back at enemy fighters, but they still got in each other’s way, yelling and giving one another thirty kinds of hell.
Between the waist gunners and the little radio compartment, Martin knelt before the ball turret assembly bulging from the floor and fitted a Z-shaped crank into its slot. He hand-cranked the ball until the twin .50s were pointed straight down and the tiny hatch slid into view. He set the brake and turned and tapped Everett on the shoulder and pointed down. Wind through the gun ports, along with the vibration and drone of four twelve-hundred-horsepower engines, made normal conversation nearly impossible. Everett nodded and stepped closer to the turret.
Martin opened the hatch and looked down into the unbelievably small space. Two miles below, the dark English Channel sparkled through the plexiglas. The last time Martin had climbed into a ball turret was on the Ill Wind.
Everett took hold of the hatch while Martin knelt and reached into the turret and engaged the power clutch by feel. He stood again and nodded at Everett, then climbed down and fitted himself in. His knees were up by his shoulders and he was looking straight down at the English Channel. His position similar to a drowned man floating face-down on the surface. He hooked up his safety strap and yelled an okay. Everett patted his back and said, “Give ’em hell, chief,” then sealed the hatch and thumped the turret. The closed hatch was now the upper part of Martin’s seat, the only reinforced armor he would have.
Martin plugged in his interphone and put on his oxygen mask and checked the flow indicator. Smell of stale air and rubber. He hung the mask back up and powered up the turret and dialed the interphone to inter. “Ball gunner checking in,” he said.