"Two gone! Three!" Lovely Lydia was shuddering bow to stern, torn by the force of the bullets flying toward her, the release of the bombs and the speed of its own wind ripping at her wings.
"All away! Get us out of here, captain!"
The engines surged again, as the captain pulled back on the stick, lining the bomber into the air.
"Rear turret! What y'all see?"
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, captain! One hit! No three! No, damn it, five hits! Jesus Christ! Omigod, Omigod! They got the Duck! Oh, no.
Green Eyes, too!"
"Hang on, boys," the captain had said.
"We'll be home for dinner. Tommy, check it out! Tell me what y'all see back there!"
Lovely Lydia had a small Plexiglas bubble in the roof, designed for the navigator to use for observation, although Tommy preferred to climb into the nose. There was a small metal step that he used to push himself up into the bubble, and he took a quick glance behind them and saw huge black spirals of smoke rising from a half-dozen ships in the convoy and a massive red explosion from an oil tanker. But his attention to the success of their work was short-lived, for what he'd immediately seen had frightened him far more in that moment than anything in the bombing run-not the speed, not the scream of the engines, not the wall of bullets they'd passed through. What he saw was the unmistakable red-orange of flames shooting from the port engine, licking across the surface of the wing.
He had screamed into the intercom: "Port side! Port side!
Fire!"
Only to hear the captain reply nonchalantly, "I know, they're on fire, helluva job, bombardier…"
"No, damn it, captain, it's us!"
The flames were shooting out of the cowling, streaking the blue air, and black smoke was smudging the wind. We're dead. Tommy had thought right then. In a second or two, or maybe five or ten, the flames will hit the fuel line and race back into the wing tank and we'll explode.
He had stopped being afraid at that moment. It was the rarest of sensations, to look out at something taking place just beyond his reach and recognize it for what it was-his own death. He felt a slight twinge of irritation, as if frustrated that there was nothing he could do, but resigned. And, in the same second, felt an odd, distant sort of loneliness and worried about his mother, and his brother, who was somewhere in the Pacific, and his sister and his sister's best friend, who lived down the block from them back in Manchester and whom he loved with a painful, dogged intensity, and how they would all be hurt far worse and for far longer than he was about to be, because he knew the explosion that was about to overtake them would be quick and decisive.
And into this reverie he'd heard the captain drawl one last time, "Hang on tight, boys, we're gonna try for the water!" and Lovely Lydia started to dive down, reaching for the waves that were their only real chance, to dump themselves into the water and extinguish the fire before the plane exploded.
It seemed to him that the world around him was screaming not words from memory, not sounds that belonged to the earth, but the crackling noise of some hellish circle of tormenting flame. He had always told himself that if they went into the drink, he would jam himself up behind the reinforced steel sled of the copilot's seat, but he didn't have time to get there. Instead, he hung desperately onto a ceiling pipe, riding into the blue of the Mediterranean ocean at nearly three hundred miles per hour, and looking for all the world in that terrifying moment like some nonchalant Manhattan commuter hanging from a subway train strap patiently waiting for his stop.
In his bunk, he shivered again.
He remembered: The sergeant in the turret screaming.
Tommy had staggered a step toward the gunner because he'd known that the man was locked into his seat, and the safety catch wouldn't release because the impact must have jammed it shut, and he was crying for help. But in that second, he had heard the captain yell to him,
"Tommy, get out! Just get out!
I'll help the gunner!" There were no sounds from the others.
The captain's order was the last sound he'd heard from any of the crew of the Lovely Lydia. He'd been surprised that the side hatch had opened, and surprised again when his Mae West had actually worked, helping him to bob on the surface like a child's cork toy. He'd paddled away from the plane, then turned back, waiting for the others to exit, but none had.
He'd called out once: "Get out! Get out! Please get out!"
And then he'd floated, waiting.
After a few seconds. Lovely Lydia had abruptly pitched forward, nose down, and silently slid beneath the water's surface, leaving him alone in the ocean.
This had always disturbed him. The captain, the copilot, the bombardier, and both gunners, they had always seemed to him to be so much quicker and sharper than he was. They were all young and athletic, coordinated, and skilled. They were quick and efficient, good shots with a machine gun or a basketball, fast around the bases legging out an extra base rap, and he had always known they were the real warriors on the Lovely Lydia, while he'd always thought of himself as this silly bookworm student, a little thin, a little clumsy, but good with calculations and a slide rule, who had grown up staring at the stars in the sky above his Vermont home, and thus, more by accident than patriotic design, had become a navigator and was more or less along for the ride. He had thought of himself as merely a piece of equipment, an appendage on the flight, while they were the fliers and the killers and the real men of the battle.
He did not understand why he had lived and all the men who'd seemed so much stronger than he had died.
And so he'd floated alone on the sea for nearly twenty-four hours, salt water mingling with his tears, on the edge of delirium, swimming in despair, until an Italian fishing boat had plucked him from the waves.
They were rough men who'd handled him with surprising gentleness. The fishermen had wrapped him in a blanket and given him a glass of red wine. He could still remember how it burned his throat as he drank.
And when they came to shore, they had dutifully handed him over to the Germans.
That was what had really happened. But in his dream the truth always evaporated, replaced instead by a much happier reality, where they were all alive, and gathered beneath the wing of the Lovely Lydia, trading jokes about the Arab merchants outside their dusty North African base, and boasting about what they would do with their lives and their girlfriends and wives when they got back to the States. He had sometimes thought, when they were still alive, that the men on the Lovely Lydia were the best friends he would ever have, and then sometimes thought that they would never see each other again, once the war was over. It had never really occurred to him that he would never see them again because they were all dead, and he was still alive, because this had never really seemed a possibility.
In his bunk, he thought: They will be with me always.
One of the prisoners in another bed shifted, the wooden slats creaking and obscuring the man's words as he talked in his sleep, the noise dissolving into an almost girlish moaning sound.