so very brightly . . and precisely because of this has its utterly dark side. He rouses himself enough to say, Come along now, Chris, you’re a thoroughly decent chap — and that’s the tip-top thing to be. But Kit goes on sobbing: I–I d-don’t mean that, Uncle Mike, I mean I–I doesn’t mean anything. . I’ve got no I. . — It’s the American, Michael thinks, the creepy chap they call Claude — he’s the one who’s dancing me back to the hula-hula night-time of Tinian, back into the hot metallic fug of the Quonset, where the cockroaches chirr up into the projector’s beam — back to the yelps and catcalls of the men who tread water in their smoky lagoon, watching as Sonja Henie twirls on the icy spot, her white tulle skirt. . frothing, her golden girdle. . flashing. — Luckies had been four bucks a carton from the PX, and the 509th Composite had first dibs, which explained why. . they were all toasted. Liquor was officially prohibited on the base, but everyone seemed to be chasing the watery beer with nips from flasks and pint bottles. They gotta let off some steam, said Sergeant Duzenbury, who was sitting beside him — and, so saying, added his own vapour to the slipstream above our heads. But Michael couldn’t let off any steam: it went on building up inside him, exerting more and more pressure, until he felt his innards. . condense, because I realised then that the monstrous and unearthly flash that had irradiated the cockpit of the B-29, so every switch and lever had its utterly dark side, would never leave me. On the six-hour flight to the target there’d been scarcely any chitchat. Tibbets kept the intercom off, but Michael had gathered at least this much: back in Utah they’d practised radar and visual bombing, but the manoeuvre they’d worked obsessively to perfect was a 155-degree diving turn. . so we could keep our nose down and get the hell out of there. For long undulating seconds Tibbets rode out the shockwave — then this man, who, in his monstrous American innocence, had named the airplane after his mother, took us circling back. Through his thick, smoked-glass goggles Michael saw what the little boy Missus Tibbets gave birth to had done: a hemisphere wobbled up into being, its surface slick and obscenely glossy . . A quarter-century later Michael cannot credit that he really witnessed this — perhaps it’d only been the hypnotic pomp of his early-morning imagination that at 8.15 . . spawned death. . sunny side up, swelling and then cracking open the heavens. Cosseted in their padded seats, the air circulating them pressurised, filtered and warmed, they’d gazed down to where, moments before, there had been the five peninsulas of Hiroshima. . a trusting hand open to receive a gift. The United Airmen looked down and saw the shape of things to come: black oil boiling in the green crucible of the surrounding hills — and the filthy geyser of the earth’s innards spurting into the sky. Michael had estimated one angel, two angels, three. . before Tibbets took his mother-ship into another sharp turn and they set course home to Henie. — T-minus seven hours. The Superfortress was towed over from the tech’ area, where the weapon they coyly referred to as the Gadget had been loaded using a super-heavy hoist. Meanwhile, in the Quonset, immediately after their final briefing, the twelve-man crew and their Royal Air Force Judas had stood heads bent to receive the blessing bestowed by a sandy young chaplain with keen blue eyes. Michael was distracted by the steady pitter-pattering of night bugs against the screen door. Ever since arriving on Tinian, he had felt the oddity of the American war effort bearing down on him: a great weight of carefully inventoried ordinance. He didn’t doubt the gravity of the situation, or the estimated casualties involved in taking the home islands, but his USAAF colleagues conceded that, now air supremacy had been achieved, the main threat they faced came as their overloaded aircraft rumbled to the end of the landing strip and failed to get aloft. Twilight’s last gleaming was a Technicolor extravaganza everyone ignored. Each evening they stood in the chow line or lay on their bunks listening as engines caught, then roared, propellers smote the dusk and the fat-bellied bombers took off — one after another, until they could be seen from the 509th’s compound: Phaetons strung out across the sky, while down below was the one that had crashed. . and burned. — Michael stares at the chaplain’s surplice, which, as he warms to his theme, rides up to reveal high-topped flight boots. Ferebee, the Group Bombardier, drawls in Michael’s ear: He don’t put on no dog, stateside Chappie flew with us whenever he could — hell, he’d come with us now if they’d let him. — Michael expects the blessing to be pro forma: Blah, blah, God. . Blah, blah, Country Before Self. . Blah, blah, Merciful. . Instead, killing his cigarette in a tin ashtray on the lectern, Chappie brandishes the Bible he holds and extemporises a lengthy homily on Matthew 8: He came down from the mountain and he healed the leper, and he relieved the centurion’s servant of the palsy, and Peter’s wife’s mother of the fever — and He cast out devils. All this He did, yet still solemnly He adjured them: the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness, where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. . — There’s still weeping and gnashing of teeth. . there’s still darkness, Michael thinks, his fifty-year-old face held in his shaking hands, Kit’s whimpering negations filling his ears: No I. . No I. . No I. . There were, Michael thinks, multitudes about me at that time — not only the crews of the three B-29 s assigned to fly the mission, but all the other personnel on Tinian — and beyond their orderly piquets of tents and Quonsets, up in the caves pitting Mount Lasso’s jungle-covered cone were the Japanese troops who continued to hold out nine months after the first marines came ashore. Smelling of their own faeces and the rubbish they scavenged by night from their conquerors’ bins. . the free economy of a democratic capitalism, these poor, emaciated devils . . slipped in through the screen door to fill in the gaps between the men of the 509th Composite — some of whom, gorged on fresh fruit, vegetables and meat flown in from the east and the south. . were actually plump, their throats bull-frogging from the elasticated collars of their freshly laundered T-shirts as they Aaaa-mened. Big kids, Michael had thought, remembering the wizened figures who sat beside him in the sickly green glow of the cockpit lights when the Lanc’ fought its way up from the Lincolnshire flatland into the dimensionless sky above the German Ocean . . which was what Sirbert still calls it, quite possibly. . his idea of a joke. Chappie rises on the toes of his boots as he nears the crux, and the snowy hem of his surplice. . rises yet higher. He says what Jesus saith: The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath nowhere to lay his head . . A pompous attitude, Michael thinks, coming from the junior arm of the Trinity. But Chappie continues: So, one of the disciples asks Jesus, is it OK if I go bury my dad? Well, this is what Our Lord said to that guy — and this is what I say to all of you brave men here tonight, one thousand, nine hundred and some years later, many thousand of miles from the Holy Land, as you make ready to depart for the other side: Follow Jesus! Follow Jesus — and let the dead bury their dead! — In Washington, where the British observers stopped off en route, Michael had been one among a number of