Captain Farley’s voice came over his earphones. “I read you, Martin. How’s the weather down there?”
Martin glanced out the left windows. “Fog’s burning off along the coast,” he said. “Clear and sunny over the Channel. Nice day to bomb Germans.”
“Roger that. Put her through her paces and keep me posted.”
Martin grabbed the controls and pulled back. The turret pitched until he sat upright and the guns were level and facing the rear of the bomber. He checked the rotation: Hands left, and he swiveled right; hands right, and he swung left. The English coastline spun below.
Francis sat on his narrow saddle seat in the tail gunner position with his head sticking up into the angular canopy and watched the world recede before him. He was shoehorned into the back end of the bomber behind the rear wheel, nearly as isolated from the rest of the crew as Martin, and a lot less mobile. He could swivel his twin .50-caliber machine guns, and that was about it. He couldn’t see where the bomber was going, or the ground directly below. He’d be able to see German fighters coming at them from the side, but he could only shoot at the ones coming in from behind. Lately those Luftwaffe pilots had taken to head-on charges, and knowing that was going on up front while he sat wedged-in here gave Francis an awful itch between his shoulder blades. It was a heck of a place to find yourself when you had never even seen an airplane till you joined up. He couldn’t scratch his own foot if he wanted to.
He got permission to clear his guns. He aimed down and pressed both fire buttons. Loud chuddering drowned out the engine roar behind him, and bright tracer rounds streaked out as Francis swung the barrels left-to-right.
In the ball turret Martin heard Farley’s okay to clear guns. He bent forward and crossed his arms to grab the metal rings to either side of his legs. He yanked them and heard the guns charge in front of him. He rotated to three o’clock, tilted toward the water, and fired a quick burst. Tracer rounds drew glowing lines toward the water.
Martin nodded, and then relaxed as best a man could inside an armed beachball with nothing but ten thousand feet of air between himself and the ground. He considered the length of the bomber before and behind him. The spectacular view. Himself inside a bubble pinched off from the world.
Memories of the Ill Wind flooded in, and Martin fought to steady his breathing. He fumbled past layers of thick clothing and fished out the leather medicine bag he wore on a thong around his neck. He held it under his nose and closed his eyes and breathed in deep. Whatever smell it used to hold was long gone. Now it only smelled like Martin Proud Horse.
Farley continually checked the instruments as the bomber climbed. At ten thousand feet he told the crew to put on their oxygen masks and check their flight suit connectors. The unpressurized cabin was already very cold. It would get much colder by the time they reached twenty thousand feet. A bare hand lost meat if it touched metal at forty-below. Twenty thousand feet wasn’t very far, when you thought about it. Less than four miles. On the ground you could run it in thirty minutes, drive it in three. But go that far straight up and you might as well be on another planet—one where human beings did not belong.
Farley checked in with Plavitz and made minor course corrections as the navigator advised. Come nine a.m. they were right on the money at the assembly point. They met up with the bombers from the Hundred and Second Group out of Covent St. George and began the long, tedious, and nerve-wracking process of forming up into staggered echelons as the group turned east and began to climb. From here through the bomb run they would maintain this formation, wingtip to wingtip. It was dangerous and exhausting flying, but it made for tighter and more accurate bomb patterns, and concentrated the gunners’ firepower while decreasing the chance that they would shoot other bombers in the formation. It also made it easier for German artillery to kill two birds with one shell, and for Luftwaffe pilots to create maximum damage with one good strafing run. But bombing missions weren’t about getting men back safely. Bombing missions were about dropping bombs.
Ten minutes after the bombers began forming up, Boney reported incoming fighter planes at ten o’clock. The bomb group had picked up their little friends, a squadron of P-47 Thunderbolts that would escort them halfway across Holland—the farthest the fighters’ fuel tanks would allow. Soon the front-heavy fighters swarmed like gnats around the bomber echelons, passing close enough that you could clearly see the pilots’ goggled faces. The single-seat airplanes seemed small next to the Flying Fortresses, but they had a massive Pratt & Whitney R2800 power plant, and what wasn’t engine on those things was gun.
Farley was happy to see them. Plenty of missions had proceeded after weather or some snafu prevented an escort squadron from meeting up with a bomb group, and the results could be pretty ugly.
A lot of bomber pilots swore that flyboys were arrogant and lazy country clubbers who didn’t have a taste for the real war, but the truth was that many bomber pilots flew their heavy birds because they had washed out of fighter training. Farley had not. He could have gone on to be a fighter pilot—had even been urged to—but for some reason he had wanted to fly bombers. Perhaps because he had been smitten with the B-17 from the moment he first saw the Y1B-17 prototype in a newsreel. Big and ugly and beautiful and graceful and aggressive all at once. Farley had been seventeen, and even though he’d been an unusual combination of bookish studies and athletic competition—he was captain of both the debate club and the swim team at his high school in Los Angeles—he had a hankering to fly. When the silver bomber with the striped tail flew across the big screen on the Movietone News at the Orpheum Theater, Joe Farley had thought, I’m gonna fly one of those.
And five years later here he was. But the world above which he now flew his brand-new B-17F was not the world in which he had first wanted to. Careful what you wish for, his father often said.
Farley glanced out the window past Broben. Fata Morgana was number-two bomber in the lead echelon, just behind and off the left wing of Wrecking Crew, the group leader. Steady Eddie Harris was a good pilot with a first-class crew who’d go to the mat for him. He never took foolish chances and he delivered the goods. More than that, Eddie brought his crews back. A pilot could goose-egg every bombing run, but if he brought his crew back every time, they’d swear he was God’s own aviator.
Farley adjusted the trim and tightened up his position. He nodded in satisfaction.
“So how do you like the new crate?” said Broben.
“I think we’ve got a lot better ride than our last one,” Farley replied. In fact he’d known it the second she took to the air. You could talk about response time and climb rates and a hatful of numbers, but the truth could not be said in words or math, and it was something he’d never remotely felt flying the Voice. A kind of kinship. The Fata Morgana was never going to handle like a sports car, but she wasn’t a wrestling match, either.
The temperature gauge showed -30° Fahrenheit. Farley snugged his gloves and nodded at Broben, and Jerry got on the horn. “Let me hear you, fellas,” he said.
The crew reported in, everything okay. Boney had the best forward view, in the bomber’s station below and ahead of Farley and Broben, and he reported coastline ahead.