“There’s a couple ways you can take that,” Broben pointed out.
“I mean all of them,” said Farley. He brought the ship around to bearing one hundred sixty-eight degrees and headed for the maw of crackling light.
Yone sat on the canvas duffel cradling a green walkaround oxygen bottle. The temperature was zero degrees Fahrenheit at this altitude, and the lethal cold reached through the insulating smartsuit Shorty had given him. His teeth would not stop chattering and the scrape along his face felt pressed by a flatiron.
Garrett handed him a strip cut from a handkerchief and lowered his oxygen mask to show how he had twisted the ends of another strip and shoved them into his nose.
“Listen!” Garrett shouted. “You’re gonna get a splitting headache and your nose is gonna bleed like you got punched!” He pointed at the U of fabric hanging absurdly from his nose. “If it gets into your mask, it’ll freeze and you won’t be able to breathe!”
Yone nodded and began twisting his handkerchief strip. Garrett patted him and yelled “Attaboy!” and Everett gave him a thumbs-up.
The fuselage began to shake. Bright blue threads of light crawled on the right-side machine gun.
Garrett lowered his mask again. “Interphone’s out!” he announced.
The bomber bucked hard. Yone lifted up from the deck and nearly landed on Garrett. The light outside the ship was bright and shot with violet and dull red.
Yone winced at a sudden splitting headache. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He tasted metal and realized that his nose was bleeding heavily.
Everett made a pained face and lifted his mask and spat an alarming clot of red.
The hull around them shuddered.
The repair drone, Rochester, flowed into the compartment from the radio room. The bug was lit up with webbed lightning like a madman’s Christmas tree. Suddenly the drone stopped moving as if it had hit a wall.
An all-consuming roar as the bomber slammed out of the world.
PART THREE:
THE MISSION
(continued)
FORTY-ONE
The Flying Fortress was, as the Americans would say, a sitting duck.
The squadron of Messerschmitt Bf 109s circled high above the deadly array of exploding antiaircraft shells, and when the Allied bombers completed their run on the high-security munitions plant and turned out of the dense flak field, the fighters were ready.
Squadron Commander Adler dove down to take on the lead bomber. Oberleutnant Jürgen Große followed a hundred meters behind his commander’s left wing. The third in their group, Leutnant Jaeger, flew behind Große in line with the commander’s right wing.
Flak had crippled the huge enemy aircraft. The rear gunner’s canopy was shattered and the right-side elevator was a dangling amputation. Evasive maneuvers were out of the question for the laboring bomber; the German fighters would be able to take their time and pick their damage.
Hauptmann Adler lined up on the tail of the wounded bomber. Große and Jaeger hung back to let him draw first blood. The Flying Fortress and three trailing Messerschmitts looked locked in place as they made a sweeping right turn that brought the flak field back in view above and ahead of them.
A shock went through Große’s gloved hands. He flinched back and saw bright blue lines come alive across his compact instrument panel like a little lightning storm. All the gauges were in the red and the indicators were going crazy. At first Große thought that the panel had short-circuited. Then he looked up from the instruments and saw the damaged bomber caged in lightning.
Directly behind it, Adler fired his wing guns. The rounds shot past, a low near miss. The ball turret spun and returned fire.
Große’s earphones screeched piercingly. Große winced and raised a gloved hand to tear the headset off. The hand stopped.
Angry colors churned the air ahead of the descending bomber. Hauptmann Adler’s Messerschmitt was outlined in bluewhite light.
As Adler fired another burst the struggling bomber vanished.
An instant later the entire front section of Adler’s fighter simply disappeared. The Messerschmitt looked sawn in two across the wing line in front of the cockpit. The open front end of the severed fuselage lifted in the sudden barrage of air and began to spin.
Große stared as Adler unbuckled from his seat and climbed up from the truncated cockpit and stepped out into empty air. Adler shot backward in the slipstream and tumbled. A ribbon of lines and drag chute deployed above him and a white parachute blossomed in the thin and freezing air.
A slit formed in the air in front of Große. The edges parted like the gaping mouth of an ocean predator scooping prey—and the Flying Fortress he had been pursuing erupted back into the world from the opposite direction, shedding molten sparks like some feral hound uncollared by an angry god of war.
Große yanked the stick and snap-rolled right to corkscrew over the looming Flying Fortress impossibly hurtling toward him. As he spun he looked up at the bomber below him trailing embers like some awful metal comet streaming fire into the world, looked up to see two men in the cockpit gaping back at him in similar astonishment.
Farley and Broben stared up as the German fighter corkscrewed overhead and past, the hard roar of its overthrottled engine fading in an empty vista of pale blue sky.
For a moment the gliding bomber creaked in a bed of wind. Then came a sound like distant popcorn popping, followed by a steady thud of 20-millimeter cannon fire.
Farley made a gentle turn and the sky ahead became full of approaching American bombers and streaking German fighters and exploding flak. Wisps of black smoke hung suspended in the air like flimsy jellyfish.
“Son of a bitch,” said Broben.
Guttural coughing from the left side made Farley look to see Number One prop spinning up. Number Two engine suddenly belched and fired up.
Broben looked right. “Three and Four are coming up,” he called.
On the instrument panel all the gauges topped out and then swung to measure correctly.
“We got juice,” Broben announced.
Farley felt the bomber come alive around him, felt it supple through his gloved hands on the wheel. He increased their dive to pick up speed and head below the oncoming bomber formation—the formation he’d been leading seven days ago.
Huge columns of smoke roiled from the ground ahead. The bomb target. They had made their run above it half a life ago, it seemed, and now there it was ahead of them only seconds after the drop. He saw that Martin had been right when he’d reported that the munitions plant had been hit but not seriously damaged.
Static screeched in Farley’s ears. Then Everett’s voice was yelling, “Bandits bandits five o’clock high seven o’clock low!”
The waist-gun Brownings started hammering.
“I’m on the high one,” Francis called out.
“Top turret here,” came Wen’s harsh twang. “Those two Me’s are comin’ back around. Another one’s spinning down to the deck. I see a parachute.”
Farley looked left to see if he could glimpse one of the fighters coming around for another run at them. Beside him Broben said, “Hey, what are you doing up here? You gotta get—”
A gun went off two feet away from Farley’s head. He flinched, and the bomber lurched. A warm pistol barrel was shoved beneath his jaw. Farley went absolutely still.
A tight voice spoke in his ear. “Lower your wheels and turn on your lights,” said Yone.