The overpressure wave caressed the bomber as she climbed above the German countryside.
Farley kept her climbing and turned northwest. “Pilot to tail gunner,” he said, remotely glad to hear that his voice did not betray his pounding heart. “What’s the status on the target?”
“What target?” Francis came back. “The Typhon hit it like a rocket and blew it into next week. Jiminy Christmas, you couldn’t fill your pockets with what’s left.”
Farley took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Crewmen yelling and cheering in his ears. Hands firm on the wheel. This moment. This moment.
He opened his eyes and looked out at the seamless blue. The round sun. The unbounded dome of real sky.
Broben climbed back into the right-hand chair. “They’re going apeshit back there,” he said as he slipped on his headset. He held up the connector and squinted at the exposed wire where it had been yanked out of the jack. He snorted, then plugged it in anyway and turned to Farley.
The captain was staring blankly out the window. Broben stayed quiet until Farley blinked and then looked at his copilot like someone just waking up. “Anything unusual?” he asked.
Broben raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
“Right,” said Farley. “Sorry.”
The bomber climbed the German sky.
“They’ll be back at their posts in a minute,” Broben said.
Farley nodded absently. “I know they will.”
Broben surveyed the instruments. “Engines are running a little cold,” he said.
“Wen said they would.”
Broben let the deep drone play another minute. Then he said, still studying the gauges, “She’s something, huh, Joe.”
A sad smile ghosted Farley’s face. “More than I could have imagined.”
“Um, captain?” came over the interphone. “Tail gunner here.”
Farley frowned. “Pilot here,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“Sir, we’re not—I mean, we….”
“Jesus, Francis, spit it out,” said Broben.
“Well—we’re not surrendering anymore, are we?”
Farley and Broben gaped at each other. Then Broben put a hand over his face and started laughing.
Farley shook his head in wonder. “That’s a negative, Francis,” he replied, and looked forward again. “We’re not surrendering anymore.”
FORTY-TWO
Here’s where I’m supposed to say that we limped back all shot up and dangling pieces, with one working engine that was running on fumes, and I had to belly her in because the gear wouldn’t lower and Martin was stuck in the ball turret. That’s the big Hollywood ending. But it wasn’t like that. We had some hull damage from the 109s and flak, but nothing important had been knocked out. The engines purred like kittens and we had plenty of fuel left, because they were a lot more efficient than they had been.
Rochester, Wen’s repair bug, wouldn’t power up again. Wen wanted us to bring the thing back to England so we could take it apart and figure out how to make more of them, but I nixed that idea. We were going to have enough problems explaining things as it was. I made him throw Rochester out over the Channel. I swear to god, he teared up. A guy who wouldn’t cry at his mother’s funeral, unless her coffin had a screw loose. But that was Wen.
Once we were out over Holland the crew started trading stories about what had happened after we broke through, and we pieced it all together. I thought they’d just thrown Yone out of the bomber, and my last-ditch power dive was what had put the Typhon into the target. Martin set that straight. He was the only one who saw the whole thing, so we all got to hear another crazy story from him on the ride back.
Then we talked about what we should do when we got back. The idea of telling what really happened didn’t even come up. We’d have been grounded, hounded, and Section Eighted. They’d have thrown away the key. But some crews had to have seen us suddenly heading the other way as the formation came out of the run, like we’d hung a U. We had to account for that. We figured a lot of bombers had been affected by the vortex, so we cooked up a story that our electrics went haywire and I lost my bearings and the wheels went down by themselves.
We arrived back at Thurgood right on the heels of the stragglers from that mission. I couldn’t believe it. Goodnight, Sweetheart had blown a tire when she touched down, and they hadn’t cleared her off the runway yet. I had to circle around and come in again.
It turned out we didn’t have to tell our fib about an electrical storm. We’d been seen going the other way after the bombing run, all right. But everybody’d figured we’d cleared a bomb jam and gone around for another run on the target. That kind of thing wasn’t unheard of, but it’s still a crazy thing to do. The eighty-eights have your altitude dialed in by then, and if you don’t kiss your ship goodbye you’re almost certainly going to lose some crew. I’d heard of men who wouldn’t fly with pilots who’d gone around again on a target.
So they locked me in a room and grilled me about it for half a day. I reckoned I was going to be court-martialed for being a damned idiot. Instead they did something else they do to damned idiots: They awarded me the Silver Star. Gave it to the whole crew.
The Stars and Stripes made a lot of hay over the story, and the papers back home got hold of it and we were flavor of the week. The Little Bomber that Could. We took some heat from the other crews, because no one likes a damn hero, but mostly we just did our job and it all blew over—until some reporter noticed that we were going out on missions and all of us were coming back, and he wrote an article about that. The No-Hitter, he called it.
We used that idea to keep people from poking around the Morgana. It’s bad luck to talk to a pitcher who’s throwing a no-hitter, and nobody wants to be the one who brings breaks the lucky streak of a bomber crew. We flew fifteen more missions and we didn’t lose a man.
Don’t go thinking any of this was a picnic. We weren’t bulletproof, bombproof, flak-proof, or anything-proof. But we had an edge. I can’t explain it any better than that. We had the Morgana.
The hardest part was not sharing what we had with the other crews. Bombers went down because we kept a zipped lip. Crews got killed, or spent the rest of the war in prison camps. It ate at us. But we’d all seen where this war would lead if we weren’t careful—and maybe even if we were—and letting that happen was a whole lot worse. It got us through the war, I think. Plus, we’d all been through something nobody else had, not even other crews who’d seen terrible action, and we couldn’t tell anyone about it. We only had each other. The Morgana got us through the missions, but we got each other through the war.
The double shot of the Little Bomber that Could and the No-Hitter was the kind of story people at home liked to hear, so the Army put us on a big morale-boosting bond tour. Brass bands, dancing girls, flybys, speeches, the whole nine yards. Plavitz got to meet Glenn Miller at one of those, not long before Miller went missing in England. Told him that “King Porter Stomp” was his favorite band tune. Miller just looked puzzled and said, “Sorry, I don’t know it.” We ribbed Plavitz for a solid week about that.
And Shorty met Jack Benny! It was at a USO show, and Shorty did his Benny imitation in front of him. Benny loved it, and he cooked up a bit with Shorty where Benny did his act, and said he’d met some guy backstage who sounded almost as good as him. And Shorty walks out and stands right next to Benny in the exact same pose, hand on his cheek and everything, and says, “Almost?” The crowd ate it up. So Benny demanded a showdown and put it to a vote, and Shorty won. It was hilarious. Benny told him to look him up in Hollywood after he killed Hitler.