“I could listen to it all day,” she said.
General Andrews grinned at her. “You just did,” he said.
Kitchner looked faintly alarmed and glanced at her cellphone. “Oh my goodness, I had no idea,” she said. She got up and pressed the tablet and removed it from its tripod stand. She stopped in the midst of collapsing the tripod looked at Farley. “You’ve really never told this story to anyone, in all this time?”
“The people I’d have told it to already knew it. The rest?” He waved indifferently.
“No girlfriend? Never married?”
“Hell, I’m not a monk. I got involved a couple times, sure.” Farley shrugged. “It never took.”
“Well. That’s a shame.”
“Not to me.” Farley’s tired smile encompassed decades. “No offense, ma’am,” he said, “but you people aren’t quite real to me. I know I’m the one who landed here. I’m the ghost. But that’s how it feels.” He patted his chest. “I’m real. Wennda was real. The world I came from was real. The world I came back to?” He shook his head. “The others got with the program sooner or later, but I just never could.”
General Andrews sat up straight. “Oh,” he said. “That’s why you kept flying.”
Farley looked chagrined. “Took me ten years to figure that out,” he said.
“All that seat time.” Andrews shook his head. “All those years.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” said Kitchner.
Andrews raised a hand to the old pilot in the chair before them as if offering him as evidence. “He was trying to get back.”
Farley looked away. “Still am,” he said.
Last night the Blue and Gray Technology Gulfstream G550 had hummed a one-hour lullaby from Baltimore to the company airfield near Norfolk. The jet had a flight attendant, a medical technician with a crash cart, a sofa, and soft beige leather seats the size of Barcaloungers. Farley had been the only passenger. The flight attendant had brought him a soft drink and asked if he wanted anything to eat, then left him alone. The med tech had turned on a Kindle after takeoff from BWI, and barely moved again until they landed.
During the brief flight Farley’s hand strayed many times to the letter that had been waiting in his mailbox when he’d finally gotten back from Jerry’s funeral. Only once during the flight did Farley remove the letter from his coat pocket, carefully unfolding it in the cabin’s dim to look down at the pale gray BGT letterhead. It bore two handwritten words, along with yesterday’s date and a time. A limo had arrived at Farley’s Inner Harbor condo at exactly that time.
The rest of the flight Farley had looked out the window at the crowded nighttime nation creeping by. All those differences, you can’t see them up here. Unbidden, his fingers touched the contours of the envelope again and again.
Now Farley watched snippets of the Veterans Day crowd passing by outside the E-Z Up.
“Blue Skies,” he realized. That’s what the band was playing out there. “Blue Skies.”
Dr. Kitchner was slipping her tablet into a small roll-on valise when Farley looked back. “Let me ask you something,” he said.
She smiled. “Of course.”
“I went along with this because Jerry arranged it,” Farley said. “I figured if he of all people finally wanted it out there, I owe him at least that much. No one’ll believe it, but what do I care by now?” He gave his slanted smile. “The general there started squirming about the time my bomber flew over the rainbow.”
General Andrews started to protest and Farley waved it off. “Hell, I’d’ve squirmed, too. Who wouldn’t?” Farley pointed at Kitchner. “But you didn’t even blink. Didn’t raise an eyebrow. Didn’t even look at the general to see if he was buying it. Do you know what you did do, ma’am?” He folded his hands over the twin metal handles of his cane and leaned forward in his folding chair. “You nodded.”
Kitchner tucked the cable into a pocket of the camera’s case. “What’s your question, captain?”
“Jerry never told our story to anybody. I’m as sure of that as anything I know. He left it up to me. He brought me here to tell it and he brought you here to hear it—and you weren’t surprised by a word of it. So my question is, Who are you really?”
“Well.” She colored. “I’m not a spy, if that’s what you mean. My name is Doris Kitchner,” she said. “I’m a volunteer archivist for the Veterans History Foundation. Mainly I’m a history professor at Georgetown. My specialization is statistical methodology of the National Socialist Party.”
“Nazi bookkeeping?” said Farley.
“In a way. They were meticulous record-keepers.”
“They were meticulous, all right.”
“Yes. Well, five years ago a World War Two–era bunker was rediscovered near the Czech border. They still show up from time to time, even now. This particular bunker was full of records pertaining to Allied bombing raids on German targets. Defensive arrays, flak patterns, target strike rates, casualties, numbers of downed aircraft, that sort of thing. Like the Allies, the German military tried to learn from every bombing raid.”
Farley spread his hands: So?
“It was my good fortune to be involved in cataloging the bunker’s contents,” Kitchner continued. “But very soon after my work began there, the Air Force classified the project and brought in their own people. We—”
“The U.S. Air Force?” Farley glanced at General Andrews, who shrugged.
Kitchner nodded. “We were taken off the project and compensated for our time and made to sign nondisclosure agreements for sensitive but unclassified information.”
“Gag orders.”
“Pretty much.”
“So what is it you’re not supposed to disclose?”
Kitchner regarded Farley over the rims of her glasses. He stared back. She glanced at Andrews. The general put his hands up and said, “Hey, I can keep a secret.”
Kitchner snorted. Then she adjusted her glasses and picked up her tablet and opened the cover. Andrews didn’t bother to hide his watching over her shoulder as she tapped the screen a few times and then swiped across it. She stopped. The general’s head craned forward and his mouth hung open like an ape beholding a magic trick. He put a hand to his mouth and he looked at Farley. “Holy god,” he said.
Farley was about to make some smartassed comment when Kitchner worked the tablet again and held it out to him. A black-and-white image filled the screen. Farley leaned forward and saw mostly empty sky pockmarked by black wisps. A flak pattern, photographed from the ground.
Farley looked up from the screen. “Am I missing something?” he asked.
Kitchner set two fingers on the screen and zoomed the image until it showed an object blurred by motion and grainy with enlargement, but unmistakably a B-17 bomber in a steep dive, the ID number and nose art too motion-blurred to make out.
Farley studied it for one deep breath, then set his jaw and glanced up at Kitchner. He could not read her expression. He looked past her at the general.
“For christ’s sake,” Andrews told Kitchner. “Show him, already.”
Wordlessly she dragged the plunging bomber to the bottom left of the screen.
The upper right now showed some kind of monster pursuing the B-17. There was no other word for it. Outspread sail-like wings that were wider than the Flying Fortress. A dark gray body that was thinner but much longer. A diamond-shaped head with a long snout and angular pale patches that might have been eyes. A dark gap at the bottom of the head that might have been an air intake or a gaping mouth. As if the creature were trying to devour the plummeting aircraft. Or screaming in rage as its quarry fled. Beneath the thing’s left wing hung some kind of pod that might have been an engine.