“Flying overalls okay?”
Silk gave him the letter. “Why bother? What’s in this for you?”
“Wrong question. You should be asking what’s in it for you. And the answer’s not down here with the butterflies.”
The Liberator looked fat. It squatted on its tricycle undercarriage, close to the ground, as if its size and weight were pressing it down. Silk was biased, he thought the bomber was a tub of lard compared with the tight lines of a Lancaster, but he sat in the co-pilot’s seat and said nothing for the first half-hour, while Barney Knox did his pre-flight checks and got airborne and climbed to eight thousand feet, following the Pacific shoreline southwards. He went through a sequence of manoeuvres and made notes on his knee-pad. Then he briefed Silk on the controls, the taps and switches and dials. “She’s yours,” he said. “Leave the fuel to the flight engineer. Just throw her about a bit.”
It was hard work. The Liberator was agile enough but it had to be kicked and shoved every inch of the way. Four Pratt and Whitney engines gave buckets of power, yet the aircraft felt heavy. Even flying straight and level was perpetual work. Instability seemed to have been built into the design. Nevertheless, flying the beast was the best thing that had come Silk’s way in months.
Knox took the bomber home to its base, just outside Los Angeles, and landed with only a slight bounce. They got out. Silk took a deep, refreshing breath of high-octane fumes. He pinched his nose and blew hard and his ears popped. A sudden world of fresh sounds arrived. A small wave of happiness came with them. He felt hungry. He hadn’t been truly hungry in a long time.
“Don’t tell me what’s wrong with the B-24,” Knox said. “The nose is so long that it blocks the pilot’s view, and sometimes the automatic pilot forgets its manners and flies aerobatics, and you want to land but the goddamn nose wheel won’t extend, so now the flight engineer has to crawl into the nose-wheel compartment and wrestle the bastard down which shouldn’t take more than five minutes provided he remembered to bring his toolkit, by which time the airfield defences will have blown us out of the sky from sheer boredom. I know it all. She’s a bitch, but she’s our bitch and I love her. Don’t talk to me about your lovely Lancasters. This bitch can hit a target a thousand miles away and bring her crew back safe. Now, one question. You want to fly with me?”
“Yes.” They shook hands. “Can you clear it with the consulate?”
“From what I hear, they’ll pay us to take you off their hands.”
“What a peculiar war it is,” Silk said.
Colman was working late at the studio. Silk left a note of thanks, packed his things, and Knox drove them back to the base.
Next morning, he was having breakfast when Knox came and sat opposite him. “Shaved yet?” he asked.
“Yes.” Strange question.
“Did you look in the mirror? The rash has gone.”
“Good Lord.” Silk felt his face. “I forgot all about it.” He looked at his arms, unbuttoned his shirt and squinted at his chest. “All gone. Gone as fast as it came. Extraordinary.”
“You reckon? I don’t. Everybody says hail the much-decorated squadron leader, what a hell of a flier, but you don’t fly. It’s the only thing your body wants to do. You keep talking about flying, you never do it. Your skin goes on strike. Won’t wear the wings.”
“So…” Silk leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “You’re saying I did this to myself?”
“And now you’ve undone it. You’re a natural-born pilot, Silko. You’re good for one thing only, and that’s flying. You and the airplane are in love. I may cry.” A waiter put a plate of blueberry pancakes in front of him. “How would you like to demonstrate the corkscrew to a bunch of trainee fliers?”
Silk drank some coffee. “One day I must tell you about my great-aunt Phoebe,” he said.
“Did she fly?”
“She thought so. That’s the important thing, isn’t it?”
WHY THE HELL NOT?
Silk spent the rest of the war on attachment to the U.S. Army Air Force. Barney Knox was a colonel with a good record as a formation leader over Germany. Now he had a roving commission to travel around the many aircrew training schools and tell them stuff he wished he’d known on his first bombing mission.
They developed a Pat-and-Mike routine. To a class of trainee pilots, Knox said: “Who here has seen a corpse up close?” Three hands went up. “Shot to death?” Two went down. “See here.” He passed out some 8-by-10 prints. “My old command,” he said. “Consequences of flak. Or fighter attack.” Some trainees glanced and quickly passed the pictures, others kept looking. “Battle damage happens,” Knox said. “You better be ready.”
“Each of you has eight or nine pints of blood in him,” Silk said. “All of it gets pumped around your body three times a minute. If a crewman gets badly hurt…”
“Arm blown off,” Knox said.
“…he’ll lose blood twice as fast because in a crisis the heart pumps twice as hard.”
“Three pints looks like six gallons,” Knox said.
“Your casualty is swimming in blood,” Silk said. “And screaming. Crewmen are panicking.”
“First thing you do?” Knox asked.
Total silence. Grim faces. This wasn’t why they volunteered.
“Disconnect the casualty’s intercom,” Silk said.
“Restore silence!” Knox shouted.
“Rear gunner’s trying to report enemy fighters three o-clock high,” Silk said, “but he can’t because…”
“Shit, you know why,” Knox said. “Questions so far?”
Nobody was in a hurry. Then a trainee raised his arm. “Sir: the casualty – ”
“Casualty’s dead, son. Question is: will your ship live?”
Later, they took up a few trainees in whatever bomber was available and Silk corkscrewed the aircraft. Back on the ground, there were many questions. Someone always pointed out that corkscrewing in close formation was suicidal. “You won’t always be in close formation,” Knox said. “Hell, some days we ended up in no damn formation at all.”
“Look at it from the enemy’s point of view,” Silk said. “He likes to get in fast and fire and get out fast. To follow a corkscrew he’s got to slow down and stay close, which brings him near my gunners. No, thanks. He’ll scram. Look for easier pickings.”
“The squadron leader knows,” Knox said. “He’s done it.”
Next day they moved on. They flew in a Harvard single-engine two-seat trainer. Knox said he won it in a poker game. Maybe he did. They cruised across America, from one aircrew school to another. “You learn success,” Silk told pupils. “Good. But it also pays to practise failure. What can go wrong? Before take-off, I always wrote the courses to target on my left hand, courses from target on my right. I wrote big. My navigator gets the chop, I don’t want to guess where to steer next.”
“And stay away from ships,” Knox said. “All sailors hate flyboys. They’ll kill you if they can.”
They were in Virginia when Knox asked Silk if he’d like to make a call to England. Silk said it was a nice idea, but wasn’t the transatlantic telephone confined to official military business? Knox said, “You’re military, I’m official, and besides I know a guy.” An hour later Silk was talking to Zoë. She was in her Albany apartment. “Should you be in London?” he said. “I worry about all those flying bombs.”