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“What’d he say after that?” Bryant said. “Was that it?”

“I said, ‘So then what?’” Bean continued. “And he said, ‘So then you lose that America.’”

Bryant looked back over his shoulder at Lewis. He was a ghostly form in the fog, part of the equipment he leaned against.

“Gabriel’s come out,” he said. “Something may be up.” He stood.

“Let me know,” Bean said. He continued to look off into the grayness. It was lightening, and closer to the ground visibility was better.

Back with the group Gabriel and Hirsch had more news. “It’s postponed again,” Gabriel said. “But we’re still on station.”

“What time is it?” Lewis asked.

“After six,” Hirsch said. He returned to the plane with Gabriel. Tuliese had come back and was poking distractedly at the number four engine from below.

Lewis resumed what he had evidently been talking about. “They want to pull off a big one. They need to pull off a big one. Put up or shut up time. I think it’s like they been comparing the losses to the accomplishments and we’re not doing so good. Maybe this whole idea of bombing during the day is hanging on this.”

“Maybe it should,” Snowberry said.

“Maybe. I myself think the RAF have got it knocked, going at night. Everyone bombs a field and comes home happy.”

“It’s a helluva way to run a war, this daytime stuff,” Piacenti said. “Shoot your way in, shoot your way out.”

“That’s the idea of the Fort to begin with.” Lewis tapped his head ironically. “All it is is a fat-assed bird with a lot of guns all over it. Put all the guns together. That’s the idea. Who needs fighter help?”

“Yeah,” Snowberry said. “Who needs fighter help?”

“It’s a shitty idea,” Lewis said. “But they want to make it work. Someone wants to make it work. You telling me they wouldn’t have come up with a long-range fighter by now if they had wanted to?”

They thought glumly about the Air Corps’ neglect on that score. Snowberry was wearing his World’s Fair button.

“This is Charge of the Light Brigade stuff, is what this is,” Lewis added.

“Bean’s doing German up there,” Snowberry said. “I can hear him.”

Lewis snorted. “At this point I just want to hit the ground alive. Let’s start from there, and worry about sprechen sie later.”

Tuliese had a panel off and was fiddling. They listened to the click-click-click of his spanner wrench. “They should cancel,” Lewis said. “They have to cancel. The Regensburg people have to be running out of time. They have to get to Africa in daylight. I can’t see how they can send us up in this. We haven’t exactly lived and breathed instrument flying.”

Bryant reflected on the relative laxity of the base and Lewis’s anger at their free time and the base CO, the car salesman from Pocatello. He understood this was what Lewis’s anger had meant. They were not ready for this. He hoped the car salesman from Pocatello understood that and passed the information along. They sat, and waited. Ball finished the rest of his candy. Bean lay on his back under the nose like someone wishing to be run over. The darkness was completely gone now, and from moment to moment the clouds inched a little higher in an irritating meteorological tease.

There was another delay, to 0715. And then, while Bryant was urinating off behind some oil drums, Piacenti tapped his arm and told him of another delay, of nearly three and a half hours.

Lewis was aghast when he got back to the plane, and tried to get Gabriel to listen to him. “Three and a half hours?” he was saying. “What about the Regensburg force? They couldn’t be waiting that long.”

“I don’t know,” Gabriel finally snapped. “Who are you, Bomber Command? Maybe they are waiting. Maybe they’re scrubbed and we’re not.”

“Sir, isn’t there someone we could ask?” Lewis pleaded. “Sir, do you understand? If they went off, then the Germans can catch them and rearm and refuel for us. Sir, they can go after us both with everything they’ve got.”

“Peeters, shut up,” Gabriel said. “You’re gonna have everybody shitting their pants before we even take off.”

Lewis stepped back and looked at him. “Yes sir, thank you sir,” he said. He sat down and put his hand in Bean’s old vomit. “I’ll have more faith in the Army, sir.”

Gabriel shook his head and walked away from him, standing with arms folded where Bean was lying. Bryant said to Lewis, “That’s the worst possible case you’re talking about. Things aren’t that bad.”

“I’m beginning to catch on,” Lewis said. His eyes were glittering. “I’m the one who gets to figure this all out, and then no one gets to listen.”

They remained where they were. It was hot. Everything was ready and there was nothing to do. They hated the Army, hated the mission, hated the wait. At eleven o’clock Lewis announced they had now been up nearly ten fucking hours and they hadn’t started the mission yet. They had been at the planes for almost six hours. No one around Bryant had spoken for two hours. Bryant was talking to himself in discrete little snippets of conversation. He had no idea how long he could wait like this, but he did know he was approaching some sort of limit.

The sky had cleared a good deal. They were perhaps waiting now for the more western bases to clear. No one mentioned the Regensburg force, and there were no official announcements on the subject. Most of their gear was strewn around them. A jeep arrived, and an officer climbed out and conferred off to the side with Gabriel. When they parted Gabriel, with a look of regret, waved them into the plane, and they stood and wrenched on their outer layers while the jeep tooled off. They climbed in in small groups, officers near the nose, gunners and radio operator through the waist. Bryant was the last aboard.

He sat on his sling and swayed like the boy on Snowberry’s swing. The air was cooler. His neck prickled. The turret retained its factory smell of gasoline and leather and steel. It was too recently off the assembly line to have lost it, he understood, and it struck him how little time had been involved in all of this — sign up, show up, train, arrive in England, end up here, doing this. He shook himself, frightened all over again. While the first B-17’s of the flight line ran up their engines, turning over the huge Wright Cyclones with a roar, he ran through his training manual’s profile of the perfect gunner, reciting silently from memory: the perfect aerial gunner, when he was six, his father gave him a.22 and taught him to shoot it at a target. At nine, he was ranging the hills and woods near his home potting squirrels until the pointing of his rifle was as natural to him as the pointing of his finger. At twelve, he got his first shotgun and went quail hunting, duck hunting, grouse hunting, and learned the principle of leading a moving target. He learned instinctively that you do not fire at a moving target, since it will no longer be where it was, but ahead of it, and learned too that his gun is a deadly weapon, to be respected and cared for. When such a boy enters the Air Corps, he has a whole background of aerial gunnery in him before he starts, and he has only to learn the mechanism of the new weapon, and the principles of shooting down the enemy airplanes are exactly the same as those of shooting a duck. Such a boy, with such a background, makes the ideal aerial gunner.

He closed his eyes. His throat seemed constricted and he wondered if he was getting the mumps. He visualized Messerschmitts as tow targets, Focke Wulfs as fragile and static ducks.

A bird stood on the canopy of the dorsal gunner in No Way, to his right, feathering wingtip feathers slightly in the gathering slipstream from the plane’s engines. Bryant thought, This must be the way it is before a stupid attack, when you know it’s going to fail and it can’t help but fail but you can’t change it or run away; you can only be a part of it, and help it to fail.