“Where’s Der Bingle?” Lewis asked about halfway across. “Don’t we get Der Bingle anymore?”
There was no answer from the ball.
“Oxygen check,” Cooper said. “Ball turret?”
“Ball turret,” Snowberry said. “Okay.”
Cooper reeled through the others, Bryant included. They rode on grimly. Bryant switched off his interphone and sang to himself. Around him the force was closing up. He could see the smoke and the shuddering from the planes to his right as they tested their guns. The racketing started on their ship and he shook in his sling when the ball and waist guns let go. He charged and cleared his own, aimed off into space, and squeezed the triggers, the roar shaking him and the tracer lines corkscrewing down and away. The waist and tail were firing, he could feel. Eddy and Hirsch up front on their single fifties. He smelled the cordite through the mask, the pungency tainting the cool oxygen. Fireworks. He flashed back on cans blowing into the air, cats shocked by porch to porch lobs. The smaller smoke bursts from the other planes’ guns trailed backward as lesser echoes of the enlarging contrail streams, all of the lines unfurling behind, striating the sky. The sight gave him the proud and uneasy sense that the whole attack, the whole formation, was indifferent to stealth or surprise, and was serenely intended to overwhelm the air defenses that lay ahead.
In their shallow elements of three the wingmen floated slightly above and behind their element leaders, trying to keep wingtips level with the leader’s waist gun positions. Paper Doll was an element leader, flanked by No Way and Archangel. Above them in a vee were Geezil II, Leave Me Home, and Dog Star. Immediately behind them were Quarterback, Lucky Me!, and Boom Town. Plum Seed flew between them as a loose egg, a spare. Element leaders maintained formation by keeping watch on squadron leaders, squadron leaders on group leaders, group leaders on combat wing leaders. There was, Bryant assumed, an extensive chain of succession worked out, in the event of what the CO called unexpected visits with the Glass Mountain.
Gabriel was correcting their course with the most discreet calibrations, the adjustments rippling through the following planes. He was flying well, and Bryant appreciated it. If the lead planes flew erratically, they forced a constant seesawing of position, with the ships sliding and sideslipping to hold their distances, which exhausted pilots and gave everyone else shortened breath, as well as shaking out the formation into a pattern too loose for adequate defense.
They did their share of weaving, but Bryant imagined the strain on Cooper and Gabriel, hauling their heavy plane around for hours with their hands and feet, and marveled at their endurance and ability. No Way and Archangel stuck right to them. Everyone was good. They were going to get through this.
They began the serious looking, for their escorts, for interceptors. Bryant divided the sky into eighths and searched each with something he hoped was methodical precision from horizon to azimuth. A scratch on the Plexiglas between the guns kept him occupied for minutes. His eyes hurt and rebelled at focusing and refocusing on nothing and his concentration waned and returned.
They turned a few degrees and he permitted himself a look down, at blue waves, the threads of whitecaps, a tiny boat. Eddy called out the Dutch coast landfall ahead and through the haze of the distance the edged pale green emerged, resolving itself as they drummed nearer into three large islands near wide river estuaries gleaming in the sun. He saw drifting motes which had to be shipping. One of the islands reminded him of Florida.
“Fighters, fighters, fighters,” someone shouted. It was Piacenti.
“Escort,” Lewis said. “Escort, sir. Three o’clock low.”
“Jesus,” Gabriel said. “Piacenti, you know?”
“Sorry, sir,” Piacenti said.
A group of them swept by in two diamond formations, green and brown Spitfires with their red, white, and blue rondelles flashing underwing. The crew cheered. They waggled their wings as they passed and climbed up and away from them, seeking altitude and a station well ahead of the bomber stream. The American P-47’s remained closer when escorting. The Brits believed it more useful to break up attacking German formations at a greater distance. The crews liked to see fighters nearby, and preferred the American strategy.
“Fighters! Fighters!” Eddy called, but Bryant could see nothing. A moment later a Spitfire flashed back past them, chasing something.
“Something’s wrong with No Way!” Piacenti called. “They got fire in the number two and three—”
Right beside him No Way was battered and smashed across its cockpit, the windshield shattered and the two inboard engines feathered and flaming. The co-pilot climbed out his window while Bryant watched, a guy named Pease who Bryant remembered hated the powdered eggs, and he waved his arms in the slipstream as if to deflect it. He let go and hit the horizontal stabilizer on the tail, and tumbled away.
“Jesus God,” Gabriel said. “What happened? Anybody see it?”
No Way nosed smoothly up with the inboards still flaming and then sideslipped like a leaf and turned over. They could see the tail gunner trying to get out and through the smoke he did, the chute blooming open. The gunners started calling together, a chant, get out, get out, get out, and while they watched two waist gunners and someone else cleared. A wing separated at the root near the fire and trailed away, easy as a veil, and it began spiraling. Bryant lost it as it fell away behind them. Lewis and Snowberry called out another chute. When they banked he picked No Way up again, fluttering toward some rolling hills. A slope rose to meet it and it exploded, the thousands of pieces filling the air like silver dust.
At Antwerp the Spitfires heeled about and flew back the other way, having waited as long as possible for the P-47’s to show up and carry on the escort. The P-47’s did not show up. Some of the Thunderbolts assigned to the rear of the formation arrived, Lewis was able to report, but there was no sign of the groups charged with their protection at the front of the stream. They waited and searched and cursed. Piacenti suggested from the waist that they were all back in their bunks, having sex with each other and farm animals.
They flew over dark green forests dotted with red and white farms and silver and blue lakes. There were a series of small villages forming a loose chain along tan roads. The sky was piercingly clear. There were no Thunderbolts. To the right a cluster of the gray and tan lanes converged on a town.
“Eupen,” Hirsch announced. Bryant felt his forehead cool and could see the planes in the formation above and behind them edging closer together, closing up the box. He swiveled his guns to the front and ran his gloved hands over the charger assemblies to reassure himself. He kept his turret moving from side to side, metronomically, to keep the fluid warm for smoother tracking. He could feel his fingertips and palms.
“I know what I hate about this so much,” Snowberry said over the interphone. They could hear him charging his guns. “No one is ever glad to see us.”
“There they go,” Lewis called. Bryant twisted around in his sling. The Thunderbolts in the rear were peeling off, their wings flashing sunlight, their fuel already exhausted.
Gabriel’s voice was constricted and the interphone buzzed and popped. He said, “It won’t be long. Call ’em out.”