He slewed his turret around and a Messerschmitt was on him in a quartering turn, the nose flashing, and the yellow dazzles of 20mm bursts walked toward his turret, one two three four five, banging the ship, and stopped, and the cowling and wingtip flashed by.
“Bryant!” Gabriel called.
“Bryant’s hit!” Ball said. “I saw the guy go past.”
“I’m okay,” Bryant was able to say. He felt like a ventriloquist’s dummy.
“Frankfurt! Frankfurt!” Hirsch was clicking the call button on the interphone in his excitement and it sounded like chattering teeth. To their left the sun showed silver and wide on two huge rivers, the Rhine and the Main. The whole formation was turning north and east toward the Initial Point.
The fighters were gone. Hirsch called in a time check. It had been more or less thirty minutes since Eupen. Bryant found that impossible to believe. Snowberry said, “You shoulda kept a better watch. You shoulda given that one to Stormy.”
Behind them Lewis was counting chutes. Bryant said, “The top squadron in the lead high group is gone, near as I can tell. Completely.”
“The 525th,” Gabriel said.
Quarterback had drifted out of sight, straggling back beyond the rear group. In that direction they could see on the curve of the earth a series of small fires generating spiraled pillars of black and gray smoke. The sky between the pillars seemed filled with confetti and litter, the hundreds of white American and occasional pale yellow Luftwaffe parachutes mingling and floating down like a chaotic airborne invasion. A Fortress miles away caught fire and fell from its vee, a quiet bundle in the sky.
“They’re pruning,” Snowberry said, and his words affected them all. “They’re pruning the 8th Air Force.”
Bryant remembered himself and checked the functioning of the four engines on his flight engineer’s panel, checking as well the fuel transfer, in case Cooper and Gabriel had forgotten. His rear end hurt and he was glad to be out of the sling seat. Hirsch announced they were passing over the IP and after a beat Lewis asked what it was.
“Dink town,” Hirsch said. “Gemünden, it’s called.”
“Just wanted to know,” Lewis said. He sounded miserable.
Bryant debated whether or not to get back into his turret and decided against it, in case there was trouble with or damage to the bomb bay doors. He’d hooked into a walk-around oxygen bottle and the rubber of his mask was cool and sloppy with sweat. He plugged in his interphone at the flight engineer’s panel.
“Now hit the target, you son of a bitch,” he heard Gabriel say to Eddy.
It felt as if they were accelerating, though he knew that wasn’t the case, and he imagined the flat and featureless landscape preceding Schweinfurt that he remembered from the briefing, imagined the flak batteries minutes away with infallible Nazis loading up and calibrating their elevations.
“What do we do if they’re using smoke?” Gabriel asked, more or less talking to himself.
The interphone crackled, and they could hear Eddy hesitate. He said, “They told us that if the lead couldn’t see the aiming point, we’d go for the housing and try for some skilled workers. We’re gonna hit something, I’ll tell you that.”
You better believe it, Bryant thought. The notion of bombed civilians at this point did not concern him. People down there were being blown up. People up here were being blown up. Everyone down there had something to do with the attempt on his life. He felt the sway and lift of short-term changes in direction, and knew the combat boxes were breaking up into their small component groups for the bomb run. The bombardiers of all following planes, Eddy included, would release on signal from the lead.
He could hear a distant thrumming and some faint booms. “Flak,” Hirsch called in. “Looks like one seven triple zero. Which is our altitude. If anyone’s wondering.”
The ship jerked upward and Bryant banged his head. There was another shock and the musical sound of fragments splaying over the plane’s metal skin. He was happy to be inside and closed in, happy to be unable to see the sky.
There was a huge boom and the plane bucked and reared upward and then mashed back to level flight.
“Guess they don’t want us at their steel balls,” Eddy murmured over the interphone. Bryant could hear his concentration.
“Everything’s fine,” Gabriel said. “Snowberry, did you see that burst?”
“It was purple and red in the center,” Snowberry said. “I don’t know how it missed me.”
Gabriel was skidding the plane a few degrees every so often as a last attempt at evasive action before turning the plane over to Eddy. Bryant felt the torque and gravity shift in his feet on the metal floor. Eddy called in the takeover, and flew them on the Automatic Flight Control, making careful and minute adjustments. Bryant imagined him hunched over the Norden bombsight the way Robin hunched over her drawings, her lips bunching and pursing, her eyes shifting in concentration.
The rate of climb indicator on the far right of his panel began to flutter. He called in the information to Gabriel.
“Stay off the interphone,” Gabriel said. “We’re fine.”
There was a creak and a growing roar and he felt from his position at the panel the circular buffeting of the changing air pressure. Back through the companionway the center of the plane was filling with light, glared highlights curving around the black cylinders of the five-hundred-pound bombs. The bomb bay doors were grinding open and the noise from the blast of air was an environmental force that surrounded the particular and thin noises from his interphone. He looked down through the companionway and out into space and saw a golden and green landscape with low drifting white smoke crossing to the southeast, the beginnings of the defensive screen the town was pinning its hopes on. The sky below was pocked and dirtied with smallish flak bursts. There was glare beyond his vision and shrapnel tinkled on the open doors.
His interphone was unplugged and he had no warning of bombs away. They shifted and dropped from sight in a single spasmic load and the whole ship rose beneath him from the enormous loss of weight, the horizon through the bomb bay doors ducking and sweeping upward.
Below them the first salvoes were hitting and he could see each as a rapid series of flashing bursts turning dark red and then black as the smoke billowed and mushroomed like underwater murk.
He watched longer than he should have before climbing back into his turret and strapping himself in.
They were turning, flying in circles around the flak while they waited for the hundreds of B-17’s following to bomb. Bryant was not a bomb jockey but he had the feeling that their bombing pattern had left a good deal to be desired. He plugged in his interphone cord.
Gabriel was telling them all to look. Bryant imagined him grabbing Cooper’s arm, pointing to the bombing pattern. “Willis! Mr. Eddy!” he said. “What do you think? Are they nailed or are they nailed?”
“Hard to say, sir.” Eddy was cautious. “Somebody was way off. See all that stuff to the north?”
“I hope we got an orphanage,” Lewis said from the back. “Kids with toys in their tiny hands.”
They maintained a steep bank, Bryant’s knees against a shell chute in the turret. “I don’t think we hit anything,” Eddy said glumly after a pause.
No one commented. Whatever had happened was no one person’s fault and there were more than enough extenuating circumstances. “So much for pickle barrels,” Piacenti commented.
Archangel was pulled in tight behind their starboard wing, and Plum Seed was drawing closer on the opposite side. The flak stopped abruptly, the sky sweeping clean ahead of them, signaling the onset of fighters, and through the charging of the guns Snowberry asked over the interphone in a small voice if they were going to be leaving anytime soon, and if so, when.