It became quiet. The flak had seemed harmless, defensive gestures the Germans only half meant but felt they should make. They flew north and west, for the Rhine. The plains gave way to hilly wooded areas dotted with orange and yellow.
“You guys should see the foliage,” Snowberry said. “In August, yet.” They could hear him rotating his belly turret.
Hirsch wondered aloud if they were exactly on course. Bryant knew that he considered himself privately to be the equal of the lead navigator. As far as Bryant understood, he was alone in that view.
“In my opinion,” Bean ventured in a shaky voice, “this was an extremely difficult mission.” He had been quiet so long Bryant for one had forgotten about him.
“Bryant,” Gabriel said. “Eddy’s gun.”
Bryant pushed the interphone to Call, embarrassed. He had forgotten. “Eddy,” he said. “Is it burned out?”
“It’s just sticking.” Eddy grunted. “Goddamn thing almost got me killed. I’m pointing it like it’s a magic wand, like it’s going to do something.”
“You keep swiveling it around, even when it’s out,” Gabriel said. “You let it hang down and it’s the dinner bell.”
“I’m not stupid,” Eddy said. His Gary Cooper voice had returned to maintain dignity but he sounded hurt.
“Try playing with the retainer on the solenoid,” Bryant said. He waited.
“Yeah,” Eddy finally said. “So what? Wait. Hirsch’s got pliers.”
“Make sure he keeps his gloves on,” Gabriel said. “Or doesn’t have them off for long.”
“I think it’s working,” Eddy said. “Who’d a thought it?” Bryant was relieved and proud and thought, Who’s not a good flight engineer?
“You know the force is split,” Lewis reported from the back. “The second combat group has to be fifteen miles away.”
“Maybe our group broke too soon,” Gabriel said. “Maybe we got a chicken colonel.”
Bryant turned his turret to the rear. The other group was a pattern of staggered dashes, just visible flying through intermittent cloud.
“Someday they may know what they’re doing in this war,” Lewis said. “Right now they have only the slightest fucking idea.”
“Does anybody know how many we lost?” Lambert Ball asked. He, too, had been quiet.
“Everybody shut up,” Gabriel said. “No more casualty lists. We got enough to worry about.”
They could hear from the tail Lewis counting softly, the numbers just whispers, counting with the interphone on. Piacenti crawled to all the gun stations with a walk-around oxygen bottle, divvying up whatever ammo was left. Bryant showed him how to feed the coiled belt he’d brought into the turret, and when they were set, Piacenti made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and disappeared.
The front of the plane was silent. Eddy and Hirsch in the nose, Gabriel and Cooper in the cockpit, and Bryant on top were searching for fighters. Ahead of them lay the corridor of their losses on the way in, the fires still burning and visible beneath the columns of climbing black smoke. They passed into it.
“It’s like training, in Florida,” Eddy murmured. “Navigating by beacons at night.”
They all recognized the similarity. “We could follow these home,” Gabriel mused.
“This stinks,” Snowberry said. “We shouldn’t have to do this.” The port wingtip brushed through one of the smoke columns. They seemed to be only creeping along, as if flying into a terrific headwind. Snowberry said, to himself, “I’m only seventeen years old.” Someone asked testily why they were dragging their ass.
“Look at them all,” Snowberry said. His voice was filled with regret.
“Keep watch ahead,” Gabriel said.
Snowberry said, “You know, it’s like you expect guys to get it. But not so many. Not everybody.”
“We’re comin’ up on the Rhine,” Hirsch announced.
Bryant turned his turret a final time to the rear, gazing back at the tall anvil of black smoke over Schweinfurt, now fifty — sixty? — miles back.
“Dots. Bandits. Fighters,” Eddy called. The dots in the distance spread into even lines, and they knew they were in for it again. Bryant had gone back to believing he was going to get home, and here all these dots were, coming hard, to make sure he understood that that was not going to be the case.
The air around them started to fill with small detonations and flashes and tracer lines began to lariat by, and a B-17 above and to the right turned almost immediately and plunged away out of sight, as if suddenly aerodynamic principles had failed it. The interphone was impossible with chatter and in the chaos that followed all the o’clocks were called out. A Messerschmitt spiraled by wing over fuselage, tumbling out of control. He saw a B-17 upside down and when he looked again it was gone. Something of a shining aquamarine sailed past, striking the turret and leaving a clouded white nick in the Plexiglas, like a distant cumulus. He fired snarling into his mask, slewing his guns around with the rage of a pestered animal, and shouting unintelligible things. There were hits all around him on Paper Doll’s fuselage, hits like dropping bricks down the cellar stairs, or pouring loads of stones into metal garbage cans. There was a stream of incoherent jabbering and Ball broke in and said, “That’s Piacenti. Don’t pay no attention to him.”
The air exploded over the right wing, an orange sheet of flame. Bryant looked and there was fire buffeting from the nacelle of the number three engine. What looked like water or mercury was washing from the wing, and he realized as the olive skin curled and withered that what he saw was the aluminum itself, melting and spraying backward. He felt his turret overheating and understood it was his imagination. For all his fear he registered engine fire procedure, and he thought: Rev up the rpm’s. They accelerated, Gabriel a step ahead of him, and the fire continued. Gabriel and Cooper closed the cowl flaps and the fire went to blue and then thin gray smoke, though the smoke kept coming. The propeller feathered and stopped.
“Fuel shut off,” Bryant said to remind them. “Fire extinguisher valve.”
“Both,” Gabriel said. “We appreciate the thought.”
He clambered down to his panel behind them to work with Cooper transferring the fuel from the tank of the dead engine, and scrambled back into the sling once Cooper had confirmed his readings.
He settled himself in and swiveled the guns and everything went white and the plane tipped and there was a whooshing vacuum of air and he felt as though he’d been hit across the ribs and arm with a metal pole. In another part of the ship there was a scooping, thunderous sound, and he felt the whole aircraft slide across to the right. He gazed at his right arm and hand and was vaguely aware of Gabriel trying to get through to him, and he could see nothing but the discreet mouth of a tear along the forearm of his jacket, but the pain beneath it fascinated him, immobilized him. He thought of acid poured along his arm, searing invisibly in a chemistry accident. There was a strange unreality to all of this, not having been touched despite all those close calls and then this violation out of nowhere, like the villain in a movie reaching into the seats to knock his teeth out.
He felt a tug on his leg and looked down to see Cooper, the worry evident in his eyes over the oxygen mask. Bryant smiled reassuringly, though Cooper couldn’t see, and made a thumbs-up sign. It must have had the desired effect, because after a wary pause Cooper patted his knee and left. He focused on the interphone and said, “No problem.”
Static popped when Cooper, back in the cockpit, plugged his interphone back in. “The turret all right?” he said. “It don’t look like it.”