He looked around himself, woozy and relaxed. The charging slides were smashed, as if someone had taken the edge of a shovel to them. The feed chutes were severed. Oil was jetting up delicately from somewhere and spattering like soft rain on the sheepskin of his collar. He had the unpleasant sense that his forearm was open, cold air on bone. His glove was sodden with blood and when he squeezed, it bubbled over his wrist. He thought, Will this be like the oxygen? and was drunkenly proud of his courage in the face of his wound, and then said What? at Gabriel’s shouts of bandits, bandits coming down from above.
“My guns’re through,” he said, as if wanting to get that clear.
“Goddamnit, track ’em!” Gabriel screamed. “They think we’re dead meat.” Hits banged along the side of the fuselage, a horse cantering on sheet metal. He understood, and swiveled the turret. A Focke Wulf was arching by and he tracked it across their beam, and then let it go, and picked up a looping Messerschmitt. Another went by overhead and he followed it easily. “Lots of kills,” he said. “I got lots of kills.”
“At least they’re less ballsy now,” he heard Cooper mutter. He tracked another, the outline shifting and slipping out of the cracked gunsight. He was scaring Germans, pretending to shoot, playing at war in the middle of war. Then the oil got worse and glazed his goggles, and he climbed tenderly out of his sling, nauseated from the smell and taste within his mask.
He recognized Hirsch in front of him on the walk-around bottle, his eyes peering at Bryant as if looking for something. Hirsch was making lowering motions with both hands, gesturing Bryant to the fuselage floor beside the turret base. Light-headed, Bryant complied. His arm was raised and cold and Hirsch was picking at it with a jackknife. The jackknife seemed incongruous. Cooper appeared beside him and took over with the knife and hacked expertly up his sleeve, the sheepskin parting yellow and thick like whale blubber. Hirsch unzipped the first aid kit and held the sulfanilamide powder up for Bryant to see. He saw his arm exposed for the first time. The skin was whitish and sheared back and blood matted blackly around it, bright red here and there. Hirsch started sprinkling the powder, and Bryant watched as it crenelated the edge of the wound. They wrapped the arm in a temporary bandage, which felt cool and clean and kind. There was some hammering and Bryant was annoyed at the noise. Hirsch disappeared. Cooper nodded sternly and thumped his good shoulder and left as well. The plane rocked and stumbled.
His head cleared a little. He pushed the interphone button.
“Thanks, everybody,” he said, stupidly. “I’m okay.”
“If you’re okay get back up in the fucking turret,” Gabriel said. He sounded absolutely harassed. “Cooper says it’s just your arm.”
He struggled to his feet. “I’m up, Skipper, aye aye,” he said.
The plane hit a wall and he catapulted into and off the panel before him, ending up on his side. They were diving. The floor rose up past him. There was a cannonade of frigid air, and things flew past him toward the bomb bay. He covered his head with his hands. He crawled around on his knees to the flight engineer’s panel, and then they pulled out of the dive and he fell back onto the floor.
The interphone was skewed on his head and when he righted it, it was filled with panicked shouts and babble.
“Get me out of here! Get me out!” Snowberry was shrieking. Lewis was demanding to know what was happening. Gabriel was shouting Bryant’s name. Bryant acknowledged. The airstream through his position was strong enough to lean against.
“Goddamnit! Get down to the nose!” Gabriel shouted. “Somebody get down to the nose!”
The plane was more or less level. Bryant hooked into the portable oxygen bottle and heard Gabriel tell Snowberry to keep his goddamn shirt on, for Chrissakes, nobody was going anywhere, before he unplugged the interphone and climbed cautiously down through the companionway.
It was much too bright. Just below Gabriel and Cooper’s seat level there was nothing but space. The nose opened outward into air like a wide-mouthed chute, flapping wires and cables. The legs of Hirsch’s seat remained in a grotesquely twisted bulkhead. His gun mount flapped backward. There was nothing in front of Bryant.
Hirsch’s interphone outlet hung loose above his head. He plugged in. It sparked and crackled.
“They’re gone,” he said.
“What do you mean, they’re gone?” Gabriel said. “Where’d they go?”
“They’re gone,” Bryant repeated.
“Jesus Christ, did they bail out? What?” Gabriel asked.
“The whole nose is gone,” Bryant said.
Snowberry said, “Oh, no.” Lewis cursed.
“Do you think they got out?” Gabriel demanded. “Is there any blood?”
Bryant looked. It was impossible to tell. His hands and feet were freezing. “I don’t see any blood,” he said.
“Their chutes?” Cooper tried. A fighter flashed by, bizarrely close without the mediating Plexiglas. “Are their chutes gone?” Bryant’s eyes were tearing even behind the goggles. Lewis and Snowberry were firing and Gabriel was jerking the plane all over the sky.
“I’m coming down,” Gabriel said. “Take over, Cooper.”
Bryant waited for him, suffering with the cold and edging out of the companionway both for his own protection and so that his pilot might get a look. Near his foot was a shattered rack for holding Hirsch’s pencils. Gabriel crawled down and mimed something Bryant couldn’t understand. He stared dumbly at his pilot until Gabriel in exasperation poked into the companionway. When he returned, he gestured that everything in front was gone. Bryant gestured that he knew that. Snowberry’s guns were still going. Cooper was shouting over the interphone, “Get back up here, you guys, no one called time out here.”
The fuselage behind them rocked and twanged like a banjo, yawing to the left. Snowberry shrieked, the sound blizzarding into static on the interphone, and didn’t stop. Get it away! it sounded like, Get it away!
Bryant was up onto the platform behind the pilots’ seats and through the passageway to the bomb bay catwalk, squeezing past the narrow V-shaped support beams in his fat flying jacket like a child desperate to get through some bannisters. In the radio room Bean had climbed onto a box, an ammo crate, to get better tracking angles for his gun out of the slanted overhead window. He took off his mask in alarm when he saw Bryant, his face painted with brass dust above the mask line from the cartridges and so much firing. He pointed at the bailout signal as if to indicate he hadn’t seen it and Bryant shook his head, and indicated Bean’s walk-around bottle and the hatchway to the waist. They stepped through it, Bean following.
The waist was empty. Cold air was blasting through an open hatch, and they hunched in the narrowed cylinder of this tapered part of the fuselage and pointed for each other at the escape door, which had been jettisoned. Piacenti’s and Ball’s oxygen masks were still plugged in and hung floppy and inverted along the wall, like bats.
He connected his interphone at Piacenti’s station to tell Gabriel, and Lewis already had, having called in their desertion after the chutes had streamed out past him. Lewis was still cursing and Bryant took the earpiece from his ear for a moment. “Both of them?” Gabriel was asking.
Lewis said something about that filthy wop bastard and his pal. Snowberry broke in in explosive bursts when his call button could override Lewis’s and gasped and made noises impossible to interpret. Lewis said, “Bryant, are you checking on the kid?”
Bryant and Bean moved with peculiar and mechanical quickness, shoulder to shoulder, the seals of their masks trembling. They hunched over the ball turret and hand-cranked it around to position the exit door inside the fuselage, and yanked it open. Blood sprinkled upward from the change in pressure.