“He says he’s gonna puke,” Gabriel called. “Get his mask off.”
They pulled him out and he seemed to uncoil raggedly from the tiny sphere. Bean was lifting weakly under his shoulders and Bryant tore off Snowberry’s mask, the vomit looping and threading from his face. His head was moving from side to side and he slapped at his thigh. His pant leg was badly holed at the knee like a boy’s old pair of jeans, and beneath the dark and soaked edges of sheepskin the kneecap slid free and flapped like the lining of a pocket.
Bryant felt his stomach rise and squeezed his hand over his mask. Bean had not slowed and seemed to be systematically checking him. His left hand was smashed and the glove was flat and mangled. Blood scattered in cold and coagulating droplets wherever he’d been, wherever he gestured. He coughed and choked and brought his good hand to his mouth to clear away the mess. Blood flecked and painted Bean’s goggles.
They stuffed a blanket between his head and the bulkhead and wrapped his feet in another. Blood dripped from his nose and he looked childlike. He was whispering something and they both looked at his parachute, hacked by shrapnel. He whispered and they understood it had to be, Don’t leave me here, and Bryant shook his head, twice, to indicate they wouldn’t. Bean cupped his chin and Bryant wiped his mouth and they hooked him into Piacenti’s air. Bean’s gloved fingers sorted through the first aid kit. Blood bubbled and froze around the seal of Snowberry’s oxygen mask and Bryant scraped at it with the double-seamed fingertips of his gloves. Bean laid the morphine syrette on the tumble of the blanket and exposed the wrist of Snowberry’s good hand and gestured for Bryant. Snowberry’s head thumped the bulkhead in pain. Bean held the wrist as level and as still as possible. Bryant jabbed it with the tiny needle, anywhere. Snowberry jerked, as though that had been the worst of all.
He tried to remember what else was necessary. Bean had clearly moved on to the knee. He remembered bored NCO’s modeling splints and neat bandages in training lectures. He had Snowberry’s flight jacket zipped open and could see a soaked area the size of a baseball on his left side. He looked at Bean and Bean looked back helplessly, his gloves under his arms, his hands in the wet of Snowberry’s knee. Paper bandages flew from the kit. Bryant found some cloth, bunched and folded, and eased it onto the spot. He held it there until Bean lifted it from his hands and set it aside and moved to expose the wound with a surprising and gentle assurance. Snowberry’s knee was already wrapped, poorly but vehemently.
Bean gestured to the ball, and Bryant understood. In the hatchway to the radio room, Cooper, too, was pointing at the ball. They were taking additional hits, and he saw a pattern of daylight through the fuselage, a magical and artificial Big Dipper.
He removed his parachute and climbed gingerly into the hatch, his rear dropping low, his legs spreading and curling upward into the gun charging stirrups. He didn’t fit completely, and the contortion was painful on the back of his neck and his hamstrings. He felt Bean close the hatch door behind him, heaving the metal door shut against the pressure of Bryant’s back.
He got his hand on the rotation mechanism and swung the turret around so that he was curled more or less upright, head and feet up, rear down. He sighted out a circular Plexiglas panel between his legs. He adjusted the reticles of the gunsight for range with a left foot pedal. Tracking and firing involved the same grip handles as the dorsal, above his head instead of in front of him. The jetstream whistled through jigsaw holes along his left side, and below and beside one leg, like paint, he had to contend with a large frozen smear of blood, hampering visibility. His knees flanked his ears. His fingers and eyes moved along the guns on either side of him, checking for damage. A fighter swam up over his crotch from the world below, lining up for a free pass at their underside. He swiveled and aligned the shot delicately and let go a burst that surprised the German pilot but was too low. The sky cleared a little and he experimented, to get the hang of the turret’s play. The rotation mechanism seemed more sensitive than the dorsal. He plugged in the interphone. Something else passed by and he fired at it, unused to the way the targets appeared so quickly from his blind spot above, and the cartridge cases tumbled and spilled over him. When he could, he slid them out the slots for the gun barrels.
A straggler trailing smoke thousands of feet below and behind them was swept over by a swarm of single- and twinengine fighters, the spurts and blips of hits at that distance registering all over the wings and fuselage. All four engines caught fire and the plane broke up gently and silently into smaller pieces.
“We got manifold pressure problems in the number two engine,” Gabriel said. Bryant could feel the shaking, their engine trying to tear itself out of the wing. They’d have to shut it down, but with only two engines left they weren’t going to keep up with the formation. The shaking stopped, and he could feel the airspeed drop.
Behind them twin-engined Me-110’s trailed along out of range with the intention of executing stragglers. They had a choice in Paper Doll of bailing out or hitting the deck, trying to get back flying the lowest possible altitude, hedgehopping home.
Gabriel asked for a vote.
“Our waist gunners already voted,” Lewis said.
“I’m asking you guys,” Gabriel said. “Our navigator’s gone so I don’t know exactly where we are. But it ain’t friendly.”
Bean was not on the system; still treating Snowberry, Bryant assumed. Bryant said, “I say we stay. Snowberry’s chute is bad news. He won’t survive a jump, anyway.”
Gabriel waited. The plane was falling back now, and Bryant imagined Archangel and Plum Seed leaving them behind, the tail gunners in each regretting Paper Doll’s misfortune.
Lewis said, “What are we gonna do? The kid can’t go. We gotta count on the flying ability of our Looeys. And me and Bryant and Harold Bean to keep them off our back.”
“Big cloud to our left,” Gabriel said. “I’m gonna use it to get down.”
The mist of the cloud edge began to stream by Bryant’s ball position, giving him the sense of dry immersion, and another straggler below them suddenly rose upward dramatically but Bryant understood that it was Paper Doll, going down. Lewis said, “I say we divvy up Ball and the wop’s stuff when we get back,” and Bryant thought about them, drifting down to the ground, killed or taken care of, and imagined Piacenti grinning and burying his parachute. He thought of Snowberry and hoped he was sleeping.
The cloud was raveling white, as bland as thick fog. The cloud would hide them all the way down to the ground, he hoped. The walk-around bottles were probably exhausted. It would be good to get off the oxygen for everyone’s sake, especially Gordon’s.
The plane banked lightly and Gabriel announced he was heading west, to avoid the mission return route. “Maybe we’ll avoid everyone heading to the main force,” he said. “It’s such a mess maybe we’ll get through. Maybe we’ll have lost those 110’s with this cloud.”
“Oh, Jeez,” Cooper said.
Bean came over the interphone. “Gordon’s not so hot,” he said calmly. “He’s throwing up and throwing up as fast as I can clear it. I took care of his knee and his hand but I don’t know what happened to his side. Maybe it’s his stomach.”
“Don’t let him drink anything,” Gabriel said, helplessly.
“I got him wedged in so he won’t bounce around much,” Bean said. “I think he’s sleeping.”
“You better get back to the radio room,” Lewis said. “You’re the only gun on top, now.”