‘Go on,’ Jack said, leaning forward.
Mikhail took an A4 black-and-white photograph from the file and slid it over the table. ‘You recognize that?’ Jack stared, then nodded. The picture showed a large-bellied four-engine aircraft in wartime British Royal Air Force camouflage, white underneath and on the fuselage sides, and khaki and olive green above, with a large RAF roundel on the centre of the fuselage and the red identification letters MA below the cockpit. In front of the letters was the image of a scantily clad woman and a roaring red dragon, and the words ‘Dragon Lady’.
‘It’s a B-24 Liberator,’ he said. ‘Somewhere in the tropics, judging by the palm trees beyond the tarmac. That’s the RAF Coastal Command camouflage scheme, isn’t it? Was this a submarine hunter?’
‘It’s a Liberator of 111 Operational Training Unit, based at Nassau in the Bahamas and used to train new aircrew on four-engine bombers. A lot of the aircrew were Canadians of the RCAF, as well as British and Commonwealth RAF men who had done their initial training in Canada. The Liberator had a longer range than the other main four-engine bombers used in the European war, and many of the crews were destined for the Far East to take part in operations against the Japanese.’
‘You mean about the time when the Americans were gearing up to drop the first atomic bomb.’
Mikhail nodded. ‘That’s what I was researching when I came across the records box with that picture. The box was peculiar because it contained papers and logbooks relating to 111 OTU in May and June 1945, material that would normally be found in England with the squadron operations records in the UK National Archives, or under restricted access along with other Second World War material still held by the Ministry of Defence. Its location in the US archives in Washington only made sense when I began reading the files and realized that they related to a secret training scheme co-ordinated by the US and were intimately tied up with the events of early August 1945, with the atomic bomb programme.’
Jack peered at the photograph. ‘My father was an RAF Lancaster pilot in the final months of the war. He told me I owed my existence to a silver butterfly that had kept him and his crew alive. It was a pendant left in the aircraft by the previous pilot, who’d brought his crew through two tours. My father kept the butterfly and had it in his hand when he died as an old man. That’s virtually all I know about his wartime experiences, as he never spoke of them. He said he was one of the lucky ones who was able to live for the future. I think that pendant had something to do with it. But he did talk a lot about his beloved Lancaster, so I grew up knowing a bit about planes. I was right, wasn’t I? This Liberator may have flown with a training unit, but she’s armed and equipped for operational flying.’
Mikhail nodded. ‘This is B-24D, serial number FK-856. You were right about Coastal Command. She’d been a Royal Canadian Air Force U-boat hunter based in Newfoundland, but with the Battle of the Atlantic winding down by early 1945, she was one of a number sent to operational training units. You can see she still has the chin fairing that houses the air-to-surface-vessel radar, and the airfoil winglets below the cockpit that carried eight five-inch rockets. Both of those features were removed when she went to 111 OTU, but the bomb-bay adaptation to carry depth charges was retained.’
‘What about the crew?’
‘That was what really piqued my interest. When I looked at the crew lists, I saw something odd. The usual operational conversion crews were men straight out of flight school. But the final crew to fly this Liberator was very different.’ Mikhail picked up the scanned sheets and flipped through them. ‘An inordinate amount of attention was paid to their selection, with secret reports from their squadron and station commanders as well as detailed intelligence assessments on each man. They were all highly experienced aircrew from the same elite RAF pathfinder group, the bombers that had flown ahead in the raids on Nazi Europe and marked the targets. Every member of the crew of FK-856 had flown at least a full tour of thirty missions over Europe, several of them a lot more; all four of the NCO gunners had Distinguished Flying Medals, the officers had Distinguished Flying Crosses and the pilot had the Distinguished Service Order as well. With the war in Europe over, many Lancaster crews were being remustered as part of “Tiger Force”, the plan to send RAF and Commonwealth squadrons to bomb Japan, and I could only think that this crew had been selected for special duties to get them to the Far East as soon as possible and were being converted to fly anti-submarine operations in the Pacific. But then I found the top-secret memo that explained it all. They were being given flight time on the Liberator before being sent to a secret destination in the Pacific to be upgraded to the Liberator’s successor, the B-32 “super-bomber”. They were being groomed to be the first generation of bomber crews to drop tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield, something Allied commanders envisaged had the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs failed to persuade the Japanese to surrender.’
‘But then the war against Japan did end, and the programme was scrapped,’ Jeremy said.
Mikhael nodded, then pursed his lips. ‘Too late for these men, though. They may well count as the last combat casualties of the war against the Nazis.’
‘Explain,’ Jack said.
Mikhail picked out one sheet with a yellow marker stuck to it. ‘It was the morning of the third of June 1945. The crew had only been in Nassau for two weeks, having previously been involved in the airdrop of relief supplies to the emergency hospital units dealing with survivors of the Belsen concentration camp. One of their last bombing missions had been over Berlin, an attempt to use the “Tallboy” twelve-thousand-pound bomb to break the flak-tower defences. It was their expertise with those bombs that caught the eye of the US intelligence officers scouting for pathfinder crews suitable for conversion to nuclear bombing. The bomber crews were very tightly knit, and the pathfinders were the best of the best. The psychological reports show that these were not the kind of men who desperately counted down the last missions to the end of their tour, traumatized by what they had seen and done and by the constant fear. We often forget that some men relished it. The men in this crew seem to have been pleased to be selected to go out to the Far East ahead of Tiger Force, eager to get back into action again. These were precisely the kind of men the intelligence officers would have been looking for.’
‘So that day they were on a training mission?’ Jack asked.
Mikhail nodded, then took out a photocopied map with ruled lines on it. ‘It was their last operation in an intensive week. They were due to take their Liberator across the United States to the island of Guam in the Pacific the next day. They were fully armed as if they were on an anti-submarine patrol, with three depth charges in the bomb bay and the machine guns in the turrets fully belted up. The depth charges were an experimental type designed to bounce on the surface of the sea, hit their target and roll under it to explode, like the famous dambuster bombs. Their mission was to fly three hundred and fifty nautical miles east of Nassau to a designated live-fire zone just north of the central Bahamas chain, find a decommissioned minesweeper that had been anchored as a target and expend all their ammunition on it before returning in a clockwise route to Nassau. Their last radio contact shows that they made it to the live-fire zone, a rectangular area of about fifty square miles extending north from the island of San Salvador. Intermittently, there’s severe electromagnetic disturbance at this location, on the edge of the abyssal plain where the Bahamas shelf extends over the Atlantic plate, an extension of the Puerto Rico Fault Line that’s still poorly understood. It’s the kind of thing that would get Bermuda Triangle fantasists all excited, but an oceanographer colleague of mine at Columbia University thinks it might be a localized upsurge of the magma that affects the geomagnetic field, an anomaly that might also disrupt compasses.’