Amerika

by Paul Lally

‘Ziggy, I’m so sorry. About everything.’

  He smiled. ‘That’s okay, we got even… with them in the end… didn’t we?’

  ‘We sure did.’

  A long pause. His eyes closed. A sense of calm settled over his face. In between breaths, ‘Do me… a favor… sweetheart.’

  ‘Name it.’

  ‘Don’t tell my folks about... about me being…. Tell them that...that...’

  ‘You were a hero.’

  ‘Yeah, something like that. You’ll know how to say it. You’re a great actress.’

  ‘I won’t have to act.’

  He smiled and then he died.

  Orlando and I dragged the dead Germans into the baggage storage compartment to get them out of sight. I didn’t care how we handled them, I just wanted them gone. We flopped down Bauer’s body first and tossed the Kampfschwimmer on top of him like so much cordwood. But when it came to Ziggy, I changed my mind and we laid him out alongside the others and folded his hands across his motionless chest.

  ‘Rest in peace, you little shit,’ I said.

  Orlando chuckled. ‘I’ll give Brother Ziggy credit, he almost pulled it off.’

  ‘Not ‘almost.’ He did pull it off. They know we’re coming. The surprise element’s out the window.’

  ‘But we still have the bomb.’

  ‘Correct.’ I said. ‘And how exactly do you suggest we drop it?’

  ‘Mason’s going to say, ‘Bombs away?’’

  ‘Don’t get wise with me. You know what I mean.’

  Orlando paused to gather his thoughts. I never hurried the man because it was always worth the wait.

  The plane hit more turbulence and Ziggy’s hands slid off his chest. I put them back again.

  He finally said, ‘If McGraw’s warning got through, they’ve scrammed the reactor and skedaddled. That means there’s nobody there to help the compliance folks.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Grab the plutonium and head for high ground. And they can’t because it’s radioactive. They’ll need all sorts of protection and that takes time. So they’ve got to try another way to keep us away. Compliance fighters, most likely.’

  ‘What do you want to be the sky will be filled with them within the hour?’

  Orlando frowned. ‘I’m not a betting man. Besides, even if I was, I’d lose that one.’

  Turns out, I was about right. Approximately twenty minutes from the target, the Messerschmitt’s jumped us. ‘Jump’ isn’t the right word; the squadron of Me109’s surrounded us like an inescapable escort; above, behind, side to side and below. The lead aircraft, probably the squadron commander, floated just off our starboard wing, his cockpit lights up full, like always.

  ‘Déjà vu,’ Ava said.

  I waved at the pilot and said through my frozen smile. ‘Ready back there, Orlando?’

  Orlando said, ‘Whenever you are.’

  I turned up the flight deck lights full so that the Luftwaffe pilot could see Herr Inspector Bauer and Hauptman Eiger leaning over the navigator’s chart table, heads down, seeming to examine the maps. Propping up the dead Kampfschwimmer had been relatively easy. Mason, an experienced sailor, lashed the body’s arms, trunk and hips to the table so that he appeared natural standing there. Bauer’s body was the problem. Half of his skull was gone, but thank God for his snap brim fedora. Pulled just right over his right eyebrow, it hid the exit wound perfectly.

  Making the dead man move had been Orlando’s bright idea. I expressed doubts he could pull it off but he said, ‘The blind shall see and the dead shall walk.’

  After we had secured Bauer’s body, Orlando cut a slit in the right shoulder of the leather jacket and slid his arm in and up alongside. That, plus using his left hand to move Bauer’s head, Orlando, kneeling behind him, was ready to become a macabre puppeteer.

  I said, ‘Do it.’

  Orlando said, ‘Lazarus, I say unto thee, arise!’

  Bauer looked up and around and out at the pilot. He raised his arm in a Nazi salute and held it. The pilot hesitated a moment, and then snapped off a smart, conventional salute in return.

  He drifted back to a more distant position, assured that we were complying with Herr Bauer’s orders. I slowly lowered the flight deck lights as Orlando moved his puppet a bit more for good measure, and then stopped.

  We held our breaths forever it seemed. But nothing happened. Just a squadron of German warplanes peacefully escorting us to our final destination.

  ‘My God, I think they bought it,’ Ava said. ‘But what happens when we start the bomb run? The instant they see that, they’ll shoot us down.’

  ‘Not with Bauer on board.’

  ‘Don’t kid yourself, he’s expendable and you know it.’

  ‘I do, but I’m counting on their getting official permission before they start shooting. Nazis love their little rules and they follow them to the letter.’

  ‘They’ll get permission sooner or later, I promise you that.’

  ‘Yeah, but by then maybe we’ll have dropped the bomb.’

  ‘And maybe not.’

  ‘Got any other ideas, First Officer James?’

  She laughed. ‘I’m not the resident pessimist, just trying to make sure you cover all your bases.’

  ‘Yeah, we’ll if you’re going to steal second base, sooner or later you’ve got to start running.’

  I throttled back the engines.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Beginning our initial descent. They’re expecting us to land peacefully, remember? Just watch how they follow.’

  I made the rate-of-descent as slow as I could. I needed to buy time.

  ‘Orlando, head back to and start rigging the chute on the bomb.’

  ‘On my way.’

  Pilot to bombardier.’

  ‘Bombardier, go ahead.’

  ‘We’re using the chute. Can you comply?’

  A slight pause, then ‘Doing the numbers now. I’ll take control of the aircraft in about...five minutes.’

  ‘Roger. Professor Friedman, can you recalibrate in time?’

  His voice in my headsets tinny and tight. ‘Jawohl, I can do this.’

  Ava touched my arm ‘The instant that bomb goes off, they’ll shoot us down like a mad dog.’

  ‘Wrong. The instant they see our bomb bay doors open they’ll start shooting.’

  ‘How long will they stay open?’

  ‘Probably a minute or so, maybe longer, from what Mason said.’

  She winced and said, ‘I guess at this point, we really don’t have much a choice.’

  The pre-dawn light turned the eastern horizon soft rose. I had witnessed countless sunrises over countless oceans while flying with Pan Am and the sight always brought the feeling of relief; daylight had won once again won over the darkness. But this time, when I saw the first shades of a new day coming to America, I felt frightened, but then happy, proud, and most of all determined as hell.

  Ava placed her hand over my hand that still gripped the throttles. The gesture wasn’t as a co-pilot backing up the pilot, but as a friend as the both of us watched the altimeter unwind the way you watch a clock ticking off the final seconds before Happy New Year. Only we had nothing to celebrate.

  I tried to judge the ground conditions but darkness still ruled the land. Then the faint gleam of a river, which could have been the Yakima that flows due south of the target. Was that a sprinkle of lights too? If so, Benton City. And what’s more, if I could see the ground then the fog wasn’t there as we had feared.

  The government had built the Hanford Site in the middle of nowhere on purpose. And accordingly, nothing could be seen, no landmarks, no city lights, nothing but scrub grass, shallow arroyos, low rolling hills and then finally, somewhere dead ahead, the blocky shape of the nuclear reactor and the plutonium storage site.

  The altimeter reached two thousand feet and I slowly leveled out. The compliance fighters obediently followed like pilot fish. They wouldn’t wonder - just yet - w
hy I stopped my descent. But if I didn’t resume it soon, they’d start to worry. The squadron leader seemed to read my mind, because he sidled up alongside me and waved. I waved back.

  Mason said, ‘Coming up on the I.P. Got the smokestack. I am taking the aircraft.’

  ‘She’s all yours.’

  I turned on the autopilot, felt the control column shudder momentarily and then smooth out as the Norden bombsight system began feeding it input signals. From now on I was just a spectator. I put my hands in my lap and stared at the slight motions of the wheel moving without me.

  ‘Look ma, no hands,’ I whispered to myself. Mason said, ‘Four minutes to drop.’

  The squadron leader slowly drifted away again. He might be on the radio already, voicing his concerns. No way to tell. How Mason managed to see the smokestack was a mystery. All I could see was the pre-dawn sky ahead and velvet black below.

  ‘Orlando, all set back there?’

  ‘Chute’s on, ready to drop.’

  Mason said, ‘Opening bomb bay doors.’

  My control panel indicator light switched from green to red as the doors in the plane’s tail opened, creating a slight buffeting as the airstream flowed up and into the open space where the bomb hung on its cradle. Outside, the compliance fighters flew steadily onward. Who would be the first to notice?

  ‘Three minutes to drop,’ Mason said.

  Ahead, a tiny red pinprick in the black velvet. Then two more dots, winking softly: the smokestack’s anti-collision lights slowly drifting toward us. The throttles advanced back and forth automatically, driven by the Norden’s dispassionate, mechanical calculations of wind drift, airspeed and outside air temperature.

  ‘Input data complete,’ Friedman said briskly. ‘Device armed.’

  The atomic bomb was finally free from its coaxial umbilical cord. No more messages from its master. The malevolent child was alive at last, its plutonium core waiting to be squeezed to death and born again into a full- blown, radioactive, Frankenstein fireball.

  And still, miraculously, the Nazi fighters maintained their position. Maybe the darkness kept them from seeing the open bomb bay doors. Or laziness. Didn’t matter. The Dixie Clipper keep flying and the clock keep ticking.

  ‘Sixty seconds.’ Mason said.

  I stared at my hands in my lap; useless, motionless. I clenched and unclenched them for lack of anything else to do. After days and nights of action, pressure, worry and concern it came down to this; motionless hands, staring straight ahead, acting like the obedient captain carefully calculating my landing as ordered by Herr Bauer.

  ‘Thirty seconds.’

  All hell broke loose, or at least that’s what it seemed like. A meteor shower of bright red tracers laced the sky above and below us and into us too.

  ‘Hang on everybody,’ I said. ‘Orlando, get ready!’

  ‘I’m there, brother.’

  ‘Fifteen seconds to drop.’

  A line of twenty millimeter cannon shells struck our left wing, followed by the swooping rush of the attacking fighter, directly over us. The clipper absorbed it without a shudder, but within seconds, our number one engine began throwing a thin finger of flame back from its cowling. I feathered the prop, killed the engine and hit the extinguisher, but with no confidence it would work.

  ‘Ten seconds!’ Mason shouted. ‘Help me hold this bearing, cap, we’re drifting.’

  ‘Wilco,’ I grabbed the controls.

  The Norden wasn’t compensating enough for the dead engines. I applied rudder to help. An explosion of noise from behind me as cannon shells shattered the navigation windows and ripped through the radio operator’s station. Soundproofing gone, the engine roar suddenly deafening, my headphones useless.

  All I could do was stare at the bomb release indicator on the instrument panel and pray for it to light up. Seeing that would somehow make all this chaos worth all the pain, all the suffering, all the work by so many people who wanted to be left alone to live their lives until they died of old age, but were up here in a shot-up plane trying to drop a bomb and start a war instead.

  The light flashed red. Mason must have shouted ‘Bomb’s away’ but I didn’t hear him, so I pointed at the indicator light and bellowed, ‘Bomb’s away!’

  I turned to Ava, expecting her marvelous grin, but she sat slumped to the right, motionless, her head on her chest. I tried to reach out to her, but another wave of cannon fire, this time into our right wing, kept me in my seat. All I could do was wrestle this slow-moving giant of a plane out of the line of fire.

  Intermittent blasts of fifty-caliber fire from Orlando’s waist gun. Doing his best, but against these sharks, we didn’t stand a chance.

  Somewhere behind us, the bomb continued its silent descent, its fusing systems clicking away, waiting for the final moment. With every second it fell, the further we escaped from the blast. But the irony of the moment suddenly struck me: with Nazi fighters chopping us up into bits, we weren’t escaping after all.

  I scrabbled around and found my smoked-glass blast goggles, and managed to get them on just as brilliant greenish-white light flooded the cockpit, so intense and overwhelming that it banished all sound.

  Silent, cold and impossibly bright, it faded seconds later, and I ripped off my goggles to see what I was doing. And just in time, because the shock wave hit us and flipped the plane almost completely on her back like a bathtub toy. Debris showered down from everywhere. Momentarily disoriented, I firewalled the remaining engines, applied cross controls, and fought her to the horizontal. But barely. With only two functioning engines we going down whether we liked it or not.

  Where were the tracers? Where were the fighters? Nothing but rosy sky ahead and a towering mushroom cloud to my right rising higher and higher with greenish lightning bolts flashing deep inside its grey billows like a monster’s heartbeat. All I could think of was that the light from the explosion had temporarily blinded them. But that wouldn’t last long.

  Someone grabbed my shoulder. Mason shouted, ‘On the BUTTON, skipper. We did it!’

  I nodded, and pointed to Ava, ‘She’s hit. Check for a neck pulse’

  He crouched over Ava, his hands probing and poking. As he worked, to my relief she stirred and tried to straighten up.

  ‘Stay still,’ Mason said. ‘Found it.’

  ‘Bad?’

  ‘Can’t tell. Lots of blood. Upper arm and shoulder. Bleeding.’

  ‘Artery?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Use your belt for a tourniquet. High up as you can get it.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He stripped off his leather belt and wrapped it around her arm. As he worked to stop the flow of blood, his trousers slowly slid down around his ankles. His boxer shorts white sails in the reddish light.

  ‘Jesus Christ, skipper. Help me out here.’

  Ava smiled and said weakly. ‘That’s okay, I won’t look.’

  The Dixie Clipper was dying, and I didn’t need warning bells and horns to tell me. She had been through too much, too long, and just wanted to lie down and die and I understood. Still no pursuing fighters, but how long could that last? How long could I keep her flying? Half the instruments were either shot up or their sensors destroyed, but the altimeter still worked; three hundred lousy feet and descending.

  ‘I’m putting her down. Professor. Orlando, up here as fast as you can.’

  ‘Roger.’

  ‘Mason, break out the life raft.’

  Off to my right a quick shimmer of reflected light. Water. Had to be the western leg of the Columbia River. If I put her on land she’d grind herself up to bits and take us along with her. Better to let her die on the water. But I had to reach it first and it didn’t look like I could.

  Dawn light just brushed the tops of the distant Cascade Mountains off to my left. Beyond that, the Pacific Ocean that we would never see like we’d originally planned. Not now, and not ever unless I flew this dying plane like I’d never flown it before.

&nbs
p; Outboard engine number four backfired flames out its exhaust. Whatever had struck its intricate world of pistons, crankshafts and valves had finally done its deadly work. Two hundred feet...one hundred eighty…...

  Orlando and the Professor on the flight deck.

  ‘Brace for a crash landing.’

  Orlando clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Lead us to the Promised Land, not into it, you hear?’

  Controls beyond sluggish now, almost useless, making huge motions just to keep her nose level and the river approaching, but perpendicular to our flight path. Had to slew her around to the left to line up for the final approach but the airspeed was so low she would stall and drop off on a wing.

  Tracer fire lancing across the sky. Fighters finally found us, game over, but a plane to land no matter what. I lowered the flaps but the starboard wing rose, trying to flip us over. Flaps only working on the right side, the left side shot out. Great. Too late now, water coming up sideways, raise the nose, raise the nose, bleed off airspeed, kick left rudder as hard as you can, line up, line up, stall warning horn, flare, flare, FLARE.

  The Dixie Clipper struck the water like a skipping stone and bounced back into the air. I fought to keep her wings level as she sagged down lest a wingtip nick the water and sending us cartwheeling nose over tail. We hit again and stayed down for good, skidding slightly sideways but not so bad as the keel dug in and the airspeed bled off and the engines, God bless them, were still pounding away, but with dying, broken hearts.

  Tracers stitched the water off to starboard in an explosion of spray.

  Two compliance fighters roared overhead. We were sitting ducks. I killed the engines and climbed out of my seat. Ava was conscious but barely.

  ‘Hang on, kid, we’re getting out of here.’

  She nodded and managed a weak smile. ‘Nice landing, skipper.’

  ‘Could have used your help.’

  ‘Next time.’

  The crew life raft rested on the debris-filled flight deck like a long yellow, tubular sausage. But when inflated would hold ten people. I did a head count. Only four.

  ‘Orlando?’

  Mason jerked his thumb aft. ‘Below.’

  The sudden hammering of the fifty-caliber answered my next question.