"Wyatt Rook."
"I've heard of you," Lenny said, shaking his hand. "The historian, right?"
Wyatt nodded.
"So," asked Lenny, "how do you fit in?"
"I hired him," Liz responded. "My family wants to know why my granddad disappeared."
"We have that in common."
"Yes," Liz said, agreeing. "Our grandfathers and Ack-Ack were the three crewmen who vanished that night."
+ + +
The four of them had driven here in Wyatt's rental car. A rural road ran parallel to the graded bed of the new autobahn. The routes split up at the mouth of the valley cradling the Ace.
The old road arced around to leave the hollow as it was, while the highway under construction plowed through the virgin meadow. Just as the plane had done when it crashed in 1944.
Luckily for Sweaty, given the state of his leg, dump trucks hauling earth away had rutted a makeshift path. Armed with an official pass to the site, Wyatt had bumped them along the track until the VW reached the pothole.
The manmade pit was more than a hundred feet across.
Big enough for the Ace.
Not to be thwarted by the inconvenience of salvaging the plane, road construction continued on up the valley. Once the Ace had been trundled off to a British museum—at the end of the war, the RAF had scrapped every Halifax not lost in combat—the road crew would fill in the pit and run the autobahn over top.
That, thought Wyatt, is why German trains run on time.
Halfway around the rim of the pit, Lenny pointed to the mid-upper turret and asked, "Why did my grandfather crew with you that night?"
"Our regular gunner—we called him De Count—was pulled from ops and branded LMF."
"What's LMF?"
"Lack of moral fiber," Sweaty explained.
"What does that mean?"
"He cracked under the strain. There were many ways a guy could get the chop. Get killed. Planes could crash on takeoff or in flight. Planes above could drop their bombs in error on our heads. Planes beside could wander into our space. Enemy fighters or flak could shoot us down or set us afire, and we'd be gone. Ditch in the sea, and we'd drown or freeze to death. If oxygen failed, hello anoxia. Frostbite and icing could weigh us down. Stripped to basics, the Ace was a flying bomb loaded with gas and ammunition. A bullet, a spark, a leak—any one could blow us sky-high long before we got to club the target."
"Heavy duty," Lenny said.
"Literally. The stress from each op accumulates. Operational twitch. Loss of nerve. Mental exhaustion. Shellshock. Signs were everywhere. The RAF had a single word to cover all those conditions: cowardice. LMF was the euphemism."
"Sounds draconian."
"It was. They thought LMF was contagious. The 'infected man' was swiftly marched away to quarantine, then humiliated, vilified, and drummed out of Bomber Command. Demoted, he was sent to the army, the navy, or down the mines. 'LMF' was stamped on his file to plague him the rest of his life. His flying badge got forfeited. In the case of De Count, that was ironic."
"Why?" asked Lenny.
"The air gunner's brevet had the letters 'AG' to the left of a single wing with twelve feathers. Originally, there were thirteen, but that could bring bad luck. To quell superstition, the brass clipped a feather off with nail scissors."
"But the jinx got De Count anyway?"
"Bingo," Sweaty said.
"Why such harsh treatment?"
"As a deterrent. The strain affected all of us to varying degrees. If there'd been a way to leave ops with honor, a lot of men would've bailed out. Instead, they kept on flying until their number came up. God knows how many planes went down because men who were afraid of the LMF stigma continued to fly when they shouldn't have."
"Do you know what broke De Count?"
"Probably. Another crew in the squadron came home from a shaky do. The Achilles heel of a British bomber was its under-belly. A Halifax had no ventral turret. Not only did flak batteries blast up from below, but Nazi night fighters were armed with upward-slanting cannons to give us a kick in the gut.
"The plane that ran into trouble took a double hit. A night fighter blew the balls off its mid-upper gunner. The castrated man dropped from his turret with both hands between his legs.
He ran around, jumping up and down, screaming, 'I've been hit!' Then flak tore a leg off the bomb-aimer. The wireless operator spent the next two hours lying in a pool of blood in the frigid nose cone, trying to keep a tourniquet cinched around the injured man's stump. The bombardier was thrashing about in pain and had to be subdued, so the radioman kept knocking him out with punches from his fist.
"When the stricken bomber landed, we were out at the pan.
Every man knew that could be him—castrated or legless—on the next op. De Count was shaking. His face blanched white."
"Stress with a capital S!" said Lenny.
Sweaty winced. "I should have seen it coming. One day, about a week before De Count cracked, they lined us up in the crew room for important news. Her Majesty was on her way to pay us a visit. We were told in no uncertain terms how to behave. When she offered us her hand, we were to say nothing more than 'How do you do, ma'am.' Hours later, the queen arrived at the air station. When she offered De Count her hand, he was overcome. Grasping her palm in both of his, he wouldn't let go. He kept saying, 'I'm so pleased to meet Your Majesty. . . .So pleased. . . .So pleased . . . So pleased . . .' That breached every rule in the book, but the queen was gracious.
All she did was put her other hand on top of his and say, 'No more pleased than I am to meet you, Sergeant, I assure you.'
"I thought De Count was going to cry.
"Shortly after, he went to the wingco and refused to fly."
"LMF," said Lenny.
Sweaty nodded. "The poor bastard. What a dirty label. How many guys found ways to avoid risking their lives for their country? Cowards who spent the war behind a desk? De Count stepped up to the plate and took it for as long as he could. The guy volunteered for dangerous duty, then suffered disgrace."
"So you got my granddad?"
"Trent was an 'odd bod,' a spare gunner attached to no particular crew. Having lost his own plane in a crash over the North Sea—he bailed out through the rear hatch just in time—he tagged onto any crew short of a gunner."
"What was he like?"
"As a marksman? We took him up for an air test before that fatal flight. Ack-Ack gave him a thumbs-up on how he handled the turrets and the guns. Jonesy exemplified the air gunner's unofficial motto: 'We aim not to please.'"
The three listeners laughed.
"What was he like as a man?" Lenny asked.
"Quiet. Withdrawn. Skinny. Eaten up inside. He said his wife had left him and taken their child. She was in Australia, if memory serves me right."
"It does. That child was my mom. She married an American. That's where I was born."
"Where do you call home?"
"Now? I recently moved to Wales. My mom leased a house in my granddad's hometown and we took back her maiden name. We hope to stay there for a year and dig into our ancestors' Welsh history. That's why I'm here on this odyssey. To learn how my granddad died."
"De Count?" said Wyatt. "What became of him?"
"He blamed himself for jinxing the crew after the Ace went down in Germany. I spent the rest of the war in a Stalag Luft camp. Only when I got home did I hear what had happened to him. The day De Count was told the Ace went missing, he took the opportunity to hang himself."
SKELETON CREW
As Wyatt walked the length of the resurrected bomber, he took in details of the fuselage. Dark green and brown camouflage colors mottled the top of the Halifax, with matte black along the sides and below. A playing card—the ace of clubs—and that nickname, chosen by the crew, were painted under the pilot's window at the nose of the plane. The rows of clubs beneath that represented the bombing ops completed by the Ace. Both wings bore the bull's-eye insignia of the RAF, as did the fuselage b
ack near the entry door. For having survived a crash and landslide burial, the bomber was in surprisingly good shape. Cannon-shell damage was solely to the tail.
Twin fins and rudders book-ending high-mounted mini-wings formed the tail assembly. Where the alloy skin was shot away, the historian could see the spars of the metal skeleton.
Peppered with holes, both fins were chunked as if they'd been chewed by sharks. No wonder the Ace had gone down.
"Amazing," Sweaty marveled. "That's what I call luck.
The night fighter ripped the tail to rat shit on both sides of the gunner, but the turret wasn't smashed."
"Anyone see a bullet hole?" Wyatt asked.
The others shook their heads.
"So gunners who live in glass houses can throw stones," declared Liz.
"If Ack-Ack didn't bail out and he wasn't shot, what happened to him?" Lenny asked.
"I didn't say he wasn't shot," Sweaty replied. "Even if the turret is undamaged, the night fighter could have drilled him through the hole in the bubble."
"What hole?" inquired Liz.
Sweaty pointed. "See the missing panel? Off the assembly line, a Boulton Paul turret offered the illusory protection of a totally enclosed Perspex cupola. But miles up in the night skies over the Reich, the temperature outside the unheated turret sank to minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit. That's numbingly cold. Just as a car windshield does in the winter, the glass surrounding Ack-Ack would mist over and then freeze up."
"So he removed the panel?" asked Liz.
"Lots of gunners did. Without a rear turret, a plane was a sitting duck, so night fighters blasted in from behind and below. Too many bombers lurched home with a shattered rear turret and a dead gunner inside. I could tell you stories of wounded guys with half a turret who kept on firing as long as they had a functioning gun. Once that ran out of ammunition, they sat defenseless in the teeth of Nazi cannons, advising their skippers on evasion maneuvers until they were dead."
The four were standing at the tail of the Ace, sighting up the fuselage as if it were a bowling alley and the turret a ball about to rumble down its lane. From this spot on the far edge of the pit, Wyatt saw why the rear gunner huddled in the loneliest outpost in the sky.
"An arse-end Charlie," Sweaty said, "had a hairy job.
Crouched in total darkness, Ack-Ack searched the night for telltale shadows that might solidify into oncoming fighters. Up, across, down, and back again, he moved his turret quarter by quarter behind the Ace, convinced that every speck on the glass was a Junkers 88. Of all his weaponry, our rear gunner's best defense was his 'Eyeball, Mark I'"—Sweaty poked a finger at his own eye—"so that's why he removed the panel from in front of his turret seat."
"To see better," Liz said.
"Yeah. For clear vision. So if the Junkers that got us shot through that gap, he sure as shootin' hit Ack-Ack."
"One way to find out," Wyatt said, and he reached into his pocket for his gravedigger's pass.
+ + +
At times like this it paid to have a translated history of Dresden riding high on German bestseller lists, as well as powerful contacts within the ranks of military historians.
Contacts like Rutger, who had arranged the pass.
You reached the bottom of the pit through a cluster of ladders, the top rungs of which were controlled by no-nonsense security guards. Waving his pass, Wyatt descended from Lilliput to the topsy-turvy realm of Brobdingnag. Wyatt was a miniature Gulliver dwarfed by the humongous plane.
The Ace lay on its belly in the cradle of earth, its wings supported by platforms of dirt. Astern of the port wing was the entry door. By luck, the historian approached just as the hatch was being forced open by the Jaws of Life.
Wyatt peered inside.
A time capsule, he thought.
Rutger, Germany's foremost historian on the Second World War, turned out to be a magic key, he was held in such high esteem. One look at the pass he'd procured and the men of the entry team were inviting Wyatt along on the first foray into the bomber since 1944.
By way of welcome, they gave him a flashlight.
The Wyatt who entered the fuselage had three eyes in his head—the two flanking his nose and the one in his mind. His mind's eye didn't live in the twenty-first century. Instead, it pictured the Ace as it was the moment before the Junkers 88 raked the tail.
He was back in Hitler's war.
Along the deep, oval-ribbed tunnel to his left, Wyatt pictured the phantom lower body of the mid-upper gunner in the dorsal turret. The head, shoulders, and arms of the ghost would be in the bubble. Up front, past the deafening roar of the four radial engines, he imagined the over-under quintet who flew the Halifax. Side by side in the cockpit were the pilot, Wrath Hannah, and Ox Oxley, his flight engineer. Below, the wireless operator, Sweaty Swetman, fronted the curtained-off cubicle of Balls Balsdon, the navigator. Beyond, in the extreme nose, hunched the bomb-aimer, Nelson Trafalgar.
A walkway ran the length of the fuselage, past Wyatt's position to the rear turret. As he swept the flashlight beam toward the tail, he saw the Ace for what it was: a flying bomb more dangerous to its crew than to the enemy.
Two thousand gallons of gas sloshed in the fuel tanks. Gun turrets, flaps, and flying controls fed off miles of pipeline filled with flammable hydraulic oil. In the bomb bay lurked tons of high explosives and firebombs. Oxygen lines, electrical wires, and intercom cables could—with a single spark—blow the Ace to bits without help from Nazi flak guns or night fighters. Ten thousand rounds of ammunition were belt-fed back along the port side by four ammo tracks linking the forward magazines to the rear turret. Set them off like firecrackers and the plane would turn into a shooting gallery.
No wonder Sir Arthur Harris, the man who sent the deathtraps out night after night, was nicknamed "Butch" by those at the "sharp end" of Bomber Command.
"Butch" for "the Butcher."
With his spine to the cockpit, Wyatt closed the distance to the rear turret. The hoops overhead and the stretched metal skin reminded him of the flatbed of a covered wagon. Shut, the turret's concave doors bulged toward him. Caught in the beam of the flashlight just outside the doors, the gunner's parachute offered a strong clue that instead of bailing out, Ack-Ack had gone down with the Ace.
Straining, Wyatt opened the sliding doors.
Unlike the ghosts his mind had seen manning the forward combat positions, the sole remaining warrior of a real-life skeleton crew occupied the rear turret. So claustrophobic was the cage-like turret that it reminded Wyatt of a Tower of London torture chamber known as the Little Ease. The dimensions of that room were such that no matter how a prisoner contorted himself, he couldn't stretch out in any direction.
Before long, the cramped quarters snapped his mind.
The same was true of the little ease of this rear turret. In life, the tail gunner had crouched almost immobile within his goldfish bowl for the six, eight, or ten hours of a bombing run, unable to stretch and relieve the kinks in his back, legs, and arms. Surrounded by metal and Perspex, he sat on the hard, backless bench with supports under his arms. His hands gripped the operating stick jutting through a diamond-shaped hole in the control table. Moving the stick left and right swiveled the turret. Pulling and pushing the stick raised and lowered the guns. The four Browning ,303s were mounted in pairs on both sides of the control stick, and were linked to the reflector sight in front of the gunner's eyes. Aiming with that gunsight, he saw an illuminated dot in the center of a glowing circle. The guns were fired by triggers on the control stick.
Each spat out 1,150 rounds per minute. In effect, like a turtle, the man and his shell were one. That's why there was no room inside for his parachute.
Ever the historian, Wyatt knew his subject.
For a moment more, his mind lingered in 1944. Cut off from the rest of the Ace's crew by half the length of the plane, with only the crackling of muted voices in his earphones to assure him that other humans were flying this op too, Ack-Ack braved the
freezing air let in by the missing Perspex panel. The only sounds were the soft hiss of oxygen in his mask and the creaks and groans of the turret reacting to high altitude. Six-inch icicles hung from the rubber of his face mask. With his goggles pushed up on his brow so he could see, he blinked repeatedly to keep his eyelashes from freezing. His eyes watered, his nose ran, and cold seeped into his multi-layered battledress. With the chill came a lethargy that undermined his efforts to stay alert.
Then he saw it!
Through the missing panel!
The outline of an incoming Junkers 88!
Rat-a-tat-tat!
Bullets tore through his chest.
Down came the Ace.
Followed by the landslide.
And here the plane lay buried for sixty-odd years, as time reduced the rear gunner to this skeleton.
The desiccated remains were still on the turret seat, the torso sprawled forward on the control table between the guns.
Through the hole created by the missing panel, Wyatt could see Liz, Sweaty, and Lenny watching from the rim of the pit. The rotting flesh within had reduced the Michelin Man to a shroud draping bones. Daylight struggled to filter through the dirty bubble, so Wyatt enhanced it with the flashlight's beam. He shone the pool on the back of the corpse to illuminate three holes near the spine, seemingly made when night-fighter bullets blew out exit wounds.
That's when the historian spotted something protruding from one of the holes.
Strange, he thought, extracting it.
What Wyatt held in his hand forced him to rethink the puzzle he'd believed the crash of the Ace had posed.
The puzzle wasn't why Ack-Ack hadn't bailed out.
The puzzle was how he had died.
INQUISITION
THE VATICAN
How many people did God kill when the act of original sin filled Him with disgust?
Answer: Every living creature on earth, except the few Noah saved with his ark. Genesis 6:5-7.
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