I told him I’d stay with him but he just shook his head. I didn’t need to hear him to know what he said next. He said jump.
I told him I’ll get you a chute and we’ll get you out of here. He kind of smiled at that, and a lot of blood ran out of his mouth. He stared ahead and grabbed the control wheel harder, and I understood that I wasn’t going to be taking him anywhere.
We all have good luck charms. We don’t talk about them much because they have power for us and no one else. Pictures of girlfriends, letters from home. Pocket watches. I wear a medicine bag. My grandfather made it for me when I left the reservation. When he gave it to me he said that one day I would fight Wakínyan Tanka, the great bird whose voice is thunder. I can’t tell you what’s in that bag, but it has things that are part of my home. My people. So a piece of home is always with me. It’s connected. Like a radio beacon. So that wherever I go, it’ll help me get back home.
So I took off my medicine bag and I put it around Pepper’s neck. I told him it would help him on his journey. I thought maybe the Ill Wind was the Thunderbird my grandfather meant. Pepper nodded and I put a hand on his shoulder. You don’t wish a dead man luck. You say goodbye and you hope his spirit finds its way. So that’s what I did.
And then I just climbed down. I grabbed my parachute and a ditch kit and I carried them to the forward hatch. The wind wasn’t so bad right behind the radio room bulkhead and I squatted down and opened the hatch and put on the chute. We were up around three thousand feet, and there was nothing below me but a whole lot of North Atlantic. Dark and choppy and cold as hell. It looked hard as metal and I could see whitecaps even from this high up.
I inflated my mae west and grabbed the sides of the hatchway. I don’t know why I didn’t jump. I wasn’t afraid to. Believe me, the idea of staying in that bomber was a lot scarier than jumping into the ocean. But I just watched the water go by underneath me and the wind was roaring through the flak hole like the bomber was screaming. I could feel it shaking all around me. I could feel the dead men all around me, too. Pepper up there looking for a landing no live man could see. Nine guys I’d had breakfast with that morning.
Then the bomber jerked right, and it threw me right out of the hatch. That air was like a wall. It spun me around like you’d throw a doll. I pull the cord and the chute opens and I’m hanging underneath it. I couldn’t see the Ill Wind because of the canopy, but I could hear her. I still can.
I hadn’t tied the raft to me, and it was still up there in the bomber. So I started worrying about what was below me instead of what was above me, because my cruise in the North Atlantic just got a whole lot worse.
Under me’s nothing but whitecaps, ten-foot waves. I’m turning, and the coast comes into view—and I can’t believe it. There’s a boat, dead ahead. A big trawler. Like the bomber just spit me out right over it.
I came down less than a hundred yards away from that boat. The Bonnie Marie. Didn’t need the raft, the flare gun, none of it. They’d seen the bomber and they saw me jump, so they were ready for me.
That was the coldest water I ever want to be in. I got tangled in my shroud lines, and they had to cut it all off me. I coughed up a gallon of North Sea, but I was on a deck and they were throwing blankets on me and yelling questions in some kind of English I couldn’t understand. Someone put a coffee in my hand and someone else poured brandy in it, and I sat on that deck and stared up at the sky.
*
So the rest of the story comes from Clay Renick, our crew chief. The ground crews were all sweating out the mission back in Jordan Abbey, and finally the squadron started coming back in. Right away they knew it was bad. The ships are limping home like whipped dogs. Shot up, flakked up, smoking, leaking everything. There aren’t enough medical teams for all the Fortresses that are shooting off red flares as they come in. The airfield looks like the Fourth of July. Say Cheese came in with the whole front bubble blown off. The ground crew are counting bombers, looking for ID numbers or nose art, trying to figure out whose ships are coming in, pedaling out to their birds the second they touch down.
Forty-eight B-17s went out. Thirty-two made it back. The orphan crews stayed on their bikes along the runway, staring up at the sky like they were wishing those bombers back. Like if they just waited long enough they’d show up. And you know, a couple stragglers did come through, toughing it out on two or three engines right above the trees.
Fifteen, twenty minutes after the last one touches down, the orphan crews start looking at each other. It’s bad luck to talk about it, and no one wants to be the first guy to head back from the airfield. You don’t give up on your ship.
Clay was the one who pointed first. I think he could have picked Ill Wind out of a whole sky full of Fortresses just from the sound. He knew those radial engines like a momma knows her baby’s breathing. The rest of the crew couldn’t see a thing, but he just set his jaw and shook his finger at the treeline and told them to hang on.
And a minute later there she was. The Ill Wind, no mistake. She was flying low and her gear was down and she was coming in on one engine. Two, Three, and Four were out and feathered. Right stabilizer just hanging off and the ship not able to fly straight. Flak hole on the left side of the cockpit, shot up like a bum-winged duck on the first day of hunting season.
And no red flare. Clay couldn’t believe it. How could a bird get that shot up and not be firing a wounded-on-board flare?
Quarter-mile before the runway her Number One cut out. Clay said it was eerie as hell, watching that big, beat-to-death B-17 come gliding in dead quiet. She was fighting to line up on the runway and when she got it centered she just dropped, bam. Smoke from the wheels and a squeak of rubber and then she’s sliding down the runway quiet as a ghost. You could see Captain Ryan and Pepper Thompson in the cockpit, but there was no brake, no crew chutes dragging her to a halt. She drifted off the runway and into the mush, and that’s what finally stopped her.
Clay just shook his head when he told me about it. “All them purple-heart wagons limping in,” he said, “and here comes the Ill Wind on no engines and held together with tape and spit, and she just glides in like a sailboat coming into the dock.”
Well, the crew was out there like a shot. Clay was the first one on board. He was supposed to let the medics on first, but he said he just couldn’t stand it. Said he knew something was wrong before he even got in the bomber. He was all set to give the captain grief about messing up the aircraft, but it just stopped up in his throat, even before he saw what was in there. Metal was pinging and creaking but there was no other sound. Nothing moved. He said it smelled like a butcher shop.
He came in through the front hatch, which was still open from when I bailed, so right away he saw J.D. there on the floor. He yelled for the medics and went looking around inside to help the wounded. He saw what I’d seen, the whole crew dead from flak and strafing fire.
But Pepper was dead, too. He had ten inches of metal sticking out from between his ribs and he was bone white. His hands were still on the wheel. Clay said he was staring out the windshield like he was still looking for a place to land.
The medics came in and Clay got out of the way. He came out of the bomber shaking his head, and all the air just went out of the ground crew. The Ill Wind had landed with no one alive on board, and that just can’t happen. There’s no place in the world for that to be right. They all stood outside the bomber and stared at it like it had just appeared there out of thin air.
When they took Pepper’s body from the bomber, Clay told one of the medics he thought Pepper should get the Distinguished Service Cross for bringing the Ill Wind home. The medic looked at him like he was out of his mind. He had one end of the stretcher with Pepper in it and Pepper was frozen in place like he was still in his copilot’s seat.
“Sergeant, this man didn’t land this aircraft,” the medic said.
“Well, the pilot sure didn’t do it,” Clay told him. “He was cut in two.”
“The copilot couldn’t have don
e it either,” the medic said. “He’s been dead for hours.”
Clay told him to his face that he was full of shit. “The man’s hands were still on the wheel,” he said. He pointed at Pepper on the stretcher. “Hell, they still are.”
“His hands were on the wheel,” the intern said, “because he’s getting rigor mortis. Which happens to a body after it’s been dead for about three hours.”
Clay stared at him. “Then who landed the goddamned ship?” he asked.
The medic shrugged and said, “Maybe it landed itself.” And then him and the other medic loaded Pepper’s body into the ambulance and went back for the rest of the crew.
Three days later I was back at Jordan Abbey. I got debriefed and I told them everything I’ve told you. No one said a word to me about me bailing.
The CO came in after my debriefing and said he thought it’d be a good idea if I transferred to Thurgood. He wanted me to know it had nothing to do with anything I’d done, or didn’t do. “The real mystery,” he said, “is what happened after you were off that bomber.”
But even so, he told me, half the base had seen that Fortress come back home and land without a living soul on board. And that story was going to hang around my neck no matter where I crewed.
I don’t know if it was me he was looking out for or the others, but I figured he had a point either way. So in the barracks I was putting my kit together to leave when Clay came in and gave me back my medicine bag. He said it’d been hanging from Pepper’s hand when he found him. I don’t know how Clay knew it belonged to me. I guess because, like I said, he knew everything about his bomber.
“One day ten years from now,” he told me, “after this goddamn war is over, maybe you and me will meet in a bar somewhere, and you can buy me a beer and tell me how this got in Pepper’s hand. But right now I don’t want to know. Understand?”
I asked him why not and he said, “Because I’d like to sleep again someday. And I’m pretty sure you telling me what happened on that ship won’t help that one goddamn bit.”
And you know, I think he was right.
five
The engines droned on for an uncomfortably long time before Farley looked over at Broben and said, “You happy now?”
Broben shrugged. “He tells a good story, I’ll give him that.”
Farley looked at his copilot a moment. “You’re an asshole, Jerry,” he said.
The laughter over the interphone was loud.
“You left your mike on, captain,” said Garrett.
“Gee, ya think?” said Jack Benny’s voice.
“Okay, pipe down,” said Farley. “Plavitz, where are we?”
“One sec, captain,” said Plavitz.
Farley muted his mike. “Don’t sulk, Jer,” he said. “It isn’t manly.”
“I’m not sulking,” Broben said brightly. “I’m indispensable. If you didn’t have an asshole, you’d be completely full of shit.”
Farley barked a laugh.
“Anyway,” said Broben, “I’m glad he cleared the air.”
Plavitz came back on the interphone. “Captain, we’re almost directly north of Zennhausen. Wrecking Crew should be making her turn any minute now.”
“Time sure flies,” said Garrett.
“Stow it,” said Farley.
A minute later the lead bomber banked right and Farley immediately followed. The squadrons began their long southward turn in formation.
Farley got on the interphone again. “Time to roll the feature, boys. We’re about ten minutes from the IP. Everybody put your work clothes on and do your job and we’ll get back home fine.”
“I hope you have a story for the ride back, chief,” said Broben.
“If we make it out of here,” said Martin, “I’ll make up another one.”
*
Garrett and Everett put on their heavy flak aprons and their helmets. All the gunners checked their guns again, hands clumsy in their thick heated alpaca gloves. The flight deck thermometer showed -30°. The weather was clear all the way to the horizon. Plavitz checked his chart against landmarks on the ground. Boney began calibrating his Norden bombsight.
After the broad turn south the formation tightened up again, and Farley concentrated on keeping the Fata Morgana straight and level and just off the leader’s left wing. Broben reported the instrument readings. In their turrets Martin and Wen scanned the sky for bandits. In the tail Francis did the same.
The first flak bursts appeared about five miles off the Initial Point, wisps of black ink along an even line. The firing pattern took shape like a connect-the-dots drawing of a shoebox thousands of feet long. Each black wisp a blast of hurtling metal shards. The flak intensified, and in seconds the barrage became the thickest concentration of flak Farley had ever seen, cottony black smears overlapping to form a box of smoke so thick that he could not see beyond it. Red detonations lit the murk.
“Shit, you think they knew we were coming?” Broben asked.
“I think they’re gonna know we were here,” Farley replied. He looked away from the thickening barrage ahead of them. “It’s not a girl I know,” he told Broben.
Broben looked at him as if he’d sprouted antlers. “It’s what?”
“Not a girl I know.” Orange light lit Farley’s face.
“Don’t go flak-happy on me, Joe. Not now. I’m begging you here.”
The cockpit shook from concussions dead ahead.
“The nose art,” said Farley. “It’s not a real girl. I see her in my head sometimes. In my dreams. She looks just like that.”
“Ohhh-kay.”
Farley shrugged. “I thought she’d be good luck,” he said.
“Well I’ll be goddamned. College Joe Farley is just as superstitious as the rest of us monkeys.” Broben flinched at a blast ahead.
“If you tell anybody, I’ll fly your side of the bomber into a steeple.”
“It’s about the only way you could get me into a church.”
“Switching to automatic pilot,” said Farley. “Asshole.”
Now the scene before them was a demented artist’s landscape of a mad god’s Hell. A massive floating bin of coalblack smoke that seethed with sullen red pulses as more 88 shells detonated within its lethal demarcations.
“Here we go,” said Farley.
Four dozen Flying Fortresses in tight formation hurled themselves into that ravenous and indiscriminate maw. Fata Morgana began to buffet as the sunlight dimmed and the smell of cordite filled the freezing air. They flew within a thunder now, constant hammer-blows of detonating flak in all directions. A sound like gravel thrown against the fuselage.
Farley’s head turned like a man watching a tennis match as he eyed the instruments and the Wrecking Crew in front of them just off the right wing. The lead B-17 shook with the artillery shells’ concussion, and Farley saw that she had already taken hits along her left side.
*
Garrett and Everett were hunkered down in the waist. Enemy fighters would not engage around the flak pattern, and there was little for the gunners to do but ride it out. Outside the thin skin of the bomber was the sound of battling Titans, mindless fury bent on their destruction.
A hunk of jagged metal punched through the hull by Everett’s right boot, ricocheted off a ceiling spar, and shot out the window on the other side not a foot from Garrett’s head. Neither gunner even saw it.
*
Someone screamed in Farley’s headphones. It sounded like Shorty, and Farley was about to order Garrett to the radio room when Shorty’s voice came on the interphone.
“Radio operator here. I’m all right. I got some kind of awful static on the radio. Felt like someone stabbed me in the ear.”
“Roger,” said Farley. “Navigator?”
“Two minutes to the IP,” Plavitz said immediately. “The flak’s so thick I’m losing ground markers.”
“Bombardier?”
“I’m having trouble adjusting the bombsight,” Boney reported. “The gyros are ac
ting funny.”
“Well, you better unfunny ’em. I need to hand this crate over to you in about a minute.”
“Working on it.”
A shell burst by their right side and knocked forty-eight thousand pounds of laden bomber to the left like a bathtub duck.
Broben sat up straight and said, simply, “Joe.”
Farley glanced at his copilot and his copilot was looking wide-eyed out the right window.
“They lost the tail,” Broben said woodenly.
Just ahead and to the right the Wrecking Crew’s nose lifted and the massive Fortress planed up into the wind. Farley saw what was coming and yanked back on the yoke and turned the control wheel to ten o’clock and prayed he’d acted fast enough.
The Wrecking Crew went tail-down. The enormous metal cross of her hung in the air in front of them, then dropped. Farley had time to see the on-end bomber sliding back toward them before the Morgana responded to his maneuver and lifted up and banked left, taking the plunging bomber out of view and leaving him gritting his teeth and white-knuckling the wheel as he waited to feel an impact.
*
In the ball turret Martin hung in the midst of exploding flak shells and watched the Wrecking Crew take a direct hit from an 88 shell that sheared off the left elevator and half the vertical stabilizer. The tail immediately dropped and kept dropping. The crippled fortress stood in cross section above and ahead of the Fata Morgana, then dropped toward her flight path.
“No,” said Martin. “No no no no.”
The Morgana’s nose lifted and the bomber veered left and Martin hung within an impossible panorama of a Flying Fortress crucified in the air before him. He sped toward it like a suicidal bird toward a building. The mortally wounded bomber grew larger as it slid down the sky, grew and dropped until Martin saw red smeared across the cockpit window, dropped below the Fata Morgana as Martin pitched his turret until he stared straight down into the front bubble not thirty feet away, stared down at the bombardier pinned to the bubble by the plummeting craft, close enough to see the certain knowledge in the doomed man’s face as the massive bomber dropped down tailfirst like a sinking ocean liner corkscrewing to the bottom twenty thousand lethal feet below. Down until the Wrecking Crew was swallowed by the lighting clouds of detonating flak that had destroyed her.
Fata Morgana Page 6