by Jim Shepard
“Fighters! Fighters!” Eddy called, but Bryant could see nothing. A moment later a Spitfire flashed back past them, chasing something.
“Something’s wrong with No Way!” Piacenti called. “They got fire in the number two and three—”
Right beside him No Way was battered and smashed across its cockpit, the windshield shattered and the two inboard engines feathered and flaming. The co-pilot climbed out his window while Bryant watched, a guy named Pease who Bryant remembered hated the powdered eggs, and he waved his arms in the slipstream as if to deflect it. He let go and hit the horizontal stabilizer on the tail, and tumbled away.
“Jesus God,” Gabriel said. “What happened? Anybody see it?”
No Way nosed smoothly up with the inboards still flaming and then sideslipped like a leaf and turned over. They could see the tail gunner trying to get out and through the smoke he did, the chute blooming open. The gunners started calling together, a chant, get out, get out, get out, and while they watched two waist gunners and someone else cleared. A wing separated at the root near the fire and trailed away, easy as a veil, and it began spiraling. Bryant lost it as it fell away behind them. Lewis and Snowberry called out another chute. When they banked he picked No Way up again, fluttering toward some rolling hills. A slope rose to meet it and it exploded, the thousands of pieces filling the air like silver dust.
At Antwerp the Spitfires heeled about and flew back the other way, having waited as long as possible for the P-47’s to show up and carry on the escort. The P-47’s did not show up. Some of the Thunderbolts assigned to the rear of the formation arrived, Lewis was able to report, but there was no sign of the groups charged with their protection at the front of the stream. They waited and searched and cursed. Piacenti suggested from the waist that they were all back in their bunks, having sex with each other and farm animals.
They flew over dark green forests dotted with red and white farms and silver and blue lakes. There were a series of small villages forming a loose chain along tan roads. The sky was piercingly clear. There were no Thunderbolts. To the right a cluster of the gray and tan lanes converged on a town.
“Eupen,” Hirsch announced. Bryant felt his forehead cool and could see the planes in the formation above and behind them edging closer together, closing up the box. He swiveled his guns to the front and ran his gloved hands over the charger assemblies to reassure himself. He kept his turret moving from side to side, metronomically, to keep the fluid warm for smoother tracking. He could feel his fingertips and palms.
“I know what I hate about this so much,” Snowberry said over the interphone. They could hear him charging his guns. “No one is ever glad to see us.”
“There they go,” Lewis called. Bryant twisted around in his sling. The Thunderbolts in the rear were peeling off, their wings flashing sunlight, their fuel already exhausted.
Gabriel’s voice was constricted and the interphone buzzed and popped. He said, “It won’t be long. Call ’em out.”
“Here they come,” Eddy said. “Here they come.”
Bryant picked them out as well, miles away, hundreds of insects rising in the heat. From all around them in a crescent to the south the flattened specks were lifting off the pale landscape and wheeling toward them, and Bryant and everyone else swung their guns around like talismans. They floated higher, spreading across the sky.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Piacenti said over the interphone. “The shit is about to officially hit the fan.”
The engines throttled slightly back, Gabriel slowing speed to allow the following planes to pack it in and close the formation further. Plum Seed slipped into No Way’s slot and together with Archangel swung close enough to hit with a rock. The specks grew larger and Bryant recognized the fatter noses of the Focke Wulfs. Someone said, “Here they come.” There was a chorus in Bryant’s ears over the interphone: Here they come.
They were above the bombers now, and swinging out in rows in a descending arc toward the leading elements of the stream, their formations perfect, coming on in groups of five, wingtip to wingtip.
Bryant called them in as they flashed through the upper groups, giving the numbers, reeling off line after line as they passed through firing. Eddy mentioned that the higher groups seemed to be getting the worst of it, and the sixth line to disengage dropped lower, and came for them.
Gabriel was shouting reminders on the interphone as they closed distance and everything accelerated, and he began slewing the plane slightly to the left and right in formation to present a more difficult target. He was warning Snowberry and Bryant at the same time to be alert, telling Eddy in the nose to call the break, down or up, to let everyone know instantly whether they’d decided to sweep over or under Paper Doll’s vee. They grew like nightmares because of the combined closing speeds of the head-on attack, holding fire as they swelled in Bryant’s Plexiglas vision: no move, no flickers or razoring lines of light, just the configurations from the aircraft identification charts on a collision course. He urinated, pissing the fear out, he hoped. His thighs warmed and then cooled and he felt the wet on his calves. He chose the central Focke Wulf and it grew and shook in his gunsight, the canopy glittering and malignant like the eye of an insect. He started firing and the plane shook and his tracers spiraled outward at the line, and Eddy and Hirsch started firing, and the wings of the fighters flashed and threw light, their tracers expanding magically and radiating past as if Paper Doll were flying into a garden sprinkler, and his own guns were drowned out by the high-pitched hammering of their pass, all of them skidding sideways as they roared by, firing in short bursts, and were gone.
“Hits?” Gabriel yelled. “Any hits? Everybody okay?”
Another line had detached ahead. “Twelve o’clock! Twelve o’clock!” Eddy was calling.
“Bryant! Bryant! Bandits coming down on you twelve o’clock!” Hirsch shouted. Someone else cut in about another bandit at ten o’clock.
The Focke Wulfs were growing in a line of seven with wing roots and noses winking light at him as they closed. They shot through the vee ahead and above them, firing all the while, and the intensity of the head-on attack was such that Bryant could see the entire vee ahead go sloppy, and Eddy screamed, “Breaking high! Breaking high!”, and there was a white flash on the top corner of the cockpit over Cooper’s seat and the Focke Wulfs broke over them, still firing, the center plane rolling and sweeping over their nose upside down, filling the sky over Bryant’s dome, shaking him and all of Paper Doll with the enormous air compression, the German’s eyes in the Focke Wulf’s black cockpit flashing into Bryant’s, the oddly shaped goggles and brown leather mask distinct and shocking. Then it was gone.
“Jesus Christ,” Bryant said hoarsely. The cockpit metal ahead of him and to the right was twisted upward where the white flash had been, and a thin wire trailed back in the slipstream. He could feel the cold now, coming over the co-pilot’s seat onto his legs.
“Cooper’s okay,” Gabriel said in response to someone’s question. “He’s a little shook up. They enlarged his view.”
“Did anybody see that son of a bitch who just came over?” Lewis asked from the tail. “I think his wingtip hit my guns on the way by.”
Behind Archangel, Quarterback was washing around in formation. Its upper turret was a red smear, cracked and jagged. One of the gun barrels stuck up at a bizarre angle. The flight engineer climbed out of the smashed shell like a bloody chick, dazed perhaps by the explosion. He held on and swayed, impossibly, against the force of the air. Bryant felt acutely their interchangeability. That was Paper Doll, this was Quarterback. Someone in Quarterback was trying to pull the gunner back in. The gunner held a finger into the battering slipstream like a man testing the wind and reached back for his parachute too late, as if remembering something, and was blown away behind them, out of sight.
“Who’s that? Who’s that?” Snowberry called. Bryant looked right and left and caught a column of smoke diagonally looping away beyond the tail.
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br /> “It’s Boom Town,” Lewis called. “Charley Rice. Three out. Four.”
Bryant remembered Hallet, fighting with him after the cat throw.
“Stop counting,” Gabriel cut in. “They’re coming around again.”
Way off to their right the Germans were flying alongside, passing their formations easily, pulling ahead to come around in more head-on passes. Bryant watched them all stream by outside of the group’s range, lining up like kids at the city pool to use the diving board, running along the edge after a dive to get back into the forming line.
They flew into the far distance and massed, wheeling, and a fraction detached, seven, and turned toward them. Others swept out at the higher squadrons.
The new group closed like the first without firing, sliding from side to side slightly as if they were projectiles out of control or a squadron of drunks, and Gabriel said, “Smart bastards, smart bastards,” and Bryant understood from an earlier briefing that the sliding represented their keeping watch in case any of the bomb group’s escort were still around, and knew then that these were veterans, old bomber killers, and felt himself wanting to urinate with nothing left and whipped his guns from one target to another, and at the very last moment they started firing, yellow and white lines looping past his turret like liquid light, and his tracer lines ratcheted out and too low and they roared overhead still in line, firing at the Forts behind. He skidded his turret around to the rear and fired short bursts but they were gone and pieces were flying from bombers way behind them in the stream.
Subsequent lines were sawing through the upper squadrons. A bit of debris with something fluttery on it went by his turret from above.
“Oh, God,” Eddy was warning. In the distance Bryant could see below the massed fighters slow sprays of specks lifting off postage stamp airfields, new planes rising all along the corridor ahead.
“Look at them all!” Snowberry said. “Look at them all! There’s a jillion of ’em!”
Lewis called in the lines that had gone through and were regrouping behind the formation. Piacenti called in the groups to the right passing them for another head-on attack. Snowberry and Eddy were trying to estimate the numbers ahead.
“Get off the goddamn interphone, everybody off the interphone,” Cooper said. “It’s like a Chinese fire drill.”
They were momentarily silent, watching the filling sky. Bryant could feel in the silence a dawning awareness on everyone’s part that something had gone, and was going to go, very wrong.
“Glad to see you’re still with us, Lootenant,” Lewis finally said from the tail.
More lines of fighters were separating out toward them from the groups ahead. Bryant registered the formation above him closing up, filling the gaps left by the last passes, and he watched two lines of seven Focke Wulfs and Messerschmitts apiece bear down on them and felt keenly the isolation and helplessness of this kind of war, hanging there in his sling and aluminum capsule, as exposed, as far away from a place to hide his head, as anyone could be.
He could see growing to the left of center in his gunsight the narrower nose and longer wings of a Messerschmitt, the pale blue of the spanner visible even at this distance. The lines came on with the Focke Wulfs echeloned behind and above the Me-109’s, and they all opened fire together. Bryant was reminded of plugging in the lights on a Christmas tree. He was hearing hits on Paper Doll and other rows of fighters were detaching from the mass and coming on, one after the other, and Bryant fired and fired, worrying now about overheating guns, trying hard to keep his bursts short. Paper Doll rocked back and bucked with all the forward firing guns going, the notion of ammo conservation gone forever.
The sky went white from a blinding flash and above him a Fort’s tail flew upward alone from a huge fireball, the concussion shoving Paper Doll down and the explosion audible through their headphones.
The fighters went through ragged and uncertain, disconcerted by the light and the blast. The tail had fallen through the formation without producing a chute and there was nothing else left. Whoever they were, Eddy called, they musta taken a shell in the bomb bay.
Hirsch seemed the first to recover and was shouting in new lines.
“Get your nose up! Nose up!” Snowberry was calling in frustration. “Give me air!” He could see the oncoming fighters but couldn’t fire, with Paper Doll’s nose above him too close to his aiming point. “Give me air!” Snowberry was calling and Bryant was firing and firing and the three-Fort vee in front of them went yellow and white and jerked upward and Bryant was blinded. He could feel the whole ship rock backward violently in the shockwave and when his vision returned with ghostly afterimage colors all three planes that had been flying in the vee ahead were gone. Paper Doll was wallowing stupidly along, nosing around for something to follow. Bryant could see the dorsal gunner in Plum Seed beside them with his hands on his head in a melodramatic gesture of shock and surprise.
“They’re all gone!” Snowberry cried. “They’re all gone! Where are they?”
“Christ amighty,” Gabriel said. “All three of them just like that.”
“What? What?” Lewis shouted. “What happened?” Bryant could imagine his frustration, as tail gunner in an endless series of head-on attacks.
“They got the whole element in front of us,” he told him. “One swoop.”
“Who was it? Who was it?” Lewis called. He had friends everywhere in the formation.
“Banshee. I’se a Muggin’. Training Wheels,” Gabriel said.
Lewis was silent. Eddy was screaming at his guns. Snowberry was crying and asking for air, a clear shot. He said Gabriel was an idiot and they were all going to get killed.
A beautiful and horrible diamond of fighters swam free ahead in a long loop and dropped deftly and in perfect order down toward them, resolving itself into a line staggered upward in altitude, each following plane higher than the one before it. The effect was that of an immense javelin or spear coming through the formation. Bryant’s arms hurt and his eyes hurt and he tracked and sighted and fired with a furious haste and effort as pass after pass became simply horrible and intense work. The casing shells overflowed from the huge metal chutes flanking his legs in the turret and rang and clattered past his feet to the floor of the fuselage, spilling further down the companionway to the hatchway door below to Eddy and Hirsch’s stations.
There were further explosions from ahead and above, and a man went spinning by his turret, a startled look on his face, knees up as if executing something tricky off the high board. A hatch door flipped by, and a flak helmet.
“Four o’clock!” Piacenti cried, “High!”, but when he looked there were no fighters up there but two B-17’s inexplicably together, frozen in contact for a moment as they collided, until they exploded in a long liquid tongue of fire, wings and control surfaces spinning outward.
The fighters behind them were banking around to return. The fighters ahead were circling to gain altitude, a few minutes away. Cooper called in a lightning oxygen check, station by station. Quarterback beyond Archangel was streaming gasoline from its number three engine, the sheets of fuel fluttering into rain as they left the wing. Every so often pieces flew from the shattered dorsal turret.
“Man,” Piacenti said from the waist, evidently getting an eyeful. Quarterback could not keep up. “We’re a losin’ ticket,” he said. Bryant flashed on Snowberry’s journal and its warning about Piacenti.
“Close up! Close up!” Gabriel was calling to Quarterback’s pilot. It drifted further back, and soon hung distantly off Archangel’s tail, Lewis reporting as it slipped still further back. From the belly Snowberry called in other losses in a congested voice. “WAAC Hunter,” he said. “Paddlefoot.”
Bryant looked up and back into the main body of the formation. Prop wash from the massed planes was deflating and collapsing the small parachutes that were drifting downward. He watched one of the white ovals puff and fold and thought, Survival is out of your hands.
“More more more
,” Eddy said. “And my fucking gun is shot.”
The fighters ahead seemed to have misjudged the necessary altitude and were hurrying down to them, having wasted precious fuel. There were limitless fighters, Bryant imagined. They were all going to go down, one by one. The question was really the order. They weren’t going to get back. What he wanted at this point was to reach the target.
They came through in waves, steady lines, and in the chaos Bryant and Snowberry and Eddy and Hirsch and Piacenti and Ball and Bean and Lewis lectured and jabbered, shrieked and called out fighters, and hit almost nothing. Something nearby exploded with splintered pieces slashing outward, end over end. A Messerschmitt of a startling green appeared following a palisade of tracers to Bryant’s left. A Focke Wulf came in from abeam and stalled, and falling away raked their belly, and he could feel the hits banging into them. “Son of a bitch!” Snowberry was screaming. “He was right there! Son of a bitch!” And they were gone.
“Comin’ around,” Piacenti called. Someone whimpered.
“They came a long way,” Lewis observed. “I don’t think they got too much juice left.”
They came on loose, every man for himself, maybe without the fuel to form up, some from the side and even the rear, and Lewis finally had something to shoot at. A Messerschmitt side-slipped by upside down, shooting at Archangel, and above them in a higher squadron Bryant saw an engine torn off and tumbling backward, the Fortress wing folding and shearing away. While he was watching, something else—a Messerschmitt?—collided head on with another Fortress, half rolling into its nose and shattering pieces outward before both planes exploded and the belly turret and its mount fell away free like a small barbell or a baby’s rattle.
He slewed his turret around and a Messerschmitt was on him in a quartering turn, the nose flashing, and the yellow dazzles of 20mm bursts walked toward his turret, one two three four five, banging the ship, and stopped, and the cowling and wingtip flashed by.