Winds of War (72 page)

After what seemed a half hour of bumping through cold air in a dark shaking machine, Pug glanced at his watch. Only seven minutes had gone by. The crew did not talk. The intercom crackled and buzzed - the helmet, unlike the rest of his clothing, was too tight and hurt his ears - but once the plane left the coast on course, the pilots and navigator shut up. Victor Henry’s perspiration from the heavy suit cooled and dried, chilling him. His watch crawled through twenty more minutes as he sat there. The lieutenant gestured to him to look through the plexiglass blister where the navigator had been taking star sights, and then to stretch out prone in the nose bubble, the bombardier position. Pug did these things, but there was nothing to see but black water, bright moon, and jewelled stars.

“Keep that light down, navigator,” the lieutenant croaked.

The sergeant who had given Pug the toilet paper was marking a chart on a tiny fold-down wooden slat, and trying to squelch the dim beam of an amber flashlight with his fingers. Crouching beside him, watching him struggle with star tables, star sight forms, dividers, ruler, and flashlight, Pug wondered what kind of navigational fix he possibly come up with. The youngster gave him a grin. Pug took the flashlight from his hands and shielded the beam to strike just the chart. Peters gestured gratitude and Pug squatted there, cramped in the space behind the two pilots, until the navigator had finished his work. The American had imagined that the long-range British bomber would be as big as an airliner, with a control cabin offering ample elbow room. In fact five men crowded within inches of each other - the two pilots, the front gunner, the navigator, and the wireless operator. Pug could just see the gunner in the forward bubble, in faint moonlight. The others were faces floating in the row of dials.

Stumbling, crouching, grasping at guy wires, Pug dragged his parachute down the black fuselage to the bubble where the rear gunner sat. The hatless boy, his bushy hair falling in his face, gave him a thumbs-up and a pathetic smile. This was a hell of a lonely, shaky, frigid place to be riding Pug thought. The bomber’s tail was whipping and bouncing badly. He tried to yell over the noise and motor roars, then made a hopeless gesture. The boy nodded, and proudly operated his power turret for him. Pug groped to a clear space in the fuselage, and squatted on his parachute, hugging his knees. There was nothing to do. It was getting colder and colder. He took something from his ration bag - when he put it in his mouth, he tasted chocolate - and sucked it. He dozed.

Garbled voices in his ear woke him. His nose was numb, his cheeks felt frostbitten, and he was shivering. A hand in the dark tugged him forward. He stumbled after the vague figure toward the cockpit glow. Suddenly it was light as day in the plane. The plane slanted and dived, and Pug Henry fell, bruising his forehead on a metal box. Rearing up on his hands and knees, he saw the bright light go out, come on and go out again as though snapped off. The plane made sickening turns one way and another while he crawled forward.

Tiny Johnson, gripping the controls, turned around, and Pug saw his lips move against the microphone. “Okay, Admiral?” The voice gargled in the intercom. “Just passing the coast searchlight belt.”

“Okay,” Henry said.

The helmeted lieutenant threw a tight grim glance over his shoulder at Henry, then stared ahead into the night.

Tiny waved a gloved hand at a fixture labelled OXYGEN. “Plug in, and come and have a look.”

Sucking on rubber-tasting enriched air, Pug crawled into the bombardier position.

Instead of sparkling sea he saw land grayed over by moonlight. The searchlight beams waved behind them. Straight below, tiny yellow lights winked. Red and orange balls came floating slowly and gently up from these lights, speeding and getting bigger as they rose. A few burst and showered red streaks and sparks. Several balls passed ahead of the plane and on either side of it, flashing upward in blurry streaks of color.

The voice of Tiny said, “Coast flak was heavier last time.”

Just as he said this something purple-white and painfully brilliant exploded in Victor Henry’s face. Blackness ensued, then a dance of green circles. Pug Henry lay with his face pressed to cold plexiglass, sucking on the oxygen tube, stunned and blind.

A hand grasped his. The voice of Peters, the navigator, rattled in his ear. “That was a magnesium flash shell. Ruddy close, Admiral. Are you all right?”

“I can’t see.”

“It’ll take a while. Sit up, sir.”

The plane ground ahead, the blindness persisted and persisted, then the green circles jerked in a brightening red mist. A picture gradually faded in like a movie scene: faces lit by dials and the gunner in moonlight. Until his vision returned, Victor Henry spent nasty minutes wondering whether it would. Ahead he saw clouds, the first of this trip, billowing up under the moon.

The navigator spoke. “Should be seeing beams and flak now.”

“Nothing,” said Lieutenant Killian. “Black night.”

“I’ve got Berlin bearing dead ahead at thirty miles, sir.”

“Something’s wrong. Probably your wind drift again.”

“D.F. bearings check out, sir.”

“Well, damn it, Peters, that doesn’t put Berlin up ahead.” The skipper sounded annoyed but unworried. “It looks like solid forest down there, clear across the horizon. Featureless and black.”

Tiny Johnson observed bitterly that on his last raid almost half of the of the planes had failed altogether to find Berlin, and that none of Bomber Command’s official navigational procedures were worth a shit. He added that he was brassed off.

The piping voice of the rear gunner broke in to report searchlights far astern, off to the right. At almost the same time, the pilots saw, and pointed out to Victor Henry, a large fire on the horizon ahead: a yellow blotch flickering on the moonlit plain. After some crisp talk on the intercom, Lieutenant Killian swung the plane around and headed for the searchlights; as for the fire, his guess was another bomber had overshot the mark and then gone ahead and bombed the wrong target. “
That’s
Berlin,” he soon said, pointing a mittened hand at the lights. “All kinds of fireworks shooting off. Well done, Reynolds. How goes it back there?”

The high strained voice of the real gunner replied, “Oh, I’m fine, sir. This operational stuff’s the real thing, isn’t it?”

As they neared Berlin, the nose gunner was silhouetted black by exploding balls and streaks of color, and fanning rays of blue light. Tiny’s voice in the intercom rasped, “Those poor bastards who got there first are catching the heat blisters.”

The lieutenant’s voice came, easy and slow: “It looks worse than it is, Admiral. The stuff spreads apart once you’re in it. The sky’s a roomy place, actually.”

F for Freddie went sailing into the beautiful, terrible display, and as the captain had said, it thinned out. The searchlight beams scattered and ran down to the left and right. The streaks and balls of flak left great holes of darkness through which the plane bored smoothly ahead. The captain and the navigator talked rapidly in fliers’ jargon.

“See that fire off there, Admiral? Some other chaps have pretty well clobbered the primary target,” said Killian.

“Or at least dropped a lot of bombs in the vicinity,” Tiny said. “I can’t make out a damned thing for the smoke.”

The view below was half moonlit clouds, half black city flickering with anti-aircraft flashes. Pug Henry saw a peculiar high column of flickers - the Flakturm, that must be - and, in another direction, an irregular blob of fire and smoke enveloping buildings and smokestacks, near the river curling silver through Berlin. The black puffs and fiery streaks of the flak slid past F for Freddie but the plane plowed ahead as though protected by a charm. The captain said, “Well, I’m going for secondary. Course, navigator.”

Shortly thereafter the motor noise ceased. The nose of the plane dipped way down. The sudden quiet was a big surprise.

“Gliding approach, Admiral,” the captain’s voice garbled. “They control their lights and flak with listening devices. Navigator’s got to take your place now.”

The plane whiffled earthward. Pug made his way to the rear gunner, who was looking down with saucer eyes in a pallid baby face at the moonlit German capital, and at the anti-aircraft winking like fireflies. A rush of icy air and a roar followed the captain’s order, “Open bomb bay.” Into the plane a strong acrid smell poured, and Pug had a mental flash of gunnery exercises on a sunny blue sea near green islands. Off Manila or over Berlin, cordite smelled the same. The navigator kept talking in a drilled cheerful tone: “Left, left . . . too much . . . right. . . dead on . . . no, left, left . . . smack on. Smack on. Smack on.
There
!”

The plane jumped. Pug saw the bombs raggedly fall away behind them, a string of black tumbling sticks. The airplane slanted up, the motors came bellowing on, and they climbed.

Below, a string of small red explosions appeared alongside the buildings and the huge fat gas-storage tower. Pug thought the bombs had missed. Then, in the blink of an eye, yellow-white flame with a green core came blasting and billowing up from the ground, almost to the height of the climbing plane, but well behind. In the gigantic flare, the city of Berlin was suddenly starkly visible, spread out below like a picture postcard printed with too much yellow ink - the Kurfürstendamm, Unter den Linden, the Brandenburg Gate, the Tiergarten, the river, the bridges, the Flakturm, the chancellery, the Opera - clear, sharp, close, undamaged, peculiarly yellow.

The cheers in the intercom hurt his ears. He seized his microphone and gave a rebel yell.

As he did so, F for Freddie was transfixed by half a dozen searchlights that swung and stopped. In the gunner’s bubble, all was blue radiance. The boy looked horror-stricken at Pug and suddenly started to scream in fright, his eyes tight shut, his mouth wide open. There was so much noise that Pug could hardly hear him. It looked like a painted scream, and in the blue light the boy’s tongue and gums were black. The plane seemed to have landed on a shining blue pyramid. The motors howled, the machine lurched, dived, sidestepped, but the pyramid stayed locked under it. Pug seized the gun mount with arms to steady himself. The gunner fell against the mount, knocking the microphone away from his open mouth. His clamber ceased in the intercom, and Pug heard Lieutenant Killian and Tiny talking in brisk controlled voices. A mass of orange and red balls lazily left the ground and floated up directly at F for Freddie. They came faster. They burst all around, a shower of fire, a barrage of explosions. Pug felt a hard thump, heard the motor change sound, heard a fearful whistling. Icy air blasted at him. Fragments rattled all over the plane, and F for Freddie heeled over in a curving dive. Victor Henry believed that he was going to die. The plane shrieked and visibly shuddered, diving steeply. Both pilots were shouting now, not in panic but to make themselves heard, and through the frail plexiglass bubble Henry stared at the fabric wings, waiting for them to break off, flutter away and signal the end of his life.

All at once the screeching, whistling blue pyramid turned black. The dizzying swoops and slips stopped, the plane flew straight. Pug caught a whiff of vomit. The gunner had fainted, and the puke was dribbling from his mouth in the moonlight and rolling down his chest: chocolate, coffee, bits of orange. The boy had eaten his whole ration. Out of the left leg of his flying suit black blood welled.

Pug tried the intercom, but the crackling in his ears had stopped. The system was dead. The stricken plane lurched on in a tumult of wind roars and howls. He went forward, clutching the guy ropes, and ran head-on into a figure who shouted that he was Peters. Pug screamed in his ear that Reynolds was wounded, and moved on to the cockpit, passing a ragged flapping hole in the starboard fuselage through which he could see the stars. Mechanically he noted the form of the Dipper. They were heading west, back to England.

In the cockpit the pilots sat as before, busy at their controls. Tiny shouted, “Ah, Admiral. We’re going home to tea. To hell with ruddy pictures. You’ll tell them you saw that gas plant go up, won’t you?”

“Damn right I will. How’s the airplane?”

“The port engine was hit, but it’s still pulling. Heading back over land, in case we have to come down. Looks like we can make it, unless that engine completely packs up.”

“Your rear gunner’s got a leg wound. Navigator’s back there with him.”

The swinging searchlights of the outer belt loomed ahead, probing the clouds, but F for Freddie climbed into the overcast undetected. Tiny bellowed at Victor Henry, his big blue eyes rolling, both hands on the wheel, “Ruddy asinine way to make a living, isn’t it, Admiral? Brassed off, I am. Should have joined the ruddy navy!”

Pulling off his helmet, Lieutenant Killian turned over control to Tiny, and wiped his face with a big white handkerchief no whiter than his skin. He gave the American a tired smile, his forehead a mass of wrinkled lines.

“It may be close at that, Admiral. We’re having a bit of trouble holding altitude. How’s your French?”

Chapter 34

Pamela had remained in London. She knew it was a night bombing mission and she knew the distances. It was not hard to calculate when Victor Henry would be getting back. At ten in the morning she went to his flat - it had no other occupant for the moment - and persuaded the charwoman to let her in. She sat in the dowdy living room, trying to read a newspaper, but actually only counting the minutes and praying that he was still alive.

Pug Henry had entered her life at a dark time. Her parents had been divorced before she was fourteen. Her mother had remarried, made a new life, and shut her out. Alistair Tudsbury had deposited her in schools while he travelled. She had grown up well-mannered, attractive, but almost wild, and had had several love affairs before she was out of her teens. In her early twenties she had met Philip Rule, a tall golden-haired newspaper correspondent, who had for a while shared Leslie Slote’s flat in Paris. An ice-cold man with beguiling ways, a rich flow of clever and corrupt tastes, Rule had bit by bit destroyed her ambition, her self-confidence, and almost her will to live. She had fought off suicidal depression by breaking off with him at last and going to work as her father’s slave; and as such, she had encountered Victor and Rhoda Henry on the
Bremen
.