A Thousand Suns

Chapter 36 Mission Time: 3 Hours, 55 Minutes Elapsed

Lieutenant Daniel Ferrelli yawned and as he did so his ears popped. The bright sunlight of early morning reflected brilliantly off the cloud layer below them and he was forced to squint irritably. The overpowering brightness and trapped warmth within the Mustang’s cockpit made him feel ‘woozy’, tired. It was that relaxed, Sunday afternoon feeling, after the pot roast, and in front of a crackling fire, where sleep could come and go easily.

He removed one glove and rubbed his eyes.

You fall asleep, asshole, and they’ll be sending what they find of you home in a matchbox.

Daniel Ferrelli, or Danny as he was known by most of the men in his squadron when they were off base, scanned the clouds around him, above and below. It looked like the kind of winter wonderland scene you’d see in the display windows of Macy’s come Christmas time: all cotton-wool snow and glitter. Like this, the sky was beautiful. He loved it above the clouds when the white floor beneath him was complete and no sign of the drab green and olive world below could be seen. It was like being in another dimension, a place of ice queens and castles. When his mother had first read him Jack and the Beanstalk he’d seen something like this in his mind. Danny focused on a plateau of cloud with a smooth top and imagined the beanstalk poking up through it, saw a tiny Jack scampering across it, magic harp under one arm and goose under the other and, thundering across the plateau, a giant roaring with anger.

The speakers in his flying cap crackled with the voice of Charles ‘Smitty’ Brown. ‘Uh, Danny?’

‘Dammit, Smitty, it’s Lieutenant Ferrelli while we’re working.’

Smitty bunked with Lieutenant Ferrelli despite being only a rating. He was overflow from the main billet. They’d lost a bed space in there, and Ferrelli had a spare bunk in his room. He’d only agreed to put up with the guy, temporarily, because they’d known each other back home before joining up. Smitty was okay — clean, tidy, but a pain in the ass with the name thing. He wondered whether with him it was a genuine case of forgetting to call him Lieutenant in front of the rest of the men or whether the guy just wanted to look a smart-ass.

‘Sorry, Dan… Lieutenant.’

‘What is it anyway?’ he asked, cutting Smitty off.

‘Well, uhh, I think I saw one of them, errr… nine o’clock, above us.’

Ferrelli looked to his left and up. There was a thick layer of cloud above them with occasional gaps between tall cumulus stacks. He looked long and hard, waiting to see a dark form passing the open sky between the cloud stacks.

‘I can’t see anything, Smitty, you sure?’

‘I saw it once, is all, sir.’

Ferrelli’s squadron had been sent to escort a wing of B-17s en route across France from Marseilles north to an airfield outside Paris. The bombers had served the last two years in Libya and Egypt, and still sported desert colours. They were being relocated back to England. The war was looking like it would be over before they bedded in with the Eighth and did anything useful. Still, Ferrelli figured it made sense to start gathering up the American planes ready to ship them back home.

Things had come unstuck pretty quickly, and he and his men had failed to rendezvous successfully with the B-17s. Not that he thought it mattered too much; it wasn’t like there was anything out there they needed escort protection from anyway.

But hey, Danny, it looks bad… losing the planes you’re meant to be protecting. To lose one is bad luck, but all twelve?

Ferrelli kept his eyes on the clouds above and to the left. ‘I don’t see anything, Smitty, not a damn—’

He saw it.

A single silhouette way above them at about thirty thousand feet. Unmistakably the outline of a B-17, flitting between the tall white columns, and it was heading west. ‘Okay, okay I see it. Looks like these fellas are on their own. If they’re the guys we’re meant to be looking after, I’d say they are totally, one hundred per cent lost by the look of it. They should be heading north, not west.’

The navigator on that plane needs to go right back to school. Jeeez… Navigation 101.

He knew it was easy enough for even the most experienced crew to drift off course by dozens of miles. Shit, he even knew of bombers that had drifted into the wrong goddamn country. Dumb-ass stuff like that happened all the time. But getting the wrong heading? No matter how lost you are, no matter where you are, the one piece of kit that’s always going to work just fine is the compass.

‘Okay, boys, let’s go take a look-see what these fools are up to.’

‘Roger that, Lieutenant,’ said Smitty. His response was mirrored by the other ten pilots, most of them bored to distraction by the flight so far and eager for something to see and do.

Ferrelli pulled up and to the left on the yoke and his P51-D swung towards the last place he’d seen the bomber. His squadron followed suit, managing to maintain a recognisable Vee-formation as they veered left and climbed steeply.

Ferrelli checked his altimeter. They were at 25,000 feet. He reckoned that bomber was somewhere around thirty. He studied the sky ahead of him, a forest of immensely tall cumulus. There was surely heavy rain down below; a real roof-rattler as his mom liked to term the sort of passing downpours that hit them without warning in the spring and ceased just as suddenly.

He saw the plane again. It was higher than he’d thought, now maybe 35,000 feet.

Damn.

Either he was losing his ability to reckon altitudes or the plane had just pulled up steeply since he’d seen it last, only seconds ago.

‘You guys see it?’ he called out to the squadron.

The voices crackled back in a chorus of confirmation.

‘Wasn’t that plane at thirty thousand? Or am I losing my touch?’

‘Yeah, sir, looked like that to me too,’ answered Jake Leonard, one of the youngest guys on the squadron. Even the distortion of radio failed to hide the fact at eighteen his voice still sounded like a kid’s. The poor guy hated answering the billet telephones; it got him pissed when people not knowing to whom they were talking referred to him as ma’am.

‘You reckon they just climbed?’ asked Ferrelli.

‘Reckon so, sir.’

Smitty decided to add his two cents. ‘It looks like they’re playing hide and seek with us, Danny.’

Ferrelli nodded.

It does look that way. What’s up with these guys?

‘I’m going to try raising them on the radio.’

He flipped the frequency. ‘Ahh… this is Lieutenant Ferrelli, United States Air Force, calling unidentified B-17 due west of me. Are you the guys we’re meant to be escorting this morning?’

He waited for a response.

There was none.

‘Unidentified B-17, west of my position, that’s your seven o’clock. Are you the guys who’ve flown up from Marseilles?’

There was still no answer.

Shit, the radio operator needs to go back to school too.

‘You reckon they got problems, sir?’ asked Jake.

‘Yeah, maybe they have. Maybe they’re all asleep.’ Hell, five minutes ago he’d been ready for a nap. Maybe they were having some technical problems, the radio might be out. He watched the bomber enter a column of cumulus the size of a mountain peak. His eyes followed the predicted course of the plane and half a minute later he spotted it again, but several thousand feet higher. The pilot had just executed a steep climb inside the cloud.

The sonofabitch was trying to lose them.

‘Anyone else here reckon this is a little fishy?’

‘What’re you thinking, sir?’ asked Jeff Thomason, a college kid from Boston, as far he could recall.

‘I think these boys have tried to shake us off. I reckon it’s time we pulled in real close and tried having a talk with them.’ Ferrelli smiled and his facemask rustled against his sandpaper chin. All of a sudden today felt like it had just got a little more interesting.

‘With me, boys, let’s keep the Vee tidy.’ He pulled back on the yoke and began to climb. His squadron followed suit. This time the flying formation was a little tidier, as they rode 7000 feet in just under two minutes to match the current altitude of the bomber. He checked the altimeter; it showed 37,000. Their P51-Ds had a ceiling of 41,000, there wasn’t much headroom left for them. But then he was pretty sure the ceiling altitude for these brutes was less than their Mustangs. He vaguely recalled the Mustang had about four or five thousand on them.

The only way is down, big fella, no way you’re going to out-ceiling us.

The B-17 maintained its course ahead of them, now no more than a quarter of a mile away. It hadn’t changed direction now that they were behind it. Neither had it decided to drop. He wondered whether the earlier evasive manoeuvres were because they thought the Mustangs were Krauts. But then you’d have to be one hell of a jittery pilot these days to be worrying about Germans. Those guys were an endangered species, like buffalo.

Ferrelli had been hoping, since his posting to England, to chance across one of their Luftwaffe boys in the skies over Germany. But then he’d arrived at the party way too late to see any of that kind of action. Those poor bastards had been pounded out of the skies of Europe months ago. He had lived in hope though, occasionally fantasising an encounter with a lone rogue ace and duelling to the death in a clear blue sky.

Just one kill, that isn’t a lot to ask for, is it?

‘You going to try the radio again, sir?’ asked Jake.

‘Err… yup, might as well, I guess.’

Ferrelli flipped the frequency again. ‘Unidentified B-17 west of my position, at thirty-seven thousand feet… hey! Can you fellas hear me?’

There was still no answer. He found himself wondering once more what the hell was wrong with these guys. Either they were the USAAF’s most incompetent bomber crew, ever, period. Or there was some trouble aboard, perhaps multiple equipment failures, or…?

Or that’s Adolf Hitler flying a stolen plane and making a run for it.

Ferrelli smiled dreamily like a kid, like some junior league scruff assembling a fantasy baseball team.

‘Danny? What do we do now?’ asked Smitty.

‘Okay, listen up, guys,’ he announced. ‘I’m going to close in on them, see if I can establish visual contact with the pilot. I want you guys to stay in formation behind them. I’ve got a real funny feeling about these boys.’

‘You reckon they’re escaping Nazis, sir?’ asked Jake hopefully.

‘Don’t let’s get too excited here, son, I’m just being thorough is all. So let’s ease those little thumbs away from the triggers shall we?’

He heard a few of them laugh nervously. They were all as wired as he was. This had to be about the most exciting thing that had happened to them since they had commenced flying as a squadron. Weeks of patrolling empty skies and needlessly escorting cargo planes and bombers, and here they were squealing like kids at a tea party just because some dumb radio operator was probably sleeping on the job.