A Thousand Suns

Chapter 48 Mission Time: 6 Hours, 24 Minutes Elapsed

Schröder pulled up steeply and rolled to his left as the three bandits rose up to meet them. He found himself laughing aloud. This was good, old-style dogfighting. One on one, the sort of duelling he had excelled in during the early days of the war.

He quickly scanned the sky to grab a snapshot of the entire skirmish, momentarily placing all nine other aircraft taking part in this particular exchange.

‘Pull these buggers after us down and to the left, and we’ll lead them close to Max’s lads,’ he said, struggling to keep his voice calm and measured.

‘Yes sir,’ both other fighter pilots replied.

The three Me-109s rolled over and dived down towards the left, one tidily behind the other like the carriages of a train. They raced past the three Spitfires still rising to meet them and all six planes fired speculative bursts in the hope of scoring some early damage. Several hundred bullets whistled angrily through the air between the two formations of advancing planes.

None of them hit anything.

Schröder’s guns clattered uselessly as the last of his ammo belts fed through.

I’m out.

He realised all he could do for now was play bait for the Spitfires and lure them in as close as he dared towards the bomber’s guns. As Schröder and his men descended to a position several hundred yards behind and to the left of the B-17, the Spitfires mirrored their arc of descent and followed their route around and down. Within a few fleeting seconds they would be lined up behind the Me-109s and in a perfect position to start shredding pieces off them.

Meanwhile, the other three British fighter planes were ascending towards the bomber from the right. Schröder hoped that Max’s boys could see them approaching and had at least one gun trained on them as they came in.

Behind them, Schröder could sense the Spitfires falling into a comfortable tailing position, closing the gap swiftly. Any second now he expected them to commence fire, but not yet. From their tidy manoeuvring he suspected these pilots were experienced. They would want to pull in a little closer before firing to guarantee a more effective opening salvo and avoid wasting rounds. A sensible ploy, but not without its downside, as Schröder had learned from experience. Many a time an enemy plane had escaped him, scrambling out from beneath the lethal gaze of his crosshair because he’d waited a second too long to get a better, cleaner, closer shot.

He hoped those Spitfires behind them were making the same mistake, holding off one or two seconds too long to get a guaranteed kill with the first volley.

Time to move.

‘On my command… Günter, Will, break right and left, I’ll lead the first of them in,’ he called out.

‘Break!’ he shouted a second later.

Both flanking Me-109s rolled in opposite directions and dived, and two of the Spitfires followed in hot pursuit leaving one doggedly following Schröder as he veered to the right and subtly closed the gap, drawing it closer to the B-17. The unfortunate British fighter pilot was about to find out for himself what sort of damage the tail-gun of a Flying Fortress can deal out.

The bomber grew in size as Schröder led his pursuer in towards the rear of the plane. Just as he’d begun to suspect the tail-gunner was sleeping on the job, the duel barrels suddenly opened up, firing twin streaks of tracers into the empty space between Schröder and the British fighter. The bullets sped past in front of the Spitfire and drifted quickly back as the tail-gunner adjusted his lead. Half a dozen bullets found their mark along the right-hand side of the fighter’s fuselage and almost immediately a thin whisper of leaking oil trailed out from the Spitfire. The British pilot seemed unperturbed and calmly held position for a few seconds more before firing a burst of gunfire that clipped the tail of Schröder’s Messerschmitt.

Schröder pulled up sharply, hoping the Spitfire would follow suit and expose her underbelly to the bomber’s left-hand waist-gun, but instead the British pilot seemed already to have learned the error of his ways and pulled warily away from the bomber.

At the same time, the other three Spitfires that had split away to specifically target the bomber rose one after the other and raked the underside of the Flying Fortress as they climbed effortlessly past her. The belly of the bomber shed a small shower of fragments that twisted and spun away below her.

As the three fighter planes streamed up past him to his right, less than fifty yards away, Max fleetingly caught sight of one of the British pilots, twisting round in his seat to look back at the bomber as they climbed up into the sky and prepared to come around for another pass.

For some reason they both nodded courteously at each other.

Pieter spun the bombardier’s gun upwards and fired a largely ineffective volley at the last of the three planes, his aim insufficiently in advance of his target, the bullets flew harmlessly behind it. Max heard Pieter cursing angrily over the comm.

‘Pieter!… shut up!’ he found himself shouting.

‘Sorry,’ he answered sheepishly.

Schröder still had that stubborn bastard on his tail. He was good. The Spitfire was proving bloody hard to shake off. Once again he quickly scanned the sky, attempting to grab another updated snapshot of their little skirmish.

He could see one of the Me-109s trailing a thick pall of black smoke and descending in a shallow dive away from the party and down towards the sea in an easterly direction. Schröder couldn’t tell if it was Will or Günter. Whoever it was, he presumably was heading back to France in the futile hope that the plane would get him all the way back to land.

One of the Spitfires was also spouting smoke, with the other 109 in hot pursuit. As he watched, the Spitfire was caught by a further well-aimed burst that carved through the starboard wing like a saw through dry wood. A short trail of tumbling debris was left in the plane’s wake. Suddenly, the wing ripped off and the plane instantly rolled over and commenced a slow spiralling dive towards the sea.

One of ours and one of theirs.

They needed to do better than that. Schröder pulled his plane up and once more led the obstinate British pilot behind him towards the rear of the bomber again, hoping that whichever one of Max’s lads was manning that position could work his magic once again and land a dozen more shots on target.

The three Spitfires that had successfully raked the underside of the bomber had so far been untroubled by either the Me-109s or any fire from the bomber. They turned around in a graceful arc above the B-17 and were now approaching from the front, head on, in a steep predatory dive.

Max looked up in horror as he realised they were lining up to make the cockpit their next target.

‘Pieter! Three of them coming fast, twelve-high!’

He imagined what three Spitfires in a tightly formed train, each firing about five seconds worth of .303 millimetre rounds one after the other into the small, enclosed space of the cockpit, would do to him and the plane.

‘Pieter! Do you see them!’ he called again, this time his voice breaking nervously.

Max could do little but watch their rapid approach. He could pull the bomber into a climb, push her into a dive or roll the plane left or right, but he knew the plane was so slow to manoeuvre that there would be no way they’d avoid the incoming fighters. All he’d be doing would be putting his gunners off balance.

‘I see ’em Max, I see ’em!’

Pieter swung his gun up and carefully lined the gun sight with the first of the three planes. Ten yards for every two hundred range.

He pulled his aim down slightly, anticipating the continued path of the leading Spitfire. ‘Come on, you little bastards,’ he muttered to himself.

The plane in the lead was holding his shot until the very last moment, two hundred feet away and still Max waited with a face screwed up with anticipation for the first high-calibre round to strike home and begin the process of shredding him and the front of the plane to pieces.

Suddenly, he saw the muzzle flash of the fighters’ six guns blazing and tracer lines began to lance down through the air just short of the bombardier’s compartment in front of the plane.

At the same instant from the compartment below, Max heard Pieter open fire.

Both Pieter and the pilot appeared to have overdone their target-lead, but in the few seconds that were left before the bomber’s cockpit resembled nothing more than the chewed-up knuckle of a dog’s bone, Pieter was going to have to pull his aim up and hit the Spitfire first.

‘For fuck’s sake, draw in the lead!’ Max shouted with desperate frustration as the fighter found the nose of the plane and dozens of rounds punctured holes through the metal plate above the bombardier’s compartment and below the cockpit.

He winced as loose shards of debris rattled around in the compartment below him with bullet-like velocity. Pieter surely had to have been hit by some of that, a bullet or shrapnel. But he could hear the gun still firing. Max watched as the tracer lines from Pieter’s gun rose up from below and found their target.

The duel MG-81s, firing a steady line of tracers, shattered the cockpit glass of the leading Spitfire and the fighter plane ceased its firing immediately, speeding down, missing the nose of the bomber by mere feet. Pieter continued firing towards the same point in space, knowing that the second and third fighters were lined up directly behind where the first one had been. The two other Spitfires cautiously avoided the solid line of fire coming up towards them and broke in different directions, roaring past the cockpit on either side, their attacking dive foiled this time.

Max heard Pieter hooting with pleasure. ‘Got ya’, you stupid bastards!’

The idiot sounded okay.

He felt a rush of relief and, with a gasp, released a breath that only seconds earlier he’d been convinced would be his last. ‘Saved my skin, Pieter… are you okay?’

‘Apart from nearly shitting myself, I’m fine.’

You and me both.

Schröder pulled past the port side, the tip of his wing yards from that of the bomber’s, rising upwards in a steep sixty-degree climb, the same damned Spitfire pursuing with single-minded, dogged determination. It fired again; this time the bullets thudded into the underside of his fuselage, one tearing through the flimsy metal plating into his cockpit, where it fractured against the solid metal frame on the underside of his seat, sending a spray of heated shards and sparks up at him past his legs.

He felt a white-hot pain shoot up his right arm as the leather of his flying jacket exploded and a fine spray of crimson appeared on the inside of his canopy.

‘Shit! Bitch!’ he screamed out in pain.

As the Spitfire rushed hungrily in pursuit of Schröder, sensing the kill was only a volley or two away, it passed carelessly close to the port waist-gun.

Stef jerked back in surprise as it roared upwards, only twenty feet away and he panic-squeezed the trigger, his aiming, at best, erratic. The MG-81 pumped forty-plus rounds at close range into the exposed belly of the British fighter plane. One of the rounds punctured one of the Spitfire’s wing tanks and the plane instantly exploded, punching the bomber in the ribs with a powerful shockwave and a fleeting moment later showering the waist section with fragments of shrapnel and burning gasoline.

‘Fucking hell! What was that?’ shouted Hans over the comm.

‘Anyone know what that was?’ asked Max.

‘I think Stef just bagged one. Stef, was that yours?’

There was no answer.

Schröder rolled his plane over, belly up, and pulled back on the yoke so that the plane began a long, graceful arc downwards. He looked ‘up’ to see the bomber below against the dark blue background of the Atlantic. A mushroom cloud of oily smoke was being left behind it, and beneath the cloud he saw hundreds of tiny fragments each tumbling and fluttering to the sea on its own spiralling path.

There was no sign of the Spitfire any more.

He noticed a fire burning along the bomber’s spine and guessed that the Spitfire had exploded and sprayed burning fuel onto the bomber’s back. It looked worse than it was. The fuel would burn out in a few seconds.

He hoped whoever it was who’d saved his life hadn’t been caught by the blast. It seemed unlikely, though; he could see what looked like hundreds of pebbledash spots along her waist section. Whoever had fired the port waist-gun had probably been shredded by the wall of shrapnel.

He turned his attention to the score sheet…

Three of theirs, one of ours. Much better.

Once more his eyes quickly searched the sky around him. He watched as the other Me-109 hung tightly to the tail of a Spitfire that was already in trouble, a white stream of unignited fuel behind it. It fired several short bursts. None found their target, but that seemed academic, the plane was desperately scrambling to find a way out of the skirmish.

‘Who is that? Will? Let him go and form up with me behind the bomber.’

The radio crackled and a moment later the pilot replied. ‘It’s me, sir, Günter.’

‘Günter? Well done, man. It’s just us now. Let’s tighten our position around the bomber.’

‘Yes, sir.’