A Thousand Suns

Chapter 58 Ditched

The empty fuel tank gave them only five more minutes before the last engine stuttered and died. They were gliding now.

‘Stef… go and strap yourself in, it’s going to be a hard landing.’

Stef pulled himself up slowly, groaning with the effort, and staggered back through the bomb bay towards the navigation compartment. He slumped down in his chair and, with the last of his strength, pulled the harness around him and buckled it.

Max checked their altitude, it was dropping past 1000 feet and falling quickly, they were going to hit the sea hard. It would be critical that the nose of the plane should need to be pulled up at the last possible moment; too soon and they would lose the forward momentum and stall, the bomber would drop the rest of the way like a stone; too late and the nose could catch a wave and the plane would flip. If he could land her smoothly and she stayed in one piece, they’d have a minute, maybe two, before the bomber was flooded and sank. Two minutes was time enough to release themselves, inflate their life-vests, possibly even retrieve and inflate the life-raft. Max knew how important the raft was for both of them. They’d die of exposure in less than an hour if they couldn’t get themselves out of the water.

Four hundred feet.

Below, the sea looked calmer than he thought it would be. He could see the faint feathery crests of white horses punctuating the rippled grey of the sea. It looked like a light chop only.

The rate of descent was increasing. The bomber was gliding, now there was nothing but the rush of air under her shuddering wings to keep them from tumbling down. Max fought an almost overpowering urge to pull up, away from the swiftly ascending sea; without engine power, that would be the death of them.

Save the pull back for the last moment before she touches down. She’ll splash heavily; she’ll skid along the surface. And then it’s just a swim for shore.

He wondered how far they had flown out from New York. He had lost track of how long they had been flying away… ten minutes, twenty, thirty? He had fought with the plane’s desire to pull to the right. Both engines on the port wing had been dutifully running until they’d started to misfire and eventually failed minutes ago. Max had been pulling against the starboard lean, steering the bomber reluctantly north-east to counteract it. He hoped he had not overdone it, and the plane had been heading more east than north. According to the map, the coastline above New York curved round to the right as New York State gave way to Connecticut and then Rhode Island. He hoped the fluctuating course he’d attempted to hold had not drawn him too close to that coastline. It would be the cruellest irony if, despite his best efforts to seek the deep water of the Atlantic, he found himself splashing down on some shallow shelf.

He had no idea how far out from the shore they were.

Three hundred feet.

Pieter’s lifeless head lolled forward as the plane’s nose continued to drop and their angle of descent steepened. Max felt a stab of guilt and anger towards the body in the seat beside him. They had flown together for nearly five years, survived some of the worst times of the war together, and in the end the bond he thought had existed between them had counted for nothing. When it came to the crunch for Pieter, their partnership played second fiddle to his sense of duty.

He had proven himself to be a better soldier than Max in the end. Unthinking, unquestioning.

Two hundred feet.

The evening light was beginning to fade below the low cloud ceiling above. To the west, the sun poked out beneath it and picked out the suds at the top of each shallow swell as a glittering amber highlight. For some crazy reason the water looked warm.

One hundred…

Max readied himself for the splash-down, tightening his harness. He shouted back over his shoulder, ‘Stef! Brace yourself!’ The sea suddenly seemed to accelerate towards them as the last few dozen feet slipped from beneath the plane.

Now…

He pulled back on the yoke in a last-second attempt to prevent the nose of the plane catching a swell that would turn it over. The flaps on both wings and the tail fins swung upwards, and the nose of the plane lifted only slightly.

The light of day vanished instantly as all of the windows in the cockpit were shrouded by churning water and the nose of the plane buried itself beneath the sea. Max felt as if the plane had hit a wall — he was thrown hard against the harness, his head snapped forward, and he banged his forehead against the yoke.

The darkness was only momentary, and light returned to the cockpit once more as the seawater swiftly drained away.

For a few short seconds it was silent except for the sound of the sea slapping against the bomber’s fuselage.

Max felt a warm stream of liquid rolling down his forehead. He put his hand to it and felt a gash above his right eye, just below the hairline. He wiped the slow trickle of blood away before it got in his eye.

The plane’s floating.

He fumbled frantically to undo his harness; aware that the valuable time she would give them both as she filled with water would disappear quickly.

He heard the sound of water cascading inside from below. It was coming in through the shattered plexiglas canopy of the bombardier’s compartment directly underneath him. He climbed out of the pilot’s seat shakily and made his way through the bomb bay, sparing a glance at the bomb.

Goodbye, you piece of shit; may you rot at the bottom of the ocean.

He felt an irrational loathing towards the little beer-keg-shaped device, and a grim sense of satisfaction that it was destined for an eternal, dark grave.

He entered the navigator’s compartment. Stef was struggling to undo his harness, his hand slipped and flapped around the buckle like a drunkard hunting desperately for his zipper down a back street.

‘Here, let me help you,’ said Max, leaning over and releasing the strap. Stef remained seated, close to losing consciousness.

There was a storage locker above the navigation desk in which the emergency kit was supposed to be stored, according to the flight manual. He pulled it open and the raft rolled out into his hands, a tightly packed cylinder of rubber. As he spread it out on the floor it was immediately obvious the thing was going to be no good to them. One side of the raft had been shredded. He looked up at the locker to see a shaft of light beaming in from the outside. Another of the fragments of debris that had peppered the side of the plane during the last dogfight had cruelly found the compartment.

‘Shit,’ he muttered.

Water rolled across the floor of the navigation compartment, just an inch deep, followed quickly by more coming from the waist section. A small wave lapped inside through the bulkhead along the floor. It was ankle-deep. By the look of it they were going down tail first.

‘Stef! We’ve got to get out now!’

The young lad stirred, his heavy-lidded eyes opened quickly, roused by the icy cold water that had found his feet.

‘Oh God, no!’ he whispered.

‘Stef, we’ve got life-vests, we’ll be all right, but we need to leave now.’

We’ll be all right? No, we won’t. Stef sure as hell won’t.

Stef looked up at Max, as if he’d heard his thoughts, his eyes wide with fear. ‘Max… I can’t swim, my leg…’

‘Yes, you can.’

‘No! I don’t want to drown… that’s the worst way—’

‘I won’t let you drown, Stef.’

Stef shook his head. ‘I’ll drown… I don’t want to go that way.’ His eyes focused on Max’s pistol. ‘Please?’

Max looked down and understood what the young lad was asking of him. Stef was right. There was no way he would make it ashore. He would die of hypothermia if he didn’t drown first.

The water had quickly risen to just below his knees, and he could feel the ice-cold water starting to get a grip on him.

‘Please, Max?’ whispered Stef, already his lips were turning blue and a puff of evaporation escaped from his mouth. ‘Don’t let me drown.’

A memory of a conversation they had all had months ago flashed through Max’s mind. The four of them huddled around a paraffin heater in some hastily assembled camp, back when KG-301 was still a functional squadron, sombrely discussing ways they might die. They had all agreed that burning to death had to be the worst way to go. Stef had confessed to a terrible fear of drowning.

‘Okay, lad… okay.’

He reached down for the gun and pulled it out of its holster, his hand trembling almost uncontrollably from the cold.

‘Please, Max… please hurry, just do it.’

He reached out with one hand and rested it on the top of Stef’s head and patted his ginger hair.

‘I’m sorry. Stef… I couldn’t land the plane ashore, I couldn’t let them have it.’

‘I kn-know,’ the boy said, his lips trembling. ‘It’s all right, Max. That w-was the mission.’

The water was thigh-deep now, but for Stef still seated, it was around his stomach, and rising swiftly up his chest. ‘P-please…’ he muttered, shaking uncontrollably.

Max slid his hand around the back of the boy’s head and embraced him with a rough and clumsy hold.

He wondered whether he could have done this for Lucian. Probably.

For a moment they both gasped and shivered in silence as the water quickly rose noisily around them, and then Max placed the barrel of the gun against the side of the boy’s head and pulled the trigger. Stef jerked once, violently, his hands clawed against Max’s back for a second before slackening.

Max let his limp body drop from his arms and slowly slide beneath the water. He held back the grief behind gritted teeth and smacked the sea angrily with one hand.

Only an inch of the little window in the navigation compartment remained above water, and through it the faint glow of the gathering dusk outside was fading fast. For a moment he considered turning the gun on himself and joining Stef and Pieter below the waves. Now the mission was over, they could once more be comrades, if only in death. One quick movement of the arm and another of his index finger and it would be over, no more struggling, it would be the easiest thing.

There’s still time to get out.

He dropped the gun, suddenly galvanised into action.

‘All right then,’ he muttered through trembling blue lips amidst a cloud of vapour. There were two ways to exit, both of them were underwater now and he would have to dive down and feel his way out blindly. He could either go back down into the waist section and out through one of the gun portholes. There might be enough room to squeeze his way out, since the port side gun had been jettisoned. Or he could climb forward, down through the flooded bombardier’s compartment and out through the belly hatch.

He decided to head for the waist section.

He waded towards the bulkhead leading to the waist. There was now a gap of only inches at the top, the water was around his chest and rising fast.

It’s flooded beyond the bulkhead, no air until you’re outside again… you ready for that?

Max breathed deeply several times. Each time he exhaled the dwindling space in front of him between the water and the roof of the fuselage filled with his foggy breath. Water bubbled and spat as trapped air from the aft of the plane hissed out through the last inches of the bulkhead doorway above the waterline.

He watched the top of the bulkhead dip below the water and felt the rear of the plane beginning to swing downwards, the plane now held above the sea by the air trapped in the front half. His ears popped from the buildup of pressure.

There was a loud, deep metallic groan. It sounded like the mournful cry of a whale.

She’s sliding under… go now!

He filled his lungs quickly and ducked through the bulkhead. Under the icy water he could hear a whole new world of sounds, the sound of metal straining and contorting, the roar of expelled air and incoming water, the click and clatter of debris spinning in circles and eddies. He pulled himself deeper and forwards, down towards where both waist-guns had once spewed bullets in anger. He was encumbered by his uniform and the thick leather flying jacket. His progress was torturously slow, but there was no time to tread water while he struggled to unzip it and shrug it off. He worked desperately with his arms, grabbing hold of the internal ribs of the fuselage and pulling himself forward to the next. His hand scraped a jagged bullet hole, one of a row that had stitched a line diagonally above the starboard waist-gun. Frantically his hand felt along the metal, seeking the edge of the porthole, as he felt his body urgently commanding him to take another breath.

He found the top rim of the porthole and with one frantic exertion he pulled himself down deeper into the flooded waist section, down and through the porthole. His legs now kicked desperately as he struggled to rise to the surface, but his flying jacket was weighing him down, and he had precious little energy left to fight the drag.

Life-vest, you idiot! Life-vest.

He felt for the pull-cord, patting his chest to find it, all the while feeling himself sinking slowly. He heard the painful groan of metal under stress below him. The plane was going down. The noise began to diminish as it pulled away from him, sinking at a greater speed than he was. He saw the bomber’s tailfin pass by closely. As it descended and faded from view he felt a rush of bubbles rising swiftly past him and the tug of the backwash from the plane plummeting below.

He felt the tickle of string against the back of his hand — the cord — and frantically waved his hand to find it again. He made contact, grasped the cord in his hand and pulled.

The vest inflated violently with a roar of bubbles and Max felt himself pulled rapidly up through little more than twenty feet of water.

He broke the surface with a roar of expelled air and gasped for a fresh lungful.

The plane was gone, marked now only by a handful of floating items of debris. The sea was kind this evening, only small swells, but it was painfully cold. The sun shone weakly; a few hours more and it would be gone. Max turned towards it.

Rises in the east, sets in the west.

West was where he was headed. He started to swim, in his heart knowing the cold would get him before long.