Paper Doll

Part Three. Schweinfurt

On one of his fathers hunting trips they had walked and walked through a damp November drizzle, their trail erratic with minor mudslides and gravel, in search of game, without success; Bryant had limped behind nursing a blister, his legs all the way to his calves slick with black mud from falls. They had seen absolutely nothing. His father after the first few fruitless hours had taken to slogging along as if on a forced march, his head lowered. They had stopped for lunch to discover that the rain had ruined the sandwiches Bryant had ineptly wrapped, and his father had swallowed that as well. While Bryant had attempted near-complete unobtrusiveness, his father had set his.22 stock-down against a forked birch to leave the trail a few feet to relieve himself. Hitting full stream he flushed a huge buck pheasant, which exploded up right before them, and his father’s urine stream had looped and written on the air while he’d tried to do everything at once with a hand on his zipper and a hand scrabbling for his gun, and had only succeeded in spraying himself and tipping the.22, which went off in Bryant’s general direction. His father ended up on the seat of his pants looking at his hands, his open zipper like a little laughing mouth and the pheasant long gone, a distant flapping among the trees. Bryant hadn’t helped him up and hadn’t mentioned the waspish sound of the bullet. He had been wise enough, in fact, not to say anything the whole march home.

With a craftsman’s care he produced a series of sweat impressions with his palm on the pages of the field manual for the Sperry turret. The moisture made the paper curl.

The summer heat made the great mounded hangars waver like hills in the humid distance. Armorers bandoliered like Mexican bandits with cartridge belts humped their loads across hardstands too hot for England.

Word was Lewis had talked to a guy whose job it was to fill out the Statements of Effects forms for lost or missing airmen. Lewis had caught this guy in one of the huts going through somebody’s stuff. The stuff had turned out to belong to a waist gunner from Boom Town named Gus Fleener, who had had his left arm taken off by flak over Kassel. They hadn’t been able to apply a tourniquet because how do you tourniquet a shoulder? So his crew buddies had made the decision to bail him out and rely on local hospitality to get him to a German hospital in time. He’d gone into shock, though, and pulled his own ripcord, there in the plane, and they’d had to bunch up the chute under his remaining arm and throw him out so it didn’t catch on the tail. The belly gunner and tail had reported seeing the chute open but no one was overly optimistic. The wound did not allow for much delay. And they knew enough about the lamentable spread in their bombing patterns to assume what the CO termed “ill will” on the part of the German inhabitants of the countryside. They’d heard stories of hapless chutists being pitchforked, or run down with hoes and sickles.

So this guy went through all of poor Fleener’s personal property, the crews heard, making out a list, while Lewis watched: socks, 4 ea., letters, 8 ea., combs, 2 ea., photos, 2 ea. Final disposition of this stuff, the guy confided to Lewis, was a touchy bit of work: some poor schmoe’s widow, he said, the last things she needs to see are some of these French postcards, or love letters with the wrong names on them. Air Corps policy was to remove the property in question as soon as possible once the airman was known to be missing or lost, so his buddies wouldn’t brood any longer than necessary on the loss. The result was the approximate opposite of what was intended. The Statement of Effects man told Lewis wistfully that he didn’t make a lot of friends.

Morale dropped as the story circulated. Snowberry at one point mused in Bryant’s presence, “Ever notice how morale here keeps going down without ever going up?” Someone posted in the ready room a list headed with the title What Won’t Work, and filled with items all the way from “Honey, You Know You’re the Only One for Me” to Prayer. Saluting was becoming more overtly a way of saying Fuck You to those who demanded it; the practice had often been considered “chickenshit” by the men in the first place, generally ignored except for the CO, the visiting brass, and formal occasions.

It was no longer uncommon, after missions, to find Norden bombsights, so obsessively protected in training in the States as the secret weapon the Axis would give Italy for, lying in the grass unattended near the hardstands like mysterious, useless gizmos cleared from the attic. Men were becoming geniuses at hoarding small slights. Unpleasant jobs and missions mornings produced a variety of obscure ailments, which debilitated no one and enriched everyone’s rotten humor. Everyone had a different method of following what was perceived to be an emerging pattern of sinister design, based on irrefutable omens. Half of three squadrons developed diarrhea.

Bryant didn’t and Snowberry did. They sat together watching Tuliese, who had quite a talent with the brush, paint the nose illustration onto Paper Doll. Now that he’d finally gotten around to it, there was little enthusiasm among the crew for ornamenting their B-17. Snowberry clutched his knees to his stomach and rocked every so often, glancing at the latrines regularly to assure himself they were there and that he could make it. Tuliese leaned close, giving special attention to the thighs. He was known as a master of shading.

The paper doll in question was a naked redhead vaguely modeled on Lana Turner. When he’d been informed that Lana Turner was not a redhead, Tuliese had answered menacingly, So what? Everyone had shrugged. She was being clothed with a filmy slip of what was supposed to be a nightgown inadequately covering her private parts. There was an unofficial contest between crews to be the most daring with their nose art, occasionally interrupted by halfhearted clean-up attempts when the brass considered things to be getting out of hand. Bryant thought of some of the flak-smashed noses he’d seen and considered how many hours of loving work were being erased in instants.

Lewis meanwhile was becoming obsessed with speed. His latest idea was the stripping of the camouflage from the B-17’s. With the paint gone there would be reduced weight and smoother surfaces, translating into fleeter Fortresses. “I mean, who are we kidding with camouflage?” he said. “They can’t see us?”

“You want to fly in a silver plane in the middle of one of those formations?” Bryant asked. “What about just carrying a sign in German that says, ‘8th Air Force Commanding Officer’?”

“Not just us,” Lewis said, with the tone of someone teaching the hopelessly limited. “Suppose they were all silver. All the planes.”

Bryant had no answer. “They’d reflect the sun,” he said. “We’d blind each other.”

Lewis thumped his cheek with his middle finger and surveyed Bryant a good long time. He said, “Sometimes you make it too easy for me.”

And Snowberry, trying not to laugh, imagining no doubt the tremor through his bowels, said, “I think Lewis means he doesn’t see the drawback.”

Bean received word that his best friend had been killed in the Pacific theater, and he was inconsolable. He did not eat and could barely speak and so worried Bryant that he decided to follow Bean around for a little while and keep an eye on him. All he was able to get out of Bean was that his friend had been involved in the bombing of New Georgia Island and had been trapped in a burning Dauntless. He sat around the day room feeling useless while Bean stared blankly at a Liberty Magazine. He had tried mentioning food, and Billy Conn, and home. Bean gazed at the table and touched an ashtray with his finger.

Snowberry slumped in a chair by the folding magazine rack. He’d been throwing up for two days now and he looked drawn. He had his sketchpad propped at an angle that allowed Bryant a look. The pad was blank. Every so often Bean shivered and rubbed his arm.

“How do you know he burned to death?” Bryant asked in a low voice.

Bean didn’t seem to hear. He fingered an old snapshot of his friend that now held a deep bronze tarnish, and let it drop. He said, “He was my best friend. What’re you guys?”

Bryant said, “Look, Bean, I’m going to write a letter, okay?” He pulled out paper and a pencil to underline his intention. Instead of oversolicitousness he intended to try something in the way of Life Goes On.

Bean simply sat, as still as a vacant house.

“I think Bean’s stepped off the curb,” Snowberry said. “If you want to know what I think.”

Bryant wrote the date on his paper and Dear Lois, and a series of lazy, slanted lines.

Beside him Snowberry noisily began to work and with quick listless strokes sketched a four-engined plane: a fat childish cross. After a moment he added a squiggle of smoke curling upward from the tail. He drew flames as fat parallel fingers and Bryant said, “Gordon,” as a warning. Without looking up, Snowberry changed the flames to bullets spraying out of a turret.

Bryant wrote, I guess these sorts of letters are supposed to go the other way, and stopped, and then tried, I’m writing because I got myself into a mess that you should know about, and stopped again, and finally wrote, How are you? and decided on that as an opening.

How had he gotten himself into this? What did he want? Lois, and his high school, his town, his friends, all seemed like a half-remembered birthday party. Lois had a right to know what was going on, he told himself, and he felt a loyalty to her that was sincere and nostalgic. But he considered: Could he have written to his prewar self and communicated anything? He thought of Snowberry’s fishing trips from the journal, and blackfish rocking gently in the sand with staring eyes and mouths opening and closing as if speech were prevented by this alien medium of air.

Before, he had vaguely hoped for a Dear John letter from her, and had thought melodramatically that he deserved it. Now he was beginning to understand that his country, for whatever its reasons, had informed him that he and his friends were in the most serious way on their own.

He became aware that Snowberry was holding his pencil motionless an inch from the pad, and was staring at it. The pencil point was trembling.

Bryant crossed out How are you? and started again.

August 14, 1943

Dear Lois,

Things here have not been going well. We have been pushed very hard and have seen many things and the rumors are something big and terrible is coming up.

I have always wanted to be honest with you so I write this letter. I have been dating another woman here, an Englishwoman, and I don’t know how serious it is.

I didn’t know whether to tell you or not but as you can see I decided to.

He folded the paper. A dispatch from the front, he thought. If and when things ever cooled down, and he were still alive, he would use it. Word was going around about a colonel in the 379th who had told his crews that the key to fighting the kind of war they were fighting was to make believe you were dead already, and then the rest came easy. Hirsch in line for chow had fiddled with calculating on his slide rule the odds on their completing their tour alive based on the squadron’s current 6.4 percent loss rate and after some angry refiguring had thrown the slide rule away. Bean had left the line to retrieve it, handling it gingerly and reading the cramped lines and numbers as though it might have made a mistake and could be coaxed out of it.

“He was flying low squadron in the low group,” Bean said. “The guy who wrote me we both knew in school. He said before it went up, the wing tanks were hit and were spraying gas all over, that you could see it raining off behind the plane.”

Snowberry dotted his pad loudly and rapidly and made a peppery trail away from his box plane. “If Piacenti hears about this he’ll never leave his bunk,” he said.

Bryant felt some dull sadness for Bean but none for his anonymous friend. He thought of the grim white-faced officer standing among the wreckage of Lemon Drop after it had crashed, and his order, strident and unnecessary: Get this cleaned up. A strong sense was growing in everyone that the dead were just part of the mess.

“He was eighteen years old,” Bean said. “Little older than Gordon. Six months out of flying school.”

“Would you cut it out?” Snowberry said murderously.

They sat quietly without speaking. While Bryant watched, Bean dipped his fingers into the ashtray before him, distractedly, looking off at something else, and brought his fingertips, powdered and gray with ash, to his mouth.

When they pulled back the curtain on the mission board the next morning, the red yarn ran to Paris, and an enlargement of the target area was headed Le Bourget. Snowberry and Bryant looked at each other immediately and understood. Le Bourget was where Lindbergh had landed after the solo Atlantic flight. Le Bourget had always been for the two of them part of the legend. It was as if they were going to bomb The Spirit of St. Louis.

They were going after the depots where reserve aircraft and crews were believed to be. Lewis didn’t like it. “Fighters,” he said in a low voice during the briefing. “Why are we going after fighters?” Bean sat beside him and registered nothing.

They would have fighter escort the whole trip, they were assured, P-47’s all the way there and back. Enough Little Friends for a party.

Lewis murmured about fighter suppression as they filed out: Why were they using B-17’s for fighter suppression? There was something strange about it: the operations map showed clear weather over most of western Europe, and there were plenty of more important targets spread in an arc across the map. Bombing airfields was not the most efficient use of heavy bombers. The crews didn’t complain — the airfields were not as heavily defended, usually, as strategic targets.

“Just do your job, General,” Snowberry said. “Nobody said it had to make sense. Let someone else run the war.”

“Maybe they want to give us a rest,” Bryant suggested.

“I think you hit it,” Lewis said. “I’m worried about why.”

In the jeep to the hardstand he added, “I don’t think it’s for what we did. I think it’s for what we’re gonna do.”

In the dark and cold plane Bryant swung experimentally on the sling seat in the turret and eyed the turret canopy critically. He wished he’d overseen the day’s cleaning of the Plexiglas; now it was too dark. Gabriel asked over the interphone with some sarcasm if he’d like to be a part of this morning’s pre-flight systems check.

They waited two hours for the ceiling to lift so they might have a safer assembly and finally went off just at dawn, a vivid orange band beneath a purple one behind the darkened and backlit horizon. The Plexiglas surfaces of the ships ahead of them in taxi position glowed with the colors.

They hooked up with a reassuringly large flight of olive green razorback Thunderbolts — as far as Bryant could tell, there were more escorts than bombers — and the gunners joyfully called in each P-47 flight as it slipped into place until they felt they were approaching Paris cocooned in Air Support.

The Thunderbolts positioned themselves above the formations and wove lazy-S patterns to maintain contact with the slower Fortresses. No one in Paper Doll saw enemy fighters until the formation made its wide turn out of the echeloned vees into the column of groups that formed the long train for the bombing run. The higher squadron swung in alongside Paper Doll and in the process, in a rare instance in which the purest chance crystallized like a well-laid plan, they trapped inside their newly formed defensive box a hapless lone Messerschmitt Me-110 that had magically appeared at three o’clock low just outside Piacenti’s window. The unhappy Messerschmitt flew level between them for a long moment. The pilot was gazing over at Bryant like someone about to get it in an old Mack Sennett short. His fuselage was dark gray with a white nose, with what looked like a little green fanged worm on the cowling. And then all hell broke loose, Bryant and Piacenti and Snowberry together hosing the fighter with tracers as the other planes around them opened up as well, the tracer lines converging from all directions like a starburst in reverse. The 110 seemed to stop and rear in mid-air, and pieces flew off like bits of confetti. It turned a baby blue underside to Paper Doll and then three tracer streams converged dazzlingly on the same point, like a mirror catching sunlight, and it disintegrated and flew backward out of the formation in a rain of shapes.

Smoke from the guns of the formation all around him trailed back from the bombers in satisfying streams.

“God, that was great,” Snowberry said over the interphone.

“That’s the best, that’s amazing, to get them like that,” Piacenti said. Bryant was trembling and overheated. He fired his guns out into space, overwhelmed by how intense the gratification had been, the physical pleasure detached from emotion, from any thought of the absurdly forlorn Mack Sennett face in the canopy before they had let fly. He watched the bombs rain down over Le Bourget, on Lindy’s head, and felt as though a part of him were killed off, and had no regrets. They burst yellow and white in the rapid streams of the bombing pattern and the smoke bloomed and spread like stirred-up muck in pond water. “Bye, bye, Bourget,” Snowberry said over the interphone, for Bryant’s benefit. “Hope the St. Louis was off at a dispersal site.”

Lewis reported a perfect bombing pattern, and added as an item of interest that somebody’s bombs had torn the wings off a fighter attempting to climb beneath them. On the flight home they had maintained perfect formation, the spread of graceful Fortresses ahead and above him beautiful against the sky, and the Thunderbolts had swooped and looped around them after they had cleared the coast, celebrating with their own near-animal grace the ease and success of the day.

There was a minor celebration after debriefing, with Cokes and watery Scotch that Cooper and Gabriel had stashed away. There had been no announcement but already there were signs of another mission the next day, which was supposed to mean no drinking. After their triumph they interpreted that as a little drinking, confined to the afternoon. Gabriel announced to the assembled crew that Snowberry, Bryant, and Piacenti had each been awarded a third of a kill for the Messerschmitt and proposed a toast now that Paper Doll had been officially baptized. Now that the Luftwaffe has felt the sting of our anger, he added wryly. They drank the Scotch and Coke and poured water over each other’s heads. It was only late afternoon and the minute amount of Scotch allotted Bryant made him woozy. It tasted like the metal cup.

“I’ve got an announcement,” Gabriel said. “Thanks to the selfless bravery of Tech Sergeant Gordon L. Snowberry, Jr.—”

“L?” Snowberry said. He was rapidly finishing a loose pile of sketches.

“—L. Snowberry, Jr., we were able to obtain gun camera footage of Paper Doll’s historic kill today.”

Bean looked at Bryant. Gun cameras were altogether glamorous gizmos reserved exclusively for fighter pilots. The notion of Paper Doll’s gunners employing gun cameras was akin to the idea of their jousting over aerodromes with the Red Baron or Max Immelmann.

“Gather round. Somebody hit the lights.”

It was a sunny midafternoon and they were sitting around crates outside the day room. The crew gathered closer and Snowberry stood before them with his pile of sketches at chest level. On the first was a number 5 ringed with a geometric pattern like a cue number on a film leader. The men laughed.

Snowberry began to flip the pages, rapidly dropping them to his feet, and as the other numbers appeared the crew chanted the countdown, as they did before base movies: 4. 3. 2. 1. The first sketch appeared, a few lines suggesting a B-17 with an oversized tail. The men cheered. The next showed the formation. The next showed a ball turret. The next showed the same ball turret, from a slightly different angle. The men hooted and complained.

The drawings began to change more quickly as Snowberry developed dexterity with the flipping, and the B-17 began to bank — though there was some argument in the audience as to whether it was in fact banking or whether a wing was falling off — and the Messerschmitt appeared, to a huge cheer. A close-up of the canopy revealed a fierce-looking Nazi with an eye patch, a dueling scar, and jagged teeth, and the crew hissed and booed. Across his fuselage were a string of tiny bull’s-eyes that an arrow and tag helpfully identified as “37 Downed Brit Bombers.” In the next drawing the Messerschmitt was approaching the viewer head on, guns blazing in sunlight-like rays. In the next, Paper Doll was viewed from the beam, with stick figures in the dorsal and waist windows firing.

“That’s Bryant. I could tell by the shape of the head,” Willis Eddy called.

“And Piacenti ‘cause his hands aren’t on the guns,” Lambert Ball said.

More sketches of the firing, the tracer streams double-dotted lines. Bryant’s and Piacenti’s guns were missing high. Snowberry’s belly turret, now visible, was firing right into the cockpit.

A big explosion, a swastikaed tail flying outward with lines of force.

A final drawing, over which was superimposed THE END: a cartoon Snowberry curled inside the ball, winking, holding up an okay sign.

The men booed and threw gear. It did seem to Bryant as though morale had picked up.

“You gotta be kidding,” Lewis called. “I think the only thing you hit was the Fort opposite.”

“Hey, you see the curve in some of these?” Snowberry rustled around at his feet for the appropriate drawings. “I got off some classic, classic deflection bursts.”

“Hey, the only thing you know about deflection shooting is that you can’t do it,” Lewis said.

Gabriel had a fat new cigar in his mouth, unlit, and he grinned around it at them like a proud father.

“Get a load of Billy Mitchell, there,” Hirsch said quietly from Bryant’s left.

“Gabriel’s all right,” Lewis answered. Gabriel was hearing again from Piacenti how the Messerschmitt had just appeared, as if out of nowhere. “He’s starting to turn into one of those beady-eyed sons of bitches who absolutely hold the course, the kind of guy you want up there. And this movie thing with Snowberry was a good idea. We could use some loosening up.”

Lewis stood and suggested a game of Gordon Pong, and over Snowberry’s protestations the idea was enthusiastically endorsed by the rest of the crew. Four crates were stacked two on two as a net and Snowberry was caught and dragged to one side. After some rules debate, it was decided that he would not be allowed to bounce once on the receiving team’s side.

He kicked and squirmed too much — it was hard to maintain a good throwing grip — so they sat on him and tied his arms and feet. The officers agreed to play, and it was Bryant, Piacenti, Lewis, and Ball against Gabriel, Cooper, Hirsch, and Eddy. The gunners against the ninety-day wonders, as Lewis put it. Bean refused to play.

On the first toss Snowberry shrieked, so it was decided to gag him as well. After a few more tosses the best tactics revealed themselves to be: on the receiving end, spread out and close to the body as it flew over the crates; on the throwing end, try to produce a spin which would overload one end of the opposite line and defeat attempts at a good solid grasp. After one throw from the officers that just cleared the crates — Lewis called net ball but was argued out of it — Bryant commented to the group on the sheer terror in Gordon’s eyes, and recommended a blindfold, both as a mercy measure and further elimination of distractions. It was agreed to, and Bean gave up a sock to that purpose when no one was able to produce a handkerchief.

The officers were ahead 3 to 0—they scored when any part of Snowberry touched the ground as the gunners caught him, tallying on two real rib-thumpers and a cheapie can of corn when a limp foot touched — when Lewis abruptly announced Refreshment Break. He poured a bit of Scotch from an abandoned cup into his Coke bottle and took a slug. Behind him in a tin lid used as an ashtray Piacenti laid a C02 cartridge atop Gabriel’s now-lit cigar and everybody ducked. The cartridge exploded in a rain of tobacco leaf and the concussion knocked Lewis forward onto his knees. He got to his feet grimly amid the laughter, spattered with the dark bits of cigar and Coke, and shook his head. “I’ll have another, barkeep,” he said. “In a clean glass.” Complaining of ringing in his ears, he ended the game prematurely. He and Bryant sat beside Bean while Piacenti and Ball laboriously began to untie Snowberry, who was again showing signs of life. Lewis offered his Coke and Bean shrugged it off.

“I hate to see a grown man dry,” Lewis said.

Snowberry was helping them now with his feet. “You guys,” he said with diffused menace. “You guys.”

“What a stand-up bunch of personnel, huh, Bean?” Lewis said. “Even when the going gets tough, there’s still time for horseplay.”

The victorious officers had left. Snowberry pouted where he lay, rubbing his hip. There were tears in Bean’s eyes.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he said. “What am I doing here?”

Bryant patted his shoulder. Lewis said, “You don’t have to figure it out. Like today. All you have to do is turn on the Brownings and let them figure it out.”

Piacenti had started the jeep and was waving them over. Gabriel wanted another photo. Piacenti leaned on the horn, and revved the engine.

“I guess it’s my buddy,” Bean said. “I guess I haven’t gotten over him.”

“He’s dead and you’re not,” Lewis said.

“I feel bad,” Bean said.

“Feel good,” Lewis said.

“He told me if anything happened to tell his girlfriend the real story,” Bean said. “I think about that.”

“I think about home, takeoff, assembly, their fighters, our escort,” Lewis said. “Flak.”

They helped Bean to his feet, and climbed aboard the jeep. At the plane Gabriel arranged them as he had before. Snowberry said, “Why don’t you make little white marks on the fuselage over our heads so you can see how much we’ve grown?” For the photographer, though, he joined with everyone else in pointing to the newly painted iron cross on the nose, and holding up one finger.

Tuliese told them what they had already heard, from a pal of the departed Gus Fleener: the operation the following day was going to be big and unusual. “Unusual” in this case had clearly sinister connotations. Bryant suspected Berlin, and was both excited and panicked. He imagined the Providence Journal headline: LOCAL GUNNER A HERO IN HISTORIC FIRST RAID ON NAZI CAPITAL. He had once asked Lewis, Imagine your name in a headline back home? Lewis had responded, Imagine your name on a list in the back of the paper?

Leaves and training courses, they knew, had been postponed. The last few missions had been, Lewis claimed now to understand, morale builders — short and easy with few or no losses. By the time they’d finished chow, there were all sorts of signs that supported the rumors: the beautiful and clear skies, which in the new iconography of the bomber crews meant Danger and Impending Missions; the heavy coming and going at Operations, including a buck-up visit, it appeared, from some major brass; fleets of extra petrol bowsers and bomb trolleys. Spare planes were wheeled to the dispersals alongside the combat-ready ones. Crew lists were displayed an hour after dinner, which struck them as formal and unusual and ominous. Everyone feasible was on the list, including the very newest crews. Lewis joked grimly as he read it that he’d found the names of three of the base dogs, including Audie. They were just to sit around and wait. It was suggested they retire around eight-thirty or nine o’clock. There were hints that roust-up would be earlier than usual.

They sat in the barracks playing cards. They were going to sit and wait for three hours to go to bed, and the theatricality of the unusual preparations made the waiting much more difficult. Hirsch had come out, pale, from a navigators’ early evening briefing, and had not answered questions. He had gone straight to another building with an oilskin packet and could be seen through the window, bent over the pool of light on his desk, scratching long rows of figures with his pencil. Guys from Archangel and Cathy Says told the same story: navigators all over the base shaken and isolated.

Bean was signing his underwear. They found him cross-hatching lines on a small pile of laundry and he explained that that was what he was doing.

“What do you think, you’re going off to camp, Harold?” Piacenti asked.

“Maybe I am,” Bean said, and Bryant understood he meant prison camp.

For a moment he was back in nature camp in Connecticut, with Snowberry sick on Mello Rolls and Bean miserable without his parents. Bean was signing his underwear for prison camp, or as an identification aid (Lewis in talking about antiaircraft casualties had once in his presence made reference to “flak stew”), or because it was a reassuring ritual and maybe he thought the extra bit of caution would help ensure his safety, a gesture of faith in a world that rewarded Preparation and Conscientiousness.

“Maybe you should write your buddy’s girl, if you’re gonna write her, Bean,” Lewis said. “You know. Tonight.”

Bean held up a pair by the waistband — GEANT H. BEAN, U.S.A.R. — Bryant read. Bean’s undershorts were strangely oversized and he looked diapered in them. Snowberry called them his Sagbag Underwear. Lewis liked to suggest Bean was hoping he’d grow into them. “I already wrote her,” Bean said. “I had to tell her everything I knew.”

“Must’ve been humiliating,” Lewis muttered from his bunk.

Snowberry shook Bryant’s arm, and leaned close. “I can’t sit here,” he said quietly. “Let’s get out. Let’s go down to The Hoops. Some of the other guys’re down there. We’ll call the girls.”

“The girls?” Bryant asked. The idea sounded as bizarre as calling his parents. “They won’t be able to come down.”

“Willya try?” Snowberry said. He was bobbing from foot to foot. “They can try, can’t they? We got at least two hours.”

Bryant debated for too long and Snowberry whirled and stalked out, and Bryant got up and followed. At the door he looked back. Piacenti picked up a card and eyed it, tantalizing Ball. Bean folded underwear. Lewis lay with his hands behind his head, eyes on the ceiling. God, he thought as he trotted to catch Snowberry, Ball. What do I know about Ball?

Base preparations over the entire area depressed them further and they were happy to get out onto the lane to the village, away from the activity. Hundreds of Wright-Cyclones were being run up and tuned by ground crews and the result was a wavering roar like an immense child’s first tentative attempts at a musical instrument. The sound was cooler and quieter in the lane, a distant racket from another world. As they walked they heard running feet and Colin and his silent friend Keir from the base party caught up to them, and wished them a good evening.

Snowberry quickened his step, and the boys accelerated in little bursts to keep up.

“It’s quite busy this evening, isn’t it, Sergeant?” Colin said.

“Yes it is,” Bryant answered. Ahead of him Snowberry was pulling away and he tried to modulate his speed to keep the group together.

“We understand you need to keep secret about it,” the boy said.

“I guess we do,” Bryant said. “How have you been?”

“Quite well, thank you. Do you remember Keir?”

“Never forget a face. Or a rider.”

The boys were quiet, Keir embarrassed or shy. “Are you off on a walk?” Colin finally asked.

Snowberry came to a stop and turned on them, so that Bryant almost fell over him. “Look, kid,” he said. “We’re on a secret mission. We got a big day tomorrow. We’re not running tours. We’re not giving interviews. Comprendo?”

“Gordon,” Bryant said.

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Snowberry said. “I’ll meet you there.” He left.

Colin stood as if struck. Keir edged away, flushed, unable to look up.

“Colin, Sergeant Snowberry’s got a lot on his mind,” Bryant said. He crouched and rubbed his hand in the dirt. It was just his luck that this would have to happen now.

Colin said, “I understand.”

Bryant patted his pockets, but there was no chocolate or gum.

“We don’t want anything, Sergeant,” Colin said. “We don’t want anything.” Keir had already turned and was attempting to drift away.

“Well, what is it?” Bryant found himself asking with some exasperation. “What is it you want from us?”

Colin pulled further away. “We don’t want anything,” he repeated.

Bryant stood, angry with his dirty hands, angry that he was alone and Colin was alone on this lane. “I don’t know what you want from me, you know?” he said. “I’m not your father. I’m not a war hero. I don’t even know what I’m doing here.”

Colin backed toward Keir, who had already started for home in mortification.

“We don’t want anything, Sergeant,” he said. It sounded like a rebuke. “We wanted to wish you luck. We wanted to see you.”

Bryant turned from them and started walking. He turned back. Colin had taken Keir’s hand and was looking back at him. “Why are you out at this time of night?” Bryant shouted. “Isn’t your mother worried? Why isn’t anyone taking care of you?”

The boys remained where they were, holding hands, gazing at him, and were still there when he glanced back once more before the curve of the lane pulled them out of sight behind a hedgerow.

He sat fidgety and uncomfortable at a table near a window in The Hoops while Snowberry drummed tunelessly with his little finger and thumb on the table top. Snowberry had reached Jean, and whatever he had told her, she had agreed to come. Robin was coming as well. Bryant wondered irritably how melodramatic Snowberry had been. Snowberry wasn’t smiling or crooning. He was all business. He’d opened one of his condom packages and was snapping it back and forth between his fingers like a rubber band. He’d gotten them each a beer and they were either too nervous to drink or were waiting for the girls.

Snowberry stopped drumming. He rubbed his eyes with his balled fists and Bryant felt as if he was keeping a younger brother up. Snowberry widened his eyes comically to regain focus and said, “Are you thinking of proposing to Robin?”

Bryant stared at him, and shook his head. “This was your idea.”

Snowberry shrugged. “I just figured,” he said.

The girls arrived forty-five minutes later. The beers remained untouched. Bryant had spent his time musing on the convexity of the surface of the beer in the glass. Snowberry had gazed off toward the bar. Their spirits had deteriorated further.

“How long have you been waiting?” Robin said after they’d crossed to the table. “We were able to get a lift in an officer’s car. Very nice young man, who claimed to be a war correspondent.” She offered her hand and he squeezed it. Jean gave Snowberry a kiss on the cheek and he looked at her morosely.

“Are you keeping up with your drawing?” Robin asked him.

“No,” Snowberry said. To mitigate the rudeness he added, “Are you?”

Robin shook her head. It occurred to Bryant that the girls didn’t have beers, but he was unable for the moment to generate the sociability necessary to volunteer to get more. The two beers sat between them like curios they were jointly examining.

“Is it going to be so very bad tomorrow?” Jean asked.

“No,” Snowberry said. “There’s a lot of big talk, though. Bryant here is excitable. Me, I’ve got no worries.”

Jean appropriated Snowberry’s untouched beer and took a sip.

Robin said, “Is anyone going to offer to buy us drinks?” and Snowberry seemed to come to himself, but instead of rising moved Bryant’s glass in front of her.

“Well,” Robin said quietly, looking between them, and placed her hands on the table.

“What I miss is reading,” Snowberry said. “I used to read a lot.”

Jean agreed. “A number of us have been exchanging books,” she said. “People are reading everything and anything.”

Bryant nodded and no one carried the conversation forward.

“I saw a wonderful bit scratched on the wall of the loo here,” Jean said. “Did I tell you? It said, ‘Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go everywhere.’”

When the boys didn’t laugh, Robin said “Well” again and shifted in her chair, and Bryant understood that what had been anxiety and sympathy was turning into frustration and resentment. He sat up, smiled ruefully for them both. “Well, heck,” he said. “If it is a big deal, we’ll probably all come back officers. That’s the Air Corps. Everyone moves up.”

“That’s right,” Jean said. “I expect you two will be running things before too long. Especially our young Gordon. In two years he has a chance to be quite an officer, that’s my guess.”

Gordon said, “In two years I have a chance to be nineteen.”

They were silent. He rarely mentioned his age; never around the girls.

He added: “Like Billy Conn used to say — I got my whole past ahead of me.”

“Billy Conn,” Bryant explained, “is a boxer Harold Bean’s always talking about.”

“Well,” Robin repeated, this time cheerfully, “I suggest we either all go for a walk, or call it a night. What do you say?”

Bryant was grateful for the idea. He was finding Snowberry oppressive, though he was behaving the same way. And he did feel that this was an opportunity to transmit something of how he felt to Robin.

They walked hand in hand. A few steps ahead Jean stopped to kiss Snowberry, and they passed them.

They sat beside a low stone wall. On the opposite side of the lane a cow gazed at them, scratching its chin in slow strokes on a wire gate. They heard a convoy of fuel bowsers coming from a long way off, and didn’t speak until they had passed. No one driving the trucks understood gear shifting and one by one they rounded the corner and ground noisily up the slight hill.

“What a nice image for things right now,” Robin said. “These cows with their mild eyes watching all this Yank bustle.”

Bryant suggested quietly that she might draw it.

She leaned his head closer with her hand. Her hair smelled of fir needles. “Oh, I’m not much use with lorries and big machines,” she said. “A lot of clank and precious few beautiful lines.”

He imagined her rushing to get dressed, hurrying into the night with almost no notice. “I’m sorry I’ve been jerky,” he said. “Thanks for coming out like this. I guess I’m just scared I’ll let everyone down. Scared I really don’t belong here, that nobody realizes that.”

It was dark. The shine on his boots interested him. Robin stroked his arm and tried to reassure him. As she spoke he grew less sure of himself, less sure of his ability to perform.

They could make out Snowberry and Jean thirty or so yards down the lane.

“Is Gordon all right?” Robin asked.

“He and Bean,” Bryant said. “They’re unhappy.”

“Just the two of them?”

He shrugged and made an amused sound with his tongue on his palate. “We all are.”

They sat in the dark and something twittered from a house eave behind them.

“I used to have dreams about you,” she said. “I used to dream the war was over or everyone had quit or one thing or another and you were living here. In one you were a tax assessor, of all things.”

He looked at her.

“Now I’m all dreamed out. They’ve stopped. That’s what Janie had said, you know, from one of her letters to my great aunt: I’m all dreamed out. She wrote it late one night at the cottage hospital.” She sighed, and bit her little finger lightly. “I think at this point you need a child’s faith,” she said. “I don’t think I have that. Gone with the lavender icing, or something of that sort, I suppose.”

They sat a bit longer. He had shifted to a cross-legged position and his foot was asleep.

“How fitting,” she added, with some anger. “How fitting, Bobby Bryant, that your aeroplane should be called the Fortress. Defended on all sides.” She stood.

“What do you mean?” he asked, looking up at her in the dark.

“I mean I’m quite exhausted, thank you, trying to get through to you, trying to get you to volunteer something. I came all the way down here, Bobby, and you sit there.” Bryant stood, and shook his leg. It was not the best move.

“I say to myself, be patient with him, Robin, think of his position, he’s just a boy at any rate, how can you know what it feels like? But Bobby, is it really so very hard? Is it so hard to be straightforward with me? To tell me how you feel?”

He felt himself becoming angry and half understood the opportunity to avoid the question. He resented her the way he resented Colin. He had never been happier anywhere than he was with her, and he remained standing apart from her, shaking a sleeping leg. She waited, and he didn’t come up with anything to say.

“Bobby Bryant,” she said, and he knew how much he had hurt her. She touched her forearm with an open palm, as if he had hurt her there. “I have to go.”

Halfway to Snowberry and Jean she turned and said vehemently, “You had better not get killed. Don’t let me hear that. You had better not get killed.”

On the way back down the lane in the dark Snowberry with his hands thrust deep in his pockets golfed a stone twenty or thirty feet with a left-footed swipe and asked, “So what happened to you?”

“We had a little fight,” Bryant said. “This has been some night.”

“Big night before a big day,” Snowberry said bitterly.

They walked on. Snowberry lined a rock off a postbox with another kick. He and Jean had not parted on the best of terms, either. “She said I was a spoiled brat,” he said. “Just out of shorts, and that I wasn’t going to give her the runaround. Then she turned on the waterworks.”

“She’s had some tough breaks,” Bryant commented.

“Ah, God,” he said. “Lewis warned me.” He bent over to discover why a stone he’d kicked hadn’t moved. “I shoulda known better. The thing is, she’s great.”

From somewhere around them a dog growled. They could see nothing but a few lights.

“I don’t need that right now,” Snowberry said. “I don’t need a dog bite.”

They waited, and then went quietly on. Bryant said, “What do you think about Bean?”

Snowberry made a dismissive noise that sounded like spitting. “Don’t you get it yet?” he said. “It’s all of us.” Down one of the turnoffs a horn blared and wavered. “Lewis is right. We’re not ready for this. There’s something big tomorrow now, and we’re not ready. We were taking that picture today and falling all over ourselves for downing that poor sorry bastard and it hit me: What are we ready for? What happens when we run into a shitstorm? On the run to Kassel they went through our formations like shit through a goose. I never even got my guns on them.”

“You sound like Lewis,” Bryant said. The conversion was not reassuring.

Snowberry snorted. “You should start thinking for yourself, and stop worrying about who sounds like who. How long has he been trying to tell us all this stuff?”

Bryant resisted the notion that Snowberry had reached a level of awareness that he had not. “I don’t see it that way,” he said stubbornly. “I don’t think we did so bad at Kassel.”

“Oh, yeah. Well. You didn’t even make it that far. Kayoed by the oxygen mask.”

“Don’t be a little asshole,” Bryant said. The “little” was a measure of how wounded he had been by Snowberry’s crack about the mask. “What good does it do to talk like that?”

“Look at this hand,” Snowberry said. Bryant couldn’t see it in the dark. “Christ.”

“Oh, God, let it be a milk run,” Snowberry added, minutes later, in a small voice. “Oh, let it be a milk run.”

He lay on his back and thought of his father.

It still seemed impossibly early. Somebody in the latrine was scrounging magazines from the trash drums. Lewis was where they had left him. Ball was asleep. Piacenti was playing solitaire, possibly; the cards were in unsteady rows beside him on the bed and Bryant could hear the faintest tapping as he laid one upon the other. Bryant had asked, on one of those interminable hunting trips when the plodding or the sun or the rain had finally angered him into courage, why he could never carry the gun, even when his father was obviously tired.

You can’t carry the gun, his father had answered. You’re a danger to yourself with a pointed stick.

The day he was to leave for the induction center, his mother had wrapped some pears and an apple together in a waxed-paper bundle for the train, and had urged him to say goodbye again to his father, waiting on the porch. His uncle Tom’s final words to him had been an admonition not to forget the following advice for getting by in the service: If you can move it, pick it up. If you can’t, paint it. If it moves by itself, salute it. Jeez, Bryant had thought. Here I am going away to something like this and that’s the best he can do? His father had been facing away from the house, gazing out over the clotheslines crowded with wash below.

“I should go if I’m going to be there by two-thirty,” Bryant had said, thinking, Turn around. Tell me I’m doing the right thing. Tell me you’re proud of all this. An inverted bright red shirt on the line waved, bye bye, bye bye.

“I’ve tried with you, Robert,” his father had said. “Your mother and I have tried. We hope you’re doing the right thing.”

He remembered lying on a cot in Florida with all those mosquitoes, thinking, You son of a bitch. If I ever get famous I’m gonna claim to be an orphan. He groaned aloud.

“Easy, trooper,” Lewis said from the opposite bunk. “Save your energy.”

He hadn’t been good enough for his father. He hadn’t been good enough to fly. He hadn’t been good enough to make bombardier, or navigator. He was an aerial gunner, and a flight engineer, and no one thought he could hit a barn at six feet and Tuliese didn’t trust him near the engines. He tried to calm himself with images of his own competence and grew frustrated. He tried to see himself again pouring fire into the hapless Messerschmitt they’d shot down, and saw instead the elusive lines of the others flashing through the formations, defeating easily the fastest manipulations of the turrets. He saw the cart-wheeling Lemon Drop, with that poor schmoe’s foot, and the Fortress from the Hamburg mission sailing into the hill. He lay under the sheets covered with sweat and dreaded the moment Lewis would notice his terror.

After a while he sat up. His feet hurt. His head pounded. The hut was darker and the sweat smell was stifling. Nearly everyone was awake. He could tell by the breathing. A little army of insomniacs, all listening, waiting, paying close attention to the night. He got off his bunk and started to walk and a voice said, “Watch the glasses, bub.” He headed for an upright shape on Lewis’s bunk. It turned out to be Snowberry.

Lewis was lying as he had been hours ago, hands behind his head. It seemed to Bryant a feat of some sort.

Snowberry whispered, “Somebody can’t sleep,” and Lewis grunted. Bryant slowly crouched beside the bed. They were quiet, and he felt like an intruder.

He became aware of another sound, a quiet and asthmatic sort of sniffing. Snowberry’s head was turned from both of them and he was crying.

Lewis wasn’t saying anything. Bryant was at a complete loss. He grimaced when he felt his own mouth trembling. Snowberry stopped for stretches, and swallowed, or made little tsking sounds with his tongue on his teeth. He did not rub his eyes or nose. Lewis seemed to be helping, though he didn’t move.

When Bryant’s knees hurt enough, he stood. Snowberry was still turned away. He crossed quietly to his bunk and climbed back into it, pulling the sheet up to his chin, remembering his grandmother in the doorway. He did not look back over at Snowberry and Lewis. He stared at the ceiling of the hut, which rippled in the darkness. He thought, tomorrow is just another mission, and, you need to sleep, and he closed his eyes to the ripples and to calm himself thought of Audie sitting blind and imperturbable in the Plexiglas nose while Ciervanski took her picture.

Someone hit the lights and he came out of what seemed a daze thinking something was wrong. He squinted and opened his eyes to slits and his watch said 1:15 a.m. All around him men were groaning and cursing. Snowberry was sitting upright already, blinking painfully. Lewis said, “Oh my God,” at the extent of his fatigue and the inhumanity of the hour.

With a refined touch of cruelty the orderly on wake-up duty read the bomb group’s timetable instead of repeating up-and-at-’em exhortations: breakfast, 0200; briefing, 0300; stations, 0515; alert, 0530; taxi, 0540; takeoff, 0550. “0550, gentlemen,” he repeated. “Let’s go.” He wasn’t going. He would be filling out forms and loafing around the day room for the next twelve hours while they did God knew what. Men swung without looking when he shook their covers, and near the door a gunner stood and shoved him with such force he cleared a bed and landed on his back. He lay stunned and winded with his arms and legs in the air like a baby’s. His breath returned with the sounds a long-distance runner makes.

“Hey,” he said, scrambling to his feet, alert for a general uprising. “Hey.” He was used to verbal abuse, and his voice registered his acute sense of the unfairness of physical abuse. He negotiated his way to the door and turned, a hand on the frame. “Stay in bed. See if I care. I hope they break all of you.” He turned off the lights and left, affecting triumph, but everyone was up.

They dressed. Bryant had saved for this mission a fresh pair of long underwear. The idea was to have something to absorb the pre-takeoff sweat before reaching altitude and the paralyzing cold. The hope was that the wait before takeoff would be short, to minimize the soaking the underwear had to absorb.

Bean was powdering his feet. Bryant borrowed some of the powder without asking. He pulled on his beat-up GI shoes. That was the prevailing wisdom: in case of hard luck, something comfortable enough to walk miles in, and dirty enough not to arouse suspicion.

Bean and Lewis, Snowberry and Ball were all without discussion putting on their best Class A uniforms — olive drab, pressed and folded wool — beneath their flying suits. Ball carefully straightened a leg and his pants fell as if new, creaseless, to the shoetops. Bean was straightening his cuffs with a special slow care. Even Lewis was working on his tie, struggling slightly with the knot: none of them held any hope that this would be a normal mission, and they were not going to be killed or captured in the worn General Issue they usually wore.

At breakfast the coffee kept coming, and was served in thick white mugs that were pleasing to handle and drink from. Every cook in the squadron was on duty, and they were asking the men in line how each wanted his eggs done. There was ham and corned beef hash and bread and a little butter. They sat before their trays staring at the excess in wonder and fear. The place was packed with crews, including guys they recognized who had to have arrived within the last week, some of whom looked younger than Snowberry. Bryant thought: Suppose we’re in formation next to some of these guys?

Ball was evidently thinking the same thing. He said, “Man, if we’re incompetent, what does that make them?”

Everyone was talking about Berlin. Bryant was able to eat all of his hash and none of the eggs. Beside him Lewis and Snowberry ate without speaking. Bean sat before his plate and did not move. Piacenti drank three mugs of coffee and went back for more.

In the briefing room there were not enough seats, and men were leaning against the walls. One young staff sergeant who looked as if he were wearing his father’s jacket sat on the floor next to the door, his eyes half closed and his mouth ajar. The extra people crowded toward the front, peering closely at the sheet covering the mission board in an attempt to see through it.

“The pulley,” Snowberry said. They were squeezed into the second row. The pulley was near the top. All the yarn had been used. They looked at the bare metal spindle with the hope there had been some mistake. “Christ, where’re they sending us?” Lewis asked. “Arabia?”

It took some time to get everyone quiet enough to begin. “I know a guy,” Lewis said wistfully, “flew fifty missions, two whole tours, and never fired a shot.”

The Ops captain stepped up to the sheet. He put a hand on it and looked at them.

“Can you imagine milking something like this?” Snowberry said under his breath. If they could have killed the Ops captain at that moment, they would have.

The sheet was pulled back. The red yarn went all the way through Germany nearly to the Austrian border.

The room was in total shock. The Ops captain who’d pulled the sheet stood quietly beside it, hands clasped, and leaned forward and gazed at it again, as if wondering if the silence were due to an empty board.

The room exploded. There were protests and loud exclamations. One group was booing. Everyone was shouting questions. Bryant sat silently and thought, What idiot dreamed this up? Lewis said clearly through the noise, “Look at the map. Their entire fighter strength has to be within eighty-five miles of that course. How many fucking fighters do you think that is?”

Snowberry was white. “How can we go that far without fighter escort?” he asked.

It took five minutes to calm everyone down. The briefing continued.

“Schweinfurt,” Snowberry said. “I’ve never heard of it.”

A major whom Bryant hadn’t seen before centered himself beside the screen, eclipsing the captain. “The primary targets,” he said, lowering his volume as the crews quieted, “are the three major ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt.”

Bryant and Bean looked at one another. What was next? Zipper factories?

“Bomber Command tells us that this is the most important target ever attacked by aircraft. This is the big deal, gentlemen, as you can see.”

He pointed to the board, as if there were something further to emphasize. “Now this is a revolutionary way of employing the strategic bomber, and you men are the first to be a part of it; we will mount a sustained attack against one especially vital industry, rather than spreading ourselves thin over a number of targets. Schweinfurt is what we call a bottleneck target, gentlemen. Nazi fighters — and a whole hell of a lot of other things in Germany — run on ball bearings. Hundreds of ball bearings, thousands in one plane alone. Seventy-six percent of those ball bearings, seventy-six percent of all the bearings in Germany, come from Schweinfurt. Get Schweinfurt and you get seventy-six percent of the bearings that make the Focke Wulfs and Messerschmitts go. I suspect that that is an item of personal interest to you men.”

“Ha, ha,” someone said from the back of the room.

The major continued.

“There will be, simultaneously, a mission against the Messerschmitt factory at Regensburg.” He pointed.

“Probably the second most important target ever attacked,” Piacenti whispered.

“The second most important target ever attacked by aircraft,” the major said. A sheet was pulled back from a second smaller board and the Regensburg mission was outlined. The men stared. The number of planes now involved in this joint mission was staggering.

“The Messerschmitt factory produces some three hundred fighters a month, a full thirty percent of the total. The idea, gentlemen, is to break the Luftwaffe fighter arm. To break it for you men, and to break it in preparation for the planned invasion of Europe.” He paused. “I don’t think I’m giving too much away to tell you men that,” he said.

“Couldn’t we just keep going after airfields, like Le Bourget?” Piacenti asked quietly.

The screen came down. They were shown photo blow-ups. They were given details of the three targets. The impossible German names for the factories they shortened to KGF, VKF 1, and VKF 2. They learned that Kugel meant spherical in German.

They felt worse receiving elaborate explanations. It seemed un-military and un-Army for their commanding officers to be so willing to confide in them. They did not expect to know precisely why they went on missions. There was not going to be a vote. They nursed the possibility that they went on some of the missions because somebody somewhere simply felt like sending them. The major spoke again of the critical concentration of ball bearings.

“We got ’em by the colones,” Piacenti said.

“Have you ever heard such dog shit in all your life?” Lewis said. “After we do this, all the machines stop. Germany surrenders.”

But they were incompletely focused on the importance of the targets. What most interested them was the length of yarn line. Their fighter escort range, drawn in an arc through the Netherlands with a blue pen, covered a forlorn fifth of the distance.

The line-up of formations and squadron positions was still concealed. It made a great deal of difference in the defensive boxes whether they were in the center, or on the leading or trailing edges, where the heaviest casualties were.

The crews were waiting for that unveiling. They had quieted and sat in orderly rows and everyone behind Bryant looked too young. The crew of Murder, Inc. had that stenciled over their left front pockets. Bryant was reminded of a school assembly.

One of the Murder, Inc. gunners, a skinny Polish guy named Skink or Strink or something like that, caught Bryant’s eyes with his own. “It just goes to show you,” he said, across the intervening row, “how important the little ball bearing is to our mechanized world.”

Bryant stared at him a moment longer, and turned back around.

“Who is that guy?” Lewis asked.

“Now we’ll talk about the opposition,” the major said.

He pointed to concentrations of black X’s — their symbols for German airfields — lining the yarn route, little visible manifestations of bad news. “Men, we’re going to be straight with you. There’s no hiding the fact that these raids are going to be hazardous.”

“That’s why you’re going to be straight with us,” Snowberry said audibly and bitterly.

“Mission planners have been able, as you can see, to choose routes avoiding the worst of the flak areas, and both targets have never been attacked before, so they’re believed to be lightly defended.” He indicated the blank spaces at the bottom of the map surrounding Regensburg and Schweinfurt. “In addition, Bomber Command has planned diversionary raids on German airfields at Bryas, Lille, and Poix, and the railway yards at Dunkirk and Calais. We’ve never even flown this far into Germany before, so they’re obviously going to be surprised.” His pointer stopped and tapped along the yarn up near the Dutch border. “The problem is that fighters are obviously going to be the danger of the day. I’m not going to mince words. We’re going to be flying through the most heavily defended sectors of the German Air Defense and deep into their homeland.”

“Oh, mince, mince,” someone said.

“And the length of the mission prevents any elaborate zigzagging or avoidance of these areas.”

“Some fucking colonel thought this one up,” Lewis breathed. “Some fucking desk-bound colonel of a bastard.”

“The Regensburg force is not coming back. They are going on to temporary airfields in North Africa. We, on the other hand, are going to turn around, and come back through those same defenses.” The crews were noisy with anxiety again. “The expectation is,” the major said, getting louder, “that the Regensburg people, going through before us, will catch most of it going in. And that we’ll catch all of it going out.”

The men sat. This was worse than they could have imagined. Bryant absorbed the information that followed with less than perfect concentration.

“We’ll be routed through that part of the German fighter belt with the greatest density of units, all capable of immediate or near-immediate response.” Snowberry bit his lip and winced. The sound carried. “Now the German units likely to come into action first will be the Gruppen of Jagdeschwader 1 and JG 26 stationed in Holland and northern France. There’s also evidence of the recent movement of units into this area—JG 2 and JG 11. There’s further evidence that JG 3 was pulled recently from the Russian front. We haven’t been able to locate it.” Bryant swept his hair back with both hands, both palms. “Now we should expect trouble from these airfields: Woensdrecht. München-Gladbach. Deelen. Leeuwarden, and Schiphol. We believe they won’t be at full strength, and we believe they won’t be well coordinated. They’ll use up valuable flying time, besides, trying to establish a height advantage and an up-sun position for attack. Gunners should be ready for the head-on stuff, and the stuff out of the sun. And pilots remember: they always look for the group with the loosest formation. They look for the raggedy-ass guys. You fly like assholes and they’ll shoot you a few more.”

He paused, and a few people coughed. “The toughest opposition should be between here and here — the coast and a point halfway to the target. After that, you should run into only a few twin-engined jobs, night fighters pressed into day work. It’s hoped that the interior will be largely empty of fighters.”

Bryant and Lewis looked at one another in amazement.

“Sir?” someone asked. “Doesn’t anybody know?”

“Intelligence is sketchy on that score,” the major said. “All we have is our best guess.”

Lewis was in the blackest despair. “Shithouse mouse,” he said. “Look at that line. You know how many Gruppen that has to be? Every Kraut in the West has to have a shot at us. We’re going to fly over everyone but the Red Baron.”

“Now there’s plenty of fighter support, as far as that goes,” the major said. “Eight Spitfire squadrons from the RAF will take us as far as Antwerp and then turn us over to two P-47 groups that’ll take us all the way to Eupen.”

“All that way,” Lewis muttered. “Isn’t that a big deal.”

“They’ll pick us up around Eupen on the return. Questions?”

“What’re you worried about?” Piacenti whispered to Lewis. “We get fighter escort the whole way. Ours all the way to Eupen and theirs all the rest of the way.” Lewis snorted.

The room was quiet. The entire row of gunners ahead of Bryant had their arms crossed, and their heads sunk down into the fur collars of their jackets.

The major looked through his notes. “Because of the importance of the strike, we’ve ordered a maximum effort. That means whatever individual extra planes are available will be added to existing formations whenever possible. The availability status for the 1st Bombardment Wing, including our group, is 238 Forts. We’re planning on sending 231 of those.” The crews gave a surprised “whoa!” “And using the other seven as ‘air spares’ to replace those aircraft forced to turn back early on with mechanical problems.”

The formation and squadron position charts were then unveiled. There was a roar of disapproval. Their group was in the lead low position of the formation, which meant the lowest part of the front of the giant arrowhead the twelve groups and 231 planes would form in the sky. Lead low and lead high, because of the head-on nature of the German interceptor strategies, were the coffin corners.

The crews gradually stopped making noise and sank into a profound depression. “As you can see, we drew a hard ride,” the major said. He was clearly frustrated with the atmosphere. He continued with the route briefing, taking it in stages: from point A to point B, there were these things to consider. “Now from point E to point F,” he said, “the force—”

“Them that’s left,” Skrink or Strink said behind Bryant.

A different weather officer took over, poor Stormy left in the wings, even more useless than usual. Whether he was on someone’s shit list or this was just standard operating procedure for such a big mission, they didn’t know.

“You guys’ll recognize this,” the new officer said, pointing to the weather chart. “A low pressure system went through Denmark last night and is heading north and east up the Baltic. An associated cold front is swinging eastward right across the map, north to south. That’s why it’s so foggy right now.”

He hit the lights from a switch near the front and a projector beamed upon a screen to the left an oversimplified diagram of cumulus clouds piled layer upon layer. There were conflicting wind arrows with velocity figures aimed at one another and a series of temperature and visibility estimates at all possible flying altitudes. Hirsch scribbled everything down on a little white pad, though later they’d be picking up mimeographed summaries of all of this, and it looked less than helpful to begin with.

They were told that this mission would take place exactly one year after the first 8th Bomber Command mission, when twelve B-17’s had made the run to a marshaling yard at Rouen. The information was intended to boost morale. The men clapped glumly.

They were given some final instructions: Fly their formations like it was a Presidential Review. Conserve ammo. Fill holes that appear in the formations as quickly as possible. Keep your guns loaded and stay alert all the way back — remember the Ju88’s. The major finished up with a joke about Nazis slipping and sliding in droves for days after this on scattered ball bearings. Ball smiled. Lewis said, “That’s the Nazis, boy. Kings of comedy.”

They were given a final exhortation: If they were successful, what they had done would significantly shorten the war. The briefing ended.

Bryant fell in behind Gabriel filing out. Gabriel touched with his finger the small airplane representing their squadron on the squadron position chart, and traced a path closer to the defensive box of the others, like a small boy attempting voodoo. They were on the far end of the low group, a position they could safely term the worst draw of the worst draw. Their major hope, as far as Bryant understood it, was to minimize vulnerability by making sure the planes ahead of them and in the center maintained a tight formation. If the formation strung out, they would be left fat and inviting and alone on the extreme edge of the “wheel,” overworking their engines to hold position with each formation turn of two or three degrees.

Gabriel grabbed a guy ahead of him Bryant recognized as the pilot of Lucky Me! and warned him about dragging his ass this time. “You don’t stay tight, I’m gonna go around you,” he said. “You remember that.”

They filed by Stormy at the door and turned their watches over to him. Hirsch kept his and a spare besides. Stormy was visibly suffering. They understood he hurt but found it difficult, considering their situation, to generate major league sympathy. Snowberry gave him a tight smile and pumped his hand.

“I wish I could go instead of you guys,” Stormy said.

“I’m with you,” Snowberry said. Ball gave Stormy the last watch and he slipped it into an open spot on his arm, and ran his forefinger from wrist to elbow over watchbands.

“Boy, if we go down, Stormy’s rich,” Ball murmured, eyeing the arm over his shoulder.

“What’re you, kidding?” Hirsch said. “Some of those watches, I think they came out of cereal boxes.”

They picked up their exterior flight clothing, parachutes, and oxygen masks. They went to the armament shops to be issued their fifty-caliber guns. They looked their individual guns over with agitation, some breaking them down right there and reassembling them. Any jams or sticking, anything less than smooth operation, was cause for bitter arguments with the armorers. Bryant checked his on the canvas engine tarps the line crews had left on the grass beside the hardstand, remembering Favale and the Texas sun at Harlingen. There were fights of near-riot intensity over ammunition: everyone wanted as much as possible, to hell with conservation, and some crews were stealing from the next plane over if the other crew was late arriving. There were extra supplies coming by truck, they were assured, and it was up to the individual captains to decide how much extra weight to take on. Gabriel decided by one-man committee on ten thousand rounds per station, which they loaded in huge wooden boxes all over the plane, like haphazard cargo. Bryant had expected Lewis to argue passionately for limitless ammo, but he had not.

There was no point, he explained, when Bryant asked about it. They were watching the crew of the plane next to them skirmish with another crew further down the flight line over a box of ammo left under the tail. Someone was brandishing a piece of cable like a whip and it snapped and cracked authentically. The plane they were fighting beneath, it occurred to Bryant, was startling and incontrovertible proof of a maximum effort: a real lemon that had aborted every mission flown so far, and had never dropped bombs on its target. It had been renamed No Way. They had assumed before it had appeared next to them looking shaky and ready to go that it was to be cannibalized for spare parts.

“We got the 2,780 blues,” Lewis said. He had apparently not finished with the topic of extra ammo; 2,780 was the number of gallons of fuel the B-17 held. “We got the fuel. We got the bombs. We got all this ammunition, we got the ten of us. Takeoff in that situation is a real interesting proposition. It’s like I strap twenty-seven gallons of fuel to your ass, fill your pockets with lead sinkers, and ask you to jump that fence.”

They watched Ball and Piacenti heft a box into the waist.

“No, I’m not gonna argue for more weight,” Lewis said. There was a crash from within and Piacenti said, “Lift it! Lift it, for Chrissakes!”

“Imagine all the bullets that are going to Schweinfurt?” Bryant said.

“I know.” Lewis headed for the hatch near the tail. “We may not hit any fighters, but we sure might knock a few cows silly.”

According to Hirsch it was coming up on 5:15 a.m. Bryant climbed aboard and went through the flight engineer’s panel with Tuliese, and then ran through his checks with Gabriel and Cooper. Finally there was nothing more to check, and Tuliese turned the plane reluctantly over to them and climbed out. Bryant could see him gazing back at Paper Doll like someone who’d left family heirlooms in the hands of vandals.

Ball and Lewis were up beside him, for no reason, it seemed, before going back to their stations. Ball hesitated at the catwalk over the bomb bay, waved, and held a thumbs-up signal. “I guess it’s like it’s in the hands of God, now,” he called.

“God didn’t pick Schweinfurt,” Lewis said. Ball stopped halfway across the catwalk and knitted his brows to indicate he hadn’t heard, and then his face brightened and he pretended he had, and he nodded.

“Idiot,” Lewis muttered. He shook Bryant’s hand. He crossed the catwalk to the radio room and shook Bean’s hand. Bean removed his headphones for the occasion but Lewis didn’t say anything, and disappeared through the door to the waist.

Bryant climbed into his turret sling for a quick test and raised his head into the Plexiglas. The black guns and the glass encased him like a pickle in a jar. He connected his interphone. Cooper was already checking the stations over it, and he gazed ahead at all the dark bustle. The clouds were surprisingly thick and low; it was like being in a vast room. He noticed without enjoyment the beauty of the lights of the trucks and the tower spindling out and intersecting, and the arrayed red and green lights of a runway full of B-17’s.

Willis Eddy seemed to be filing or sawing something up in the nose, the sound coming rhythmically over the interphone as a background to his voice. “Anything’s better than a month of going after U-boat pens,” he said. “The way I figure it. Solid concrete.”

“What are you doing?” Gabriel asked him. “What’s that noise?”

The noise stopped.

“0530,” Hirsch announced.

The ceiling had lowered still more. North of the tower the clouds were dropping and were now so low that the term “ceiling” seemed a little foolish.

“This is fog,” Eddy called from the bombardier’s perch. “What’re they talking about, no fog?”

“Stormy,” Bryant lamented. “What happened?”

“It’s always the weather nobody figures on,” Gabriel said. The lights all around them were reflecting in carnival-like patterns on the cloud wall above. The grayness drifted in to the point of easing No Way into a shadowy uncertainty beside them.

“We can get up in this,” Cooper said. “But I hate to think about assembly.”

“We try to assemble in this,” Lewis said from back in the tail, “we’re gonna have a few unplanned mergers.”

“It just came over,” Gabriel said. “We wait.”

They piled out and sat or lay around the hardstand on excess equipment. Bryant sat on a coil of rope. Snowberry sat on a squat twelve-gallon drum of hydraulic fluid. Ball settled in Indian style against an empty fifty-caliber box and was eating his candy. Piacenti wagged a finger and warned him he’d wish he had it later.

Audie appeared out of the fog, nosing her way over. Bryant said, “Hey, Audie, where you been?” and the dog’s tail wagged and she padded gingerly over to him. She lay down to wait with them, her muzzle tucked between her front paws. Bryant gave her one of his Baby Ruths. She chewed exaggeratedly, the caramel sticking to her molars.

Bean was down on his hands and knees as though he had lost something or was studying the surface of the hardstand. He threw up, bracing himself with his hands spread wide, and shuddering, and then made an effort to clean it up.

“National League,” Snowberry said. His hands were together between his knees and he was looking out toward Bryant. “Goobers Bratcher. Chops Broskie. Played for the Cards and Braves. Skeeter Scalzi. The Giants. Bunions Zeider. Spinach Melillo, Inky Strange. Podgie Weihe. Yam Yaryan.”

Bean rose and worked his way unsteadily down to the nose. He sat by himself.

“I think Bean asked that girl to marry him,” Piacenti theorized.

Lewis was flicking small stones into the mess Bean had made. “That’s one way to solve your problems. How do you know that?” They all gazed at Bean, a small Buddha out in the fog under the nose, crosslegged in his heavy jacket.

“He showed me. He gave her a ring I think he got at Woolworth’s. Probably turn her whole arm green.”

“Jeez,” Ball said, wrapping the end of his Oh Henry! and repocketing it. “Married. Jeez.”

They were silent. Someone slammed a hatch door violently way off in the fog.

“American League,” Snowberry said. “Inch Gleich. Bootnose Hoffman. Whoops Creeden. Boob McNair. Ping Bodie.”

“Ping Bodie,” Lewis said. “I remember Ping Bodie. Somebody once asked him what it was like rooming with Babe Ruth. He said, ‘I don’t room with Babe Ruth. I room with his suitcase.’ Ping Bodie.”

Bryant gave Audie another pat and got up and went over to Bean. He sat beside him and Bean nodded and rubbed an eye with the back of his hand. Bryant wondered whether or not to congratulate him. Bean was looking out into the fog, concentrating on something. “Habe,” he said. “Ich habe ein … injury,” he finally added. “I don’t remember the word for injury.”

“How you doing?” Bryant asked. “You all right?”

“Oh, I’m okay,” Bean said. He sounded tired and sad. “I just hate this waiting.”

“It stinks,” Bryant agreed. “You know what Lewis is always saying — as long as it keeps happening quickly.”

Bean seemed further discouraged and Bryant regretted bringing Lewis up.

“You know, in some way, this is just worse odds,” Bean said. “We’re all gonna die, you know, someday, and anything could happen. This is just worse odds.”

“That’s a good way of thinking about it,” Bryant said quietly.

“Except it doesn’t help,” Bean said.

“I have some extra candy,” Bryant said, although he didn’t. “Want some?”

Bean shook his head. “You know, I don’t really think about getting killed,” he said. “I’m scared of getting hurt. I can imagine disappearing, or not being around anymore. But I don’t want to feel it. Imagine how some of those guys felt?”

“A lot of guys say that,” Bryant murmured. “Me, I worry about dying, too.”

“The one thing I can’t figure,” Bean said, “through all of this, is why Lewis signed up to go through it again. Even Lewis.”

Bryant thought about it. A jeep swept by, the mist soupy before its headlights. “He told me once he’d rather listen to us idiots talk about the war than the idiots back home,” he offered. “So I guess he wasn’t happy there.” It sounded obvious and lame.

“One night he had this horrible dream,” Bean said. “You know, like Snowberry has. We were alone in the hut, sacked out early. I woke him up. I asked him then. He said, ‘Harold, it’s a shithouse bind. You become a real American by fighting in another country.’ Then he tried to go back to sleep.”

“What’d he say after that?” Bryant said. “Was that it?”

“I said, ‘So then what?’” Bean continued. “And he said, ‘So then you lose that America.’”

Bryant looked back over his shoulder at Lewis. He was a ghostly form in the fog, part of the equipment he leaned against.

“Gabriel’s come out,” he said. “Something may be up.” He stood.

“Let me know,” Bean said. He continued to look off into the grayness. It was lightening, and closer to the ground visibility was better.

Back with the group Gabriel and Hirsch had more news. “It’s postponed again,” Gabriel said. “But we’re still on station.”

“What time is it?” Lewis asked.

“After six,” Hirsch said. He returned to the plane with Gabriel. Tuliese had come back and was poking distractedly at the number four engine from below.

Lewis resumed what he had evidently been talking about. “They want to pull off a big one. They need to pull off a big one. Put up or shut up time. I think it’s like they been comparing the losses to the accomplishments and we’re not doing so good. Maybe this whole idea of bombing during the day is hanging on this.”

“Maybe it should,” Snowberry said.

“Maybe. I myself think the RAF have got it knocked, going at night. Everyone bombs a field and comes home happy.”

“It’s a helluva way to run a war, this daytime stuff,” Piacenti said. “Shoot your way in, shoot your way out.”

“That’s the idea of the Fort to begin with.” Lewis tapped his head ironically. “All it is is a fat-assed bird with a lot of guns all over it. Put all the guns together. That’s the idea. Who needs fighter help?”

“Yeah,” Snowberry said. “Who needs fighter help?”

“It’s a shitty idea,” Lewis said. “But they want to make it work. Someone wants to make it work. You telling me they wouldn’t have come up with a long-range fighter by now if they had wanted to?”

They thought glumly about the Air Corps’ neglect on that score. Snowberry was wearing his World’s Fair button.

“This is Charge of the Light Brigade stuff, is what this is,” Lewis added.

“Bean’s doing German up there,” Snowberry said. “I can hear him.”

Lewis snorted. “At this point I just want to hit the ground alive. Let’s start from there, and worry about sprechen sie later.”

Tuliese had a panel off and was fiddling. They listened to the click-click-click of his spanner wrench. “They should cancel,” Lewis said. “They have to cancel. The Regensburg people have to be running out of time. They have to get to Africa in daylight. I can’t see how they can send us up in this. We haven’t exactly lived and breathed instrument flying.”

Bryant reflected on the relative laxity of the base and Lewis’s anger at their free time and the base CO, the car salesman from Pocatello. He understood this was what Lewis’s anger had meant. They were not ready for this. He hoped the car salesman from Pocatello understood that and passed the information along. They sat, and waited. Ball finished the rest of his candy. Bean lay on his back under the nose like someone wishing to be run over. The darkness was completely gone now, and from moment to moment the clouds inched a little higher in an irritating meteorological tease.

There was another delay, to 0715. And then, while Bryant was urinating off behind some oil drums, Piacenti tapped his arm and told him of another delay, of nearly three and a half hours.

Lewis was aghast when he got back to the plane, and tried to get Gabriel to listen to him. “Three and a half hours?” he was saying. “What about the Regensburg force? They couldn’t be waiting that long.”

“I don’t know,” Gabriel finally snapped. “Who are you, Bomber Command? Maybe they are waiting. Maybe they’re scrubbed and we’re not.”

“Sir, isn’t there someone we could ask?” Lewis pleaded. “Sir, do you understand? If they went off, then the Germans can catch them and rearm and refuel for us. Sir, they can go after us both with everything they’ve got.”

“Peeters, shut up,” Gabriel said. “You’re gonna have everybody shitting their pants before we even take off.”

Lewis stepped back and looked at him. “Yes sir, thank you sir,” he said. He sat down and put his hand in Bean’s old vomit. “I’ll have more faith in the Army, sir.”

Gabriel shook his head and walked away from him, standing with arms folded where Bean was lying. Bryant said to Lewis, “That’s the worst possible case you’re talking about. Things aren’t that bad.”

“I’m beginning to catch on,” Lewis said. His eyes were glittering. “I’m the one who gets to figure this all out, and then no one gets to listen.”

They remained where they were. It was hot. Everything was ready and there was nothing to do. They hated the Army, hated the mission, hated the wait. At eleven o’clock Lewis announced they had now been up nearly ten fucking hours and they hadn’t started the mission yet. They had been at the planes for almost six hours. No one around Bryant had spoken for two hours. Bryant was talking to himself in discrete little snippets of conversation. He had no idea how long he could wait like this, but he did know he was approaching some sort of limit.

The sky had cleared a good deal. They were perhaps waiting now for the more western bases to clear. No one mentioned the Regensburg force, and there were no official announcements on the subject. Most of their gear was strewn around them. A jeep arrived, and an officer climbed out and conferred off to the side with Gabriel. When they parted Gabriel, with a look of regret, waved them into the plane, and they stood and wrenched on their outer layers while the jeep tooled off. They climbed in in small groups, officers near the nose, gunners and radio operator through the waist. Bryant was the last aboard.

He sat on his sling and swayed like the boy on Snowberry’s swing. The air was cooler. His neck prickled. The turret retained its factory smell of gasoline and leather and steel. It was too recently off the assembly line to have lost it, he understood, and it struck him how little time had been involved in all of this — sign up, show up, train, arrive in England, end up here, doing this. He shook himself, frightened all over again. While the first B-17’s of the flight line ran up their engines, turning over the huge Wright Cyclones with a roar, he ran through his training manual’s profile of the perfect gunner, reciting silently from memory: the perfect aerial gunner, when he was six, his father gave him a.22 and taught him to shoot it at a target. At nine, he was ranging the hills and woods near his home potting squirrels until the pointing of his rifle was as natural to him as the pointing of his finger. At twelve, he got his first shotgun and went quail hunting, duck hunting, grouse hunting, and learned the principle of leading a moving target. He learned instinctively that you do not fire at a moving target, since it will no longer be where it was, but ahead of it, and learned too that his gun is a deadly weapon, to be respected and cared for. When such a boy enters the Air Corps, he has a whole background of aerial gunnery in him before he starts, and he has only to learn the mechanism of the new weapon, and the principles of shooting down the enemy airplanes are exactly the same as those of shooting a duck. Such a boy, with such a background, makes the ideal aerial gunner.

He closed his eyes. His throat seemed constricted and he wondered if he was getting the mumps. He visualized Messerschmitts as tow targets, Focke Wulfs as fragile and static ducks.

A bird stood on the canopy of the dorsal gunner in No Way, to his right, feathering wingtip feathers slightly in the gathering slipstream from the plane’s engines. Bryant thought, This must be the way it is before a stupid attack, when you know it’s going to fail and it can’t help but fail but you can’t change it or run away; you can only be a part of it, and help it to fail.

Over on No Way the dorsal gunner was rotating his turret and elevating his guns to dislodge the bird, which turned slowly and imperturbably with the rotating canopy, the black fifty-caliber barrels flanking it in a paradox of power and impotence.

No Way went off ahead of them, the huge tail swinging around like a monstrous and slow weathervane. Bryant could see on the small blurred face of the tail gunner his irritation at the danger and probable stupidity of all this. He swiveled his guns at Paper Doll angrily, like the butt of a joke, a man in a tiny car fitted with towering and foolish fins.

Bryant watched them go off tail-heavy and wallowing, only slowly achieving any sort of grace, and then looked on blankly as his own ship began the rush forward. The end of the paved strip was happily vague in the fog but he could feel when they had been on earth too long, and started counting, and it seemed far too late when he felt the bump and lift and sway of Paper Doll finally letting go and straining upward. The wings tilted and wobbled under the weight and the trees marking the end of the base appeared and rolled by beneath, and that gave way to undifferentiated gray, and then they were climbing and banking to the right, although he couldn’t be sure. No one spoke. All four engines sounded good. He watched for lights, for the black shapes of other Forts, though by then it would be too late. The engines’ pitch seemed changed and enclosed, a roar in a bathtub. The gray began to thin and strand and suddenly they were out and into a brilliant blue, the sun flooding across his canopy and the ship’s upper surfaces, and all around him was the awesome boys’ war spectacle of the entire group’s B-17’s rising from the cloud blanket, like a horizon of magically appearing good guys, all sweeping into the clear and cold sunlight.

They were to form up as a squadron seven miles north of the field. The earliest planes to arrive began circling at an agreed-upon altitude and subsequent arrivals formed into their three-plane vees and slipped into place to join the slow wait. With the twelve-plane squadron finally assembled, they began climbing to the south to find the larger group. Hirsch announced they were eleven minutes late.

The larger group was not where it was supposed to be. Bryant circled his glass dome, scanning the blue and finding nothing. Gabriel asked Hirsch peevishly if they were where they were supposed to be, and Hirsch, though he wasn’t lead navigator, confirmed it testily. After the pre-takeoff wait the delay was particularly irritating.

They crisscrossed a good bit of England searching. With every change of direction there were groans over the interphone. Willis Eddy every so often asked Hirsch to identify various towns. Hirsch pointed out Peterborough and Oxford, and then stopped answering. A pond or lake below was a luminous light blue. Bryant imagined Robin seeing these colors, and missed her. Eddy speculated on the interphone as to the identities of subsequent villages until Gabriel told him to pickle it, and Cooper asked for some semblance of interphone discipline.

With the rest of their squadron they circled, scanning the horizon for the larger group.

“What’s a silage?” Willis Eddy asked. His voice in Bryant’s ear suggested a casual curiosity that made Bryant wish Eddy would lose consciousness until the bomb run. He lifted his earpiece away and cleaned an ear with his little finger, his glove under his arm, and resettled the earpiece.

“A what?” Gabriel was saying.

“A silage,” Eddy said. The formation banked and they banked with it. The horizon lifted and swung and their starboard wing rose to the light. “S-I–L-A-G-E. Like on a farm.”

“Jesus Christ,” Gabriel said.

It’s where they keep the animals at night,” Lewis called in. “What’s going on up there?”

“I thought that was a barn,” Eddy murmured.

“Eddy, the next thing I hear out of you better have to do with the bomb run,” Gabriel said. “You keep interphone discipline like Gracie Allen.”

“Jeez Louise,” Eddy said. The interphone was silent.

No Way was not far off their port wingtip. Their dorsal gunner rotated slowly, as if satisfying himself the bird was gone. Bryant remembered the potato farms in Barrington he’d been taken to see, a Fourth of July he’d spent in Tiverton, hot and dusty and enjoying a sticky strawberry soda while a parade went by. Small parade by Providence standards, with dogs sprinting along the route barking at the bands. A barnstormer had been promised in a local field and had indeed shown up, but had spent all of Bryant’s visit tinkering with an engine that seemed disappointingly small and ill-kept. Mother of Jesus, the barnstormer kept saying in exasperation. Afterwards Bryant’s father had sardonically commented on the miracle of the airplane, although his uncle Tom had been more enthusiastic later when Bryant had reported on the trip. The barnstormer’s machine had resembled the biplane he’d seen disintegrate as a small child and he’d come away impressed with the flying machine as an amazingly complex assemblage of interdependent elements, all capable of failure. That any of them flew and returned their pilots to earth safely he found a notion to marvel at. He’d started studying engines not long after that. He hadn’t been very good—“Just watch,” he remembered his father saying more than once, like Favale, like Tuliese — but he had been dogged.

Despite the radio silence imposed on him, Eddy was the first to call in the larger formation of Fortresses, turning like slow birds off to the north at an unexpectedly high altitude. They climbed to rendezvous, and in a group slipped into their position as lead low squadron.

There was something matter-of-fact about the spectacle, having to do with the bland impossibility of the sheer numbers of planes. Above and behind him B-17’s extended into the sky with the dazzling and fraudulent abundance of replicating images in facing mirrors.

He could see Bean amidships peering upward out of the radio operator’s oval window. Bean saw him and waved and pointed. He realized with awe that the bomber stream extended farther back than they could see.

“I guess the theory is, the Germans just don’t have this many cannon shells,” Lewis said finally, from the tail.

Bryant adjusted his mask and thought again, unhappily, about the brevity of his training — who was to replace who as formations of this size got thinned out or broke down? Did anybody really know? — and swiveled his turret to face forward. His mask was wet. His toes were ominously cold. It was August. In September of the previous year he had first set foot in an airplane of any kind.

He swayed on his sling, squeezing his oxygen hose every so often as a hedge against ice buildup. He felt the cold through the sheepskin and felt the hollowness and fragility of the airplane carrying them. He thought of Lewis, whispering to Snowberry during the night in an effort to calm him, the words frightening Bryant, at least, still more. All we have is that thin metal can. We can’t run and we can’t hide. We just do our job and do right by our buddies and tighten up our ass and pull our knees in and hope for the best.

The leading aircraft of the 231-plane formation left the English coast at a little promontory of Suffolk that Hirsch identified in passing as Orford Ness. Snowberry repeated the name with distaste from the ball turret below and then was silent. They were over water at 1:17, just about two hours after takeoff. Hirsch called it in. Bryant thought of Stormy with all those watches. They left landfall at 14,000 feet and climbing, in a bomber stream sixty miles long and drawing closer together. The sea crossing was scheduled to take thirty-five minutes.

“Where’s Der Bingle?” Lewis asked about halfway across. “Don’t we get Der Bingle anymore?”

There was no answer from the ball.

“Oxygen check,” Cooper said. “Ball turret?”

“Ball turret,” Snowberry said. “Okay.”

Cooper reeled through the others, Bryant included. They rode on grimly. Bryant switched off his interphone and sang to himself. Around him the force was closing up. He could see the smoke and the shuddering from the planes to his right as they tested their guns. The racketing started on their ship and he shook in his sling when the ball and waist guns let go. He charged and cleared his own, aimed off into space, and squeezed the triggers, the roar shaking him and the tracer lines corkscrewing down and away. The waist and tail were firing, he could feel. Eddy and Hirsch up front on their single fifties. He smelled the cordite through the mask, the pungency tainting the cool oxygen. Fireworks. He flashed back on cans blowing into the air, cats shocked by porch to porch lobs. The smaller smoke bursts from the other planes’ guns trailed backward as lesser echoes of the enlarging contrail streams, all of the lines unfurling behind, striating the sky. The sight gave him the proud and uneasy sense that the whole attack, the whole formation, was indifferent to stealth or surprise, and was serenely intended to overwhelm the air defenses that lay ahead.

In their shallow elements of three the wingmen floated slightly above and behind their element leaders, trying to keep wingtips level with the leader’s waist gun positions. Paper Doll was an element leader, flanked by No Way and Archangel. Above them in a vee were Geezil II, Leave Me Home, and Dog Star. Immediately behind them were Quarterback, Lucky Me!, and Boom Town. Plum Seed flew between them as a loose egg, a spare. Element leaders maintained formation by keeping watch on squadron leaders, squadron leaders on group leaders, group leaders on combat wing leaders. There was, Bryant assumed, an extensive chain of succession worked out, in the event of what the CO called unexpected visits with the Glass Mountain.

Gabriel was correcting their course with the most discreet calibrations, the adjustments rippling through the following planes. He was flying well, and Bryant appreciated it. If the lead planes flew erratically, they forced a constant seesawing of position, with the ships sliding and sideslipping to hold their distances, which exhausted pilots and gave everyone else shortened breath, as well as shaking out the formation into a pattern too loose for adequate defense.

They did their share of weaving, but Bryant imagined the strain on Cooper and Gabriel, hauling their heavy plane around for hours with their hands and feet, and marveled at their endurance and ability. No Way and Archangel stuck right to them. Everyone was good. They were going to get through this.

They began the serious looking, for their escorts, for interceptors. Bryant divided the sky into eighths and searched each with something he hoped was methodical precision from horizon to azimuth. A scratch on the Plexiglas between the guns kept him occupied for minutes. His eyes hurt and rebelled at focusing and refocusing on nothing and his concentration waned and returned.

They turned a few degrees and he permitted himself a look down, at blue waves, the threads of whitecaps, a tiny boat. Eddy called out the Dutch coast landfall ahead and through the haze of the distance the edged pale green emerged, resolving itself as they drummed nearer into three large islands near wide river estuaries gleaming in the sun. He saw drifting motes which had to be shipping. One of the islands reminded him of Florida.

“Fighters, fighters, fighters,” someone shouted. It was Piacenti.

“Escort,” Lewis said. “Escort, sir. Three o’clock low.”

“Jesus,” Gabriel said. “Piacenti, you know?”

“Sorry, sir,” Piacenti said.

A group of them swept by in two diamond formations, green and brown Spitfires with their red, white, and blue rondelles flashing underwing. The crew cheered. They waggled their wings as they passed and climbed up and away from them, seeking altitude and a station well ahead of the bomber stream. The American P-47’s remained closer when escorting. The Brits believed it more useful to break up attacking German formations at a greater distance. The crews liked to see fighters nearby, and preferred the American strategy.

“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.

“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.

“Bryant!” Gabriel called.

“Bryant’s hit!” Ball said. “I saw the guy go past.”

“I’m okay,” Bryant was able to say. He felt like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

“Frankfurt! Frankfurt!” Hirsch was clicking the call button on the interphone in his excitement and it sounded like chattering teeth. To their left the sun showed silver and wide on two huge rivers, the Rhine and the Main. The whole formation was turning north and east toward the Initial Point.

The fighters were gone. Hirsch called in a time check. It had been more or less thirty minutes since Eupen. Bryant found that impossible to believe. Snowberry said, “You shoulda kept a better watch. You shoulda given that one to Stormy.”

Behind them Lewis was counting chutes. Bryant said, “The top squadron in the lead high group is gone, near as I can tell. Completely.”

“The 525th,” Gabriel said.

Quarterback had drifted out of sight, straggling back beyond the rear group. In that direction they could see on the curve of the earth a series of small fires generating spiraled pillars of black and gray smoke. The sky between the pillars seemed filled with confetti and litter, the hundreds of white American and occasional pale yellow Luftwaffe parachutes mingling and floating down like a chaotic airborne invasion. A Fortress miles away caught fire and fell from its vee, a quiet bundle in the sky.

“They’re pruning,” Snowberry said, and his words affected them all. “They’re pruning the 8th Air Force.”

Bryant remembered himself and checked the functioning of the four engines on his flight engineer’s panel, checking as well the fuel transfer, in case Cooper and Gabriel had forgotten. His rear end hurt and he was glad to be out of the sling seat. Hirsch announced they were passing over the IP and after a beat Lewis asked what it was.

“Dink town,” Hirsch said. “Gemünden, it’s called.”

“Just wanted to know,” Lewis said. He sounded miserable.

Bryant debated whether or not to get back into his turret and decided against it, in case there was trouble with or damage to the bomb bay doors. He’d hooked into a walk-around oxygen bottle and the rubber of his mask was cool and sloppy with sweat. He plugged in his interphone at the flight engineer’s panel.

“Now hit the target, you son of a bitch,” he heard Gabriel say to Eddy.

It felt as if they were accelerating, though he knew that wasn’t the case, and he imagined the flat and featureless landscape preceding Schweinfurt that he remembered from the briefing, imagined the flak batteries minutes away with infallible Nazis loading up and calibrating their elevations.

“What do we do if they’re using smoke?” Gabriel asked, more or less talking to himself.

The interphone crackled, and they could hear Eddy hesitate. He said, “They told us that if the lead couldn’t see the aiming point, we’d go for the housing and try for some skilled workers. We’re gonna hit something, I’ll tell you that.”

You better believe it, Bryant thought. The notion of bombed civilians at this point did not concern him. People down there were being blown up. People up here were being blown up. Everyone down there had something to do with the attempt on his life. He felt the sway and lift of short-term changes in direction, and knew the combat boxes were breaking up into their small component groups for the bomb run. The bombardiers of all following planes, Eddy included, would release on signal from the lead.

He could hear a distant thrumming and some faint booms. “Flak,” Hirsch called in. “Looks like one seven triple zero. Which is our altitude. If anyone’s wondering.”

The ship jerked upward and Bryant banged his head. There was another shock and the musical sound of fragments splaying over the plane’s metal skin. He was happy to be inside and closed in, happy to be unable to see the sky.

There was a huge boom and the plane bucked and reared upward and then mashed back to level flight.

“Guess they don’t want us at their steel balls,” Eddy murmured over the interphone. Bryant could hear his concentration.

“Everything’s fine,” Gabriel said. “Snowberry, did you see that burst?”

“It was purple and red in the center,” Snowberry said. “I don’t know how it missed me.”

Gabriel was skidding the plane a few degrees every so often as a last attempt at evasive action before turning the plane over to Eddy. Bryant felt the torque and gravity shift in his feet on the metal floor. Eddy called in the takeover, and flew them on the Automatic Flight Control, making careful and minute adjustments. Bryant imagined him hunched over the Norden bombsight the way Robin hunched over her drawings, her lips bunching and pursing, her eyes shifting in concentration.

The rate of climb indicator on the far right of his panel began to flutter. He called in the information to Gabriel.

“Stay off the interphone,” Gabriel said. “We’re fine.”

There was a creak and a growing roar and he felt from his position at the panel the circular buffeting of the changing air pressure. Back through the companionway the center of the plane was filling with light, glared highlights curving around the black cylinders of the five-hundred-pound bombs. The bomb bay doors were grinding open and the noise from the blast of air was an environmental force that surrounded the particular and thin noises from his interphone. He looked down through the companionway and out into space and saw a golden and green landscape with low drifting white smoke crossing to the southeast, the beginnings of the defensive screen the town was pinning its hopes on. The sky below was pocked and dirtied with smallish flak bursts. There was glare beyond his vision and shrapnel tinkled on the open doors.

His interphone was unplugged and he had no warning of bombs away. They shifted and dropped from sight in a single spasmic load and the whole ship rose beneath him from the enormous loss of weight, the horizon through the bomb bay doors ducking and sweeping upward.

Below them the first salvoes were hitting and he could see each as a rapid series of flashing bursts turning dark red and then black as the smoke billowed and mushroomed like underwater murk.

He watched longer than he should have before climbing back into his turret and strapping himself in.

They were turning, flying in circles around the flak while they waited for the hundreds of B-17’s following to bomb. Bryant was not a bomb jockey but he had the feeling that their bombing pattern had left a good deal to be desired. He plugged in his interphone cord.

Gabriel was telling them all to look. Bryant imagined him grabbing Cooper’s arm, pointing to the bombing pattern. “Willis! Mr. Eddy!” he said. “What do you think? Are they nailed or are they nailed?”

“Hard to say, sir.” Eddy was cautious. “Somebody was way off. See all that stuff to the north?”

“I hope we got an orphanage,” Lewis said from the back. “Kids with toys in their tiny hands.”

They maintained a steep bank, Bryant’s knees against a shell chute in the turret. “I don’t think we hit anything,” Eddy said glumly after a pause.

No one commented. Whatever had happened was no one person’s fault and there were more than enough extenuating circumstances. “So much for pickle barrels,” Piacenti commented.

Archangel was pulled in tight behind their starboard wing, and Plum Seed was drawing closer on the opposite side. The flak stopped abruptly, the sky sweeping clean ahead of them, signaling the onset of fighters, and through the charging of the guns Snowberry asked over the interphone in a small voice if they were going to be leaving anytime soon, and if so, when.

It became quiet. The flak had seemed harmless, defensive gestures the Germans only half meant but felt they should make. They flew north and west, for the Rhine. The plains gave way to hilly wooded areas dotted with orange and yellow.

“You guys should see the foliage,” Snowberry said. “In August, yet.” They could hear him rotating his belly turret.

Hirsch wondered aloud if they were exactly on course. Bryant knew that he considered himself privately to be the equal of the lead navigator. As far as Bryant understood, he was alone in that view.

“In my opinion,” Bean ventured in a shaky voice, “this was an extremely difficult mission.” He had been quiet so long Bryant for one had forgotten about him.

“Bryant,” Gabriel said. “Eddy’s gun.”

Bryant pushed the interphone to Call, embarrassed. He had forgotten. “Eddy,” he said. “Is it burned out?”

“It’s just sticking.” Eddy grunted. “Goddamn thing almost got me killed. I’m pointing it like it’s a magic wand, like it’s going to do something.”

“You keep swiveling it around, even when it’s out,” Gabriel said. “You let it hang down and it’s the dinner bell.”

“I’m not stupid,” Eddy said. His Gary Cooper voice had returned to maintain dignity but he sounded hurt.

“Try playing with the retainer on the solenoid,” Bryant said. He waited.

“Yeah,” Eddy finally said. “So what? Wait. Hirsch’s got pliers.”

“Make sure he keeps his gloves on,” Gabriel said. “Or doesn’t have them off for long.”

“I think it’s working,” Eddy said. “Who’d a thought it?” Bryant was relieved and proud and thought, Who’s not a good flight engineer?

“You know the force is split,” Lewis reported from the back. “The second combat group has to be fifteen miles away.”

“Maybe our group broke too soon,” Gabriel said. “Maybe we got a chicken colonel.”

Bryant turned his turret to the rear. The other group was a pattern of staggered dashes, just visible flying through intermittent cloud.

“Someday they may know what they’re doing in this war,” Lewis said. “Right now they have only the slightest fucking idea.”

“Does anybody know how many we lost?” Lambert Ball asked. He, too, had been quiet.

“Everybody shut up,” Gabriel said. “No more casualty lists. We got enough to worry about.”

They could hear from the tail Lewis counting softly, the numbers just whispers, counting with the interphone on. Piacenti crawled to all the gun stations with a walk-around oxygen bottle, divvying up whatever ammo was left. Bryant showed him how to feed the coiled belt he’d brought into the turret, and when they were set, Piacenti made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and disappeared.

The front of the plane was silent. Eddy and Hirsch in the nose, Gabriel and Cooper in the cockpit, and Bryant on top were searching for fighters. Ahead of them lay the corridor of their losses on the way in, the fires still burning and visible beneath the columns of climbing black smoke. They passed into it.

“It’s like training, in Florida,” Eddy murmured. “Navigating by beacons at night.”

They all recognized the similarity. “We could follow these home,” Gabriel mused.

“This stinks,” Snowberry said. “We shouldn’t have to do this.” The port wingtip brushed through one of the smoke columns. They seemed to be only creeping along, as if flying into a terrific headwind. Snowberry said, to himself, “I’m only seventeen years old.” Someone asked testily why they were dragging their ass.

“Look at them all,” Snowberry said. His voice was filled with regret.

“Keep watch ahead,” Gabriel said.

Snowberry said, “You know, it’s like you expect guys to get it. But not so many. Not everybody.”

“We’re comin’ up on the Rhine,” Hirsch announced.

Bryant turned his turret a final time to the rear, gazing back at the tall anvil of black smoke over Schweinfurt, now fifty — sixty? — miles back.

“Dots. Bandits. Fighters,” Eddy called. The dots in the distance spread into even lines, and they knew they were in for it again. Bryant had gone back to believing he was going to get home, and here all these dots were, coming hard, to make sure he understood that that was not going to be the case.

The air around them started to fill with small detonations and flashes and tracer lines began to lariat by, and a B-17 above and to the right turned almost immediately and plunged away out of sight, as if suddenly aerodynamic principles had failed it. The interphone was impossible with chatter and in the chaos that followed all the o’clocks were called out. A Messerschmitt spiraled by wing over fuselage, tumbling out of control. He saw a B-17 upside down and when he looked again it was gone. Something of a shining aquamarine sailed past, striking the turret and leaving a clouded white nick in the Plexiglas, like a distant cumulus. He fired snarling into his mask, slewing his guns around with the rage of a pestered animal, and shouting unintelligible things. There were hits all around him on Paper Doll’s fuselage, hits like dropping bricks down the cellar stairs, or pouring loads of stones into metal garbage cans. There was a stream of incoherent jabbering and Ball broke in and said, “That’s Piacenti. Don’t pay no attention to him.”

The air exploded over the right wing, an orange sheet of flame. Bryant looked and there was fire buffeting from the nacelle of the number three engine. What looked like water or mercury was washing from the wing, and he realized as the olive skin curled and withered that what he saw was the aluminum itself, melting and spraying backward. He felt his turret overheating and understood it was his imagination. For all his fear he registered engine fire procedure, and he thought: Rev up the rpm’s. They accelerated, Gabriel a step ahead of him, and the fire continued. Gabriel and Cooper closed the cowl flaps and the fire went to blue and then thin gray smoke, though the smoke kept coming. The propeller feathered and stopped.

“Fuel shut off,” Bryant said to remind them. “Fire extinguisher valve.”

“Both,” Gabriel said. “We appreciate the thought.”

He clambered down to his panel behind them to work with Cooper transferring the fuel from the tank of the dead engine, and scrambled back into the sling once Cooper had confirmed his readings.

He settled himself in and swiveled the guns and everything went white and the plane tipped and there was a whooshing vacuum of air and he felt as though he’d been hit across the ribs and arm with a metal pole. In another part of the ship there was a scooping, thunderous sound, and he felt the whole aircraft slide across to the right. He gazed at his right arm and hand and was vaguely aware of Gabriel trying to get through to him, and he could see nothing but the discreet mouth of a tear along the forearm of his jacket, but the pain beneath it fascinated him, immobilized him. He thought of acid poured along his arm, searing invisibly in a chemistry accident. There was a strange unreality to all of this, not having been touched despite all those close calls and then this violation out of nowhere, like the villain in a movie reaching into the seats to knock his teeth out.

He felt a tug on his leg and looked down to see Cooper, the worry evident in his eyes over the oxygen mask. Bryant smiled reassuringly, though Cooper couldn’t see, and made a thumbs-up sign. It must have had the desired effect, because after a wary pause Cooper patted his knee and left. He focused on the interphone and said, “No problem.”

Static popped when Cooper, back in the cockpit, plugged his interphone back in. “The turret all right?” he said. “It don’t look like it.”

He looked around himself, woozy and relaxed. The charging slides were smashed, as if someone had taken the edge of a shovel to them. The feed chutes were severed. Oil was jetting up delicately from somewhere and spattering like soft rain on the sheepskin of his collar. He had the unpleasant sense that his forearm was open, cold air on bone. His glove was sodden with blood and when he squeezed, it bubbled over his wrist. He thought, Will this be like the oxygen? and was drunkenly proud of his courage in the face of his wound, and then said What? at Gabriel’s shouts of bandits, bandits coming down from above.

“My guns’re through,” he said, as if wanting to get that clear.

“Goddamnit, track ’em!” Gabriel screamed. “They think we’re dead meat.” Hits banged along the side of the fuselage, a horse cantering on sheet metal. He understood, and swiveled the turret. A Focke Wulf was arching by and he tracked it across their beam, and then let it go, and picked up a looping Messerschmitt. Another went by overhead and he followed it easily. “Lots of kills,” he said. “I got lots of kills.”

“At least they’re less ballsy now,” he heard Cooper mutter. He tracked another, the outline shifting and slipping out of the cracked gunsight. He was scaring Germans, pretending to shoot, playing at war in the middle of war. Then the oil got worse and glazed his goggles, and he climbed tenderly out of his sling, nauseated from the smell and taste within his mask.

He recognized Hirsch in front of him on the walk-around bottle, his eyes peering at Bryant as if looking for something. Hirsch was making lowering motions with both hands, gesturing Bryant to the fuselage floor beside the turret base. Light-headed, Bryant complied. His arm was raised and cold and Hirsch was picking at it with a jackknife. The jackknife seemed incongruous. Cooper appeared beside him and took over with the knife and hacked expertly up his sleeve, the sheepskin parting yellow and thick like whale blubber. Hirsch unzipped the first aid kit and held the sulfanilamide powder up for Bryant to see. He saw his arm exposed for the first time. The skin was whitish and sheared back and blood matted blackly around it, bright red here and there. Hirsch started sprinkling the powder, and Bryant watched as it crenelated the edge of the wound. They wrapped the arm in a temporary bandage, which felt cool and clean and kind. There was some hammering and Bryant was annoyed at the noise. Hirsch disappeared. Cooper nodded sternly and thumped his good shoulder and left as well. The plane rocked and stumbled.

His head cleared a little. He pushed the interphone button.

“Thanks, everybody,” he said, stupidly. “I’m okay.”

“If you’re okay get back up in the fucking turret,” Gabriel said. He sounded absolutely harassed. “Cooper says it’s just your arm.”

He struggled to his feet. “I’m up, Skipper, aye aye,” he said.

The plane hit a wall and he catapulted into and off the panel before him, ending up on his side. They were diving. The floor rose up past him. There was a cannonade of frigid air, and things flew past him toward the bomb bay. He covered his head with his hands. He crawled around on his knees to the flight engineer’s panel, and then they pulled out of the dive and he fell back onto the floor.

The interphone was skewed on his head and when he righted it, it was filled with panicked shouts and babble.

“Get me out of here! Get me out!” Snowberry was shrieking. Lewis was demanding to know what was happening. Gabriel was shouting Bryant’s name. Bryant acknowledged. The airstream through his position was strong enough to lean against.

“Goddamnit! Get down to the nose!” Gabriel shouted. “Somebody get down to the nose!”

The plane was more or less level. Bryant hooked into the portable oxygen bottle and heard Gabriel tell Snowberry to keep his goddamn shirt on, for Chrissakes, nobody was going anywhere, before he unplugged the interphone and climbed cautiously down through the companionway.

It was much too bright. Just below Gabriel and Cooper’s seat level there was nothing but space. The nose opened outward into air like a wide-mouthed chute, flapping wires and cables. The legs of Hirsch’s seat remained in a grotesquely twisted bulkhead. His gun mount flapped backward. There was nothing in front of Bryant.

Hirsch’s interphone outlet hung loose above his head. He plugged in. It sparked and crackled.

“They’re gone,” he said.

“What do you mean, they’re gone?” Gabriel said. “Where’d they go?”

“They’re gone,” Bryant repeated.

“Jesus Christ, did they bail out? What?” Gabriel asked.

“The whole nose is gone,” Bryant said.

Snowberry said, “Oh, no.” Lewis cursed.

“Do you think they got out?” Gabriel demanded. “Is there any blood?”

Bryant looked. It was impossible to tell. His hands and feet were freezing. “I don’t see any blood,” he said.

“Their chutes?” Cooper tried. A fighter flashed by, bizarrely close without the mediating Plexiglas. “Are their chutes gone?” Bryant’s eyes were tearing even behind the goggles. Lewis and Snowberry were firing and Gabriel was jerking the plane all over the sky.

“I’m coming down,” Gabriel said. “Take over, Cooper.”

Bryant waited for him, suffering with the cold and edging out of the companionway both for his own protection and so that his pilot might get a look. Near his foot was a shattered rack for holding Hirsch’s pencils. Gabriel crawled down and mimed something Bryant couldn’t understand. He stared dumbly at his pilot until Gabriel in exasperation poked into the companionway. When he returned, he gestured that everything in front was gone. Bryant gestured that he knew that. Snowberry’s guns were still going. Cooper was shouting over the interphone, “Get back up here, you guys, no one called time out here.”

The fuselage behind them rocked and twanged like a banjo, yawing to the left. Snowberry shrieked, the sound blizzarding into static on the interphone, and didn’t stop. Get it away! it sounded like, Get it away!

Bryant was up onto the platform behind the pilots’ seats and through the passageway to the bomb bay catwalk, squeezing past the narrow V-shaped support beams in his fat flying jacket like a child desperate to get through some bannisters. In the radio room Bean had climbed onto a box, an ammo crate, to get better tracking angles for his gun out of the slanted overhead window. He took off his mask in alarm when he saw Bryant, his face painted with brass dust above the mask line from the cartridges and so much firing. He pointed at the bailout signal as if to indicate he hadn’t seen it and Bryant shook his head, and indicated Bean’s walk-around bottle and the hatchway to the waist. They stepped through it, Bean following.

The waist was empty. Cold air was blasting through an open hatch, and they hunched in the narrowed cylinder of this tapered part of the fuselage and pointed for each other at the escape door, which had been jettisoned. Piacenti’s and Ball’s oxygen masks were still plugged in and hung floppy and inverted along the wall, like bats.

He connected his interphone at Piacenti’s station to tell Gabriel, and Lewis already had, having called in their desertion after the chutes had streamed out past him. Lewis was still cursing and Bryant took the earpiece from his ear for a moment. “Both of them?” Gabriel was asking.

Lewis said something about that filthy wop bastard and his pal. Snowberry broke in in explosive bursts when his call button could override Lewis’s and gasped and made noises impossible to interpret. Lewis said, “Bryant, are you checking on the kid?”

Bryant and Bean moved with peculiar and mechanical quickness, shoulder to shoulder, the seals of their masks trembling. They hunched over the ball turret and hand-cranked it around to position the exit door inside the fuselage, and yanked it open. Blood sprinkled upward from the change in pressure.

“He says he’s gonna puke,” Gabriel called. “Get his mask off.”

They pulled him out and he seemed to uncoil raggedly from the tiny sphere. Bean was lifting weakly under his shoulders and Bryant tore off Snowberry’s mask, the vomit looping and threading from his face. His head was moving from side to side and he slapped at his thigh. His pant leg was badly holed at the knee like a boy’s old pair of jeans, and beneath the dark and soaked edges of sheepskin the kneecap slid free and flapped like the lining of a pocket.

Bryant felt his stomach rise and squeezed his hand over his mask. Bean had not slowed and seemed to be systematically checking him. His left hand was smashed and the glove was flat and mangled. Blood scattered in cold and coagulating droplets wherever he’d been, wherever he gestured. He coughed and choked and brought his good hand to his mouth to clear away the mess. Blood flecked and painted Bean’s goggles.

They stuffed a blanket between his head and the bulkhead and wrapped his feet in another. Blood dripped from his nose and he looked childlike. He was whispering something and they both looked at his parachute, hacked by shrapnel. He whispered and they understood it had to be, Don’t leave me here, and Bryant shook his head, twice, to indicate they wouldn’t. Bean cupped his chin and Bryant wiped his mouth and they hooked him into Piacenti’s air. Bean’s gloved fingers sorted through the first aid kit. Blood bubbled and froze around the seal of Snowberry’s oxygen mask and Bryant scraped at it with the double-seamed fingertips of his gloves. Bean laid the morphine syrette on the tumble of the blanket and exposed the wrist of Snowberry’s good hand and gestured for Bryant. Snowberry’s head thumped the bulkhead in pain. Bean held the wrist as level and as still as possible. Bryant jabbed it with the tiny needle, anywhere. Snowberry jerked, as though that had been the worst of all.

He tried to remember what else was necessary. Bean had clearly moved on to the knee. He remembered bored NCO’s modeling splints and neat bandages in training lectures. He had Snowberry’s flight jacket zipped open and could see a soaked area the size of a baseball on his left side. He looked at Bean and Bean looked back helplessly, his gloves under his arms, his hands in the wet of Snowberry’s knee. Paper bandages flew from the kit. Bryant found some cloth, bunched and folded, and eased it onto the spot. He held it there until Bean lifted it from his hands and set it aside and moved to expose the wound with a surprising and gentle assurance. Snowberry’s knee was already wrapped, poorly but vehemently.

Bean gestured to the ball, and Bryant understood. In the hatchway to the radio room, Cooper, too, was pointing at the ball. They were taking additional hits, and he saw a pattern of daylight through the fuselage, a magical and artificial Big Dipper.

He removed his parachute and climbed gingerly into the hatch, his rear dropping low, his legs spreading and curling upward into the gun charging stirrups. He didn’t fit completely, and the contortion was painful on the back of his neck and his hamstrings. He felt Bean close the hatch door behind him, heaving the metal door shut against the pressure of Bryant’s back.

He got his hand on the rotation mechanism and swung the turret around so that he was curled more or less upright, head and feet up, rear down. He sighted out a circular Plexiglas panel between his legs. He adjusted the reticles of the gunsight for range with a left foot pedal. Tracking and firing involved the same grip handles as the dorsal, above his head instead of in front of him. The jetstream whistled through jigsaw holes along his left side, and below and beside one leg, like paint, he had to contend with a large frozen smear of blood, hampering visibility. His knees flanked his ears. His fingers and eyes moved along the guns on either side of him, checking for damage. A fighter swam up over his crotch from the world below, lining up for a free pass at their underside. He swiveled and aligned the shot delicately and let go a burst that surprised the German pilot but was too low. The sky cleared a little and he experimented, to get the hang of the turret’s play. The rotation mechanism seemed more sensitive than the dorsal. He plugged in the interphone. Something else passed by and he fired at it, unused to the way the targets appeared so quickly from his blind spot above, and the cartridge cases tumbled and spilled over him. When he could, he slid them out the slots for the gun barrels.

A straggler trailing smoke thousands of feet below and behind them was swept over by a swarm of single- and twinengine fighters, the spurts and blips of hits at that distance registering all over the wings and fuselage. All four engines caught fire and the plane broke up gently and silently into smaller pieces.

“We got manifold pressure problems in the number two engine,” Gabriel said. Bryant could feel the shaking, their engine trying to tear itself out of the wing. They’d have to shut it down, but with only two engines left they weren’t going to keep up with the formation. The shaking stopped, and he could feel the airspeed drop.

Behind them twin-engined Me-110’s trailed along out of range with the intention of executing stragglers. They had a choice in Paper Doll of bailing out or hitting the deck, trying to get back flying the lowest possible altitude, hedgehopping home.

Gabriel asked for a vote.

“Our waist gunners already voted,” Lewis said.

“I’m asking you guys,” Gabriel said. “Our navigator’s gone so I don’t know exactly where we are. But it ain’t friendly.”

Bean was not on the system; still treating Snowberry, Bryant assumed. Bryant said, “I say we stay. Snowberry’s chute is bad news. He won’t survive a jump, anyway.”

Gabriel waited. The plane was falling back now, and Bryant imagined Archangel and Plum Seed leaving them behind, the tail gunners in each regretting Paper Doll’s misfortune.

Lewis said, “What are we gonna do? The kid can’t go. We gotta count on the flying ability of our Looeys. And me and Bryant and Harold Bean to keep them off our back.”

“Big cloud to our left,” Gabriel said. “I’m gonna use it to get down.”

The mist of the cloud edge began to stream by Bryant’s ball position, giving him the sense of dry immersion, and another straggler below them suddenly rose upward dramatically but Bryant understood that it was Paper Doll, going down. Lewis said, “I say we divvy up Ball and the wop’s stuff when we get back,” and Bryant thought about them, drifting down to the ground, killed or taken care of, and imagined Piacenti grinning and burying his parachute. He thought of Snowberry and hoped he was sleeping.

The cloud was raveling white, as bland as thick fog. The cloud would hide them all the way down to the ground, he hoped. The walk-around bottles were probably exhausted. It would be good to get off the oxygen for everyone’s sake, especially Gordon’s.

The plane banked lightly and Gabriel announced he was heading west, to avoid the mission return route. “Maybe we’ll avoid everyone heading to the main force,” he said. “It’s such a mess maybe we’ll get through. Maybe we’ll have lost those 110’s with this cloud.”

“Oh, Jeez,” Cooper said.

Bean came over the interphone. “Gordon’s not so hot,” he said calmly. “He’s throwing up and throwing up as fast as I can clear it. I took care of his knee and his hand but I don’t know what happened to his side. Maybe it’s his stomach.”

“Don’t let him drink anything,” Gabriel said, helplessly.

“I got him wedged in so he won’t bounce around much,” Bean said. “I think he’s sleeping.”

“You better get back to the radio room,” Lewis said. “You’re the only gun on top, now.”

“Yep,” Bean said.

They racketed on in the white fog. “Keep going, cloud,” Gabriel said.

“But stop before the ground,” Cooper said.

Then the clouds were gone and green hillsides were coming up at them. They rose and soared over one, registering the successive images: the spilled stones of some fence mending, bright green clover in the sunlight, an open-mouthed boy with a staff.

They dipped and followed the land, a high-banked stream and tall blue firs going by. “Well, we got a nose open like a funnel and two engines out and enough holes in us to make a watering can and if our airspeed drops any more we’ll be taxiing home, but I don’t see anybody behind us and I think we slickered ’em,” Gabriel crowed. “Lewis? See anything?”

Lewis was silent. Then he said, “Not yet.”

“You guys can come off oxygen,” Gabriel said. “In case you didn’t know.”

Bryant pulled off his mask. The cold air streamed over his mouth and cheeks and nose like home. The hillsides and thickets rolled and pleated beneath them, bright with clarity in the sunlight, Paper Doll towing its shadow across the landscape. They were close enough to see the gravel on hillside trails and paths weaving beneath them and the cool, bottle green depths of a shaded pool overhung with thick trees. A white and black goat on an outcropping watched them come and ducked awkwardly, leaning backward on its haunches and keeping its front legs straight.

“It feels good to be off oxygen,” Gabriel said.

Bryant said, “The lieutenant can say that again.”

“I think I know what I’m doing,” Gabriel said. “I’m going by the sun.”

They’d begun following a stream, slipping lower as the cool spruce and fir tips rose past Bryant’s position, the steeply banked forest blurring by, and Bryant watched as the blue and white water unreeled beneath him, changing features and speeds, rocks, Whitewater, snags, clear cul de sacs, and around a bend he was over a fisherman, a big leather rucksack at his hip, ripples drifting outward from his legs, his thin rod the wisp of a line.

The stream banks narrowed and drew together and a fir branch whistled by his turret. Others slapped and grated their wingtips, and Gabriel gave a northerner’s version of a Rebel yell. A huge fir rose from a grassy bend and they lurched upward, the sound of the branches on their starboard wing like someone crushing kindling. “Whoa, Nellie,” Gabriel called. The stream opened out dramatically into a river, the water silver and smooth beneath, and they turned with it to the north, the prop wash from the lowered outboard engine fluttering the surface of the water. They roared by over a sailboat, collapsing the sail, and past docks and swimming floats, the white figures bobbing or pointing in shock as they careened past. They passed a humped yellow-green bank edged with willows and he could see picnickers and the red and white squares of blankets dotted with food and drink and that same crescent of lawn and remembered Robin, and swung his barrels harmlessly at everyone who pointed or ran.

Gabriel ducked still lower, and Bryant sped along in his glass ball twenty or so feet above the waves, catching a faint mist of spray kicked up by the props. Something rang faintly on the fuselage but he’d seen no one on shore fire anything. A woman on a float directly below them capsized as they thundered over. A small red dog ran to the water’s edge and threw himself in.

“Oh God,” Gabriel said, and ahead of them the river opened out into some sort of inland port, and there were two long gray ships in their path, the decks busy with superstructure and the tiny figures of running men, and delicate barreled guns swinging about to face them.

“It’s the German Navy, for Chrissakes!” Gabriel said, and yanked the plane into a hard bank just as the naval guns opened fire with theatrical booms and huge geysers erupted around and behind them. He banked them the opposite way, trapped into going right over the ships, and as they spanned the distance Bryant sighted along the superstructure and opened up, able to watch in the river surface his hits skip and spray upward across the bow and along the deck, a crew member leaping and pedaling an invisible bicycle into the water. The ships’ guns thundered and then they were over, Paper Doll jerking and someone screaming on the interphone, and Bryant spun the turret and kept firing, the naval guns turning slowly to retrack, Lewis’s twin fifties clattering now, too, fountaining water around the ships. They banked away from the river and were skimming farmland, scaring livestock.

Gabriel was sobbing and cursing. After a moment they heard another voice on the same line, and Bean said, “They got Cooper. It came in the same hole the other shell made.”

Gabriel was still crying. “God, I just bent over to get the trim tab,” he said. “God, I just bent over.”

“I’m going to stay up here with him,” Bean said.

“Are you sure he’s dead?” Lewis said.

“He’s a mess,” Bean said. “He’s all over the steering column.” His voice was flat and high with shock.

Ahead jumbled shapes and lines rose from the landscape and converged.

“Town! A town!” Bryant said. “You see it?”

Gabriel and Bean took them down the main street at full throttle. Wagons swerved from the road and collided. A woman cleaning windows toppled outward and he flashed past and missed what happened to her. The huge wings filled the street with shadow from side to side and the sense of power was exhilarating, the greatest rush of adrenaline of all. They went by a pack of dogs turning over onto their backs in supplication, a railroad crossing, three boys on bicycles all wearing red, gaping.

Lewis was firing back down the center of the street. Bryant began firing, too, for Cooper, turning his guns this way and that and ripping up the windows and housefronts in long ravaging bursts. An elderly and fat man with tiny glasses glinting white emerged ahead with a long rifle and lifted it to them, and he slewed the turret ever so slightly and triggered a burst and folded the fat man in half, his arms waving from a puff of red mist.

They were out of the town but still over the main road, the telegraph wires below looping up and descending with each pole, and there were hedges and then an expanse of tarmac with white numbers and aircraft, camouflaged in gray and green and marked with black crosses.

“We’re over an airfield! We’re over an airfield!” Lewis cried, the first to understand, in the tail. “Get us out of here!”

Gabriel and Bean banked them sharply to the left and Bryant could see spinning away thirty feet below airfield personnel running in all directions, flak batteries swiveling uselessly around as they tried to get the barrels low enough. A Fiesler Storch, a single-engined observation plane as delicate and awkward as a chicken, with a huge ribbed window along its side, turned violently away from them, apparently in its landing pattern, and as it swung behind them Lewis opened fire, his tracer streams lashing across its length. It dove immediately into the ground and exploded and its engine went shooting up over a little hill into some trees.

There were more fields of tan and green lines of cultivation spanning quickly away behind them and he hoped they were safely away from it but Lewis called, “Trouble. Bryant, get out of there, and get to Bean’s gun.”

Gabriel was steady enough now that Bean was able to come all the way back and help Bryant out of the ball. With the hatch sprung he unfolded painfully out into the waist and flexed and rubbed parts of his legs as he scrambled back to the radio room and Bean’s gun.

Closing fast behind them from above was a black Dornier 217, a night fighter, maybe, clearly all the airfield had around with everything else out intercepting the returning bomber stream.

“Let it close, let it close,” Lewis said. “I’m dangling my guns.”

The Dornier started firing early and inaccurately — filled with trainees, Bryant registered — and it closed in until the faceted Plexiglas nose filled his gunsight and he let fly. Lewis had opened up with his twin fifties as well and the three streams of tracers hesitated and flexed and then converged across the Dornier and disintegrated it, the wings and tiny pieces spinning end over end after them as if continuing pursuit.

“We did it!” Bryant called. “We did it!”

“Me-110’s!” Bean called. “Head on. Treetop level.”

The hits smashed into them along their entire length from wingtip to wingtip, it seemed, and Bryant fired as they flashed beside one another over his position, their bellies pale gray and then gone. Lewis did not fire. Bryant could see them hesitate, and then not bank around.

“They’re not coming after us,” he called in. “I think they’re out of gas.” It was, he realized, probably the only reason they’d been returning to the field.

The interphone sputtered and gasped.

“What happened?” Lewis said, his voice faint.

Gabriel chattered and snorted as if he was trying to clear something from his throat. Bean said, “Bobby, you better get up here. Some control wires are flapping around behind me.”

They were hydraulic lines. He found them fluttering and whipsawing right beside his turret, back behind Cooper’s seat. He could make out Gabriel’s head but did not want to see Bean or what was left of Cooper. The hydraulic fluid which allowed operation of the brakes and flaps was slipping away, streaming yellow and thick from the broken lines. He pinched the feeder tubes shut with pliers, and needed more fluid to keep the pressure in the system up. He broke into the flight rations behind Gabriel’s seat, and found a can of apricot juice. He used that. He wrapped the pinched areas with electrical tape.

“Don’t use the brakes or flaps until the very end,” he called to the cockpit, to whoever was flying.

The hydraulic fluid had leaked through his hacked jacket to his bandage, and stung. He looked back down the catwalk toward the radio room, empty, and the waist with Snowberry beyond. His mind unclouded like washed glass, the pain stinging and clear in his arm, and he understood that they weren’t getting back, that this had been more malevolent than they could have imagined, and that he had been, finally, adequate, sort of, with no one to see.

Lewis’s final words struck him and he called Lewis, but no one answered. He climbed back through the bomb bay, through the radio room, past Snowberry, who seemed drowsing as he went by, boots splayed out like a lazy hillbilly.

There was a hatchway to the tail and he crawled into it on his hands and knees, squeezing forward past the assembly for the raised tail wheel. The flexing sheets of steel in the huge hollow tail above him echoed and lightly boomed with a drum-like sound in the wind. The cables along the narrow fuselage were severed, and he was relieved — the interphone was out, and the wind streamed through jagged holes generated from the head-on attacks. In the darkness his gloved hand slipped on ice except that part of the ice was sticky and he knew it was frozen and coagulating blood. He could see light beyond the armored headrest and the glass was smashed outward, sharp-edged and spread with crystals of blood. “Lewis,” he said. “Lewis.”

There were shell cases everywhere, in some parts six inches deep. The sighting glass on the machine guns was shot out. The ammunition boxes were torn and splintered. There were holes through the seat back, from the Me-110’s head-on pass, he knew, and Lewis’s head was back against the headrest but his middle had been destroyed and thrown forward all over the guns he had held.

Bryant had to back out, without turning around, and he was crying, his gloves smeared and gummy with blood, his head down and his rear edging tentatively back until he was out of the hatchway at the end of the waist, curled against the door, crying.

He pulled himself over to Snowberry, who looked on without expression as his head jiggled with the plane’s motion. He lowered his face close and Snowberry looked into his eyes and bubbled some blood from his mouth. He was white and an eye drifted. He reached up and squeezed Bryant’s nose feebly. Bryant understood he was dying. He opened the box of flight rations left for the waist and found an Oh Henry! He held it close to Snowberry’s face and unwrapped it, holding the pebbled bar up for him to see. He broke it in two, and let Snowberry inhale the sugar smell. He put half in Snowberry’s mouth. He put the rest in Snowberry’s hand, and sat with him. Snowberry gave a little artificial grin, showing teeth.

Bean peered close to Snowberry and then tapped Bryant to get up, gesturing toward the waist guns. He picked up the flight rations, puffing, and threw them out the escape hatch. He unslung the right waist gun from its mount and cleared an ammo belt and threw that out as well.

Bryant understood that they were lightening the load and stood and fumbled with the other gun. Bean threw out tool boxes and ammo boxes, and started work on the support housing for the ball turret itself. The ball could be jettisoned and was safer off in a rough landing.

He led Bryant by the hand away from Snowberry to the radio room. Bryant watched him broadcast an alert to British Air Sea Rescue. He saw ocean waves outside the small side window. He helped Bean heft the stacks of transmitters and receivers and tuners back to the waist, and they heaved them out. It took three trips. When they left the radio room, the red warning light was on, signaling them to destroy the radio.

In the cockpit when they returned, the air was unbelievable on the broken open side, Cooper’s side. Gabriel was talking to himself. He told himself that the hydraulics were inoperative and most of the electricals were burned out. He said the inverter was shot and the trim tabs jammed. He said they were losing altitude and their airspeed was way too high. He said they should get Snowberry, because they were going to put it down in the Channel. He saw Bryant crying and he waved him violently away. “A lot of good that does,” he said, nearly hysterical. “A lot of good that does.”

They went back to the waist and hefted Snowberry. His head thumped and bobbed against Bryant’s chest and they had an impossible time on the narrow catwalk, tipping this way and that, catching limbs. Bryant’s arm was open again and streaming blood and he was faint. They managed to lay Snowberry down beside the dorsal turret and Bryant’s flight engineer’s panel. There was nothing to wedge him in with. Bryant leaned into the cockpit and saw above and beside them two Spitfires, watching them lose altitude, trying by example to nurse them back.

Bean stayed with Snowberry, wedging himself in to cushion the blow for his friend. Bryant assumed Cooper’s seat when the steering columns began to shake, the great posts with their horseshoe wheels impossible for Gabriel to control alone anymore as the last of the hydraulics went and Paper Doll dipped lower, and lower, and the gray and rough waves loomed up like harsh and jagged pavement, and Gabriel wrapped an arm around the column, trying to bring them in along the troughs of these waves, trying to keep their nose up. And Bryant held on and mimicked his pilot and fought what was out of control, wanting despite everything to believe the nose would stay up and the fuselage would hold together, wanting to believe in Air Sea Rescue and the Spitfires’ silent assurance, wanting to believe that Hirsch had jumped, that Eddy had survived, that Snowberry hadn’t suffered so; wanting to believe even then in their ability to deal with the uprushing stone ocean, rising now in all its detail, filling his field of view.