As the three fighter planes streamed up past him to his right, less than fifty yards away, Max fleetingly caught sight of one of the British pilots, twisting round in his seat to look back at the bomber as they climbed up into the sky and prepared to come around for another pass.
For some reason they both nodded courteously at each other.
Pieter spun the bombardier’s gun upwards and fired a largely ineffective volley at the last of the three planes, his aim insufficiently in advance of his target, the bullets flew harmlessly behind it. Max heard Pieter cursing angrily over the comm.
‘Pieter!.. shut up!’ he found himself shouting.
‘Sorry,’ he answered sheepishly.
Schroder still had that stubborn bastard on his tail. He was good. The Spitfire was proving bloody hard to shake off. Once again he quickly scanned the sky, attempting to grab another updated snapshot of their little skirmish.
He could see one of the Me-109s trailing a thick pall of black smoke and descending in a shallow dive away from the party and down towards the sea in an easterly direction. Schroder couldn’t tell if it was Will or Gunter. Whoever it was, he presumably was heading back to France in the futile hope that the plane would get him all the way back to land.
One of the Spitfires was also spouting smoke, with the other 109 in hot pursuit. As he watched, the Spitfire was caught by a further well-aimed burst that carved through the starboard wing like a saw through dry wood. A short trail of tumbling debris was left in the plane’s wake. Suddenly, the wing ripped off and the plane instantly rolled over and commenced a slow spiralling dive towards the sea.
One of ours and one of theirs.
They needed to do better than that. Schroder pulled his plane up and once more led the obstinate British pilot behind him towards the rear of the bomber again, hoping that whichever one of Max’s lads was manning that position could work his magic once again and land a dozen more shots on target.
The three Spitfires that had successfully raked the underside of the bomber had so far been untroubled by either the Me-109s or any fire from the bomber. They turned around in a graceful arc above the B-17 and were now approaching from the front, head on, in a steep predatory dive.
Max looked up in horror as he realised they were lining up to make the cockpit their next target.
‘Pieter! Three of them coming fast, twelve-high!’
He imagined what three Spitfires in a tightly formed train, each firing about five seconds worth of. 303 millimetre rounds one after the other into the small, enclosed space of the cockpit, would do to him and the plane.
‘Pieter! Do you see them!’ he called again, this time his voice breaking nervously.
Max could do little but watch their rapid approach. He could pull the bomber into a climb, push her into a dive or roll the plane left or right, but he knew the plane was so slow to manoeuvre that there would be no way they’d avoid the incoming fighters. All he’d be doing would be putting his gunners off balance.
‘I see ’em Max, I see ’em!’
Pieter swung his gun up and carefully lined the gun sight with the first of the three planes. Ten yards for every two hundred range.
He pulled his aim down slightly, anticipating the continued path of the leading Spitfire. ‘Come on, you little bastards,’ he muttered to himself.
The plane in the lead was holding his shot until the very last moment, two hundred feet away and still Max waited with a face screwed up with anticipation for the first high-calibre round to strike home and begin the process of shredding him and the front of the plane to pieces.
Suddenly, he saw the muzzle flash of the fighters’ six guns blazing and tracer lines began to lance down through the air just short of the bombardier’s compartment in front of the plane.
At the same instant from the compartment below, Max heard Pieter open fire.
Both Pieter and the pilot appeared to have overdone their target-lead, but in the few seconds that were left before the bomber’s cockpit resembled nothing more than the chewed-up knuckle of a dog’s bone, Pieter was going to have to pull his aim up and hit the Spitfire first.
‘For fuck’s sake, draw in the lead!’ Max shouted with desperate frustration as the fighter found the nose of the plane and dozens of rounds punctured holes through the metal plate above the bombardier’s compartment and below the cockpit.
He winced as loose shards of debris rattled around in the compartment below him with bullet-like velocity. Pieter surely had to have been hit by some of that, a bullet or shrapnel. But he could hear the gun still firing. Max watched as the tracer lines from Pieter’s gun rose up from below and found their target.
The duel MG-81s, firing a steady line of tracers, shattered the cockpit glass of the leading Spitfire and the fighter plane ceased its firing immediately, speeding down, missing the nose of the bomber by mere feet. Pieter continued firing towards the same point in space, knowing that the second and third fighters were lined up directly behind where the first one had been. The two other Spitfires cautiously avoided the solid line of fire coming up towards them and broke in different directions, roaring past the cockpit on either side, their attacking dive foiled this time.
Max heard Pieter hooting with pleasure. ‘Got ya’, you stupid bastards!’
The idiot sounded okay.
He felt a rush of relief and, with a gasp, released a breath that only seconds earlier he’d been convinced would be his last. ‘Saved my skin, Pieter… are you okay?’
‘Apart from nearly shitting myself, I’m fine.’
You and me both.
Schroder pulled past the port side, the tip of his wing yards from that of the bomber’s, rising upwards in a steep sixty-degree climb, the same damned Spitfire pursuing with single-minded, dogged determination. It fired again; this time the bullets thudded into the underside of his fuselage, one tearing through the flimsy metal plating into his cockpit, where it fractured against the solid metal frame on the underside of his seat, sending a spray of heated shards and sparks up at him past his legs.
He felt a white-hot pain shoot up his right arm as the leather of his flying jacket exploded and a fine spray of crimson appeared on the inside of his canopy.
‘Shit! Bitch!’ he screamed out in pain.
As the Spitfire rushed hungrily in pursuit of Schroder, sensing the kill was only a volley or two away, it passed carelessly close to the port waist-gun.
Stef jerked back in surprise as it roared upwards, only twenty feet away and he panic-squeezed the trigger, his aiming, at best, erratic. The MG-81 pumped forty-plus rounds at close range into the exposed belly of the British fighter plane. One of the rounds punctured one of the Spitfire’s wing tanks and the plane instantly exploded, punching the bomber in the ribs with a powerful shockwave and a fleeting moment later showering the waist section with fragments of shrapnel and burning gasoline.
‘Fucking hell! What was that?’ shouted Hans over the comm.
‘Anyone know what that was?’ asked Max.
‘I think Stef just bagged one. Stef, was that yours?’
There was no answer.
Schroder rolled his plane over, belly up, and pulled back on the yoke so that the plane began a long, graceful arc downwards. He looked ‘up’ to see the bomber below against the dark blue background of the Atlantic. A mushroom cloud of oily smoke was being left behind it, and beneath the cloud he saw hundreds of tiny fragments each tumbling and fluttering to the sea on its own spiralling path.
There was no sign of the Spitfire any more.
He noticed a fire burning along the bomber’s spine and guessed that the Spitfire had exploded and sprayed burning fuel onto the bomber’s back. It looked worse than it was. The fuel would burn out in a few seconds.
He hoped whoever it was who’d saved his life hadn’t been caught by the blast. It seemed unlikely, though; he could see what looked like hundreds of pebbledash spots along her waist section. Whoever had fired the port waist-gun had probably been shredded by the wall of shrapnel.
He turned his attention to the score sheet…
Three of theirs, one of ours. Much better.
