All of a sudden the bomber lurched and started to roll to the left. Through the open hatch both struggling men paused in their efforts as they stared down to see the suburbs of Brooklyn slide away and the steely grey of the Atlantic begin to drift into view. The plane was rolling hard to port, taking them inland. If it continued much further it would roll over onto its back and begin an irrecoverable dive.
Hans suddenly screamed as he lost his grip on the bulkhead and swung out over the open chasm. The only thing keeping him from falling was his grip on the gun. His legs seesawed desperately as he tried in vain to swing them up onto the walkway above.
‘SHITshitshitshit!’ he gasped up at Max.
Max held on to the gun with grim determination. ‘Hold on! Hans, grab my arm with your other hand!’ he shouted down to him.
The bomber pulled out of the roll, momentarily levelling, before beginning to roll to starboard.
Hans reached up with his other hand and grabbed hold of Max’s sleeve. Max was struggling hard to keep from tumbling out, his one-handed hold on the bomb rack weakening fast.
‘Get your legs up on the walkway! I can’t hold on to you much longer!’ he shouted down to Hans.
His long legs swung several times, but came nowhere near close to the metal grating. He shook his head. ‘I can’t do it.’
Max looked to Stef for help. The lad was making his way towards them on his hands and knees, groaning with the effort, but he looked too weak to be of any use. Max’s grip was weakening rapidly; another ten seconds and he could see both himself and Hans tumbling side by side down to earth.
‘Hans, I can’t pull you in, you’ve got to get your legs up!’
The big German tried again. This time his left heel swung high enough to hook over the top of the walkway.
‘That’s it! Come on, you big idiot!’ called Stef weakly, lying on the walkway beside Max.
Hans dug his heel into the metal grating and pulled upwards with his lower leg and his arms. He hefted himself up enough that his hands could reach up past the gun and grab the walkway.
‘Good boy, keep pulling,’ encouraged Max, relieved that Hans was bearing some of his own weight.
Hans began pulling himself up and grinned foolishly at them. ‘Nearly fucking well lost it th — ’
The plane lurched hard to port once more, the left wing dropping almost ninety degrees. Without a sound Hans vanished.
‘Oh no!’ whispered Stef.
And all of a sudden he saw it, little more than a black dot appearing, then disappearing amidst the rolling clouds. He quickly raised his binoculars and studied the portion of sky in which he had last seen the plane.
‘Dammit!’ he whispered to himself. ‘Where’s it gone?’
‘Delaware!’ Truman called out. ‘You see anything yet?’
‘Uh… I thought I saw something, sir.’
And then the clouds broke. Through his binoculars Captain Eugene Delaware caught sight of the flying fortress, as the plane bore down on Manhattan Island. By the look of it, the plane was already over the Hudson and now on its way northwards, running parallel with Broad-way and up to Times Square.
‘Oh, yeah! There it is, sir! It’s coming right towards us now!’
Truman looked up at the men in the room with him. ‘My God, they’ve made it all the way over, then,’ he uttered, the conceit of measured calm he had managed to maintain throughout the day finally beginning to show the first signs of slipping away from him.
The young battery captain’s voice came over the speaker once more. ‘Mr President, something’s happening! ’
Wallace found his legs beginning to tremble uncontrollably. Once more he shot a glance up at Dr Frewer, the only other person in the room whom he felt he could draw comfort from. Frewer met his eyes, but this time he didn’t offer a reassuring shake of the head or a knowing smile; the tension was played out across his face as well.
Oh-my-God, this is it. Even Oppenheimer’s man is having doubts.
Truman put his hand over the phone and his gaze travelled around the room. ‘And now, gentlemen, we’re going to know, one way or the other.’
‘The plane is turning now, sir! She’s… yeah, she’s banking pretty steeply, sir. I’d say it looks like they’re in trouble,’ Delaware continued. ‘She’s heading due west now! It’s a steep turn, sir!’
Max stared into the chasm. The ground below was rotating slowly now, but he could see it gradually increasing in speed.
It’s going into a spin.
He pulled himself up, holstering the pistol, and clambered through the bulkhead up into the cockpit. Pieter was slumped over the pilot’s flight stick. There was blood under his jaw and down his neck; he was either unconscious or dead by the look of him. He must have been caught by one of the Walther’s bullets during the struggle. It looked like he’d received a wound to his throat.
Max saw that Pieter had managed to pull out his own sidearm. He must have been getting ready to come back and settle the issue when the bullet had caught him.
So, for this mission, for your beloved Fuhrer, you would have shot me too?
He shook his head sadly. Both Pieter and Hans had been the better soldiers, prepared to do anything to see the job done, too damned stupid to question whether it should be.
He pulled Pieter’s body back and grabbed hold of the flight stick, pulling against the lazy downward spiral that the bomber had settled into. The altimeter displayed an altitude of only 2000 feet, and that was slipping away steadily. He pulled back and to the right and within a few seconds the B-17 had straightened out and levelled. With the plane on an even keel, he momentarily released the pilot’s flight stick, settled into the co-pilot’s seat and grabbed the flight stick there.
Below them now he could see the central island of New York, Manhattan, its tall structures clustered together like giant chess pieces on an enormous metropolitan chess board.
Max had flown over Berlin several times, but the size and scale of the city he saw now below him was a poignant demonstration of the sheer might and muscle of America. While Speer had dreamed of a gigantic trophy structure in the heart of Germany, over here it looked like they’d been routinely building them for decades.
And we thought a single bomb would make them surrender.
Even if the bomb worked as it was hoped, and destroyed only this city, he wondered if a country capable of such impressive scale could be beaten so easily. America was a giant, a leviathan, a Goliath of economic muscle and might. Perhaps back in 1942, when the German empire stretched from the Atlantic to the Urals, the Baltic to the Black Sea, before things had ground to a halt outside Stalingrad, perhaps back then Germany had stood only shoulder high to them; a vain midget standing on tiptoes.
He pulled the B-17 to the right and the Atlantic swung into view once more. Below, he could see the large pale green statue of the crowned lady holding aloft a torch. For a few seconds he struggled to recall its name, and then it came to him: Liberty. He watched as the statue passed beyond sight of the cockpit canopy and the buildings of New York slid away beneath him.
The fuel gauge showed empty. It had done so for some time now, he guessed. Pieter had been flying on the margin of safety, the extra fuel capacity the tanks could hold over and above the dial reading. But that too must be all but exhausted. One of the engines had begun to stutter, the last one on the starboard wing that was still functioning. That left two engines on the port side still going strong. He decided to reduce the throttle on them to even things out a little. The plane was still going to pull gently to the right, and he would need to constantly correct the plane’s course to keep it going in a straight line…
A straight line where?
The plane had to be ditched, far enough out that it would be deep, but not so far they had no hope of making it ashore.
He heard movement beside him and turned to see Stef leaning over Pieter’s seat. ‘Is he dead too?’ he asked with a weak voice.
‘I think so.’
‘What happened, Max?’ he asked groggily.
For a moment he toyed with feeding the lad some untruth, that the mission had been recalled, or that Hans
