hand at the lights. “All kinds of fireworks shooting off. Well done, Reynolds. How goes it back there?”
The high strained voice of the real gunner replied, “Oh, I’m fine, sir. This operational stuff’s the real thing, isn’t it?”
As they neared Berlin, the nose gunner was silhouetted black by exploding balls and streaks of color, and fanning rays of blue light. Tiny’s voice in the intercom rasped, “Those poor bastards who got there first are catching the heat blisters.”
The lieutenant’s voice came, easy and slow: “It looks worse than it is, Admiral. The stuff spreads apart once you’re in it. The sky’s a roomy place, actually.”
F for Freddie went sailing into the beautiful, terrible display, and as the captain had said, it thinned out. The searchlight beams scattered and ran down to the left and right. The streaks and balls of flak left great holes of darkness through which the plane bored smoothly ahead. The captain and the navigator talked rapidly in fliers’ jargon.
“See that fire off there, Admiral? Some other chaps have pretty well clobbered the primary target,” said Killian.
“Or at least dropped a lot of bombs in the vicinity,” Tiny said. “I can’t make out a damned thing for the smoke.”
The view below was half moonlit clouds, half black city flickering with anti-aircraft flashes. Pug Henry saw a peculiar high column of flickers — the Flakturm, that must be — and, in another direction, an irregular blob of fire and smoke enveloping buildings and smokestacks, near the river curling silver through Berlin. The black puffs and fiery streaks of the flak slid past F for Freddie but the plane plowed ahead as though protected by a charm. The captain said, “Well, I’m going for secondary. Course, navigator.”
Shortly thereafter the motor noise ceased. The nose of the plane dipped way down. The sudden quiet was a big surprise.
“Gliding approach, Admiral,” the captain’s voice garbled. “They control their lights and flak with listening devices. Navigator’s got to take your place now.”
The plane whiffled earthward. Pug made his way to the rear gunner, who was looking down with saucer eyes in a pallid baby face at the moonlit German capital, and at the anti-aircraft winking like fireflies. A rush of icy air and a roar followed the captain’s order, “Open bomb bay.” Into the plane a strong acrid smell poured, and Pug had a mental flash of gunnery exercises on a sunny blue sea near green islands. Off Manila or over Berlin, cordite smelled the same. The navigator kept talking in a drilled cheerful tone: “Left, left… too much… right… dead on… no, left, left… smack on. Smack on. Smack on.
The plane jumped. Pug saw the bombs raggedly fall away behind them, a string of black tumbling sticks. The airplane slanted up, the motors came bellowing on, and they climbed.
Below, a string of small red explosions appeared alongside the buildings and the huge fat gas-storage tower. Pug thought the bombs had missed. Then, in the blink of an eye, yellow-white flame with a green core came blasting and billowing up from the ground, almost to the height of the climbing plane, but well behind. In the gigantic flare, the city of Berlin was suddenly starkly visible, spread out below like a picture postcard printed with too much yellow ink — the Kurfurstendamm, Unter den Linden, the Brandenburg Gate, the Tiergarten, the river, the bridges, the Flakturm, the chancellery, the Opera — clear, sharp, close, undamaged, peculiarly yellow.
The cheers in the intercom hurt his ears. He seized his microphone and gave a rebel yell.
As he did so, F for Freddie was transfixed by half a dozen searchlights that swung and stopped. In the gunner’s bubble, all was blue radiance. The boy looked horror-stricken at Pug and suddenly started to scream in fright, his eyes tight shut, his mouth wide open. There was so much noise that Pug could hardly hear him. It looked like a painted scream, and in the blue light the boy’s tongue and gums were black. The plane seemed to have landed on a shining blue pyramid. The motors howled, the machine lurched, dived, sidestepped, but the pyramid stayed locked under it. Pug seized the gun mount with arms to steady himself. The gunner fell against the mount, knocking the microphone away from his open mouth. His clamber ceased in the intercom, and Pug heard Lieutenant Killian and Tiny talking in brisk controlled voices. A mass of orange and red balls lazily left the ground and floated up directly at F for Freddie. They came faster. They burst all around, a shower of fire, a barrage of explosions. Pug felt a hard thump, heard the motor change sound, heard a fearful whistling. Icy air blasted at him. Fragments rattled all over the plane, and F for Freddie heeled over in a curving dive. Victor Henry believed that he was going to die. The plane shrieked and visibly shuddered, diving steeply. Both pilots were shouting now, not in panic but to make themselves heard, and through the frail plexiglass bubble Henry stared at the fabric wings, waiting for them to break off, flutter away and signal the end of his life.
All at once the screeching, whistling blue pyramid turned black. The dizzying swoops and slips stopped, the plane flew straight. Pug caught a whiff of vomit. The gunner had fainted, and the puke was dribbling from his mouth in the moonlight and rolling down his chest: chocolate, coffee, bits of orange. The boy had eaten his whole ration. Out of the left leg of his flying suit black blood welled.
Pug tried the intercom, but the crackling in his ears had stopped. The system was dead. The stricken plane lurched on in a tumult of wind roars and howls. He went forward, clutching the guy ropes, and ran head-on into a figure who shouted that he was Peters. Pug screamed in his ear that Reynolds was wounded, and moved on to the cockpit, passing a ragged flapping hole in the starboard fuselage through which he could see the stars. Mechanically he noted the form of the Dipper. They were heading west, back to England.
In the cockpit the pilots sat as before, busy at their controls. Tiny shouted, “Ah, Admiral. We’re going home to tea. To hell with ruddy pictures. You’ll tell them you saw that gas plant go up, won’t you?”
“Damn right I will. How’s the airplane?”
“The port engine was hit, but it’s still pulling. Heading back over land, in case we have to come down. Looks like we can make it, unless that engine completely packs up.”
“Your rear gunner’s got a leg wound. Navigator’s back there with him.”
The swinging searchlights of the outer belt loomed ahead, probing the clouds, but F for Freddie climbed into the overcast undetected. Tiny bellowed at Victor Henry, his big blue eyes rolling, both hands on the wheel, “Ruddy asinine way to make a living, isn’t it, Admiral? Brassed off, I am. Should have joined the ruddy navy!”
Pulling off his helmet, Lieutenant Killian turned over control to Tiny, and wiped his face with a big white handkerchief no whiter than his skin. He gave the American a tired smile, his forehead a mass of wrinkled lines.
“It may be close at that, Admiral. We’re having a bit of trouble holding altitude. How’s your French?”
Chapter 34
Pamela had remained in London. She knew it was a night bombing mission and she knew the distances. It was not hard to calculate when Victor Henry would be getting back. At ten in the morning she went to his flat — it had no other occupant for the moment — and persuaded the charwoman to let her in. She sat in the dowdy living room, trying to read a newspaper, but actually only counting the minutes and praying that he was still alive.
Pug Henry had entered her life at a dark time. Her parents had been divorced before she was fourteen. Her mother had remarried, made a new life, and shut her out. Alistair Tudsbury had deposited her in schools while he travelled. She had grown up well-mannered, attractive, but almost wild, and had had several love affairs before she was out of her teens. In her early twenties she had met Philip Rule, a tall golden-haired newspaper correspondent, who had for a while shared Leslie Slote’s flat in Paris. An ice-cold man with beguiling ways, a rich flow of clever and corrupt tastes, Rule had bit by bit destroyed her ambition, her self-confidence, and almost her will to live. She had fought off suicidal depression by breaking off with him at last and going to work as her father’s slave; and as such, she had encountered Victor and Rhoda Henry on the
She had never met a man quite like Commander Henry: taciturn, apparently an old-fashioned narrow professional, yet incisive and engaging. She had found him attractive from the start, and had come to like him more and more. Aboard ship, such attractions take on an unreal intensity, but usually fade fast on dry land. For Pamela the feeling had only grown stronger on seeing him again in Berlin. There she had sensed that Pug was beginning to like her, too. But the start of the war had broken their contact, except for the momentary encounter in Washington.
