The Last Mission Read online

  Now the fighters were coming up under us. Campbell in the nose and Bradley in the top turret couldn’t fire without hitting our own planes. They had to hold fire while the Messerschmitt 109 could fire at will. I saw the German’s guns flash.

  Our glass nose shattered.

  “Campbell?” Mast asked.

  There was no response, just the thump and ping of machine-gun rounds shooting us to pieces.

  The German rolled under our left wing. Bradley got in a few shots, and then our waist gunner opened up.

  “Yahoo!” Bradley screamed.

  “I got him…I got him,” Max’s voice rejoiced over the intercom.

  Several of the Germans were flipping in flames, but the bulk of the fighters, maybe a dozen, were swinging wide to the south, using their speed to get out ahead of us again. They weren’t done playing.

  “Campbell? You still with us?” Mast asked.

  I wanted to scream. How could he be with us? His whole compartment had been shot to pieces. And if we sat here, flying in a straight line, all neatly bunched together, we’d all be shot to pieces.

  “Where the hell are our fighters?” Bradley yelled from over my shoulder.

  I looked at Mast, who was checking his watch. “We still have a ways to go.”

  Our escort fighters couldn’t take us all the way to targets in Germany, so the German pilots had their fun until we were back inside our fighters’ range. Then they simply turned away and went back to their bases, knowing our guys couldn’t follow them.

  “Here they come again,” a voice screamed on the radio, “dead ahead…dead ahead.” And then the voice was lost in the roar of gunfire.

  “I got him,” a voice screamed.

  “Classy Chassis is hit!” A Fortress rolled over on its back.

  “Get over! Get over!” A voice begging the pilot of Classy Chassis to right the plane so his crew could jump. “Get over, damn it! Get over.”

  Then a pair of fighters lined up on our nose. We’d lost our nose gun and the ball turret in the belly. We had nothing to shoot back with. Their guns blinked, and instantly I heard the rattle of machine-gun rounds shooting pieces out of our plane, then there was a sound like a car crash as our number-two engine burst into flames.

  “Feather two,” Mast said. It was the same tone of voice he had used back at the field when he ordered me to “Start two.” I was stunned, watching the fire burn right outside his window. “Feather it and quench it, Marron.”

  Mechanically, my hands flew to the throttle console, like a pianist’s fingers that seem to read the music. I cut the fuel to two, changed the prop pitch so the propeller wouldn’t drag in the wind, and hit the number-two engine fire extinguisher. Almost instantly there was a billow of smoke, and the flames began to shrink.

  Bradley dropped down from his turret, giving up his job as gunner and taking over his function as flight engineer. He adjusted the engines backing down on the right wing to keep the plane balanced.

  “You’re gonna lose speed, Colonel.”

  Mast nodded and fingered the throttles to get the feel of his new power arrangement, then he switched to the squadron frequency and told his pilots that we’d be dropping back.

  “We’ll hang with you,” one of the pilots answered.

  “Negative,” the colonel snapped back, leaving no doubt that he meant it. “I’ll see you back at the Bridge.”

  We were already falling behind the others, trailing smoke to advertise our helplessness. The Messerschmitts were forming up again to the south, trying to decide whether they had time to get ahead of us again or if they should just lie back and pick up the stragglers. There were two of us. Classy Chassis had righted herself, but she had fallen ten thousand feet below the group. She couldn’t possibly climb back up. And with one engine out, there wasn’t a chance that we could catch up.

  We waited for their choice and tried to contain our relief when they began diving down toward the Chassis.

  “Must think we’re already finished,” Bradley said.

  Mast regripped his throttles. “That’s their mistake.”

  He was instantly on the radio to Classy Chassis. “Keep going down. I’ll get our fighters right on top of you.” A second later, he was talking to a major who headed a fighter squadron of six P-38 Lightnings. He gave him the position where Chassis would be coming into his range, and whetted the major’s appetite by counting the Messerschmitts that were following the bomber down to the deck.

  “Okay,” the fighter commander answered eagerly. And then he asked, “You going to be okay, Colonel?”

  “We’re looking good,” Mast said. I wondered what could possibly be looking good to him.

  We were shot to pieces, had three dead men aboard, and were losing altitude to a burning engine. We were probably somewhere over the Rhine, with all of occupied France to cross; that meant more German fighters, and probably more flak. Then there would be the Channel, and beyond that the tricky proposition of landing a four-engine plane on three engines—and all that assumed that the nose stayed attached to the rest of the plane and that the wing held together.

  We were down into one of the puffy clouds, which seemed to offer us a measure of invisibility. When I heard the gunners on Classy Chassis, I hoped that the cloud would last all the way to England.

  “There’s a dozen of them coming down on top of us!”

  “Six! I only count six.”

  “Eight o’clock.”

  “I’m on ’em. I’m on ’em.”

  Then there was the sound of machine-gun fire. There were more voices screaming as each of the gunners opened up.

  “We’re hit…Jesus, we’re hit!”

  The pilot’s voice shouted, “Report control surfaces.”

  “Rudder okay!”

  “I got one! I got one!”

  And then there was a new voice—the fighter major speaking very calmly. “We’re coming in the other way, Classy Chassis. We’ll swat ’em off you.”

  There was a yelp of joy from one of the Fortress gunners. “Our guys! Our guys! Lightnings, twelve o’clock high.”

  The attacking Messerschmitts must have flown right across the murderous gunfire of the twin-engine P-38s. We could hear the bomber’s crew screaming for joy, counting the Germans that were shot out of the sky.

  “They’re breaking off! The bastards are running for their miserable lives.”

  New voices joined in. “I got one. Dumb bastard flew right across my nose…Got him! He’s on fire…I’m following them up! They’re running out of speed!” Then voices were lost in the noise of more gunfire. It was a heady moment, with their fighters suddenly the targets. Before I could enjoy it, we broke through the cloud cover. We were at about twelve thousand feet, well within the range of their antiaircraft guns, and we still had to cross most of France.

  “Level her off at three thousand,” Colonel Mast’s voice suddenly said. He had taken his hands off the yoke and was in the process of pulling off his oxygen mask. I grabbed my wheel and set my feet near the rudder pedals. My left hand settled on top of the throttles. Mast leaned his head back, his lips stretched across his teeth as if he were dead. “You’re doing fine, Marron. Just yell if you need me.” His eyes closed, as if he thought he might fall asleep.

  We settled down into a clear afternoon, with the sun at ten o’clock, moving down in the southwestern sky. Below was farm country, with endless fields of brown streaked with white snow patches. As our plane roared by, I could see cows running in terror away from our shadow.

  There were villages, scattered randomly wherever roads might meet. They flashed beneath us—tight clusters of stone houses bordering narrow streets. There were people moving, some of them waving a greeting. Crazy, but I wanted to wave back at them. They seemed normal, totally involved with the problem of living, and delighted that our noisy aircraft was interrupting the boredom of their work. They had nothing to do with the hell I had just experienced. Their waves seemed to be a signal of salvation.

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nbsp; I saw a train to the north, running from east to west, puffing up rhythmic balls of smoke. There was a barge on a river, nosing up to what appeared to be a lock, and then a tractor, running right under us.

  I pushed back on my vent window and filled my head with the taste of fresh, clean air. I felt important, speeding high above the world: one of its warriors returning home.

  We could see the landfall off to the coastline. Next we were over the Channel, looking ahead at England, hardly a smudge on the horizon. Mast was leaning forward, testing new frequencies on the radios and then fixing our position according to a map that he had clamped to his knee. “You’ll see a town,” he said, “with a white lighthouse rising above the buildings. Line up the lighthouse with a brown Norman church tower that should bear about two-one-zero.”

  I nodded and squinted over the shattered glass nose. I didn’t even notice the blots that opaqued the navigator’s glass astrodome.

  Mast took over when we spotted the airfield, a triangle of concrete with a cluster of buildings at its center. It was low, nearly obscured by the surrounding trees, but it was bigger than the towns I could see to the north and to the south.

  “Here goes nothing,” he said as he lowered the wheels. Then he called instructions into the intercom, telling his crew to be ready to get out quickly, and to make damn sure everyone else got out with them. I think he fully expected the Fortress to break up into a thousand pieces as soon as the wheels touched down. But he floated it over the boundary fence like a feather and set her down so gently that I never heard the squeak of the tires.

  Trucks surrounded us when we turned off the runway. Ambulances were waiting with their back doors thrown open. When we braked to a stop, Mast remained sitting behind the yoke, his shoulders slumped and his eyes down.

  “You okay, Colonel?” I asked cautiously.

  “I’m too young for this shit,” he answered.

  He looked as if he could be in his eighties.

  I unbuckled my harness, and then the shoulder straps of the parachute. I stood unsteadily, and then dragged the chute out of the seat. “For a while back there I expected to be using this. Some career—bailing out on my first mission.”

  “You handled yourself well,” Mast told me. He was still leaning back, waiting for some sort of transformation to lift him out of his seat.

  “If I had known we were going to make it back I could have left the ball gunner in his turret. I think I screwed up…”

  “You did right,” he answered. “Once you got him out, we had a choice. I never would have landed this crate with one of our guys hanging out the bottom.

  “I broke his shoulder. Maybe his arm, too.”

  “And you saved his life. He’ll do a stint in the hospital and then finish up the war teaching gunnery or selling war bonds. It’s a better prospect than the rest of the guys have.”

  I saw the medics carrying a body bag out from under the nose, and then another. Our bombardier, Lieutenant Campbell, didn’t need one. When the nose gun was shot out, he was blown out through the hole in the belly. There wouldn’t be anything for his family to bury.

  “Are they all out?” Colonel Mast wanted to know.

  “Yes, sir. That’s it.”

  “Okay,” he said. He rose up out of the pilot’s seat like a ghost. “Let’s get out of here.” He grabbed one of the exposed frames and let himself down from where the hatch used to be. I realized why he had been waiting; he didn’t want to look into the eyes of the young boys who had flown with him, not even the ones who were still alive.

  As we walked to the jeep, he told me that new planes had been ferried in and that he would be forming two new crews. “Callihan and Brombeck both have time on you, Marron, so you’ll copilot for one of them. Any choice?”

  “No, sir. I don’t know either of them.”

  “Okay. We’ll leave it up to them.”

  We threw our gear into the back of a waiting jeep, and then I piled in with it, leaving the passenger seat for the colonel.

  “Tough flight, sir?” asked the driver, a corporal with the quartermaster corps.

  Mast sighed. “Just another day at the office.”

  When we reached the barracks, I handed him his gear and pulled mine out of the car. He started away from me, and then turned back. “Lieutenant Pettit was the new officer in the squadron. He was navigator on the Italian Stallion. Now that he’s gone, you’re the newest officer in the fleet.”

  I nodded, not understanding where he was leading.

  “That makes you our new community-relations officer. You’re our interface with the Brits living around here.”

  I hadn’t heard of a community-relations officer, but it made sense there would be one. If our guys went roaring through town, singing at the top of their lungs, or if an anxious sergeant propositioned the mayor’s daughter, there would have to be someone assigned to deliver the apology.

  “What’s the assignment?” I asked.

  “Right now it’s cows,” he said. “When we fly over the barns they stop giving milk. Seems the noise terrifies them.”

  “And…?”

  “Just keep telling them we understand, we’re very sorry, and promise them that we’ll never do it again. Promise them anything, damn it. Just keep them off my back. If I hear about angry Brits, you’re going to hear from an angry colonel. Understood?”

  “Jesus, Colonel, hasn’t anyone told them about the war?”

  Mast shook his head. “They know all about the war. They’ve been invaded. We’re the invaders.”

  Now

  I’m awake when the giant 747 breaks free from the clouds and settles into the first light of an English morning. We touch down with a soft bump and then taxi past a whole city of buildings sprouting jetliners like parked cars. I clear customs and load my garment bag into a rental car. I’m dead tired, and I can’t get used to the left-hand shift. Just outside the airport, I start into a traffic circle in the wrong direction. Maybe Kit was right that I’m too old for this sort of thing.

  I take the M-12 around London, then pull onto the A-26 secondary highway and head out into East Anglia, following a sign that says Norwich 52 miles. Gradually, I get more comfortable driving on the left, with the faster cars blurring past to my right. My death grip relaxes on the steering wheel and I can lift my eyes from the road and look around.

  The contrast is startling. I have been focused on the two lanes of pavement edged with garishly striped crash barriers, but beyond the road the land is a pasture of green and umber. I think of the moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy steps out of the black-and-white farmhouse and sees a new world of color, except that this is an old world that has the time to revel in its color.

  I remember it instantly as I look for miles over gently rolling land that flattens out in the distance. I can see the shapes of villages, each marked with its distinctive church tower. There are Roman towers and Norman towers, marking whole ages of occupation. And then there are the Gothic towers, built on faith and financed by the flourishing wool trade. There were several hundred years when all these fields pastured sheep and when the villages housed the Flemish weavers with their spinning wheels and looms. Ships from all over the world made port in Great Yarmouth or slipped up the river to Norwich to load cargoes of English cloth.

  The American occupation lasted only three years, too short a time to leave a legacy of towers. What we left were airfields, paved with miles of concrete, surrounded by cities of wood and corrugated sheet metal. They were the forts of the time, but they have vanished without a trace.

  There were hundreds of airfields in East Anglia, along the coast of Norfolk and Suffolk, back in the fens of Lincolnshire, further south toward Cambridge. This was the area of the great English aircraft carrier that was closest to the German-held continent. It was flat country, much of it reclaimed from the sea, and it was sunny country, all of which made it ideal for air operations. The distinctive church towers, which served as perfect navigational aids, were a bonus.
What was ridiculous was laying down these centers of destruction on land given to grazing and fishing among a pastoral people who cared little for political necessities. I remember Colonel Mast telling me that as far as the East Anglians were concerned, the Germans weren’t the invaders; we were.

  I’ve left the hills and I drive in light traffic on a flat plain that will take me all the way to the sea. I remember that the Cardinal Road ran south from Norwich to Whittingbridge, and then east until it met the road American engineers built to connect the airfield. But there is no Cardinal Road on my rental-car map. All the roads are letters and numbers. Whittingbridge isn’t even a town, but simply an area marked with italic letters. I’m suddenly afraid that the whole place may have been turned into a shopping mall.

  I’m lost as soon as I leave the highway. I remember narrow roads, bounded by hedgerows, identified by distinctive trees or a barn of a particular color. Now the roads are paved and striped. Intersections are square corners. None of the names are familiar.

  Except that Norwich Cathedral is rising at a very familiar angle in the distance, and the small village to my right is in exactly the same place, even if its skyline is totally different. I turn in its direction and before long see a small marker for Whittingbridge.

  At first I seem to be mistaken. The street, with its sidewalk shops, is nothing like what I remembered. The rough faces of the buildings have been cemented over. The windows are large panes of glass without the intricate mullions, and the store signs are larger and more intrusive. For an instant I’m sorry I returned.

  The Town Hall! At last something I recognize. It was a miniature Palladian, two stories high, set back behind a lawn. Now the lawn is gone, replaced by striped boundaries for angled parking. The street has been widened until it touches the front steps of the building. There’s a sign over the double doors, much more prominent than the Roman lettering that’s still etched in the stone.