Брайан Гарфилд: The Romanov Succession

Over the water of Lake Ladoga he pressed the intercommike button. “Test-fire your guns.”

In the machine-gun positions—spine, dorsal and belly turrets; nose and tail—the gunners exerted hand and foot pressures to swing their turrets around. The motors set up a grind ing like electric hand drills. The guns cleared their throats with short bursts and tracers arced toward the water.

“Report.”

“Nose gunner—all in order, Highness.”

“Waist one. All in order….”

Beneath the thrumming plane the broad cleats of tank treads had crushed the snow. They droned over a lambchop-shaped lake. Ulyanov had the chart in his lap. “On course, on time. Eight minutes to I.P.”

Felix waggled his wings in signal to Ilya Rostov and throttled back while Rostov’s bomber moved ahead, shooting away at full power. The earth was white and endless, the forests covered with snow. The sun struck Felix’s left shoulder. “We’re going to do it.” He turned and stared at Ulyanov. “Do you know that?”

“Yes sir,” Ulyanov said quietly. “We are.”

“Pilot to bombardier. Seven minutes to I.P.”

“Acknowledge, Highness. Ready to open bomb-bay doors.”

“Good bombing weather,” Ulyanov observed. He looked out at the sky. Felix glanced to his left through the perspex—and froze in every muscle.

Then he stabbed the intercom button. “Bandits. Coming out of the sun. Gunners….”

The sky was full of them. Against the sun it was hard to count them but there seemed to be dozens—possibly as many as a hundred of them—peeling off in streams and diving: specks that grew rapidly into the distinctive stubby shapes of Red Air Force I-16 fighters.

“Maybe they’re not after us.” Ulyanov said.

Felix had the microphone open; he did not take his eyes off the diving squadrons. “Bomber Six-Four to pursuit leader—Bomber Six-Four to pursuit leader…. My recognition code is Red-Green-Blue, do you copy? Recognition code Red-Green-Blue. Over.”

But there was no reply and now out ahead of him the first wave of them was diving against Ilya Rostov. Ahead of Rostov he could see the snow-cleared rails amid the trees. Rostov’s guns opened up abruptly: tracers arced upward from eight of his fifty-calibers and the plane began to dodge.

Then they were coming in at Felix with guns chugging. “Pilot to blister guns—open fire. Prepare for evasive action.”

He flung the yoke hard over and sideslid to the left; the only option was to lose the rest of his altitude and sit on the deck so that they couldn’t dive straight at him without crashing.

Not more than twenty feet above the trees he zigzagged the heavy bomber in little jerks across the snowscape and the seat shuddered from the pounding recoil of the bomber’s own guns; the cockpit filled with the stink of burnt cordite and he had a kaleidoscopic impression of the Red fighters wheeling about the bomber. He yanked the big plane to starboard, almost snagging a wingtip in the treetops.

The fighters were shooting from maximum range because they had to pull out of their power dives before the ground came up at them. He said, “Navigate us, in God’s name!”

But Ulyanov was staring straight ahead and his face went white. “They’ve got Ilya.”

It was as if Rostov had flown into a wall. The tail of the huge airplane whipped into the air and there was a burst of blinding flame when it hit the trees and he saw dark bits wheeling through the air.

Felix broke left; rammed all throttles to climb power but kept his elevator surfaces level: he closed his cowl flaps and the bomber went into its screaming acceleration. The burst of speed took the pursuit by surprise and left the fighters behind—their tracers fell into the forest—and then he was flying into the black ball of smoke from Rostov’s crash and the heat bounced Felix’s craft as if it were a toy kite. His stomach hit his throat and he almost lost his vision and when he came out of it he was in a roiling confusion of crisscrossing Red fighters and juddering impacts—impressions too rapid to be registered. The airframe staggered and pulled to the right and he had to use muscle to correct the drag; a pair of Red planes collided in midair almost dead ahead of him with no flame, no explosion, merely an odd entanglement of metal that dropped out of the sky like a safe. Ulyanov said with utter dispassion, “We’ve lost a chunk of the wing. Leading edge.”

“There’s the train,” Felix said. “I see the train.”

It was coming up the grade at the end of the plateau of forests—from here it seemed motionless but the mane of smoke from the locomotive’s stack bent straight back over the cars. “Bombardier—one minute to I.P. We’re going to finish it. It’s moving directly toward us at twenty-five.”

He saw them coming at him from the port side—three of them in a vee—and he jerked the plane toward them and it threw them off; they swept overhead but there was another one coming dead-level at him across the treetops and he heard the guns chattering behind him—the dorsal gunner’s voice: “Look at that! I got him—I got him!” And the I-16 plunged into the trees in a black burst of smoke.

He had the altitude of the jump from Rostov’s explosion; he used it to take violent action—a feint to the right, a sudden dive to the left with the four Cyclone engines shrieking at full power. He had gone rock-steady. “There will be no evasive action once we turn onto the bomb run. Brace yourselves—and God bless you all….”

“Bombardier to pilot. PBI centered.”

“Bombardier—eight seconds.”

“Ready Highness-”

“They’re not going to stop us. Not now….” He jammed the mike button. “Two seconds—one—it’s your airplane….”

And then there was nothing he could do but sit in the juddering pool of his terror. Fifty feet above the roadbed the B-17 roared straight down the railway and for a moment he had the utter fright of knowing that the smokestack of the engine was going to smash right into the nose of the plane. Then they were over it, past it, running down the back of the train with the jerk and slam that meant the bay doors were open. It was as if he could drop down through the greenhouse and land safely on his feet on the catwalk of the train.

All around him the I-16s were snarling and wheeling: jabbing at him with their guns; dodging like mosquitoes. Something stitched a line of half-inch holes through the ceiling of the cockpit and the bullets lanced forward at an angle, breaking the windscreens outward: slivers of glass spun about the cockpit and one of them cut the back of his right hand. He was cool enough to make a rough count of the planes he could see in the air and he had to estimate their number at more than thirty; it was a miracle he was still in the air and it was a miracle that was needed: he needed it and history needed it…. The lurch of the airframe pasted him down into the seat and he saw the nose writhe wildly into the sky and for a moment he thought they’d been shot to pieces but then he realized what it was: two tons of bombs had left the airplane and the sudden loss of weight had thrown them upward fifty feet in the air.

“ Bombs away !”

He hauled everything to climb power and angled his flaps and sent the big plane into a narrow skidding turn that might easily wrench the wings off but it was worth the risk, anything was. “I’m making a three-sixty.”

“ What ?”

“I said a three-sixty. We’re making the bomb run again— we’ve got to be sure. ”

He was far enough into the turn to be able to see out when the delay-fused bombs went off and he was close enough to it to be rocked by the explosion, deafened by the earsplitting thunders of it.