Alex Scarrow - A thousand suns

‘Stef, how’re we doing?’ he called into the interphone.

‘There’s a waypoint coming twenty minutes further along this course.’

‘Heading north-west?’

‘Yes sir, two hundred and ninety-five degrees.’

The course would take them in a straight line up to Nantes, south of Paris and the dense Allied air traffic north of the city.

Stef’s voice on the interphone again. ‘I’ll be taking another reading in five minutes, sir.’

‘Good, give me a shout when you’re about to do it.’

Flying by night and above cloud cover, Stef could only navigate by dead reckoning, backed up with periodic attempts at celestial navigation using a sextant. While he was taking a reading, the plane would need to be as steady as possible. Even the most carefully taken readings could only give them an approximate position and could only be used to confirm Stef’s calculation of where he thought they were based on the track, speed of the aircraft and time passed, offset against drift and any head or tail winds. A good navigator working and communicating constantly with the pilot could, in theory, navigate blind from any point to any other point. In reality, minor inaccuracies, as a result of slight calibration errors in the equipment or human error, could inevitably accumulate to throw the dead reckoning calculation off.

But Stef was good. He had a young and alert mind, and was constantly rechecking his work and confirming speed and drift values with Max over the interphone.

By contrast, Schroder and his squadron had only visual contact with the bomber and Max’s periodic announcements of direction changes and speed to ensure they remained on course. During the dark hours of the night, they had flown much closer to the B-17 and had been able to maintain a visual by moonlight. The Me-109s had flown slightly higher than the bomber and had been able to see it fairly easily silhouetted against the blue tinged snow-like cloud carpet below. But it was getting lighter now, and they had pulled further away.

Which had been fortunate.

At 4.30 a.m. they had passed within a few miles of a squadron of fighter planes. From that distance they had been unable to work out whether they were American or British. It was most likely they were American. If they had seen them, then undoubtedly the Americans had seen them too. The squadron of fighter planes had not changed course, nor had they attempted to raise them on the radio.

The Allies now owned the sky; no one was expecting to see any German planes in the air. So no one was looking particularly hard, nor would any Allied pilot be particularly suspicious about coming across unexpected planes in the sky.

The flight so far had been uneventful, to the point even that Max had allowed his mind to wander, if only for a few moments at a time.

Pieter took off his flying gloves and rubbed his hands furiously. ‘It’s bloody freezing! As cold as Bolsch pussy.’

Over the comm. he heard Hans chuckle.

Max pulled the mask away from his mouth and exhaled a cloud of vapour. ‘It is. Lads,’ he announced to the others, ‘make sure you keep squeezing your masks.’

At freezing point the exhaled vapour quickly produced ice crystals within the mask, which could block the oxygen supply pipe.

He watched Pieter trying to warm himself up.

‘Go and see how the other two are, Pieter, that should get some blood flowing.’

Pieter nodded. ‘Yeah, good idea.’ He unplugged himself from the interphone, plugged his regulator into his ‘walkaround’ oxygen cylinder, pulled himself out of the copilot’s seat and clambered back through the bulkhead towards the bomb bay, carrying his oxygen cylinder under one arm like a rolled-up newspaper.

Max decided it was time to check in with Schroder and his men. He switched to radio. ‘Mother Goose calling, how are my little goslings?’

Max heard the speakers of his earphones crackle as Schroder answered. ‘Good morning, Max, we’re still here.’

‘How’s your fuel reading?’

‘We’re all about the same, just about empty on the drop tanks. What’s our position?’

‘North-west of Lyon, another four hundred miles or so.’

There was no immediate response from Schroder, the man was obviously doing some quick mental arithmetic or perhaps consulting with his men on another frequency.

The earphones crackled again. ‘It looks like it’s going to be a bit on the tight side.’

That was no big surprise, they’d all known even with the drop tanks giving them added range that crossing half of Germany, and some of Switzerland and all of France was going to take them to the very limit.

‘I can drop altitude a little; not much though,’ said Max. It would help marginally.

‘No, best to stay up high, we’ll do fine, Max. Don’t worry about us. It’ll be close, but we’ll have enough to get us there.’

‘Okay. Listen, we have a waypoint coming up in quarter of an hour, the one that takes us north-west for a little while, heading two-nine-five. I’ll call in when we’re due for that.’

‘Good.’

Max studied the horizon again. The amber stain towards the east had grown to colour half the sky, and the first rays of the sun were appearing above the cloud carpet. The cover of night was fast fading.

Now it gets a little trickier.

Pieter ducked through the bomb bay’s bulkhead. He stopped to look down at the bomb. It was suspended within a metal cradle just above the bomb hatch. It wobbled slightly as the plane negotiated a brief moment of turbulence. He shook his head in wonder at it.

‘So, little man, you’re a giant dressed as a midget, eh?’ he muttered to himself.

He pulled the glove off one of his hands and reached out towards the rack to touch it. The cold metal was like that of any other bomb, but he sensed inside it immense power, sleeping for now, biding its time.

Something like this should have a name, a big, powerful name, and full of meaning.

Pieter struggled for a moment to think of one… his mind focused around the biblical story of David and Goliath, a small being killing a much larger one. The metaphor felt appropriate, but then he reminded himself that David was a Jewish hero. He sighed at his own stupidity, and not for the first time felt a sneaking envy for the kind of education that Max had. He would know what to call it; Max would conjure up an appropriate name, probably something in Latin, something far more fitting without any effort at all.

He pulled his glove back on and ducked through the bulkhead on the other side of the bomb bay to enter the navigator’s compartment. Stef was sitting at the radio operator’s desk attempting to control several large maps on its tiny surface. He had the sextant out and was preparing to take another reading before the light of dawn totally obliterated the faint light of the stars.

‘Morning, Baby Bear,’ he shouted through his mask.

Stef frowned angrily at him. ‘Ahh, come on, when are you going to stop calling me that, Pieter? I’m nineteen.’

‘When you can grow a proper beard, son, then I’ll take you to the best whorehouse I know. My treat.’

The young lad lifted his mask to show off the meagre ginger tuft on his chin and attempted to muster a deeper voice. ‘You don’t think I’d touch anything after your little man’s been near it, do you?’

‘You think it’s a “little” man do you? I’ve put fully grown horses to shame.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘Anyway,’ said Pieter, bending his little finger, ‘it’s got to be bigger than your fanny tickler.’

Stefan’s mask was still plugged into the interphone, and over his earphones he heard Hans laughing coarsely. Max’s voice added to the exchange.

‘Tell Pieter to knock it off for me, will you?’