Alex Scarrow - A thousand suns

Stef obliged. ‘Max says stop arsing around.’

‘All right, all right,’ said Pieter. He patted Stef on the shoulder to show the kid he was just messing with him and carried on towards the aft bulkhead, leaving Stef and the navigator’s compartment behind him. He ducked as he passed through the bulkhead and entered the waist section.

Just ahead on the floor was the bulge of the ball turret, beyond that on either side the openings for both of the waist-guns. It was noticeably colder and noisier in this section of the fuselage, as the wind angrily whistled past the open gun ports. The floor between the two machine guns, which were offset by a few feet to allow two waist-gunners to operate simultaneously without bumping into each other, was overlaid with wooden planks. It was the only floor space of the plane to have planking to ensure neither gun operator would trip over one of the ribs that ringed the fuselage. Hans was sitting on the wooden floor hugging his knees.

Pieter shouted, ‘Hans, what the fuck are you doing down there?’

‘Fucking freezing up by the gun. I’m just having a break.’

Pieter wasn’t entirely without sympathy for Hans. He was feeling the bitter cold too. They were all used to the sealed comfort of their Heinkel 111.

Pieter pointed at one of the MG-81s that had been installed in place of the Brownings. ‘Is it okay to — ?’

Hans nodded. ‘Sure, you’ll freeze your bloody balls off after a few seconds though.’

Pieter climbed onto the planked floor and stood behind the gun. He held it in his hands and stared out through the waist-gun porthole. The wind battered his face as he looked out upon the grey-blue world outside and he struggled to keep his eyes open as streams of tears quickly emerged and were blown horizontally across his cheeks. He remembered to pull down his goggles and was able to look out again more comfortably.

He hunkered down behind the gun and, with one eye closed, aimed along the sight and down the barrels. He squeezed the trigger momentarily and let a dozen rounds off. Most of the shells dropped outside and were instantly whisked away by the wind. Three or four rattled down inside onto the wooden floor.

Hans reached out for them and eagerly scooped them up, placing them in the pocket of his flying jacket to savour the fading warmth of the casings through the thick leather.

He placed a hand to his ear and then nodded, Max was on the interphone saying something. ‘He’s test firing the portside gun, Max,’ Hans replied. He nodded and then pulled his mask from his face and shouted out to Pieter. ‘He says stop messing around with the guns.’

Pieter nodded back at him and reluctantly let go of the waist-gun.

The curse of the co-pilot… fuck all to do.

It angered and frustrated him that he’d been trained as well as any pilot, but rarely had a chance to put those skills into practice. To be fair, Max was better than a lot of pilots who tended to hog the flying time and rarely allowed their co-pilots to refresh their skills. However, on this mission the flying time was too long for one pilot; once they were clear of France, Max would hand over to Pieter to cross the Atlantic, and once they approached America, Max would take over again.

Nonetheless, he resented the hours ahead of them during which he’d have nothing to do but worry, and wait.

Mission Time: 3 Hours, 55 Minutes Elapsed

6.00 a.m. 300 miles from Nantes

Lieutenant Daniel Ferrelli yawned and as he did so his ears popped. The bright sunlight of early morning reflected brilliantly off the cloud layer below them and he was forced to squint irritably. The overpowering brightness and trapped warmth within the Mustang’s cockpit made him feel ‘woozy’, tired. It was that relaxed, Sunday afternoon feeling, after the pot roast, and in front of a crackling fire, where sleep could come and go easily.

He removed one glove and rubbed his eyes.

You fall asleep, asshole, and they’ll be sending what they find of you home in a matchbox.

Daniel Ferrelli, or Danny as he was known by most of the men in his squadron when they were off base, scanned the clouds around him, above and below. It looked like the kind of winter wonderland scene you’d see in the display windows of Macy’s come Christmas time: all cotton-wool snow and glitter. Like this, the sky was beautiful. He loved it above the clouds when the white floor beneath him was complete and no sign of the drab green and olive world below could be seen. It was like being in another dimension, a place of ice queens and castles. When his mother had first read him Jack and the Beanstalk he’d seen something like this in his mind. Danny focused on a plateau of cloud with a smooth top and imagined the beanstalk poking up through it, saw a tiny Jack scampering across it, magic harp under one arm and goose under the other and, thundering across the plateau, a giant roaring with anger.

The speakers in his flying cap crackled with the voice of Charles ‘Smitty’ Brown. ‘Uh, Danny?’

‘Dammit, Smitty, it’s Lieutenant Ferrelli while we’re working.’

Smitty bunked with Lieutenant Ferrelli despite being only a rating. He was overflow from the main billet. They’d lost a bed space in there, and Ferrelli had a spare bunk in his room. He’d only agreed to put up with the guy, temporarily, because they’d known each other back home before joining up. Smitty was okay — clean, tidy, but a pain in the ass with the name thing. He wondered whether with him it was a genuine case of forgetting to call him Lieutenant in front of the rest of the men or whether the guy just wanted to look a smart-ass.

‘Sorry, Dan… Lieutenant.’

‘What is it anyway?’ he asked, cutting Smitty off.

‘Well, uhh, I think I saw one of them, errr… nine o’clock, above us.’

Ferrelli looked to his left and up. There was a thick layer of cloud above them with occasional gaps between tall cumulus stacks. He looked long and hard, waiting to see a dark form passing the open sky between the cloud stacks.

‘I can’t see anything, Smitty, you sure?’

‘I saw it once, is all, sir.’

Ferrelli’s squadron had been sent to escort a wing of B-17s en route across France from Marseilles north to an airfield outside Paris. The bombers had served the last two years in Libya and Egypt, and still sported desert colours. They were being relocated back to England. The war was looking like it would be over before they bedded in with the Eighth and did anything useful. Still, Ferrelli figured it made sense to start gathering up the American planes ready to ship them back home.

Things had come unstuck pretty quickly, and he and his men had failed to rendezvous successfully with the B-17s. Not that he thought it mattered too much; it wasn’t like there was anything out there they needed escort protection from anyway.

But hey, Danny, it looks bad… losing the planes you’re meant to be protecting. To lose one is bad luck, but all twelve?

Ferrelli kept his eyes on the clouds above and to the left. ‘I don’t see anything, Smitty, not a damn — ’

He saw it.

A single silhouette way above them at about thirty thousand feet. Unmistakably the outline of a B-17, flitting between the tall white columns, and it was heading west. ‘Okay, okay I see it. Looks like these fellas are on their own. If they’re the guys we’re meant to be looking after, I’d say they are totally, one hundred per cent lost by the look of it. They should be heading north, not west.’

The navigator on that plane needs to go right back to school. Jeeez… Navigation 101.

He knew it was easy enough for even the most experienced crew to drift off course by dozens of miles. Shit, he even knew of bombers that had drifted into the wrong goddamn country. Dumb-ass stuff like that happened all the time. But getting the wrong heading? No matter how lost you are, no matter where you are, the one piece of kit that’s always going to work just fine is the compass.