Alex Scarrow - A thousand suns

‘Okay, boys, let’s go take a look-see what these fools are up to.’

‘Roger that, Lieutenant,’ said Smitty. His response was mirrored by the other ten pilots, most of them bored to distraction by the flight so far and eager for something to see and do.

Ferrelli pulled up and to the left on the yoke and his P51-D swung towards the last place he’d seen the bomber. His squadron followed suit, managing to maintain a recognisable Vee-formation as they veered left and climbed steeply.

Ferrelli checked his altimeter. They were at 25,000 feet. He reckoned that bomber was somewhere around thirty. He studied the sky ahead of him, a forest of immensely tall cumulus. There was surely heavy rain down below; a real roof-rattler as his mom liked to term the sort of passing downpours that hit them without warning in the spring and ceased just as suddenly.

He saw the plane again. It was higher than he’d thought, now maybe 35,000 feet.

Damn.

Either he was losing his ability to reckon altitudes or the plane had just pulled up steeply since he’d seen it last, only seconds ago.

‘You guys see it?’ he called out to the squadron.

The voices crackled back in a chorus of confirmation.

‘Wasn’t that plane at thirty thousand? Or am I losing my touch?’

‘Yeah, sir, looked like that to me too,’ answered Jake Leonard, one of the youngest guys on the squadron. Even the distortion of radio failed to hide the fact at eighteen his voice still sounded like a kid’s. The poor guy hated answering the billet telephones; it got him pissed when people not knowing to whom they were talking referred to him as ma’am.

‘You reckon they just climbed?’ asked Ferrelli.

‘Reckon so, sir.’

Smitty decided to add his two cents. ‘It looks like they’re playing hide and seek with us, Danny.’

Ferrelli nodded.

It does look that way. What’s up with these guys?

‘I’m going to try raising them on the radio.’

He flipped the frequency. ‘Ahh… this is Lieutenant Ferrelli, United States Air Force, calling unidentified B-17 due west of me. Are you the guys we’re meant to be escorting this morning?’

He waited for a response.

There was none.

‘Unidentified B-17, west of my position, that’s your seven o’clock. Are you the guys who’ve flown up from Marseilles?’

There was still no answer.

Shit, the radio operator needs to go back to school too.

‘You reckon they got problems, sir?’ asked Jake.

‘Yeah, maybe they have. Maybe they’re all asleep.’ Hell, five minutes ago he’d been ready for a nap. Maybe they were having some technical problems, the radio might be out. He watched the bomber enter a column of cumulus the size of a mountain peak. His eyes followed the predicted course of the plane and half a minute later he spotted it again, but several thousand feet higher. The pilot had just executed a steep climb inside the cloud.

The sonofabitch was trying to lose them.

‘Anyone else here reckon this is a little fishy?’

‘What’re you thinking, sir?’ asked Jeff Thomason, a college kid from Boston, as far he could recall.

‘I think these boys have tried to shake us off. I reckon it’s time we pulled in real close and tried having a talk with them.’ Ferrelli smiled and his facemask rustled against his sandpaper chin. All of a sudden today felt like it had just got a little more interesting.

‘With me, boys, let’s keep the Vee tidy.’ He pulled back on the yoke and began to climb. His squadron followed suit. This time the flying formation was a little tidier, as they rode 7000 feet in just under two minutes to match the current altitude of the bomber. He checked the altimeter; it showed 37,000. Their P51-Ds had a ceiling of 41,000, there wasn’t much headroom left for them. But then he was pretty sure the ceiling altitude for these brutes was less than their Mustangs. He vaguely recalled the Mustang had about four or five thousand on them.

The only way is down, big fella, no way you’re going to out-ceiling us.

The B-17 maintained its course ahead of them, now no more than a quarter of a mile away. It hadn’t changed direction now that they were behind it. Neither had it decided to drop. He wondered whether the earlier evasive manoeuvres were because they thought the Mustangs were Krauts. But then you’d have to be one hell of a jittery pilot these days to be worrying about Germans. Those guys were an endangered species, like buffalo.

Ferrelli had been hoping, since his posting to England, to chance across one of their Luftwaffe boys in the skies over Germany. But then he’d arrived at the party way too late to see any of that kind of action. Those poor bastards had been pounded out of the skies of Europe months ago. He had lived in hope though, occasionally fantasising an encounter with a lone rogue ace and duelling to the death in a clear blue sky.

Just one kill, that isn’t a lot to ask for, is it?

‘You going to try the radio again, sir?’ asked Jake.

‘Err… yup, might as well, I guess.’

Ferrelli flipped the frequency again. ‘Unidentified B-17 west of my position, at thirty-seven thousand feet… hey! Can you fellas hear me?’

There was still no answer. He found himself wondering once more what the hell was wrong with these guys. Either they were the USAAF’s most incompetent bomber crew, ever, period. Or there was some trouble aboard, perhaps multiple equipment failures, or…?

Or that’s Adolf Hitler flying a stolen plane and making a run for it.

Ferrelli smiled dreamily like a kid, like some junior league scruff assembling a fantasy baseball team.

‘Danny? What do we do now?’ asked Smitty.

‘Okay, listen up, guys,’ he announced. ‘I’m going to close in on them, see if I can establish visual contact with the pilot. I want you guys to stay in formation behind them. I’ve got a real funny feeling about these boys.’

‘You reckon they’re escaping Nazis, sir?’ asked Jake hopefully.

‘Don’t let’s get too excited here, son, I’m just being thorough is all. So let’s ease those little thumbs away from the triggers shall we?’

He heard a few of them laugh nervously. They were all as wired as he was. This had to be about the most exciting thing that had happened to them since they had commenced flying as a squadron. Weeks of patrolling empty skies and needlessly escorting cargo planes and bombers, and here they were squealing like kids at a tea party just because some dumb radio operator was probably sleeping on the job.

Mission Time: 4 Hours Elapsed

6.05 a.m., 300 miles from Nantes

Hans watched the Mustang slowly approaching through the plexiglas of the tail-gunner’s blister.

‘It’s an easy shot, Max; he’s coming straight up behind us. One burst and I can put half a dozen shells straight into the canopy.’

His voice was loud with excitement, and Max’s headphones crackled from the volume. Max shook his head. Hans had a hair-trigger manner about him; fire first, think later.

‘We should see if we can bluff our way out of this, before we give ourselves away. They don’t look too worked up, they’re just curious.. so we’ll play along with them for now.’

Pieter turned to look at him. ‘How are we going to do that? You speak English all of a sudden?’

‘I’ll think of something, just give me a minute.’

The American’s voice crackled through their headphones again, a long sentence, entirely unintelligible to them. Pieter was still looking at him. Max knew he wanted to call in Schroder and his men to make a quick clean kill out of this. It wouldn’t be hard — these Yanks were probably all green, and it was unlikely that they had seen much action. Schroder and his squadron of seasoned vets would make mincemeat of the poor bastards.