Alex Scarrow - A thousand suns

His crew murmured assent.

A moment later, Hans’s voice came across loudly. ‘I can see ’em now. Spitfires! Goddamn Spitfires! Three of them are engaging our boys, three splitting off and coming for us!’

Oh shit… here we go again.

Mission Time: 6 Hours, 24 Minutes Elapsed

180 miles across the Atlantic

Schroder pulled up steeply and rolled to his left as the three bandits rose up to meet them. He found himself laughing aloud. This was good, old-style dogfighting. One on one, the sort of duelling he had excelled in during the early days of the war.

He quickly scanned the sky to grab a snapshot of the entire skirmish, momentarily placing all nine other aircraft taking part in this particular exchange.

‘Pull these buggers after us down and to the left, and we’ll lead them close to Max’s lads,’ he said, struggling to keep his voice calm and measured.

‘Yes sir,’ both other fighter pilots replied.

The three Me-109s rolled over and dived down towards the left, one tidily behind the other like the carriages of a train. They raced past the three Spitfires still rising to meet them and all six planes fired speculative bursts in the hope of scoring some early damage. Several hundred bullets whistled angrily through the air between the two formations of advancing planes.

None of them hit anything.

Schroder’s guns clattered uselessly as the last of his ammo belts fed through.

I’m out.

He realised all he could do for now was play bait for the Spitfires and lure them in as close as he dared towards the bomber’s guns. As Schroder and his men descended to a position several hundred yards behind and to the left of the B-17, the Spitfires mirrored their arc of descent and followed their route around and down. Within a few fleeting seconds they would be lined up behind the Me-109s and in a perfect position to start shredding pieces off them.

Meanwhile, the other three British fighter planes were ascending towards the bomber from the right. Schroder hoped that Max’s boys could see them approaching and had at least one gun trained on them as they came in.

Behind them, Schroder could sense the Spitfires falling into a comfortable tailing position, closing the gap swiftly. Any second now he expected them to commence fire, but not yet. From their tidy manoeuvring he suspected these pilots were experienced. They would want to pull in a little closer before firing to guarantee a more effective opening salvo and avoid wasting rounds. A sensible ploy, but not without its downside, as Schroder had learned from experience. Many a time an enemy plane had escaped him, scrambling out from beneath the lethal gaze of his crosshair because he’d waited a second too long to get a better, cleaner, closer shot.

He hoped those Spitfires behind them were making the same mistake, holding off one or two seconds too long to get a guaranteed kill with the first volley.

Time to move.

‘On my command… Gunter, Will, break right and left, I’ll lead the first of them in,’ he called out.

‘Break!’ he shouted a second later.

Both flanking Me-109s rolled in opposite directions and dived, and two of the Spitfires followed in hot pursuit leaving one doggedly following Schroder as he veered to the right and subtly closed the gap, drawing it closer to the B-17. The unfortunate British fighter pilot was about to find out for himself what sort of damage the tail-gun of a Flying Fortress can deal out.

The bomber grew in size as Schroder led his pursuer in towards the rear of the plane. Just as he’d begun to suspect the tail-gunner was sleeping on the job, the duel barrels suddenly opened up, firing twin streaks of tracers into the empty space between Schroder and the British fighter. The bullets sped past in front of the Spitfire and drifted quickly back as the tail-gunner adjusted his lead. Half a dozen bullets found their mark along the right-hand side of the fighter’s fuselage and almost immediately a thin whisper of leaking oil trailed out from the Spitfire. The British pilot seemed unperturbed and calmly held position for a few seconds more before firing a burst of gunfire that clipped the tail of Schroder’s Messerschmitt.

Schroder pulled up sharply, hoping the Spitfire would follow suit and expose her underbelly to the bomber’s left-hand waist-gun, but instead the British pilot seemed already to have learned the error of his ways and pulled warily away from the bomber.

At the same time, the other three Spitfires that had split away to specifically target the bomber rose one after the other and raked the underside of the Flying Fortress as they climbed effortlessly past her. The belly of the bomber shed a small shower of fragments that twisted and spun away below her.

As the three fighter planes streamed up past him to his right, less than fifty yards away, Max fleetingly caught sight of one of the British pilots, twisting round in his seat to look back at the bomber as they climbed up into the sky and prepared to come around for another pass.

For some reason they both nodded courteously at each other.

Pieter spun the bombardier’s gun upwards and fired a largely ineffective volley at the last of the three planes, his aim insufficiently in advance of his target, the bullets flew harmlessly behind it. Max heard Pieter cursing angrily over the comm.

‘Pieter!.. shut up!’ he found himself shouting.

‘Sorry,’ he answered sheepishly.

Schroder still had that stubborn bastard on his tail. He was good. The Spitfire was proving bloody hard to shake off. Once again he quickly scanned the sky, attempting to grab another updated snapshot of their little skirmish.

He could see one of the Me-109s trailing a thick pall of black smoke and descending in a shallow dive away from the party and down towards the sea in an easterly direction. Schroder couldn’t tell if it was Will or Gunter. Whoever it was, he presumably was heading back to France in the futile hope that the plane would get him all the way back to land.

One of the Spitfires was also spouting smoke, with the other 109 in hot pursuit. As he watched, the Spitfire was caught by a further well-aimed burst that carved through the starboard wing like a saw through dry wood. A short trail of tumbling debris was left in the plane’s wake. Suddenly, the wing ripped off and the plane instantly rolled over and commenced a slow spiralling dive towards the sea.

One of ours and one of theirs.

They needed to do better than that. Schroder pulled his plane up and once more led the obstinate British pilot behind him towards the rear of the bomber again, hoping that whichever one of Max’s lads was manning that position could work his magic once again and land a dozen more shots on target.

The three Spitfires that had successfully raked the underside of the bomber had so far been untroubled by either the Me-109s or any fire from the bomber. They turned around in a graceful arc above the B-17 and were now approaching from the front, head on, in a steep predatory dive.

Max looked up in horror as he realised they were lining up to make the cockpit their next target.

‘Pieter! Three of them coming fast, twelve-high!’

He imagined what three Spitfires in a tightly formed train, each firing about five seconds worth of. 303 millimetre rounds one after the other into the small, enclosed space of the cockpit, would do to him and the plane.

‘Pieter! Do you see them!’ he called again, this time his voice breaking nervously.

Max could do little but watch their rapid approach. He could pull the bomber into a climb, push her into a dive or roll the plane left or right, but he knew the plane was so slow to manoeuvre that there would be no way they’d avoid the incoming fighters. All he’d be doing would be putting his gunners off balance.