Steven Boyett - Fata Morgana

So I took off my medicine bag and I put it around Pepper’s neck. I told him it would help him on his journey. I thought maybe the Ill Wind was the Thunderbird my grandfather meant. Pepper nodded and I put a hand on his shoulder. You don’t wish a dead man luck. You say goodbye and you hope his spirit finds its way. So that’s what I did.

And then I just climbed down. I grabbed my parachute and a ditch kit and I carried them to the forward hatch. The wind wasn’t so bad right behind the radio room bulkhead and I squatted down and opened the hatch and put on the chute. We were up around three thousand feet, and there was nothing below me but a whole lot of North Atlantic. Dark and choppy and cold as hell. It looked hard as metal and I could see whitecaps even from this high up.

I inflated my mae west and grabbed the sides of the hatchway. I don’t know why I didn’t jump. I wasn’t afraid to. Believe me, the idea of staying in that bomber was a lot scarier than jumping into the ocean. But I just watched the water go by underneath me and the wind was roaring through the flak hole like the bomber was screaming. I could feel it shaking all around me. I could feel the dead men all around me, too. Pepper up there looking for a landing no live man could see. Nine guys I’d had breakfast with that morning.

Then the bomber jerked right, and it threw me right out of the hatch. That air was like a wall. It spun me around like you’d throw a doll. I pull the cord and the chute opens and I’m hanging underneath it. I couldn’t see the Ill Wind because of the canopy, but I could hear her. I still can.

I hadn’t tied the raft to me, and it was still up there in the bomber. So I started worrying about what was below me instead of what was above me, because my cruise in the North Atlantic just got a whole lot worse.

Under me’s nothing but whitecaps, ten-foot waves. I’m turning, and the coast comes into view—and I can’t believe it. There’s a boat, dead ahead. A big trawler. Like the bomber just spit me out right over it.

I came down less than a hundred yards away from that boat. The Bonnie Marie. Didn’t need the raft, the flare gun, none of it. They’d seen the bomber and they saw me jump, so they were ready for me.

That was the coldest water I ever want to be in. I got tangled in my shroud lines, and they had to cut it all off me. I coughed up a gallon of North Sea, but I was on a deck and they were throwing blankets on me and yelling questions in some kind of English I couldn’t understand. Someone put a coffee in my hand and someone else poured brandy in it, and I sat on that deck and stared up at the sky.

So the rest of the story comes from Clay Renick, our crew chief. The ground crews were all sweating out the mission back in Jordan Abbey, and finally the squadron started coming back in. Right away they knew it was bad. The ships are limping home like whipped dogs. Shot up, flakked up, smoking, leaking everything. There aren’t enough medical teams for all the Fortresses that are shooting off red flares as they come in. The airfield looks like the Fourth of July. Say Cheese came in with the whole front bubble blown off. The ground crew are counting bombers, looking for ID numbers or nose art, trying to figure out whose ships are coming in, pedaling out to their birds the second they touch down.

Forty-eight B-17s went out. Thirty-two made it back. The orphan crews stayed on their bikes along the runway, staring up at the sky like they were wishing those bombers back. Like if they just waited long enough they’d show up. And you know, a couple stragglers did come through, toughing it out on two or three engines right above the trees.

Fifteen, twenty minutes after the last one touches down, the orphan crews start looking at each other. It’s bad luck to talk about it, and no one wants to be the first guy to head back from the airfield. You don’t give up on your ship.

Clay was the one who pointed first. I think he could have picked Ill Wind out of a whole sky full of Fortresses just from the sound. He knew those radial engines like a momma knows her baby’s breathing. The rest of the crew couldn’t see a thing, but he just set his jaw and shook his finger at the treeline and told them to hang on.

And a minute later there she was. The Ill Wind, no mistake. She was flying low and her gear was down and she was coming in on one engine. Two, Three, and Four were out and feathered. Right stabilizer just hanging off and the ship not able to fly straight. Flak hole on the left side of the cockpit, shot up like a bum-winged duck on the first day of hunting season.

And no red flare. Clay couldn’t believe it. How could a bird get that shot up and not be firing a wounded-on-board flare?

Quarter-mile before the runway her Number One cut out. Clay said it was eerie as hell, watching that big, beat-to-death B-17 come gliding in dead quiet. She was fighting to line up on the runway and when she got it centered she just dropped, bam. Smoke from the wheels and a squeak of rubber and then she’s sliding down the runway quiet as a ghost. You could see Captain Ryan and Pepper Thompson in the cockpit, but there was no brake, no crew chutes dragging her to a halt. She drifted off the runway and into the mush, and that’s what finally stopped her.

Clay just shook his head when he told me about it. “All them purple-heart wagons limping in,” he said, “and here comes the Ill Wind on no engines and held together with tape and spit, and she just glides in like a sailboat coming into the dock.”

Well, the crew was out there like a shot. Clay was the first one on board. He was supposed to let the medics on first, but he said he just couldn’t stand it. Said he knew something was wrong before he even got in the bomber. He was all set to give the captain grief about messing up the aircraft, but it just stopped up in his throat, even before he saw what was in there. Metal was pinging and creaking but there was no other sound. Nothing moved. He said it smelled like a butcher shop.

He came in through the front hatch, which was still open from when I bailed, so right away he saw J.D. there on the floor. He yelled for the medics and went looking around inside to help the wounded. He saw what I’d seen, the whole crew dead from flak and strafing fire.

But Pepper was dead, too. He had ten inches of metal sticking out from between his ribs and he was bone white. His hands were still on the wheel. Clay said he was staring out the windshield like he was still looking for a place to land.

The medics came in and Clay got out of the way. He came out of the bomber shaking his head, and all the air just went out of the ground crew. The Ill Wind had landed with no one alive on board, and that just can’t happen. There’s no place in the world for that to be right. They all stood outside the bomber and stared at it like it had just appeared there out of thin air.

When they took Pepper’s body from the bomber, Clay told one of the medics he thought Pepper should get the Distinguished Service Cross for bringing the Ill Wind home. The medic looked at him like he was out of his mind. He had one end of the stretcher with Pepper in it and Pepper was frozen in place like he was still in his copilot’s seat.

“Sergeant, this man didn’t land this aircraft,” the medic said.

“Well, the pilot sure didn’t do it,” Clay told him. “He was cut in two.”

“The copilot couldn’t have done it either,” the medic said. “He’s been dead for hours.”

Clay told him to his face that he was full of shit. “The man’s hands were still on the wheel,” he said. He pointed at Pepper on the stretcher. “Hell, they still are.”