Steven Boyett - Fata Morgana

“His hands were on the wheel,” the intern said, “because he’s getting rigor mortis. Which happens to a body after it’s been dead for about three hours.”

Clay stared at him. “Then who landed the goddamned ship?” he asked.

The medic shrugged and said, “Maybe it landed itself.” And then him and the other medic loaded Pepper’s body into the ambulance and went back for the rest of the crew.

Three days later I was back at Jordan Abbey. I got debriefed and I told them everything I’ve told you. No one said a word to me about me bailing.

The CO came in after my debriefing and said he thought it’d be a good idea if I transferred to Thurgood. He wanted me to know it had nothing to do with anything I’d done, or didn’t do. “The real mystery,” he said, “is what happened after you were off that bomber.”

But even so, he told me, half the base had seen that Fortress come back home and land without a living soul on board. And that story was going to hang around my neck no matter where I crewed.

I don’t know if it was me he was looking out for or the others, but I figured he had a point either way. So in the barracks I was putting my kit together to leave when Clay came in and gave me back my medicine bag. He said it’d been hanging from Pepper’s hand when he found him. I don’t know how Clay knew it belonged to me. I guess because, like I said, he knew everything about his bomber.

“One day ten years from now,” he told me, “after this goddamn war is over, maybe you and me will meet in a bar somewhere, and you can buy me a beer and tell me how this got in Pepper’s hand. But right now I don’t want to know. Understand?”

I asked him why not and he said, “Because I’d like to sleep again someday. And I’m pretty sure you telling me what happened on that ship won’t help that one goddamn bit.”

And you know, I think he was right.

The engines droned on for an uncomfortably long time before Farley looked over at Broben and said, “You happy now?”

Broben shrugged. “He tells a good story, I’ll give him that.”

Farley looked at his copilot a moment. “You’re an asshole, Jerry,” he said.

The laughter over the interphone was loud.

“You left your mike on, captain,” said Garrett.

“Gee, ya think?” said Jack Benny’s voice.

“Okay, pipe down,” said Farley. “Plavitz, where are we?”

“One sec, captain,” said Plavitz.

Farley muted his mike. “Don’t sulk, Jer,” he said. “It isn’t manly.”

“I’m not sulking,” Broben said brightly. “I’m indispensable. If you didn’t have an asshole, you’d be completely full of shit.”

Farley barked a laugh.

“Anyway,” said Broben, “I’m glad he cleared the air.”

Plavitz came back on the interphone. “Captain, we’re almost directly north of Zennhausen. Wrecking Crew should be making her turn any minute now.”

“Time sure flies,” said Garrett.

“Stow it,” said Farley.

A minute later the lead bomber banked right and Farley immediately followed. The squadrons began their long southward turn in formation.

Farley got on the interphone again. “Time to roll the feature, boys. We’re about ten minutes from the IP. Everybody put your work clothes on and do your job and we’ll get back home fine.”

“I hope you have a story for the ride back, chief,” said Broben.

“If we make it out of here,” said Martin, “I’ll make up another one.”

Garrett and Everett put on their heavy flak aprons and their helmets. All the gunners checked their guns again, hands clumsy in their thick heated alpaca gloves. The flight deck thermometer showed -30°. The weather was clear all the way to the horizon. Plavitz checked his chart against landmarks on the ground. Boney began calibrating his Norden bombsight.

After the broad turn south the formation tightened up again, and Farley concentrated on keeping the Fata Morgana straight and level and just off the leader’s left wing. Broben reported the instrument readings. In their turrets Martin and Wen scanned the sky for bandits. In the tail Francis did the same.

The first flak bursts appeared about five miles off the Initial Point, wisps of black ink along an even line. The firing pattern took shape like a connect-the-dots drawing of a shoebox thousands of feet long. Each black wisp a blast of hurtling metal shards. The flak intensified, and in seconds the barrage became the thickest concentration of flak Farley had ever seen, cottony black smears overlapping to form a box of smoke so thick that he could not see beyond it. Red detonations lit the murk.

“Shit, you think they knew we were coming?” Broben asked.

“I think they’re gonna know we were here,” Farley replied. He looked away from the thickening barrage ahead of them. “It’s not a girl I know,” he told Broben.

Broben looked at him as if he’d sprouted antlers. “It’s what?”

“Not a girl I know.” Orange light lit Farley’s face.

“Don’t go flak-happy on me, Joe. Not now. I’m begging you here.”

The cockpit shook from concussions dead ahead.

“The nose art,” said Farley. “It’s not a real girl. I see her in my head sometimes. In my dreams. She looks just like that.”

“Ohhh-kay.”

Farley shrugged. “I thought she’d be good luck,” he said.

“Well I’ll be goddamned. College Joe Farley is just as superstitious as the rest of us monkeys.” Broben flinched at a blast ahead.

“If you tell anybody, I’ll fly your side of the bomber into a steeple.”

“It’s about the only way you could get me into a church.”

“Switching to automatic pilot,” said Farley. “Asshole.”

Now the scene before them was a demented artist’s landscape of a mad god’s Hell. A massive floating bin of coalblack smoke that seethed with sullen red pulses as more 88 shells detonated within its lethal demarcations.

“Here we go,” said Farley.

Four dozen Flying Fortresses in tight formation hurled themselves into that ravenous and indiscriminate maw. Fata Morgana began to buffet as the sunlight dimmed and the smell of cordite filled the freezing air. They flew within a thunder now, constant hammer-blows of detonating flak in all directions. A sound like gravel thrown against the fuselage.

Farley’s head turned like a man watching a tennis match as he eyed the instruments and the Wrecking Crew in front of them just off the right wing. The lead B-17 shook with the artillery shells’ concussion, and Farley saw that she had already taken hits along her left side.

Garrett and Everett were hunkered down in the waist. Enemy fighters would not engage around the flak pattern, and there was little for the gunners to do but ride it out. Outside the thin skin of the bomber was the sound of battling Titans, mindless fury bent on their destruction.

A hunk of jagged metal punched through the hull by Everett’s right boot, ricocheted off a ceiling spar, and shot out the window on the other side not a foot from Garrett’s head. Neither gunner even saw it.

Someone screamed in Farley’s headphones. It sounded like Shorty, and Farley was about to order Garrett to the radio room when Shorty’s voice came on the interphone.

“Radio operator here. I’m all right. I got some kind of awful static on the radio. Felt like someone stabbed me in the ear.”

“Roger,” said Farley. “Navigator?”

“Two minutes to the IP,” Plavitz said immediately. “The flak’s so thick I’m losing ground markers.”