Steven Boyett - Fata Morgana

“So what do you make of the Indian?” Broben asked.

“He seems all right. Handled himself pretty well after I threw him to the wolves.”

Broben nodded. “If he shoots like he pitches, he’ll clear us a path all the way to the IP.”

“He was a ball gunner on another B-17,” Farley said carefully. “Had to bail out when they took hard flak.”

Broben whistled. “Why didn’t they just hand his crew a new bird like they did with us?”

“He is the crew.”

“Oh.” The lieutenant nodded slowly. “That’s a lousy break.”

“It is that.”

They were quiet again. Both men thinking of so many who had been here so briefly. A sad parade of unremembered names and faces and truncated histories. To talk about them was to conjure ghosts, invite bad luck, dwell on whether that dread country they had entered lay in wait for you as well. It was not discussed.

“So how’d a belly gunner make it out and nobody else?” Broben asked.

“Have to ask him.”

“I might just do that. What was his ship?”

Farley took so long answering that Broben thought he hadn’t heard him. Then he said, “ Ill Wind. ”

“Bullshit.”

“That was his ship.”

“Bull and shit. They were all dead on the Ill Wind .”

“ On her, yeah. He bailed.”

“You’re telling me we got a guy from the Ill Wind on our brand-new bird.”

“Yes, Jerry, that’s what I’m telling you.”

Broben frowned. “That’s some bad juju, Captain Pilot sir.”

“You sure you aren’t just getting the heebie jeebies about going up in a new boat?”

Broben shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe.”

“You’d rather be on the Voice ?”

“Not on Hermann Göring’s worst day. That heap of shit was the best weapon Germany ever had. I miss her like I miss getting crabs.”

Farley nodded. He had inherited the Voice of America after Henry Alan Logan had been killed by flak, but he had never warmed to her. More important, she had never warmed to him. Farley liked the idea of a clean slate when it came to the bomber.

Broben leaned back in his folding chair. “So what happened on the Ill Wind ?”

“I think it’s better if Martin tells it. But go easy on the guy, Jer.”

Broben waved as if shooing flies and glanced around the club. The pinups on the wall, a dartboard not in use, the men drinking and smoking and talking RPMs and pull-up speeds, hydraulic failures and flak patterns and Luftwaffe tactics. “So who’s the dame?” he asked.

“What dame?”

“The one you’re about to fly all over western Europe.”

“I already explained who she is. The legend—”

Broben raised his hands. “Spare me the King Arthur stuff, Joseph. You handed Shorty everything but a photograph to work with. Come on, give. Whose puss we got plastered on our bird?”

“No one I know, I swear.”

Broben studied him. “That’s not exactly a straight answer.”

Farley shrugged. “It’s an answer.”

The room went quiet. Frank Sinatra was suddenly loud on the wall-mounted speaker.

Farley looked up to see Major Delvecchio standing in the doorway. He did not meet anybody’s gaze as he slowly raised a hand to touch his cap. He gave a little nod and then he left.

Broben’s Well, shit seemed loud in the smoky room.

Men quietly finished their drinks and slipped out into the cold English night.

“Guess I better go join the conga line,” said Farley.

“Why bother?” said Broben. “When haven’t we been on the assignment sheet? Better I should grill our ground guys.”

“The Ordnance boys don’t know any more than we do.”

“They may not know where we’re going,” said Broben, “but they know what we’ll be hauling there.”

Farley nodded. “I’ll take what I can get,” he said.

The flight line was a hive of activity. Farley put his hands in his jacket pockets against the cold as he walked along the row of Nissen huts to the operations room. He watched service trucks speed out from the bomb storage depot to the bombers on their hardstands, headlights taped over so that only narrow slits of light showed. Ground crew rode on the bombs in back like kids on a hayride. One of them was playing a harmonica, and the tones bent flat as the truck receded.

Farley tracked one service truck along the taxiway until it pulled up by the Fata Morgana. He nodded to himself. Ordnance would be assembling and loading bombs most of the night, and the ground crews would be working on the ships till dawn. They never seemed to sleep. Most of them had been mechanics before the war. Repairmen, some of them. They knew his bomber better than he ever would, and they worried themselves sick whenever their crate was out on a mission. Like parents loaning the car to a kid on his first date. They grilled you when you got back: How’d she do, what went wrong, how’d this or that repair hold up? And when ships didn’t come back they sat on their bicycles along the runway and stared up at the sky like some stone age tribe forlorn at their god’s abdication.

At the Operations Room a knot of pilots was gathered by the door. Farley greeted them as he worked his way toward the assignment sheet on a clipboard hanging on a nail.

In front of Farley, Hap Saunders turned away from the sheet in disgust. Hap was a scrawny little cuss who flew the Dollar Short. He shrugged at Farley. “Why don’t they just list who isn’t going?” he said. “It’d save a bunch of time.”

“’Cause it’d be a blank sheet of paper,” said Hernandez, beside him. Hernandez flew Montezuma’s Revenge. As far as Farley knew, he was the only Latin-American pilot in the AAF. He nodded at Farley. “Ordnance tell you anything?” he asked.

“My XO went to get the lowdown.”

“I heard it’s mixed incendiaries and M44s.”

“Munitions factory?” Farley wondered.

“I’m thinking.”

Hernandez hurried away with Saunders. Neither had mentioned whether he’d seen Farley on the list. You found your own name on the assignment sheet. And if your name wasn’t on it, you didn’t mention that, either.

But of course it was there. Farley, Joseph M., Capt.

They never listed the other crew. They knew they’d be going with you.

A touch on the shoulder at 0430 brought Farley from a deep sleep on his cot in the officers’ barracks. He always slept well the night before a mission. He had no idea why. Most of the others tossed and turned and called out in their sleep—if they could get to sleep. Farley went out like a light and stayed that way. Broben said that Farley could sleep on a meathook.

So when Staff Sergeant Boatman, the operations officer, came in quietly and went from cot to cot politely waking the officers on the mission roster—those who weren’t already awake, anyhow—Farley had to swim up from the bottom when his shoulder was shaken and his name softly called.

“Morning, captain,” said Boatman. “Briefing at oh five-thirty. Enjoy your breakfast.” And then he was moving on to the next cot.

Broben was already getting dressed when Farley sat up. “Shit, shower, and shave, Joseph,” Jerry said quietly.

Farley blinked. “The service at this hotel has really gone downhill,” he said.

Broben nodded. “New management. I hear there’s an outfit in Berlin interested in the property, though.”

Farley rubbed his face, unfazed by the activity around him. “If there’s no coffee around here,” he said, “they can have it.”

The crowded jeep slowed down but did not stop as it went by the dark shape of the bomber in the predawn light. Martin, Garrett, Everett, Francis, and Shorty hopped off and shouldered their heavy Browning machine-gun barrels in their oily sleeves. They waved thanks to the driver, who sped off to collect the next crew. Garrett and Everett headed for the waist hatch, griping all the way. Their bright yellow mae wests flapped in the cold damp morning as the men heaved their parachute harnesses into the bomber and climbed in after. Francis went around to the other side, where he had his own little hatch at the rear of the aircraft for his tail gunner post.