David Gibbins - The Gods of Atlantis

The intercom crackled through his ear muffs. ‘That’s Charles to you, skipper.’

White grinned to himself. ‘Seen anything interesting?’

‘Only those blue holes in the reef, hundreds of them.’

‘Anyone know anything about them?’ White asked.

‘Some of them are incredibly deep,’ Brown replied. ‘I had a week at Nassau before you lot arrived, and the station commander discovered I was a keen fisherman. He flew me out in a Catalina to a huge blue hole on Andros Island, where we landed on the sea and hauled in enough fish for all the messes on the base that night. The local Bahamians are terrified of the blue holes. They say fishermen and children who go too near them are sucked in. They think they contain monsters, and they say that seeing a whirlpool is a sign of a hurricane on the way. The station commander was some kind of geologist in Civvy Street and thinks it might be based on truth: a kind of vortex effect in the water when the tide comes in, maybe exacerbated by a rising onshore wind that makes the swell build up the water over a hole. When we dropped in altitude a few moments ago, I saw a hole with a white swirl in the centre, and I think that’s what he was on about.’

‘All right,’ White said. ‘But if it turns out to be a monster, let us know. A little excitement wouldn’t go amiss.’ He leaned left and stared at the sea behind the aircraft, searching for the hole Brown had spotted but seeing only a turquoise bank of reefs extending into the blue depths, the beginning of the open Atlantic to the north of the Bahamas. He remembered that last sortie over Berlin, looking down and seeing a different kind of vortex. Instead of dropping marker flares with the other pathfinders, they had dropped ‘window’, thousands of thin aluminium strips that spoofed the German radar. As the huge searchlights played across the night sky, he had watched the silver strips swirling round and round, not falling but rising up around them, as if they were in the eye of a hurricane. A fully laden Lancaster ahead of them had exploded, and they had dropped hundreds of feet into the vacuum created by the fireball, a terrifying freefall through the swirling vortex of silver. They had been directly over one of the huge flak towers, a fortress like a medieval castle next to the site of the Berlin Zoo. The debriefing officer told him that the tower housed tens of thousands of Berliners seeking refuge from the bombing and the coming Russian onslaught. Perhaps what he had seen was the rising heat of confined humanity escaping upwards from the roof of the tower. It was the one image from those nights over Berlin that was seared on his retinas, and he saw it when he closed his eyes now. It had been like medieval paintings he had seen of the axis mundi, a link between heaven and earth and the underworld, a vortex that seemed not like an escape route for souls to heaven but a swirling funnel that had nearly sucked him down to hell.

He felt a nudge on his arm, and turned to see the co-pilot looking at him. ‘Five minutes are up, sir. Do you want me to take her in for the attack?’

White straightened in his seat, then put his feet back on his pedals and his hands on the control wheel. He suddenly felt bone tired, and shook himself, scanning the instrument panel. ‘I have to log this one as pilot, to keep our US Air Force handlers happy that we’re not just treating this as some kind of lark.’

‘Righto, skipper. On your mark.’

‘She’s mine.’ White took over, immediately feeling the aircraft bucking against him, giving leeway to the controls until he could feel his way into the soul of the beast. He glanced right and saw Parker’s hand reach up to the fast-feathering switches above the windscreen, waiting to see that the pilot was in control of the aircraft before making any adjustments to the propellers. The trim came out perfectly this time, slightly nose-heavy, but the plane yawed a few degrees to starboard and Parker pushed up the switches to feather the propellers on the port side. ‘A north-easterly wind is picking up,’ he said to White. ‘We’re low enough now to be affected by the surface wind, and you can see it ruffling the sea.’ The aircraft came back to level, and the compass wobbled around the thirty-degree mark. White played with the throttles, listening above the din for the harmonious sound of all four engines in sync, while Parker tapped the propeller pitch levers to maintain the same rpm. White glanced at him. He was good. He knew Parker had done nearly two tours as flight engineer on a Lancaster, and had that special knack of reading a pilot and his relationship with his aircraft. He felt a surge of confidence. Whatever lay ahead of them, in the Pacific and beyond, he knew he could meld the new men into his crew. Their survival was what counted, in this confined, ear-splitting beast where they lived only in the present, where all that mattered was the sheer fact of being alive.

The navigator tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Five minutes to target, skipper.’

‘Right. Dropping to two hundred feet.’

He felt his pulse quicken. He nosed the aircraft down, coming level again a minute later. It was rougher now, more turbulent over the denser air, like driving across cobbles, as if they were riding the waves themselves. He felt the tail shake that could indicate imminent stall, but he knew it was just buffeting as the slipstream at low altitude corkscrewed around the tail planes. Most of the crew had no proper seats or safety harnesses, another of the less endearing features of the Liberator. A sudden impact could be fatal to any of them. He peered out of the port window at the whitecaps, now alarmingly close, and then glanced up at the long narrow wing. That was the one thing about the Liberator that really frightened him. They were sound, reliable machines, with greater range than the Lancaster or Flying Fortress, and had been quickly adopted by RAF Coastal Command as long-range anti-submarine planes. But they were not amphibious like the other mainstays of Coastal Command, the Catalina and the Sunderland, and they had very poor ditching characteristics: high wings, a big tub belly, and a nose that collapsed on impact if the pilot failed to trim the aircraft so that the tail was down, not always possible in the circumstances of an emergency landing. He gripped the control wheel hard. They could not ditch, and at this altitude they could not bail out. He focused hard, reminding himself. This was a training mission. Nobody was shooting at them. They would be all right.

The bomb-aimer’s voice crackled on the intercom. ‘Should I open bomb-bay doors, skip?’

‘Roger that. Open bomb-bay doors.’ He heard the hydraulics as the doors swung open, then felt more buffeting as the open doors increased the drag. The din inside the fuselage was even more pulverizing. They were carrying three two-thousand-pound depth charges, shaped like oil drums. The charges were normally used against deeply submerged submarines, but these ones were pressure-fused to blow at a depth of only thirty feet and represented a revolution in thinking about anti-ship warfare. The bombs and torpedoes that had been the standard anti-ship weapons of the war impacted against the armour-plated sides and superstructure of ships, whereas depth charges might be dropped to explode beneath the vulnerable lower hull. The bomb-aimer had trained with 617 Squadron, using the bouncing bombs that had been deployed on the famous dambuster raid, and they were going to try the same technique against the target, with the charges spinning anticlockwise so that when they hit the side of the hull, the traction of the spin would carry them under the keel to explode. That was the theory, anyway. It had never been tried before on a ship. Privately White thought that it was a game devised to keep an experienced crew amused before they went on to the real business in the Pacific in the days to come.