Jim Shepard - Paper Doll

“He was flying low squadron in the low group,” Bean said. “The guy who wrote me we both knew in school. He said before it went up, the wing tanks were hit and were spraying gas all over, that you could see it raining off behind the plane.”

Snowberry dotted his pad loudly and rapidly and made a peppery trail away from his box plane. “If Piacenti hears about this he’ll never leave his bunk,” he said.

Bryant felt some dull sadness for Bean but none for his anonymous friend. He thought of the grim white-faced officer standing among the wreckage of Lemon Drop after it had crashed, and his order, strident and unnecessary: Get this cleaned up. A strong sense was growing in everyone that the dead were just part of the mess.

“He was eighteen years old,” Bean said. “Little older than Gordon. Six months out of flying school.”

“Would you cut it out?” Snowberry said murderously.

They sat quietly without speaking. While Bryant watched, Bean dipped his fingers into the ashtray before him, distractedly, looking off at something else, and brought his fingertips, powdered and gray with ash, to his mouth.

When they pulled back the curtain on the mission board the next morning, the red yarn ran to Paris, and an enlargement of the target area was headed Le Bourget. Snowberry and Bryant looked at each other immediately and understood. Le Bourget was where Lindbergh had landed after the solo Atlantic flight. Le Bourget had always been for the two of them part of the legend. It was as if they were going to bomb The Spirit of St. Louis.

They were going after the depots where reserve aircraft and crews were believed to be. Lewis didn’t like it. “Fighters,” he said in a low voice during the briefing. “Why are we going after fighters?” Bean sat beside him and registered nothing.

They would have fighter escort the whole trip, they were assured, P-47’s all the way there and back. Enough Little Friends for a party.

Lewis murmured about fighter suppression as they filed out: Why were they using B-17’s for fighter suppression? There was something strange about it: the operations map showed clear weather over most of western Europe, and there were plenty of more important targets spread in an arc across the map. Bombing airfields was not the most efficient use of heavy bombers. The crews didn’t complain — the airfields were not as heavily defended, usually, as strategic targets.

“Just do your job, General,” Snowberry said. “Nobody said it had to make sense. Let someone else run the war.”

“Maybe they want to give us a rest,” Bryant suggested.

“I think you hit it,” Lewis said. “I’m worried about why.”

In the jeep to the hardstand he added, “I don’t think it’s for what we did. I think it’s for what we’re gonna do.”

In the dark and cold plane Bryant swung experimentally on the sling seat in the turret and eyed the turret canopy critically. He wished he’d overseen the day’s cleaning of the Plexiglas; now it was too dark. Gabriel asked over the interphone with some sarcasm if he’d like to be a part of this morning’s pre-flight systems check.

They waited two hours for the ceiling to lift so they might have a safer assembly and finally went off just at dawn, a vivid orange band beneath a purple one behind the darkened and backlit horizon. The Plexiglas surfaces of the ships ahead of them in taxi position glowed with the colors.

They hooked up with a reassuringly large flight of olive green razorback Thunderbolts — as far as Bryant could tell, there were more escorts than bombers — and the gunners joyfully called in each P-47 flight as it slipped into place until they felt they were approaching Paris cocooned in Air Support.

The Thunderbolts positioned themselves above the formations and wove lazy-S patterns to maintain contact with the slower Fortresses. No one in Paper Doll saw enemy fighters until the formation made its wide turn out of the echeloned vees into the column of groups that formed the long train for the bombing run. The higher squadron swung in alongside Paper Doll and in the process, in a rare instance in which the purest chance crystallized like a well-laid plan, they trapped inside their newly formed defensive box a hapless lone Messerschmitt Me-110 that had magically appeared at three o’clock low just outside Piacenti’s window. The unhappy Messerschmitt flew level between them for a long moment. The pilot was gazing over at Bryant like someone about to get it in an old Mack Sennett short. His fuselage was dark gray with a white nose, with what looked like a little green fanged worm on the cowling. And then all hell broke loose, Bryant and Piacenti and Snowberry together hosing the fighter with tracers as the other planes around them opened up as well, the tracer lines converging from all directions like a starburst in reverse. The 110 seemed to stop and rear in mid-air, and pieces flew off like bits of confetti. It turned a baby blue underside to Paper Doll and then three tracer streams converged dazzlingly on the same point, like a mirror catching sunlight, and it disintegrated and flew backward out of the formation in a rain of shapes.

Smoke from the guns of the formation all around him trailed back from the bombers in satisfying streams.

“God, that was great,” Snowberry said over the interphone.

“That’s the best, that’s amazing, to get them like that,” Piacenti said. Bryant was trembling and overheated. He fired his guns out into space, overwhelmed by how intense the gratification had been, the physical pleasure detached from emotion, from any thought of the absurdly forlorn Mack Sennett face in the canopy before they had let fly. He watched the bombs rain down over Le Bourget, on Lindy’s head, and felt as though a part of him were killed off, and had no regrets. They burst yellow and white in the rapid streams of the bombing pattern and the smoke bloomed and spread like stirred-up muck in pond water. “Bye, bye, Bourget,” Snowberry said over the interphone, for Bryant’s benefit. “Hope the St. Louis was off at a dispersal site.”

Lewis reported a perfect bombing pattern, and added as an item of interest that somebody’s bombs had torn the wings off a fighter attempting to climb beneath them. On the flight home they had maintained perfect formation, the spread of graceful Fortresses ahead and above him beautiful against the sky, and the Thunderbolts had swooped and looped around them after they had cleared the coast, celebrating with their own near-animal grace the ease and success of the day.

There was a minor celebration after debriefing, with Cokes and watery Scotch that Cooper and Gabriel had stashed away. There had been no announcement but already there were signs of another mission the next day, which was supposed to mean no drinking. After their triumph they interpreted that as a little drinking, confined to the afternoon. Gabriel announced to the assembled crew that Snowberry, Bryant, and Piacenti had each been awarded a third of a kill for the Messerschmitt and proposed a toast now that Paper Doll had been officially baptized. Now that the Luftwaffe has felt the sting of our anger, he added wryly. They drank the Scotch and Coke and poured water over each other’s heads. It was only late afternoon and the minute amount of Scotch allotted Bryant made him woozy. It tasted like the metal cup.

“I’ve got an announcement,” Gabriel said. “Thanks to the selfless bravery of Tech Sergeant Gordon L. Snowberry, Jr.—”

“L?” Snowberry said. He was rapidly finishing a loose pile of sketches.

“—L. Snowberry, Jr., we were able to obtain gun camera footage of Paper Doll ’s historic kill today.”

Bean looked at Bryant. Gun cameras were altogether glamorous gizmos reserved exclusively for fighter pilots. The notion of Paper Doll ’s gunners employing gun cameras was akin to the idea of their jousting over aerodromes with the Red Baron or Max Immelmann.