B for Buster (5 page)

CHAPTER 5

EVERY MORNING AT BREAKFAST the loudspeaker switched on. There was a click and a buzz, then the deep thump of a finger being tapped on a microphone somewhere. And then a voice came on—the lovely, whispery voice of an English WAAF. “Good morning, gentlemen,” she always said.

A silence filled the room with the first click from the speaker. Talking stopped, and eating stopped, and row after row of airmen became as still as photographs.

The WAAF cleared her throat. She always did, and I always imagined her fingers, thin and white, lifting up to touch her lips.

Everyone was listening, and no one moved. They
never
moved before she spoke again. Our whole days depended on the next thing she would tell us. I wanted her to say that we were “on” for the night. I was sick of being stood down day after day—more than a week since Lofty went flying. I wanted her to say that we were on, that I would be heading off to Germany.

I looked at little Ratty and saw he had his fingers crossed. Lofty was putting his hand in his pocket. Two tables away, Donny Lee's head of clown-red hair was bent over his breakfast.

The WAAF, like an angel, said, “You are on for tonight.”

I cheered. I shook my hands in the air like a boxer; I shouted, “Hooray!”

I was the only one who did. Ratty was grinning, and Will had a thumb cocked up. Buzz and Simon and Pop all looked as happy as clams, but I was the only one in the whole room who cheered. Lofty took his hand from his pocket, and his pipe was in his fingers. He popped it in his mouth and smiled at us, but his new, dark eyes seemed hollow.

At every other table, all around the room, there was one long groan followed by a lot of muttered voices. There was a lot of staring, too, all aimed in my direction. Donny Lee went scurrying to the door like a guy with his hair on fire.

“Well, chaps,” said Lofty, “I'll take a squint at the list. See if we're flying.” He puffed on his empty pipe as he wandered away.

All around, plates were being pushed aside and breakfasts left unfinished. But we kept tucking in at ours, hoping that
Buster
was on the list, trying to guess where the night would take us. We were the only ones left in the room when Lofty appeared in the doorway again and told us, “Shake a leg, chaps. We're on.”

The hours seemed endless. We flew circuits and bumps from ten to noon, ate a lunch and stooged around, then went in for briefing. It was my first time in the hut, and I felt like bounding across the benches to claim a seat at the front. But I forced myself to go slowly, swaggering instead, with my worn-looking cap pushed back, nodding hellos to people I didn't know. I thought I looked like Billy Bishop, but a wave of titters came from behind me. I wanted to sink through the floor, until Lofty looked up and smiled to see me.

There was a stage at the front of the room, a row of chairs and a lectern, an enormous curtain at the back. More than a hundred airmen stamped to attention as the officers came in, then sat again with a squeal of benches and a shuffling of feet.

The CO stood at the lectern in his leather jacket and crushed cap, looking the way I had only tried to look. He made a joke that wasn't funny. I laughed loudly, though no one else laughed at all. Then he pulled a cord, and the curtain slid open.

The room filled with voices and mutters. “Good God,” said a gunner. “It's Happy Valley again.”

A pair of red ribbons started at Yorkshire and bent their way south, turning here and there, to end at Düsseldorf in the valley of the Ruhr. It didn't look like a long way on the map. The ribbons passed over the North Sea, over Holland, then dodged into Germany with a sudden turn. “Piece of cake,” I told Lofty.

He didn't answer.

We got the weather report from a white-haired meteorological officer, a little fellow so short that he might have been the eighth dwarf. The crews called him Drippy because he nearly always predicted rain. But tonight, he said, the skies would be mostly clear. He sniffed and sat down, and a parade of officers followed him. We got the news—the gen—on signals and timing and routing. Nearly eight hundred aircraft would be converging over Düsseldorf, so we had to be sure that we kept at the proper altitude and headings. The intelligence officer tapped a pointer on the map to show us where we'd meet the flak and searchlights. His stick went
tappa-tappa-tappa
across half the stupid map. I said, “Sir! You should tap where there
isn't
flak.” Again, my laugh was the only sound.

I cringed inside myself, and didn't look up until the briefing was finished. Then the pilots and the navigators swarmed toward the front, and gunners drifted off. I joined the mob of wireless operators lining up to collect a list of frequencies on a bit of paper called a flimsy.

I kept to myself until supper, then joined
Buster'
s crew in the dining hall. I could smell the eggs and bacon, and went drooling to my table. Only the operational crews got eggs; to me they were something like medals.

A WAAF brought one to me. In her little blue suit she leaned over my plate and served me from a spatula. “There you go, love,” she said.

I could hardly turn my eyes away; they nearly popped from my head. Right in front of me, beautiful and smooth, as white and soft as cream, was the first real egg I'd seen in more than a month. But my second would be waiting when we came back from Germany, so I ate this first one in two big bites. All around the tables people were joking about the eggs, asking each other, “If you get the chop, can I have yours at breakfast?”

We ate quickly, then collected our escape kits and our parachutes. We changed into flying clothes—into clobber, we called it. The gunners lined up to plug into the electricity and test their heating systems, and there was a smell of hot wires and scorched leather. Then the sun was going down, and we waited on the lawn for the truck to take us out to
B for Buster.

Dirty Bert came along with his bomb trolley. It was stacked with pigeon boxes, and each of the metal crates had its end open, the round lid clipped to the side of the box. Inside, behind the flaps of the cardboard linings, the pigeons cooed and scratched. Bert doled them out to the “wops”—the wireless operators—so I got in line with the others.

The wops ahead of me took the boxes without a word, without even a nod to Bert. I tried to do the same, but he held the box too tightly. My hands slid right off it, and I staggered back, surprised. Then, head down, I went at him again.

“'Allo, sir,” said Bert.

I tugged at the box.

“I saved Gilbert for you, sir,” he said. “Gibby's a fine little bird. I think you'll like 'im, sir.”

The box still wouldn't budge. Gilbert had his head so far through the hole that I was afraid he would peck me on the wrist. The guys behind me were muttering and pushing, trying to hurry me along. I looked up at Bert and saw the friendliest smile I had ever seen in the air force.

“You'll watch 'im, won't you, sir?”

“Yes,” I said. “All right, I will.”

“Good luck to you, sir.” He winked. “'Appy flying.”

“Thank you,” I said.

The box came easily then. I carried it away with my face red from the shame of talking to Bert. The pigeon clattered and cooed, until I was sure that everyone was staring at me. I shook the box and told the bird, “Shut up!” The more I shook, the more he squawked, the stupid thing.

I thought of shoving the box underneath a fuel bowser and telling Lofty, when he asked, “Gee, I didn't see any pigeon.” But when the truck came to take us out to
Buster,
it was too late. Lofty shouted, “All aboard! Women and children and pigeons first.”

He was just showing off for the lady driver, who turned around in her WAAF cap and tittered at me as I held the pigeon, like a kid with a giant lunch box. “Don't eat him, now,” she giggled. All the way across the field I thought of clever, withering things I should have told her.

Sergeant Piper was waiting under
B for Buster,
with his gang of erks around him. He greeted us in a way that was friendly and rude at the same time, with a wisecrack about sprogs. Then he stood at the tailgate, catching our elbows as we tumbled down. Gilbert fluttered and squawked as I leapt to the ground. “Careful with that, boy,” said Sergeant Piper, as though it was a bomb that I carried. He had a big wrench in his hand, so I only glared at him.

We carted our gear to
Buster
's door. Everyone had a flask of coffee and a paper bag full of sandwiches and oranges and chocolate. We climbed in and lugged it all to our places. As I stepped down from the cockpit to the nose I squinted at the pipes and hoses and tried to see in them my phantom navigator.

There was no
feel
of ghosts. I knew the sense of haunted places: the witch's house in Kakabeka; the gloomy meadow just above the falls, where an Indian princess had flung herself into the river. They were clammy places, even in the sunshine.
Buster
just felt empty, like any old machine.

I stowed my parachute away and strapped the pigeon box in place. As I reached inside to take out the food and water cans, the pigeon tried a breakout. “Get back,” I said, giving him a poke.

From up and down the kite came thuds and bangs as others stowed their things. We examined everything from the bombsight in the nose to Ratty's twin guns in the tail, then went out to lie in the grass and wait.

The sun was nearly down, the moon not risen yet. The tiny blackflies—midges, the English called them— swarmed around in swirling clouds. Dew had settled on the grass. Ratty and the others who smoked got out their cigarettes and puffed circles at the sky. Buzz lay stretched on his side, digging with his fingers at the soil.

I couldn't sit still. I tingled all over with the excitement of flying, and I sat up and lay down and sat up again.

Lofty and Pop went walking around
Buster,
tugging at the trimming tabs, patting at the wheels. Sergeant Piper went with them, his hands in his pockets, talking like a car salesman about every little thing. The three of them bent down to look at the tail wheel, and I saw a flash of silver at Pop's throat. He was wearing a crucifix that I hadn't seen before.

It was for luck, I thought. He wasn't the only one who carried something with him. Little Ratty had a rabbit's foot that he had brought from the States. He had hung it round his neck for his very first flight, on the Canadian prairies, in one of the canary-colored trainers we knew as Yellow Perils. He had never climbed into an aircraft without it. Will had a picture of a girl tucked in his helmet. We all knew she was his wife, and we all knew he kept her picture there, though he was always very secret about the way he slipped it into place before a flight. Simon, somewhere, had a white handkerchief that smelled very faintly of perfume. Buzz carried nothing with him, yet he never flew without a charm, and he was busy digging in the grass now to find one.

I had a ray gun. It was just a ring—a kid's silly ring— such a stupid thing to carry that nobody knew I had it. It was buttoned in my tunic pocket, and it would stay there until I was alone in the darkness, bent over my desk where no one could watch me.

Only Lofty had no lucky charm, and no belief that he needed one. He had smiled at the stinky handkerchief, and chuckled at the rabbit's foot, and he certainly would have howled at my ray-gun ring. It wasn't stuff like that, he'd said, that had kept us alive through our training, while so many others had bought the farm. “You don't need
luck,
” he'd told us. “You've got
me.
”

I patted my pocket. The ring was still there.

“Hey!” cried Buzz, suddenly sitting up. “I found one.” He held up his trophy, a tiny four-leafed clover.

Ratty applauded; Will made a wolf-call whistle. Buzz wedged the clover into his flying glove, up to the tip of his trigger finger. By the end of the flight it would be a green smudge, like a bug squashed on his skin.

We spent half an hour loafing around on the grass before Lofty signed the 700. Then we climbed aboard for another half hour of waiting in the kite. The sun had warmed the black metal, and
Buster
was oven-hot. I sweated in just my jacket and my trousers, and pitied the gunners bundled in their leather coveralls. At seventeen thousand feet their sweat would freeze into ice. So would Lofty's. He was such a great guy that he kept the hot-air outlet aimed down toward me and Simon instead of at himself. I would always be warm.

Gilbert squawked. I rapped on the box, but he squawked even louder. Then Simon shouted at me, “Why's that bird throwing a wobbly? If he doesn't shut up, he'll come a gutser.”

I didn't know exactly what Simon meant, but it sounded awful. I banged on the box and told the pigeon to be quiet. It bashed around, then settled down. And through my window I watched the darkness close in. The other bombers stretched away in staggered rows. The closest one was
E for Eagle,
and I could see the pilot in his cockpit, a black dot against a sky that wasn't much lighter. Sergeant Piper and the other erks stood around their trolley. They leaned back with their arms crossed, digging their toes at the grass. They looked bored and impatient, like people waiting too long for a bus.

Then at last we got the word. It started at Bomber Command in High Wycombe, filtered down to Group, down to the squadron, and at last to the airmen.

Lofty cleared his throat. “Right. Let's get this bus in the air,” he said.

CHAPTER 6

“SWITCH TO GROUND.” That was Lofty, his voice coming through the intercom.

“Switch to ground,” said Pop.

“Landing gear locked.”

They ran through their checklist, the old guy sounding bored. He had been a mechanic long before the war began, and he still had that slow, mechanical way of thinking.

The erks bustled below me. Others wheeled the trolley into place, then stretched out the cable to plug into the fuselage. Every moment brought us closer to the op, and every moment was harder to wait. Other bombers were being readied in just the same way at just the same time—dozens and dozens and dozens of them—at every airfield in every county in all of England. But it seemed that the entire air force, from Bomber Harris down to the lowest erk, had only one task right then—to get old
B for Buster
airborne.

“Master switches on. Tanks one and three, switches on,” said Lofty.

“Switches on,” echoed Pop.

“Propeller fully up. Gills open.”

A pair of erks walked the first propeller around, grabbing the blade tips to roll the engine over.

“Ignition, number one,” said Lofty. “Booster on. Coils on.”

The outer engine whined. The propeller blades turned and stopped, turned again, then spun in a blur as the engine caught. Number two was started, three and four, and they ran in a ragged, shaking roar until Lofty got them synchronized. He backed the throttles to let the engines idle.

“Compass set to on,” said Lofty. “Ground battery disconnected. Switch to flight.”

Our lights came on, gleaming on the ground. Along the row of bombers, others sparkled red and green and white.

“Door closed,” said Pop. “Ready to taxi.”

“Roger that. Switch on, clutch in, gyro out,” said Lofty. “Right, let's go.”

Will passed by my station on his way to the cockpit, and I looked up to watch him lower the second dickey seat and settle in at Lofty's side. He would work the throttles and the pitch levers, letting Lofty put all his strength into the rudders and the column. I heard a rasping sound below me, and saw an erk come running out from the wheel, dragging a chock on its bit of rope. The engines quickened, and we rumbled forward.

Lofty steered a weaving path along the perimeter, then swung quickly onto the runway with a burst from the starboard inner. We rocked forward as the brakes went on.

There was still a chance we wouldn't be flying. At any moment the op could be canceled, the bombers sent back to dispersal.
Hurry up,
I said under my breath.
Just
get us off the ground.

“Elevator tabs, two divisions,” said Lofty. “Rudder neutral. Fuel cocks, Pop?”

“All switches set,” said Pop.

“Flaps down thirty. Gills open one-third.”

We waited for the flare. My stomach churned from excitement.

“Hang on,” said Lofty. “Full throttles, Will.”

The engines howled.
Buster
shuddered and lurched forward, veering to the left. For a moment I clutched my belts, but Lofty got us straightened out, and the ground blurred below my window, faster and faster.

“Throttles locked,” said Lofty.

“Okay,” said Will. He started calling out the speed. “Forty knots. Fifty knots,” he said. “Sixty knots, Skipper.”

The tail came up. “Oo-oop,” said Ratty. No one laughed; we'd heard the joke on every training flight since April.

“Seventy knots. Eighty,” said Will. “Ninety knots, Skipper.”

B for Buster
hurtled down the runway, the engines at a high pitch, the metal vibrating, the wheels thundering on the tarmac.

“Ninety-five. One hundred, Skipper.”

“Are we there yet?” asked Ratty.

And all the thunder and the shaking stopped. We were flying, the ground below us falling away. The end of the runway went by, and then dark fields split by a silvery web of old stone fences.

“Climbing speed,” said Lofty.

“Okay, Skipper.”

“Flaps up ten.”

“Flaps up, okay,” said Will.

“Wheels locked. Undercarriage up.”

“Okay, Skipper.”

Hydraulic motors hummed.
Buster,
half-alive, cranked up her wheels and her flaps. Her four-engined heart beat loudly and fast from the effort of hauling herself from the ground. Then the undercarriage thudded into place, and the wind whistled through the canopies.

“Cruising speed,” said Lofty.

The engines settled to a steady, hurried thrum. The huge Halifax leaned in a turn, the nose high, the deck and my table slanting steeply. I had to lunge to catch my pencil as it rolled toward the edge, and I saw the pigeon in its box, its head poking through the round hole in the flap. Will came down from his perch on the folding seat and poked me in the side. He pointed up with his thumb, telling me to look.

I twisted backward in my seat. Peering up through the passage, I saw Lofty there—his whole right side— his leg thrust toward the rudders, his arm reaching for the column. I saw, very dimly, the bottom of his cap brim and the bulge of his oxygen mask. He had his pipe in his mouth, jammed in the rubber.

Will leaned down. He pried up my helmet flap and bellowed in my ear. “Good old Lofty, eh?” Then he went smiling to his bombsight.

“Skipper, your course is two-one-oh,” said the navigator through the intercom.

“Two-one-oh, roger,” said Lofty. We tilted farther.

It was wonderful to fly. I felt sorry for the erks, and for everyone else who labored on the ground—for all the farmers and the villagers and the people in the cities who had never slipped those bonds of earth. Flying was the one thing that had brought all of us together, that kept us apart from the poor slobs below. I was better than them. I was an airman, a flier, a rover of the air.

“It's a beautiful night,” said Will, in his place again at the bow. Surrounded by glass, lying flat on his stomach, he could
feel
that he was flying. “There's kites all around us, all turning and weaving. I can only see their navigation lights, and they look like hordes of fireflies. And there's moonlight on the river, and stars floating. It looks magical. As though the Milky Way has fallen on the ground.”

“Gee, all I see's a river,” said Ratty.

“And there's a farmhouse, a chink of light between the blackout curtains. It's the only thing on the ground, and it looks so lonely, one light in all the dark and nothing. It looks like God's house, that's what it's like.” Will was a poet. It was why we sometimes called him Shakespeare. He wrote things down but hardly ever showed them to anyone, and never read them aloud. “We're going to pass right over it,” he said, “and— there—I can look right down the chimney and see the fire in the hearth. Just an instant. Just a glimpse.”

I set the frequencies on my wireless. I fitted the screwdriver into the slot and turned it back and forth to match the numbers on my flimsy. It was a chore I had done so often, on so many flights, that I found it hard to believe that I was doing it now on the way to Germany, astride a belly full of bombs. Then I grinned inside my mask to think that I was already on the battlefield, fighting in the boundless world of Superman and Buck Rogers, on a fabulous field that stretched in all directions and rose from the earth to the heavens. I imagined the people below turning their faces to the sky, telling each other, “Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane. It's—the Kakabeka Kid!”

I tightened my curtain. I leaned into my corner and, hunched by my desk, pulled the ray-gun ring from my pocket. It was a crummy thing that didn't shoot rays, or anything else. But it stood for the Space Patrol and all my heroes, and I always felt a tingle when I put it on. When I was small I had worn it on my thumb, and I'd had to clench my fist to keep it from falling off. Now it barely squeezed onto my little finger. I had owned that ring for years and years.

“Skipper, steer one-five-six,” said Simon.

“Roger. One-five-six,” answered Lofty.

We joined with fifty other bombers and all flew south together. Our lights went out, and those of the others, and we traveled through the blackness. I drew the curtain round my desk and covered up my window. The little goosenecked lamp made a pool of light on the wireless.

“Seven thousand feet,” said Lofty.

The plane shivered as we passed through someone's slipstream. The engines quickened for a moment, then settled back to their steady drone.

“Twelve minutes to the coast,” said Simon.

“Roger,” answered Lofty.

We passed ten thousand feet. “Oxygen, boys,” said Lofty. I tightened my mask and connected to the system. The air had a taste of rubber, but I thought of it as the breath of
Buster.

“Hey, Kakky, how's the bird?” asked Simon.

I didn't bother to look; I knew that he'd be lying like a lump on his belly, maybe sleeping and maybe not. No matter how high we flew, it didn't seem to bother the pigeon. At eleven thousand feet, a man would conk out in a minute or two, but pigeons kept breathing at twice that height. I hadn't known it at first. On one of our training exercises, at fifteen thousand feet over the North Sea I had shone my torch into the pigeon box and seen the bird standing up. I'd shouted, “Holy smokes, the pigeon's awake!”

Simon laughed again now. I aimed my tiny ray gun at him through the curtain.

I couldn't listen to the wireless and the intercom at the same time. I kept switching back and forth between them, listening on the wireless for any recalls or news about wind shifts, then catching bits of talk on the intercom.

“Crossing the coast,” said Will. “There's the surf. A silver thread.”

I turned off my lamp and peered out through the little window. I could see nothing down there, but I didn't like the thought of empty water. It would be so cold, so dark and heaving.

“Okay to test the guns, Skipper?” That was Buzz, his voice sounding excited.

“Roger. Blast away, boys.”

I heard the whine of the powered turrets, and I felt the hammer of the guns. The bit of sky that I could see lit up with bursts of tracer curving off in all directions. It was sudden and short, and then there was only the darkness again. But the flashes glowed on my eyelids, sparkling white and orange every time I blinked.

We carried on across the Channel with the engines booming. I couldn't see very far ahead, not at all behind or straight below. I didn't like looking out at nothing but a black emptiness, so I covered the window again, switched on the light, and sat and waited. I looked up at the rudder cables and the hoses, then down at the deck, imagining the bombs nested in their bay below it. To my side, by the window, the paint didn't exactly match where two metal plates met at a riveted joint. I touched the place, wondering which bit was new and which was old, and then what had happened on
Buster
the night that a dead man landed the plane. I thought of the voice I had heard, or imagined, calling out for the course for home. Then the same coldness touched me again, and I knew it had been a mistake to start thinking like that.

My intercom crackled. “Searchlights ahead.”

“I see them, Will,” said Lofty.

“Flak now. Just starting up.”

Lofty didn't answer. There were two clicks from his intercom, and we droned along toward the enemy coast, jinking left and right, now dropping fifty feet, now rising so much more. Lofty never used the autopilot; he kept us moving through an empty sky the way a rabbit flits from hole to hummock to dodge the hawks above it.

“It's beautiful, really,” said Will. “Terrible, but beautiful.” He sounded dreamy and wondering. “It's like a fence of light, like rows of swords all waving back and forth. The flak is bursting high—big orange balls—and the tracers are flying through it. They look like flaming onions, all right. It's quite a show. It's— Oh, Geez, someone bought it there. A ball of fire, like a meteor.”

I had to see for myself. I put my head through the curtains and looked toward the nose. Simon was shrouded at his desk; I couldn't see him at all. Will was stretched out atop his Perspex, above a glow of light, as though he flew along like Superman. The searchlights swung, the tracers soared, and the flak puffed in sudden, scattered bursts, as though they had blown holes right through the night to show the day behind it. It was like watching, all at once and from up above, all the fireworks that I had ever seen, and watching them in silence. Our own engines drowned out all the sound. But there was nothing beautiful there; my first look at the enemy scared me half to death.

The searchlights weren't at all like the ones we'd seen at London. Those had turned and reeled like dancers, but these jabbed at the dark; they hunted through it. They seemed alive, and cruel.

I saw the bomber going down—or another. It passed across the Perspex with its streaming tail of fire. For a moment it glowed in the searchlights, and I saw that one wing was sheared off in the middle. A parachute blossomed from an upper hatch, then wrapped itself around the tail, and a little speck of a man squirmed and writhed on the end of the cords, dragged behind the bomber. Wrapped in flame, the Halifax went hurtling toward the ground, pulling that poor doomed man behind it.

“Unsynchronizing,” said Lofty. He fiddled with his levers to set the engines at a ragged roar. The single deafening note became a fluttering
oom-ba-oom
that was meant to fool the lights that sought us out by sound.

Then I heard the flak—or
felt
it—faint, hard pops that ripped the air apart. I was too scared to look away. The lights seemed to slide toward us, spreading out and stretching higher. We jinked along, up and down, left and right, but straight toward a wall of light, and it didn't seem possible that we could fly right through it. The Perspex bubble glowed a silver white, and the colors of the flak washed across the panes. They flickered on the metal walls, orange tongues like a fire catching.