Alternate Gerrolds (8 page)

We bounced up through the damn fog, shaking and buffeting and cursing all the way. But the bird held together, and at last we climbed up into the clear blue sky above the gray blanket. Suddenly, the warm June sun poured down on us like a welcome smile, filling the plane with lemon-yellow light. The air smoothed out and the bird stopped complaining. Colonel Peck glanced back to me with a smile. I gave him a big thumbs-up.

We were on our way to Germany. And Berlin. And history.

Crossing the channel, we saw some fishing boats. Even in the midst of war, men still cast their nets into the sea to feed their families. I wondered if they looked up and wondered about us in turn. Did they ever think about the planes that crossed back and forth across the channel, and if so, did they wish us well—or did they just resent the burden of the war.

I scribbled notes in the log. Time, position, heading. At the opposite end of the plane, Van Johnson was probably writing another love letter to his fiancée, June. He wrote one every mission and mailed it as soon as we landed. She wrote back every time she got a letter from him. We teased him about it, but we envied him the letters and the connection to someone back home.

“Okay, Jimmy,” Colonel Peck turned around to me. “What’s it going to be? Paris or Amsterdam?”

I pulled out my lucky silver dollar, flipped it, and caught it on the back of my wrist. I lifted my hand away to show him. “Uh—ah—it looks like Paris,” I said. I glanced at the compass. “Uh, you wanna come right about—ah, forty degrees, skipper.”

This was part of the security around this operation. Once we were in the air, not even the ground stations were supposed to know where we were. We had been instructed to plot three separate courses to the target; we were forbidden to choose our final heading until we were out over the channel, away from all possible ground observers. Of course, all the flight crews knew that there were U-boats in the channel, tracking the comings and goings of all flights, but we didn’t worry about it. Much. Colonel Peck and I favored two different courses, Amsterdam and Paris, each named for the city we’d head toward before turning toward Berlin.

Our group had been sending single flights out over the continent for months, spotting troop movements, checking weather conditions, dropping
leaflets, taking photos, surveying bomb damage, all that stuff—a lot more flights than we needed to. They were decoys to get the jerries used to the sight of a single Allied plane crossing their skies. Some of the fellows resented the duty. They’d rather have been dropping bombs, and nobody would tell them why their flights were so important, but they were.

We’d flownaalot of the flights too, mostly the missions over Berlin and our secondary targets. In the past week, we’d even made two leaflet drops, dropping the package and then pulling up and away sharply to the right exactly as we would do later today. The leaflets had warned the Berliners to leave the city, because we were going to destroy it. We implied that we’d be sending a thousand planes across the channel, darkening their skies with the roar of engines and the thunder of bombs. We’d heard they were installing ack-ack guns from here to the Rhine and we wondered if they’d test them on us today.

Once, we’d also dropped an agent into Germany. A fellow named Flynn. His job was to contact members of the underground and warn them to get out of Berlin before the sixth. I wondered where he was now. I hoped he had gotten out. A nice fellow, I guess, but I wouldn’t have his job. He’d seemed foolhardy to me.

Colonel Peck glanced at the altimeter, tapped it to make sure it wasn’t stuck, and then spoke into his microphone. “All right, Stan, Ollie. We’re at cruising altitude. You can start arming the device.” He waited for their confirmations, then switched off again.

We’d heard that the Nazis had forbidden the civilian population to flee Berlin, but our intelligence sources were telling us that at least a third of the civilians had evacuated anyway and more were streaming out every day. Even if the bomb failed, we would still have seriously disrupted the economy of the Reich’s capital. Most of the overlords of the Reich had already moved themselves away from the city—except for that pompous turnip, Goering. He had publicly boasted that not a single allied bomb would fall on Berlin. I wondered if he would be in Berlin today. I wondered about all the others too. Goebbels, Heydrich, Eichmann, Hess, Himmler, and the loudmouthed little paper-hanger. Would they be close enough to see the blast? What would they think? What would they do?

Some of the psych boys said that they believed that Corporal Shickelgruber would sooner die in the holy flames of martyrdom than ever let
himself be captured and put on trial for war crimes. Worse, he would take the nation down with him.

If the bomb worked—

Of course it worked. We’d seen it work in Nevada. I couldn’t get it out of my head—that terrible mushroom cloud climbing into the morning sky, churning and rising and burning within. It was a preview of Hell. Afterward, we were given the chance to withdraw from the mission. None of us did. Perhaps if we hadn’t already been a crew, some of us would have. I’d have considered it, but I couldn’t let the other fellows down. Later, we spent long hours talking among ourselves. If we ended the war, we’d be heroes. But ... just as likely, we might be war criminals. Nobody had ever used a bomb like this before.

But never mind that—if the bomb worked the way we wanted it to, we’d paralyze the Third Reich. The armies would stop fighting. The generals would surrender rather than let their troops be incinerated. Perhaps even they’d overthrow the murderous bastards at the top and save the rest of the world the trouble of hanging them. Perhaps.

And perhaps they’d do something else. Perhaps they’d launch a ferocious counter-attack beyond our abilities to comprehend. Perhaps they’d unleash all the poison gases and deadly germs they were rumored to have stockpiled. Who knew what they’d do if they were scared enough?

But that wasn’t our worry. All we had to do was deliver the device. Behind us, taking off at fifteen-minute intervals, thirty other planes would be following; each one equipped with cameras and radiation-detectors. The visible aftermath of this weapon would be on movie screens all over the world within the week.

I tried to imagine what else might be happening today. Probably the French resistance was being signaled to do whatever they could to scramble communications and transportation among the Nazis. Our ambassadors were probably preparing to deliver informative messages to other governments. We’d entered the war in 1939. Everybody expected us to invade Europe before the end of the summer. I wondered if our troops were massing even now to follow us into Germany.

Lieutenant Bogart came forward then with a thermos of coffee. It was his habit to come up to the cockpit for a while before we reached enemy territory. Today, he had more reason than ever. Despite his frequent protestations otherwise, the thought of the bomb in our belly clearly
disturbed him as much as the rest of us. Perhaps him more than anybody. He looked burnt and bitter. “Which way are we headed, skipper? We going over Paris?”

Colonel Peck nodded. “It’s the long way around, but I want to give Stan and Ollie plenty of time to arm the device.”

I looked at Bogey suddenly. There was something odd in his eyes, but I couldn’t identify the look. Anger perhaps? Some long-remembered hurt?

“Uh, ahh-h—you’ve been to Paris?” I asked.

He nodded. “I was there. For a while. Just before the jerries moved in.”

“I never made it myself. I always wanted to go, but something always came up. I had to stay home and help Pop with the business.”

“After the war is over,” Colonel Peck said, “We’ll all meet for champagne on the Champs Elysees.” He got a wistful look on his face then. “It’s one of the most beautiful streets in the world. Lined with cafes and shops and beautiful women. You could spend your days just sitting and sipping coffee. Or you could stuff yourself with mushrooms and fish poached in butter. You could follow it with little thin pancakes filled with thick rich cream. And the wine—we had champagne and caviar on toast so crisp it snapped. I never had a bad meal anywhere in France. They could make even a potato a work of art.”

He looked to Bogey for agreement, but the bombardier just shrugged. “I spent most of my time on the left bank, drinking the cheap wine. I didn’t get to the same joints you did, Colonel.”

“You saw a lot of Europe before the war, skipper?” Reagan asked.

Peck shook his head. “Not as much as I wanted to. But I have good memories.” He stared off into the distance as if he were seeing them all again. “I remember the tulip gardens in Copenhagen—so bright they dazzle the eyes. And the dark canals of Amsterdam, circling around the center of the city. All the buildings are so narrow that the staircases are almost like ladders.” He shook his head sadly. “I can still taste the thick layered pastries of Vienna. And I remember wandering through the sprawling parks of Rome—do you know there are wild cats living all over the ruins of the Colosseum? They’ve probably been there since Caesar’s time. And the rumpled hills of Athens, the Parthenon looking down over the city, and ouzo in your belly like licorice fire. Berlin. The beerhalls and the nightclubs. The screech of the trains. The smell
of coal. The old opera house. On Sundays, you could go to the afternoon concerts; if you were a student, you paid half price. That’s where I first heard Beethoven and Wagner. What a marvelous dichotomy the Germans represent, that they could produce such sublime music—and such incredible horrors too.”

“Uh, ah—you’ve seen Berlin?” I asked. This was the first time he’d ever admitted it.

Colonel Peck nodded. “A long time ago.” His eyes were shaded grimly. “It’s a funny old town. When I was there it was full of students and workmen, shopkeepers and grandmothers in babushkas. No one was angry then. The streets were clean and the people were stolid and happy. It was spring, and the world was green and fresh and full of butterflies and hope. It was a long time ago, and I was very ... young.”

Bogey and Reagan exchanged a look then. Worried. Was the colonel having second thoughts?

Almost as if in answer to their question, Colonel Peck added, “It was the music. I was sure that Berlin had to be the most marvelous city in the world for such incredible music to live there.” And then, as if realizing again where he was and what he’d just said, he shook his head grimly. “I’ve never liked this idea. Bombing a city. Civilians. It’s—” He didn’t finish the sentence. Instead he reached over and flipped the fuel tank switches. It was time to lighten the left side of the plane for a while.

After a moment, he turned around again and looked at the three of us. First Reagan, then me, then finally Bogey. “All right,” he said. “What is it?”

“Ah, uh—are you feeling all right, skipper?”

Colonel Peck nodded with his chin, in that grim way of his. “If you’re worrying if I can do the job, stop worrying. This is what we’ve trained for.”

“Right,” said Bogey, clapping one hand on the Colonel’s shoulder. “We don’t need Berlin. We’ll always have Paris.” I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.

Bogey was the weirdest one in the crew, always saying things that were either bitter jokes or just plain bitter. Colonel Peck wasn’t sure what Bogey meant either. He just looked at him sideways for a long moment. The two of them studied each other the way two men do when they first meet, sizing each other up, getting a sense of whether they’re going to be friends or enemies.

These two jokers had known each other for a long time, but right now, at this moment, it was as if they’d never really seen each other before. Bogey shifted the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other and grinned fiercely at Peck. Peck’s expression relaxed, widened into a matching grin. And then suddenly, we were all grinning and laughing nervously.

“We’re starting to take ourselves a little too seriously,” said Peck. “Take over, Ronnie, I’m going back to check on the boys.” He levered himself out of his seat and climbed past Bogey into the rear of the plane.

We waited until we were sure he was gone. None of us dared speak. Finally, I had to ask it. “Ah, ah—do you fellas think he’s gonna be all right?”

Bogey shifted his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, then back again. “I dunno. I’ve seen a lot of men do a lot of strange things. When the crunch comes, that’s when you find out what a man’s made of.” He added. “He’s got a look in his eye all right.”

Reagan didn’t say anything for a moment. He looked like he was rehearsing his next words. At last, he said, “I had a private briefing with General Donleavy last night.” We waited for him to continue. “He said ... he said that if for any reason Colonel Peck was unable to carry out the mission...I was to take over and make sure the device was delivered. I asked him if he thought that was likely. He said no, but ... well, the top brass just wanted to cover every possibility, that’s all.”

“Ah, uh, you can’t be serious,” I stammered.

“Well, General Donleavy suggested that if I thought I had to do such a thing, I should talk it over with the bombardier and the navigator and maybe the flight engineer. I wouldn’t have said anything, but—” He glanced backward.

“Uh—you
can’t
do it,” I said. “You just can’t. The colonel didn’t mean anything by what he said. You saw him. He’s just—I mean, anybody’d feel bad having to do this. You would, wouldn’t you?” I looked to Bogey, alarmed at the way the conversation was going.

Bogey’s expression was dark. “I’m not going to have any trouble dropping this bomb. I’ve seen the Nazis face-to-face.” He looked to Reagan.

“Well,” said Reagan. “I guess ... a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

“Ah, uh, you can’t do this, Colonel. You gotta give him a chance. You do this, you’ll wreck his career—”

Bogey poked me hard in the shoulder then, and I shut up just as Colonel Peck climbed back into the cockpit. If he’d heard anything, he didn’t show any sign. He glanced around at us with gentle eyes, and I
knew
he knew.