B for Buster (24 page)

CHAPTER 27

I WATCHED THE FUEL bowsers nestle up against the Lancs. I watched the erks bombing up the kites, and anyone could guess that we were going a long way. They stuffed the bellies of the Lancs with enough incendiary bombs to start a fire that might burn forever. The bowser king moved from one aircraft to the next, missing only one. Fletcher-Dodge wouldn't be flying that night.

I went through the day in a trembling worry, not sure why my dream had started again or why the ghosts had come. I sat with Percy for a while, trying not to let him see my fear. Just holding him made me feel better, and I thought of smuggling him into the briefing. But it was a good thing I didn't. It might have scared him silly.

The target was Berlin. The Big City, the Holy City. There would be a belt of searchlights and flak nearly forty miles wide. There would be more night fighters than we had ever imagined. No city in Germany was defended as heavily as Berlin. But Ratty was pleased that we were going. “I'm getting my wish,” he said.

That evening, for the first time since I'd left home, I wrote a letter to my mom and dad. I lay on my bed, with Percy standing on my pillow, and I wrote, “Dear Mom and Dad.”

I didn't tell them that I loved them; I didn't tell any lies at all. I only said that I missed them very much right then. I said that I wasn't sorry that I had come to England, but that I wished I was home in Canada. I told them not to feel bad about anything they had done, and that was all I could think of. I wondered how to finish it, what to say instead of “Love.” I was still lying there, looking at the letter, when the old guy came in and found me.

“Time to go, Kid,” he said.

I signed my name and stuffed the letter in the envelope. I didn't know what to do with it; I held it up toward him.

“You can leave it on your bed,” said Pop. “I think that's good enough.”

He stood in the corridor two beds down. I took Percy in my hand, then put him on my shoulder, and walked past the old guy. His hand came onto my back. “First time for everything,” he said. “An orphan writing to his folks.”

I didn't ask him how he knew; he probably only guessed. “How old are you, Kid?” he said. “Seventeen?”

“Sixteen,” I told him. “But my birthday's pretty soon.”

His hand pressed harder for a moment. “My oldest boy's fifteen,” he said. “I wish he was more like you.”

It made me happy to hear him say that. I knew he was trying to tell me that he wished his own boy was as strong as me. Maybe he, too, thought he was going to get the chop above Berlin, and he worried about whether his son could carry on without him.

We collected our chutes and our escape kits. We changed into flying clothes. Percy stayed with me, always watching wherever I went. I noticed that he wasn't worried, that he didn't twitch at all or sing the mournful pigeon song. When I tucked him inside my jacket, into the sheepskin lining, I really wasn't frightened.

Then I stood at the edge of the tarmac with Lofty and Pop and others. Trucks full of crews were going by, puttering out to the kites. I saw Donny Lee waving at me from one of them, his white fingers spread. He didn't seem quite whole, more like a swirl of dust.

Even as I watched he disappeared, and I didn't find it so frightening as the first time I'd seen him. It seemed to me that he was on his way back to wherever it was he had come from. Or maybe he wasn't even there, and it was just the jitters that had made me think he was.

We sat below the Lanc exactly as we'd used to sit around
Buster
. Will looked at the photograph in his helmet, and Simon took a sniff of his handkerchief. Ratty smoked his cigarettes. Buzz found his clover right away, took out his crossword, and tackled some of the clues. We were sick to death of hearing them.

The Lanc was still new enough to us that Lofty and Pop ran carefully through their checklists when the time came. Blowers, boosters, ignition on. The engines started up, and the erks pulled away the chocks. We took off into daylight and gathered with a great flock of kites. Others joined us as we headed for the sea.

Then darkness came, and we sort of hid inside it. The engines roared and thrummed, and we flew along on autopilot. Lofty just sat behind controls that worked themselves and looked around, and up, watching the sky.

Others were doing the same thing: Will in the nose; Buzz and Ratty behind me. The Lanc was faster than old
Buster,
and it flew higher. But no one liked it better than Ratty. His tail turret gave him a better view than he'd ever had in a Halifax, and he told us—delighted—that he could see the Big Dipper and the sword of Orion and all of Cassiopeia.

“Just make sure you see the fighters,” Lofty said.

We crossed the enemy coast in the middle of the stream, with seven hundred bombers ranged across the sky. We were like a great stampede of cattle rumbling along behind the leader, through bursts of flak from ships and shore, then on across black Europe.

Percy, in his oxygen mask, stood looking out the astrodome. I wondered if he felt the same as I did, that it was good to leave the sea behind us. He turned his head and blinked, then hopped across my back from one shoulder to the other.

Buzz saw squirts of gunfire off to the west, and we knew the night fighters were prowling through the herd of bombers. Then a Lanc exploded in a ball of yellow, and on the other side, a kite was streaming fire from an engine. It was turning a long, slow circle, said Will. It was going down. “They've bought it,” he said.

The stream flew on and on. It stretched and grew, and it twisted through the sky like a huge, crawling snake. Its head was thrusting toward Berlin, its tail still over the sea. We worked our way along in the middle of the thing, rocked by the propwash and slipstreams.

We passed through searchlights and a belt of flak. Another crate went down. Ratty counted parachutes: “Two, three, four,” he said quickly. That was all that came out. Lofty switched the autopilot off and nudged us higher in the sky. His pipe clicking inside his mask, he and Pop fiddled with the engines to get the settings and the mixtures right. And on we flew—on and on through the blackness.

I scanned through the frequencies on the wireless. I adjusted the antenna and twiddled with the knobs, and for a moment I heard music. It came from England, lovely Vera Lynn singing about the bluebirds and Dover. I fed it through the intercom, just a few notes, a few words about love and laughter that sounded sad as heck up there in the dark above Germany.

Then Will said, “I see it. There's Berlin.”

The engines hummed their steady sound. We bounced through a pocket of air.

“God, it's burning,” said Will. “It must be burning from end to end. It looks like the earth's on fire.”

Ratty cried, “I want to see! Just jink us round for a minute, Lofty.”

“Just
wait,
” snapped Lofty.

“Wheezy jeezy. I'm getting my wish. I'm going to see Berlin.”

What a funny thing to have wished for, I thought, to see a city burning. But I couldn't help feeling happy for Ratty, maybe because I had never wished for anything as strongly as he had wished for this.

“I don't believe it,” he said. “How many kids grow up in cardboard boxes and get to see Berlin?” His turret whined back and forth. “What's it like, Shakespeare? What's it look like?”

“Just like Hamburg,” said Will. “Just like Nuremberg and Mannheim.” He whispered through the intercom. “It's a mass of flames, a whirlwind burning. It looks like hell has cracked open, and it's bubbling up to the surface; it's spilling into the sky. I can see the devil down there, and all his demons, and that's what it's like. Boys, we're flying into hell.”

Lofty clicked his intercom. “Just shut the hell up,” he said.

He sounded exactly like my old man. I remembered hearing that so many times. Shut the hell up. Get the hell out. Go to hell, go to hell, go to hell. I wondered what he would say to me now if he could see me flying toward the fire, doing exactly what he had told me to do a thousand times. What he had always told me to do.

“The flak's heavy,” said Will. “You ever seen so many searchlights, Skipper?”

No answer from Lofty.

“They're turning the whole sky white. They're weaving and crossing. There goes a Lanc. Christ, there goes another.”

And then we flew into the flak. I smelled the bursts of it and felt the air blast against us. With shaking hands I grabbed little Percy and tucked him into my jacket. I pulled away his oxygen and hoped that he could sleep before he sensed my fear.

Lofty started weaving back and forth. He put us in a dive and pulled us out again. Ratty's guns were firing.

Then the searchlights coned us. They glared in through the bubbles and the canopy and lit up the kite with a white glow. We dropped at least a thousand feet; I was suddenly weightless in my chair. Then Lofty pulled us up with the nose high, with the whole crate slanted. Flak burst below the nose and tossed us higher. Something black and small broke off and came skittering down the fuselage. It bounced on the deck, leapt to my desk and again to the floor, and lay spinning at my feet.

It was Lofty's pipe, and I picked it up.

The stem was nearly chewed off. He had bitten right through it in places, leaving deep and jagged marks. He had worn the end away and shortened it to a stump. He must have bitten on that pipe harder than a wounded man would bite on a bullet to keep from screaming in pain.

I held it as the Lanc shook from end to end. I looked at that pipe and realized that Lofty was terrified all the time.
All the time,
whenever that pipe was in his mouth.

I felt ashamed that I had found him out. I remembered him scoffing at clovers and rabbits' feet, at my plastic ray-gun ring. There was no such thing as luck, he had said. But all along he had kept his own talisman with him. In the air, in the mess, through all the hours of waiting, he had whistled and puffed on that pipe. He needed it more than the rest of us together needed all our lucky charms.

It shocked me to see him coming toward me now, staggering down the fuselage. He was so desperate to get his pipe back that he had put on the autopilot and ripped off his mask, tearing away his oxygen and his wires. His arms held out, his mouth screaming, he lunged at me and grabbed at that thing.

Then the flak hit us. It tore the starboard wing in two.

A gusher of flames billowed out. We fell on our side and went into a spin, and the flames wrapped around the fuselage. The smell of petrol was thick enough that I could hardly breathe.

Everyone was yelling. The searchlights still held us, and the flak puckered all around. Simon was clawing toward the escape hatch in the top of the fuselage. But the spin of the kite pushed him away, and he went sliding down the kite. Lofty had been thrown against the side, and was stuck there with his arms wide, the pipe in his fingers. Then petrol ignited in the fuselage. A river of fire flowed over the metal, pouring down toward the nose, pouring over Lofty's boots. In the glow of flames I could see him staring at me. Just staring with a wild look. And the fire rose around him.

I grabbed my parachute and pulled it toward me. It weighed hundreds of pounds, that bundle of silk. I buckled it on, but couldn't get out of my chair. The fire and the searchlights wheeled round and round in the astrodome. Then there was a flash of light, an incredible wallop of air. And the Lancaster exploded.

I woke up in my dream. I was spinning through bitter-cold air. The ground below me was on fire—not solid earth, but a sea of flames. I felt weightless, as though I was floating.

It was Percy who woke me. As he struggled from my jacket, his wings slapped against my throat, then against my face. I didn't know if he meant to save me or only to save himself. When he was halfway out, the air caught his wings and his tail, and it snatched him away in a thrashing blur of feathers.

I fell facedown, watching the earth and the flames. Then I tried to run, my legs kicking at the air, and sent myself tumbling head over heels.

I pulled the rip cord. I thumped my fist against the parachute. The silk erupted from the case, wrapping all around me, spilling up behind. It wrenched me onto my back, and I looked up at the stars and the stream of bombers marching through the searchlights and the smoke. Then it rolled me over toward the earth, and rolled me over again.

Cords zapped across my cheeks and across my arms. Then the chute snapped open and the harness dug into my thighs, and it pulled me right out of my boots. I watched them fall as I floated upright above Berlin, in the sweeping of the searchlights, like Captain Marvel below a multicolored cape.

I drifted along on the wind, scudding above the city. I wondered if Percy was near me, if he would flutter down to sit once more on my shoulder. And then, when he didn't, I wondered what would happen when he got home and found no one waiting at the loft. Someone would find him, I thought; someone would think to go looking. Or maybe Percy would home straight to the mess.

The parachute was huge and round and white above me. The leading edge fluttered in a silent wind; the shrouds stretched down and met at my shoulders. I turned slow circles, looking down past the toes of my socks to the fires of Berlin. I swung from side to side, and the searchlights washed over me and passed along. I saw the Lancaster hit the ground, or the main part of it at least; I was pretty sure it was ours. There was a flash of light as the bombs exploded. And in that instant they all just disappeared: poor stupid Buzz; little Ratty, who had got his last wish; Will the poet, Simon the gadna; and Lofty, with his secret still clutched in his hand.

All alone, I floated into the blackness. With no sense of falling, no sense of movement, I drifted through the void that belonged to Donny Lee and a thousand others. I was afraid to look around in case I saw him there, or a host of airmen sailing with me, all white-faced or burned to crisps. Between the heaven and the stars I swung below the chute, flying through the world of the dead.