They stayed on course with the bombers as long as Hazlitt figured they were showing up on the German radar screens, then they began a wide diving turn to starboard and dropped below the angle of the enemy tracking stations. They were well out over the North Sea as they finally set course for the French coast.

  Wingate dozed. The woman beside him had fallen asleep and her head had slipped down and was resting against his shoulder. The warmth of her body was pleasant. Under other circumstances, he might have gotten around to following up on it, but twenty feet above the ocean doing a couple of hundred miles an hour was no place for such ideas.

  It was de Lille who broke through Wingate’s drifting thoughts and snapped him back to the present. He leaned right across Wingate, pointing out the window. “France!” he yelled. “La belle France!” He threw his hand up to his forehead and gave a precise little salute.

  In the distance, the chalk cliffs of northern France showed up gray and ghostly in the moonlight. A second later Hazlitt had pulled up the nose of the Liberator and they crossed the coast. At once, two lines of slow-moving tracer curved upward from some ground defense position toward them. A moment later, two more appeared through the opposite window. Hazlitt took the plane in a quick weave to port and as the tracer slid out of Wingate’s view, McGrady in the rear turret let loose with a couple of two-second bursts from the Brownings.

  Wingate eased the woman back against the bulkhead and went forward to the cockpit. Hazlitt was hunched over the control column, holding the plane just clear of the woods below. Manganaro was lying on his belly, manning the gun position in the big Perspex nose.

  Wingate bent down toward Hazlitt and yelled, “You want me to take one of the waist guns?”

  Hazlitt nodded. He pointed to the headphone lead hanging from Wingate’s helmet and indicated that he should plug it in when he got there. “Port side!” he yelled.

  It wasn’t a bad position for Wingate, just aft of his stack of explosives. When he wasn’t using the gun, he could set down his ass on the edge of one of the boxes. He plugged in the headphones, unlocked the machine gun, and cleared the breech. He checked its traverse. He figured that it gave him an arc of fire of almost 180 degrees, for and aft and up and down.

  “Wingate,” said Hazlitt, over the intercom. “We don’t want to draw any fire. Hit anything that comes too close. Otherwise, ignore it.”

  There were glimmers of light from the ground, sometimes singly, sometimes two or three. They might have been single farmhouses. They might have been villages or even small towns, there was no way of telling. On the whole the krauts had done a pretty good job making the locals toe the line. What kind of misery went on down there, thought Wingate. The sooner the invasion came the better. Everything else was just picking around the edge of the real issue.

  Another burst of tracer curved up at them, missed, then disappeared. Then another, slower and more obvious. It rose from Wingate’s right and he swung the gun to check it. They were pushing up something around 37 millimeter, by the look of it. Most likely a mixture of high explosives and incendiary. He thought of the boxes filled with his own H.E., not a couple of feet from his ass. Jesus, if anything touched one of those ...!

  The gunner below stayed with them. He was good, thought Wingate. Pity they hadn’t sent him to Russia. The tracer curved closer, but whether from the same position or not he couldn’t be sure.

  “Hey, Mac!” came Manganaro’s voice through the headphones. “You’d better take care of that son of a bitch!”

  Wingate fired. The same second, the first of the heavy rounds from below smashed into the port wing tip. The Liberator groaned, slewed to starboard, then checked and came level again. Again Wingate fired. Tracer curved backward from the Browning.

  A second round from the ground defense gun slammed into the Liberator, chopping through the thin aluminum skin beside his elbow and slamming into one of the boxes. The plane lifted, yawed, and settled again. Wingate waited for the explosion. There was nothing he could do to prevent it. The whole of his past didn’t flash past him the way it was supposed to. He didn’t attach any importance to the fact. It was an oversight on God’s part, or maybe there was nothing in his past that was worth taking a second look at.

  Cowan, from the mid-upper turret, was yelling over the intercom, “Hey, Jesus! Not bad!”

  Still nothing happened. He realized dimly what it was that Cowan was getting excited over. The gun position on the ground had exploded. There was some gasoline dump those guys had been defending down there. Columns of flame were barreling upward. The surrounding woods were catching fire and the night wind was driving the flames deeper into them. Men were racing out of blazing tents, trying to get clear.

  Wingate turned back to the dim interior of the fuselage. He put out his hand and ran it carefully down the side of aluminum skin. Sure as hell, something had ripped through it. He could feel the ragged edges of metal curling inward. He moved his hand over further. There was the box, not twelve inches away. There was the splintered hole in the wood where the shell had gone through. Why the Christ hadn’t the whole aircraft gone up? He knew he ought to be giving thanks for a miracle. Instead, he found himself wondering what problems such unreliable crap was going to cause other guys. Here there were only a handful of lives at stake. There were going to be times when there were thousands.

  Someone grabbed his arm and spun him around. It was General de Lille. There wasn’t enough light to make out his expression, but he was waving his other hand around in the air and yelling at the top of his lungs.

  Wingate cried, “Hey, hold it, hold it, General! I can’t hear a damn thing through this helmet. Give me a second ...”

  He loosened the chin strap and lifted the earpiece. “Something you wanted to say to me?”

  “Are you mad?” de Lille screamed. “This is France below us—France! Why are you shooting?”

  It was a question Wingate had never been asked before. Off the top of his head he couldn’t think of an answer. He’d taken it for granted that in wars people tended to throw lead at one another. It was a fact of life that didn’t have to be explained—even to generals.

  De Lille burst in again. “Look what you have done! Regardez!” He was waving aft to where the blazing gasoline dump was now a distant glow. “That is France burning—my country! There are Frenchmen down there—French women, French children. Suppose you have hit one of them—eh? That is murder—you understand? Murder!”

  How did you argue with a guy like this? How did you explain to him? Wingate didn’t try. He nodded and said, “I’ve got to tell you, General—that just didn’t occur to me.” He unplugged the intercom lead, pushed past General de Lille, and went forward. “That Frenchman’s crazy,” he said when he reached the woman. She was checking the contents of the briefcase she had brought aboard with her in the beam of a large flashlight.

  “It’s not the nationality,” she said. “It’s the rank. In my experience, anyone over the rank of colonel is crazy. Brigadiers all the way up to Churchill—they’re all crazy.”

  It was a thought. Wingate nodded. “You could be right,” he admitted. “It would sure explain some things ...”

  “Oh, I’m right,” she said. “It’s poor bastards like us who take all the shit.”

  She was forthright, no doubt about it. Plain-speaking. Absolutely no bullshit about her. “Wingate,” said Wingate. “Mac Wingate.” Then he added quickly, in case she’d had any doubts about where he fit in her military classification, “Captain. Simple, plain captain.”

  “I never doubted it,” she said. “The name’s Andrews, Mac—simple, plain major.”

  “Major,” said Wingate.

  “Aw, what the hell, Mac. Make it Betty. With all this shit flying around outside, we might not make it through the night.” She gave his arm a couple of quick slaps and asked, “Any damage back there—apart from setting France afire?”

  “One of my boxes took some shrapnel. Nothing else that I could see.” The thought of that box still troubled him, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Oh, shit!” she snapped. “Better go back and check mine. I’m setting up a base nursing station south of Naples.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Wingate said.

  “A whole bundle,” she cried. “Maybe we’ll get to see you there. Just don’t get belly wounds—huh? Stick with something neat and clean.”

  “I’ll give it a try,” said Wingate.

  He continued forward into the cockpit. Manganaro was still in the nose, below Hazlitt, only the heels of his boots showing.

  When Wingate had plugged himself back into the intercom system, Hazlitt said, “Nice shooting. Any damage back there?”

  “They hit us with something,” said Wingate. “It must have been solid, it didn’t explode. No damage. What about up here?”

  “We took a round in the wing tip. We weren’t so lucky there, the damn thing was explosive,” growled Hazlitt. “I’m having trouble with the port aileron. I fancy something’s nicked one of the control arm joints. It keeps binding.”

  All the time he spoke, Hazlitt had his eyes locked directly ahead of him. They were too near the treetops for him to take the least chance. There was a clearly visible tension in his arms and shoulders, as if he was having a permanent struggle to keep that port wing tip up.

  “D’you need any help?” asked Wingate. He’d been deprived of action for too long. After a while, it got to him the way lack of booze got to an alcoholic. He couldn’t function properly.

  “You can take over from Brad till we cross the Loire,” said Hazlitt. “There’s more wind than I expected. We’ll need a new course for Marseilles. They don’t usually base fighters south of there. I don’t expect any trouble. It’s pretty obvious we’ve fooled the bastards. Nobody’s expecting us. But I’d feel better with as many eyes on the lookout as we can muster.”

  “Glad to help,” said Wingate.

  Manganaro came up into the cockpit and Wingate edged his way forward into the nose. It was a crawl, with shoulders touching both sides of the available space as he edged forward, and his back brushing against the aircraft’s cross-members. The area was padded, when he finally got into it, and he settled down behind the gun to scan the night sky ahead. Below, the moonlit woodland with interspersing belts of farmland swept in a continuous blur through his field of vision and disappeared beneath his belly. Ahead, there were occasional chinks of light and now and then the dim flash of some vehicle’s headlights. Above the horizon, the sky was black velvet hung with brilliant stars.

  Wingate covered the sky ahead methodically. He knew the principles of night vision, the rods and cones in the eye that perceived light, the one set responsive to low light and the other set not. Not that he needed much theory. He’d discovered as a kid when he was night hunting back home that there was no point looking directly at something at night. You got a better impression of what was there by looking ten degrees off it. That’s how he operated now, not trying to pierce the darkness ahead by concentrating on each particular spot in the sky, but letting his eyes make slow sweeps. If there was anything there, it would show up in some corner of his field of vision and not in the center.

  “Two minutes,” Hazlitt’s voice reported over the intercom. “Then we’ll have crossed the Loire.”

  The river came into Wingate’s field of vision on his left. The moonlight struck it at just the right angle to turn it a shimmering silver. It sure looked beautiful. Maybe one day he’d get a chance to see it on foot. They said the wine was some of the best in France. A chateau loomed on the near bank, spires soaring into the night. A moment later they were over the river themselves. Twenty feet below Wingate’s belly, the water moved placidly along. The nose came up again as Hazlitt lifted them over the cliffs of the south bank. The river was behind them at last and Hazlitt set a new course for the south coast.

  “OK, Wingate,” grunted Hazlitt over the intercom. “You can come up now.”

  It had been easier getting in than it was getting out. Wingate knew that the minute he started to pull back. He got to his knees, but his back struck one of the cross-members. He pushed backward with one leg, rested his knee, then pushed backward with the other. How did a hulk like Manganaro manage it, he was wondering. There must be a trick.

  A voice on the intercom snapped, “Hold it!” It was a voice full of tension, almost panic. A voice screwed up to the limits. It sounded to Wingate like McGrady, but it could have been Cowan in the mid-upper turret.

  Wingate paused, shoulders brushing the passageway, back in contact with another cross-member.

  Hazlitt’s voice broke the silence. The intercom crackled and he said in calm deliberate tones, “Just tell me what you see, Ed. Take your time.”

  “Fighter!” breathed McGrady’s voice at last. “Port beam. High and turning ...”

  “I got him,” cut in Cowan’s voice, the touch of cheerfulness irrepressible.

  “You OK, Ed?” came Hazlitt’s steady voice.

  “I’m—OK,” McGrady gasped. After a moment, voice again under control, he said, “I need a port turn, Skipper.”

  “When you’re ready, Ed.”

  Wingate tried to visualize what was happening. He knew nothing about aerial combat, but he knew port from starboard and he knew that getting out of the way was a pretty good tactic in any field of operations. A rabbit knew that much. The fighter must be coming in from somewhere behind and above his left hip. It must be doing twice the Liberator’s speed. If Hazlitt turned toward it at exactly the right moment, it would overshoot them and pass them on Wingate’s right.

  Ten seconds slipped past. Wingate’s heart began to thump in anticipation. He’d never felt so naked in the whole of his life. All his training and experience screamed at him. It was madness to be as exposed as this when they were under fire. They ought to be clawing their way into a slit trench. Common sense demanded that they get their heads down!

  “OK, Skipper,” said McGrady, voice ice-cool now. “Take her to port—now!”

  Hazlitt forced the port wing down and hit the rudder bar with his left foot. The horizon ahead of Wingate twisted. Stars began to slide to his right through the black sky. There was no sound of firing, but he could feel the long vibrations through the aircraft as the heavy Brownings somewhere behind him opened up. With luck, both McGrady and Jack Cowan would have their guns bearing on this bastard at the same time.

  He waited, gripping his own gun with both hands, thumbs poised above the firing button. A moment later, the fighter slid into his field of vision, already beginning to climb away. He found himself swiveling the Browning on its mounting and letting loose two four-second bursts. He was still firing as he realized the plane had already slipped beyond his view.

  Hazlitt came back to level flight. They flew on, still just above the ground, for almost twenty seconds. Then McGrady’s voice came again, “Starboard beam, Skipper. Coming fast. Steady. Turnabout starboard—go!”

  The right wing tip dropped. The massive bulk of the B-24 pulled around in a steep starboard turn. Again there was the vibration of the Brownings behind Wingate, then the sudden appearance of the twin exhaust banks of the fighter as it streaked across his view. He was more certain where to look this time and what to expect. He got in a continuous six-second burst that sent a stream of glowing tracer right up the fighter’s ass. He expected to see results, but nothing happened. A moment later, the plane had flashed from view.

  “How bad’s the damage?” came Hazlitt’s voice, steady and matter-of-fact.

  Wingate wasn’t aware they’d been hit, but Manganaro said, “He got in a burst amidships. But we’re OK.”

  “Anyone hit?”

  No one answered.

  “Is he still there, Ed?” asked Hazlitt.

  “Port again,” McGrady responded. “Turning now. Steady. And turnabout port—now!”

  Again they turned, the stars ahead of Wingate twisting in the sky, then sliding quickly across the Perspex nose and out of sight. There was a long vibration, then a solid thump.

  “Got the bastard!” came McGrady’s excited voice over the intercom.

  An instant later the flaming mass of the fighter shot through Wingate’s field of vision, cartwheeling out of control. It struck the treetops over to his right and plunged into them with a giant ball of flame, setting the whole scene ablaze.

  Hazlitt was having trouble controlling the big bomber. It came sluggishly out of the bank, slid downward to within a few feet of the trees, then finally held steady. There was a vibration under Wingate’s body that hadn’t been present before. It felt as if one of the engines was trying to tear itself loose from its mountings.

  Hazlitt checked with the crew, calling each of them in turn. When he got to Cowan in the mid-upper turret, there was no reply. He checked again. Still nothing.

  “Mac,” asked Hazlitt, at last. “You OK?”

  “OK.”

  “Check Cowan.”

  Wingate forced himself backward, bruising his knees, rapping the back of his head on an aluminum cross-member. He went aft. Cowan had been hit in the legs and his intercom lead had been severed. He was bleeding badly. Wingate could feel the damp ooze in the pants of his flying suit as he struggled to get Cowan down and into the main fuselage. He could hear Hazlitt talking to Manganaro.

  “Things are a bit dicey,” Hazlitt was saying, voice flat as a pool table. “We’ve lost hydraulic fluid. We’re stuck with the wheels up. I’ve feathered the outer starboard engine, otherwise it’ll drag the wing off. How high do you think we could climb with an engine out?”

  “Difficult to say. We’re carrying quite a payload. What did you have in mind?”

  “Ten—maybe fifteen thousand ...”

 

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