Going home

Abstract

The war was hunting him. He knew this deep in the folds of his brain and far down inside the hidden pathways of his nerves, but he tried to shake these instincts free and look at the instrument panel in front of him. He focused on flying and refused to think of the flak that was detonating around his aircraft in frightening bursts of black. He held the U-shaped yoke with both hands in order to keep everything steady, everything stable, but the whole plane bucked and jolted. The sky cracked open in puffy explosions. Jagged shards of steel zipped through the air. Planes around him fell. Lieutenant Odd Englebretson looked at his instrument panel (altitude, air speed, fuel) and the numbers that kept him aloft all seemed good. He and his co-pilot banked hard and circled around the way they had just come. Odd allowed himself a moment to glance down at the firestorm raging below in Nazi Germany. Docks, ships, warehouses, submarine pens, syn-thetic oil factories and roads were all ablaze in brilliant shades of orange. Bomb bursts marched across factories and enormous shockwaves rippled across the city. The whole harbor boiled in a sea of punishing fire as a column of black smoke vented upwards. It was the color of used motor oil. It foamed and lifted. The 321st Bomb Group had just dropped over thirty tons of TNT onto Hamburg and, now, they were on their way back to the green fields of England. The return journey wouldn’t be easy. Odd and his crew had a blown out engine—the propeller spun lazily as greasy smoke vented from it, and there was tremendous drag on the right wing as he fought to keep everything level, everything purring. He was surrounded by other olive drab airplanes that were also in various states of damage. Odd realized his tongue was dry and he licked his cracked lips. He turned to his co-pilot. “How’s engine three?” he asked, adjusting his rubber air mask. “Think we can we make it home?” Odd pointed the snout of his bomber towards an imaginary dot on the horizon and, like the other B-17 Flying Fortresses thrumming around him, he pushed towards it, dreaming of a cigarette and a tall glass of whiskey. England and all of its safety was just beyond the curvature of the earth. All he had to do was arc towards it, all he had to do was keep the gyroscope steady and let the simple physics of air speed and thrust work their magic. For now, the long slow fall to earth was being denied. “How’s engine three?” he asked again. His co-pilot, Finn O’Brien, leaned towards the window. “Torn to shit. We got holes out there the size of fucking baseballs.” His Boston accent was strong and he stretched out the word baseballs. “Think we’ll make it?” “Hard to say, skipper.” Engine number three was only one problem to worry about. There was also a large, tangled mess hanging and flapping in front of Odd. Although he couldn’t be sure, it seemed like most of the nosecone had been torn off. A few minutes ago, they’d taken a direct hit with flak and the entire Plexiglas nose had been ripped away. The support beams at the front of the plane sprouted open like some kind of strange metal flower. It looked bad, and Odd wondered if they would have to parachute out. The idea of drifting down to Nazi Germany and then being tossed into a prisoner of war camp made him shake his head. “Naw. We’ll make it,” he said to O’Brien. “We ain’t bailing out. Not today.” His tone was full of conviction but, deep down, he wasn’t so sure. The flak was letting up so, maybe, with a little luck, they might all be gloriously drunk in five hours. Yeah, he thought, thinking of that glass of whiskey again. If the secret gears and switches of his plane kept on doing their thing, maybe he’d be able to light a cigarette and drift into the numb. Easy-peasy, he thought. Just stay focused. Inside his facemask, he pursed his lips and pretended to blow out cigar smoke. His mouth was still dry and he sucked on his tongue to make some spit. Flak continued to burst around the cockpit in dark blots. He looked out, and swallowed. Odd hated flak more than just about anything else in the war. Back on base, while he whittled away time, he often heard phantom explosions in his eardrums. Flak was one of the more diabolical inventions of modern warfare, he thought. The Germans sent artillery shells whistling up into the sky and these canisters exploded around incoming bombers like him. Although it looked like black smoke, lurking inside each of these clouds were fist-sized chunks of metal. If you flew into flak (and it was damn near impossible not to) your plane would be shredded.