Amerika (53 page)

Ava placed her hand over my hand that still gripped the throttles. The gesture wasn’t as a co-pilot backing up the pilot, but as a friend as the both of us watched the altimeter unwind the way you watch a clock ticking off the final seconds before Happy New Year.  Only we had nothing to celebrate.

I tried to judge the ground conditions but darkness still ruled the land. Then the faint gleam of a river, which could have been the Yakima that flows due south of the target. Was that a sprinkle of lights too? If so, Benton City. And what’s more, if I could see the ground then the fog wasn’t there as we had feared.

The government had built the Hanford Site in the middle of nowhere on purpose. And accordingly, nothing could be seen, no landmarks, no city lights, nothing but scrub grass, shallow arroyos, low rolling hills and then finally, somewhere dead ahead, the blocky shape of the nuclear reactor and the plutonium storage site.

The altimeter reached two thousand feet and I slowly leveled out. The compliance fighters obediently followed like pilot fish. They wouldn’t wonder - just yet - why I stopped my descent. But if I didn’t resume it soon, they’d start to worry. The squadron leader seemed to read my mind, because he sidled up alongside me and waved. I waved back.

Mason said, ‘Coming up on the I.P. Got the smokestack. I am taking the aircraft.’

‘She’s all yours.’

I turned on the autopilot, felt the control column shudder momentarily and then smooth out as the Norden bombsight system began feeding it input signals. From now on I was just a spectator. I put my hands in my lap and stared at the slight motions of the wheel moving without me.

‘Look ma, no hands,’ I whispered to myself. Mason said, ‘Four minutes to drop.’

The squadron leader slowly drifted away again. He might be on the radio already, voicing his concerns. No way to tell. How Mason managed to see the smokestack was a mystery. All I could see was the pre-dawn sky ahead and velvet black below.

‘Orlando, all set back there?’

‘Chute’s on, ready to drop.’

Mason said, ‘Opening bomb bay doors.’

My control panel indicator light switched from green to red as the doors in the plane’s tail opened, creating a slight buffeting as the airstream flowed up and into the open space where the bomb hung on its cradle. Outside, the compliance fighters flew steadily onward. Who would be the first to notice?

‘Three minutes to drop,’ Mason said.

Ahead, a tiny red pinprick in the black velvet. Then two more dots, winking softly: the smokestack’s anti-collision lights slowly drifting toward us. The throttles advanced back and forth automatically, driven by the Norden’s dispassionate, mechanical calculations of wind drift, airspeed and outside air temperature.

‘Input data complete,’ Friedman said briskly. ‘Device armed.’

The atomic bomb was finally free from its coaxial umbilical cord. No more messages from its master. The malevolent child was alive at last, its plutonium core waiting to be squeezed to death and born again into a full- blown, radioactive, Frankenstein fireball.

And still, miraculously, the Nazi fighters maintained their position. Maybe the darkness kept them from seeing the open bomb bay doors. Or laziness. Didn’t matter. The
Dixie Clipper
keep flying and the clock keep ticking.

‘Sixty seconds.’ Mason said.

I stared at my hands in my lap; useless, motionless. I clenched and unclenched them for lack of anything else to do. After days and nights of action, pressure, worry and concern it came down to this; motionless hands, staring straight ahead, acting like the obedient captain carefully calculating my landing as ordered by
Herr
Bauer.

‘Thirty seconds.’

All hell broke loose, or at least that’s what it seemed like. A meteor shower of bright red tracers laced the sky above and below us and into us too.

‘Hang on everybody,’ I said. ‘Orlando, get ready!’

‘I’m there, brother.’

‘Fifteen seconds to drop.’

A  line  of  twenty  millimeter  cannon  shells  struck  our  left  wing, followed by the swooping rush of the attacking fighter, directly over us. The clipper absorbed it without a shudder, but within seconds, our number one engine began throwing a thin finger of flame back from its cowling. I feathered the prop, killed the engine and hit the extinguisher, but with no confidence it would work.

‘Ten seconds!’ Mason shouted. ‘Help me hold this bearing, cap, we’re drifting.’

‘Wilco,’ I grabbed the controls.

The Norden wasn’t compensating enough for the dead engines. I applied rudder to help. An explosion of noise from behind me as cannon shells shattered the navigation windows and ripped through the radio operator’s station. Soundproofing gone, the engine roar suddenly deafening, my headphones useless. 

All  I  could  do  was  stare  at the  bomb  release indicator on the instrument panel and pray for it to light up. Seeing that would somehow make all this chaos worth all the pain, all the suffering, all the work by so many people who wanted to be left alone to live their lives until they died of old age, but were up here in a shot-up plane trying to drop a bomb and start a war instead.

The light flashed red. Mason must have shouted ‘Bomb’s away’ but I didn’t hear him, so I pointed at the indicator light and bellowed, ‘Bomb’s away!’

I turned to Ava, expecting her marvelous grin, but she sat slumped to the right, motionless, her head on her chest. I tried to reach out to her, but another wave of cannon fire, this time into our right wing, kept me in my seat.  All I could do was wrestle this slow-moving giant of a plane out of the line of fire.

Intermittent blasts of fifty-caliber fire from Orlando’s waist gun. Doing his best, but against these sharks, we didn’t stand a chance.

Somewhere behind us, the bomb continued its silent descent, its fusing systems clicking away, waiting for the final moment. With every second it fell, the further we escaped from the blast. But the irony of the moment suddenly struck me: with Nazi fighters chopping us up into bits, we weren’t escaping after all.

I scrabbled around and found my smoked-glass blast goggles, and managed to get them on just as brilliant greenish-white light flooded the cockpit, so intense and overwhelming that it banished all sound.

Silent, cold and impossibly bright, it faded seconds later, and I ripped off my goggles to see what I was doing. And just in time, because the shock wave hit us and flipped the plane almost completely on her back like a bathtub toy. Debris showered down from everywhere. Momentarily disoriented, I firewalled the remaining engines, applied cross controls, and fought her to the horizontal. But barely. With only two functioning engines we going down whether we liked it or not.

Where were the tracers? Where were the fighters? Nothing but rosy sky ahead and a towering mushroom cloud to my right rising higher and higher with greenish lightning bolts flashing deep inside its grey billows like a monster’s heartbeat. All I could think of was that the light from the explosion had temporarily blinded them. But that wouldn’t last long.

Someone grabbed my shoulder.  Mason shouted, ‘On the BUTTON, skipper. We did it!’

I nodded, and pointed to Ava, ‘She’s hit. Check for a neck pulse’

He crouched over Ava, his hands probing and poking. As he worked, to my relief she stirred and tried to straighten up.

‘Stay still,’ Mason said. ‘Found it.’

‘Bad?’

‘Can’t tell. Lots of blood. Upper arm and shoulder. Bleeding.’

‘Artery?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Use your belt for a tourniquet. High up as you can get it.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He stripped off his leather belt and wrapped it around her arm. As he worked to stop the flow of blood, his trousers slowly slid down around his ankles. His boxer shorts white sails in the reddish light.

‘Jesus Christ, skipper. Help me out here.’

Ava smiled and said weakly. ‘That’s okay, I won’t look.’

The
Dixie Clipper
was dying, and I didn’t need warning bells and horns to tell me. She had been through too much, too long, and just wanted to lie down and die and I understood. Still no pursuing fighters, but how long could that last? How long could I keep her flying? Half the instruments were  either  shot  up  or  their  sensors  destroyed,  but  the  altimeter  still worked; three hundred lousy feet and descending.

‘I’m putting her down. Professor. Orlando, up here as fast as you can.’

‘Roger.’

‘Mason, break out the life raft.’

Off to my right a quick shimmer of reflected light. Water. Had to be the western leg of the Columbia River. If I put her on land she’d grind herself up to bits and take us along with her. Better to let her die on the water. But I had to reach it first and it didn’t look like I could.

Dawn light just brushed the tops of the distant Cascade Mountains off to my left. Beyond that, the Pacific Ocean that we would never see like we’d originally planned. Not now, and not ever unless I flew this dying plane like I’d never flown it before.

Outboard engine number four backfired flames out its exhaust. Whatever had struck its intricate world of pistons, crankshafts and valves had finally done its deadly work. Two hundred feet...one hundred eighty…...

Orlando and the Professor on the flight deck.

‘Brace for a crash landing.’

Orlando clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Lead us to the Promised Land, not into it, you hear?’

Controls beyond sluggish now, almost useless, making huge motions just to keep her nose level and the river approaching, but perpendicular to our flight path. Had to slew her around to the left to line up for the final approach but the airspeed was so low she would stall and drop off on a wing.

Tracer fire lancing across the sky. Fighters finally found us, game over, but a plane to land no matter what. I lowered the flaps but the starboard wing rose, trying to flip us over. Flaps only working on the right side, the left side shot out. Great. Too late now, water coming up sideways, raise the nose, raise the nose, bleed off airspeed, kick left rudder as hard as you can, line up, line up, stall warning horn, flare, flare, FLARE.

The
Dixie Clipper
struck the water like a skipping stone and bounced back into the air. I fought to keep her wings level as she sagged down lest a wingtip nick the water and sending us cartwheeling nose over tail. We hit again and stayed down for good, skidding slightly sideways but not so bad as the keel dug in and the airspeed bled off and the engines, God bless them, were still pounding away, but with dying, broken hearts.

Tracers stitched the water off to starboard in an explosion of spray.

Two compliance fighters roared overhead. We were sitting ducks. I killed the engines and climbed out of my seat. Ava was conscious but barely.

‘Hang on, kid, we’re getting out of here.’

She nodded and managed a weak smile. ‘Nice landing, skipper.’

‘Could have used your help.’

‘Next time.’

The crew life raft rested on the debris-filled flight deck like a long yellow, tubular sausage. But when inflated would hold ten people. I did a head count. Only four.

‘Orlando?’

Mason jerked his thumb aft. ‘Below.’

The sudden hammering of the fifty-caliber answered my next question.

‘Shove the raft through the nose, we’ll hand Ava down.’

‘I don’t need any help. I’m fine.’

Ava stood by her seat, weaving slightly, holding her blood-soaked, wounded arm.  Then she fainted, but the professor broke her fall by grabbing her shoulders in time.

More tracer fire, more planes.

‘Go, go, GO!’

Mason tossed the raft down the crew spiral staircase and followed. I grabbed Ava’s feet, Friedman her shoulders and we half-walked, half- stumbled after him.

Roaring engines and cannon fire as the fighters made another strafing pass. The clipper shuddered from hits up on the flight deck. Had we stayed any longer we would have been mincemeat.

I steered our small group forward into the cramped mooring compartment, where Mason had dropped the bomb. It took only seconds to unlatch the boarding door and swing it open.

We manhandled the raft up and over the hatch coaming and let it drop into the water. As it fell I yanked the cord releasing the CO
cartridge and the compressed yellow sausage hissed and twisted and swelled into our instrument of escape.

‘Mason, you go and I’ll hand Ava down.’

‘Got to set the charge.’

Satisfied, he straightened up from the Norden bombsight and patted it affectionately. ‘Bye, bye baby.’

He dropped into the raft and steadied it. Ava came to as she landed and Mason propped her up to one side. The Professor went next. The wind had picked up and the water was getting choppy. He had trouble getting his feet planted on the raft’s rubbery floor.

Mason shouted, ‘C’mon, doc, c’mon, she’s gonna blow.’

I ended his indecisiveness by grabbing a pair of short-handled oars, and half-jumping, half-climbing, got into the raft and pulled him down with me. I heard the roar of flames before I saw them.

Sheltered in the lee of the clipper’s bow, right wing was now ablaze.