The Gods of Atlantis (50 page)

White remembered the last time they had dropped a Tallboy, looking down at the inferno, watching the flash of the explosion and the ripple of the shock wave as it pulsed out through the flames. It had been the night of their last raid against Berlin, before they had left it to the Russians to finish the job. That was another reason why VE Day seemed like a hollow victory. They all knew that Heinrich Himmler had tried to negotiate with the Americans for the remnant Wehrmacht and SS to join the Western Allies against the Russians. There was the prospect of a war ahead that would make the final chapter of the struggle against Japan seem nothing more than a mopping-up operation. At Bomber Command HQ he had seen strategic planning maps drawn up with half the world in red, as if a tide of blood were seeping into the nooks and crannies of the borders of Europe and Asia, ready to drip through and burst the barriers. Already the death of Hitler seemed like a historical sideshow, a footnote on a stage that had expanded to encompass the entire world, where the forces of war set in motion by the last six years had taken on a momentum of their own, creating the prospect and the weapons of true apocalypse.

He banished the thought from his mind and settled back into his seat, concentrating on alleviating the discomfort of the next four hours as they hit their target and then flew back to Nassau. He looked at his coffee flask, and then at the piss tube beside his seat, remembering the last time he had used it and the howls of outrage from the waist gunner, who had been sunning himself in the open gunport and received a
faceful in the slipstream. It was another small design glitch of the Liberator. He was pleased to have his old crew still with him, all except the tail gunner, who had been demobbed on compassionate grounds after his wife had been killed in one of the final V-2 rocket attacks on London. The US intelligence officer had said that the crew were to stay together for conversion training to the B-24 so that they would be most effective together in the new aircraft. The only problem was that the Lancaster had a crew of seven and the Liberator ten, so taking into account the absent rear gunner, there were four new faces: the co-pilot, the two waist gunners and the rear gunner, all of them experienced pathfinder crew. He had warmed to the rear gunner, Flight Sergeant Brown, when they had first met on the tarmac in Nassau and he had seen the ribbon and rosette of the Distinguished Flying Medal and bar above the silver pathfinder badge on Brown’s tunic. He was a cheeky chap, an English emigrant to Canada who had joined the RCAF three years ago, and the only one of them who had flown in Liberators before, in 1943, during a tour with Coastal Command. It was always good to have a cheerful rear gunner, given his chances of survival if the plane went down. The old Liberator hands called the pilot’s seat a coffin, from the shape of its armour-plated sides and back, leaving only the legs unprotected from below; but if anyone was in a coffin it was the rear gunner. The British Boulton Paul turret had no opening to allow him to bail out, and his only chance was to disengage himself from his harness and crawl back through the fuselage, a difficult enough task even while the plane was on the ground. The fire from a burning engine could wrap around the fuselage and cook the rear gunner alive. White had watched many times on raids over Europe as turrets had broken free from disintegrating bombers and fallen ten thousand feet or more, the gunners trapped inside. He had sworn that if he were ever to order his crew to bail out, he would remain on board and go down with the aircraft if he were unable to get the rear gunner out. It was a small pact with fate, and it meant that he always felt a particular affinity with the rear gunner. He clipped on his mask and spoke through the intercom. ‘How’s Tail-end Charlie?’

The intercom crackled through his ear muffs. ‘That’s Charles to you, skipper.’

White grinned to himself. ‘Seen anything interesting?’

‘Only those blue holes in the reef, hundreds of them.’

‘Anyone know anything about them?’ White asked.

‘Some of them are incredibly deep,’ Brown replied. ‘I had a week at Nassau before you lot arrived, and the station commander discovered I was a keen fisherman. He flew me out in a Catalina to a huge blue hole on Andros Island, where we landed on the sea and hauled in enough fish for all the messes on the base that night. The local Bahamians are terrified of the blue holes. They say fishermen and children who go too near them are sucked in. They think they contain monsters, and they say that seeing a whirlpool is a sign of a hurricane on the way. The station commander was some kind of geologist in Civvy Street and thinks it might be based on truth: a kind of vortex effect in the water when the tide comes in, maybe exacerbated by a rising onshore wind that makes the swell build up the water over a hole. When we dropped in altitude a few moments ago, I saw a hole with a white swirl in the centre, and I think that’s what he was on about.’

‘All right,’ White said. ‘But if it turns out to be a monster, let us know. A little excitement wouldn’t go amiss.’ He leaned left and stared at the sea behind the aircraft, searching for the hole Brown had spotted but seeing only a turquoise bank of reefs extending into the blue depths, the beginning of the open Atlantic to the north of the Bahamas. He remembered that last sortie over Berlin, looking down and seeing a different kind of vortex. Instead of dropping marker flares with the other pathfinders, they had dropped ‘window’, thousands of thin aluminium strips that spoofed the German radar. As the huge searchlights played across the night sky, he had watched the silver strips swirling round and round, not falling but rising up around them, as if they were in the eye of a hurricane. A fully laden Lancaster ahead of them had exploded, and they had dropped hundreds of feet into the vacuum created by the fireball, a terrifying freefall through the swirling
vortex of silver. They had been directly over one of the huge flak towers, a fortress like a medieval castle next to the site of the Berlin Zoo. The debriefing officer told him that the tower housed tens of thousands of Berliners seeking refuge from the bombing and the coming Russian onslaught. Perhaps what he had seen was the rising heat of confined humanity escaping upwards from the roof of the tower. It was the one image from those nights over Berlin that was seared on his retinas, and he saw it when he closed his eyes now. It had been like medieval paintings he had seen of the
axis mundi
, a link between heaven and earth and the underworld, a vortex that seemed not like an escape route for souls to heaven but a swirling funnel that had nearly sucked him down to hell.

He felt a nudge on his arm, and turned to see the co-pilot looking at him. ‘Five minutes are up, sir. Do you want me to take her in for the attack?’

White straightened in his seat, then put his feet back on his pedals and his hands on the control wheel. He suddenly felt bone tired, and shook himself, scanning the instrument panel. ‘I have to log this one as pilot, to keep our US Air Force handlers happy that we’re not just treating this as some kind of lark.’

‘Righto, skipper. On your mark.’

‘She’s mine.’ White took over, immediately feeling the aircraft bucking against him, giving leeway to the controls until he could feel his way into the soul of the beast. He glanced right and saw Parker’s hand reach up to the fast-feathering switches above the windscreen, waiting to see that the pilot was in control of the aircraft before making any adjustments to the propellers. The trim came out perfectly this time, slightly nose-heavy, but the plane yawed a few degrees to starboard and Parker pushed up the switches to feather the propellers on the port side. ‘A north-easterly wind is picking up,’ he said to White. ‘We’re low enough now to be affected by the surface wind, and you can see it ruffling the sea.’ The aircraft came back to level, and the compass wobbled around the thirty-degree mark. White played with the throttles, listening above the din for the harmonious sound of all four
engines in sync, while Parker tapped the propeller pitch levers to maintain the same rpm. White glanced at him.
He was good
. He knew Parker had done nearly two tours as flight engineer on a Lancaster, and had that special knack of reading a pilot and his relationship with his aircraft. He felt a surge of confidence. Whatever lay ahead of them, in the Pacific and beyond, he knew he could meld the new men into his crew. Their survival was what counted, in this confined, ear-splitting beast where they lived only in the present, where all that mattered was the sheer fact of being alive.

The navigator tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Five minutes to target, skipper.’

‘Right. Dropping to two hundred feet.’

He felt his pulse quicken. He nosed the aircraft down, coming level again a minute later. It was rougher now, more turbulent over the denser air, like driving across cobbles, as if they were riding the waves themselves. He felt the tail shake that could indicate imminent stall, but he knew it was just buffeting as the slipstream at low altitude corkscrewed around the tail planes. Most of the crew had no proper seats or safety harnesses, another of the less endearing features of the Liberator. A sudden impact could be fatal to any of them. He peered out of the port window at the whitecaps, now alarmingly close, and then glanced up at the long narrow wing. That was the one thing about the Liberator that really frightened him. They were sound, reliable machines, with greater range than the Lancaster or Flying Fortress, and had been quickly adopted by RAF Coastal Command as long-range anti-submarine planes. But they were not amphibious like the other mainstays of Coastal Command, the Catalina and the Sunderland, and they had very poor ditching characteristics: high wings, a big tub belly, and a nose that collapsed on impact if the pilot failed to trim the aircraft so that the tail was down, not always possible in the circumstances of an emergency landing. He gripped the control wheel hard. They could not ditch, and at this altitude they could not bail out. He focused hard, reminding himself.
This was a training mission. Nobody was shooting at them. They would be all right
.

The bomb-aimer’s voice crackled on the intercom. ‘Should I open bomb-bay doors, skip?’

‘Roger that. Open bomb-bay doors.’ He heard the hydraulics as the doors swung open, then felt more buffeting as the open doors increased the drag. The din inside the fuselage was even more pulverizing. They were carrying three two-thousand-pound depth charges, shaped like oil drums. The charges were normally used against deeply submerged submarines, but these ones were pressure-fused to blow at a depth of only thirty feet and represented a revolution in thinking about anti-ship warfare. The bombs and torpedoes that had been the standard anti-ship weapons of the war impacted against the armour-plated sides and superstructure of ships, whereas depth charges might be dropped to explode beneath the vulnerable lower hull. The bomb-aimer had trained with 617 Squadron, using the bouncing bombs that had been deployed on the famous dambuster raid, and they were going to try the same technique against the target, with the charges spinning anticlockwise so that when they hit the side of the hull, the traction of the spin would carry them under the keel to explode. That was the theory, anyway. It had never been tried before on a ship. Privately White thought that it was a game devised to keep an experienced crew amused before they went on to the real business in the Pacific in the days to come.

Parker reached over to the top of the instrument panel between them and tapped the compass housing. ‘The gyro’s gone on the blink.’

White remembered what the briefing officer had told them, and then tapped the housing himself. ‘It must be the magnetic disturbance near the fault line north of San Salvador that they talked about. At least it shows we’re in the right place.’ He squinted at the sun, noting its position between the metal frames of the cockpit window. ‘We’re going to have to fly by dead reckoning. Everyone, eyes peeled for the target now. It should be coming up in a few minutes. Bomb-aimer, take position. Gunners, cock weapons. After we’ve dropped our charges, I’m going to come round so you can have some target practice on whatever’s left of that minesweeper.’

‘Have some fun, you mean, sir,’ Brown’s voice crackled in.

‘Whatever you say, Charles.’ White smiled wryly to himself, then took a deep breath. Without the compass, he felt like an ancient mariner on an unknown ocean, as if the beast he was riding were on some unseen current in the air that would take them inexorably to their destination. Instinctively he looked for the only talisman he had ever carried, a little metal butterfly pendant he had been given by his eight-year-old daughter on leave after his first tour. He had told her how on a daylight raid his aircraft had risen above the clouds into the brilliant sunshine, and how the clouds had seemed as white as angels’ wings, as if he were being conveyed directly to heaven without death. What he did not tell her was how the clouds were peppered with the burst of flak, how other aircraft were falling burning all round him, and how the Tallboys they dropped through the orange and red skymarkers to the unseen target below had shaken and rippled those white clouds with their blast, sending up black clouds that curled and billowed through the white as if the fires of hell had broken through to heaven itself. His wife had said they would pray every night for those angels to cleave a path ahead of him through the bullets and the shrapnel so that he would return safely to them. After that last mission, he had gone back to his aircraft to retrieve the butterfly, but on the way he had seen the new pilot, a fresh-faced boy who could not have been more than nineteen, who would be flying into the reach of death even in those final days and would need all the luck he could get. As he passed him, the boy had smiled, saying nothing but waving him a breezy salute, and in that moment, White felt as if he had transferred all that was within him to the future. He had left the butterfly pinned to the instrument panel of his Lancaster, the only place that seemed right for it. Now he looked below the gyro compass to where he was so used to seeing it, and remembered his final night of leave two weeks ago, when he had left his wife and daughter asleep in their cottage before the long flight to Nassau. The butterfly had kept him safe. But soon he would need a new talisman, for a new war.