CHAPTER 21

I HAD NEVER SEEN ribbons as long as the ones that stretched across the map the next day at briefing. They dodged across France and over Belgium, then wound their way to the east, so deep into Germany that they almost reached Poland.

The target was Nuremberg, an ancient city full of castles and cathedrals. I asked Ratty, beside me, “Why are we going there?”

He whispered back, “I guess that’s where they ran out of ribbons.”

The intelligence officer showed us the things to watch for. He pointed at a photograph taken from twelve thousand feet and showed us the monastery and the royal castle and the bronze dome on the tomb of a saint. He said the starlight would shine on that bronze; we were lucky it was there.

“And now,” he said, “here are the defenses.”

We all leaned forward as his pointer scratched along the picture. I thought he would show us a hundred searchlight batteries and a thousand flak towers. But he smiled and ran his pointer along a ditch a hundred feet wide, and back up an ancient wall that nearly circled the city. “That’s about it,” he said. “They shouldn’t give you much trouble.”

He got a chuckle out of just about everybody. But those defenses seemed very sad to me. I thought they must have been built centuries before, to keep out men and horses, but it seemed that the people inside them hoped they would keep out bombers, too. I remembered someone saying almost the same thing about London, and I thought of the dead baby that I had seen there in the Big Smoke. I supposed there would be a lot of dead babies in Nuremberg, and that struck me as sort of a shame.

The intelligence officer let the laughter fade away. Then he got down to serious business, showing us the things that could really hurt us. All along the route there were guns and searchlights and night fighters. But our worst enemy, he said, would be time. To Nuremberg and back, it was eight or nine hours in the air. The darkness wouldn’t last that long. “Don’t relax when you’ve dropped your bombs,” said the officer. “You’ll battle the fighters all the way home.”

“What about Window?” somebody asked.

“It will help, but I’m afraid they’ve largely found their way around that.”

There were mutters among the airmen, little coughs and nervous breaths. If it hadn’t been for Percy, I would have been terrified. I couldn’t have hauled myself into the crate that night if it hadn’t been for him.

We drove to dispersal in the Morris. Or most of us did, at least; Pop refused to get into the thing. He wouldn’t even throw his chute aboard. So he legged it across the runway as the rest of us drove, with Ratty balanced on the bumper. Lofty parked behind Buster, jamming the binders too suddenly. Buzz slid right off the fender and sprawled on the grass. He shouted, but not from anger. He’d landed right on top of a four-leaf clover.

For the first time ever before an op, the keys were left in the Morris. Any change in routine was normally met with fears of a jinx, but no one said anything this time. They must have thought it really didn’t matter what we did if we were already on a chop list.

Pop arrived five minutes later, out of breath, frowning at the Morris. “I hate that thing,” he said. “It gives me gooseflesh just to look at it.”

“Then don’t look, old boy,” said Lofty.

“I’ll never get in it.”

“That’s fine, Pop. You don’t have to.”

Lofty sounded kind and caring, but the old guy looked nervous. He took out his crucifix, and it was still in his hand when we climbed through Buster’s door.

In bright daylight we started the engines. We wouldn’t see the sun go down until we were halfway to France, and Buster was hot and muggy, thick with kerosene fumes. Along the wings, the airscrews thrummed as Lofty and Pop tested the temperatures, the pressures, the flaps and magnetos. They did it carefully, and they did it twice. Each engine was run up and throttled back, each magneto switched to left and right and back again.

“It looks good,” said Pop.

“I don’t know,” said Lofty. “Gee, I don’t know.”

The bombers started passing, nose to tail along the perimeter. I watched them through my window as they lumbered by, huge and black, shimmering heat from their wings.

The erks pulled our chocks away. Sergeant Piper held up his thumbs. Will, in his place beside Lofty, nudged the throttles. By the sound of the engines I knew he was pushing the levers farther than ever to get Buster moving with all the weight of bombs and fuel. We turned onto the runway, then braked to a stop.

“Magnetos,” said Lofty.

“We checked them already,” said Pop.

“I want to check them again.”

Pop sighed. His breath whistled in the intercom. But he did as he was told, and Lofty worried that something was wrong with the magnetos. “Damn,” he said. “There’s too much drop.”

That old dodge? I heard Bert’s voice in my mind. But suddenly Lofty said, “To hell with it. Full throttles! Lock ’em, Will.”

If anything really was wrong with Buster, she managed to hold herself together. She took us through the evening to the night, all the way to Nuremberg without a murmur from the engines. She took us across the city, lurching through the flak and the billowing smoke from the fires. Percy lay inside my jacket, and I held him tightly as we rolled to the left. Through my window, eighteen thousand feet below, I saw the dome where a saint was buried, and I saw the castles burning.

Buster brought us home again. She brought us to a land of clouds, and went shivering through them as I tuned the loop and listened on the wireless. I picked up the streams of dots and dashes. “Skipper, we’re on the beam,” I said.

Two nights later the old crate took us to Italy, and it was such an easy show that even Fletcher-Dodge came along in his perfect R for Rags. It was our best machine, bright and new like a showroom car. He had renamed it for his favorite old dog. More than five hundred bombers went, and all but three came home to England. But Fletcher-Dodge stepped out of Rags as though he was Jimmy Doolittle returning from Tokyo. He was still swaggering the next day, when the first of the Lancasters came.

The entire squadron watched it circle round the field. We watched it tilt and sideslip down, then level off above the field, beyond the hedge. We heard the engines fade away, then rise again.

Fliers and erks and WAAFs, they all cheered as the Lancaster touched the ground. No one could have cheered more loudly if the king had arrived inside it. Then they surged forward, and I saw Ratty practically skipping along at the front of them all, Lofty—somewhere in the middle—grinning round his pipe. But I stayed where I was, feeling empty and sad. I saw the ending when that Lanc arrived.

Over the next few days I watched others arrive, one at a time, and a line of Lancs began to grow at the farthest end of the field. I never went near them until I had to, when our turn came around to go up for a spin on the fifteenth of the month. It was a night flight, under a big full moon.

I felt strange getting into a kite without a pigeon box to carry. I kept thinking that I’d forgotten it, that I heard—from a distance—the flutter of Percy’s wings, the bubbly coo of his voice. For the others our first pigeonless flight was something to joke about. Simon said he was glad he wouldn’t have to smell the bird anymore. “No lie,” said Ratty. “We’ll never smell pigeons again, soon as the Kid takes a bath.”

I settled at the wireless, not wedged down in the nose, but high in the fuselage, right below the astrodome and just behind the engines. A trainer took the pilot’s seat as Lofty hovered near him. He fired up the engines, taxied to the runway, then steered west to the coast in the moonlight. Down into valleys, up over hills, we took the same sort of winding route we’d taken in Buster our first time up, and I loved it all over again.

The Lanc made our old crate look like a dodo bird. Despite what I wanted to think, I loved flying in a thing so fast and big. I leaned sideways and looked forward through the front office, out through the windshield at the moon straight ahead. We were climbing toward it, with the engines in their perfect, powerful drone. Lofty was driving now, and it seemed that he could take us there if he wanted to, that he could put us down among the craters, or just loop the loop around that moon. But he throttled back and rolled us over, and I saw the ocean—all bright and sparkling—slant across the glass.

A shiver of delight ran through me. For a moment there was nothing in my thoughts but the joy of flying. I reveled in the weightlessness of dipping into the dive, then felt myself grow huge and heavy as we leveled out above the sea. I grinned as we turned and gamboled through the sky.

“Roaring rockets!” I said, and this time nobody laughed at me. Then I reached inside my jacket to stroke at Percy’s feathers, and when I found only sheepskin, all my joy dissolved.

I suddenly missed my little friend so strongly that my heart ached. I felt a terrible guilt that I’d forgotten that he wasn’t there. And I thought of what it really meant to be flying in a Lanc—that he would never be with me again.