Chapter Fifteen

Doris, her face as grim as that of everyone around her, from the lowest-ranked corpsman to the adjutant who’d led her outside from the hangar only a very short while ago, watched as Jim Fredericks brought a pair of binoculars to his eyes. His face was ghost white.

“What is it?” Doris asked, her anxiety showing as she grabbed his arm. Looking in the same direction, she squinted but could still barely make out the shape of the incoming B17 bomber.

“Here.” Major Fredericks passed her the binoculars as he was given a walkie-talkie.

Muttering her thanks, Doris put them to her eyes and focused on the stricken plane. Almost at once, she wished she hadn’t. “For cripes’ sake!” she uttered as it came into view. “How the hell’s it still flying!”

In no way was it a question. Unable to help herself, Doris zoomed in and could quite clearly see the damage the aircraft had taken. The top half of the fin had been shot away, a good portion of the port wing seemed also to have disappeared, and one of its port engines was feathered and leaving a trail of thick, black smoke, as was the outer on the other side, though it was at least still turning. Only one of the main undercarriage wheels was down. The tailwheel also looked like it had been shot away, and the bomb bay doors were still open.

Taking the binoculars from her eyes, she wiped her brow clear of the sweat that had broken out as she took stock of the damage. Shaking her head in disbelief, she again muttered, “How in hell’s the pilot keeping her in the air!”

Unable to stop herself, she was about to put them back to her eyes when Jim Fredericks tapped her on the shoulder.

“Sorry, Doris, but I’m going to need those back.”

Completely understanding, she held them out to him. Before he could put them back up to his eyes, she asked him if he could tell her anything else about it.

Many sights in her life had saddened her, but never had Doris seen the face he now turned upon her. Doris could only think of one expression to describe what she could see: complete and utter despair.

He glanced around before answering—probably, she surmised, to make sure no one who didn’t need to know overheard what he was about to say. Taking her by the elbow, Fredericks led her until they were a little away from the crowd. Once satisfied, he told her, “You’ve seen the state it’s in?” Doris nodded. “It’s worse. Not only can’t they get the other undercarriage leg down, but they have a bomb hung up.”

“Bloody hell!” Doris swore. “They can’t get the wheel down or get rid of the bomb?” She felt very silly asking the questions, but they came out of their own accord.

Fredericks shook his head, his lips pursed in grim determination. “Believe me, they’ve tried everything.”

“Well, why don’t they bail out?” Doris demanded, fighting down the instinct to panic.

If anything, her companion’s face lost more color. “The members of the crew still alive are too badly wounded to survive bailing out,” he told her bluntly.

Doris took a few precious seconds to process what she’d been told, seconds during which the B17 droned its painful way ever closer to its destiny.

“So let me get this straight…” She had to make a second attempt to speak, after swallowing hard. “That flying wreck is being flown by a wounded pilot with crew who can’t bail out, they can’t get the landing gear down, and to top it off, a bomb may go off, even if he manages to land…”

A loud bang punctuated her statement, and both looked up for the cause. As if the B17 hadn’t gone through enough, the barely working engine had blown up. Wiping her brow, she could all too easily imagine the pilot struggling to keep the wings level and trying to coax extra power out of his two remaining engines. The one good thing, if it could be called good, was at least it wasn’t both engines on the same side, else she didn’t think much would prevent the bomber from corkscrewing into the ground. As it was, she estimated the bomber was about half a mile from the end of the runway he was aiming for, and equally as obviously, the poor soul was committed to bringing his plane in to land.

All around, the only sound to be heard was the very unsteady drone of the bomber’s overtaxed and failing engines. No one was moving, nobody was saying a word, and every game had stopped. Even the little terrier had sat down, head cocked to the side, aware of the tension in the air. Doris had gripped Jim Fredericks’s arm, and even though she was aware of what she’d done, nothing would persuade her to let go.

Whether by luck or design, the unknown pilot was aiming his aircraft for the runway farthest from the inhabited side of the airfield. Where Doris stood, with the emergency vehicles now revving their engines in readiness for racing the couple of hundred yards to the end of the runway if they were needed, the tension in the air was palpable.

Closer and closer and nearer to the ground the B17 got with each passing second. Doris only remembered much later that as the one main wheel was inches from touching down on the tarmac, she was yelling at the top of her voice, as if the pilot could hear her encouragement, “Keep the power up! Don’t let the wing drop!” She was by no means the only one.

For a second or two, as the entire base held its breath, she thought he was going to pull off a miracle, and she started to punch the air with her free hand, shouting, “Yes! You absol…”

Fate had other ideas.

It all happened too quickly. One moment, the sole wheel touched down and began to roll. Somehow, the pilot was summoning the strength to keep the other wing off the ground, and as yet, the bomb bay doors hadn’t begun to scrape along the runway. Then, as if in slow motion, the wing dipped, and with a screech of grinding metal and a shower of sparks it hit the runway. At the same time, the bomb bay doors struck and the single main wheel leg gave way under the tremendous stresses. The tortured plane began to skid along the runway, breaking up as it went. First, the already damaged tail section broke off, and then the wing which had first scraped along the runway sheared off, the one working propeller cartwheeling toward the perimeter fence. None of the plane was under even partial control now. Doris’s gaze sought out the cockpit, and she would swear until the day she died she saw the pilot hold up a blood-smeared hand in salute.

In the next second, the bomber exploded in a huge red, yellow, orange, and white fireball.

Doris, hand now tightly gripped on Jim Fredericks’s arm, momentarily turned away in horror before she forced herself to look back at where the remains of the aircraft was now merely a tumbling mess of metal careering along the runway. Standing as tall as she could manage and ignoring the tears streaming down her face, she bit her lip and offered up a prayer for the ten brave young men she’d witnessed dying before her.

“What the hell are you waiting for?”

The remains of the plane had by now come to a halt, and against the crackle of fire Jim Fredericks was the first to regain his senses.

“Fire crews!” He turned on those men who were simply standing and staring in shock. “Get your asses into gear!” They promptly jumped into their wagons and made off at speed toward the wreckage.

Doris hoped they’d be careful, as she could hear what could only be ammunition exploding. Without needing to be shouted at, the medical corpsmen too jumped into their meat wagons and made to follow the fire trucks, albeit at a slower pace. She didn’t blame them, as she couldn’t believe anything could be done for the crew. Undoubtedly everyone left aboard had been killed in the crash and explosion.

Even if she’d wanted to go and help, she found as the major peeled her hand off his arm that her feet had become welded to the ground. A rather grubby-looking mechanic appeared before her.

“Third Officer Winter?”

“Yes?” She was a little surprised her voice was still working.

“We couldn’t find anything wrong with your engine, ma’am,” he told her.

Looking around, it appeared she wasn’t going to get anything more out of the adjutant about the wretched handkerchief. Not that her heart was in it at the moment. Also, he was running as fast as he could toward where the fire was being tackled by the fearless crowd going about their grim tasks around the crash site.

“Ma’am?” The mechanic tried to get her attention back.

She gave herself a quick mental shake. “I’ll just have to put it down to one of those things.”

“Will you be getting off, then?” he asked.

“Suppose I may as well.” She sighed, looking over at the busy scene across the way. “There’s nothing I can do to help here.”

The mechanic, without saying a word, picked up her flight bag before she could say anything—hopefully his hands weren’t as dirty as his overalls—and set off back toward where she’d left her Mosquito. “Er…” She coughed and tried again. “How often does…?”

The mechanic glanced briefly over his shoulder but never broke his stride. “Second time this month. The last one left a crater ten feet deep.”

Taking in this deplorable news took until they got back to her plane, which was surrounded by a good number of men, most of them pilots.

“Hi, guys! Anything I can do for you?” She hoped her forced cheery voice wasn’t out of order.

Upon hearing a fellow American’s voice, especially one of female persuasion, everyone who’d been looking at her plane whipped around, amid a general muttering along the lines of, “Gosh darn, a dame flyer! Well, I’ll be damned!” Eventually, they quieted down, and she was able to get between them and open the hatch so she could stow her bag.

It appeared all anyone wanted to know, or rather, check up on, was, “And she’s really made of wood?” together with an awful lot of rapping on the fuselage and wings to check.

It took her a good couple of tries to get them to believe her. As she strapped herself in, they were watching her with a certain amount of admiration and the Mosquito with definite astonishment. She couldn’t help but wonder if at least half their curiosity was a way of trying to keep their minds off the tragedy they’d all just witnessed. She couldn’t blame them.

About halfway through the startup procedure, it struck Doris she didn’t have permission to take off. Looking out of the cockpit, she saw her audience were alternately watching her, then turning their backs and gazing upon the funeral pyre still blazing away. There must be someone there she could ask. Making sure the brakes were still on, she unstrapped and jumped down onto the hard standing and trotted across. Without really having a clue who was who, she tapped the one with the most impressive-looking shoulder rank on the elbow. When he turned around, she wished she’d picked someone else. There were silent tears running down his cheeks, and he was making no effort to hide them.

“Can I help you?”

Despite being an eyewitness to the B17 explosion only minutes earlier, Doris suddenly felt like she was an intruder at a private funeral. A part of her wanted to ask if this young man knew anyone on the aircraft. Just in time, the more sensible part of her brain snapped down on the thought. Despite the base being home to a large number of bombers and, consequently, an even larger number of men to crew and service them, the odds were very strongly in favor of him indeed knowing at least one of them.

She’d heard quite a few times people saying grief had no place in war. They were wrong. There is always time for grief. How you displayed it, or didn’t, was what counted. When the stupid civil war in Spain had taken her husband, she’d been left to her own devices and had come very close to floundering in her own well of sorrow. Upon receiving the letter telling her of Donald’s death, Doris had taken to her bed for a week, only having the strength to get up to use the bathroom, but not enough to eat much. By the time she’d managed to drag herself outside, because she’d run out of food, she’d been in a very bad state. In fact, more than one person she passed on the street had pressed a quarter or sometimes a dollar into her hand in the mistaken belief she was homeless, down on her luck. This had shocked her into rushing back to her apartment and taking a good hard look at what stared back at her in the mirror. It hadn’t been a pretty sight. After a long, cold shower, she’d taken some time to get dressed and then had talked to their wedding photograph. Donald had told her, in no uncertain words, to get her behind back out there and start living.

From then on, she went out each day, did the shopping, tried her best to enjoy the odd coffee, even though her taste buds refused to work. She was living on automatic pilot and hadn’t realized it. At any time of the day, and for no reason she could fathom, she would find herself with hot tears streaming down her face. Only when a mechanic at the airfield where her husband’s plane was based suggested she take it up for a spin had she found her thoughts becoming clear again, and only when she was back in the air behind the stick of his biplane, hers now, could she actually accept he was dead.

She was snapped out of the past by a hand waving back and forth before her eyes.

“Ma’am! Ma’am,” a voice was saying.

Gradually, the face of the officer she’d first tapped on the arm swam into view. Blinking rapidly, she forced herself back to the present. The officer’s head was canted to one side, a mixture of curiosity and sadness. She shook her head. “Yes. I’m sorry. Own little world, you know.”

He didn’t answer, didn’t even show any signs of emotion when the odd round of ammunition from the B17 whizzed overhead. Behind him, Doris could see men hitting the ground as bullets whizzed past their heads. For her part, so long as those around her didn’t dive for cover, she wouldn’t. Of course, it could be the last bad decision she ever made, and she’d have some explaining to do if she delivered a new Mosquito with bullet holes in it.

Finally, she managed to ask what she wanted to. “Yes. Sorry to bother you, but you know I don’t have a radio.” She waited for him to nod. “Well, do you think there’d be a problem if I, you know, took off?”

It took the officer a few seconds to reply with a single nod, before turning his back on her and, with a wave of a hand, gathered all his colleagues together. At a gentle pace, they all moved off toward the pyre. Squinting, Doris could swear she could see tracer ammunition screech past them, their phosphorescent light clearly showing up even in full daylight. She’d just turned on her heel and taken one step back toward her Mosquito, when a spent bullet landed right where she’d been standing.

More than a little unnerved, Doris took off and set course for where she needed to make the delivery. First, though, she banked low over the now smoldering remains of the B17 and dipped her wings in a pilot’s salute to fallen comrades.