In War Times (17 page)

“War secret,” said Wink.

“Right. Well, it definitely had some kind of effect on me.”

“You’d better lay off the strong drink,” said Wink.

S
AM HAD WORKED
a fifteen-hour shift, but was awakened by a rough shaking an hour after he fell into bed. Something heavy was tossed atop him. “Suit up.”

“For what?” He was sure that Wink, on the next cot, was awake, but feigning sleep with all of his considerable skill.

“Mission over Berlin. Be at the flight line in ten minutes. Here’s your pill.”

“Why didn’t you say there must be some mistake?” Wink said, after they left.

“You’re provoking the gods,” said Sam, zipping himself into the flight suit and shoving his feet into his boots. He stood and swallowed the Dexedrine they’d left.

Another torch glare provoked moans. Wink’s silence did not protect him. “Suit up. Ten minutes.”

Wink was on his feet in a flash. “Yes, sir!” Crisp salute.

“We’re calibrating,” he told Sam as they walked through the chilly night.

“I figured that out.”

Sam’s B-17 was called Sally Rand; he had a brief glimpse of her well-endowed red-clad figure while climbing the ladder. The interior was close and dark. He was to sit next to the bombardier, a man called Henk, he’d been told during the pre-flight briefing where he met Glenning, Mason, and the other crewmembers.

In front of Henk was a small, glowing screen—one that Sam had undoubtedly assembled and tested a few days ago. Henk was intense and quiet, and so was everyone else when they heard that their mission was to bomb Berlin. The assumption, both by the Allies and by the Germans, was that Berlin was safe from daytime bombing raids, and the more precise targeting such raids would allow.

Sam’s perception of himself as an irreplaceable cog in the war effort evaporated as he zipped and buckled himself into his gear. The survival rate for these missions was low. Their hospital was filled with men who’d been wounded by shrapnel ripping through the thin aluminum skin of their plane, or by bullets fired from the German planes as they came right up to the B-17, or by the huge 88mm antiaircraft guns protecting German targets. They might even be trying to get rid of him because of what he knew.

The plane bounced down the short runway. He had by now seen thousands of takeoffs, and many botched attempts. It was a breath-holding proposition as to whether the plane would actually take off before it reached the end of the strip or crash into Bedder’s field, long since cleared of valuable sheep and cows. His radio crackled. “We’re off, boys.”

Sam nervously adjusted his oxygen mask. The plane was not pressurized; the first bullet hole would have depressurized it. England vanished beneath him, a beautiful blur of deep green, and then there was the Channel, patterned with white-edged scallops which were waves. Suddenly everything vanished into mist. He calculated their speed, their trajectory, and when they emerged into a world of gold and ruby-drenched cloud his breath was taken away by its beauty. He was suspended above this beauty, on his very first airplane flight, inside the latest weaponry of death.

“Come on back, Dance. You’re to check out the ball turret setup.” Glenning helped him settle into the gyroscopic Plexiglas sphere suspended beneath the belly of the plane after Mason climbed out. “You’re not the man for this kind of mission. Too tall.”

He began to check out the computerized gyroscopic sight. The information was transmitted to him through blips of light on a tiny screen; he had only to rotate and superimpose his own dots for the sophisticated device to calculate his own plane’s speed and the speed and curve of the target, which the simple sight of humans could not do with any great accuracy. Calculus at work. Had Newton dreamed of weapons? Of course; catapults and such. But mostly he dreamed of pure information. Rather like Hadntz’s dreams, except that she had tried to use her information positively, knowing the negative ends to which it could be turned.

But there was no way to control how a technology might be used.

The clouds cleared and he assumed that they were still over France. Miller’s “Moonlight Sonata” played over his headphones from a radio station near Tidworth. Despite his heated clothing he was cold. The pilot of one of the Mustangs escorting them caught Sam’s eye and gave him a quick smile: he was that close. East was the blinding sun and then out of it German fighters that seemed to have come from above. His Mustang friend peeled off and engaged the Messerschmitt in gunfire.

There was no time to trade places with Mason. Sam did not think; his training thought for him. He pointed the guns at the Messerschmitt 109 and was rotated into firing position. Firing in short bursts, as he’d been taught, he thought that perhaps it was one of his bullets that pierced the fuselage of the other plane; assuredly, it was the Mustang that sent it down in a spiral of smoke and flame.

Alert and cool now, he stopped thinking about anything other than being suspended above occupied France, defending tons of munitions and the nine other lives on his plane. His headphones were filled with technical messages from the navigator or engineer to the pilot, mixed with excited chatter when they began cutting through the harrying German planes.

They were one organism, bent on survival. He’d never had such an intense feeling before; the instantaneous communication, the bond as each engaged in a specialized task. And a deeper pride: his fix had worked. Although he had been tested and re-tested, knowing, intellectually, that lives depended on him, being here brought home the seriousness of his own small part in the war effort, and after that it never left him. One must execute all things to the best of one’s ability, unslowed or deflected by bullshit—bureaucratic pettiness, human jealousies, or greed.

Rotate the cramped sphere hanging in all this beauty. Fire and fire right there into the face of the German hidden behind his mask. Hope the frost would clear from his goggles; there, it had. Dizziness and panic; has his oxygen tube crimped or come loose? Someone finds the crimp; unkinks it. Breathing again, pure oxygen, and then the attack seems over and he is pulled from the turret.

“It works,” he tells Mason through his radio microphone.

“You did great,” Mason says as he takes over and Sam is deeply gratified at the compliment. At least they’re still alive. Back at his post next to the bombardier, he finds that his own screen is not working.

By the time he fixes it, they are suddenly over Berlin, surrounded by flak meant to confound the sensitive tracking devices embedded in this machine of death. Mustangs and Messerschmitts everywhere. Parachutes fill the sky—more American POW’s, if they survive. The 88’s below boom ceaselessly. The surviving B-17’s are westward blips, their range exhausted. Sally Rand’s target, a refinery, is below and amid a hail of ground-launched missiles. The bombardier lets go and a cheer rises through their shared mind:
Target hit
! Jubilance!

Turning from the now-high sun, Germans in pursuit. A shock rips through the plane; a shudder, a stall. A cry of agony: “God! Damn, damn! My fucking
hand
—” A sickening drop, the plane recovers, but low, missing one engine.

Across Germany they fly, trying to climb, then just trying to make it back. Talk of diverting to Switzerland then—no, the Channel and a dash. “Sweet, sweet!”

Mason dead, right where Sam had been, the ball turret. The entire crew crying, even himself.

Three B-17’s lost and five Mustangs. And, as if peripheral, twenty-seven men. Target hit. Slosh of whisky downed after peeling off sweat-drenched suit.

Quiet, pulled-aside congratulations from the pilot—apparently the gyroscopic setup greatly enhanced their defense, his kill of a plane, their very survival and ability to go up again and kill the civilians as well as the soldiers of Germany. Much improved, a great breakthrough.

He’d heard rumors of firestorms deliberately started by the Allies. He hadn’t believed it; even the Japanese targeted only Pearl Harbor.

Now he did. The Germans had indeed targeted civilians everywhere, and the Allies were not above it, either. The entire world was involved in such atrocities.

As was he.

During his plummet into sleep he wondered how anyone could get up and do this again in just a few hours.

But all fliers did, many and many times over until they too fell from the sky.

There were no soldiers in the barracks when he woke. It was four in the afternoon. He couldn’t believe that they’d let him sleep in just because of a little run over Berlin.

But he now had a much better idea of what was happening across the Channel.

Was that why he had been sent? By Hadntz?

If so, he had a feeling that it was just the beginning.

S
PRING BROUGHT SLIGHTLY
warmer mists, the classic English beauty of deep gardens, but not hoped-for days with Elsinore.

After the bombing he sought her out more frequently. He realized that he wasn’t going to the mansion just to be around the children. Maybe that had never been the case. If he had fooled himself, though, he probably hadn’t fooled anyone else—not Wink, who teased him about Elsinore, nor Mrs. Applewhist, or even Elsinore herself.

But more often than not, when he went to the mansion, she was not around. Still, he did enjoy being with the children; they begged him to play the piano for them so that they could have sing-alongs after dinner. They still groaned if he brought his saxophone, except for the red-haired boy, Charles, to whom he had given a few elementary lessons. Even Mrs. Applewhist, always in her flowered cotton dress and well-worn green apron, welcomed him now that Elsinore was scarce.

Sam and Wink let the Hadntz Device well enough alone. Apparently, it required some kind of activation, which required what they both had decided might be nuclear fission. Obviously, that was not possible. So it stayed on the shelf, seemingly inert. “Though God knows what it’s really up to,” Wink remarked more than once.

Sam was desperately disappointed. He had placed his hopes on the device more than he realized. Some kind of easy out, some kind of no-cost solution. Magical restorer of life. But if it worked, why hadn’t Hadntz built one and used it by now?

Perhaps she had, and had thereby left them behind.

There was news of terrible slaughter in the Pacific, in Russia. In Tidworth, the 610th continued the invasion buildup. The Perham Downs, gaining a local reputation and more players, were invited to many gigs, where they invented semimodern interpretations of old standards.

On his trips to London, Sam often now found himself at the front door of the theatrical warehouse, and tried to retrace his route to the house to which Hadntz had taken him. Perhaps he had to go inside, wander through the rooms of time first, and come out another door. He finally gave it up; if she wanted to find him, she would. If she still lived.

One day, as Sam stepped off the train at Paddington Station, a man in a black suit approached him.

“You are Samuel Dance?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m with British Intelligence. Follow me, if you please.”

“I don’t—”

“Here is my identification. We are working in conjunction with your OSS concerning a certain physicist whom you know.”

Sam was silent.

“She has made a deal with us, but she requests your help. Only you.” The man looked around. “Now, if you’ll come this way, we need to talk in private.”

With a good number of negative scenarios bouncing around in his mind, Sam weighed his alternatives.

“I would like to talk with someone from OSS about this.”

“That can be arranged.”

But he never actually met anyone from the OSS. They simply gave “permission” for him to participate in the operation. The upshot was that he was to be dropped behind enemy lines, in France. He could not talk about this with anyone when he returned.

At two in the morning, Sam and Wink walked somewhat unsteadily down a cobblestone street in Tidworth. In the distance, a few flyboys started up another chorus of “There Will Always Be an England,” the words replaced by ribald substitutes at which they roared in laughter.

“All right. Spill.” Wink gave Sam’s arm a sharp shake, as if that might dislodge a recounting of what he had done while absent.

“Can’t talk,” Sam replied.

“Talk anyway. You’re useless. You don’t say anything, you don’t do anything except what’s required, and, what’s worse, you’ve completely stopped practicing.”

Sam kicked a stone out of the way and continued walking, hands in pockets. His head spun with unbearable images.

“You’re telling me that some stupid command is keeping you from telling me what happened last week? Are we in this together or not?”

They were on the outskirts of town now. “Nice night,” commented Wink. “Lots of stars.”

“Lots of stars.”

“Let’s sit on that rock and watch them.”

Sam shrugged and accepted a cigarette from Wink. They smoked in silence for a few minutes. Then Sam said, “I was with Hadntz.”

“What?” Wink’s voice was filled with amazement. “In London?”

“No. In Germany. And—I don’t know. We went to a few places. Maybe Poland.”

“I’m amazed, astonished, astounded. You were across the Channel. You went to ‘a few places.’ What kind of places?”

“I was dropped in France. Hadntz and I went to labor camps. I was her driver.”

“Labor camps?”

“They’re killing people,” said Sam. “Deliberately and methodically. Working them to death making weapons. Look. I really don’t
want
to talk about it. But I will tell you that Hadntz found her daughter. Alive. And the Germans are building incredibly huge rockets.”

“How huge?”

“About fifty feet long. The ones I saw. I doubt we know how many they have—maybe thousands. Hadntz said that they’re going to attach warheads to them. They have a pretty complex gyroscopic guidance system. But that isn’t the worst thing I saw.”

“My guess—the people,” said Wink.

“They are starved, beaten, and worked to death. They are publicly killed for the smallest infraction, the least suspicion of sabotage, or even for not working quickly enough. But I guess it’s the same philosophy our own slaveholders had. The Slavs and Poles and Gypsies—the ‘non-Aryans,’ whatever they are—are considered subhuman, just like the Negroes were to the slaveholders. It’s a pretty convenient way to look at other people, if you can get away with it, and if you don’t give a shit about them. It’s a deep human trait. We all must have it. I guess it’s one of the things that Hadntz wants to deal with, to change, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how.”