The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [53]
"Short notice, Ice, I'll need to get busy and run this past Grady—"
"—who like a sane general thinks this is the perfect chance to grab off some long overdue notice for his star B-17 coolie, the modest but capable Lieutenant Eisman. I already cleared it with him. C'mon, Ben, Dex got his rah-rah for slapping splints on guys somegoddamnwhere. Moxie gets his for shooting off ack-ack in some English cow pasture. How about mine, what're you waiting for?"
He had to resist yanking his feet off the floor of the Plexiglas nose cone as the bomber shuddered across acres of unforgiving concrete in what seemed to be a never-ending takeoff. Then, like an elevator going up, the B-17 Flying Fortress lifted, turned its tail to the smelter stack, and began the long climb north.
Beneath and on all sides of him, old known earth mapped itself on the underside of the plastic shell where he huddled in fascinated suspension. Wheatfields winter-sown and fallow stretched below like checkered linoleum laid to the wall of the Rockies. There to the west he could pick out the long straight brink of Roman Reef and its dusky cliff, and the snake line of watercourse that would be English Creek. Gros Ventre, though, held itself out of sight beneath its cover of trees. The four big engines drummed loud enough he regretted he had not brought earplugs. However, that would have denied him the company of Jake and the crew via the earphones.
"Everybody copacetic? Navigator, the fake bomb jockey still with us? Make sure he doesn't touch anything that can go off."
"I'll slap his hands, skipper."
Ben was pretty sure they were kidding. On the other hand, twin half-inch guns poked up from the cheeks of the plane just on the other side of the plastic from him and he made a hurried inventory of switches not to bump.
Jake got back to business. "Sparks, how's that weather by now?"
"Clear at Edmonton. It starts to heavy up after that. Cumulonimbus to thirty thousand, the whole ball of horseshit."
"Hear that, Ben? Arranged a ceiling flight for you."
Christ and a bear, that's seven miles up in one of these things. "Just don't drop me, Lieutenant Eisman."
"Haven't lost a scribbler yet."
Soon the Sweetgrass Hills crouched beneath the plane, their three ancient summits the only sentinel points in uncountable miles of prairie. For a fleeting moment aligned with the bomb-aiming panel of Plexiglas directly in front of Ben, Devil's Chimney looked like the front sight of a rifle zeroed in. He thought back to Toussaint Rennie and hoped a dressed-out elk was hanging in that windsprung barn on the Two Medicine. Scanning the passing geography and jotting frantically, crystals of detail for the Tepee Weepy piece, snatches to write to Vic, his thinking as ever quickened with the vantage point of defied gravity. Maybe I was meant for thin air. Or is that birdbrain logic? Either way, he had the giddy feeling of being on top of it all. The colossal modern warp of time claimed everywhere below him; only a man's puny lifetime ago, the swiftest things on this shoulder of the planet were buffalo and Indian ponies. B-17s annihilated every pace of the past and along with it substituted sky for high ground. "Space is the bride of time." Elemental Gaussian physics, weirdly brilliant even back there in the stolid print of the college textbook, the blindered genius Carl Friedrich Gauss sitting in Gottingen unaware of the Napoleonic Wars going on around him while he figured out basics of the universe. The goddamn Germans, too bad they were born with brains.
The intercom broke in. "Friendlies at three o'clock, skipper."
"I see them. Our sisters in arms."
"Not in mine," moaned another voice on the intercom.
Ben reached behind him to the airframe and grabbed binoculars out of their wall pouch. Sleek as the four points of a prong, the formation of Cobras was overtaking them as if the bomber was a lumber wagon. Flying tight and right. He knew, he just knew. Cass in her element.
"Bruiser