The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [61]
How did the 190 find them? He would circle back, if he could. Marshall called to the gunners, “Don’t blink!”
It must have been sheer, lousy chance, he thought. Fighters were looking for them, but the chance of finding them in the clouds was one in a million. And finding them again, unlikely.
But the FW would alert others. More German fighters would be looking for them now. A straggler. A defenseless Yank.
“Those big Fritzes get ambitious when Goering threatens to send them to the Russian front,” Marshall said. “He promised them an Iron Cross for every Fort.”
They flew on, Webb maneuvering only a little, a slight zigzag in the clouds. There was a nervous babble on the inter-phone for a while, but it died down.
The silence of the inter-phone then was like the crew holding its breath. When Marshall wasn’t scanning the cloud-clogged skies, he steadied himself by methodically reviewing the compass, the altimeter, the airspeed indicator, making a constant inventory of the instruments. Could we speed up? Could we trim better?
Webb, exhausted, handed off to Marshall while he wrote up the data in his log. They seemed to be flying in slow motion. It was eerie, timeless. They pushed through the enveloping grayness, at times seeming not to move at all. Marshall’s eyes were stinging. He had to remind himself to blink. He had hardly noticed when they came down out of the sub-zero cold.
Slowly they groped their way, fighting the yoke and rudder pedals, trying to pile up the miles behind them. An hour of this. Or was it a day? Or a week?
The hands of the chronometer crept ahead but didn’t seem to have any meaning. The Dirty Lily skulked through the grog. They were slinking toward home.
We won’t die, Marshall said to himself. We might not die.
Then the clouds began breaking up. Damn. Adrenaline pulsed higher. The vapor around them thinned, broke apart, and gradually evaporated. They were in the open.
It must be Belgium down there, unless they had angled down over France. No sign of the Channel, unless it was the blue haze on the horizon.
Farmland, a river, a village—a mile or so below. Marshall could make out a stone church. More villages and fields.
Campanello was calling through the inter-phone the name of the river below when a Jerry fighter bore in on them from dead ahead. Grainger yelled out, “Attack! Attack! Twelve o’clock level.”
—Grainger was shooting.
—The plane jolted.
—The Plexiglas nose cone shattered.
—Bullets smacked the back of the pilots’ control panel.
—Top turret opened up, then the waist gunners.
—The FW raced under them and was gone.
Wind screamed through the opened fuselage, and the Dirty Lily bucketed and shuddered. Marshall and Webb both grabbed their yokes, fighting a plane almost out of control. Their air speed was dropping dangerously.
Webb motioned downward. He and Marshall both pushed forward on their yokes. The crippled plane nosed down.
The top turret gunner called, “I think I got him!”
Tail gunner: “No, you didn’t.”
“Al’s hit!” Campanello yelled. His voice was thin and distant in Marshall’s headset. “Shoulder. And me. My leg.”
Webb yanked the yoke to the right. They pulled through a diving turn, then hauled back. Straining, muscling, Webb and Marshall leveled the bomber at about five hundred feet, maybe less.
“Bandit, ten o’clock high!” Top turret.
The guns were hammering again.
The FW—silver with red markings—raked their port side, nose to tail.
Hadley, the radio man, called out something that sounded like “running board.”
Chick Cochran was on the inter-phone from the waist. “We’ve got a fire back here!”
“Bail out, bail out!” cried Webb.
“No!” Marshall cried. “Too low!”
Webb leaned back and reached for his chute pack. Marshall clung to the yoke.
Marshall called to the crew, “I’m bringing it in.”
Marshall said to Webb, “It’s my airplane.”
He saw fields next to a village. He was going straight in. He yelled on the inter-phone for the ball-turret gunner to crawl out.
They crested a line of trees,