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Ester was leaning forward, again

st the wheel. The top of his head was gone, but his earphones, incredibly, remained pinned to what was left of his head. Bitter could see the gray soupy mash of his brain.

The copilot, blood streaming down his face, was taut against his shoulder harness as he tried to pull the wheel back against the weight of Ester’s body and the aerodynamic forces of the dive itself.

Bitter pulled Ester’s body back in the seat and started to unfasten the blood-slippery harness latches. When he turned to the flight engineer to get him to help move Ester’s body out of the seat, he saw that the copilot, who had just barely managed to force the airplane into a nearly level attitude, was looking at him with glazed, terrified eyes. His yellow rubber “Mae West” inflatable life jacket was streaming blood.

The flight engineer was looking at Ester’s open skull, then he threw up.

“Help me get him out of there! ” Bitter ordered.

When there was no response, Bitter decided to move the body himself. Ester was a lot heavier than he looked. And once his head tilted backward, a thick, glutinous mess spilled out of it onto Bitter.

But he dragged him into the aisle between the seats and slipped into the pilot’s seat. The copilot was now slumped unconscious.

And the B-17 was entering a spin.

If he couldn’t bring it out of that, they would all die. Centrifugal force would pin them where they were; they couldn’t even bail out.

Chapter TWO

Lieutenant Commander John B. Dolan, USNR, wearing a fur-collared horsehide naval aviator’s jacket, stood on the observation platform of the control tower of Fersfield Army Air Base. He was holding a china mug of Old Overholt rye whisky-sweetened coffee in one hand and a pair of binoculars in the other. From time to time, he would put the binoculars to his eyes with the practiced skill of an old sailor and examine the cloudy sky to the east.

Both the aviator’s jacket and the binoculars were prewar. The leather patch sewn to the breast of the jacket was stamped with a representation of naval aviator’s wings and the legend CAP DOLAN J.B. “Cap” stood for chief aviation pilot. Dolan had decided that it would fuck up the patch if he corrected the rank to reflect his current status, and besides, he suspected there were few people around who had any idea what “Cap” stood for. He had guessed correctly. Many of the Air Corps guys mistakenly interpreted it as the abbreviation for “captain,” and so addressed him.

The binoculars bore two identification labels. One read “Carl Zeiss GmbH Jena” and the other “Property Aviation Section USS Arizona.” Chief Aviation Pilot John B. Dolan had once flown Vought OS-2U “Kingfishers” off the catapults on the battleship Arizona.

The planes of the two squadrons based at Fersfield were thirty minutes late, but Dolan was not yet worried. His opinion of the skill of the Army Air Corps pilots was not high. It was not a chauvinist opinion, Navy vs. Army, but a professional judgment. Dolan was not surprised that they flew so badly, but that with so little training and experience they flew as well as they did.

It was a magnificent accomplishment on their part that they could fly seven hundred-odd miles into Europe, find and bomb a target, and then find their way home again. Without considering any trouble they ran into en route, he expected them to be an hour or so off their estimated time of arrival.

Forty minutes after they were expected, a sloppy formation of B-17s appeared to the southeast. When Dolan saw through the binoculars that the lead plane had begun a course correction toward Fersfield, he felt sure it was their squadron. He stepped to the window, tapped on it with his mug to get the Aerodrome Officer’s attention, and raised the mug in the direction of the formation.

Three of the twenty-odd aircraft detached themselves from the formation and began to drop toward the base. Flares erupted from the first and last planes of the trio, the signal for wounded aboard.

Dolan heard the peculiar sound of the English-built fire and crash trucks starting, and then the more familiar sound of Dodge ambulances.

The planes with wounded aboard turned on final and came in for a landing. Dolan studied their numbers through his binoculars. Commander Bitter was in K5,"Danny’s Darling.”“Danny’s Darling” was not among the three planes with wounded aboard.

The first two ships made it in all right, but the right landing gear of the third ship collapsed on touchdown. The B-17 skidded sideward but did not leave the runway as it screeched to a stop. It blocked the runway, however, and there was a ten-minute delay—during which the remaining B-17s circled slowly and noisily above—until a tractor could push the crash-landed B-17 off the runway.

Then the landings resumed, at roughly one-minute intervals. Dolan was not impressed with the pilots’ skill in bringing their ships in. In what he judged to be a fifteen-mile crosswind, several of them had to make frantic last-minute maneuvers to line the planes up with the runway.

He looked for “Danny’s Darling” among the circling and landing B-17s but could not find it. In the belief that the squadron commander was likely to stay up until the last of his chickens had gone to roost, Dolan was not particularly concerned about it. So he didn’t expect it when he felt a tug at his sleeve and turned to find Major Dumbrowski, the junior of the two squadron commanders, standing there with pain in his eyes.

“‘Danny’s Darling,’” Major Dumbrowski said, “didn’t make it. I’m sorry, Commander.”

Dolan nodded his head. “What happened?” he asked. Neither his face nor his voice showed any emotion.

“Four Messerschmidts got through the fighters and hit us head-on. ‘Danny’s Darling’ was flying lead. I guess it was cannon fire. One moment they were straight and level, and the next they were in a spin.”

“You see any parachutes?” Dolan asked.

“No,” Dumbrowski said. He held up his left hand and demonstrated the attitude of the stricken plane. “When it gets in a spin like that, you almost never see anybody get out.”

“Yeah,” Dolan said. “No chance he could have recovered?”

“One of two things happened, maybe both,” Dumbrowski said. “A cannon round took out the controls, otherwise it wouldn’t have gone into that spin. Or it took out the pilots. That’s what they’ve learned to do, make a frontal assault and take out the pilots or the controls. Both, if they can.”