A Thousand Suns (6 page)

In absolute darkness, in this cockpit with a ridged floor and all manner of debris and silt sitting on it, he was not going to find his torch by touch. That simply wasn’t going to happen.

‘Oh shitshitshit,’ Chris found himself muttering.

Mark’s coming, should be here any second. For fuck’s sake calm down.

A faint light turned the world outside the plexiglas cockpit from black to a deep blue. It flickered brighter and darker, but over time it was growing steadily stronger.

Chris sucked in a big breath and puffed out a sigh of relief.

He saw a dark form through the algae-fogged glass of the cockpit. It was treading water outside. No doubt Mark was calling for him on the radio and probably getting worried that he wasn’t receiving an answer.

Chris found himself smiling with relief. The cavalry was here.

Bless you, Mark.

He could see Mark’s foggy form moving across the cockpit plexiglas, the torch came up and he shone it into the cockpit. The bright halogen beam shone into his face. Chris gestured for Mark to aim it down to the floor of the cockpit, hoping he would be seen through the thin film of scum on the plexiglas.

The beam changed direction and tilted downwards.

Immediately Chris could see the outline of his torch and the camera. He reached down and picked them both up.

But his eye was drawn to movement ahead of him.

The light from Mark’s torch shone through the bulkhead into the radio operator’s booth and beyond down the inside of the fuselage to the waist-gun stations. Manning these positions, silently looking through their gun sights, stood two ghostly young men in flying leathers. They remained motionless, squinting into the darkness, awaiting the inevitable swarm of enemy fighters.

My God!

One of them turns towards Chris as if finally aware that he is being watched. He nods.

And that was the last thing he clearly recalled. The rest was a jumble, Mark entering the cabin and pulling him out, the slow ascent, the short pause for decompression halfway up . . . and him babbling away to Mark about ghosts in the machine.

Will begrudgingly handed him a mug of coffee. ‘There you are. This’ll help.’

Chris took it gratefully and held it in both hands, savouring the warmth seeping through the chipped enamel to his fingers. ‘Thanks.’

Mark was already out of his dry suit and back in his clothes and starting to pack away the diving helmet. ‘How are you feeling now?’ he said.

‘Like a bloody moron,’ replied Chris.

‘You were saying all kinds of strange stuff coming up.’

‘Yup, rambling like a fool no doubt.’

Mark smiled. ‘Kind of.’

‘Nitrogen narcosis . . . I know, I know.’

‘Yeah. You were all over the place when I pulled you out. What got you so worked up?’

Chris looked guiltily at Will. ‘I was taking some shots in the cockpit and I guess the flash must’ve spooked an eel or something similar. It knocked me for six on the way out. I lost the torch and the camera, and I suppose that’s when I started losing it.’

‘Yes, you sure did. You gave me a pretty nasty scare back there.’

‘I was sitting in the dark, no radio contact. I lost it . . . you know, panicked.’ Chris shook his head, angry with himself.

‘Don’t beat yourself up over it.’

He looked up at Mark. ‘Thanks for coming in and getting me. That was nasty back there, it really shook me up.’

‘No sweat. Diving on wrecks, those confined spaces . . . shit like this happens. It’s easy to get rattled when you’re boxed in.’

Will was ready to start up the engine and take the
Mona Lisa
back to Port Lawrence. ‘You Boy Scouts done for the night?’

Mark answered before Chris could get a word in. ‘Yeah . . . No more diving for us tonight.’

Chapter 5

Missing in Action

Chris looked out of the window of the coffee shop. It was pouring down, and the wind was gusting. The rain smacked angrily against the glass as if frustrated at the missed opportunity to soak him and the two other solitary patrons inside.

Real Brit weather, that’s what Elaine would say.

Chris smiled; she wasn’t wrong. There was many a day as a child he’d been taken down to Southend-on-Sea for a fun-filled bank holiday at the beach only to spend it in a greasy café looking out at the rain and sipping tepid tea.

Same deal today, only it was tepid coffee.

Chris checked the time, it was nearly half-nine in the morning. Time to get to work.

He pulled out several prints he had made first thing this morning; an image of the engine casing and the propeller, an image of the waist-gun port and the bullet holes stitched diagonally across it, an image of the nose of the bomber and the plexiglas canopy to the cockpit and the observer’s blister.

And the plane’s ident.

Chris squinted. It wasn’t as clear as he had hoped and he held the glossy paper closer to his face as he tried to make it out. It was a picture of a near-naked lady, smiling wickedly with an arm coyly covering ample breasts. Her hair looked like dreadlocks.

Dreadlocks?

Below the image, faint and peeling, a single word that made sense of the woman, her improbable hair and the mischievous, impish face.

Medusa.

Below that, stencilled in formal USAAF style, were three letters. Chris noted them down on a napkin and then dialled a number he’d pulled off the Internet a couple of days earlier.

A woman answered.

‘Hi,’ said Chris, quickly adopting a more authoritative BBC accent. ‘I wonder if you can help me? I’m making a documentary on the United States Air Force based in England during the war. It’s really a programme that follows the fortunes of the crews of several planes, you know? How they coped with the war, their personal experiences of it. That kind of thing. Are you with me?’

‘So far,’ the female voice replied.

‘I need a little information on the identity marker of a particular plane. Where it served, which squadron it was in, who its crew were . . . can you help me with this kind of infor—?’

‘I’ll put you through to the Crew Reunion Helpline.’

Chris shrugged. The old BBC documentary ruse wasn’t necessary, then.

‘Crew Reunion Helpline, what’s your Regimental Designation? ’ said another female operator.

‘My what?’

‘Regimental Designation.’

‘Would that be the letters on the plane?’ asked Chris hopefully.

‘Yes.’

‘The letters are L, then beneath that GS.’

‘Okay . . . just a second . . .’

Chris could hear the clacking sound of fingernails on a keyboard and in the background the sound of other voices and phones bleeping.

‘You get a lot of calls like this?’ asked Chris casually.

No answer. Obviously not part of the script.

‘Hello. The L denotes the 381st Bomber Group. The GS was the squadron identification code for the regiment. GS was Squadron 535. They were stationed in England from April 1943 to January 1945 and then in Germany until the squadron was disbanded in 1947. What was the plane’s name?’

‘Do you mean the nickname?’

‘Yes, sir, the nickname.’

‘
Medusa.
’

‘Medusa? Like the snake lady?’

‘That’s it.’

Chris heard the clacking sound of nails against plastic keys again. A pause. Then something else being typed. Another wait. Chris thanked God they hadn’t modernised their switchboard to employ an ‘on hold’ musak system.

‘Oh,’ said the female voice.

‘What’s the problem?’

‘Not a problem, sir . . . it’s just never happened before. That record is flagged. I’ll need to talk to the supervisor. Can you hold?’

‘Yeah, okay.’

The line went silent. Chris looked out of the window again. The rain was easing off slightly but still coming down enough to drench him if he was going to have to walk back down the coast road to Port Lawrence. Mark had borrowed the Cherokee. He’d wanted to take the damaged helmet radio downtown to find a Tandy or a Radio Shack. He was convinced it would be a quick and easy fix, although when he was due back was anyone’s guess. ‘Downtown’ was twenty miles away.

There was a click, the call was being transferred.

‘Hello? I believe you were enquiring about a plane serving with the 381st called
Medusa
?’ A male voice.

Chris confirmed the name.

‘I’m sorry about the confusion,’ he sounded flustered. Like somebody unaccustomed to this kind of conversation. ‘The records show this plane went missing in a raid over Hamburg in 1944.’

‘Missing over Hamburg?’

‘Yes. Hamburg, Germany.’

Thanks for that.

‘The plane crashed?’ Chris asked, lowering his voice.

‘Probably, sir. Most MIAs were assumed to be crashes.’

‘So she wasn’t recovered?’

‘Well, no, of course she wasn’t. Like I say, the records simply list the plane as missing.’

‘What about her crew? Were there any survivors?’

‘The records show that all nine of them were also reported as MIA.’

‘None resurfaced after the war as POWs?’

‘I’m sorry, sir; all I can give you is what is printed here. We can send you a copy of the records we have for a nominal fee of ten dollars. Would you like to give me your name and address?’

‘Uh? . . . no don’t bother.’ All of a sudden he felt the urge to end the call very quickly.

‘Can I ask
why
you’re enquiring about this plane?’ the man on the end of the phone asked.

Chris hung up. Almost immediately he wished he’d attempted to slide out of that conversation in a casual, easy manner, rather than panicking as he had. Even more so, he wished he’d thought to withhold his number before dialling in. It left him feeling jumpy.

Coffee.

It’s one of those things that become increasingly insipid the more you have of it. The first mouthful of the first cup of coffee of the day was always sublime, after that it all goes downhill. Chris curled his lip at the bitter-sweetness of his fifth since lunchtime. It was black to boot, which didn’t help. He’d exhausted the supply of cream cartons from the guest room’s wicker basket of courtesy refreshments, but the coffee and the sachets of sweetener were still going strong.

He turned out the light on the bedside cabinet and carried his mug across the room in total darkness to the bathroom. He pulled open the bathroom door and entered the crimson twilight of yet another impromptu developing booth. The sink was an inch deep with developing fluid and on the floor in a shallow plastic tray was some fixative. Strung across the bathroom, dangling from a length of twine like an unlikely laundry line, hung photographs of the B-17. Chris ducked underneath it on the way to the sink, and placed his mug of coffee on a toiletry shelf above. He pulled out several sheets of photographic paper that had been exposed to the negatives he’d selected to print.

Chris was pretty sure that
News Fortnite
would pass on these prints of the co-pilot; they were too grim for their regular readers.

He slid the sheets of photographic paper into the sink and gently separated them in the fluid. Silently he counted to sixty as the sheets of paper slowly darkened and form and definition emerged from the white.

The first shapes to make sense were the symmetrical round black holes of the co-pilot’s eye sockets. Chris watched as the detail slowly emerged. A row of vertical lines that slowly became teeth, the lower jaw slightly askew where Chris had placed it last night.

The second sheet of paper revealed an image of the body taken from further away, showing off some of the cockpit, the steering yoke and the plexiglas canopy. It was a better composition in his opinion. It helped tell more of a story, placed the body within a context, grounded it within a simple visual narrative.

But it was the third sheet of photographic paper that really caught Chris’s eye.

Mark was sitting on the bed fiddling with a soldering iron and the guts of the damaged helmet radio housing when Chris entered his motel room unannounced.

‘Fancy going for a beer?’

Mark jerked, and a blob of solder missed its target. ‘Jeez, don’t you knock?’

Chris looked suitably apologetic. ‘Sorry. What are you up to?’

‘I’m just trying to work out where the loose connection is on this damn radio. It’s definitely a loose wire.’

Mark picked up the carbon-fibre casing for the radio and turned it towards Chris so he could clearly see the nasty gouge.

‘Are you sure you didn’t bang it on anything last night?’

‘All right, already, maybe I might have accidentally clumped it on the way inside the plane. Listen, I’ll pay for the damage, okay? It’s the least I can do. Come on, let’s go get a pint and I’ll buy some dinner too, since it’s getting on for supper time.’

‘A “pint” eh? Why not?’

‘And I want to show you something . . . I want a second opinion.’

Mark looked intrigued. ‘What is it?’

Chris smiled. ‘First, beer.’

It was actually a lot more pleasant inside than it promised to be from the outside. ‘Lenny’s’ was an old converted shutterboard boathouse, just down the street from the motel they were staying in. At some time in the past its timber walls had received a cheerful coating of sunflower-yellow, but the paint had flaked off in many places, exposing wood so old it could tell a story or two. A single flickering neon sign fizzed over the doorway asserting that the hut was a ‘Bar & Grill’.

Inside, Mark and Chris could have been in any sports bar, in any town, in any state. A juke box, a pool table and carved wooden Indian standing guard outside the toilets. Nothing changes, thought Chris. Hell, there were faux American sports bars in every new town, in every county in England. Which was even worse. Sports bars populated by spotty young Essex boys pretending to be American.

A TV in the corner above the bar was showing some football. Chris was no big NFL fan, but Mark was.

‘Good choice. You want to sit up at the bar?’

Chris shook his head. ‘Nah, not my sport.’

Mark laughed. ‘I forget, soccer’s your game, isn’t it?’

Chris shook his head wearily. ‘It’s known as “football” around the rest of the world. Anyway, listen, I want to show you something.’

‘You can show me up at the bar, can’t you?’

‘Discreetly, if you don’t mind.’

Mark nodded. ‘Oh, okay. I’ll go find us somewhere comfortable and you can buy me that beer and dinner, then.’

Chris went up to the bar and ordered a couple of Buds and two Steak Royales from a chalkboard menu that seemed to favour fish. The Royales were described as ‘grilled and seasoned with Lenny’s secret blend of herbs and spices and served with jumbo jacket fries’.

He looked round the bar as the barman pulled a couple of ice-cold bottles out of a fridge and shouted the order through a hatch into the kitchen.

It wasn’t particularly busy, perhaps no more than a dozen drinkers, mostly regulars by the look of them, all staring vacuously at the TV. There was no doubt that it was mid-week and out of vacation season.

Chris took the beers over to a little wood-panelled booth that Mark had found. He smiled when he realised Mark had still managed to keep the TV set in view.

‘Who’s winning, then?’ he said as he set the bottles of beer down.

‘The Dolphins,’ replied Mark, chugging a mouthful directly from the bottle, leaving some suds on his beard. ‘Ahhh, I needed that. Thanks.’

‘I got us some grilled steaks and fries to wash the beer down.’

‘Great. So, Chris . . . what’s this thing you want a second opinion on?’

Chris slipped off his shoulder bag and pulled out a manila folder. He set it carefully on the table between them and opened it to reveal a dozen black and white photographs.

‘Ahhh, you’ve developed them already.’

‘Just some.’

Chris spun the folder round so that the pictures inside were the right way up for Mark. He studied them intently for a few moments, spreading them out across the table.

‘They look good.’ He pointed to a group of three images of the body aboard the plane. ‘Nice, you definitely caught his best side.’

‘I want you to look closely at these three pictures.’

‘At what?’

‘I’m not going to say just yet. I don’t want to bias your opinion.’

Mark studied the grim images of the pilot. Chris definitely knew his craft. The photographs were high-contrast. He knew enough about the way Chris worked to know that this was deliberate. The contrast pushed the images away from various greys towards decisive whites and blacks. It made every little detail, every little bump and groove stand out.

‘Well, what do you want? A judgement on the composition?’

‘Of the de-composition more like,’ said Chris. ‘Sorry, go on.’

‘Okay . . . they’re striking, but I wouldn’t think they’ll make their way onto any kitchen calendars or Mother’s Day cards. You think your employers will go for them?’

Chris shook his head. ‘What,
News Fortnite
? Nah . . . It’s a little too visceral for them. This is the kind of scat image that some sick website would love.’

Mark looked back down at the images of the skeletal face. He was right. If it were just a skull it wouldn’t be quite so bad. But the few strands of organic debris clinging to the bone still looked like flesh. And the tuft of blond hair poking out from beneath the leather cap, the vertebrae of the neck descending into layers of clothing all came together to produce an unpleasant portrait of decay.

‘Let me help you a little here. Take a close look at this one,’ he said, picking up a photo and handing it to Mark. It was a close-up of the body. An image that showed the skull and the vertebrae of the neck descending into the leather flying jacket and uniform tunic.

Mark looked it over carefully. ‘No, I can’t see what you want me to see.’

Chris pointed to a metallic object half-obscured by the lower jawbone and radio mouthpiece.