Crucified (12 page)

"Jesus Christ!" the German exclaimed, tearing the headphones off his ears when he could no longer take the confession his agent had extracted with the Judas chair.

The Legionary turned.

"Don't swear," he said, glowering at the cringing man.

"I can't hear what he's saying through the shrieks. Why's there an echo in the recording?"

"I held the recorder at the end of a tube from an oxygen mask on his face."

"Did he reveal anything new?"

"No, just what's in his archive. He repeated the name of the Judas agent several times."

"That's merely his suspicion. These papers contain no proof. Nor does the archive"—the Art Historian flicked a dis-missive hand at the other papers stolen by the Legionary—"of the crewman he suspected of betraying the
Ace of Clubs"

"Let's pray there's a clue in the bomber itself," said the young priest.

"And use this fellow Rook."

"Do you know him?"

"No, but I just finished reading his books. He's a digger, and he's got an inquiring mind. In his search for Hitler's Judas, he might stumble across our Holy Grail."

"Who was Hitler's Judas?" the Legionary asked.

"I'll give you three clues, and you can puzzle it out. Play detective on the Internet.

"Clue one: Cyrenaica.

"Clue two: Blue Max.

"Clue three:
Wiistenfuchs."

War of the Worlds.

Alien.

The Thing.

Standing on the rim of the pit above the
Ace of Clubs,
Wyatt felt as if he had wandered onto the set of one of those science fiction films in which a crashed UFO has cratered the ground.

He hoped aliens would emerge from the wreckage.

Nope.

What impressed him first was the
size
of the unearthed bomber. Its wingspan was a hundred feet, its length seventy feet, and its height twenty feet or more. He'd once seen a photo of squadron crews fronting a similar plane. Wingtip to wingtip, it took more than thirty men to span a Halifax.

Surprisingly, the aircraft was still intact. The
Ace
had belly-landed in a valley, skidding along this hollow flanked by trees.

The force of the crash had destabilized one slope, causing a landslide to crumble down and bury the plane. With bombs dropping night and day, churned-up dirt was the rule, not the exception. If a plane falls in a forest and there's no one around to see it, does that imprint a memory?

Evidently not.

So here the
Ace
had languished for sixty-odd years, camouflaged by the neglect of East Germany, a Communist country virtually frozen in time at the end of Hitler's war.

Only the fall of the Berlin Wall had lured development east, and now autobahns were reunifying its medieval cities with the west.

Highways like this one.

With the biggest pothole in the world.

"This reminds me of
Gulliver's Travels,"
said Sgt. Earl Swetman. With the recent death of Mick Balsdon on the Judas chair, Sweaty—that's how he'd introduced himself at the hotel—was the sole survivor of the
Ace's
crew. Once a redhead with a freckled face, he now sported white hair and liver spots.

With a little imagination, this could have been Lilliput.

The gigantic plane did resemble a staked-down man—his head the cockpit, his crucified arms the wings, his belly button the mid-upper turret, his feet the double-finned tail. An anthill of little people swarmed around the castaway. By squinting his eyes, Wyatt could turn the salvage scene into Gulliver lashed to the beach in Jonathan Swift's novel.

"I don't like that," said Sweaty.

"What?" Wyatt asked.

"The rear turret. The guns point back."

"Shouldn't they?"

"Not for bailing out. The quickest way for Ack-Ack to escape would have been to swivel his turret to point like that, open the doors behind his seat to grab his chute from just inside the fuselage of the plane, then rotate the turret to one side. With the guns pointing left or right, he could backflip out the opening and drop from the other side."

"So if Ack-Ack did that, the guns should still be pointing sideways?"

"Yeah, not to the rear. The way they're pointing means the turret doors open
into
the plane."

"Could he escape that way?" asked Liz.

"Sure. But he didn't. Before I bailed, I glanced along the fuselage tunnel. I saw the mid-upper gunner descend from his turret. I didn't see the rear gunner crawl forward."

"He didn't get out?" said Wyatt.

"That's my fear."

Under a sodden gray sky threatening rain, these four who had met up in Germany circled the unearthed plane. The trek was slow, as Sweaty struggled with a gimpy l
eg.
"I hurt it when I landed after bailing out," he explained. "By the time you reach my age, your chickens come home to roost. I'm booked for a hip replacement once I return to the States. But I couldn't miss this. I owe these guys. And I've got to know
why
we went down that night."

Like Sweaty, their fourth member—about thirty, well dressed and obsessively groomed—was also from the States.

He'd told the others at the meet-and-greet this morning at the hotel that he was Lenny Jones, Trent Jones's grandson.

Trent Jones had been the mid-upper gunner.

"Liz Hannah," Liz had said, offering her hand. "Granddaughter of Fletch Hannah, the
Ace of Clubs'
pilot."

"Wyatt Rook."

"I've heard of you," Lenny said, shaking his hand. "The historian, right?"

Wyatt nodded.

"So," asked Lenny, "how do you fit in?"

"I hired him," Liz responded. "My family wants to know why my granddad disappeared."

"We have that in common."

"Yes," Liz said, agreeing. "Our grandfathers and Ack-Ack were the three crewmen who vanished that night."

+ + +

The four of them had driven here in Wyatt's rental car. A rural road ran parallel to the graded bed of the new autobahn. The routes split up at the mouth of the valley cradling the
Ace.

The old road arced around to leave the hollow as it was, while the highway under construction plowed through the virgin meadow. Just as the plane had done when it crashed in 1944.

Luckily for Sweaty, given the state of his leg, dump trucks hauling earth away had rutted a makeshift path. Armed with an official pass to the site, Wyatt had bumped them along the track until the VW reached the pothole.

The manmade pit was more than a hundred feet across.

Big enough for the
Ace.

Not to be thwarted by the inconvenience of salvaging the plane, road construction continued on up the valley. Once the
Ace
had been trundled off to a British museum—at the end of the war, the RAF had scrapped every Halifax not lost in combat—the road crew would fill in the pit and run the autobahn over top.

That, thought Wyatt, is why German trains run on time.

Halfway around the rim of the pit, Lenny pointed to the mid-upper turret and asked, "Why did my grandfather crew with you that night?"

"Our regular gunner—we called him De Count—was pulled from ops and branded LMF."

"What's LMF?"

"Lack of moral fiber," Sweaty explained.

"What does that mean?"

"He cracked under the strain. There were many ways a guy could get the chop. Get killed. Planes could crash on takeoff or in flight. Planes above could drop their bombs in error on our heads. Planes beside could wander into our space. Enemy fighters or flak could shoot us down or set us afire, and we'd be gone. Ditch in the sea, and we'd drown or freeze to death. If oxygen failed, hello anoxia. Frostbite and icing could weigh us down. Stripped to basics, the
Ace
was a flying bomb loaded with gas and ammunition. A bullet, a spark, a leak—any one could blow us sky-high long before we got to club the target."

"Heavy duty," Lenny said.

"Literally. The stress from each op accumulates. Operational twitch. Loss of nerve. Mental exhaustion. Shellshock. Signs were everywhere. The RAF had a single word to cover all those conditions: cowardice. LMF was the euphemism."

"Sounds draconian."

"It was. They thought LMF was contagious. The 'infected man' was swiftly marched away to quarantine, then humiliated, vilified, and drummed out of Bomber Command. Demoted, he was sent to the army, the navy, or down the mines. 'LMF' was stamped on his file to plague him the rest of his life. His flying badge got forfeited. In the case of De Count, that was ironic."

"Why?" asked Lenny.

"The air gunner's brevet had the letters 'AG' to the left of a single wing with twelve feathers. Originally, there were thirteen, but that could bring bad luck. To quell superstition, the brass clipped a feather off with nail scissors."

"But the jinx got De Count anyway?"

"Bingo," Sweaty said.

"Why such harsh treatment?"

 "As a deterrent. The strain affected all of us to varying degrees. If there'd been a way to leave ops with honor, a lot of men would've bailed out. Instead, they kept on flying until their number came up. God knows how many planes went down because men who were afraid of the LMF stigma continued to fly when they shouldn't have."

"Do you know what broke De Count?"

"Probably. Another crew in the squadron came home from a shaky do. The Achilles heel of a British bomber was its under-belly. A Halifax had no ventral turret. Not only did flak batteries blast up from below, but Nazi night fighters were armed with upward-slanting cannons to give us a kick in the gut.

"The plane that ran into trouble took a double hit. A night fighter blew the balls off its mid-upper gunner. The castrated man dropped from his turret with both hands between his legs.

He ran around, jumping up and down, screaming, 'I've been hit!' Then flak tore a leg off the bomb-aimer. The wireless operator spent the next two hours lying in a pool of blood in the frigid nose cone, trying to keep a tourniquet cinched around the injured man's stump. The bombardier was thrashing about in pain and had to be subdued, so the radioman kept knocking him out with punches from his fist.

"When the stricken bomber landed, we were out at the pan.

Every man knew that could be him—castrated or legless—on the next op. De Count was shaking. His face blanched white."

"Stress with a capital S!" said Lenny.

Sweaty winced. "I should have seen it coming. One day, about a week before De Count cracked, they lined us up in the crew room for important news. Her Majesty was on her way to pay us a visit. We were told in no uncertain terms how to behave. When she offered us her hand, we were to say nothing more than 'How do you do, ma'am.' Hours later, the queen arrived at the air station. When she offered De Count her hand, he was overcome. Grasping her palm in both of his, he wouldn't let go. He kept saying, 'I'm so pleased to meet Your Majesty. . . .So pleased. . . .So pleased . . . So pleased . . .' That breached every rule in the book, but the queen was gracious.

All she did was put her other hand on top of his and say, 'No more pleased than I am to meet you, Sergeant, I assure you.'

"I thought De Count was going to cry.

"Shortly after, he went to the wingco and refused to fly."

"LMF," said Lenny.

Sweaty nodded. "The poor bastard. What a dirty label. How many guys found ways to avoid risking their lives for their country? Cowards who spent the war behind a desk? De Count stepped up to the plate and took it for as long as he could. The guy
volunteered
for dangerous duty, then suffered disgrace."

"So you got my granddad?"

"Trent was an 'odd bod,' a spare gunner attached to no particular crew. Having lost his own plane in a crash over the North Sea—he bailed out through the rear hatch just in time—he tagged onto any crew short of a gunner."

"What was he like?"

"As a marksman? We took him up for an air test before that fatal flight. Ack-Ack gave him a thumbs-up on how he handled the turrets and the guns. Jonesy exemplified the air gunner's unofficial motto: 'We aim
not
to please.'"

The three listeners laughed.

"What was he like as a man?" Lenny asked.

"Quiet. Withdrawn. Skinny. Eaten up inside. He said his wife had left him and taken their child. She was in Australia, if memory serves me right."

"It does. That child was my mom. She married an American. That's where I was born."

"Where do you call home?"

"Now? I recently moved to Wales. My mom leased a house in my granddad's hometown and we took back her maiden name. We hope to stay there for a year and dig into our ancestors' Welsh history. That's why I'm here on this odyssey. To learn how my granddad died."

"De Count?" said Wyatt. "What became of him?"

"He blamed himself for jinxing the crew after the
Ace
went down in Germany. I spent the rest of the war in a Stalag Luft camp. Only when I got home did I hear what had happened to him. The day De Count was told the
Ace
went missing, he took the opportunity to hang himself."