Crucified (13 page)

As Wyatt walked the length of the resurrected bomber, he took in details of the fuselage. Dark green and brown camouflage colors mottled the top of the Halifax, with matte black along the sides and below. A playing card—the ace of clubs—and that nickname, chosen by the crew, were painted under the pilot's window at the nose of the plane. The rows of clubs beneath that represented the bombing ops completed by the
Ace.
Both wings bore the bull's-eye insignia of the RAF, as did the fuselage back near the entry door. For having survived a crash and landslide burial, the bomber was in surprisingly good shape. Cannon-shell damage was solely to the tail.

Twin fins and rudders book-ending high-mounted mini-wings formed the tail assembly. Where the alloy skin was shot away, the historian could see the spars of the metal skeleton.

Peppered with holes, both fins were chunked as if they'd been chewed by sharks. No wonder the
Ace
had gone down.

"Amazing," Sweaty marveled. "That's what I call luck.

The night fighter ripped the tail to rat shit on
both
sides of the gunner, but the turret wasn't smashed."

"Anyone see a bullet hole?" Wyatt asked.

The others shook their heads.

"So gunners who live in glass houses
can
throw stones," declared Liz.

"If Ack-Ack didn't bail out and he wasn't shot, what happened to him?" Lenny asked.

"I didn't say he wasn't shot," Sweaty replied. "Even if the turret is undamaged, the night fighter could have drilled him through the hole in the bubble."

"What hole?" inquired Liz.

Sweaty pointed. "See the missing panel? Off the assembly line, a Boulton Paul turret offered the illusory protection of a totally enclosed Perspex cupola. But miles up in the night skies over the Reich, the temperature outside the unheated turret sank to minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit. That's numbingly cold. Just as a car windshield does in the winter, the glass surrounding Ack-Ack would mist over and then freeze up."

"So he removed the panel?" asked Liz.

"Lots of gunners did. Without a rear turret, a plane was a sitting duck, so night fighters blasted in from behind and below. Too many bombers lurched home with a shattered rear turret and a dead gunner inside. I could tell you stories of wounded guys with half a turret who kept on firing as long as they had a functioning gun. Once that ran out of ammunition, they sat defenseless in the teeth of Nazi cannons, advising their skippers on evasion maneuvers until they were dead."

The four were standing at the tail of the
Ace,
sighting up the fuselage as if it were a bowling alley and the turret a ball about to rumble down its lane. From this spot on the far edge of the pit, Wyatt saw why the rear gunner huddled in the loneliest outpost in the sky.

"An arse-end Charlie," Sweaty said, "had a hairy job.

Crouched in total darkness, Ack-Ack searched the night for telltale shadows that might solidify into oncoming fighters. Up, across, down, and back again, he moved his turret quarter by quarter behind the
Ace,
convinced that every speck on the glass was a Junkers 88. Of all his weaponry, our rear gunner's best defense was his 'Eyeball, Mark I'"—Sweaty poked a finger at his own eye—"so that's why he removed the panel from in front of his turret seat."

"To see better," Liz said.

"Yeah. For
clear
vision. So if the Junkers that got us shot through that gap, he sure as shootin' hit Ack-Ack."

"One way to find out," Wyatt said, and he reached into his pocket for his gravedigger's pass.

+ + +

At times like this it paid to have a translated history of Dresden riding high on German bestseller lists, as well as powerful contacts within the ranks of military historians.

Contacts like Rutger, who had arranged the pass.

You reached the bottom of the pit through a cluster of ladders, the top rungs of which were controlled by no-nonsense security guards. Waving his pass, Wyatt descended from Lilliput to the topsy-turvy realm of Brobdingnag. Wyatt was a miniature Gulliver dwarfed by the humongous plane.

The
Ace
lay on its belly in the cradle of earth, its wings supported by platforms of dirt. Astern of the port wing was the entry door. By luck, the historian approached just as the hatch was being forced open by the Jaws of Life.

Wyatt peered inside.

A time capsule, he thought.

Rutger, Germany's foremost historian on the Second World War, turned out to be a magic key, he was held in such high esteem. One look at the pass he'd procured and the men of the entry team were inviting Wyatt along on the first foray into the bomber since 1944.

By way of welcome, they gave him a flashlight.

The Wyatt who entered the fuselage had three eyes in his head—the two flanking his nose and the one in his mind. His mind's eye didn't live in the twenty-first century. Instead, it pictured the
Ace
as it was the moment before the Junkers 88 raked the tail.

He was back in Hitler's war.

Along the deep, oval-ribbed tunnel to his left, Wyatt pictured the phantom lower body of the mid-upper gunner in the dorsal turret. The head, shoulders, and arms of the ghost would be in the bubble. Up front, past the deafening roar of the four radial engines, he imagined the over-under quintet who flew the Halifax. Side by side in the cockpit were the pilot, Wrath Hannah, and Ox Oxley, his flight engineer. Below, the wireless operator, Sweaty Swetman, fronted the curtained-off cubicle of Balls Balsdon, the navigator. Beyond, in the extreme nose, hunched the bomb-aimer, Nelson Trafalgar.

A walkway ran the length of the fuselage, past Wyatt's position to the rear turret. As he swept the flashlight beam toward the tail, he saw the
Ace
for what it was: a flying bomb more dangerous to its crew than to the enemy.

Two thousand gallons of gas sloshed in the fuel tanks. Gun turrets, flaps, and flying controls fed off miles of pipeline filled with flammable hydraulic oil. In the bomb bay lurked tons of high explosives and firebombs. Oxygen lines, electrical wires, and intercom cables could—with a single spark—blow the
Ace
to bits without help from Nazi flak guns or night fighters. Ten thousand rounds of ammunition were belt-fed back along the port side by four ammo tracks linking the forward magazines to the rear turret. Set them off like firecrackers and the plane would turn into a shooting gallery.

No wonder Sir Arthur Harris, the man who sent the deathtraps out night after night, was nicknamed "Butch" by those at the "sharp end" of Bomber Command.

"Butch" for "the Butcher."

With his spine to the cockpit, Wyatt closed the distance to the rear turret. The hoops overhead and the stretched metal skin reminded him of the flatbed of a covered wagon. Shut, the turret's concave doors bulged toward him. Caught in the beam of the flashlight just outside the doors, the gunner's parachute offered a strong clue that instead of bailing out, Ack-Ack had gone down with the
Ace.

Straining, Wyatt opened the sliding doors.

Unlike the ghosts his mind had seen manning the forward combat positions, the sole remaining warrior of a
real-life
skeleton crew occupied the rear turret. So claustrophobic was the cage-like turret that it reminded Wyatt of a Tower of London torture chamber known as the Little Ease. The dimensions of that room were such that no matter how a prisoner contorted himself, he couldn't stretch out in any direction.

Before long, the cramped quarters snapped his mind.

The same was true of the little ease of this rear turret. In life, the tail gunner had crouched almost immobile within his goldfish bowl for the six, eight, or ten hours of a bombing run, unable to stretch and relieve the kinks in his back, legs, and arms. Surrounded by metal and Perspex, he sat on the hard, backless bench with supports under his arms. His hands gripped the operating stick jutting through a diamond-shaped hole in the control table. Moving the stick left and right swiveled the turret. Pulling and pushing the stick raised and lowered the guns. The four Browning ,303s were mounted in pairs on both sides of the control stick, and were linked to the reflector sight in front of the gunner's eyes. Aiming with that gunsight, he saw an illuminated dot in the center of a glowing circle. The guns were fired by triggers on the control stick.

Each spat out 1,150 rounds per minute. In effect, like a turtle, the man and his shell were one. That's why there was no room inside for his parachute.

Ever the historian, Wyatt knew his subject.

For a moment more, his mind lingered in 1944. Cut off from the rest of the
Ace's
crew by half the length of the plane, with only the crackling of muted voices in his earphones to assure him that other humans were flying this op too, Ack-Ack braved the freezing air let in by the missing Perspex panel. The only sounds were the soft hiss of oxygen in his mask and the creaks and groans of the turret reacting to high altitude. Six-inch icicles hung from the rubber of his face mask. With his goggles pushed up on his brow so he could see, he blinked repeatedly to keep his eyelashes from freezing. His eyes watered, his nose ran, and cold seeped into his multi-layered battledress. With the chill came a lethargy that undermined his efforts to stay alert.

Then he saw it!

Through the missing panel!

The outline of an incoming Junkers 88!

Rat-a-tat-tat!

Bullets tore through his chest.

Down came the
Ace.

Followed by the landslide.

And here the plane lay buried for sixty-odd years, as time reduced the rear gunner to this skeleton.

The desiccated remains were still on the turret seat, the torso sprawled forward on the control table between the guns.

Through the hole created by the missing panel, Wyatt could see Liz, Sweaty, and Lenny watching from the rim of the pit. The rotting flesh within had reduced the Michelin Man to a shroud draping bones. Daylight struggled to filter through the dirty bubble, so Wyatt enhanced it with the flashlight's beam. He shone the pool on the back of the corpse to illuminate three holes near the spine, seemingly made when night-fighter bullets blew out exit wounds.

That's when the historian spotted something protruding from one of the holes.

Strange, he thought, extracting it.

What Wyatt held in his hand forced him to rethink the puzzle he'd believed the crash of the
Ace
had posed.

The puzzle wasn't why Ack-Ack hadn't bailed out.

The puzzle was
how
he had died.

      
THE VATICAN

How many people did God kill when the act of original sin filled Him with disgust?

Answer: Every living creature on earth, except the few Noah saved with his ark. Genesis 6:5-7.

How many sinners did God kill in Sodom and Gomorrah because they'd engaged in perverted sex?

Answer: Every living thing. Genesis 19:24-25.

How many sinners did Moses kill under God's command because they turned against Him?

Answer: About 3,000. Exodus 32:27-28.

How many sinners did God kill for daring to look into the Ark of the Covenant, the chest holding the stone tablets with the Ten Commandments?

Answer: 50,070. 1 Samuel 6:19.

How many Israelites did God deliver into the hands of the men of Judah to slaughter?

Answer: Half a million. 2 Chronicles 13:14-18.

How many Ethiopians did God kill for His chosen people?

Answer: One million. 2 Chronicles 14:9-13.

How many Assyrians did God kill after their king and his servants made fun of Him?

Answer: 185,000. Isaiah 37:36.

How many sinners did God kill in one day for having sex outside of marriage?

Answer: 23,000. 1 Corinthians 10:8.

And when God eventually completes His killing spree, how many sinners will be dead?

Answer: Enough to cover the earth. Jeremiah 25:32-33.

So says the Bible. The Word of God. And either you believe it or you don't. If you
believe
it, you will have no doubt that God isn't into Wrath Lite. God demands worship, and sinners suffer His wrath, either in this world or in the next. And the Secret Cardinal also believed two more truths: that Christian devotion is
objective
and outside the realm of free thought, and that the most sacred duty of the Roman Catholic Church is to protect that original deposit of faith.

Thus the Inquisition.

To those who worked in the Palace of the Holy Office, the heart of the present-day Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the word "inquisition" was a sacred one. Inquisition was a procedure developed by Roman law. It left the entire process of investigation, accusation, interrogation, trial, and punishment in the hands of a single official. Inquisition built the Roman Empire, and after that empire was Christianized by Constantine, inquisition guarded the Roman Catholic Church.

Inquisition was—and
is
—defense of the faith.

Who was the first inquisitor? God, of course. The first inquisition was God's handling of the Satan-inspired original sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. "God became the first and greatest teacher of the Inquisitors of heretical depravity," wrote Luis de Paramo, the canon of Leon and the inquisitor of Sicily, "Himself providing them with the example of a just and legal punishment."