Crucified (6 page)

YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND, 1941

"Is there someone here named Hannah?"

"That's me," replied one of the card players basking in the sun. "What do you want?"

"My name's Mick Balsdon. The notice board says we're crewed up."

"You lucky son of a bitch." The pilot slapped down a card before he stood up and shook hands. "Balsdon, huh? I'll call you Balls. That's what I want in a crew."

"Do I call you Skipper?"

"Call me Wrath. As in the wrath of God."

"Who dubbed you that?"

"No one yet. But the Nazis will."

"If I'm so lucky, how come you left your crew up to the luck of the draw?"

The sandy-haired pilot plunked his peaked cap down on his head at a rakish angle. He tapped the flying brevet sewn to the chest of his uniform. "Size me up," he challenged. "What do you think? Am I a good pilot?"

"Damned if I know."

"They say there's more to choosing a pilot than there is to choosing a wife. A bird-brained wife can still make you happy, but a bird-brained pilot is sure to get you killed. When we're in the thick of it over Germany and the first flak explodes in the black of night, can you tell from eyeing me what I'll do?

Sure, I'll play the game every pilot's taught to play: change altitude, course, and speed to throw off the next burst. But will I stupidly balance the pattern with a symmetrical jog to the other side, so the Huns will be able to predict where we'll be and blast us out the sky? Or will I veer to a spot selected ran-domly, so you can watch the next shell explode where we would have been had I balanced it out? You don't know, do you?"

"Uh-uh," said Balsdon.

"Meet Ack-Ack DuBoulay, our arse-end Charl
ie.
" The pilot crooked his thumb at the player across the card table.

"DuBoulay, like double A, as in 'ack-ack.' Get it?"

"Dick DuBoulay," the rear gunner said, offering Balsdon his hand. He was a lanky fellow, all sinew and bone, with tousled blond forelocks on his brow. "Welcome aboard."

Ack-Ack, the navigator thought.

Anti-aircraft gun.

"So again we're in the thick of it, pounding our first target, and in zooms a night fighter blasting at our tail. Can you tell by looking at him how Ack-Ack will react? Sure, he's got that gunner's wing on his chest, but you don't know his scores at gunnery school. In the face of a horrific hail of incoming cannon shells, with the odds against him, will he quash his fear and hurl back well-aimed fire? Or will he freeze and take us down with him?"

"Russian roulette."

"And what about you?" The pilot flicked his middle finger at the twelve-feather halfwing brevet on Balsdon's chest. "Are you skilled at analyzing navigational problems under fire?"

"What do you think?"

Hannah shrugged. "I won't know till we're shot full of holes.

Nor would it help if I'd taken RAF Admin up on its offer to stroll around in a hangar and crew up like blind man's buff. 'I like your brand of smokes. Want to fly with me?' Or, 'You look like a boozer. I quaff, too.' The way I see it, chaps, life's a gamble. The odds are one in six against surviving a thirty-ops tour. They're one in forty against surviving two tours. If our number comes up, our number comes up. I'd rather gamble for money with the blokes fate assigns me. So pull up a chair. Balls.

You may deal the cards. Once the rest seek us out, we'll find a pub and I'll buy the crew its first round."

"The ace of clubs," Balsdon said, holding up the card the pilot had slapped down. "Good name for a bomber."

DuBoulay grinned.

Hannah winked. "The
Ace of Clubs
it is."

+ + +

What a weird way to fight a war.

From that operational training unit in Kinloss, Scotland, Wrath's crew-—as they came to be called—were posted to a squadron down near York. Going to war had always meant shipping out or marching off to far-flung lands, not to return till the job was done. Rot in the trenches. That was war. But in Bomber Command, the men went to war for a few hours, returning at dawn to a near-normal life. A day at the pub, at the cinema, seeing family and friends, then these warriors of the night were outward bound again. What a clean, comfortable way to engage in battle, but the psychological stress accumulated with each op.

Bleak House—named for the Dickens novel—was their new home. It was a prefab Nissen hut on the squadron's airfield.

Sixteen feet wide by twenty-four feet long, the hut had a low ceiling and a concrete slab for a floor. All seven crewmen were sergeants, so they roomed together in double-deck bunks, snoring on lumpy mattresses stuffed with excelsior.

"I feel like the princess and the pea," grumbled Hugh "Ox"

Oxley. The flight engineer was a ruddy-faced mechanic who could drink anyone into a coffin.

"Don't pee on me," said Russ "Nelson" Trafalgar, stretched out on the bunk beneath him. The bomb-aimer had been a professional athlete before the war.

"Want to switch beds?" Ack-Ack growled from the bunk farthest away from the small coal-burning stove. The stove radiated just enough heat to keep those within five feet of it warm. Crewmen relegated to the ends of the hut were forced to sleep under their overcoats and several blankets to survive the cold, damp nights. Coal was rationed and never lasted until dawn, so the airmen honed "midnight requisitioning"—illegal raids on the coal yard—to an art.

"Goodnight, ladies," groused Wrath. "If I don't get my sleep, I'll nod off in the cockpit."

Wrong thing to say to this motley crew.

"Good night, ladies," Ox's bass voice filled the dark.

"Good night, ladies," Nelson's baritone chimed in.

"Good night, ladies," Ack-Ack's tenor topped off the mix.

"We're going to leave you now." The barbershop chorus sang itself to sleep.

Come morning, the room reeked of body odor and stale cigarettes. The first man up stoked the stove, then put a record on the gramophone. Glenn Miller's "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me)." "Chattanooga Choo-Choo." The Mills Brothers' "I'll Be Around." Or one of the jazz discs that the crew had purchased from the personal effects of a squadron leader blown to bits over Nuremberg.

Bleak House was rendered a little less bleak by a poster on one wall. It showed an RAF pilot as handsome as Errol Flynn flying a combat mission over Hitler's Germany. Off to the side, a vampire in a Messerschmitt launched a cowardly attack on our hero, swooping down from the blazing ball of high noon. The poster warned, "Beware of the Hun in the Sun!"

Since Bomber Command no longer struck by day, one of the crew had added, "Und Be Vatching Also, Kinder, fur das Goon in the Moon!"

"Torture time, lads," announced the early riser.

The latrines, showers, and washstands huddled together in a building at the center of several huts. From the yelps of those inside, it was clear there was no hot water today. The ordeal of breakfast was worse. In the mess hall, the men got powdered eggs and chalky milk and the ever-present mystery meat called Spam. "Ham that failed its physical," gagged Monty "De Count"

Christie, the gunner who manned the dorsal turret atop the
Ace
of Clubs.

The best thing about going on a mission?

The preflight meal was eggs, sausage, beans, and fried bread.

Breakfast done, it was time to play roulette. Every morning at ten, the wing commander received a call from Group HQ, and every morning Wrath walked over to hear if there would be a war on that night.

+ + +

"A
Yank?"
the pilot had moaned, back when they'd first crewed up. "How can that be? The Yanks still haven't figured out if Hitler's villain enough for them to join the war."

"I hear he volunteered to fly with the RCAF. Canada attached him to the RAF," said Balls.

"His name?"

"Swetman. Earl Swetman."

"He'll be Sweaty. What's his trade?"

"Wireless operator."

"He'll think he's a
radioman."

"Give him a chance, Skipper. He doesn't have to be here.

Surely, that's in his favor."

Wrath sucked on his pipe, then blew out a pair of perfectly round smoke rings.

"Mark my words, chaps. He'll be garrulous and pushy. He'll natter on about how everything's bigger in Texas. Nothing will please him. Our beer will be flat—not bubbly like Schlitz back home. His knickers will twist when he finds his bollocks don't have their own latrine. He'll have too much money, and he'll lord it over us. In the end, to keep our sanity, we'll have to shoot him ourselves and save the Nazis the trouble."

"Shall we bet?"

"A crown says he's a prat," declared Wrath.

Sweaty, however, had proved that pessimistic prophet wrong. The Yank was a freckle-faced carrot top who fit in from the start. So much so that you'd think the RAF grew up around him. Within a week of arriving in Yorkshire, he knew every pub and club for miles around Bleak House, and those who rationed the beer all knew—and
liked
—him. A pub crawl with Sweaty was a raucous affair. Publicans lost track of how many pints they served his group. He could spin a yarn that clung judiciously to the truth, or line-shoot the best duff gen around. Want to play cards? Sweaty could hold his own at friendly and cutthroat alike. Sit him at a piano and the place the men leapt onto the backs of their mates, until finally one of the human pyramids collapsed.

Another time, they piled the furniture in the center of the room to act as a scaffold for Sweaty, who'd covered his bare feet in soot. Slowly, he was carried aloft until a trail of charred footprints staggered up from the fireplace, across the ceiling, and down the far wall to the door.

One night, Balsdon returned from leave to the sound of unbridled revelry in the lounge. Sweaty was leading a boisterous crowd of flyboys in a round of "Bang, Bang, Lulu." The men were naked except for black ties around their necks. Beer sloshed from pint glasses waved high as they trod on a carpet of clothes. One of the merrymakers spotted Balsdon at the door.

"Get him!" he yelled, forcing the navigator to turn and run for his life, hotly pursued by a mob of birthday-suit hangmen jerking up their ties like gallows ropes.

Hurrah for Sweaty.

He got Wrath's men through the crushing stress.

All but one.

Her wrists tied behind her back, the suspected witch hung naked and shaved of all body hair from a ceiling beam in the dark York dungeon. He knew what they were searching for, these Dominican monks of the Catholic Church, as they meticulously examined her belly for the Devil's mark. He had read the unexpurgated version of
Malleus Maleficarum—The
Hammer of Witches
—back in his locked room at the Vatican.

Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, also Dominican monks, wrote that theological encyclopedia in 1486 to tell witch hunters how to spot women guilty of copulating with the Devil, holding black "sabbats," thwarting the birth of babies, and instigating misfortunes like hailstorms, crop failures, illness, and insanity. The Dominicans in this dungeon were probing the heretic for her "witch's tit," a third nipple used to suckle demons. They might find it in a wart, a mole, or a birthmark.

The test would be if the tit was insensitive to the jab of a "witch prickle" dagger.

Alone down here, with just the company of the waxwork figures, the Legionary was lost in the realm of the heretical books that had possessed his mind for the past two years.

Because he was battling Satan for possession of his soul, he had no recollection of having hired a local burglar to bypass the after-hours alarm system of the Inquisition—a chamber of horrors that did good trade off the tourists who came to York for its bloody history. One moment the Legionary was the faithful servant of God and Christ, and the next moment he was in the diabolic clutches of the Devil.

"All witchcraft comes from carnal lust," he'd read in
The
Hammer,
"which is in women insatiable."

He, of course, had never lain with a woman. Although so many other priests succumbed to sins with both sexes, the Legionary was forever reminded of his vow of celibacy by the nail-hole scars in his palms. As the beam of his flashlight ran up and down the voluptuous wax woman, he understood what St. Paul had meant when he said, "Now the works of the flesh are manifest: immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, witchcraft. . ."

Surely she had the witch's tit, this sexual playmate of Satan.

As did the wanton women he spied on the streets and in the media of modern times.

Was
this
what Christ had suffered and died for?

The Legionary's cross was to live in a decadent era drowning in a sea of sin.

Sodom and Gomorrah.

The stench of burning flesh assaulted his mind as he shifted his flashlight to the next exhibit. Here, the same woman was tied to an upright stake by a cord around her neck and a chain about her midriff. The cord passed through a hole in the post so the executioner, if desired, could strangle her. During the Inquisition, it was heresy
not
to believe in witches, and nothing eradicated allegiance to Satan better than fire. Perhaps a hundred thousand women had burned like this one. Cartloads of faggots—dry brushwood—were piled around the witch, and as he stared, the Legionary imagined the woman becoming engulfed by flames. Her arms flailed in a futile attempt to push the blaze away. Then she shrieked at the top of her lungs.