Love and Hydrogen (31 page)

By then, he'd thrown open the canopy, jumped out, and started running. He stopped at the hangars. The firefighting crew was still arcing water from a good distance away onto the smoking rocket.

It was explained to us the next morning, by Wörndl, that in the event of trouble, we should never do what he did; as a strategy it was almost certainly fatal.

“What
should
we do?” someone asked.

“Bail out,” Wörndl said.

“At two hundred meters?” we asked.

He shrugged. “I'm not going to pretend we have a solution to this problem if we don't,” he said.

The trainees drew lots to see who would go first. Short straw went to a boy I knew only as Herbert who'd transferred in from the Africa Korps. His last name, Ziegler whispered, was Glogner. Glogner climbed into the cockpit the next morning with the sun in his eyes, squinting and grinning while Wörndl helped him, from the ladder, with his various snap-fasteners and connections. It was cold. We could see our breath. We stood around joking and steaming like a clutch of small dragons. Wörndl shut the canopy and cleared away the ladder, Glogner started his engine, and off he went with a roar down the grassy field, white with frost, while we cheered as if at a football match. He left the ground and the undercarriage dropped away, hit the grass, and rebounded upward into the belly of the aircraft. Glogner must have realized what had happened because he pulled the nose up and banked, just as Wörndl had done. He brought the thing around creditably but his wing clipped one of the flak towers on the airfield boundary. He hit the grass at an angle, bounced, and skidded eighty meters or so before ending up on his nose. Again, no explosion. We all rushed to him behind the racing fire tender and ambulance.

When we arrived the stretcher-bearers were kneeling with their backs to the cockpit, weeping and tearing up grass. We fought one another for a view, and shouted and argued over what we were seeing. Some caught on sooner than others. The cockpit was filled with a black-and-red-and-yellow soup. The yellow looked like chicken fat. The fuel cells had shattered and the fuel had poured into the cockpit. Those who understood explained it to those who still didn't: Glogner had been dissolved alive.

OUR ESPRIT DE CORPS was affected by this turn of events. Seven of the fourteen remaining trainees requested transfer, which was immediately granted. We were told their replacements would arrive within the week.

In the meantime the seven of us remaining went on with our straw-drawing.

A boy named Uhlhorn was the next winner and went off and returned without incident. When we swarmed him afterward he pronounced the whole thing a piece of cake. As did our next winner, a near-midget named Bamm. That night we celebrated our first full day without a disaster. The next day we began with one: a sour Bavarian whom no one liked named Hauff came in too high to touch down anywhere near the landing cross and was thrown from the cockpit when the Komet hit. The Komet bounced, splintered, turned over, and blew up. Hauff jackknifed and tumbled nearly as far as the Komet and broke his neck and both legs.

The next Komet exploded on the flight line. When we reached the spot, there was only a blackened and steaming stain. Medical personnel found a bone fragment, and brought it in on a stretcher.

My turn came next. “Come come come, Baby Bird,” Uhlhorn said as I held up my straw. “Your one-six-three-B is steaming and ready to blow. We need to put you in it or it will blow up for no reason.”

“I don't think we've worked out all of the problems with this aircraft,” I muttered to Wörndl as we walked to my Komet. The fueling trucks had topped off the tanks and were backing away. The mechanic's face was red and streaming tears from the fumes.

“In engineering the phrase for a machine like this is ‘still technically immature,' ” he answered.

I climbed the ladder. He helped with my seat harness and R/T lead.

“Hold the stick steady after you punch the ignition and keep your eyes on the pressure indicator,” he said. If on takeoff you lose pressure, pull the throttle back and let her just roll. If she doesn't stop before the perimeter, jump for it.”

“Jump for it,” I said.

“Jump for it,” he repeated. Otherwise I was to keep the stick steady and not push her after I was airborne. I was to drop the wheels when about ten meters off the ground. When my airspeed hit eight hundred I was to pull back on the stick and just let her climb until the rocket gave out on me. Was all that clear? It was.

He mentioned that from inside with the canopy closed, the engine would sound uncannily like an abandoned fox terrier. Apparently his parents had made a stab at an unprofitable kennel before the war.

“Here's to you, Pitz,” he said. “Broken neck and legs!”

He saw my face and explained that, after Hauff, that would be his standard good-luck cry.

To trust is to honor, I thought, as he backed away, and I swung the canopy closed and slid the lock.

Otto, Eli, Wörndl; they were all the kind of men I wanted to be. They worked with their hands to retool the world. They'd taken this marvel of design—a child's riding toy that was presently the fastest thing on earth—and prepared it to be ready for me, in this place and at this time. Here, Pitz, they were saying with their expressions, and with their bearing. You take it.

My palms were sticky inside my gloves. I could smell the sheepskin. I trimmed the tail slightly heavy, opened the fuel cocks, engaged the starter motor, and eased the control to full thrust. The thing bolted like a wild horse. Landscape jerked, unreeled, and started ribboning by. The jolting and juddering ceased, my cheeks flattened, and I was up and tore forward like an arrow from a bow. I was on my back with only a few strands of cirrus above me. Blue and blue. My mind was washed clean. There was a jerk and a swinging, suspended in midair. I registered that the fuel was exhausted. Silence descended like a soft curtain.

I filled my radio with a blizzard of static from shrieking.
This
is Heini Opitz, I shouted to myself in my little box. Not that poultry-legged dumpling from Aschau—!

The speed started to fall away. I glanced at my altimeter. I dropped a wing and saw a lake and some farmland. On the horizon, the sun. On my headset I could hear Flight Control still asking why I'd been shouting. I started my wide turns. It took forty minutes to descend. I kept her steady as I lost altitude, let down the landing skid at three hundred meters, and put her down like a bag of stones just past the landing cross. The shoulder harness straps gave me welts from the concussion. But she held together, and stopped.

SO LIKE PENGUINS we sit huddled in the snow and ice at Brandis outside of Leipzig. Our little group is intended primarily for the protection of the immense Leuna synthetic fuel plants. Our success has been limited. That's the way our commanding officer chooses to phrase it in his communiqués. We've flown a dozen interception missions. As far as anyone can tell, no one has hit an enemy aircraft with any kind of ordnance, though Bamm has inadvertently almost torn the tail off a B-17 on a dive through the formation. Five of us still have not fired our guns. It's January and we're fond of telling ourselves that our casualty rate will be one hundred percent before the year is out. Wörndl predicts the same by midsummer.

Most days we're fogged in and can't see the wind sock at the top of its ten-meter pole. The bombers go by overhead and we play skat. After yet another snowfall, Wörndl sculpted a reclining Aphrodite near the mess. He surpassed himself with the care he lavished upon certain details. We christened her Mrs. Wörndl.

As a boy I was thought to handle free time badly. I spent my unsupervised summer days with a stick shearing smaller branches off the birch trees outside of town. I redirected streams. I cooked a mouse.

Bamm has his kit all packed and is perpetually trying to conceive a way of organizing a trip to Berlin on the sly. We play pranks on one another. We explore the varieties of depression. We experiment with irritating behaviors. We watch our moods deteriorate. Ziegler, a big redheaded Frisian, appoints himself Morale Officer and drinks himself into a stupor with two bottles of plum brandy. He claims to be conducting a test. In December he became the first to perform a forward loop in a Komet, though not voluntarily. Each night he informs whoever will listen that his fiancée lives too far away, and that brandy
consoles
him.

We are all insomniacs. We are, as a group, a picturesque compendium of physical tics.

The subject of the day for armchair strategists is The Problem of Pilots. The Komets are cheap and easy to produce. Hundreds can be had in a matter of months. That leaves the question of who will fly them. Recruits appear in our midst regularly. After each new crash, most put in for reassignment. Which leaves our group not so much growing by leaps and bounds as just barely replenishing itself.

But this isn't about winning the war. This is about our doing what we want to do. If others don't want to do it with us, the hell with them.

Otherwise, are things so bad? The rocket motors, tested and tested again, now give a good account of themselves. Or at least don't explode so frequently. We've all become adept at picking up the slightest off-note in the rocket's roar. The fuel stinks so dreadfully at altitude that tears pour down our cheeks, even through our goggles, but the steam problem has been solved.

Ziegler has taken to weeping in his sleep. Uhlhorn and Bamm have taken to carrying his cot out into the latrine and leaving him there.

We're strafed by a pair of silver Mustangs sweeping in low over the forest, but no one's hurt, and otherwise we're left alone.

We're instructed to entertain a delegation of visiting Japanese, come to view the wonder weapon. Wörndl takes up his Komet and roars it around at tree level, pelting along like some kind of insane flying reptile at full throttle just ten meters above the field. “Wasn't that something!” he shouts at the Japanese after he lands and is presented to them. Still deafened, they smile politely, bow from the waist, and remain silent.

ON SUNDAY, the 24th of January, church bells are ringing and the sky is a brilliant blue, and our dozen new 163 B's are lined wingtip to wingtip in the early-morning sun, resplendent in their fresh varnish. No breakfast today. We all stand outside with our hands in our pockets, watching the bombers come on. They're so high they're only specks at the ends of vapor trails that extend back for miles.

We're going up in staggered pairs and Uhlhorn and Ziegler are first. I'm to help Uhlhorn while Wörndl assists Ziegler. Uhlhorn's in too much of a hurry and I work to slow his rush through the pre-takeoff procedures. He's not a complete loss by any means, but so Austrian he might have fallen out of Franz-Joseph's waistcoat, and forever gesticulating and talking sixteen to the dozen when you want him to just sit still. Across the runway, Wörndl is leaning into Ziegler's cockpit with the self-assurance of a baker sliding loaves into an oven.

Finally Uhlhorn's ready, I pull away the ladder, he goggles his eyes and gives me a thumbs-up through the Perspex, his rocket fires, and off he goes. Ziegler follows.

Bamm and Wörndl are the next pair. I'm in the final one with a new boy named Rösle.

Otto helps me into my seat. The shipping tag is still on the control stick. “Has anyone flown this one yet?” I ask him. “No,” Otto says, absorbed in my harness buckles. “But Eli said he saw a test run of the engine.”

I make a face at him through the Perspex and give him the thumbs-up. “Climb aboard the mighty flea!” Rösle shouts over our R/T. I test my controls for free play and punch the starter button. Again the rush and the bouncing, again the upward sweep and the arrowing, again my war whoops and shrieks.

Still high above, the bomber stream begins to change course slightly. Arcing toward them, the first contrails from our Komets. It looks to be forty or so B-17s in five echelons. Now they're the size of match heads. Now coffee beans. Now crickets, spreading all around me, and the air is filled with lariating tracers and I hear thunks on my wings and fuselage. Rösle half-turns in my peripheral vision, and, standing on his wingtip, flashes away to my left. I try to use my cannon but my principal—only—advantage—speed—is lost when jockeying around for the proper firing angle. The air seems dirty and filled with debris. I bank and sweep over one, then two Fortresses and I'm out of the formation and the air is clear again. I fire my cannon off into space. My engine cuts out.

The Komet seems to brake hard in midair, and I'm thrown forward against my harness. There's still more than enough momentum and speed for one more pass through the formation. A Thunderbolt spins by, hoping to provide the bomber stream with some protection. I pass him like he's a dray horse. I close distance to the trailing B-17s, depress the trigger, and my cannons jam. I curse God and creation and scream frustration for the next sixty minutes all the way down to the airfield.

Still ranting, I approach slightly high and overshoot the landing cross and hurtle along the frozen grass. The perimeter thrums toward me. I pull the canopy release and unbuckle the harness. There's blinding white light from the floor and heat sears upward, and I jerk up my knees and plant my feet on the seat and jump. Maybe I land on my head or possibly all fours. The Komet blows up seventy meters or so farther down the runway.

The ambulance drivers rush up and take inventory. My face is stinging. I'm told my eyebrows and eyelashes are gone, along with a good third of my hair. Someone smears something on my cheeks and neck and I'm carried off to a bed.

WHEN I WAKE there's an impromptu celebration and meeting around my bunk. It transpires that Wörndl's Komet caught fire right above the field. He had to bail out forty meters from the treetops and his parachute caught the upper branches of a big pine, insuring he only cracked his ankle. He tells everyone that it was like jumping off a church steeple with an umbrella.