B for Buster by Iain Lawrence Page B

training flight since April.
    â€œSeventy knots. Eighty,” said Will. “Ninety knots, Skipper.”
    B for Buster
hurtled down the runway, the engines at a high pitch, the metal vibrating, the wheels thundering on the tarmac.
    â€œNinety-five. One hundred, Skipper.”
    â€œAre we there yet?” asked Ratty.
    And all the thunder and the shaking stopped. We were flying, the ground below us falling away. The end of the runway went by, and then dark fields split by a silvery web of old stone fences.
    â€œClimbing speed,” said Lofty.
    â€œOkay, Skipper.”
    â€œFlaps up ten.”
    â€œFlaps up, okay,” said Will.
    â€œWheels locked. Undercarriage up.”
    â€œOkay, Skipper.”
    Hydraulic motors hummed.
Buster,
half-alive, cranked up her wheels and her flaps. Her four-engined heart beat loudly and fast from the effort of hauling herself from the ground. Then the undercarriage thudded into place, and the wind whistled through the canopies.
    â€œCruising speed,” said Lofty.
    The engines settled to a steady, hurried thrum. The huge Halifax leaned in a turn, the nose high, the deck and my table slanting steeply. I had to lunge to catch my pencil as it rolled toward the edge, and I saw the pigeon in its box, its head poking through the round hole in the flap. Will came down from his perch on the folding seat and poked me in the side. He pointed up with his thumb, telling me to look.
    I twisted backward in my seat. Peering up through the passage, I saw Lofty there—his whole right side— his leg thrust toward the rudders, his arm reaching for the column. I saw, very dimly, the bottom of his cap brim and the bulge of his oxygen mask. He had his pipe in his mouth, jammed in the rubber.
    Will leaned down. He pried up my helmet flap and bellowed in my ear. “Good old Lofty, eh?” Then he went smiling to his bombsight.
    â€œSkipper, your course is two-one-oh,” said the navigator through the intercom.
    â€œTwo-one-oh, roger,” said Lofty. We tilted farther.
    It was wonderful to fly. I felt sorry for the erks, and for everyone else who labored on the ground—for all the farmers and the villagers and the people in the cities who had never slipped those bonds of earth. Flying was the one thing that had brought all of us together, that kept us apart from the poor slobs below. I was better than them. I was an airman, a flier, a rover of the air.
    â€œIt’s a beautiful night,” said Will, in his place again at the bow. Surrounded by glass, lying flat on his stomach, he could
feel
that he was flying. “There’s kites all around us, all turning and weaving. I can only see their navigation lights, and they look like hordes of fireflies. And there’s moonlight on the river, and stars floating. It looks magical. As though the Milky Way has fallen on the ground.”
    â€œGee, all I see’s a river,” said Ratty.
    â€œAnd there’s a farmhouse, a chink of light between the blackout curtains. It’s the only thing on the ground, and it looks so lonely, one light in all the dark and nothing. It looks like God’s house, that’s what it’s like.” Will was a poet. It was why we sometimes called him Shakespeare. He wrote things down but hardly ever showed them to anyone, and never read them aloud. “We’re going to pass right over it,” he said, “and— there—I can look right down the chimney and see the fire in the hearth. Just an instant. Just a glimpse.”
    I set the frequencies on my wireless. I fitted the screwdriver into the slot and turned it back and forth to match the numbers on my flimsy. It was a chore I had done so often, on so many flights, that I found it hard to believe that I was doing it now on the way to Germany, astride a belly full of bombs. Then I grinned inside my mask to think that I was already on the battlefield, fighting in the boundless world of Superman and Buck