A thousand suns

He turned to look at Stef to see the boy was still unconscious. He lifted the blanket to check his leg wound and found several small patches of wet blood soaking through.

‘He’s still losing blood.’

It looked like a slow trickle of blood, but it was still leaking out of him. If they could find him some medical attention as soon as this was all over, he would pull through. The lad had lost a fair bit, but he guessed he still had a chance. It was more likely he was simply sleeping from exhaustion than passed out from lack of blood.

Good, let him sleep. If he’s moving around less, the tourniquet will do a better job.

‘Hans, what’s our position?’

The gunner shook his head like a horse trying to shake off a bridle. ‘I don’t know, Pieter just told me it was time to wake you up.’

Max pulled the blanket off and stood up stiffly. He plugged into the interphone beside the port waist-gun and lifted his mask. ‘Pieter, what’s our position?’

‘Ahhh, good afternoon Max,’ he replied cheerfully. ‘We’re about forty minutes off the coast.’

‘You kept to two-fifty-five degrees?’

‘Yeah, and cruising at two hundred and fifty.’

That was fifty miles per hour faster than the minimum cruise speed; the burn from that extra speed had been unnecessary. Fuel, not time, was the important variable. Max wondered anxiously what their reserves were. There couldn’t be much left. ‘What’s the fuel look like?’

‘Don’t worry, Max; we’ve probably got an hour, maybe two, of fuel left. Looks like we’ll make it with some to spare.’

Max checked his watch: if they hadn’t drifted too far north or south they might actually make it to New York after all. He smiled. Not only did it look like, against the odds, they would actually make it, but it looked like they were going to arrive more or less on time. As the hour of midnight struck in Germany, they would be dropping the bomb over New York.

Pieter had done well, flying a little faster than they’d needed to bring them in on time. Max trusted his co-pilot would have calculated the fuel burn before making that kind of decision, and he had calculated well, so it seemed. Drift and head or tail wind would, of course, affect any dead reckoning Pieter could make, but at 5000 feet altitude that wasn’t going to throw his reckoning off by too much.

‘Well done, Pieter.’

Hans was looking longingly at the thick grey blanket wrapped around Stef.

‘Jump in under the blanket,’ he said to the gunner, ‘it’s quite warm under there.’

Hans nodded eagerly and slid along the wooden-panel floor to sit beside Stef. He pulled the thick grey blanket up over himself, up to the chin.

‘Keep an eye on that wound, though.’

‘Yeah.’

Max climbed through the bulkhead into the navigation compartment, and then through the second bulkhead into the bomb bay. The bomb hung at the bottom of the rack before him, cradled in its metal frame. He sat down on the floor and dangled his legs over the narrow walkway into the darkened bay below. When the bomb bay doors were open, that area would be a dazzling bright abyss. Max was surprised at how little protection there was either side of the narrow walkway, perhaps only eighteen inches wide, and the open space above the bomb bay doors. It would be perilously easy to misplace a foot and fall through. But then he reminded himself that the space above the doors normally would be packed full with 600lb bombs, stacked one above the other in the racks, allowing no room for a clumsy crew member to slip through and fall to his death. He also recalled reading in the manual that while the bay doors were open, the bomb bay was off limits to the crew.

He felt inside his tunic pocket for the envelope and pulled it out. Major Rall had used a normal, unmarked envelope, no insignia. Against his better judgement, Max felt himself injecting this moment with portentous significance. He was about to open the most important envelope in the world. Curiously, it seemed poetically right that such an envelope would be so unremarkable — plain, white, small. He pulled off a leather glove and put a finger under the flap, sliding it along and opening it up.

So, here we are.

He reached in and felt a single sheet of paper and pulled it out. He unfolded it and scanned the words on the paper. It was letter-headed stationery from the Ministry of Armaments, from Albert Speer’s office no less. Halfway down the page was a short paragraph and a diagram indicating how the altimeter detonator should be set up. Max glanced down at it. The detonator could only be reached by lining up the correct six-digit code on a thick locking bar that ran over the top. The digits could be set by rotating a series of cylinders with numbers on the side. It reminded him vaguely of the code wheels on an Enigma machine. He looked back at the piece of paper and found the code number at the end of the paragraph.

One… five… zero… eight… two… seven.