A thousand suns

Daniel Ferrelli, or Danny as he was known by most of the men in his squadron when they were off base, scanned the clouds around him, above and below. It looked like the kind of winter wonderland scene you’d see in the display windows of Macy’s come Christmas time: all cotton-wool snow and glitter. Like this, the sky was beautiful. He loved it above the clouds when the white floor beneath him was complete and no sign of the drab green and olive world below could be seen. It was like being in another dimension, a place of ice queens and castles. When his mother had first read him Jack and the Beanstalk he’d seen something like this in his mind. Danny focused on a plateau of cloud with a smooth top and imagined the beanstalk poking up through it, saw a tiny Jack scampering across it, magic harp under one arm and goose under the other and, thundering across the plateau, a giant roaring with anger.

The speakers in his flying cap crackled with the voice of Charles ‘Smitty’ Brown. ‘Uh, Danny?’

‘Dammit, Smitty, it’s Lieutenant Ferrelli while we’re working.’

Smitty bunked with Lieutenant Ferrelli despite being only a rating. He was overflow from the main billet. They’d lost a bed space in there, and Ferrelli had a spare bunk in his room. He’d only agreed to put up with the guy, temporarily, because they’d known each other back home before joining up. Smitty was okay — clean, tidy, but a pain in the ass with the name thing. He wondered whether with him it was a genuine case of forgetting to call him Lieutenant in front of the rest of the men or whether the guy just wanted to look a smart-ass.

‘Sorry, Dan… Lieutenant.’

‘What is it anyway?’ he asked, cutting Smitty off.

‘Well, uhh, I think I saw one of them, errr… nine o’clock, above us.’

Ferrelli looked to his left and up. There was a thick layer of cloud above them with occasional gaps between tall cumulus stacks. He looked long and hard, waiting to see a dark form passing the open sky between the cloud stacks.

‘I can’t see anything, Smitty, you sure?’

‘I saw it once, is all, sir.’

Ferrelli’s squadron had been sent to escort a wing of B-17s en route across France from Marseilles north to an airfield outside Paris. The bombers had served the last two years in Libya and Egypt, and still sported desert colours. They were being relocated back to England. The war was looking like it would be over before they bedded in with the Eighth and did anything useful. Still, Ferrelli figured it made sense to start gathering up the American planes ready to ship them back home.

Things had come unstuck pretty quickly, and he and his men had failed to rendezvous successfully with the B-17s. Not that he thought it mattered too much; it wasn’t like there was anything out there they needed escort protection from anyway.

But hey, Danny, it looks bad… losing the planes you’re meant to be protecting. To lose one is bad luck, but all twelve?

Ferrelli kept his eyes on the clouds above and to the left. ‘I don’t see anything, Smitty, not a damn — ’

He saw it.

A single silhouette way above them at about thirty thousand feet. Unmistakably the outline of a B-17, flitting between the tall white columns, and it was heading west. ‘Okay, okay I see it. Looks like these fellas are on their own. If they’re the guys we’re meant to be looking after, I’d say they are totally, one hundred per cent lost by the look of it. They should be heading north, not west.’

The navigator on that plane needs to go right back to school. Jeeez… Navigation 101.

He knew it was easy enough for even the most experienced crew to drift off course by dozens of miles. Shit, he even knew of bombers that had drifted into the wrong goddamn country. Dumb-ass stuff like that happened all the time. But getting the wrong heading? No matter how lost you are, no matter where you are, the one piece of kit that’s always going to work just fine is the compass.

‘Okay, boys, let’s go take a look-see what these fools are up to.’

‘Roger that, Lieutenant,’ said Smitty. His response was mirrored by the other ten pilots, most of them bored to distraction by the flight so far and eager for something to see and do.

Ferrelli pulled up and to the left on the yoke and his P51-D swung towards the last place he’d seen the bomber. His squadron followed suit, managing to maintain a recognisable Vee-formation as they veered left and climbed steeply.

Ferrelli checked his altimeter. They were at 25,000 feet. He reckoned that bomber was somewhere around thirty. He studied the sky ahead of him, a forest of immensely tall cumulus. There was surely heavy rain down below; a real roof-rattler as his mom liked to term the sort of passing downpours that hit them without warning in the spring and ceased just as suddenly.

He saw the plane again. It was higher than he’d thought, now maybe 35,000 feet.

Damn.

Either he was losing his ability to reckon altitudes or the plane had just pulled up steeply since he’d seen it last, only seconds ago.

‘You guys see it?’ he called out to the squadron.