B for Buster by Iain Lawrence Page A

tearing right through them, nearly out of control. My arms were pinned at my sides, my feet to the floor. We came hurtling out into the searchlights and flak, plummeting down in a tight spiral. Pop shouted at Lofty. “Pull up, pull up!”
    And down we went.
    I saw the ground spinning fast, a pinwheel of searchlights and tracers and flak. Someone vomited, and the reek of it came oozing through my mask. Ratty, in the tail, kept crying out, “He’s still behind us!”
    The wings thumped. The rudders creaked.
Buster
came shuddering out of its dive with its nose high, its wings tipped over. I felt the airspeed falling off; I heard the shriek of wind fade to a whisper. “Watch it!” said Pop. “You’ll stall her now.”
    Slowly,
Buster
rolled over. My window faced the ground and now the sky. My stomach filled with butterflies as
Buster
tipped and rolled, then tumbled again through the night. We fell a thousand feet to our right, a thousand more to our left. Then Lofty brought the nose up and hauled us round in a swooping turn.
    He set the throttles; he set the trimming tabs. And up we climbed toward the clouds, back on route to Bochum. I shone my light into the pigeon box and saw the bird lying on the floor, twitching like a dog in a dream. I gave him water, and he settled down a bit.
    Our engines growled; the deck was slanted as we climbed. Then Lofty, breathing heavily, came on the intercom. “Will. You okay?” he said.
    â€œOkay, Skipper,” said Will.
    He was the one who had thrown up, dizzied by the motions. He was crawling now across his splattered Perspex, cleaning up as best he could.
    â€œSimon?” asked Lofty.
    â€œHere, Skippa,” he said in his Australian way.
    â€œKak?”
    â€œYes,” I said. My voice cracked in a high tremble.
    â€œPop?”
    â€œRight here.”
    â€œBuzz?”
    â€œHere, Skipper.”
    â€œRatty?”
    There was no answer from the tail.
    â€œRatty?” asked Lofty again. “Ratty!” he said more loudly.
    â€œRoger,” said Ratty. He sounded frightened. “Skipper, I’m okay.”
    We carried on and bombed the target. It was a nightmare over Bochum, with the clouds lit up, and the night fighters floating bright white flares above us. We never saw the buildings we were hitting, only the flashes of the bombs and the reddish glow of a spreading fire. We bombed on sky flares that drifted, red and green, through the canyons of the clouds.
    Then I dropped the photoflash. We took our picture and turned for home in the bomber stream. Lofty kept us jinking left and right as we flew a weaving, droning course.
    An hour after midnight, somewhere over Gelsenkirchen, Donny Lee and all his crew vanished from the sky.

CHAPTER 10
    THAT MORNING I DREAMED that I was falling. I went spinning through the sky, and a fiery earth went round and round below me. It looked exactly as the ground had looked from
Buster’
s window, but in my dream I fell alone, without the kite around me. I spun through empty air, through darkness, feeling that I was floating instead of falling. I tried to run, and woke up kicking at my blankets, clutching my pillow to my chest like a parachute. I was thumping at it desperately, trying to tear it open.
    It all seemed so real that it took me a minute or more to shake the dream away. I had to make myself remember that
Buster
hadn’t really broken up over Bochum, that we had come safely home before dawn. I remembered the surge of the engines as we floated over the hedge, the little shriek of the tires touching the runway.
    I even heard Ratty’s voice, his laugh. “That’s two. Just twenty-eight to go.”
    I stayed in my bed, in the gloom of the hut, thinking of Donny Lee. I tried to picture the boy I’d known in Kakabeka, but all I could see were searchlights sweeping, and the gleam of his bomber in the sky.
    We had seen it happen, on the homeward trip. The