Resistance by Anita Shreve Read Free Book Online

fields. He'd be grounded if anyone had observed and reported him. He could see the spires of Cambridge in the distance. He began to climb then, as high as he could push the plane. He wanted to take himself aloft—away from the earth.
    Case's cheeks were vibrating with the plane. They waited for the takeoff flares. Over the intercom, the pilot asked for position checks. Ekberg, in the tail, sounded drunk. How had he not noticed that before? They would be the second plane behind
Old Gold,
the lead ship painted garishly to identify it in the air—a gaudy duck with its dull flock behind. Twenty planes, and they were number two.
    Ted looked at his mission flimsy, passed it over to Case. On it were the code words and the details of the mission. It was made of rice paper; if they went down, Ted was supposed to eat it. He saw the flares then, gave the thumbs-up sign to the chief on the ground to pull the chocks, closed the window. He taxied out of the hardstand and got into line on the perimeter track. He could not see over the nose and had to use the edge of the taxiway for a guide. Already the noise inside the plane was deafening. He thought sometimes he minded the noise the most, and that if there was a Hell, it would sound like the interior of a B-17. He ran up the engines to test them. They were loaded to the limit, with five thousand pounds of bombs and twenty-six hundred gallons of fuel; it was always a guess as to whether they'd make it off the ground. He thought of Shulman in the nose, watching the rush of the ground beneath him.
    Old Gold
left the runway; Ted gunned the engines. The noise, which before had seemed unbearable, now became monstrous. He knew that behind and below him the men were praying: Get this sucker off the ground. That's right, he thought, get the bomber off the ground, and then do it, if you're lucky, thirteen more times. The runway ended, and they were up into the soup.
    The RAFs called it the milky goldfish bowl. Ted climbed in a spiral over the beacon, looking out for a shadow in the mist—another groping B-17 that might stray too near. At 10,000 feet, he gave the order for oxygen and put on his own mask. Twenty seconds without oxygen could be fatal. Squeeze the pumps, he reminded them; don't freeze your spit. He added, as he always did, to keep the glove liners on, no matter what. The gunners sometimes stripped them off in the heat of battle in order to better manage the machinery, but at high altitude, fingers would freeze on gunmetal and have to be ripped off. It would be so cold the navigator wouldn't be able to make a note with a pencil; lead froze at 20,000 feet. Icy air blasted through the openings in the waist where the gunners stood. Most of the men were plugged in, their electrical suits keeping their bodies functioning. But Ted, after he'd burned his leg on his eighth mission because of a frayed wire, had decided to stay with the sheepskin. They all wore their Mae Wests, but few of them could perform their jobs with their parachutes on their backs. They kept them nearby, hanging on hooks. When they hit the flak, he'd give the order for the flak jackets. Rees would stand on his as he almost always did. On a mission with another crew, Rees had seen a Luftwaffe Junker rake the bomber's belly. The left waist gunner was shot from below. The blast had made a hole two and a half feet wide, and the dead man, to Rees's horror, had simply fallen out the bottom of the plane.
    The engines were straining in the climb. At 14,000 feet they broke into the clear.
    From the Channel to the rally point, he rotated with Case every fifteen minutes, a tactic he had learned to prevent Case from seizing up on him. Fly the plane close to the others in the formation, but not too close. Scan the sky for the fighters you knew would soon be out there.
    Over the intercom, he could hear the chatter. Idle chatter 20,000 feet over the Channel. You were still alive if you could talk to your buddies, joke around. The words