Read Online B for Buster by Iain Lawrence - Free Book Online

Rogers, on a fabulous field that stretched in all directions and rose from the earth to the heavens. I imagined the people below turning their faces to the sky, telling each other, “Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane. It’s—the Kakabeka Kid!”
    I tightened my curtain. I leaned into my corner and, hunched by my desk, pulled the ray-gun ring from my pocket. It was a crummy thing that didn’t shoot rays, or anything else. But it stood for the Space Patrol and all my heroes, and I always felt a tingle when I put it on. When I was small I had worn it on my thumb, and I’d had to clench my fist to keep it from falling off. Now it barely squeezed onto my little finger. I had owned that ring for years and years.
    â€œSkipper, steer one-five-six,” said Simon.
    â€œRoger. One-five-six,” answered Lofty.
    We joined with fifty other bombers and all flew south together. Our lights went out, and those of the others, and we traveled through the blackness. I drew the curtain round my desk and covered up my window. The little goosenecked lamp made a pool of light on the wireless.
    â€œSeven thousand feet,” said Lofty.
    The plane shivered as we passed through someone’s slipstream. The engines quickened for a moment, then settled back to their steady drone.
    â€œTwelve minutes to the coast,” said Simon.
    â€œRoger,” answered Lofty.
    We passed ten thousand feet. “Oxygen, boys,” said Lofty. I tightened my mask and connected to the system. The air had a taste of rubber, but I thought of it as the breath of
Buster.
    â€œHey, Kakky, how’s the bird?” asked Simon.
    I didn’t bother to look; I knew that he’d be lying like a lump on his belly, maybe sleeping and maybe not. No matter how high we flew, it didn’t seem to bother the pigeon. At eleven thousand feet, a man would conk out in a minute or two, but pigeons kept breathing at twice that height. I hadn’t known it at first. On one of our training exercises, at fifteen thousand feet over the North Sea I had shone my torch into the pigeon box and seen the bird standing up. I’d shouted, “Holy smokes, the pigeon’s awake!”
    Simon laughed again now. I aimed my tiny ray gun at him through the curtain.
    I couldn’t listen to the wireless and the intercom at the same time. I kept switching back and forth between them, listening on the wireless for any recalls or news about wind shifts, then catching bits of talk on the intercom.
    â€œCrossing the coast,” said Will. “There’s the surf. A silver thread.”
    I turned off my lamp and peered out through the little window. I could see nothing down there, but I didn’t like the thought of empty water. It would be so cold, so dark and heaving.
    â€œOkay to test the guns, Skipper?” That was Buzz, his voice sounding excited.
    â€œRoger. Blast away, boys.”
    I heard the whine of the powered turrets, and I felt the hammer of the guns. The bit of sky that I could see lit up with bursts of tracer curving off in all directions. It was sudden and short, and then there was only the darkness again. But the flashes glowed on my eyelids, sparkling white and orange every time I blinked.
    We carried on across the Channel with the engines booming. I couldn’t see very far ahead, not at all behind or straight below. I didn’t like looking out at nothing but a black emptiness, so I covered the window again, switched on the light, and sat and waited. I looked up at the rudder cables and the hoses, then down at the deck, imagining the bombs nested in their bay below it. To my side, by the window, the paint didn’t exactly match where two metal plates met at a riveted joint. I touched the place, wondering which bit was new and which was old, and then what had happened on
Buster
the night that a dead man landed the plane. I thought of the voice I had heard, or imagined, calling out for the