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

course for home. Then the same coldness touched me again, and I knew it had been a mistake to start thinking like that.
    My intercom crackled. “Searchlights ahead.”
    â€œI see them, Will,” said Lofty.
    â€œFlak now. Just starting up.”
    Lofty didn’t answer. There were two clicks from his intercom, and we droned along toward the enemy coast, jinking left and right, now dropping fifty feet, now rising so much more. Lofty never used the autopilot; he kept us moving through an empty sky the way a rabbit flits from hole to hummock to dodge the hawks above it.
    â€œIt’s beautiful, really,” said Will. “Terrible, but beautiful.” He sounded dreamy and wondering. “It’s like a fence of light, like rows of swords all waving back and forth. The flak is bursting high—big orange balls—and the tracers are flying through it. They look like flaming onions, all right. It’s quite a show. It’s— Oh, Geez, someone bought it there. A ball of fire, like a meteor.”
    I had to see for myself. I put my head through the curtains and looked toward the nose. Simon was shrouded at his desk; I couldn’t see him at all. Will was stretched out atop his Perspex, above a glow of light, as though he flew along like Superman. The searchlights swung, the tracers soared, and the flak puffed in sudden, scattered bursts, as though they had blown holes right through the night to show the day behind it. It was like watching, all at once and from up above, all the fireworks that I had ever seen, and watching them in silence. Our own engines drowned out all the sound. But there was nothing beautiful there; my first look at the enemy scared me half to death.
    The searchlights weren’t at all like the ones we’d seen at London. Those had turned and reeled like dancers, but these jabbed at the dark; they hunted through it. They seemed alive, and cruel.
    I saw the bomber going down—or another. It passed across the Perspex with its streaming tail of fire. For a moment it glowed in the searchlights, and I saw that one wing was sheared off in the middle. A parachute blossomed from an upper hatch, then wrapped itself around the tail, and a little speck of a man squirmed and writhed on the end of the cords, dragged behind the bomber. Wrapped in flame, the Halifax went hurtling toward the ground, pulling that poor doomed man behind it.
    â€œUnsynchronizing,” said Lofty. He fiddled with his levers to set the engines at a ragged roar. The single deafening note became a fluttering
oom-ba-oom
that was meant to fool the lights that sought us out by sound.
    Then I heard the flak—or
felt
it—faint, hard pops that ripped the air apart. I was too scared to look away. The lights seemed to slide toward us, spreading out and stretching higher. We jinked along, up and down, left and right, but straight toward a wall of light, and it didn’t seem possible that we could fly right through it. The Perspex bubble glowed a silver white, and the colors of the flak washed across the panes. They flickered on the metal walls, orange tongues like a fire catching.
    I gripped the edges of my desk. I was absolutely terrified.
    The flak knocked us sideways. It hammered us down and tossed us up. The kite reeked of exploded shells as we lurched through shattered air. Everyone was shouting all at once, and poor old
Buster
groaned and rattled.
    Then suddenly everything was quiet. We were back in the darkness, in our cloak of night. I thought hours had passed, but it had been only moments. We had crossed just one belt of flak. We weren’t even close to the target.

CHAPTER 7
    THE OP PASSED LIKE a nightmare, in a series of visions that were too frightening to be real. Now we were growling through the darkness, now being hurled across the sky. With
Buster
tipped on its side, I looked through my little window, three miles down at the valley of the Ruhr. I saw smoke in the moonlight, oozing