Free B for Buster by Iain Lawrence

soon or too late, it wouldn’t light up the ground for the picture. I was afraid that if I messed up, we would have to do the op all over again.
Come on, Will.
    I listened to his voice guiding us on. I opened the chute, and heard air whistle through it.
Come on.
    â€œBombs gone!” he cried at last.
    B for Buster
leapt up a hundred feet. Lightened from the load, the enormous thing floated up like a feather on a breath of air. But still we flew straight along as our bombs hurtled down. I held the flare in the mouth of the chute and started counting the seconds. When I got to eight I dropped the flash and slammed the little door.
    â€œThere’s flares popping off all over,” said Will. “Great explosions on the ground. They look like boils at first, then they shatter into pus. There’s a clot of smoke ten thousand feet high.”
    The air buffeted against us. I felt the blasts of the bombs, as though fists pummeled at the wings. The airframe creaked, then banged, and I was certain that the old bus was about to crack open. But at last we tilted to the left, and went down in a spiraling dive.
    â€œBomb doors closed,” said Lofty.
    I staggered back to my wireless to send the signal that we’d bombed the target. This time I dared a glance from the cockpit. I looked down at a land of fire and smoke, and saw that the peaceful place we’d come to had been turned to a horror. The stream of kites was still passing the target, the bombs still bursting.
    When I plugged in at my desk Ratty was babbling through the intercom. “Look at it burn,” he said. “Wheezy jeezy, look at it, will you? We gave it a pasting, eh? We plastered that place. No lie.”
    I saw him in my mind, glowing red from the fires on the ground, a little demon hunched in his ball of glass. Helmeted and masked, plugged into air and heat, he was a part of the plane. We all were.
Buster
kept us breathing and
Buster
kept us talking. We were only the nerves of a metal monster.
    But we had leveled out, and were flying for home. I breathed again, and smiled again, and blinked out tears that came for no reason except that I was still alive. I tuned in England on the wireless and tapped out a message on the key. Somewhere miles and miles away, in a little room with lights and people, someone listened to my dots and dashes and put a tick on a bit of paper to count another load of bombs.
    â€œSkipper, your course is zero-zero-niner,” said Simon. It came out “noiner” in his Australian accent.
    We flew toward home. There was flak near the border, and again at the coast, but it didn’t seem so bad anymore. I just trembled and sweated until it was past. And then the Channel seemed almost friendly.
    Ratty told a long joke about two farmers and a nun. Buzz thought about his crossword clues. “Hey, is there another word for an orange?” he asked.
    We started descending before we crossed the English coast. Gilbert poked his head from his box, blinking around with his stupid eyes. I felt a twinge of guilt to think how I’d promised to look after him but hadn’t given him a thought. So I got out my water bottle and gave him a drink in his little tin. Then I unbuttoned my mask, took a sandwich from my bag, and shared tiny bits of the bread.
    Will saw distant combats—brief spurts of tracer—but no fighters came on our tail. I ate an orange and a chocolate bar as the gunners kept their watch. Our engines droning, we slipped along above fields and cities, over the little Yorkshire farms. And we landed well before the sun was up.
    Our flaps were down, our undercarriage locked. Will, in the second dickey seat again, called out the height and speed as Lofty kept us aiming for the flare path.
    â€œSixty feet, one-ten,” said Will. “Fifty feet, one hundred.”
    We flitted past the pigeon loft.
    â€œForty feet, one hundred.”
    â€œThrottles back,” said Lofty.
    The wheels