Free The Crew by Margaret Mayhew

passed him a scrap of paper with his latest radio fix. Piers went over everything again.
    â€˜Navigator to pilot. ETA on target is o three forty-five.’
    â€˜Roger, nav.’
    In less than half an hour, he realized, it would be his birthday.
    Sitting on his canvas sling seat, head and shoulders in the Perspex dome of the mid-upper turret with the rest of him, feet in stirrups, down in the draughty fuselage, Bert was thinking about Emerald and fancying his chances. She was a smashing bit of skirt, the best-looking bint he’d ever taken out. They’d had agood old snog in the back row at the flicks, and look how she’d given him the silk stocking – to bring him luck, she’d said, with one of her sidelong smiles – and if that wasn’t a come-on he didn’t know what was. He fingered it round his neck, grinning to himself. Next time he took her out . . .
    Blimey, what was he doing, dreaming about that now? He was supposed to be keeping a sharp look-out for enemy fighters, and anything else that could get them into trouble.
    He put Emerald out of his mind and rotated the turret slowly. Trouble was, when you went on staring out into the dark for long you started imagining all sorts of things. What was only a cloud started looking like a whole lot of Messerschmitts, and you could fire away at nothing and put the wind up everyone else, not to mention waste ammo. Sometimes he felt sort of trapped in the turret. You had to be a bit of a Houdini to haul yourself up into it, and getting out in a hurry’d be a bloody sight worse. And once he was there, there he had to stay unless the skipper ordered him to leave. He tried not to think about the turret having no armour protection, or about the RAF roundels painted just below and making a nice convenient bull’s-eye aiming point for Jerry fighters, or about the fact that he couldn’t wear his parachute and had to stow it down below. Most of all, he didn’t think about all the stories of mid-uppers coming back from ops without a head.
    Still, he wouldn’t have swapped places with Charlie for anything – all on his tod at the blunt end there, out in the cold. Not for all the tea in China.
    Piers couldn’t see much until his eyes adjusted from the light of his chart lamp to the darkness of thecockpit, and when they did, it all looked far, far worse than he had expected. He stood behind Van, staring in horror at the glittering wall of exploding flak and searchlights ahead. Christ, they had to go into
that
! It was sheer suicide. They’d have no chance at all. He wanted to dash back behind his curtain, but a dreadful fascination made him stay and watch it all come closer and closer. A shell burst somewhere beneath them and he grabbed for a handhold as D-Dog plunged about wildly and shrapnel rattled hard on the fuselage. A searchlight beam swept the sky only yards away, and a second beam followed so close he thought they must surely have been spotted. Another shell exploding even nearer almost flung D-Dog onto her back. God, they’d never get out of this alive. It was hopeless.
Hopeless.
    A stab of orange fire flared suddenly away to port. As it grew he saw that it was a bomber on fire, flames flickering furiously along its wings. An almighty explosion lit up the sky and dazzled his eyes. Mesmerized, he watched blazing brands of wreckage spin earthwards.
    â€˜Bomb doors open, skip.’ Stew’s voice sounded perfectly calm.
    â€˜Roger, bomb aimer. Bomb doors open.’
    â€˜Right . . . steady. Left, left. Left, left. Steady . . . steady. Bombs gone, skip.’
    D-Dog turned away from the target, heading for the dark. Back at his charts, hands shaking, Piers somehow pulled himself together.
    Charlie could see the glow from the fires for a long while on their route back. They’d clobbered the place well and truly. Given the Jerries a taste of their own medicine.
    It