Flying Angels(34)

“I guess so.” Emma was slower to warm up to people than Pru was, and she was always a little suspicious of new faces in their midst.

“We should try to get to meet them. We’ll be flying with them soon,” Pru commented.

“I hope they’re good,” Emma said seriously.

“I’m sure they will be. And in the end, we all figure it out as we go.” Emma nodded agreement and closed her eyes again. “Get some sleep. You look knackered,” Pru told her.

   “I am. I have to be up at three-thirty. We fly at four tomorrow.”

“Me too.”

“Wake me, if I don’t get up,” Emma said, as she turned on her side, and was already half asleep again.

“Night, Em. Sleep tight,” Pru whispered and closed her eyes, trying to forget the images of the day. She didn’t know how she’d survive it sometimes, if it weren’t for her friends, like Emma and Ed. They gave each other the strength to do it all again every day. She wondered if any of the Americans who had arrived would turn out to be good friends too. Time would tell.



* * *



—

The alarm Emma had set the night before went off at three-thirty, which gave them both just enough time to roll out of bed and into their flight clothes, head down the hall to brush their teeth, wash their faces, and comb their hair, and then run down the stairs, and grab a cup of coffee, rush out to a car and head to the tarmac less than a mile away. Or if there was no car, they ran there. They had the time calculated down to the last second, without a minute to spare, to get every last second of sleep they could before facing another day.

The wartime coffee was bitter, and sugar was rationed, but tea was hard to come by. Neither Emma nor Prudence took the time to eat breakfast. Their corpsmen would bring them something from the mess hall, even if it was a single piece of toast and an apple, or a paper cup of porridge. It was enough to start the day.

Their planes were side by side on the tarmac, and their pilots were already there, checking the engines. Ed drove up minutes after Pru got there. He looked fresh and alert, and he smiled when he saw her. Emma had already climbed the ladder into her own C-47 and was checking the supplies. They had used a lot the day before, and her corpsmen had restocked them. Ten minutes later, they were ready to go. Pru glanced at the empty beds on her plane. They were ready for twenty-four men to be brought back to the base.

   “Where are we headed?” she asked the pilot. He had the flight plan and the map. She put her parachute on as they taxied down the runway a few minutes later. They went where the battles were hottest, and where they’d been radioed in code that the need was greatest. They would have the wounded ready for them on litters when they arrived.

“We got a call an hour ago. Luftwaffe hit about eighty miles from here. They have thirty-nine men injured. It won’t take us long to get there. They’ve got the boys ready to load, we can take twenty-four and another transport will pick up the fifteen or sixteen walking wounded after us,” he said matter-of-factly, in the jargon that was familiar to her now.

Emma’s flight took off first, and they were right behind her. Pru saw them take off in the opposite direction. The Luftwaffe had been busy the night before. It was an ugly thought, but she hoped that their own boys had done just as much damage in Germany that night. She was so tired of the war. They all were.

The heavy C-47 took off in a velvet sky filled with stars. They would land at their destination before the dawn, and bring the boys back to the base, restock supplies, and take off again. They would spend the day ferrying broken bodies and bleeding men back with them, twenty-four of them on every flight, a never-ending stream of wounded after four and a half years of war. The cities were in rubble. Almost every family had lost a son, or several, and children had lost parents. Prudence sat in her jump seat looking at the night sky. It looked so peaceful. It was hard to believe that they kept killing people every day.

   “Beautiful up here, isn’t it?” Ed said softly, sitting just behind her, and he handed her an apple. She nodded in answer and took a bite. “We’ll miss this one day.”

“No, we won’t. How can you say that?” She turned to look at him.

“It gives our lives purpose, and meaning. We know why we’re here. We have a mission, and we fulfill it many times. We have a chance to win again every day, and save lives.”

“And when we don’t, it hurts like hell.” She thought of Emma the night before, and the sadness in her eyes over the boy they had lost. She didn’t know him, they never did. It didn’t matter. The boy’s life was precious. They all were. Pru thought sometimes that she’d never want children after this. She had already lost too many. She didn’t know how their parents, or the parents who had lost little children in the bombings in London, survived it. She couldn’t have borne it, and never wanted to be this brave again. She longed for peacetime. She had grown up with war. It had gone on for too long. The plane took a sharp turn then, and they dropped altitude sharply. She looked at Reggie, the pilot. He was watching the sky intently.

“I saw something.” A moment later they saw a fighter plane heading toward a target, with two more behind it, and they dropped lower. No one spoke as Reggie maneuvered, waiting for the fighter planes to come after them and attack. They saw the sky light up when the bombs hit the ground in the distance. Death had come early in the day to the people below them. They took another sharp turn and stayed well below the fighter planes that kept heading into the distance. They didn’t bother to come after the big cargo plane. They had completed their mission and headed back to Germany. Prudence and her crew had been lucky this time. The fighter planes could have come after them, but they didn’t. Pru and Ed and the pilot watched the fires grow beneath them as the bombs did their damage, and they headed toward their mission to pick up twenty-four men who might get lucky that day. Some lived and some died, some would be saved, and some couldn’t be. It was all in a day’s work for Pru and the men she flew with.