Passeggiata (complete 2016)

Goodwin was in his element down here 'in the weeds'; he loved low altitude flying, the danger, the immediate -- and final -- consequences of making any mistake excited him, made him feel more alive than anything he had ever done in his life. He kept one hand on the throttle levers, the other on the wheel, his feet jockeyed the rudder pedals furiously as the B-24 plowed through ground thermals and air currents -- usually prop-wash from the aircraft just ahead. He rarely scanned his instruments now, leaving those to The Queer and instead keeping his eyes fixed on the aircraft dead ahead and -- peripherally -- the ground rushing by barely one hundred feet below. At almost four hundred miles per hour in the thick roiled air, the ride was intensely rough and gunners in the back of the aircraft vomited out their gunports, sandwiches and coffee drifting down onto the treetops and cowering faces of a completely astonished landscape.

The formation achieved complete tactical surprise that morning; as expected, enemy fighters had been drawn to the coast and ground defenses simply couldn't engage targets coming in at such a low altitude. As the miles reeled by, as the target grew ever closer, the pilots and group commanders knew they had pulled it off.

The bombardier in Hell's Belles called the IP, but the pilot would continue to fly the aircraft to the target because of the low altitude; dropping the bomb load would be called by the pilot as Goodwin had the best sense of orientation and drift to the target from his vantage point, and because bomb sights were useless at this altitude. Perhaps the biggest danger the men now faced came not from enemy aircraft or anti-aircraft fire, but by bombs dropped from aircraft immediately ahead, and even their own bombs. Bomb fragments and flying debris thrown violently into the air from bombers just ahead would become as deadly as any other hot metal fired at them in anger, and all simply because from this altitude and at this speed their bombs would impact and detonate just milliseconds after being dropped. With this in mind, they increased spacing between aircraft as they approached the rail yard.

Goodwin got word from his bombardier that the target was now less than ten miles ahead -- less than a minute away now. He pulled back gently on the stick and the Liberator climbed ever-so-slightly, up to maybe a hundred and seventy feet above the ground, and he commanded that the bomb bay doors be opened. Flak started popping above the formation, then gunners on the ground lowered their aim and began firing into the formation, oblivious to the danger this presented to their own forces on the ground.

Goodwin saw bombs dropping from the aircraft ahead -- "too soon, goddamn it!" he yelled -- and a wall of flame-filled dirt filled the view ahead of the instrument panel. Now, instead of seeing the onrushing world just ahead he saw black clouds filled with boxcars, flaming fountains of twisted rail and molten meat. As rock and timber, the sinew of all railways filled the air, he heard shattering glass and metal slamming into metal all around, he smelled cordite and scorched earth as smoke poured into the cockpit -- and his eyes watered reflexively as the stench washed over him.

He instinctively pickled the bomb release switch on his wheel, felt the aircraft lurch as the load fell away, and he rushed to trim the elevators to keep the Liberator from shooting up uncontrollably into the flak-filled sky. As suddenly, Hell's Belles cleared the wall of cloud and roared off into open skies. The lead aircraft, just ahead and to his left, burst into flame and disappeared behind him in an instant, black cotton balls full of death paved the way ahead, so he jinked up and right, down and left, left rudder, right rudder, hug the ground, pull up...the men behind held on as Hell's Belles corkscrewed through the air -- still, Goodwin hoped, unscathed.

Goodwin looked left; there were no other aircraft in sight...

"Queer! We got anyone on us!"

Silence.

Goodwin looked at his co-pilot. The boy was slumped over to his right, his head leaning against shattered glass, blood and bits of brain were splattered all over the cockpit.

"Shit! Needham? You with me?"

He called on the intercom for someone to come up to the cockpit and move Needham's body from the controls; someone -- he didn't have time to look -- came forward and muscled the body aft; again he called, this time for the bombardier to come up and sit beside him and help scan the horizon for enemy aircraft.

"Bandits!" he heard over the intercom. "Nine o'clock high! 190s comin' down, skipper! Large formation!"

Goodwin looked high over his left shoulder; he could make out yellow spinners on the diving Focke-Wulf 190 fighters as they sliced downward through the clear sky towards the formation. He slammed the throttles forward again, dove as far down into the weeds as he dared and concentrated on sudden obstructions that popped up ahead -- and shot-by with dizzying speed. Gunners began calling targets, machine guns hammered the sky and the air filled once again with scorched gunpowder -- now mixed with testosterone-drenched adrenalin, vomit and piss.

20mm cannon rounds slammed into Hell's Belles just aft of Goodwin; he heard men screaming, then smoke filled the air. The aircraft began to yaw left, he slammed in right rudder and looked out over his left shoulder: the number one engine was simply gone! The entire engine cowling and structure had been hot away, now flame-licked soot raced away from the wreckage into the slipstream. Another burst of machine gun fire from his gunners, someone yelling "Got him, I got the bastard!" and Goodwin methodically toggled the number one fire extinguisher and dialed in some aileron and rudder trim to compensate for the yaw inducing drag of the blown away engine.

He turned south toward Genoa and Corsica, slowly nursed his altitude back up to ten thousand feet as the German fighters fell off to refuel. Pavia drifted by, then Piacenza and Parma, all off to the left, while survivors of the formation closed in behind Hell's Belles. Goodwin was now in tactical command of the group, and he signaled for the formation to tighten up. They would head for Sicily, where the closest Allied forces were located. If anyone had to ditch or was forced to land before making Libya, they could shoot for Sicily. Goodwin worked up a rough course toward Bastia, on the northeast coast of Corsica; from there he would lead the group to Palermo, then toward the Libyan coast, and, be it ever so humble, home.

The Ligurian coastline loomed ahead, Genoa lay just to the right, buried under a vast wall of storm clouds that had ominously -- in the intense summer heat -- climbed to well over forty thousand feet. The way ahead was now choked with building cumulus clouds, some towering so high Goodwin couldn't make out the tops from this altitude. Soon he was weaving the formation through tight white canyons of vaulting clouds, and the ambient turbulence became more pronounced with each passing minute. Each time the Liberator shook it sounded to Goodwin as if someone was throwing a metal toolbox into a brick wall; each concussion was followed by jarring rattles and cascades of loose metal detritus finding its way back into the aircraft's belly.

Goodwin was aware of a flash, then a volley of 20mm cannon fire tore through the Liberator; fire engulfed the right wing and smoke poured into the cockpit -- but this time Goodwin smelled raw gasoline . . .

"Get ready to jump!" he called out. "Assume bailout stations!"

Goodwin pushed the nose over while he armed and fired all the primary and secondary fire extinguishers, and Hell's Belles dove down into cloud...the pure white cloud soon grew dark and cool as sunlight retreated from memory . . . A matter of pure chance now, the cloud's moisture added to the fire suppressing chemicals flooding the blazing wing, and almost instantly the fires were out. Goodwin looked at his engine instrumentation -- only the number two engine remained but there was now almost zero fuel left in the tanks. Hell's Belles was going down, and going down fast.

+++++

Ludvico Ferranté hated Germans. Everything about them. He hated the imperious way they ordered him about, the strutting air of superiority they assumed when coming into his father's ristorante, their boisterous pretensions of being the 'master race' . . . all of it, all of their imbecilic Teutonic braggadocio . . . and yet most of all, he hated Major Gunther Schrader with a fury that would fire his soul until the end of time. In Ludvico Ferrante's mind, Italy would never live down the shame of having allied itself with these Hitlerite scum; the only way to regain any measure of self respect would be to help throw these mad thugs out of his country. And this he intended to do.

Ludvico had just this day turned twenty one years old, yet here he was, in the ristorante as he was everyday, serving seafood from his father's boats to German officers and the wives and mistresses of the rich Austrian industrialists who still came to Portofino, despite the war. Portofino had been held in highest regard in the German mind since Goethe roamed the area as a young man; it had become something of a ritual for the sons of wealthy German bourgeois families to find their way to Rapallo and Portofino as a part of their education, a part of seeing how decadence tempted and distorted the Real German Man, swayed him from material achievement into diseased decadence. But oh, how fun it was to be tempted! How rich it was to be decadent, even if only for a summer!

But Gunther Schrader was something else entirely.

"We Germans are your allies!" he had heard time and time again from Schrader, but that was before he had raped half the women in Portofino, and as often as not at gunpoint, and in the company of a half dozen or so other willing 'noble allies'. Now, with the Americans in Sicily and the invasion of the Italian mainland rumored to be just days away, Ludvico and hundreds of other men and women in the area were forming partisan bands to wage guerrilla warfare against the Germans -- until the Allies could reach the area.

'How easy it would be,' Ludvico said to himself, 'to slit this man's throat right here, right now!' Or poison his soup, place a bomb in his car! Now, today . . . right now!

'Do it!' he told himself. 'Now!'

Though there were others in the ristorante, including two other German officers, Ludvico went to a cutlery case and pulled out a long knife used to filet fish table side. He was going to carry it over and place it on the serving cart next to Schrader's table, put it there, then when the time was right . . . strike!

"You! Boy! Bring us more bread, and some real butter, none of this ersatz crap for me!" Schrader pointed at Ludvico with steak knife in hand, the malevolence in the gesture total and unmistakable. "And another bottle of wine, you idiot!" He turned to the woman sitting at his side, a local whore too used to the good life to refuse this crude pig. "That little shit!" Schrader continued, "I'm going to have to beat some common sense and good manners into him before this day is done."

Ludvico carried the knife to the cart and placed it there, and was going to turn from the window and go to the kitchen when he saw it in the skies over Rapallo. Fire! Fire and smoke! At first it was too far away, there was no sound . . . only an intense, blinding light . . . but soon he heard it . . . the unmistakable sound of a stricken airplane, engine catching and sputtering, even though the noise was still so far away, so far across the bay. He could feel the German's eyes on the back of his neck, heard his chair scraping back on the stone floor, and he soon felt the man's dark presence by the window next to him.

Schrader looked at the flaming aircraft, saw parachutes like trailing petals fall from within roiling black plumes and settle on errant breezes, dropping towards the sea. Ludvico looked at Schrader's face for a moment, saw the hard set of the man's jaw, the anger and hatred flaring from red, bull-like nostrils, the man's pale, grey eyes watching, calculating, hoping that death would claim those desperate men. Perhaps he did not want to have his lunch interrupted, or his afternoon with this slut du jour now simpering at his table. Ludvico looked at him, hating him, his anger growing by the minute.

Schrader called out to the two officers seated near the patio door, told them to take a detachment of men toward Santa Margherita Ligure and see to it that any survivors were rounded up and brought to him this afternoon. "NOW!" Schrader screamed, and the men jumped and ran out through the piazza to their waiting truck.

Ludvico reached down, picked up the knife then drove it into Schrader's neck with ferocious intensity. He felt the blade slice through the larynx, felt cold steel against sinew and bone, and he twisted the blade while he watched with satisfaction as Schrader turned to look at him. Schrader fumbled for the pistol on his belt but Ludvico slashed the blade mercilessly through the German's neck; blood filled the man's mouth and sputtered into the air when the knife was withdrawn.

"Excuse me, Sir, while I just go and fetch your bread and butter," Ludvico said, then he walked over to the whore and drove the knife through the woman's breast, into her heart, holding his hand over her mouth while he did so.

"Vico!" he heard his father screaming. "What in God's name are you doing!"

The son turned to the father as the son becomes the father, and as he looked at the cowardly old man he felt a wave of sympathy wash over his soul.

"Help me, father. Let's get them to the boat, now, before someone comes!"

"What?!"

"Father! Move! We must move them before it is too late!"

His father ran into the kitchen with terror in his eyes; one of the cooks came out a moment later and looked at Schrader's body, then at the whore's.

"Eh, Ludvico! Don't you know how to stick someone without making such a fucking mess!"

Though he might have expected any number of responses to seeing what he'd done, Ludvico never expected this one. Trini LaFortuna was a rogue, almost a harlequin, and a great cook as well, but Ludvico had never once suspected Trini was with the partisans. And Trini had never suspected young Ferranté had the balls to pull off something so utterly brazen and -- heroic!

The two young men wrapped the German in an old linen table cloth, then the whore, and they carried the bodies out to the cart they used to bring fish up from the docks to the market stalls. They dumped the bodies in the cart, covered them with garbage -- fish guts and cans and scraps of beef and vegetables -- and while Trini went back inside to mop up the floor and straighten up the rest of his mess, Ludvico rolled the cart down to his father's fishing boat.

He looked once toward the sea while he unloaded the cart into the ice well under the deck.

Nothing. He could see little, if anything, of interest out past the cape, just a line of black thunderstorms headed south and east across the bay. Of the darkness that had settled over his heart -- he could see nothing at all.

+++++

Paul Goodwin felt the last series of blasts shake Hell's Belles just as he ordered his crew to jump; the next thing he was aware of was hurtling through the sky free of the aircraft. He had no idea if he had jumped or if the aircraft had exploded and he'd been thrown clear; whatever had happened -- it didn't matter now, he knew he was falling inexorably seaward and he had but moments to deploy his parachute before he hit. Cold, powerful gusts from the storms slammed into him, tumbling his body ferociously, and he fought to get his hands on the metal release and pull. He was barely aware, perhaps just once during these first frantic moments, that his flight suit was scorched, indeed, parts of it still seemed to be burning. Concussive waves of thunder crushed the air from his lungs, the hair on his arms tingled as sheets of lightning arced through the air all round his falling body, yet all he could think of in that moment was that he might be on fire!

He found the release and pulled, clouds of silk trailed skyward and opened, Goodwin's body jerked and twitched as the 'chute opened, and suddenly he was aware that the fabric of his flight suit around the back of his neck was hot, and suddenly he could smell flesh -- his flesh -- burning. The pain was instantly unreal, excruciating, and he beat at the unseen furies with his gloved hands, writhing and screaming in anguished frustration -- and then he looked up.

Glowing traceries of fire raced up the nylon lines toward his parachute, one by one the lines began to blacken and snap; soon little patches of flame erupted on the 'chute itself. 'This is a fucking nightmare!' he told himself . . . 'I'm going to wake up . . . now! Time to wake up . . . Time to wake up . . .'

But the nightmare did not end.

He looked down between his feet at the sea. He could see waves now, white-capped storm-driven waves cresting and breaking everywhere he looked, wind-driven foam racing leeward with his last hopes and dreams - and he looked up one last time to see the remnants of his parachute burst into flame, felt the sudden jolt of acceleration that pronounced his onrushing death. He watched in helpless wonder now as the once serenely remote sea reached up for him, ready to smash the spark of life from his body. In one last act of defiance, Goodwin spread his arms and legs wide, tried to make his body produce as much drag as possible then, just seconds before impact, he straightened his body, streamlined his form as rigidly as he could -- his toes pointed down, one hand over his nose, the other pointed straight overhead as if beseeching a just God to show just the tiniest bit of mercy on his soul...

He felt nothing, absolutely nothing of the impact. His first awareness was of cool water soothing his burned neck, salt water flooding his nose, stinging his lips. He pulled at the cord on his Mae West and -- nothing happened! He remembered something from flight training, what was it? Follow your bubbles, push hard for the surface and follow your bubbles! His lungs began to burn, his eyes too as salt water flooded over them, but he found after a moment that the stinging stopped once he blinked his eyes a couple of times and the pH balanced out. He looked up, saw the roiled surface just above his head and he burst into the air and sucked down as much as he could before a wave rolled over and tumbled him mercilessly back down into the sea. He kicked his way back to the surface again, found the manual inflation tube on the Mae West and began blowing the damned thing up. He chose a few angry words, hurled them carelessly at God when the Mae West proved totally defective, and he began treading water. His best hope now was to stay afloat long enough for a German patrol boat to come looking for his body.

Within a few moments the worst of the storm passed, the sea even began to lay down a bit, and as waves rolled-by he looked from the crests towards land, tried to gauge how far away it might be to the nearest bit of shoreline. Storms obscured his view to the east and south, more storms appeared ready to roll down from the north, and only one small parcel of land was just barely visible off to the west. Trees were not individually visible, so he assumed land was at least five miles away, maybe more, but he just couldn't tell.

"Well, fuck," Goodwin said aloud. "It's either swim or die. So come on, let's get to it!" He pulled off his boots, cut away the remnants of the parachute and it's harness, leaving only the yellow vest, his scorched flight-suit, socks and gloves.

On the crest of the next big wave, he caught his bearings and began swimming to the west. It felt good at first, the movement kept him warm, and the sea grew less agitated as time passed. Soon he convinced himself he could make out trees and a few castle-like villas perched on distant hillsides, but he also began to get a better angle on the distances involved. He was still at least four or five miles offshore, and now he could tell that strong winds were blowing him away from land! Every stroke he took seemed to set him back further, and he soon grew dispirited, then angry.