“Did you fly them?” Johnson asked quietly, respectfully.
“No. I came over last spring. Just before Hamburg.”
“Oh—yeah, Hamburg. We really hit ’em there, didn’t we?”
Del took a breath, as if to speak, but did not know how to start. The fires in Hamburg flashed in his memory, the city glowing like an immense coal, throbbing and shifting with the intense heat, so intense that Del felt his own skin burning too, four miles above.
“Hamburg was my second trip,” Del began. He knew, now, that Hamburg was what got him through his next twenty-five ops, too. He had been in the later part of the bomber stream, and he could see the biblical destruction as he approached the city. The fires lit the countryside for miles around. They illuminated the bombers, too, as they churned through the sky, but th
