A Memory Between Us (13 page)

“Figures,” Jack said. Did they know the Fourth Bomb Wing was headed for the Messerschmitt plant to keep more Me 109s from the skies?

Even if they knew, they were in for a surprise. While seven groups in the Fourth Wing targeted Regensburg, nine groups in the First Wing aimed for the ball bearing factory at Schweinfurt. Then the brilliant part—First Wing would return to England, but Fourth Wing would swing south for North Africa. Boy, would the Germans be confused.

In addition to 500-pound bombs, the Fort carried mess kits and shaving kits, changes of clothing and blankets. Jack welcomed this first shuttle mission. He needed a few days away to chase off the memory of yesterday’s fiasco and to purge his mind of Lt. Ruth Doherty.

“Those Me 109s are heading west for the tail-end combat box,” Manny said.

“Again?” Several B-17s flying “Tail-End Charlie” had fallen since they crossed the Dutch border.

Each combat box carefully stacked and staggered bombers from two or three groups to maximize firepower and minimize danger. Colonel Castle led the 94th in the lead of the second of three combat boxes, a good spot but not immune. No one was immune.

“Fw 190s coming our way from two o’clock high.” Gene Levitski, the new copilot, squinted at the clear sky from under gigantic brown eyebrows. “Remember, boys, don’t forget to lead. Short bursts. Don’t waste ammo. We’ve got a long mission.”

Jack shifted in his seat. Yep, longest mission ever. At least eleven hours, and already his rear end ached. His mind flashed to Ruth’s sweet laughter at his continuing discomfort. Just yesterday. He shoved the image away. He had more important things to consider, like the long haul with low fuel over the Mediterranean. Warmer water than the Channel, but no less deadly. And did the North African Theater have decent Air-Sea Rescue? Jack didn’t want to find out.

“Here they come, boys,” Levitski said. “Four of ’em.”

Jack hoped his copilot stayed alive. He calmly called out bogies and let Jack concentrate on the plane and the formation. Still, Jack eyed the fighters coming straight for the nose. Years of experience kept him from following the instinct to wheel away, which would plow him into another ship in the tight formation.

At three hundred yards, tracers blinked toward him. “Get ’em,” Jack said.
Sunrise Serenade
trembled as her .50 caliber machine guns opened up—Charlie’s in the nose, and Harv’s twin guns overhead.

The fighters pressed in, their propellers in round blurs. Bullets crossed paths in the sky. Three clunks rattled the right wing. Each Fw 190 did a split-S and disappeared under the Fort. Paul Klaus’s guns joined the racket from the ball turret hanging from
Sunrise
’s belly.

Klaus whooped on the interphone. “I got one. Tore his wing right off. Don’t you dare call me a Kraut again, Owens.”

“Taking away all my fun.” Harv kicked shell casings off his turret platform. “Come on, Jerry. Send up some more. Gotta beat Klaus.”

Jack didn’t share Harv’s eagerness. Every bullet carried risk to men, to electrical and control cables, and to fuel and hydraulic lines. He checked the fuel and oil in engines three and four. Looked okay. He couldn’t afford the loss of even one engine, not with all that water ahead.

Klaus let out an expletive. “There goes one of our Forts.
Dear Mom
, it says.”

“Chutes?” Jack asked.

“One, two.” Silence. “Cockpit on fire. She’s in a spin.”

“Come on, you guys,” Jack said. “Get out.”

“Three, four.” This from Everett, the tail gunner. Then he cursed. “She exploded.”

“Oh Lord.” Jack didn’t even know how to pray. Despite the black heaviness in his chest, he adjusted his throttles to maintain airspeed at 180 miles per hour.

“Whole cloud of twin-engined fighters,” Manny said from the waist. “They’re passing us up.”

They were aiming for the final combat box, which was too far back to benefit from the firepower of the forward boxes. From Jack’s estimation, the 146 B-17s spread over an unacceptable fifteen miles. When they reached Africa, Col. Curtis LeMay—the commander of Fourth Wing, the developer of the combat box, and never a man to mince words—would have plenty to say.

Jack took careful note of how LeMay and Castle led. Neither commander had to fly such a rugged mission, but both did. The men respected things like that.

Over the next hour the tail gunner called out the demise of half a dozen Forts from the final groups, as well as the explosions of many enemy fighters. The 94th missed out on most of the action, which provoked colorful language from the top turret. Nevertheless, half of the remaining twenty planes in Jack’s group bore wounds—a feathered engine here, a chunk out of a wing there, punctured fuselages everywhere.

Sunrise
had three holes close to the Tokyo tanks. Only the B-17s in the Fourth Wing bore the extra fuel tanks in their wingtips, which extended their range all the way to North Africa.

“We’re at the Initial Point,” Norman Findlay said from down in the nose.

Jack smiled as he made the dogleg turn to start the bomb run. The navigator’s dislike of nicknames included abbreviations. Everyone else called it the IP.

Jack leaned down to the low panel on the center console and activated the AFCE so Charlie could fly the plane, the Automatic Flight Control Equipment, as Norman would call it. What a lot of syllables the boy wasted.

“Okay, Charlie, she’s all yours.”

“Thanks, Skipper.” Charlie’s voice sparkled. As lead bombardier for the squadron, he’d line up the target in his Norden bombsight. Every adjustment he made in the bombsight altered the plane’s course until positioned over the target. The rest of the bombardiers in the squadron would keep their eyes on
Sunrise
and release their bombs when Charlie did.

The Luftwaffe abandoned them, which meant flak ahead. Jack squinted into the distance at the leading groups. No black puffs of flak, only dark specks plummeting eighteen thousand feet to earth.

“That’s one beautiful target,” Charlie said.

Jack didn’t have Charlie’s view through the clear Plexiglas nose, but in a few minutes he saw what his friend meant. The Danube River made an unmistakable bend, as in the slides at briefing, and an aircraft factory snuggled in the bend, complete with workshops, hangars, and an airfield. Best of all, a column of smoke rose thick and dark from the center. Only a few smudges of flak spoiled the picture.

“Just aim for that smoke, huh, Charlie?”

“That’s … what … I’m … bombs away.”

Jack had that heavy rising-in-an-elevator feeling as the load fell from the bomb bay. “Okay, Charlie, I’m taking back my girl.” He turned off the AFCE. “Let’s continue our European tour, men.”

He followed Castle east to the Rally Point. The combat boxes formed up again, and Jack’s low squadron flew neater and tighter than Babcock’s high squadron. Good. Castle would notice.

Now for the southern leg, the fun part. All those Fw 190s and Me 109s would be refueled and ready to hit them over western Germany, not over the Alps and across Italy. Let them search and burn up that fuel.

Fuel. The holes in his wing made him nervous. “Levitski, check the fuel in the Tokyos.”

The copilot flipped the fuel indicator switch on the far right of the panel. His thick eyebrows bunched together over his oxygen mask. He flipped the switch some more. “The right tank’s down to 390 gallons. Left tank’s still at 540.”

“Oh boy.” Jack looked out the right window toward the wingtip. “Must have a slow leak.” It wouldn’t show up in the engine fuel pressure, because they couldn’t transfer from the auxiliary tanks until each engine fell below one hundred gallons.

“I see it,” Levitski said.

A golden dotted line bled away in the slipstream, and nothing could stanch the flow. Jack had lost 150 gallons in about an hour and a half. He couldn’t afford to lose all 540 gallons, 20 percent of total fuel capacity. Jack’s lungs strained against the pressure, the waters threatening to swamp him.

“Novak?” Levitski said. “What do you want to do?”

Jack coughed away the sensation. “Can’t do anything. Can’t even transfer what’s left until the main engines fall below one hundred gallons. Where are we at now?”

“About 155 in each.”

Over two hundred gallons total to burn before he could transfer. One whole hour. He would lose another hundred gallons by then, which could mean the difference between landing in Africa and ditching in Mediterranean waters.

Jack forced his mind to focus. He couldn’t lose that much fuel. If only he could—yes! Jack rapped his thigh with his palm. “I’ve got it. Okay, Harv, fuel transfer. Pump off sixty gallons from engine four into engine two. Then another sixty from three to one.”

The flight engineer extracted his big frame from his turret and gave Jack a curious look, but at Jack’s nod, he crouched over the fuel transfer switches on the threshold of the door to the bomb bay.

After the fuel transfer, Jack retrimmed the ailerons to maintain level flight with the wings unbalanced. Then he sent Harv with a portable oxygen bottle into the bomb bay to drain the leaking Tokyo tanks into the emptied tanks of engines three and four.

“Good thinking, Novak,” Levitski said. “We might make it now.”

Jack shrugged, but he took pride in his clever, lifesaving idea, one of many in his career. Top leaders needed ingenuity, and Jack knew he had it even under pressure.

“Say, fellows, look below,” Charlie said from the nose.

Jagged hills built up to majestic, frosted peaks, and Jack let out a low whistle. “Okay, boys—the Alps, sunny Italy, a Mediterranean beach vacation—don’t say I never take you anywhere nice.”

“I feel a song coming on,” Charlie said. “‘I’ve flown around the world in a plane.’”

Jack smiled at the appropriate lyrics. Today he’d add another continent to his list—North America, Australia, Europe, and now Africa.

“‘I’ve settled revolutions in Spain. And the North Pole I have charted. Still I can’t get started with you.’”

Jack squirmed on his sore backside. He couldn’t get started with Ruth, no matter what he did or said or planned. Just as well, because something was wrong with the girl. She told him to leave her alone? Fine. That’s what he planned to do.

14

Redgrave Park

Thursday, August 19, 1943

“Chicken again?” May said with a wrinkled nose and whiny voice, a perfect imitation of the other nurses.

Ruth smiled and scooped the last bite of chicken à la king onto her fork, bland but filling. “I wonder where those girls were during the Depression.”

“Their memories must be shorter than ours.” May scraped her plate clean of her second helping, yet she was just a slip of a thing. “I wonder if we’ll hear anything tonight.”

“I didn’t hear planes today. With this weather …”

May stood and picked up her tray. “Africa. I can’t believe they’re in Africa.”

If they made it. Ruth followed her friend, returned her tray, and stepped out into the misty evening.
“‘One misty moisty morning.’”
She could still see Jack’s confident grin as he sauntered toward her. That was before he knew, and he knew only the smallest part.

“I hope it’s clear tomorrow.” May threw her cape around her shoulders. “This waiting—oh, it’s unnerving.”

Ruth smiled at the role reversal. “Don’t you always tell me to trust in the Lord?”

May let out a small laugh. “I know, but I wish I knew Charlie was all right, and Jack too. My goodness, 60 planes lost out of 376. That’s 600 men. We’ve never lost even half that many before. The odds—”

“Hush.” Ruth put her arm around May’s shoulder. “Don’t get worked up. I know you’re worried. I am too, but we have to be strong for our patients.”

“I know, and hundreds of Bible verses tell us not to fear, and I do trust God. I do. No matter what, his will is best.”

Was it? Ruth tensed as they turned onto the pathway into the woods behind Redgrave Hall for their evening walk. Was it best for Pa and Ma to die? For those men—

“If Charlie and Jack are in heaven now, we should rejoice for them, and if they’re alive, we should rejoice to have more time with them.”

Ruth’s heart drifted down. She had no more time with Jack, but she forced a smile and jiggled May’s shoulder. “So when Charlie comes home, will you go out with him?”

“Yes.” May’s smile twitched about. “I’ve been praying. I thought I was sparing my heart, but look at me. Am I less worried than I would be if he were my boyfriend? No. I’m only depriving each of us of happiness, however short it may be.”

At least Charlie and May would have that happiness. Her heart rose back into position.

“Will you patch up things with Jack?”

Ruth let her arm fall and hugged her cape about her. “There’s nothing to patch up.”

“Nonsense. He’s crazy about you, and you’re crazy about him, even if you won’t admit it.”

Ruth sighed. How had she convinced herself both she and Jack only wanted friendship? How had she let it progress so far?

“One thing about Jack Novak.” May trailed her hand on a tree trunk. “He doesn’t give up.”

“He did.”

“I can’t see him giving up so easily.”

Black leaves mottled the leaden sky, as thick and wet as the sadness that had been her companion for several days. “You didn’t hear his voice.”

“Why? What did he say?” May asked, not with Flo’s malignancy or Marian’s lust for gossip, but with confidential compassion.

Ruth picked up her pace. “Come on. I have my physical for the flight nursing program tomorrow and I want to be in shape.” Now more than ever she needed to get off the island.

“Ruth, I’m not giving up.”

She groaned. “Jack didn’t say anything, do anything.”

May came alongside. In the last few weeks she kept any pace Ruth set. “What happened? You’ll feel better if you talk about it.”

“Is that right, Freud?”

May chuckled. “Freud has nothing to do with it. It’s what friends do.”

The branches tangled in a web overhead. Exactly why Ruth avoided friendship.

“Let’s start from the beginning. Charlie and Jack caught us dancing in the street, and then Charlie hauled me away under the pretense of buying pencils. Pencils?”