Code Name: Infamy (Aviator Book 4) (10 page)

“Vampire one, Judy.”

He was closing quickly and rotated the scale to twenty-five miles. He had the bandit level and on his nose, and as it reached the bottom of the indicator, he selected five miles on the range.

“Vampire one, V sub C high.”

Kid was reaching overload and couldn’t remember what V sub C was. The dot began to run on the screen, and he flipped the scale to one mile; it was gone. Velocity of closure! Shit, I’m about to run into the Bandit. He instantaneously pulled off hard left and jerked the throttle to idle. After settling his Hellcat, he confessed to Jenks. “Vampire clean.” He no longer had the Bandit on his scope. Not only that, the violent maneuver had tumbled his internal gyros. He now had vertigo.

“Snap vector; one, two, zero. Bandit is three miles level, speed two hundred.”

Kid went back to the five-mile scale and gently turned his aircraft to the heading as he slowed to 210 knots. Centering the target he carefully monitored his speed as he methodically drew the electronic specter to his guns. When it was near the bottom of the screen, he selected one mile.

“Judy!”

At a half mile he slowed to 205 knots and switched to gun aim mode on the auxiliary control unit, positioned over the throttle. Carefully closing until the radar return filled the reticule, Kid stabilized in a perfect gun aim position. Each wingtip touched a line of the gun aim range rings etched on the scope, meaning the Bandit was at 250 yards. Kid squeezed the trigger; four .50-caliber Browning M-2 machine guns and two 20- millimeter AN/M2 cannons ripped open the darkness. The combined muzzle flash was bright, but the retinal overload created by the exploding bandit rendered him completely blind, and he jerked the Hellcat away from the newborn nova. Uncoordinated and rough, he lost control of the aircraft and began a spiral toward the black ocean below. Realizing he could do nothing while blind but make things worse, he let go of the controls. Instead he concentrated on finding the thunderstorm lights that would bathe his cockpit in bright white light, allowing him to see again.

Fumbling around, he finally found it and turned on the lights. Bright light fed constricted eyes, and he could see the instruments. Even though his head told him he was spiraling to the left, his instruments showed right. Trust the instruments, he told himself. Kid took the controls gingerly and began to recover as he turned the lights to dim. Once level he flipped his lights back to red, and his eyes recovered rapidly. Still the only light outside of the cockpit was the flaming Bandit. He watched as it impacted the ocean, instantly smothering the flames. A transient memory flashed through his consciousness of shooting a Roman candle into the Red River as his father steadied his hand. The sudden reminiscence reinforced his mixed feelings for the Japanese crew that had just perished at his hand. By extension they had killed his father and brother in China three years earlier. Lieutenant David “Kid” Brennan had come to the Pacific for vengeance, and he had reaped it often. But everything changed after what he had seen on Okinawa.

He’d been tasked with doing a reconnaissance flight over a troop presence on the southern cliffs. But it wasn’t troops. It was women, some holding babies to their breasts, jumping to their deaths on the rocks below. What had they been told would happen to them if the Americans took the island? he often wondered. As he’d flown by, he’d locked eyes with one of the women, a mother holding her child. A mother not unlike Theresa. A child not unlike his son.

It was shocking, even in this tropical meat grinder, and his recurring nightmare started after that. It wasn’t the Japanese woman jumping; it was his Theresa, clinging to their son as she flung herself from the same cliff. I have to get my head back in the game, he told himself. A night carrier landing loomed ahead in the darkness. That was nightmare enough.

10:00 Local, 10 May, 1945 (15:00 GMT, 10MAY)

Diego De Almagro, Santiago de Chile

Ten clear strikes rang out from Catedral Metropolitana de Santiago’s bell tower. Irish rolled over and found Maria’s deep brown eyes watching him. They were filled with a sadness he could feel.

“This is a cruel fantasy.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I am a woman and a whore. I cannot own property, and no man will want me.” She rolled away from him, pulled her legs up to her chest, and wept silently. Irish could feel her body shudder, and it tore at him in a way he didn’t fully understand. He eased out of bed, sliding effortlessly from between the silk sheets, and went into the living room. For a long while he stood over the telephone, staring at it, lost in deep contemplation. With resolution he seized the phone and dialed.

“Spike? Irish. I need a favor.”

01:55 Local, 10 May, 1945 (16:55 GMT, 10MAY)

USS Suwannee, off the coast of Okinawa

Kid trimmed the Hellcat hands off and dimmed the cockpit lights as much as he could. His eyes had recovered, but it was dark—a total darkness like he had never seen. An hour earlier he had watched the crescent moon set. All visual reference and his heart sank with it. There was no horizon, no up, no down. Nothing but black. And it was time to land. His only allies were his Hellcat’s flight instruments and his own skill. Kid feared he didn’t have enough of either. And he was low on gas. The gauges glowed blood red: wings, level; airspeed, 80 knots; altitude, level at 500 feet; gear and flaps down. He felt like he was clinging to the gauges by his fingernails, barely hanging on, barely able to decipher their code, barely able to determine what to do next.

“Vampire one; two miles, descend to approach altitude.”

The radio crackled to life; the voice was a gift in the dark. He had set the AN/APS-6 back to transponder mode to allow the controller to closely track him and line him up behind the Suwannee. Kid eased off a little power, set a 500-feet per minute descent on his vertical speed indicator, and started down into the abyss.

“Vampire, you are one mile.”

Kid took a peek and saw the deck lights come on; he also uncaged his internal gyro and began to get rough. He kept looking out, trying to fly his Hellcat with no reference, trying to get reference from the ship. His instrument scan broke down, and his flight control inputs became exaggerated by fear.

“Vampire is a half mile.”

His control stick moved violently as he tried to average out the inputs, and he knew he was really killing snakes in the cockpit now. The term pilots used about when they got rough, as if they were trying to club snakes with the control stick, didn’t seem funny now. He had a full-fledged case of vertigo, too.

“One quarter mile!”

The controller’s nervous voice raised the stress level. On the port edge of the Suwannee’s deck, just past the edge or ramp, was a small LSO platform. On it stood Landing Signal Officer Lieutenant Jim “Hoffer” Hoffman, also known as Paddles. His job was to guide Kid onto the deck of the Suwannee. Also a pilot, he flew dive bombers on his off days, and he felt for Kid as only another naval aviator could.

“Kid’s losing it. Light me up.”

A Third Class Petty Officer threw a switch that lit the lights on his night LSO suit. Its arms and legs had yellow lights, and the paddles he held in his hands were orange. Hoffer held them out, forming an illuminated Roman Cross. Kid’s approach was un-salvageable, and Hoffer began to slowly wave his arms over his head. The signal was a wave-off command, a mandatory go-around. But Kid kept it coming. Hoffer walked out onto the landing area, frantically waving his arms. Inside the Hellcat, Kid recognized the signal with a jolt of cognition and immediately jammed the throttle forward. Too much! rattled through his brain, but it was also too late.

Horsepower generated by the Pratt Whitney R-2800-10W Double Wasp engine spiked as the turbo charger kicked in and instantly converted to torque through the Hamilton Standard four-bladed propeller. Its force caused the aircraft to rotate around the propeller, literally rolling Kid’s Hellcat inverted. Hoffer saw the wingtip lights slowly roll until they were reversed and off the port side.

“Easy with it!” he futilely yelled into the dark night.

Kid was in deep shit and knew it; he was much closer to death than earlier in the night. Much closer than he had ever been in this endless war. He had passed its edge, penetrating the very threshold of his demise. He’d been shot down, but with his parachute, he’d hit the water and survived. This time, there would be no chance. This time, the ocean would swallow him whole.

His bladder voided as he hung upside down in his straps. Then, instinctively, he jerked the throttle back and snap rolled the Hellcat upright. Gingerly he pulled back on the stick as he fed in right rudder and small amounts of power. He saw the flight deck edge lights pass above him. Suwannee’s deck was a mere forty feet off the water, and he was below it—but he wasn’t in the water yet.

Pumping the stick slightly to break his rate of descent, he hovered over the inky, black death. Kid stopped looking at the altimeter when it passed twenty feet. Slowly, with discipline borne of experience and sheer determination to live, he fed in power. He had to fight the urge to slam it to the stop, and it nearly drove him mad in the microseconds that expanded into minutes as his intellect and instinct methodically and with purpose moved his body to execute perfect control inputs. It would take perfection to save him.

Once lower than the length of its wing, the Hellcat stabilized on a cushion of air, the life-giving ground effect. Kid let the Hellcat dig its claws into the still night. At 80 knots he began to program in more back-stick pressure, and then held the attitude for an 80-knot climb profile. Leaping off the ocean, the Hellcat continued to point to the stars as Kid unbridled all 2,200 horsepower. Climbing at 30 degrees nose up, Kid reached 3,000 feet before he thought about pulling back the throttle.

Hoffer looked over at his backup LSO. “Now that was a wave off!”

“Are we gonna get him onboard Paddles?”

“I’ll catch him; don’t you worry about that.”

Kid’s next approach made it all the way to the ramp before he went high, and Hoffer waved him off again. After his controlled go-around, the ship radioed Kid, asking what his fuel state was.

“Vampire 1, say state.”

Irritated by the intrusion as he attempted to muster the concentration he’d need for another approach, Kid snapped back a one-word response. “Confused!”

In the tower the air boss looked over at “Stutz”—Lieutenant Commander Stutzman—who had been quietly watching his boy joust with the devil. “He’s rattled, Stutz.”

Stutz merely nodded in the soft red light; there was nothing else to say. His pilot, whom he had sent up on this suicide mission, was hanging by a thread. On the LSO platform, the ship’s phone rang. Hoffer picked it up.

“Yeah, well, I’m scared, too, and I’m on the ship, not in a Hellcat running out of gas. Let me do my job!”

He slammed the receiver back onto its holder. CAG, the commander of Suwannee’s air group, stepped out of the shadows. “Who was that?”

“Skipper of the ship.”

Immediately, the phone violated the quiet night again. This time CAG grabbed it and answered with authority. “Cag.”

“This is the ship’s captain, and I don’t much like being hung up on!”

“We are pretty busy down here, Skipper.”

“Roger that, bring him up the starboard side and have him bail out.”

“Negative.”

“Excuse me?”

“As long as he’s got gas, I’m working him.”

“Cag, I can’t keep this ship pointed in the wind all night. For all we know a Jap sub is launching torpedoes at us right now.”

“This ship could be sinking right now if it wasn’t for him. I’m the one who sends these young men up there, and I’m damn well gonna get them back if I can!”

“My duty is to this ship and the one thousand men on it. One more pass!”

“Aye, aye, sir.” CAG slammed down the phone harder than Hoffer had. “Trick or treat pass, Paddles; let’s get our boy home.”

In the tower, the boss handed Stutz a radio handset. “The elephants are stomping. Why don’t you see if he even has enough fuel for another pass?”

Stutz took the handset and rested it under his chin as he keyed the microphone. “Hey, Kid, its Stutz; you got enough gas for another try?”

The sound of a friendly voice calmed him. “It’ll be close,” he responded.

“Roger that. Turn in early and stay on those instruments until you can’t stand it. And then give them one more scan after that.”

“Roger.”

Stutz handed the boss back his handset and leaned against the table top that depicted a diagram of the ship’s deck and scale aircraft cut-outs, each with a corresponding side number of the actual air wing aircraft it represented. It showed where aircraft were positioned, for planning purposes on deck . One was still in the air, and a spot was conspicuously open for it on the port side amid ship.

“You think he’s got enough, Stutz?”

“No.” Swiveling in his big barbershop-type chair, the boss reached over and hit the lever on the squawk box.

“Bridge, tower.”

“Go ahead, tower.”

“Recommend you signal the plane guard destroyer to stand by for rescue at sea.