Dragon (2 page)

In the co-pilot’s seat to the right of Dennings, Mort Stromp acknowledged the control tower’s clearance for takeoff. He lowered the flaps. Two of the crew in the waist turrets confirmed the flap setting.

Dennings reached over and switched on the intercom. “Okay, guys, here we go.”

He eased the throttles forward again, compensating for the tremendous torque by slightly advancing the left engines over those on the right. Then he released the brake.

Fully loaded at 68 tons,
Dennings’ Demons
, her tanks filled to their filler caps with over 7,000 gallons of fuel, her forward bomb bay holding a six-ton bomb, and carrying a crew of twelve, began to roll. She was nearly 17,000 pounds overweight.

The four 3,350-cubic-inch Wright Cyclone engines strained at their mountings, their combined 8,800 horsepower whipping the 16.5-foot propellers through the wind-driven sheet of water. Blue flame erupting from exhaust manifolds, wings enveloped in a cloud of spray, the great bomber roared into the blackness.

With agonizing slowness she picked up speed. The long runway stretched out in front of her, carved out of the bleak volcanic rock and ending at an abrupt drop eighty feet above the cold sea. A horizontal bolt of lightning bathed the fire trucks and ambulances spaced along the runway in an eerie blue light. At eighty knots Dennings took full rudder control and advanced the right engines to their stops. He gripped the wheel grimly, determined to get the
Demons
in the air.

Forward of the pilots, in the exposed nose section, Stanton the bombardier apprehensively watched the runway rapidly diminish. Even the lethargic Stromp straightened up in his seat, his eyes vainly attempting to penetrate the darkness ahead for the change in black where runway ended and the sea began.

Three quarters of the runway passed, and she was still glued to the ground. Time seemed to dissolve in a blur. They all felt as though they w re flying into a void. Then suddenly the lights of the jeeps parked beside the end of the runway burst through the curtain of rain.

“God almighty!” Stromp blurted. “Pull her up!”

Dennings waited another three seconds, and then he gently eased the wheel toward his chest. The B-29’s wheels came free. She had barely clawed thirty feet out of the sky when the runway vanished and she struggled over the forbidding water.

Morrison stood outside the warmth of the radar but under the downpour, his four-man staff dutifully standing behind him. He watched the takeoff of
Dennings’ Demons
more in his mind than his eyes. He saw little more than the lurch of the bomber as Dennings thrust the throttles forward and released the brakes before it was lost in the dark.

He cupped his ears and listened to the engine’s pitch diminish in the distance. The uneven sound was faint. No one but a master flight mechanic or an aircraft engineer could have caught it, and Morrison had served in both capacities during his early Army Air Corps career.

An engine was slightly out of tune. One or more of its eighteen cylinders was not firing continuously.

Fearfully, Morrison listened for some sign the bomber was not going to lift off. If
Dennings’ Demons
crashed on takeoff, every living thing on the island would be incinerated within seconds.

Then the radar man shouted through the open door, “They’re airborne!”

Morrison exhaled a tense sigh. Only then did he turn his back on the miserable weather and walk inside.

There was nothing to do now but send a message to General Groves in Washington informing him that Mother’s Breath was on her way to Japan. Then wait and hope.

But down deep the general was troubled. He knew Dennings. The man was too stubborn to turn back with a bad engine. Dennings would get the
Demons
to Osaka if he had to carry the plane on his back.

“God help them,” Morrison muttered under his breath. He knew with dread finality his part of the immense operation didn’t stand a prayer.

“Gear up,” ordered Dennings.

“Am I ever glad to hear those words,” grunted Stromp as he moved the lever. The gear motors whined and the three sets of wheels rose into their wells under the nose and wings. “Gear up and locked.”

As the airspeed increased, Dennings dropped the throttle settings to save on fuel. He waited before beginning a slow and gentle climb for altitude until the airspeed touched 200 knots. Unseen off the starboard wing, the Aleutian Island chain slowly curled northeast. They would not sight land again for 2,500 miles.

“How’s that number-four engine?” he asked Mosely.

“Pulling her share, but she’s running a tad hot.”

“Soon as we hit five thousand feet, I’ll drop her back a few rpm’s.”

“Wouldn’t hurt, Major,” Mosely replied.

Arnold gave Dennings the course heading they would maintain for the next ten and a half hours. At 4,900 feet Dennings turned control over to Stromp. He relaxed and stared into the black sky. No stars were in sight. The plane was feeling the turbulence as Stromp threaded it through the ominous mass of thunderclouds.

When they finally cleared the worst of the storm, Dennings unbuckled himself and climbed out of his seat. As he twisted around, he could see through a port window below the tunnel leading to the waist and tail section of the plane. He could just make out a piece of the bomb suspended in its release mechanism.

The crawl tunnel had been narrowed to receive the immense weapon into the bomb bay and was a tight fit. Dennings wiggled through past the bomb bay and dropped down on the opposite end. Then he swung open the small airtight door and slipped inside.

Pulling a flashlight from a leg pocket, he made his way along a confined catwalk running the length of the two bomb bays that had been modified into one. The weapon’s huge size made for an incredibly snug fit. Its outer diameter measured less than two inches away from the longitudinal bulkheads.

Hesitantly, Dennings reached down and touched it. The steel sides felt ice cold to his fingertips. He failed to visualize the hundred thousand people it could burn to cinders within a short second, or the ghastly toll from burns and radiation. The thermonuclear temperatures or the shock wave from the Trinity test could not be sensed in a black-and-white movie film. He saw it only as a means of ending a war and saving hundreds of thousands of his countrymen’s lives.

Returning to the cockpit, he stopped and chatted with Byrnes, who was running through a schematic of the bomb’s detonation circuits. Every so often the ordnance expert glanced at a small console mounted above his lap.

“Any chance of it going off before we get there?” asked Dennings.

“Lightning strike could do it,” answered Byrnes.

Dennings looked at him in horror. “A little late with a warning, aren’t you? We’ve been flying through the middle of an electrical storm since midnight.”

Byrnes looked up and grinned. “We could have gone up just as easily on the ground. What the hell, we made it, didn’t we?”

Dennings couldn’t believe Byrnes’s matter-of-fact attitude. “Was General Morrison aware of the risk?”

“Better than anyone. He’s been on the atomic bomb project from the beginning.”

Dennings shuddered and turned away. Insane, he thought, the operation was insane. It’d be a miracle if any of them lived to tell about it.

Five hours into the flight and lighter by 2,000 gallons of expended fuel, Dennings leveled the B-29 off at 10,000 feet. The crew became more upbeat as the dawn’s orange glow tinted the eastern sky. The storm was far behind them, and they could see the rolling swells of the sea and a few scattered white clouds.

Dennings’ Demons
was cruising to the southwest at a leisurely 220 knots. Thankfully, they had picked up a light tail wind. Full daybreak showed them alone in the vast emptiness of the North Pacific Ocean. A solitary airplane going from nowhere to nowhere, Bombardier Stanton mused as he gazed absently out the windows of the nose.

Three hundred miles from Japan’s main island of Honshu, Dennings started a slow, gradual climb to 32,000 feet, the altitude at which Stanton would release the bomb on Osaka. Navigator Arnold announced they were twenty minutes ahead of schedule. At the current rate of speed, he figured they should be landing at Okinawa in a shade under five hours.

Dennings looked at the fuel gauges. He suddenly felt cheerful. Barring a hundred-knot headwind, they should make it with four hundred gallons to spare.

Not everyone was wallowing in good cheer. Seated at his engineer’s panel, Mosely studied the temperature gauge of engine number four. He didn’t like what he read. He routinely tapped the dial with his finger.

The needle twitched and wavered into the red.

He crawled aft through the tunnel and stared through a port at the underside of the engine. The nacelle was streaked with oil and smoke was trailing from the exhaust. Mosely returned to the cockpit and knelt in the narrow aisle between Dennings and Stromp.

“Bad news, Major. We’re going to have to shut down number four.”

“You can’t prod her along for a few more hours?” asked Dennings.

“No, sir, she can swallow a valve and catch fire at any minute.”

Stromp looked over at Dennings, his face somber. “I vote we shut four down for a while and let it cool off.”

Dennings knew Stromp was right. They would have to maintain their present altitude and nurse the other three engines to keep them from overheating. Then restart number four during the ascent to 32,000 feet and the bombing run.

He hailed Arnold, who was bent over his navigator’s board tracing the flight path. “How long before Japan?”

Arnold noted the slight drop in speed and made a swift calculation. “One hour and twenty-one minutes to the mainland.”

He nodded. “Okay, we’ll shut number four until we need it.”

Even as he spoke, Stromp closed the throttle, flicked off the ignition switch, and feathered the propeller. Next he engaged the automatic pilot.

For the next half hour everyone kept a wary eye on number four engine while Mosely called out the temperature drop.

“We have a landfall,” announced Arnold. “A small island coming up about twenty miles dead ahead.”

Stromp peered at it through binoculars. “Looks like a hot dog sticking out of the water.”

“Sheer rock walls,” observed Arnold. “No sign of a beach anywhere.”

“What’s it called?” asked Dennings.

“Doesn’t even show on the map.”

“Any sign of life? The Nips could be using it as an offshore warning station.”

“Looks barren and deserted,” answered Stromp.

Dennings felt safe for the moment. No enemy ships had been sighted, and they were too far from shore to be intercepted by Japanese fighters. He settled down in his seat and stared unseeing at the sea.

The men relaxed and passed around coffee and salami sandwiches, immune to the droning engines and the tiny speck that appeared ten miles away and 7,000 feet above their port wingtip.

Unknown to the crew of
Dennings’ Demons
, they had only a few minutes to live.

Lieutenant Junior Grade Sato Okinaga saw the brief glint from the reflected sun below him. He banked and went into a shallow dive for a closer inspection. It was an aircraft. No question. A plane from another patrol, most likely. He reached for the switch to his radio, but hesitated. In a few seconds he’d be able to make a positive identification.

A young and inexperienced pilot, Okinaga was one of the lucky ones. Out of his recently graduated class of twenty-two, who were rushed through training during Japan’s desperate days, he and three others were ordered to perform coastal patrols. The rest went into kamikaze squadrons.

Okinaga was deeply disappointed. He would have gladly given his life for the Emperor, but he accepted boring patrol duty as a temporary assignment, hoping to be called for a more glorious mission when the Americans invaded his homeland.

As the lone aircraft grew larger, Okinaga didn’t believe what he saw. He rubbed his eyes and squinted. Soon he could clearly make out the ninety-foot polished aluminum fuselage, the huge 141-foot wings, and the three-story vertical stabilizer of an American B-29.

He stared dumfounded. The bomber was flying out of the northeast from an empty sea, 20,000 feet below its combat ceiling. Unanswerable questions flooded his mind. Where had it come from? Why was it flying toward central Japan with one engine feathered? What was its mission?

Like a shark knifing toward a bleeding whale, Okinaga closed to within a mile. Still no evasive action. The crew seemed asleep or bent on suicide.

Okinaga had no more time for guessing games. The great winged bomber was looming up before him. He jammed the throttle of his Mitsubishi A6M Zero against its stop and made a circling dive. The Zero handled like a swallow, the 1,130-horsepower Sakae engine hurtling him behind and beneath the sleek, gleaming B-29.

Too late the tail gunner sighted the fighter and belatedly opened fire. Okinaga squeezed the gun tit on his control stick. His Zero shuddered as his two machine guns and two twenty-millimeter cannons shredded metal and human flesh.

A light touch of the rudder and his tracers ate their way into the wing and the B-29’s number-three engine. The cowling ripped and tore away, oil poured through holes, followed by flames. The bomber seemed to hover momentarily, and then it flipped on its side and spun toward the sea.

Only after the choked-off cry of the tail gunner and his short burst of fire did the
Demons
realize they were under attack. They had no way of knowing from what direction the enemy fighter had come. They barely had time to recover when the shells from the Zero ate into the starboard wing.

A strangled cry came from Stromp. “We’re going in!”

Dennings shouted into the intercom as he fought to level the plane. “Stanton, jettison the bomb! Jettison the goddamn bomb!”

The bombardier, wedged against his bombsight by the centrifugal force, yelled back. “It won’t fall free unless you straighten us out.”