Whip (16 page)

And there was the matter of just how high the B-25 could climb. No one in the squadron, or no one any of the pilots knew, had ever flown the airplane to its listed service ceiling

— that altitude where the B-25 could still climb at a rate of at least one hundred feet per minute. Out of curiosity and also his fervent desire to know just about everything there was to know about the machine in which he flew off to war, Whip took up his bird for a joust to high altitude. He carried only fuel and ammunition for his guns; no bombs.

The flight manual said the airplane would take off with a full load and climb steadily to a service ceiling of twenty-five thousand feet. The book proved right; they passed that height with a climbing rate of at least three hundred and eighty feet per minute. But —

"Captain, how much longer we going to keep up this crazy shit?" A pause, then: "sir,"

added grudgingly. The complaint was voiced by the flight engineer, Corporal Bruce Coombs.

"What's wrong back there?" Whip quipped. "You guys don't like clean air?"

"Skipper, how high are we now?" Coombs ignored the pilot's query.

"Twenty-nine thousand and we're still going."

"Let's go the other way, sir. Like, down."

"Is that an official complaint, Coombs?"

"Shit, yes, sir! Captain, it's thirty-two degrees below zero in this here airplane and these clothes and blankets don't hack it. We're freezin' to death!"

His own enthusiasm had permitted enduring the cold. They'd dressed as best they could for the flight. All the clothes they could borrow, blankets, canvas; they looked like refugees running from a glacier. It worked only for a little while. The temperature went down steadily until the men
were
half-frozen. Alex Bartimo turned to Whip. "You can't see me because of this bloody oxygen mask, but my teeth are blue and my lips are yellow and my liver has curled up and died, and it is way past time to get the hell out of here." A spasm went through the Australian. "Whip, you're going to have a crew with frostbite. I don't know if you're laughing behind that gargoylish mask, but this is
serious

."

Whip looked down on the earth nearly six miles below. He was enraptured with islands shrunk to tabletop relief models, the sun silvered and gleaming across a vast stretch of ocean, clouds blinding white on their tops and casting splotchy shadows below and —

He sighed, pulled the plug and started down.

Alex Bartimo had been right. Bruce Coombs had two frostbitten toes. The whole squadron came to visit him. It was a special occasion. The temperature at Garbutt Field was one hundred and twelve degrees above zero and they had a cursing gunner with frostbite.

"I'd like to see the face on the guy in the Pentagon who reads
that
medical report,"

murmured one pilot.

Whip sat on the hood of the jeep three quarters of the distance down the runway at Garbutt Field. Thunder snarled across the field and bounded along the desert. Dust flew wildly behind spinning props. The Death's Head Brigade was alive, testing its muscle, honing its skills, finding out just what it could do with the modified airplanes loaded to their limits. Whip had marked off runway distances so that he would
know
what his men could do. Every pilot in the squadron was going through takeoff tests. Here at Garbutt they had plenty of room. A man who didn't get off the ground in the distance allotted to him found his mistake wasn't irreversible. Plenty of room left. Once they got to Kanaga Field there wouldn't be any room. Not extra feet, anyway. Here and now was the time to find the flaws.

At the far end of the runway a killer airplane rolled slowly onto the active. It bobbed on its nose gear, coming gently to a stop, the nose wheel aligned with the runway. Whip grinned at the sight. Huge yellow fangs to each side of the eight guns in the nose marked the number seven ship in the squadron. First Lieutenant Octavio Jordan was at the controls, with Duane Collins, another First, in the right seat. The full crew was aboard, and the bomb bays were loaded with bombs filled with sand.

Whip brought the radio microphone to his lips. "Seven, how about it?"

"We're ready."

"You'd better be. What's your numbers?"

"Density altitude at just over five thousand feet, boss."

"You still think you can get that thing off in three?"

"You're my mother. I can do anything mom tells me I can do."

No more time for conversation. Thunder rose from the far end of the runway as Jordan went to flat pitch on the props and brought the throttles steadily forward. The airplane shook and trembled from the nearly four thousand horsepower screaming through the engines. But they didn't move yet. The pilots stood on the brakes, holding her back.

They'd move only when every gauge in that cockpit told them they had it all going for them. Behind the bomber a small sandstorm had leaped into being, hurled away from those wildly thrashing propellers.

"Seven to control. We're, ah, go."

At almost the same moment Jordan called out brake release Whip heard the change in propeller pitch, a clear aural signal the airplane was moving, hacking great chunks of air as it pulled forward. Gone now was the levity they'd exchanged for several moments, for pounding along a dirt runway in a bomber loaded with lead up to its ass was no game.

Not when a single mistake could produce a blinding sheet of flame and five dead men.

The B-25 howled louder and louder as it sped down the runway. Whip watched Jordan's technique with the airplane and nodded his approval. The pilot had the nose wheel up slightly, preventing it from digging into the soft ground, decreasing his drag. It might add up to only a fraction of performance but fractions have a habit of getting together and producing major results.

Faster, faster, still faster, and Jordan would need every bit of speed he could squeeze from his airplane. The engine gauges were all the way around to max performance; manifold pressure and r.p.m. and fuel flow and the rest of it, everything in the green and at the stops, and a blast of thunder pounded Whip as the B-25 hurtled past him. He watched with hawk eyes. At two thousand seven hundred feet from starting his roll Jordan was coming back on the yoke. The airplane was heavy, God, she wallowed a bit in the heat, but the wings had their grip on air. Jordan was flying as if he were taking off from the airstrip in the New Guinea mountains he'd never yet seen, committing to what lay in the future, and as fast as he had the machine above the ground they were dragging up the gear, getting it out of the way, cleaning up the airplane.

"Not bad for a wetback," Whip said into his mike.

"It was all the help from the flies in the bays, boss. All them wings going for us."

"How did she feel?"

"Like the wings were made of lead." The B-25 was climbing out in a wide circle about the field as Jordan exchanged his observations with Whip on the jeep. "Funny thing, though.

She acted like she
wanted
to fly. Had to hold her down a bit until we hit the marker at two-seven."

"Roger that."

"Don't think that mystery field of yours will be any problem, boss."

"Better not be," Whip said. "Okay, off you go to that target area. They'll be waiting for you."

"Roger. Seven out."

Jordan and his crew eased off to the west to join several other bombers already making practice runs against a target in the desert, a silhouette of a Japanese ship patched together from trees and brush.

Whip dismissed Jordan's airplane from his mind. Number Eight was moving into position. Whip looked down the runway. Captain Hoot Gibson in the left seat and First Lieutenant Ray Gordon to his right. No teeth or fangs on this bird. Dazzling orange lightning flashes marked the Number Eight airplane.

"Eight's ready to wind up," came the crackle in Whip's earphones.

"Okay, Kansas. Let her rip."

"Roger that, little man."

"Sound off when you kick loose."

"Right."

Number Eight went to the wall with power, another winged killer straining at the leash, and then she was on her way, pounding down the airstrip. At just that moment Hoot Gibson brought her off the deck the right engine faltered.

Number Eight and five men hovered on the brink of oblivion.

Gibson played it like the virtuoso he was. He didn't waste a second in getting the nose down again. They were going too fast and were too far down the runway to come to a stop; the B-25 would have gone screaming out into the boonies and torn herself to pieces.

Everything had to be decided on a matter of split-second timing. Gibson put her back on earth,
kept up full power
. The right engine banged ominously, but Gibson was now gambling on that good left engine and whatever power he could strain from the right.

At the last possible moment he hauled her into the air. It was a total commitment.

Gibson had well over the minimum flying speed necessary to fly her out on one engine,
if
he hadn't been on gross overload. The B-25 boomed into the air, grabbing for sky, the gear coming up. Her speed was falling away swiftly and their time was fleeing with terrible haste.

And then the bomb bay doors came open and Gibson salvoed the full load of practice bombs. Two tons of dead weight plunged from the airplane, lightened the load on the wings, gave the good left engine the chance it needed. It had all happened with terrifying speed and there hadn't been a second to spare, for even as the bombs were falling the right engine died completely and they were feathering the propeller blades knife-edge into the wind. Gibson brought her around with only one fan running, still hot because of her heavy fuel load, and put her down on a feather mattress.

Not until they were rolling on dirt did Whip Russel say a word. "What the hell kind of takeoff was that?" he asked the still shaken pilots.

"The best kind," came the response. He could hear Gibson sucking in air. "We're back home."

"You think that thing is supposed to fly on one fan?"

"Practice makes perfect, boss."

"Consider yourself graduated. Good job, Hoot."

"I'll take three fingers. J and B on the rocks. Don't bother with the ice."

Five days later Whip considered his men — and their planes — ready to go. The bugs had been worked out of the machinery and the men knew their machines. They gathered on the fifth day, seated or sprawled by Whip's airplane.

"We've had a signal, as Alex would say," Whip announced, "from General Smyth. The long and short of it, gentlemen, is that we leave tomorrow morning for our new home.

Takeoff at first light. You will load the aircraft tonight and have your ground crews aboard while it's still dark. We're going into Seven-Mile to refuel and then stage on up to Kanaga Field."

Chris Patterakis looked up at a threatening sky. "What's the weather for tomorrow?"

"Front's moving through. But it doesn't look too bad for what we want to do. Seven-Mile will lay on a diversionary strike somewhere to keep the Japs occupied and away from us when we come in and go out." He looked at his men. Lou Goodman stood behind him, by the nose of the airplane.

"Get your beauty rest tonight, troops. The general also passed on the word that the Emperor's best have started to make their move. The big push into New Guinea."

A murmuring rose from the men at his words. "Hold it," Whip added. "As soon as we land at Kanaga, we get ready to fly. Within two hours of landing, if we get the call."

16

They observed strict radio silence going into Seven-Mile. The tower handled the eleven bombers with light gun signals and brought in the B-25s hastily. On the ground the airplanes were rolled to one side and the fuel trucks driven to them. Some of the ground crews left the bombers here, to wait for another B-25 coming up from Garbutt Field, and two more still being worked on to provide replacements. There would be fourteen airplanes in all at Kanaga: eleven ships committed to missions, one always on standby, two more waiting in the wings to move out on call. There wasn't room for more.

They had a land line in by now between Seven-Mile and Kanaga and they could pass on the exact moment the bombers left the Moresby area so that the ground troops and the natives in the mountain field would be ready to roll the false barriers away from the airstrip. Whip's crews assembled on the ground, and Whip stepped away from center front. From this moment on it was Lou Goodman's show. That was their deal.

"You're all being issued sidearms," Goodman told the men, "and you will wear them at all times when you're at Kanaga. I'm going to repeat that.
At all times
. Flight and ground crews both. Just so no one makes any mistakes that's a direct order and there'll be a court martial for anyone who screws up." He let his eyes rove about the men as he spoke. They may as well understand
him
right from the word go.

"You're not just flying into an advance airfield," he went on. "You're going into territory that may have as many Japanese in the area as friendly troops and natives. You may have to defend that field at any time day or night. It's all down to the bare bones. When we land at Kanaga, everyone will move all belongings and other materiel from their aircraft. You'll do that before you walk six feet from your plane. Captain Russel has already told you we're to be on standby call, ready to roll, two hours after we hit Kanaga. I'm changing that."

He paused. Let them look at one another. Let Whip's eyebrows go up a notch or two at the same time. It'll do the little bastard good to know what side his bread's buttered on.

"It's ninety minutes now, gentlemen. You'll need that half-hour for personal activities.

Because when you get your first good look at Kanaga the first thing you're going to want to do is take a good crap. All right; load up."

They were ready, bombed and fueled, one hour and seven minutes after landing at Kanaga. Goodman didn't bother the crews. They knew what to do and didn't need anyone screwing up their well-drilled act of getting ready to fly and fight. He understood this kind of outfit. You had to be ramrod straight with them. The moment they even suspected you were playing soldier you'd lost them. They'd take orders but there'd be a wall of ice between the men and their commander so thick you could make iceberg sandwiches.