Whip (20 page)

"All right, troops, they're getting close. Stay in tight. No stragglers." Whip was calling out the signals like a man on the gridiron. They'd chewed what was left of the barges to a blood-soaked shambles and continued on their way. The other ten pilots wondered why they were still staying on the deck with those Zeros snapping at their heels. All they had to do was ease apart and come back on the yokes and they'd be in clouds too thick for the Japanese to do anything about it but curse. Well, Whip had his own way, whatever it was.

"Coombs, how far back are they?" Whip called his turret gunner.

Bruce Coombs looked through plexiglas down the trailing tube of fuselage, between the two rudders, watching the Zeros coming in like lithe sharks. "They're almost in range, Major." Coombs hesitated. "If we're gonna play that game of yours we better do it now, sir."

Even as the turret gunner called in the position of the Zeros he saw the first bright flashes along the wings as they opened up with their cannon.

"They're in range
now
," Coombs added hastily.

"Everybody split, now.'" Whip barked, hands and feet mauling the controls.

It could not have been better. Masahiko Obama thought of the next flag on the side of his fighter, squinted through his eyepiece and squeezed the trigger on his stick. He felt the thudding recoil of the cannon as they fired, and —

His face was a mask. The bomber suddenly wasn't there! Cannon shells split empty air.

Like two swarms of fast whales, the bombers had broken from their tight cluster, splitting their tight formation to the left and the right. Obama rocked his wings, furious, giving the signal for the fighters also to split, to take each pack with an equal division of Japanese planes. He eased in rudder, moved the stick. All the Yankees had done was to delay the inevitable. Strange, however. They could escape easily enough in those clouds just above. They —

His Zero hurtled toward the B-25s, closing with enormous speed. He banged down on the trigger, firing all guns and cannon, but his aim was off, far off.

A stream of tracers splashed across his vision as turret and waist gunners in the enemy bombers opened up with a deadly crossfire.

In the B-25s the pilots and copilots were flying as if each man had an extra set of arms and hands. Struggling to keep in tight both formations the pilots and the men to their right were working in unison, hauling back on throttles, banging down on gear handles, dropping the first notch of flaps. The airplanes shuddered with the sudden deceleration, gear and flaps throwing out tremendous drag, as if the bombers had slammed into invisible quicksand.

"Here they come!"

"Man, they didn't expect that!"

"Get that guy to the right! That's it; hose 'em!"

Four Zeros, startled, whipped beneath the bombers, skimming wavetops. Several started up and broke off the maneuver because of the clouds. One fighter disappeared into the overcast, forced to climb to avoid a collision. But in that moment of utter confusion most of the veteran Japanese reacted with instinctive skill, breaking even more sharply to the sides, keeping up their speed so they could roll back swiftly. It was a dangerous maneuver that exposed the fighter undersides to the enemy gunners. Obama cursed; a Zero had become a ball of fire. Another was disintegrating in the air.

It took only moments to roll sharply one way and then roll back the other, following the reasoning that a withering strike into the midst of the bombers was still the best move to make. Obama saw the bomber he'd been following shedding pieces of metal and one propeller starting to slow as cannon shells found the engine, but he couldn't slow his fighter in time. He had to break off the attack, skidding sharply to avoid a collision.

The other Zeros followed his lead, moving in a loose swarm
between
the split formations of enemy bombers, because there was nowhere else to go. The fighters plunged between the bombers, gunners tracking, lacing the sides of the Zeros with streams of fifty calibers. But it was no more than a fleeting shot, really. The Japanese fighters were moving too fast, and they raced ahead of the bombers.

Which was everything Whip had been hoping for…

19

"Clean 'em up!" Whip whooped into his mike, snapping out the words, and even as he shouted the command the pilots had been expecting, he and Bartimo were bringing up the gear, dragging in the flaps, going to full power on the big Cyclones. Emergency power, the copilots now on the quadrants, handling the levers, leaving the pilots free to fly, to concentrate on the airplanes and flying and what they might yet do with that awesome firepower pointing forward from each bomber. The gunners called out the Zeros splitting, some down, a few up, two breaking away completely, but the big bunch ramrodding it directly between the bomber formations.

"Okay, everybody bring it in close. Move, you people! Come on, come
on
!" Whip's shouted words were unnecessary. As quickly as he'd called to clean up the B-25s everyone knew what to do, had done it and even now were bunching together again. But Whip was alive with a glorious fury, savagely intense, every muscle and nerve straining, and the words were needed expressions for the energy burning from him. The formations closed, nine bombers in tight —

"Lead from Twelve." That was Ben Patillo, flying one of the two planes added to the mission. "I've got one burning, trying to feather. I'm falling back."

"Lead, Shannon here. I'm staying with him."

"Okay, okay. The rest of you tighten it up, goddamnit,
tighten it up
."

Lou Goodman studied Whip Russel. He'd already dismissed the crippled bomber from his mind —

Masahiko Obama felt the centipede with cold legs crawling down his neck. He hadn't had that feeling many times, but now he knew he was racing ahead of the bombers, and he would be exposed to the nose gunners. He shook off the feeling. Foolish man! he cursed himself. Those are not fighters back there. Bombers, with only a single gun in the nose of each airplane. He shook off the feeling, ready to come around and —

"
Now
!" He shouted the command to himself, and in a move of beautiful precision he had the stick hard over to the left, tramping left rudder, hammering the throttle full forward.

No airplane in the world turned like the Zero; the machine came around in a beautiful tight curve. Fighting the strain of centrifugal force Obama looked up through his cockpit glass, keeping the enemy formation in sight, and —

His blood ran cold. He looked into the most terrible sight he had ever seen in his life. An immense black bullet surrounded with rippling, blazing fire, pointing straight at him, coming at him, and the Zero shuddered from nose to tail, staggered in its flight as a fury of enemy bullets slammed into the machine. The canopy cracked wide, air howled.

Obama felt one slug in his leg, a knife of unbelievable pain. Another blazed into a shoulder, the instrument panel coming apart before him.

He had no time to think, there was no thinking. Gasping with the agony slicing through him he rolled level, horsed the stick back as hard as he could pull. The Zero leaped upward, a stupendous bursting climb. More blows; holes in the wings, metal flying away, and then he was into a world of gray, in the clouds, struggling to remain conscious, to keep that back pressure, keep the airplane flying, keep going through the loop he had started…

That's right, you bastard… keep coming around, keep coming…

Whip was raw nerve, hunched forward, thumb caressing the gun tit, waiting, waiting.

The right moment, he wanted that as he watched the Zero with two orange slashes diagonally across the fuselage, one of their leaders, coming around in that tight turn and

—

Twelve machine guns roared. The stream of lead from the B-25 caught the first Zero.

Whip saw metal flying, the cockpit tearing open and —
he was gone
. Whip gasped with disbelief. He'd had him cold-cocked, right on the griddle, and the son of a bitch had jerked his fighter out of the way.

Not you, you son
of a bitch. Oh
, no, not you. You're
mine
…

Obama's wingman, Petty Officer Kumao Tokunaga, had stayed with his leader. He'd rolled level, started back on the stick with Obama. But he was just behind the lead fighter, and for Tokunaga there was no escape.

Whip gripped the yoke until his knuckles were white. The second Zero was pinned to the wall. In an unbelievable moment the fighter took the full brunt of his massed guns. It took only a moment as the engine was smashed from its mounts, the cockpit churned into bubbling flesh, the tanks blown wide open and exploding and the Zero was no longer there, only a mass of burning sputum coughed from the sky.

It was the opening play in instant disaster for the stunned Japanese. One moment they had been the pursuers, the wolves snapping at their fleeing prey, and in the next instant the prey had become dragons spitting terrible fire. Psycho's bomber rolled sharply, in a wild and punishing maneuver that put him directly on the tail of a Zero just starting its turn, and the Mitsubishi before him literally shredded as he held down the gun tit for a long, overwhelming burst. He watched pieces of airplane flying into the air, flashing past his own cockpit. A distant banging sound told him they'd hit some of those pieces, and then the wings, both of them, snapped away from the Zero and the wreckage whipped violently into the sea.

In just those few awful seconds, five Zero fighters were burning or torn apart by the incredible firepower of the bombers. The others were fleeing wildly to escape, breaking away in shallow dives in the narrow airspace still left to them.

It was over. They might blow the bastards out of the air, but they couldn't pursue them.

Whip grinned at Alex Bartimo and the grin was infectious. Goddamn, they'd done it.

Whip glanced off to one side and the grin froze on his face. Out of the cloud cover, trailing a long scarlet tongue of flame, came a single Zero, more flying wreckage than airplane. The fighter was on its back, coming out of a loop, and Whip glimpsed two diagonal orange slashes, the same fighter he had chewed up when he opened his attack that had escaped with the unbelievable roll and breakout in a loop into the clouds. Now he was coming back, it was impossible, what the hell kind of impossible pilot was in that airplane?

And then Whip Russel knew the terrible, awful thing that was about to happen and there was nothing he could do. He started to shout his warning, but even as the words formed in his throat, staring through his left window, he knew it was too late, and he didn't know if he was going to cry or scream because —

He was beyond pain now. His leg was useless, numb, his shoulder still sending traces of its agony through him. He gritted his teeth to stay conscious, just a bit longer, and in the misty gray of the clouds all about him he saw the sudden reflection of fire from the engine, felt the heat wash into the cockpit through the shattered glass, and he knew the end was here with him.

But if death is here, one does not fight it. It is to be embraced, so its final sweet moment may be lived to the full.

Masahiko Obama thought of his home in Osaka, the temple on the hill that always caught the morning sun. Clouds vanished before him as the Zero whipped beautifully through the final part of its arc and he sliced away from the clouds, and there was the American bomber before him, leaping upward, growing in size. Blood spurted from between his lips and Obama smiled.

Banzai.

Live ten thousand years.

Masahiko Obama held the stick steady and true in his dying hands. He went to join his ancestors with peace in his heart and a smile on his bloodied lips.

"My God!
It's Psycho
!"

The Zero came straight down. It tore into the second bomber in the formation like a silvered, burning dagger. The engine went into the wing root between the fuselage and the right engine, and the fuel tanks exploded, and in that last awesome moment the B-25

and its five men vanished in the angry fireball that filled the world.

The shock wave cracked outward and the pilots fought to keep from one another, to avoid the collision that the roiling air threatened. Then small burning pieces fell away into the ocean and it was gone.

Alex Bartimo glanced at Whip. He was frozen, still looking behind him. Alex saw their slow drift to the left. He brought in rudder, held them straight.

"Lead, Shannon here."

They waited for Whip Russel to answer. But he was just turning his head forward. He didn't seem to have heard. Alex thumbed the transmit button.

"Lead here. Go ahead."

"Patillo can't make it back if he has to climb. He's on one fan and the other may go any moment. His panel is shot out and he hasn't any gauges. We're going to have to make an end run around the island along the coast and hope we can make it into Seven-Mile."

Still no answer from Whip.

Alex took it. "Everybody from Lead. Throttle back so Patillo can come up to us. We'll go back together."

20

It was a long and wearying flight down the northern coastline of New Guinea. After the intense fighting against the warships and barges, and then the hammering exchange with the Zero fighters, the men were exhausted. The loss of Psycho and his whole crew had been another drain of emotional and physical energy. Two bombers had flown from the combat area earlier, Dusty Rhodes escorting Muhlfield home on his one good engine.

Psycho was gone and that left ten bombers out of the thirteen that had started, now making the circuitous trip back.

The two surviving Airacobra pilots had elected to stay with the bombers as long as their fuel would permit. Also, neither fighter pilot relished climbing out on the gauges, and to make it back to Seven-Mile overland meant flight through towering clouds.

What kept everyone on the edge, as well, was that remaining engine in Ben Patillo's airplane. He'd extinguished the fire in one, but the second power plant was acting up.