Wingmen (9781310207280) (61 page)

Fred killed the
first Zeke as it tried to walk up on the skipper’s tail, with a
low-degree deflection shot that was just like shooting at a towed
target sleeve. The enemy pilot had shown a fatal lack of attention
by letting Fred get that close in perfect firing position. It took
three seconds of shooting. Every shell seemed to hit; the great
greenhouse canopy was smashed and one wing was torn off completely.
He had time to notice that the pilot was bailing out and hoped he
could be that lucky if the time ever came. Obviously, the stories
of Japanese pilots jumping without parachutes were not completely
true. The second Zeke had come at him from ahead and above and it
missed; then stupidly it had tried to outclimb the Hellcat. Fred
simply followed him into a well-executed Immelmann, rolling out at
the top of the half-loop to find himself in perfect position. He
exploded the Zeke’s fuel tanks with a single long burst. Then he
split-s’ed back to his previous altitude in time to see the skipper
begin tangling with five or six more Zekes.

He wanted
badly, desperately, to help, but it was impossible. The enemy
pilots that came at him now were obviously better trained than the
others; nothing he did could shake them, and they were steadily
shooting him to pieces.

The first one
scattered machine gun bullets down his right wing like a handful of
rocks, leaving a random pattern of little holes. Another sawed off
several inches of wingtip and put a very ominous, single small hole
in the engine cowling. In minutes the overheated engine began to
throw oil, obscuring his vision forward just when he needed it the
most. After a particularly violent maneuver in which he climbed
vertically until he stalled and then fell like a stone for five
hundred feet before regaining control, a pair of deadly Zekes hit
him hard somewhere in the rear. The rudder controls became very
sluggish. Once during the struggle he saw a Hellcat locked in
another tangle with several Zekes and thought it might be the
Skipper, but he couldn’t be sure. They had him trapped and almost
done for when he heard someone tallyhoing. It sounded like Duane
Higgins. Hellcats dove past him and burning Zekes began falling
like so many autumn leaves. But the last enemy pilot, as if giving
him a parting shot, hit him hard and very nearly killed him.

It was a single
twenty-millimeter cannon shell, he was sure, that slashed through
the canopy just above his eyes and exploded outside of the aircraft
with a tremendous
whomp
that tore the stick from his hand and blinded
him with its flash. When he could see again he was almost on the
deck, fishtailing erratically and barely flying. But calm instinct
took over and he trimmed the plane. He began to climb, dimly aware
that something was very wrong. It was then that the pain hit
him.

The pain was
like a living thing surging up through his arm and side and
wrenching control of his own body away from him. It overwhelmed him
and he nearly blacked out. He came to only by the strength of sheer
terror and shock, and then he knew there was no time to lose and
that he must get back to the ship. When he tried to climb again, he
realized that something was wrong with his right hand, the hand on
the stick. When he moved it, the pain shot through his arm and
washed in waves over his heart. He grabbed the stick with his left
hand, and the pain eased somewhat. Forcing his mind to work, he
remembered the course back to the task group and shakily turned to
zero six zero, crossed the islands and the reef and headed out to
sea. He flew mechanically, totally oblivious to the blood slowly
saturating the right side of his flight suit.

In a few
minutes, his engine began to run rough and trail smoke. The idea
that he might not make it back penetrated his barely functioning
mind. He looked past his bleeding hand to the instrument panel, saw
that oil pressure was nearly gone and engine temperature was far
into the red. He began to lose altitude in order to ditch. He took
it down to one hundred feet before decreasing the throttle, knowing
he couldn’t reach it with his throbbing right hand, yet unable to
take his left off the stick and face the pain that would inevitably
follow. Finally he could wait no longer. For a moment he clenched
his teeth, then shouted deliriously when the weight of flying again
hit the damaged hand. But he cut back on the throttle, even lowered
the flaps some, before taking the stick again with the left hand.
Concentrating grimly on the task at hand, unaware of anything else,
he mothered the sinking fighter to the surface of the water, flared
to drag his tail portion first, hit hard, bounced once, and nosed
over to a crashing stop. At the final contact, the straps on his
right side tore loose and his body was flung into the instrument
panel. His head crashed into the gunsight.

Strangely, he
was feeling no pain as he calmly pushed himself back into his seat,
reached up and slid the canopy back. The sudden quiet after hours
of continuous noise was somehow comforting, and he disentangled the
straps on his left side and tried to hoist himself out of the
cockpit. When his right foot found a step on the seat, his leg
collapsed and he dropped back. “Damn,” he said out loud, and he
began again to crawl out of the sinking plane, pulling himself with
his left hand and pushing with his left foot. He rolled onto the
wing like a sack of potatoes, slid head first into the warm sea
water, and quickly pulled the handle on the Mae West to inflate it.
It whooshed up around him and he bobbed, contented. He was
alive.

Relaxed, Fred
suddenly felt half-asleep. The sea water and the quiet lapping of
small waves against his life jacket seemed to ease the hurts, and
he thought, I’ll just take a little nap, then head back to the
ship. Things will be all right then. I can have dinner with the
guys and the skipper, maybe take in the evening movie; then I’ll
hit the sack and get a good night’s sleep. It will be nice.
Everything will be all right.

He slept.

Jack watched
Fred’s Hellcat sink. Then he saw the tiny figure of the pilot
floating on the water like a piece of debris. He slowed to minimum
speed, lowered flaps, and drifted over at fifty feet. Fred was
alive. He had to be. How else could he have gotten out? Or inflated
the life jacket? Jack circled and flew over once more, torn between
staying near Fred or flying away and leaving him.
If I leave him
, he thought,
he’ll die
.
There could be no other end. He checked all around him, seeing only
empty sky. His aircraft seemed in good shape. The engine ran
smoothly. On the horizon, delicate smoke rose from the islands of
Truk.

He ditched
almost casually, nearly losing sight of his wingman on the final
approach. Then for a horrible second he thought he would run over
him in the water. But the Hellcat mushed in and stopped short of
the bobbing figure by a good hundred yards. As though it were an
everyday experience, Jack lay back the straps and turned off the
power switches just the way he did when he left the fighter on the
deck of the
Constitution
. He stepped out, reached back in for
the seat-cushion raft, and plunged into the water. He inflated his
life jacket first, before his heavy flight boots could drag him
under. Then the life raft was blown up and he struggled into it.
The little folding paddle and the first-aid kit were right where
they were supposed to be. Jack took out the paddle and began to
row.

One hundred
yards in a rubber doughnut proved to be almost more than he could
manage, and it took him an agonizing thirty minutes to reach Fred.
When he did reach him, he was so motionless in the vinyl pillows of
the Mae West that Jack thought he was dead. The water around him
was brownish with blood.

“Fred.” Jack
tucked the paddle under his feet and grabbed Fred’s collar. “Fred,
wake up.” He shook him.

“Hi,
Skipper.”

Jack heaved a
deep sigh of relief and tried to pull Fred’s inert form into the
raft. “Help me here, Fred. Please.” Jack reached out and removed
Fred’s goggles; then he saw with shock that Fred’s eyes had been
forced shut in his black, swollen face. “Come on, Fred. There’s
room in the raft. Come on.”

“Sure,
Skipper,” said Fred. Sluggishly, he placed both hands on the side
of the raft. Jack saw that one hand was bleeding. He grabbed Fred
by the back of the flight suit and tugged with all his strength.
The raft nearly foundered, but when it settled, Jack had Fred
halfway in.

“Come on, Fred,
help,” he pleaded. Fred groaned, began to crawl painfully. Working
together, they inched his body into the raft. Jack turned him over,
holding him like a baby.

“Oh, Jesus,”
said Fred, and was quiet.

Jack looked at
him carefully, afraid that he’d stopped breathing, and put his head
on Fred’s chest to listen to his heart. He couldn’t hear it but
felt his chest expanding and contracting. He lifted Fred’s right
forearm and pulled off the glove. The ring finger tore off and
stayed in the glove and a fountain of blood poured out. Aghast,
Jack fought to keep control and scrabbled for the first-aid kit.
Fred came to again and began thrashing and moaning as Jack broke
open the little package, found a bandage, and tried to stanch the
flow of blood. Fred passed out again, thankfully, and Jack wound
the bandage around the hand and nub of finger, then took out the
second and last bandage, wound it into a strip, and tied it as
tightly as he could around Fred’s upper arm. He hoped it was
enough.

Fred moaned,
delirious. Morphine. That would help. Jack searched through the kit
and found five Syrettes. Shaking uncontrollably, he broke one open,
uncovered the needle, pulled back the left arm of Fred’s flight
suit, and jabbed it in. Fred almost immediately calmed. Breathing
easier, Jack dropped the Syrette overboard and began to search the
rest of the body.

Halfway down
Fred’s right side was another surprise. He caught his finger on
something sharp and jagged, then rolled him over to get a better
look. A three-inch piece of aluminum was protruding from his side.
He touched it gingerly, finding it solidly wedged in between the
ribs. There appeared to be little blood, so he left it. He searched
some more, and found an ugly, black-and-blue, knobby fracture in
the right leg below the knee. He took his hands away, grateful that
there was nothing more to find, but still overwhelmed by the nature
of the wounds. He could no more help Fred than he could get them
both back to the ship. He drew a shuddering breath and exhaled it.
He felt very helpless.

“Not time to go
yet,” said Fred, distinctly.

“No, Fred,”
said Jack. He tried to hold him close. “I won’t leave you.”

“Champ,” said
Fred, “and don’t you forget it.”

“I won’t,” said
Jack.

“Skipper
wouldn’t like it. No more doping around.”

“Don’t worry.
You’ll be all right.”

“Me and
Heckman.”

“Yeah,” said
Jack. “You and Heckman.”

Then Fred was
still, and Jack held him all through the morning while the sun
burned down on them. A strike force of bombers and fighters passed
overhead. Two of the fighters stopped to circle. Jack waved
frantically, but the fighters left, and they were alone again.

Some time in
the early afternoon—Jack couldn’t tell exactly when because his
watch had stopped—Fred came to. The morphine was wearing off. For a
few minutes, before the pain became too much, he was lucid.

“How’d you get,
here, Skipper?” he asked.

“I flew,” said
Jack. “Don’t talk. You’ll be all right.”

“I’m getting
pretty good at this ditching business.”

“I’d say you
got it down pat.”

“I never got to
show you how to tie a knot in a cherry stem.”

“No, you
didn’t.”