1920: America's Great War-eARC (26 page)

The men of the O-7 heard explosions in the distance and grinned. This could only mean that some German tankers had been hit by the other American subs. Their attempt to draw off the German escorts might have been the cause.

Carter couldn’t wait. He ordered the sub to periscope depth and stared at the outside world. In the distance a number of ships were on fire. Great, greasy billows of flame reached for the stars. The other two subs had killed at least some of the tankers.

He was counting the dead and dying ships when he sensed motion. He swivelled the periscope and saw a German destroyer less than a hundred yards away and picking up speed as it headed toward him. It had sat unmoving and silent on the surface hoping to catch the American sub unawares. It had succeeded. Sharp eyes on the destroyer had spotted the periscope silhouetted against the burning tankers.

“Dive, dive, dive!” Carter screamed. The crew reacted desperately, but it was too late. The knife-edged prow of the German destroyer sliced through the hull and conning tower of the O-7. Carter’s last thoughts were of sheer terror as he and his sub were cut in half by the larger ship. The two sections sank quickly. There were no survivors.

* * *

The captain of the German destroyer glared angrily at the debris and the handful of mangled bodies that bobbed to the surface. He had won a Pyrrhic victory. The American sub was dead, but the destroyer’s hull had been badly damaged by the collision and she was taking water. Damage control parties were working desperately to shore up ruptured bulkheads. He would have a devil of a time getting his ship back to Los Angeles. Already the destroyer was down by the bow and his executive officer sadly informed him that she would probably sink. Worse, the American sub attack had destroyed perhaps half of the desperately needed tankers.

At least there were no more American submarines to contend with. Reports said there’d been three and that all three had been destroyed. But who, he wondered, had won the battle?

CHAPTER 15

Josh rather liked being driven around in a staff car by an enlisted driver, even though the driver was an Army private who must be wondering just what Josh had done to deserve him. At any rate, they drove in relative luxury until, about ten miles outside of town; they exchanged the car for a motorcycle and sidecar, with Josh in the sidecar. At this point, the driver turned into a lunatic who drove as fast as he could over the rutted dirt roads that rapidly deteriorated into crude paths in the dense and rugged woods.

Josh hung on for dear life as he was pitched back and forth. More than once his head hit the windscreen and he wondered if the bruises would qualify as yet another wound. When he questioned the driver, he was told that he was supposed to get Josh to the site by three. Josh thought they could have left a little earlier and driven more slowly, but such was life in the military.

A few minutes before three, they pulled up before a log gate that was guarded by a pair of grim-faced soldiers armed with Thompson submachine guns. Other guards were visible in the woods behind, and barbed-wire fencing ran as far as he could see.

The guards checked their ID and let them through. They drove down a hillside and into a valley. A tent city was at one end along with a crude airfield. Chalk outlines and rough structures that looked vaguely familiar were scattered about. Several dozen small biplanes were scattered about. From the miscellany of colors and styles, he assumed they were civilian craft, but what the devil were they doing in an army installation?

He would find out in a minute. He got out of the sidecar, checked his bruises and limbs to see that all was there and promptly snapped to attention. Colonel Billy Mitchell stood beside him.

“At ease, Lieutenant. How was your trip?”

“Sir, about as frightening as the thought of going up in one of those little planes.”

Mitchell chuckled. “We will arrange a ride to complete your education.”

Josh was about to say something when he realized that Mitchell was serious. “Sir, the admiral only said you were working on something to harm the German fleet and that I was to talk to you about your progress. May I ask what that is?”

Mitchell glared at him. “Certainly you are not alluding to my attempts to sink warships with bombs are you? While my attempts might have failed, I do believe such will happen and in the not to distant future.”

“As in the next few weeks, sir? I would dearly love to see the German fleet destroyed,” Josh asked hopefully.

“As I told your admiral, absolutely not,” he said as they walked over to a two-seater biplane. Josh was suddenly filled with dread. “Get in the rear and take two of those bags of flour with you.”

Josh did as the colonel ordered. A grinning mechanic handed him two bags of flour and then showed him how to use the speaker tubes to communicate with the pilot, Mitchell, if he didn’t feel like screaming at the top of his lungs. Mitchell started the engine and the mechanic spun the propeller, and they started bouncing down the dirt field.

“Don’t worry about freezing to death, Lieutenant; you won’t be up all that long.” They cleared a stand of trees by a few inches and climbed only a little. “And we won’t be going so high that you won’t be able to breathe. That doesn’t happen until about ten thousand feet.”

Josh didn’t know whether to feel reassured or not. The plane banked and Josh had a marvelous view of the camp and what he presumed were targets. He’d quickly realized that the shapes were intended to be ships and the collections of poles and canvas mimicked warships’ superstructures. The size of the targets told him that German battleships were what they were going to go after.

“Lieutenant, what we are going to do is very simple. I’m going to fly over the target and you’re going to drop a flour bag and try to hit the damn thing anywhere you can. The bags weigh twenty-five pounds each and will be awkward to handle, so just do your best. I don’t expect accuracy from you, only an understanding of what we’re doing out here and what we’re up against.”

Mitchell banked the plane again and came straight in on the port side of a target ship. “Drop when you’re ready,” Mitchell said.

Good god, Josh thought, we’re only about twenty feet off the ground, or ocean, he corrected himself. The bag was heavy and awkward to handle, but he managed to hold it over the side.

“Some day soon would be nice,” Mitchell snapped.

Josh dropped the bag and twisted to see. The plane banked and he spotted a white blob and a puff of dust on the ground about a hundred feet short of the outline of the hull.

Mitchell laughed. “Actually, that wasn’t half bad for a first try by someone who’d never been on a plane. Grab another bag and we’ll do it again.”

They did and, this time, Josh dropped with more decisiveness and confidence. He still missed but was much closer. Mitchell landed the plane and they got out, which was just as well as Josh was starting to feel very cold. Now he understood why pilots were heavily bundled up even in warm weather.

“Not bad at all for a rookie,” Mitchell said. “A few more tries and you’d be hitting the target with monotonous regularity. Now you can tell Sims how easy it is. But tell me one thing, Lieutenant.”

“Sir?”

“Could you hit the target at night with fires burning all around you and with a score of assholes with machine guns trying to blow you out of the sky? And, oh yeah, your target might just be moving erratically at twenty knots an hour in an attempt to shake you off.”

Josh saw the point. “I hope I would give it a helluva try, Colonel.”

“Good answer. Now watch.”

A group of small planes lifted over the hill and descended in an attack pattern. The flour Josh had dropped had been washed away by the ground crew and the new pilots had a clean target. Twelve bags were dropped and seven of them hit.

“Good, but they can and will do better. Thank God we don’t have a shortage of gas or, for that matter, flour.”

Josh looked around at the number of other pilots who’d gathered near them. He was shocked to see that some were women. Mitchell commented that, yes, a dozen or so were women, but that all were civilians.

“And if Admiral Sims is concerned about the fair sex getting into combat, tell him not to worry. I have no intention of letting women fly when we do attack.”

Josh understood. Mitchell was covering his ass. When push came to shove, there would be little anyone could do to prevent a civilian woman from getting into her plane and doing whatever the hell she wished to help her country. Josh felt a surge of pride for the volunteers, male and female.

Sunlight was just starting to fade and Mitchell said that Josh would stay the night. When he protested that he really should get back to San Francisco, Mitchell laughed.

“Why I’ll bet you got a girl back there, don’t you? Well, I’ll just bet she’d like you alive and in one piece, now wouldn’t she? You saw how miserable that road was in the daytime, now think of your driver trying to navigate that dangerous trail in the dark. You crash and your body will be eaten by bears or cougars before you can say jack shit.”

Bears? Cougars? All of a sudden a night with a bunch of crazy civilian pilots didn’t seem like a bad idea after all.

* * *

A few dozen yards away and obscured by shadows, twenty-three-year-old Amelia Earhart watched the two men converse. She was surprised to see the lone junior officer gain access to the field. Mitchell was obsessive about security, so the young man must represent someone important. Sims, she concluded.

Amelia had managed to get fairly close to the visitor and concluded that he was fairly cute but not her type. Too bookish, she thought and laughed silently. She lived for the adventure of flying.

Amelia had been flying planes for more than a year. She’d fallen in love with the freedom of flight and had taken lessons. She’d proven an apt pupil. Her family lived in Long Beach; thus, she was able to join the strange force created by General Billy Mitchell and called the “Fireflies.”

She sometimes wondered if Mitchell was aware that she and several other pilots were women. The female pilots dressed like men and didn’t flaunt their femininity. Maybe Mitchell was kept ignorant of the gender of some of his pilots, or maybe he was just desperate for qualified pilots.

Either way, she had a plane, a Curtiss JN4 biplane. As a warplane in the 1916 campaign in Mexico, it had been a failure. It was now only used as a trainer. Some had even been sold to civilians which is how she got hers.

Fully loaded with five hundred pounds of cargo, its ninety horsepower in-line engine could barely get the plane off the ground. The plane was a two seater, but Amelia liked flying alone.

Amelia also thought she’d heard the colonel say something about women pilots not going into combat. The comment made her laugh. She would do what she bloody well wished.

* * *

Sometimes the prisoners would ignore Martina Flores when she walked by the compound, except, of course, to stare at her ripe femininity. The day before she’d signaled that she wanted a distraction. She said throw stones at her.

“
Puta
! Whore! Bitch!” yelled the men as she strolled by. She made an obscene gesture. The men behind the wire hurled rocks, being careful to make sure none hit her.

Martina screamed back at them and threw her own rock over the fence. None of the guards noticed that it wasn’t one that had been thrown at her, and none of them noticed it really wasn’t a rock.

Joe Sullivan picked it up and tucked it in his sleeve. It was a small package. When Martina ran away, the uproar ended. As instructed, he waited a few minutes and then delivered it to Captain Rice, who took it and walked away. When Rice was in the collection of rags he called his tent, he carefully opened the package. His eyes widened. Two keys lay snug in the box. One was labeled “Main Gate,” and the other said “Armory.”

Well, well, Rice thought and smiled. The captive Americans had been in their prison near Raleigh for a couple of months and, by now, all had sharp objects they could use as knives. But a key to the German’s armory? That meant rifles. Well, well indeed.

* * *

“General Marshall, I really think you should come and look at the river.”

Marshall stood and stretched. He’d been working on yet another response to Washington outlining the futility of it all. “Thank you, Sergeant,” he said grumpily and walked the hundred yards to the ice-filled torrent.

What torrent? What river? His eyes widened as he took in the scene. Scores of soldiers were standing by the edge of the river. “Sir, it’s just like someone turned off a faucet.”

Indeed, it was. Marshall’s mind raced. The river was placid and calm and the depth was dropping rapidly. What the hell had Hoover done? Had he actually found a faucet? But the strange man had said to get ready. So Marshall’s men were ready.

“Barges and bridges,” Marshall yelled. “I want barges in the water and I want them stuffed with everything we’ve got. And get those pontoons across now!”

Everything had been loaded and waiting for several days. Preassembled pontoons were run out and connected, followed by planking for men and vehicles. The river did not complain. It continued to drop and was now only a few feet deep and moving very slowly. Barges pushed out like a Biblical horde, delivering men and supplies to the other side and then returning for more.

In only a few hours, the first bridge was finished, and then the second. A third and fourth would follow shortly. One bridge was for vehicles, and trucks began to move carefully across the bobbing structures. Infantry started their trek across the second bridge.

Hoover materialized beside Marshall. His face was grim, but there was a satisfied glint in his eyes. “What the devil did you do, Mr. Hoover?”

“Blew up a couple of mountains and choked the gorges. That created rough dams.”

“How long will they last?”

Hoover shrugged. “No idea. I would hurry, however. We are trying to ease pressure on the dams by allowing some water to run through, but the dams can’t last long.”

Marshall saw infantry moving slowly. “Double time, damn it,” he yelled.

“No!” Hoover said softly. “Vibrations will damage the bridges. Have them walk normally.”

Damn it, Marshall thought. I knew that. He was too anxious to get men across. Still, they could and did hurry with no gaps between the men.

Marshall had a horrible thought. He visualized a tidal wave rushing downstream when the dams gave up the ghost. “How much warning will we have and will the water rise quickly or gradually?”

“I have no idea. I do have men ready to signal if the dams collapse. Just keep your people moving.”

A truck stalled on the vehicle bridge and some men started to work on it. “Push it in the river,” Marshall yelled. “Nothing delays the crossing.” Men heaved and the truck fell off the shaking pontoons and into the river.

“I wonder if this is like Moses crossing the Red Sea,” Marshall said. “The Bible said the sea parted but never said the land was perfectly dry. Was it was something like this, with everybody running like the devil to get across in time?” He laughed harshly. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve an army to get across and it still might not get to San Francisco in time.”

Hoover didn’t reply. His mind was already someplace else.

* * *

The joint Army-Navy headquarters complex at the Presidio was a madhouse of activity as armed soldiers and sailors either took up stationary positions or patrolled the extensive grounds. The command and communications system had broken down and there was fear that the headquarters was in grave danger.

Civilian employees like Elise were either shuffled out of the compound or denied entry. Inside, Luke Martel strapped on a .45 automatic and wondered just what the hell had gone wrong.

General Nolan stormed into the conference room and took charge as more senior officers deferred to him. “Gentlemen, let’s review. At approximately three this morning, a boat containing eight men was spotted by one of our shore patrols as it was attempting to come ashore. The patrol and the people in the boat exchanged fire. Two of our men were killed and a couple more wounded. The occupants of the boat jumped out and ran inland. They were the survivors of the fight. We found four dead bodies and they were all German Navy Marines.”