Aces (57 page)

It was roughly fifteen miles to base camp from the outskirts of Rangoon. Steven tilted his cap down over his eyes and slouched
in the back seat of the Jeep. He would have liked to doze away the slow ride—along a narrow road that tunneled through jungle
greenery—but sleep was impossible. He was too keyed up wondering if today he might finally enjoy his first victory. He sure
had come a long way in the months since he’d left his job at Donovan Air Charter.

Back around the middle of May, Steven had used what was left of his sign-up money to buy himself a railway ticket to San Francisco.
Once he was in Frisco he’d made contact with Cappy Fitzpatrick, who was in charge of the group of volunteers setting sail
via freighter for the voyage to the Far East. They’d arrived in Rangoon in August, and had enjoyed a couple of weeks of free
time in which to explore the city until the rest of the A.V.G. had arrived. Soon after, Chennault had showed up, to take all
two hundred and ten of them—pilots and ground support personnel combined—on an uncomfortable railway trip to the training
camp he’d set up in Toungoo, about a hundred miles to the north.

The Toungoo camp was an abandoned RAF base. Once Steven and the others had set foot in it, they’d understood why the Brits
had left. The heat and bugs would have been bad enough, but steamy Toungoo, which was in the process of being reclaimed by
the jungle, was also home for rats and snakes and bloodsucking bats… Well, he hadn’t exactly seen the bats suck blood, but
other guys had said they had, and he believed them.

There had also been disease. Steven had suffered a nightmare bout of dysentery, but he managed to get over it and hang in.
A lot of guys hadn’t been as lucky, and had left the A.V.G.’s employ on stretchers.

Toungoo had been bad news, but the A.V.G. fleet of P-40 Tomahawk fighters had been just as unfriendly to the men. A lot of
the guys had gained their experience flying multi-engined aircraft. For them, getting acquainted with a single-engine fighter
had been like learning how to fly all over again. There’d been a lot of crashes, especially during landings. Steven remembered
how Chennault got progressively angrier and more frustrated as the accidents ate away at his precious fleet, and his sparse
inventory of spare parts.

It had been sometime in the fall that one of the pilots, remembering how the Japs, who were an island people, were supposed
to be afraid of sharks, received permission from Chennault to have the P-40s’ noses painted up like ferocious man-eaters.
Meanwhile, the old man’s stateside contacts had asked the Walt Disney Studios for their help in coming up with an insignia
for the A.V.G. The Disney people had devised a tiger wearing a pair of little wings, leaping though a V for victory. Chennault
loved it. From then on, the A.V.G. were The Flying Tigers.

Now, bouncing along in the Jeep on his way back to base, Steven couldn’t help smiling, remembering how the old man had been
so contemptuous of him after reviewing his “career” at Donovan Air Charter, and after having laid eyes on him. As it turned
out, Steven had been one of the A.V.G.’s better pilots, right from the start. While he hadn’t the shooting expertise of the
veteran fighter pilots, Steven had cut his teeth flying his pop’s single-engine jobs, so he at least hadn’t needed to unlearn
a lifetime’s worth of experience, unlike those poor multi-engine veterans…

The news delivered via radio of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had cut short Chennault’s “kindergarten.” Thinking back
on it, Steven figured that had been just as well. School had already cost the Tigers a dozen planes, lots of ammo, and the
life of one man. If they’d kept on training, pretty soon there would have been none of them left for the Japs to pick on.
As it was, they could put up only some fifty airplanes at one time, and they had to split their numbers to try to protect
hundreds of miles of territory against the Jap air force, one of the best in the world.

That second week in December, the A.V.G. squadrons went their separate ways. Chennault took the majority of the A.V.G. to
Kunming. Cappy Fitzgerald led twenty-one airplanes to Rangoon.

It was just a little after 6
A.M.
when the Jeep pulled into base camp. The grounds, and the packed dirt airstrip, had been hacked out of the banyon trees and
jungle creeper. There were several hangar tents for the airplanes, a supply tent that also housed the squadron’s radio equipment,
a mess tent, and a tent that served as operations room and bar. The motor pool—a couple of Jeeps, and three lorries laden
with oil and fuel drums—was hidden under camouflage netting. Several orderly rows of smaller tents where the men slept were
staked out under the shelter of the tall palms.

“Cappy wants all pilots in operations,” one of the motor pool guys said as the Jeep came to a halt.

Steven made a quick detour to the mess tent for a mug of coffee, and headed over to operations, where he found himself a folding
chair in the back. Cappy was up on the raised platform at the front of the tent.

Cappy was in his thirties, Steven guessed. He was only about five feet, nine inches tall, but he was broad-shouldered, and
Steven knew from personal experience that Cappy was very strong: the guy could whip Steven in arm wrestling anytime. Cappy
had a thick black moustache, and curly black hair. He was dressed for flying in high boots, khaki pants, and an olive green
T-shirt. He had a holstered .45 cinched around his waist, and his leather jacket draped over a chair.

Cappy was joking with some of the guys seated up front. “Tell us your secret for success!” the guys were demanding. In the
previous battle, Cappy had singlehandedly accounted for two Jap bombers and two fighters. That meant an extra two grand, so
far, in Cappy’s pay envelope this month. The A.V.G. was paying its pilots a bonus of five hundred bucks per confirmed kill.

“All right, listen up,” Cappy shouted. “I want to go over the mistakes we made last time. First off, I’ve been told those
radios the old man managed to scrounge up have finally been installed in our planes, so we should be able to communicate with
each other, and the base.

“Okay, about the battle a couple of days ago. I guess we now all know that the old man was right when he warned us against
one-on-one dogfights. The Jap fighters can outmaneuver us every time in individual duels, so what we’ve got to do with them
is just what Chennault taught us to do against bombers: get above the enemy, and power dive on him. Bounce the suckers with
all six machine guns blazing, and then haul ass away from them, circling and climbing to repeat the maneuver. Everybody got
that?

“Second, it’s a safe bet that there’s gonna be one fuck of a lot more of them than us. Fortunately, they like to fly in tight
formations. What we do is pick out the thickest concentration of the enemy for our dives. That way we’re likely to hit something
on each pass. Finally, I want you to concentrate on bombers. Don’t let yourselves be decoyed by Jap pursuits looking like
they’re turning tail and running away. Stay with the bombers! They’re easier targets, they’ve got bigger crews, and they’re
the real danger to the city and our base—”

“Hey, Cappy! What’s going to keep the fighters off our tails?” Stan Jenkins called out. Jenkins, close to forty, had been
a captain in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Word had it that the corps had offered to promote him to bird colonel to get him to
stay. Jenkins would have been base commander, but he’d turned down the job, explaining to Chennault that he didn’t want to
deal with the paperwork.

Before Cappy could reply to Jenkins’ question, one of the radio men entered the tent and made his way to the front. He whispered
something to Cappy, who nodded.

“All right!” Cappy announced to the group. “We’ve received word from one of our coastal spotters that a large force of bombers
accompanied by fighter escort is heading this way. For a change, we’ve got all our planes on the ready line.

“Now, getting back to Stan’s question,” Cappy continued. “We’ll work it this way. We’ll split up into two flights. Ross will
lead Flight One against the fighters. It’ll be their job to keep the fighters occupied. I’ll lead Flight Two against the bombers.”
Cappy quickly divvied up the pilots.

“Any questions?” he demanded, looking around. There were none. “Then let’s saddle up, cowboys! We’ve got about fifteen minutes
to get our asses in the air to meet ‘em!”

Steven was first out of the tent. He shrugged on his jacket and zipped it up while he was running to the airstrip, where the
ground crews were busy preparing the planes. He stopped short when he saw that his own P-40 was not on the ready line. He
looked around, and saw his plane—with its engine cowling off—parked just inside the hangar tent.

Steven saw the chief mechanic pacing up and down the ready line, directing his men, and hurried to intercept him. The chief
saw him coming and shook his head. “Sorry, Steve. She’s just sprung a coolant problem. She ain’t going nowhere.” He hurried
away.

Steven just stood there, too angry to say anything, or even to curse.

“Tough break, kid.”

He turned. Cappy was standing behind him. “Your first time out, your guns jam.” Cappy shook his head. “And now this…”

Steven nodded. “Now I’m
still
not going to know if I’ve got the guts to make it as a fighter pilot. I’m worried about what you said. That the longer a
guy waits, the worse it’ll be for him…”

“What
I
said?” Cappy looked mystified, but then he smiled wearily. “You talking about that baptism of fire shit?” He rolled his eyes.
“Kid, I was drunk…”

“You’re just saying that now.”

Cappy sighed. “Ah shit, this serves me right for getting drunk and shooting my mouth off to impressionable young kids…” He
tossed Steven his canvas flight helmet. “Go on, you can take my plane.”

Steven stared at him. “You mean it?”

“Go on, move your ass! Before I change my mind—”

“I’m gone!” Steven laughed. “Thanks, Cappy!” he yelled over his shoulder as he dashed to the ready line.

The rest of the olive green and brown, camouflage-painted P-40s had been started up, and were taxiing out onto the runway.
The ground crew stood clear as he climbed into the cockpit of Cappy’s fighter and strapped himself in. He pulled on the canvas
flight helmet and then murmured a prayer as he went through the complex start-up procedure, worried that now Cappy’s airplane
would malfunction.

She didn’t. Her Allison V-12 engine wheezed to life coughing blue smoke, and gradually built to a confident roar. Grinning
with excitement, Steven waited for the revs to climb, and when she was ready, he slid shut the Plexiglas canopy and taxied
out onto the runway.

Everybody else was already in the air, so he had the runway to himself. He picked up speed and took off, raising his landing
gear as he climbed to join the rest of the Tiger pack, heading toward the coast to intercept the Japs.

After his last experience, Steven was itching to test his guns, but he didn’t dare. Ammo was precious. No plane carried more
than a minute or so worth of firepower. His radio crackled and he heard Cappy inform the Tigers that Steven Smith was flying
his plane, and that Jenkins was now the leader of Flight Two.

Clouds began to appear as they neared the coast. The Tiger pack was about fifteen miles from the field, within sight of the
Rangoon waterfront, when Steven spotted the Jap formation, a flock of dark-winged specks, closing fast. He keyed his radio.
“I see them!”

“We all see them, kid, over,” Jenkins said, his voice sounding calm over the static.

“Jesus, there’s a lot of them, over,” one of the other pilots said, his voice sounding tinny, his signal breaking up over
the little speaker hanging by a twist of wire from Steven’s instrument panel.

“I count sixty bombers, over,” one of the others chimed in.

“I count twenty fighters, over,” another Tiger said.

“Cut the chatter,” Jenkins ordered. “Everybody stay off the radio, unless it’s an emergency. Let’s get some altitude on those
suckers, over and out.”

Steven pulled back on the stick of his P-40 and climbed. The Japs were pretty close now. He could see that the fighters were
open-cockpit, fixed-landing-gear, Ki-27 monoplanes. The Ki-27 was armed with just a pair of light machine guns in her nose,
which were not terribly effective against the P-40’s armor-plating, and self-sealing fuel tanks, but the Jap fighter could
turn on a dime, stick to your tail like glue, and eventually chew you up. In an individual duel, a Ki-27 against a P-40 was
a lot like a judo expert up against a heavyweight boxer. The Ki-27 delivered lots of little stings that eventually added up,
and, meanwhile, was itself hard to hit—but if the P-40 did connect, its four .30-caliber wing guns and the pair of fifty-calibers
in her nose could literally explode the unarmored Ki-27 out of existence.

“All right,” Jenkins radioed. “Split up into your flights. Ross, go after those fighters, keep them off our backs; over.”

“Happy hunting.” Ross chuckled. “Over and out.”

Steven watched as the airplanes of Flight One banked away and then began to dive on the Jap fighters.

“Flight Two, follow me!” Jenkins radioed. “Let’s kill some bombers! Over.”

Steven pushed his stick forward and dived toward what looked liked an acre of Jap airplanes in the sky. Deep in concentration,
feeling no fear at all, he flicked off the safety on his guns and picked out a target. The gray, twin-engine Mitsubishi bombers
were heavily armed, but it was their turret cannons on top their fuselages, just behind the cockpit, that were especially
dangerous to the Tigers. During training, the A.V.G. had been taught to use their .50-caliber, long-range guns to kill the
turret gunners, and then open up with their close-range, .30-caliber wing guns.

As Steven dived, his target’s turret cannon swung his way and began winking fire. He resisted the instinctive impulse to veer
away. He took his time framing the cannon in his cross-hair sights and let loose a burst. The drumbeat pounding of his twin
fifties vibrated through the cockpit. He saw his tracer rounds impact on the turret. Shards of plexiglass went spinning off,
twinkling in the sunlight. The cannon stopped firing and began to swing lazily, aiming at nothing at all.