Air Force Eagles (10 page)

Marshall recalled him at once. Riley had been a fifteen-victory ace with Quesada's Ninth Tactical Air Force—he'd been sent to Ramitelli to give a dive-bombing demonstration and a pep talk. When he left, he'd put on a dazzling twenty-minute display of low-level acrobatics.

"Sure, I remember. You really beat up the runway in your Mustang." Then, with a diffident grin, "They call me Seffy Mizrahi here, but I can't get used to it."

Riley commented, "The Red Tails were a good outfit. You never lost a bomber you were escorting, did you?"

Marshall liked him immediately. Few people—even Air Force pilots—had ever heard of the pilots from Tuskegee, much less of their combat successes.

Riley explained that he'd arrived the night before, direct from his training in Prague. "Only had five days of training, half a dozen hops in one of these crates." He gestured to the fighter's fuselage with his elbow. "Pretty sorry after a 51, huh?"

In just the few moments of their conversation, the sun had crept up enough for the soft morning light to light up the chiseled angularity of Riley's face. He'd pulled his poncho off, smoothing down a shock of straight black hair. His skin was almost as dark as Marshall's, whose normal copper tone had burned jet black after only one week under the desert sun. They had no friends in common, so they talked of Italy and Prague, and Riley asked why Marshall was flying for Israel.

"I couldn't get a flying job back home. No one will hire Negroes—and I'm too stubborn to give up flying. Besides, I sort of like the idea of fighting for a minority—it's in my blood, so to speak. What about you? You could be flying with the airlines if you wanted to."

Riley hesitated for a moment. "Sorry I brought the matter up. I can't tell you. Please don't ask."

Marshall was considering that when Myers came over and told them that Riley would be Marshall's wingman. The field telephone rang loud in the crisp desert air and the adjutant emerged from the tent, yelling, "Cockpits, please."

The pilots turned to their aircraft, busying themselves with the pre-takeoff chores, plugging in the radios, adjusting the harnesses.

Erich Weissman climbed up on the wing with a rag, polishing the thick armored glass for the fifth time that morning. Marshall liked him; he was conscientious to a fault and full of the skills he'd picked up working as a slave laborer building jet engines for the Nazis.

In Prague, Erich had told him about his years at Dachau, where the Germans had beaten and starved him so that his body was as twisted and gnarled as a Monterey pine. In a flat voice, he poured out unbelievable stories of mass death and grisly cremations, portraying the scenes of horror with a powerful immediacy. Talking as he worked, his emotions tearing him to bits, Weissman wielded his wrench as if the bolts were the heads of Nazi prison guards. Weissman had strengthened Marshall's belief in his current mission and made him think about home. Racism in the United States might not be as ghastly as racism had been in Germany—but it was still racism, and he was increasingly aware that he was going to have to fight it.

"Of course. The ones who got away. It wasn't just the concentration camps like Dachau and Auschwitz, you know. They used slave labor in factories. I was a worker at Nordhausen, building jet engines in a factory tunneled into the mountains. Thousands died there, building it and working in it."

He paused, eyes gleaming, mouth working. "It took a lot of people to kill six million Jews, not just a few SS guards, but businessmen and officers, people trying to win the war no matter what the Nazis did. And at the end, most of them just stopped their murdering, took off their uniforms and walked away."

Marshall shook his head in disbelief as Weissman went on. "I'm going to go after the ones I know personally and the ones I'll find out about. And then I'll kill them." He turned back to polishing the canopy, his intensity leaving Marshall shaken.

A green flare shot up and they started engines, the prop blast swirling diamond-sharp facets of desert sand into a glittering rainbow of colors. Behind the short line of fighters, the sun's rays reached out to reflect off the dark line of distant green hills, hinting at the heat that would crisp them by the time they returned. If they returned.

There were no taxi-ways and they went quickly through their warm-up drill in the revetments before wheeling out to takeoff, the angular Avias dipping and bobbing on their narrow-tread landing gears past clusters of cheering ground crew.

In two minutes they were airborne, Myers and the quiet man from New York, David Lipschitz, in the first section, Marshall leading the second with Riley tucked in on his wing. The Messers climbed at a steep angle that still surprised Marshall, slanted back in his seat, his feet nestled in the straps of the unfamiliar German-style rudder bar. Everything about the plane was different—its German smell and hostile German angularity were so different from the P-51. Still, it climbed well, clawing upward at three thousand feet per minute before they leveled off at eight thousand feet. He noted gratefully that all four planes had survived the toughest test, the takeoff, and that none were streaming oil or coolant. So far, so good.

They headed for the sea in a loose finger-four formation, ignoring the wildly inaccurate fire as they passed over the Egyptian antiaircraft batteries at Ashdod.

Sweating in the cramped cockpit, Marshall felt a surge of sympathy for the poor German pilots who'd had to fly this dog in combat. He could hardly see out of the fortresslike visor, and the lack of control harmony warned of a malicious plane ready to turn and bite if the pilot was careless for a moment.

He glanced to the left and his heart jumped. Riley had the wing of his fighter tucked so close he could have touched it. Marshall waved him away, frightened. A midair was the worst flying hazard, worse than combat, worse than fire—the tremendous speed and mass meant that the slightest kiss of one airplane against another could tear them apart.

Riley shook his head, edging in closer, holding-up his hand to show three fingers. Marshall looked away, not wanting to encourage the madman, knowing what was coming. Riley sidled in and tapped his wingtip three times—
skitch, skitch, skitch
—against Marshall's fuselage, in a touch so sure, a tap so light, that Marshall barely felt it. Riley then pulled out to a normal combat formation.

It was extraordinarily delicate flying—a stronger tap could have thrown the airplanes together, sent them tumbling to the sands below. Strange guy, Marshall thought. Quiet on the ground, almost as if he had something to hide. Then he shows off like this.

The front line was never far away in embattled Israel. Ahead, Myers waggled his wings. The target was a long column of Egyptian trucks, dust roiling behind them, each one crammed with troops. A spearhead of tanks and half-tracks was spread out in loose marching order across the road to Tel Aviv.

Myers's wing lifted and they dove at the head of the column, each pilot picking a target for the two little bombs his Avia carried, hoping for a lucky hit that would stop a tank. They flashed through the erratic flak barrage, most of it from multiple barrel 40-mm Oerlikons, then arced back up for the strafing runs. Free of its bombs, the fighter felt much better in the climb.

Marshall armed his cannon and plunged toward the brown sand again, firing at the trucks, noting the black smoke pouring from two burning tanks, one at each end of the column. The ailerons of the Avia stiffened alarmingly as he gained speed, until, at the pullout, it felt as though he was steering a runaway concrete mixer.

Now there were half a dozen trucks burning. Completely panicked by this first attack from the air, the Egyptian infantry was abandoning the trucks, scattering on foot into the desert. As Marshall tucked into a vertical bank to set himself up for another run-in, he saw an Israeli airplane crashing at the side of the road. It was like a film—he'd looked just in time to see it whole, a slight stream of smoke behind it, nose down at an impossible angle, and then it merged with the ground in an instantaneous change from machine to a fire-gutted cloud of black smoke. He knew that it was either Myers or Lipschitz, for Riley was tight on his wing.

Remembering his role as a maintenance officer, Marshall felt a stab of apprehension. He mumbled a prayer as he turned for a final pass. "Dear God," he prayed, "if it had to happen, please let it be from gunfire, don't let it be from my mistakes."

They flew back to Ekron to refuel and rearm and found that it was Lipschitz who had crashed. Myers's airplane sat forlornly in its revetment, streaked with sheets of sand-crusted oil from hits in his oil cooler. Their first battle, and 25 percent of Israel's fighter force was destroyed, and another 25 percent was out of commission.

"Well, Moshe, shall we go again?"

"Call me Bear. I'll never get used to Moshe. Now that the Gyppos know we're here, why don't we take a crack at air-to-air? I hear they've really been working Tel Aviv over."

The Egyptian bases were only fifteen minutes flying time from Tel Aviv. They had been bombing twice daily, using modified Douglas C-47s as bombers and ex-RAF Spitfires as escort.

The ground crew worked hard, and soon the planes were climbing again, back toward Ashdod, Riley in the lead.

Marshall saw them just as Riley waggled his wings at the enemy formation, two C-47s acting as makeshift bombers, escorted by four Spitfires. They were loafing along at about five thousand feet, confident that the Israelis had neither flak nor fighters. The F.22 Spitfires were lovely things, with squared-off wingtips, tall rudders, and cowlings bulging like a bosomy woman's blouse from the big Griffon engines. Moving like sidewinders in great S-turns above the two Dakotas, the Spitfire pilots were eager for the bomb drop to be made so they could strafe the city streets with their cannons.

Riley's flat voice crackled through the radio. "Bombers first."

They flashed through the surprised Spitfires, pulling behind the C-47s to fire. It was a slaughter. Marshall saw his cannon shells explode a Douglas's fuel tank, tearing off the wing to send his victim spinning erratically to the ground, incontinently spewing out bombs like beans from a bag. Riley's smoking target was slanting toward the sea south of Tel Aviv when the Spitfire escort hit them.

Still unfamiliar with his plane, Marshall heaved the stick over and booted rudder to turn left ninety degrees in a vertical bank, applying full power as he pulled the nose up in the ridiculously high angle of climb of which the Avia was capable. Two of the Spitfires, their speed bled down by his turn, foundered after him, falling behind. He stood his plane On its wing and saw Riley diving away toward Ekron, the other two Spitfires on his tail, almost close enough to fire.

Stall-turning, Marshall dove through his own pursuers, flinging himself headlong after the planes on Riley's tail. They grew quickly in size from little crosses into lovely Spitfires shining in the morning sun. His altitude gave him speed and he gained rapidly, firing a long burst at the first one, just hoping to scare him. Instead the long intermittent lines of 20-mm shells magically converged into the glistening Plexiglas, blowing the pilot's head off and sending the airplane vertically into the ground. The other Spitfire turned and ran. Marshall cranked his neck around to see if he was being followed; then, fuel and ammunition low, he eased back the throttle and dove down to catch up with Riley.

It was a near-fatal error. A Spitfire came from out of nowhere and Marshall's instrument panel disappeared in a blinding explosion as cannon shells hammered into him. One minute he was flying a fighter, the next he was trapped like Houdini in a safe. He jettisoned the canopy, loosened his seat straps, and kicked the stick forward, sling-shotting himself out of the fighter; not waiting to slow down, he pulled the ripcord while he was still tumbling, jerking to a halt as the canopy blossomed.

He had less than a minute to survey the carnage of four crashed aircraft—his own and the three Egyptian planes. As the Spitfires disappeared to the west, Riley's airplane, the last fighter in the Israeli Air Force, headed toward Ekron trailing smoke.

Marshall hit the ground, rolling as he punched the quick release button on his parachute harness. He'd somersaulted to a stop, and lay still for a moment, eyes closed, catching his breath, gingerly trying to determine if he'd been wounded or injured. He opened his eyes to a Roman circus scene. A scowling gladiator-muscled farmer was poised with a pitchfork over his throat, about to pin him to the ground forever. Behind the farmer an angry group had gathered, muttering ominously. He thought he understood the Hebrew word for Egyptian.

Marshall closed his eyes, wishing that his Luftwaffe flying gear had some Israeli insignia.

When he opened his eyes again, the pitchfork was still there and the muttering was growing louder. He took a breath and shouted the only Jewish words he could remember: "Gefilte fish, gefilte fish," and then, in English, "I'm an American."

Putting down the pitchfork, the farmer said in a cultivated accent, "Why didn't you say so? You're the damnedest, blackest American I've ever seen. Thought you were one of the Gyppo bomber pilots. I was within a toucher of pronging you."

Marshall told the story to Riley that night at the pilot's hangout, the Atom Bar in Tel Aviv. Bear laughed and said, "I tan so easily, I'd better watch it. In a week, you'll look like a Swede next to me."