Amerika (42 page)

‘You okay?’

‘Fine, just need a hand. It’s on the heavy side.’

We unfastened the retaining bolts and lifted the bombsight and slid it onto its mounting plate in the nose of the plane. The Couba Island crew had  done  a  meticulous  job  of  welding  a  series  of  cross  braces  that supported it so that its view plate rested just above a small, optically flat Plexiglas window fitted into the hull. They had also made a kneeling pad and backrest that Mason could use as he crouched over the device.

Mason patted the device. ‘My Navy buddies would kill for this sweetheart.’

‘It’s that special?’

He looked at me disdainfully. ‘A Norden bombsight can drop a pickle in a barrel from twenty-five thousand feet and do it every time. The Navy was just starting to get them when Adolf dropped the bomb. We could have won the war with this baby.’

‘Sill can.’

He laughed, but he winced from the wound, and then patted the top of the device. ‘This is the sighting head - the thing I look through. It’s got an extended vision telescope that lets me acquire the target at an oblique angle. Once I’ve done that, the flight stabilizer down here locks on the target and keeps the plane flying on my heading.’

‘It’s connected to our autopilot?’

He grabbed a thick cable and slipped it into a waiting socket. ‘It is now. You didn’t know about that part?’

‘I didn’t know any of this stuff.’

‘Captain Fatt sure knew how to keep his mouth shut. And he was right to do so. This thing is top secret. We have orders to protect it with our lives. Can’t let it fall into enemy hands no matter what. See this thing here?’

He pulled out a small red knob near the bottom of the unit. ‘If I leave that out, one minute from now this whole thing blows up. It’s got a combination thermite and torpex charge inside. The thermite melts the mirrors, gear housing and anything that the enemy could make use of,  and then the torpex takes over and blows it all to kingdom come.’

‘Are you planning on pushing in that knob any time soon?’

He touched it but didn’t. ‘Plus, if for some reason you don’t activate it - say you get shot up with anti-aircraft fire or something-’

‘- or German commandos.’

‘And the plane crashes, then this little baby goes into a booby-trap mode when it sustains over six impact G’s. If a bad guy starts poking around the wreckage, spots it and touches it, BOOM, goodbye sight, goodbye bad guy. Those Norden folks thought of everything.’

‘Times almost up.’ I nervously reached over to push in the button but he beat me to it.

‘Anyhow, so when I spot the Initial Point on the Columbia River and we start our final run, my baby and I are flying this bird from then on.’ He gave me a salute. ‘With your permission of course.’

I returned his salute. ‘Granted.’

God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right, even though I think it is hopeless
.

Admiral Chester Nimitz

F
rom six thousand feet, Oklahoma seems flat and featureless. But it’s not.

For that matter, most of America west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies looks that way at altitude. Hour after hour, nothing but endless plots of farmland laid out ruler-straight, filled with wheat, soybeans, alfalfa and corn.

It  always  puzzles  me  why  people  chose  to  tame  our  planet  with perfectly laid-out borders separating farmhouse from forest, beets from sorghum, and neighbors from neighbors. Mother Nature works just the opposite: one thing flows into another, hills into valleys, rivers into streams, mountains  into  molehills  in  an  unending  sequence  that  carries  with  it animals, vegetables and minerals moving in the same effortless way in a perfect curve leading from birth to death. To hell with borders, give me Mother Nature’s way every time.

A nineteen-hour flight leads to thoughts like these. So far we had been in the air seven hours: seven uneventful, engine-droning hours when pilots encounter all sorts of interesting thoughts prompted by being aloft with nothing to do but keep going straight across endless Oklahoma.

The autopilot was holding us on a steady course for our target, and my crew was in various states of readiness: Ava lay curled up beneath the navigator’s table, sound asleep. Ziggy was prowling around the plane in search of some blankets, because even though it was August on the ground, air temperature decreases with altitude, and at six thousand feet things were on the chilly side. Orlando manned the engineering station while Friedman and Mason were aft, working on the bomb.

‘Engineer to pilot,’ Orlando said over the intercom.

‘Go ahead.’

‘Can you step into my office for a second?’

I didn’t like the sound of that, and moments later I understood why when, with no amount of tapping the fuel gauges of our right sponson, the indicator needles on both tanks were not where they were supposed to be.

‘How long’s it been like this?’

‘For the past half hour. Something must have finally worked its way loose in the tanks. Maybe we took a hit in a seam or something.’

‘I don’t remember seeing anything like that when we checked the plane at Creeley’s. Do you?’

He swept his hands across the maze of indicators and gauges like he was blessing the congregation. ‘Brother, we can agree all day on what we did or didn’t see. But this tells me we are never going to make it to the target.’

‘How much fuel have you transferred up to the wing tanks?’

‘As much as I could. Any more and we’ll be flying sideways.’

He was right. In a normal flight - which this one sure as hell wasn’t - fuel pumps transferred the sponson’s gas up to the wing tanks, which in turn fed it to the engines. But because the Nazis had already damaged our left wing tank at Couba Island, the right one had to do all the heavy lifting.

Orlando and I exchanged a long look.

He finally said, ‘What’s your plan B?’

‘Actually, this was it.’

Even  though  useless,  I  rapped  the  fuel  indicator  gauges  with  my knuckles one last time in vain hopes of getting a different result. Then I headed for the navigation table where I unrolled the chart, took out my plotter, took a deep breath and got down to work.

Our line of progress so far was indicated with a series of my carefully drawn pencil lines leading from Couba Island to Creeley’s landing, south of Baton Rouge, and then across into Texas, where we had passed well north of Dallas, not wanting to excite any interest in Nazi compliance fighters coming up for a look-see.

According to our Sons of Liberty contacts in Dallas, there weren’t many planes around, but I figured far better to be safe than sorry. After all, we had no flight clearance and never would. As the world – including the Nazis - was concerned, the
Dixie Clipper
had gone down in the ocean months ago with all hands on board.

Yet here she was cruising at six thousand feet with an American flag painted on her nose, packing machine guns and an atomic bomb. With Texas long gone behind us, we were now about to leave the Oklahoma panhandle and cross over into Colorado. But if Orlando’s fuel consumption calculations were correct, we’d crash somewhere in southern Idaho, probably skidding to a stop on some farmer’s potato field, with a lot of explaining to do.

I felt a tug on my pants cuff and Ava’s sleepy voice floated up beneath the chart table said, ‘You’re still barefoot, you know.’

‘No shoe stores up here.’

She unwound herself and joined me. ‘What’s brewing?’ I tapped the map. ‘Ever been to Nevada?’

‘Been over it many a time.’

‘We’re heading for the Sons of Liberty base there.’

‘I thought that was supposed to be after we dropped the bomb.’

While I explained the fuel problem she casually unfastened her hair, held the hairpins in her teeth, ran a comb through it, and then tied it up neatly again, all the while staring intently at the map. I felt like I was in her bedroom for some reason. Not a bad feeling, by the way.

My ‘Plan C’ for what it’s worth, was as simple as a stump: divert to the secret base before, not after the mission, as originally planned. Take on a full load of fuel, fly off again, leaking tanks and all, and lose it in a steady stream over Nevada, Oregon and Washington until we reached the target and dropped the bomb.

When I finished, Ava took my plotter, spent a couple of minutes working out some numbers of her own and then shook her head. ‘Based on your calculations we can reach the target for sure, but we’ll be running on fumes after that.’

‘When that bomb goes off it will stir up a hornet’s nest of compliance fighters and they’ll spot us in no time. We’ve got to bury the murder weapon somewhere fast.’

‘How?’

‘I figure we’ll have just enough fuel to reach the Pacific coast. We’ll put her down a mile offshore, scuttle her and then take to the rafts.’

She winced, ‘I wish there were some other way.’

‘I’m open to suggestions.’

She stood there for a long minute, lost in thought, her finger tapping on Sentinel Island, a tiny speck of land in the middle of Lake Mead. Once an impressive mountain, now just the tip of it protruded from the waters of a  lake  created  when  they  built Hoover Dam, re-named  Boulder  Dam because FDR didn’t like our previous president, but was savvy enough not name it after another politician. Somewhere on that desolate-looking tip of land was the Sons of Liberty refueling base.

‘Who runs this operation again?’ I said.

‘The McGraw brothers; Jacob and Esau. Own and operate a paddleboat, the
Desert Queen.
Give tours of the dam, the islands, that sort of thing.’

‘Where the hell did they get a paddleboat?’

‘A lake steamer they trucked in from somewhere on the Missouri River. Re-assembled it piece by piece. Company’s based at Lake Mead Marina, and the refueling site is on Sentinel Island, about a half-mile away.’

She paused and made a face. ‘I still can’t see diverting there with the fuel leaking the way it is.’

‘Like carrying a water bucket with a hole in it. Run fast enough, you’ll make it to the sink in time.’

‘We’re showing about one-forty indicated. Why don’t we descend and see if the winds are more favorable?’

‘Air density will eat up our fuel even faster.’

She winced, ‘You’re right, I forgot about that.’ She slapped the plotter on the map. ‘Why can’t something go right for a change?’

I returned to the radio operator’s station. The clipper’s autopilot was locked onto a radio frequency found by our RDF. I thumbed through a list of station frequencies more westerly than northwesterly and dialed the first three without any luck. But the fourth one, KNVN, Las Vegas, boomed out Glenn Miller’s
Chattanooga Choo-Choo
so painfully loud that I had to yank off my headset.

I started to curse but then checked myself. Our situation was getting way too tense. The atmosphere thick with gloom and doom. Fatt had taught me long ago that a leader must appear greater than the problem or he was in deep trouble. How the hell was I supposed to do that? Then I had an idea. I flicked the switch that sent the swing music blaring over a set of speakers mounted in the ceiling of the flight deck.

At first nobody reacted; Orlando kept fussing with the potentiometers, Ava bent over the map. But then she started swaying to the beat, slowly at first and then more and more as the forceful beat of Miller’s music turned the flight deck into a dance hall. Or at least it seemed like that to me and why not? Here I was, a shoeless captain flying a plane leaking like a sieve, with an impossible mission ahead. Why not at least act bigger than the problem at hand?

I made sure the autopilot was tracking the new station in Nevada, but instead of sitting down, I returned to the navigator’s station and tapped Ava on the shoulder.

‘Care to dance?’

Her surprised laughter was like a flash of happy lightning.

‘Seriously?’

I led her into the small space between the navigation and engineering stations and did a scaled-down version of a jitterbug, while Orlando beamed with pleasure. My bare feet limited my moves, but I think I did a fairly good job, all things considered.

Halfway through our performance, Ziggy appeared with an armful of blankets. He leaned against the radio operator’s table with a happy grin on his face. As the music ended I spun Ava around with a final flourish. We stood there staring at each other as Frank Sinatra began singing
Night and Day
.

‘Thanks for the dance,’ she said. ‘I needed that.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘Like Sinatra?’

‘He’s okay, I guess. You?’

‘Too skinny for my tastes.’ She patted my shoulder. ‘I like my fellas with a little more muscle.’ She went back to the map while I went over and turned down the music.

Ziggy said, ‘How’d you get the radio to play that?’

I briefly explained the Radio Direction Finder but lost him halfway through. Even so, he stayed with it, asking questions about the tuning amplifier, the Morse code key and the transmitters and receivers. I finally said, ‘Thinking about changing professions?’

‘Thought I maybe could help you guys out, but that radio stuff’s too complicated.’ He hefted the blankets and made a face at them. ‘Looks like I’m stuck with being a glorified cook.’

‘Don’t sell yourself short, Zig. You make great food and you’re a great scrounger, too.’

‘Much rather shoot a machine gun.’

‘Careful what you wish for.’

I left him to his brooding while I returned to the cockpit. After a careful check of the instruments, I keyed the microphone.

‘Pilot to engineer.’

‘Yes, sir’ Orlando said.

‘Let me know if our rate of fuel loss increases.’

‘Roger, wilco, and by the way, all the years I’ve known you, I never saw you dance like that.’

‘We all have our secrets.’