Return From the Inferno (37 page)

Many of these soldiers were armed with Soltam 160-mm heavy mortars, a monster of a weapon which could accurately hurl a large HE shell more than 8500

meters. Others were manning antitank weapons, small portable rocket launchers and even long-range grenade throwers. In all, more than 800 heavy weapons were armed and ready. All were aiming south.

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The River Guards weren't exactly sure what was coming toward them-only that it was big, packing a lot of firepower, and was literally just around the bend.

Whatever it was, the Strom Wacht were confident they could stop it with their

"superior" firepower, although that was an adjective used exclusively by their officers.

Still, not a man among them was not astonished when the massive battleship appeared around the bend about two miles away, its stacks belching black smoke nonstop from engines going at top speed, its decks bristling with men, its turrets swinging nine enormous gun barrels.

Almost lost in the spectacle were the eleven gun barges following dutifully behind the battlewagon. Their crews too were at battle stations, the tank turrets turned out at 45-degrees, their MLRS tubes lowered to the most extreme firing angle.

It was not shaping up to be a typical, quantity-vs.-quality military engagement. It was more like "quantity-vs.-quantity." The NS troops were capable of launching almost 125 tons of ordnance at the battleship once it came into range; the ship and the gun barges could hurl nearly 95 tons back.

The NS troops had the advantage of fighting from fixed as opposed to floating positions, and they had command of terrain on both sides of the river.

The Nazi troops on the bridge were mystified then when they saw the battleship seemingly come to a dead stop about a mile and a half away. They had been prepared to stop the ship from running under the bridge, setting up such a gauntlet of weapons that the ship would be a battered hulk before it even reached the bridge. Now, by stopping dead in the water, it seemed as if the ship was committing one of the world's worst nautical errors: losing momentum.

But as the NS troops prepared their weapons to fire on signal from their commanders, they saw the massive warship begin to turn slowly to the right, its turrets turning one way as its hull turned the other.

Thirty long seconds went by.

Then the New Jersey fired its guns.

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All nine of them went off at once-nine massive, sixteen-inch guns, each hurling a high-explosive shell weighing more than a ton at a fixed target a little over a mile away.

The old John Henry Long Memorial Bridge never had a chance. Neither did the men on top of it.

The massive broadside didn't so much drop the center span of the bridge as it did vaporize it. Mere seconds after the nine, one-ton shells exploded on impact with the center girders, the middle 200 feet of the steel bridge simply vanished in a cloud of flame, metallic dust and a billion bits of flaming shrapnel. The concussion alone killed more Strom Wacht on the bridge than the actual explosions. Many more on the banks died as a result of the storm of white-hot debris that pelted them for more than two horrible minutes.

Even before the smoke and flame had cleared, the battleship had pointed its bow north again. Its engines cranked back up to two thirds speed, it passed underneath the demolished bridge a minute later without another shot being fired.

Its relentless journey north had been delayed by a mere five minutes.

The Bridge at Cairo

The large drawbridge located one mile south of Cairo, Missouri had been built primarily for railroad traffic.

It was a relatively new construction, stacked steel girders held in place by massive concrete supports. It was nearly three times as wide as the John Henry Long Bridge, twice as long and a full twenty feet higher.

Thousands of NS troops had been gathering in the area since early that morning. Their commanders had already heard what had happened down at the Myersburg bridge; they were determined not to let it happen at Cairo. So no troops were actually stationed on the bridge itself. Rather they were dug in deep on the east bank of the Mississippi, their lines stretching two full miles down from the span.

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These NS units-actually a light division consisting at approximately 4200

troops-were not infantrymen. Rather they were in the artillery business.

Specifically they were the llth Heavy Field Gun Division.

Their main weapon was the S-23 180-mm heavy artillery piece, an enormous cannon capable of firing a 40-pound, rocket-assisted shell more than 30 miles at velocities approaching half the speed of sound.

Common sense seemed to dictate that a shell fired from this gun with its barrel depressed all the way could inflict damage on the heavy-plated battleship which would be passing a mere quarter mile away.

This assumption became mind-boggling when multiplied by the two hundred guns in the llth Heavy Field Gun Division, and downright astronomical when the element that the guns could fire three times in thirty seconds was factored in.

And once again, the plan was to stop the warship and its barges before they even reached the bridge.

It was growing dark when word reached the llth Division's commanders that the warship was now a mere 12 miles away and steaming at 15 knots.

Word was passed down the line to prepare the massive 180-mm guns for immediate firing. A blanket of silence descended on the two-mile line of Nazi cannoneers, broken only by the sharp clanks of gun breeches being locked into position. The artillery pieces were arrayed in such a way as to create a massive field of fire that would pin in on the ship. Each gun crew was told to prepare to fire three shells within the advertised half minute time frame, and an additional three only on orders from the individual gun captains.

Privately the top officers in the llth NS were confident that two shots from each gun would prove plenty in sinking the battleship.

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Like most low-level fighter attacks, the troops near the target never heard the jet coming.

One moment the only noise rustling through the llth NS positions was the gurgling of the river running on by; in the next, the air was filled with a horrible mechanical scream.

The Harrier flashed by their positions at top speed, the exhaust from its engine actually creating a steamy turbulence on the river's surface. It was flying that low.

It was by them before any of the soldiers could react, sweeping from side to side before it streaked underneath the bridge and up into a ass-end climb.

Coming back around, the Harrier actually slowed its speed down to 300 mph, flying at a louder, slightly higher altitude. The NS troops were ready for it this time, and they took the only action afforded to them: they blocked their ears. The llth was not outfitted with any kind of anti-aircraft weapons, and by being thrown into action without its usual support units, it was now absolutely defenseless from the air.

And that's exactly what the pilot in the Harrier wanted to know.

Hunter checked his clock and his fuel load and then put the Harrier into a second, straight-up climb.

His dangerous yet essential tactic had worked; he was certain that the entrenched heavy gun unit was not equipped with AA guns. If they had been, one or two of them surely would have taken a shot at him by now.

He pulled out of the climb at 7500 feet and turned north. Timing had been the key so far to his plan within a plan. He hoped it would not fail him now.

A few seconds later, he had his answer.

Off in the darkened horizon, he saw first one, then two sets of red blinking lights.

A moment later, his radio crackled to life.

"This is Maple Leaf Flight ... do you read me? Over."

Hunter recognized the voice right away. It was General Jones.

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"Ten by ten, General," Hunter replied. "You're right _on time."

Hunter had closed to within two miles of the red lights by now, close enough to see the outlines of the enormous C-5 Galaxy cargo planes coming toward him.

"Everything is set on this end, General," he called over to Jones who was piloting the lead C-5. "There's a slight east to west gusting down there, but I think it's too low to be concerned with . . ."

"Roger, Hawk," Jones came back. "This thing wouldn't sway in a hurricane."

Hunter swooped down and under the C-5s, lining up about 500 feet below the second Galaxys right wing. With the precision of an air demonstration team, the three planes-the two flying behemoths and the small VTOL attack jet-turned as one, gliding into a 180-degree, slow descent. At the end of the maneuver, they leveled off at 1200 feet, just four miles down from the llth Field Gun Divisions positions.

Even though it had been his idea, Hunter wasn't 100-percent sure that his arming of the huge C-5s was feasible. But because the airplane was the only one in the FC arsenal that could fly over Fourth Reich territory unopposed, he knew he would have to work with it within the parameters of his overall plan.

The key was the gigantic cargo jet's enormous wing span. Designed for heavy lift-the plane could carry more than 260,000 pounds of anything-the wings were both long, wide and durable. They weren't adaptable for carrying heavy iron-bomb payload. They proved very adaptable, however, to carrying bomb dispenser canisters, similar to the one attached to the bottom of Hunter's jump jet.

But while the Harrier carried that single canister-capable of dropping more than 120 parachuted bomblets-the Galaxies had been adapted to carry 20

dispensers, each. That produced a staggering drop potential of 2400 bomblets, per airplane. The implications were very frightening. But Necessity was a mother after all, and desperate times usually spawn some pretty sound ideas.

So Hunter had drawn

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up the plans months ago while sitting on his upstate mountain retreat and passed them on to the FC Air Force Special Operations Unit. A newly sprung Jones joined them soon afterward, and working together, they completed the adaptation just twenty four hours ago.

The problem was, it had never been tested.

Hunter went in first, sowing half of his 120 bomblets on the first half mile of NS cannons, the combined flare from the dozens of separate explosions giving Jones and the pilot of the other C-5 a bright visual target to key in on.

Hunter's parachuted barrage caused quick, extensive damage to the first two dozen heavy enemy guns. No sooner had he dropped them, when he gunned the Harrier for all it was worth in order to get the hell out of Jones'

barreling-in C-5. He saw the stream of bomblets spewing out from the first C-5's wings and the only way to accurately describe it was as a blizzard. A blizzard of slowly descending HE bomblets, originally intended for hard duty like cracking runway asphalt, or denting some tanks.

By the time the blizzard hit the ground, Jones had already pulled the big C-5

up and away to the west. What followed in its awesome wake was an almost indescribable storm of fire, smoke, destruction, death. Ordered to stay at their guns no matter what, hundreds of Nazi troops were slaughtered within mere seconds. Not only that, the two thousand sown bomblets created such a combined explosive impact, that a huge trench was instantly formed along the first mile of the llth NS positions. Within seconds it cratered off and a mighty rush of water came flowing in from the temporarily diverted river.

The second C-5 mimicked Jones's run perfectly-with almost the identically horrible results. The second mile of huge guns and the hapless soldiers who manned them to the end was simply bombed into the earth. There was no reason for Hunter to swoop down and add what was left of his canister onto the target. There wasn't even a reason for him to go down and take a closer look.

It was quite clear from even 5000 feet that nothing was left of the llth Heavy Field Gun Division.

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Its engines slipped from idle to the one half speed, the New Jersey and its grateful crew steamed past the site of the carnage and continued on under the tall railroad bridge, its eleven gun barges lined up perfectly in tow.

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It was midnight when the officers in charge of the defense of the Cape Giraud Highway bridge got word about the massive United American carpet bombing down at Cairo.

Though appalled at the carnage, and by the equally devastating defeat at Myersburg, the NS officers made a grim decision that they would not be caught in any hellish maelstrom delivered by either the UA's naval fire or its air power.

Theirs was a combined force-the first to meet the floating American fortress that was, at that minute, just 20 miles down river. It totaled 14,000 men.

Half were hard-nosed Fuhrerstadt Home Guards, infantrymen who specialized in terrorizing the occupied countryside. The other half consisted of what was known as a Verbindung Kommando-a. Combined Command. Its troops were equally adept at operating SAM systems to antitank weapons to river coastal defense.

It was this last talent that set them apart from the rest of the Nazi troops trying to stop the New Jersey.

For the first time, the warship would be faced with soldiers who were used to fighting on the water.

The Kommando's coastal defense teams used a simple weapon against large floating targets.

They would load up rubber boats with as much high explosive as they could carry and by using wire-guided control for

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power and steering, would direct these floating bombs into their target.

The added twist for the CD teams this night was their loading up of rubber boats filled not only with HE but also napalm cannisters specially triggered to explode up and out on contact with their target.

The idea was that if the HE boats weren't able to rip a hole in the side of the battleship, then the napalm boats would at least set the ship on fire.

It was 0130 hours when the battlewagon was spotted, steaming at one-third speed up toward the Cape Giraud bridge.

While the bridge itself was brightly lit and obviously bristling with troops of the Fuhrerstadt Home Guard, the Coastal Kommando units were hidden in the high weeds and bulrushes on the west side of the river. A total of 50 rubber boats were set to launch, half with HE, half with napalm bombs.