Whip (11 page)

"You're keeping an old man in suspense, Lieutenant."

"There's an old dry lake bed in the mountains, sir. It's completely off the beaten path.

Not even that many natives know about it except by word of mouth. The ones that do —

they're headhunters, by the way — are friendly to us. I even knew a few of them from the old days. The lake bed, well, the natives did us a favor. They dragged in bushes and spread them all over the field so that aerial reconnaissance by the Japanese wouldn't show a thing. The lake bed is in clouds quite a bit, but we can operate from it. We've got about four thousand feet of runway and — "

"What we're planning," Whip broke in, "is to make sure some old B-25s, even wrecks, are left in the dispersal areas and on the flight line at Seven-Mile so the Japs will see them there. Having all our airplanes disappear could be a tip-off and we don't want to take any chances. But the 335th
will
disappear. Hell, Lou, we've been stashing supplies up there for weeks. The natives have been lugging them in for us. A steady long pull. Every now and then, when we know the Japs are occupied, we fly in whatever we can. We've been using two C-47s and that old Lockheed 10."

"A what?"

The two men stared at one another. Once again it had leaped into being. The old Lockheed 10. The same kind of airplane in which Lou Goodman, for the first time, had taken a kid named Whip Russel into the air.

Whip's eyes sparkled. "Hell of a thing, ain't it? Lou, why don't you join up with us?" The words rushed from Whip as if he were afraid he might not say them if this moment passed. "I mean," he went on hurriedly, "running our operation from the ground. Jesus, if anyone knows all the answers, it's you. We need a man who can make iron airplanes out of wood if he has to, and you're the best there is!"

"Hold it, hold it," Goodman chuckled, but his laugh had a touch of harshness to it. "I couldn't get my ass out of Garbutt Field if I wanted to. And believe me, son, I
want
to."

He shook his head at himself. "Or do I? Hell, I don't know. But this whole caper you people are putting together — "

Goodman turned to stare through his office window at the heat-baked nothingness of Garbutt Field. "You've had some crazies in your time, Whip, but this one takes the cake.

I — "

"I can bust you out of here," Whip said with sudden quiet.

"When did you make general?" Goodman demanded.

"I mean it," Whip said stubbornly. "All it takes is a phone call. Our code name is Billygoat — "

"Appropriate. It stinks."

" — and we've got top priority on a secret basis."

Lou Goodman scratched his belly, came to a sudden decision. "Tell you what, boy. Don't make any phone calls. I can always break out of here to inspect Moresby if I say it's necessary. Okay; suddenly it's necessary. I'll go along with you crazies just to see how it all stacks up."

A crooked grin appeared on Whip's face. "On to other things. You've got a B-25 here with long-range tanks, don't you?"

Goodman nodded. "We do. Belongs to the 317th. They're waiting for some special radios for it."

"We'll borrow it for a while."

A wary look crossed Goodman's face. "I don't think I'm going to like this."

"It'll be a blast, Lou. Make your vital body fluids move faster. I said we haven't used skip bombing against the Japanese yet, that we were waiting until the whole outfit was ready to go. But someone's tried it a few times. You know Bill Kanaga?"

"Yeah, I know him. Hawaiian. He's almost as crazy as you. B-17 driver. What about him?"

"He's going into Rabaul, into Simpson Harbor, tomorrow night with his B-17."

"Night intruder run?"

"Uh uh, boss. I didn't say
over
Simpson Harbor. I said into it, and we're going along with him. That's why we need that 25 with the long-range tanks."

Goodman stared, speechless.

"And we'd like you to go along with us, see how the whole thing works."

Whip had never seen Lou Goodman turn dead white before. But the big man did it now.

The blood drained from his face as he nodded his assent.

11

Seven-Mile Drome was still the same stinking, broiling, bug-infested, dusty, humid and pestilential outhouse Lou Goodman remembered. The best of the airfield facilities remained primitive, support operations were a ghastly joke, the fighter defenses an embarrassment. Only the Japanese remained adept as they made unannounced sweeps down the mountain slopes for target practice against the hapless occupants of Seven-Mile. Airfield defense here was a mockery; no siren, no radar, a pitifully few machine guns. The air-raid warning system comprised one sentry who, when alarmed by the sound or sight of approaching Japanese aircraft, fired three shots rapidly into the air. At least the system was foolproof. If you didn't hear the sentry firing off his alarm you were certain to hear enemy bombs exploding.

Shortly before they returned to Seven-Mile an additional warning system had been put into effect. The operations tower — a rickety assembly of logs — mounted a single pole over the structure, and if you heard shots
and
saw a red flag being run up the pole, and also saw the tower operators jumping or tumbling to the ground as fast as they could move — well, no one else came to visit except the Japanese.

Lou Goodman climbed down from the B-25 and surveyed the local sights with a sinking heart. God, Garbutt Field was bad.
This
stank. No revetments for the planes on the ground. If there came a warning of only a few minutes, standby crews kicked over the engines of their bombers and ran like hell to get into the air and away from the enemy bombs that would be whistling earthward at any moment. It was the only defense against the enemy, but it had its own perils of emergency takeoffs with cold engines, and, possibly running into a swarm of Zeros waiting for just this sort of marvelous opportunity to catch the bombers at the worst possible moment — staggering into the air, on the deck and at slow speed.

Goodman walked slowly along the soft and unpredictable runway — itself a matter of profanity and accidents. The more he ran through his mind the hellish conditions under which these men had to live, the more astonished he was with the dogged tenacity of these people to push themselves into combat.

Lou Goodman paused beneath the wing of a B-17, grateful for its shade, and looked with bleak thoughts at the mountains in the distance. It took a specific effort to remind himself that New Guinea was an island.
Island
? It was a mockery of the word, and the very use of that term, island, was what contributed so strongly to the misunderstanding, or lack of understanding, of what these men like Whip Russel had to face.

Greenland was the largest island in the world. New Guinea was the next largest, and who the hell even thought of New Guinea as a body of land just about sixteen hundred miles long and at least five hundred miles from north to south at its widest point? My God, thought Goodman, the bloody place is more than three hundred thousand square miles!

The single most dominating feature of New Guinea was the massive Cordillera extending the length of the island. The huge upthrusting contained a number of parallel east-west mountain ranges that narrowed into the Owen Stanley Range in the Papuan Peninsula.

You think of jungle and you imagine, at the most, high hills.
Not mountains that peaked
16,000 feet into the sky
. They compounded the normal and lethal everyday problems of combat air crews. Navigation under conditions of poor weather was a nightmare.

Survival in such country could often be a happenstance; a man alone, trying to slog his way across this country — and there was so damned much of it! — faced grim odds.

But then, Muhlfield had an incalculable advantage in having been here, in this very territory, before the war began. During that period, faced with the stark reality of no roads or ports worthy of the name, the Australians had exploited air travel in the best of textbook fashions. Winged transportation had been almost solely responsible for developing and maintaining the gold fields of the Bulolo Valley in the mountains southwest of Salamaua. There had been other fields, but most especially there had been an effort in locating what might be bonanza finds. To do this the Australians had cut airstrips in many isolated areas and carried on their work by flying in machinery and materiel. This is how, of course, Muhlfield knew of that dry lake bed and its potential as a landing field.

If
they could operate from their Field X, then Whip Russel's force of B-25 bombers had much more available to it than seclusion and shorter range to the Japanese airfields along the northern strip of eastern New Guinea. They would bring closer the vital Japanese targets that lay beyond. Across Vitiaz and Dampier straits from New Guinea's Huon Peninsula lay Cape Gloucester, the western tip of New Britain, which curved northeasterly to culminate in Gazelle Peninsula and Rabaul. New Ireland, long and narrow, paralleled the long axis of the Papuan peninsula of New Guinea so that New Ireland, the Admiralty Islands, part of New Guinea, and New Britain all enclosed the Bismarck Sea.

And that —
all
of it — was hostile territory.

Lou Goodman scuffed his boots in the dust of Seven-Mile Drome. For a strange moment, he might have been on a dusty California strip, walking idly, content to let his mind meander as he strolled along the runway. He treasured the moment, and he tried desperately to grasp onto the past, to warm himself with its friendly touch. But he could not shake the harsh reality of the New Guinea sun, the rumble of engines being tested, the distantly looming mountains that seemed suspended over the thick and dangerous jungle.

And beyond all that lay the ocean and the islands to the north, and at the far end of New Britain, the powerful Japanese bastion of Rabaul. Where they were flying that night, on a mission suicidal and impossible, but so brash in its concept it might work.

If it didn't, he would die before the next dawn. He was surprised that the threat of death was more curious than frightening. Lou Goodman walked just a bit more briskly after that astonishing thought.

Bill Kanaga smiled all the time. Or so it seemed to Goodman. He looked like the last choice Goodman would have made for the pilot of a four-engined bomber.

"I understand you've made out your last will and testament," Kanaga told him with startling cheeriness.

"You seem to have me on a griddle, Captain," Goodman said, still unsure of his own sense of this roly-poly killer.

"No offense, sir," came the bland reply. "I do."

Goodman smiled at him. "Your reasons should be interesting."

Kanaga nodded. "You seem sane enough, Colonel. What the hell are you doing with this bunch of thieves? Didn't they tell you what the odds were tonight?"

"I can figure those myself," Goodman said, a bit more gruff about it than he should have been.

"Nothing intended to offend, Colonel," came the bland retort. "But it's unusual tonight. I fly my missions alone. Nobody comes along. If I have to look out for someone tailing with me it messes up my concentration. A night strike like we're going on is safer with one plane than two."

"You mean we're dead weight," Goodman told him. No use in anything but straight from the shoulder.

"I mean you
could
be dead weight. It depends on many things."

"And if you decide we're a lead bucket, what then, Captain?"

The round face was unmoving. "Then, sir, you don't fly with me. Not you and not Whip Russel, who just happens to be the most natural pilot I've ever seen in my life."

"Then what's the beef?"

"You're a bird colonel. You really shouldn't be here. You're going along as a passenger.

Maybe," Kanaga said slowly, "you might just saw some sharp edges in that B-25.

Russel's going to be a very busy pilot and anything could interfere with — "

"Captain."

Kanaga went silent. His eyes were dark and flashing.

"Captain, I taught Whip Russel to fly. A very long time ago."

There was a moment's hesitation, then the round face broke out into an enormous smile, and Lou Goodman knew he'd sailed through the test. "Colonel, did you know you remind me of my favorite uncle?"

"No, I didn't, but I think I like the idea."

"You should, sir. He's a marvelous man. And, Colonel?"

"What is it, Captain?"

"I don't want to sound like a Dutch nephew, but you'd do well to get some shuteye."

Goodman didn't answer for a moment. "Yeah," he said finally, "I guess I would."

"See you tonight, Colonel. Bring your rubbers. You never know when its gonna rain."

12

The dull red lights stretched away in narrowing lines and converged in a bowl of utter blackness. Good God Almighty, thought Colonel Lou Goodman. It's like a railroad tunnel out there. With both ends sealed off to make it as dark as it is.

The dull red lights were hooded flares spaced evenly along the runway of Seven-Mile.

They could be seen only by the pilot of an aircraft moving in their direction, and the guidance they provided seemed pitiful. But the flight crews, and especially the pilots, Bill Kanaga and Mike Anderson in the B-17 and Whip Russel and Alex Bartimo in the B-25, had been under "red light only" for the last hour. To their night-acclimated vision the dull glows were beacon enough for the job at hand.

They had been waiting for one final word before starting engines, and Goodman knew it was "go" for the mission when he heard Whip and Alex beginning their checklist in the cockpit above and behind him. At the moment Lou Goodman was crammed into the plexiglas nose of the B-25, along with a fifty-caliber machine gun. Normally the bombardier would be in this position but Goodman had bounced him, because where they were going, and the manner of their visit, made the presence of a bombardier more than excess baggage. If someone was going along for the ride Goodman preferred it to be himself.

That presupposed a measure of insanity, Goodman mused with a crooked grin, but, what the hell…