Whip (22 page)

When they finally returned to action, they teamed up with several A-20 light bombers out of the Moresby area and went out against enemy airfields at Madang. The mission proved a contest between enemy antiaircraft positions on the ground and the low-flying bombers. One A-20 took a direct hit and exploded off to their left. Their own force of eight bombers, dropping on high-speed level passes, took light damage with only one man wounded.

"It stinks," Whip told Goodman later that day. "I think we blew up two shithouses and killed a cow, or whatever it was that had four legs and horns."

Goodman nodded agreement. It was hardly the kind of mission for the special talents of the 335th. "They're laying low," Goodman offered by way of explanation. "Probably still trying to figure out what hit them the time before."

Whip shrugged. All he wanted was the call to get into the thick of it. Another mission, this time with nine B-25s to Wewak, offered slight recompense for the effort. They struck the enemy airfield hard, but the flak was heavy and gave them fits because it was so well concealed. Whip came back to Kanaga with over two hundred holes in his airplane, but his last moments at Wewak had proven eminently satisfying. Four Japanese bombers on the ground burned after a wild, jinking, scraping-the-trees strafing run.

Then they got the word. Stand down for two days, get all your planes ready.

Whip leaned over Goodman's "desk" in the cave. "What's the word?"

Goodman looked up. "This would scare the pants off anyone but you."

"That good or bad?"

"Depends on your point of view. FEAF is laying on a strike into Simpson Harbor at Rabaul." He took a deep breath. "A dusk strike, right at sunset."

Whip didn't say anything for a while. Then a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth and grew into the grin Goodman hadn't seen for a while. "Lou, I'll tell you something.

Ain't nobody else I would say this to." He chuckled. "I don't know whether to be glad —

or just plain scared."

Goodman kept a straight face. "I think maybe I ought to go along. I might even fly copilot for one of the troops."

Whip sobered. "Don't be so quick. This one's going to be a bitch. We're talking about
Rabaul
, remember?"

"Yeah, I remember. I'd still like you to think about it."

Whip studied him. "Fat man, why the hell do you want to go?"

"Someone's gotta look after you, kid. The navy is setting up a big scrap with the Japanese. They're probing, trying to find out everything they can before they get into it.

They do know the Japanese outnumber us, and badly, in some respects. They want very much to cut down those odds. So we're supposed to go after warships."

They went into the target area with the engines screaming out all their power. Speed was everything and they stayed as low as the airplanes could fly, leaving long disturbed trails in the water behind them. They had made the flight far out to sea, using dead reckoning to navigate, and swung wide to come into their target. They would race over a thin neck of land that would hardly slow them down.

In the lead airplane Whip held her steady, engines to maximum power, watching the world racing at him, their closeness to the water turning it into a sea of burnished gold.

To one side their long shadow leaped wildly across the waves, a grotesque ghost flashing along with them. Their timing was perfect, with the large orange disc of the sun about to touch the distant horizon. Then they were upon the northwest beach and they hurtled over the few dwellings, catching the antiaircraft positions completely by surprise. Whip caressed the firing button, held off. No use wasting ammunition here, now. In a few seconds he'd need every bullet he had.

They raced by trees and Whip held the slight altitude he'd gained to cross the neck of land. Before them Simpson Harbor spread far and wide, huddled beneath volcanic peaks on several sides. There were ships everywhere.

"Jesus, I didn't know there were that many ships in the whole world," Alex said.

"Do you see those cruisers?"

"Righto. Other end of the place; damn. Everybody gets a crack at us, it seems."

Whip grinned. "Gotta be fair, Lieutenant."

Alex gestured. "Bomb bays coming open." The airplane trembled as the doors gaped.

Fire rippled along the side of the warship.
That
crew wasn't asleep at the switch. The first of the tracers lifted at them, drifted and raced by. But they wouldn't have to worry about geysers. Too many ships in their way for the Japanese to depress their guns that low.

They'd be shooting each other to pieces.

But this destroyer was right in line with their approach and he could be trouble for the planes following. All he had to do was keep firing and he was bound to snare one of them.

"This is Lead. Numbers Two and Three, take a crack at that tin can as you go over."

Whip brought in rudder, aimed at dead center of the destroyer from maximum range and opened up for a long burst. As the guns crashed before them and the terrible orange light flared, he walked the rudders from side to side. The murderous scythe of his twelve heavy machine guns raked the enemy warship in a tornado of gunfire. Half the flak positions went silent. Whip banked to clear the destroyer masts.

He heard Bruce McCamish on the radio; Mac had taken the Number Two slot from Psycho. "Kessler, I'll hit 'em left, you take them right."

"Okay, Mac."

The destroyer died. By the time the fourth bomber raced into direct line of its antiaircraft not a gun remained firing. Dead and broken bodies were strewn across the decks. The B-25s swept on.

The world turned slow motion, an erratic film, unreal, impossible, insane. Bombers tore through the harbor, working toward the three heavy warships that were their targets. By now all Simpson Harbor was ablaze with light and glowing coals. Hundreds of guns were firing, guns of all sizes and calibers, clawing into the air at the American raiders that had struck with such audacity. The bottom of the sun had slipped beneath the horizon and in the remaining half-light the flickering bursts of orange and red and yellow made the harbor a garish scene of strobe lights. As guns flashed and shells erupted about them, shadows became reality and real objects mere retinal images. A flashing, flickering world that threatened vertigo. There was not a single instant in which to do other than concentrate; stay high enough to clear those masts, watch out for that ship, fire! hit that flak position… warn the planes following. It was threading, working yoke and rudder, punching through the shock waves of exploding shells, ignoring the thudding impacts into the airplane of enemy bullets and shells striking home. And through it all, somewhere in the back of a man's mind, was that still greater insanity, that if your plane was struck, if fuel turned into flame, if metal broke and aerodynamic lines yielded to greater forces, then it was better to die than to be a survivor.

"
There
! See it? Three cruisers. That big mother to the left… that's our baby…"

Whip chanted his call of the target approaching, hidden behind a line of waspish flame of antiaircraft guns. He squeezed the tit with his thumb and his fifties roared and bucked and exploded, and even as he poured in toward the enemy warship he was walking rudder, and now he banked sharply, kicked the rudder pedal, skidding, slewing wildly, giving them no target to hang onto.

"Kessler! I'm going to drop straight into the bastard!" he shouted into his microphone.

"Roger." That was all from Arnie in the second bomber. They knew what to expect from one another. Whip hurled the bomber about like a wild man and then he was only a moment from position, he was ready to do what a man could do only from feel and experience, and a terrible glare filled his eyes as a shell exploded directly before them.

Something struck the windscreen with a terrible bang, but he ignored it, he
had
to ignore it, and he was ready. He yelled "
Drop
!" to Alex and his copilot cut away that fat 2000-pounder in their belly and the B-25 jumped from the release of the weight. No skipping of bombs this time — Whip had aimed so that his missile would arc through the air along its ballistic trajectory and if he had aimed right the goddamned thing should hit that mothering cruiser at just about the waterline. To his right Arnie Kessler, with the colonel aboard as observer, the poor son of a bitch, was skipping his bomb into the warship. Whip raced beyond the high mast and hammered on the throttles, full emergency power, everything she could give, the engines howling at the world, they could take only so much of this but to hell with that, it had to be all the way and they cleared the cruiser and back in the turret Coombs like to have torn their ears off with his screech.

"
Bullseye
! We got the son of a bitch! Right in the goddamned belly, we got the son of a b

— " His voice died away in a gurgle and they didn't know if he was busy or something had happened to him, because there was no time to ask. They swerved sharply and it was a game again; jinking, bobbing, weaving, a wild run through the enemy defenses of fire and steel, but they were punching through and there were those volcanic peaks, they had their position down clearly, and tomorrow,
all
of tomorrow and all the days beyond that, lay in getting the hell out of this place. Whip fired at anything and everything that lay before them. His airplane was a dervish, a maddened thing flinging itself through the sky, but he picked his targets, little toy dolls of men and their guns, and he hammered out burst after burst, because these same sons of bitches below could wipe out the bombers that were coming behind.

One B-25 was hammered by a shell blast and missed its target. The bomb was aboard and there was no way, no hope, of ever going
back
into that charnel house of flak, and the pilot saw a big ship before him, transport or merchantman, he didn't know and didn't care, he lined up and heaved that fat bomb out of his innards, and the plane following saw the whole incredible sight of the heavy bomb smashing through the sides of the ship as if it were paper, going clean through and coming out the other side, ripping through the air straight into the side of a destroyer and blowing that son of a bitch clean above the surface, and that's all they saw, except the turret gunner, who was cursing and laughing at the same time, reported a sheet of flame from where the destroyer had been hit and they figured they had that sucker wiped out.

And then they heard the heartrending sound that froze every man in the bombers…

"This is Jordan. We've been hit." He was calling in the blind, not to one man but to all, and they knew what that meant.

"Jordan!" Whip was shouting into his mike. "How bad… can you make it out?"

"No way, my friend." How could a man's voice go soft and gentle in the midst of all this hell? But… they say when a man knows it's all over, that his last seconds are trickling away like the final grains of sand in the emptying hourglass, there's no need for fear, no need to panic. That's all behind you.

That's what they say.

Whatever; Jordan's last seconds were trickling, fast. For Octavio Jordan and his copilot, Duane Collins, and his navigator, Ray Blair, and their radioman/gunner, Tim Bailey, and their flight engineer, Bud Marion, for all five men. The other crews saw the flames tearing at the bomber, gouging through metal, shrieking free of fuel tanks and ruptured lines as it thundered over the harbor, a dazzling beacon, a fireball reflecting a garish glow over the water, and they all wondered the same thing, how in the name of God was Octavio staying at the controls, still flying, working at it, controlling and directing his blazing meteor of an airplane, because they all knew the heat was
inside
, the cockpit was an inferno.

They were burning alive inside that son of a bitch, and every man prayed and hoped and shouted for Jordan to put her in, to smash her into the water and end it all.

But he didn't
. He stayed with it, whatever of his flesh was bubbling, and with agony tearing at him, and his skin flaying off him and his lungs seared and choking. He stayed with his dying airplane. Long enough to reach Lakunai Airdrome where, to everyone's astonishment, they saw Zeros racing along the runway, taking off to intercept them even as they raced from the harbor, and with just enough light left to work over the bombers no longer in formation.

Hell would have raked their ranks, except for Octavio Jordan, who for all they knew was by now shrieking in mortal agony, because there was more fire than metal, but the huge spearhead of flame came across the runway right on the deck, straight into the path of the enemy fighters just breaking ground.

The dying man, the dying men, took out four Zeros just getting airborne, and the now exploding bomber with what everyone hoped were dead men smashed into parked fighters at the far end of the field. Maybe a dozen more Zeros went up and their pilots died in their cockpits as twelve tons of blazing, exploding bomber erupted in their midst.

One Zero made it off the ground, sallied forth into the air, made a desultory pass at a B-25 and flew away.

They really didn't pay the fighter that much attention. In the closing darkness, as they sped away for their own survival, they kept thinking the same thing. A man knows he's going to die.

What makes him live long enough to burn to death?

Someone said love of the men he knew, with whom he flew, with whom he shared life and death every day.

Could a man love so strongly?

That was tougher to face than the enemy.

22

"It's not my idea. Read the orders yourself. FEAF is calling the shots. They want the fighter bases torn up, as many Zeros as we can get wiped out on the ground. Don't look to
me
, Lou. Go talk to headquarters." Before Lou Goodman could respond Whip was at it again. "Know why they're in such a sweat? Because the Japanese shot down seven out of twelve B-17s on one mission. The Fortress herself, the big invincible iron bird that's been giving the Japs so much shit all these months." Whip grinned wolfishly, enjoying the moment, watching Lou Goodman eating the words he had thrown in such heat and with such finesse not too long ago at him. Because headquarters wanted those fighter fields chewed up, and they had a new weapon with which to do the job.