Whip (27 page)

But the general was on his feet. "I'm flying to Seven-Mile to have a meeting with General Spaulding. He flew in this morning from Kenney's office. I'd like you to come along with me. There's a hell of a lot more at stake than the 335th, Colonel, but I'm not ignoring this problem either. We're going to have to bring this whole mess to a head."

"General, it sounds like you're going to ask me to break up this outfit. Jesus, sir, Whip and I have been friends a long —"

"I'd rather you didn't go any further with that line of thinking, Colonel. There's more to it than what we've talked about. I've spent some time with your flight surgeon. About Whip. He's getting close. Did you know that? Much more of this and —"

"He's a hell of a lot tougher than any of you people could dream of, General."

Smyth ignored the remark. "I know how long you've been friends," he said with a tone of finality. "I wouldn't ask you to do anything of the sort, what you just said before." He paused. "So, I'm not asking. I'm giving you a direct order, Colonel Goodman. And I'm going to let you figure out the best and the easiest way."

"If it helps, General, I could always shoot him."

Smyth showed his first flash of anger. "My God, are you all insubordinate up here?"

"You could always shoot
me
, then."

"I've thought of it, Lou. Let's go."

27

The Japanese hadn't waited for the bombers. Under cover of first darkness that same night the loose convoy of barges slipped from a sheltered cove along the north edge of Cape Gloucester on New Britain Island and started south within the Dampier Strait. This reduced their passage in the open sea to its minimum and kept them close enough to the northern coastline of New Guinea at daybreak to enjoy the patrolling protection of some two dozen Zero fighters.

General Smyth was right; Fifth Air Force had laid on a heavy strike. Sixteen B-17s crisscrossed the convoy from twenty-two thousand feet. It was like shooting at gnats with a shotgun. They never hit a barge, but the tumultuous wave action from the exploding bombs apparently upended one of the clumsy vessels and sent it to the bottom. The Zeros were still climbing as the Flying Fortresses dropped, and the heavies would have been in for a rough time except that the second wave was coming in. The big force of B-25s got a good bomb pattern and a half-dozen barges went up in blinding sheets of flame as the fuel stores let go.

Now the Zeros had the advantage of diving on the bombers well below them, and a massacre was averted only by the presence of sixteen P-40 fighters. They did less damage to the Zeros than they'd liked to have done but they did accomplish their mission in drawing off the fighters. It was one of those nip-and-tuck situations. There were enough Zeros to have rudely shoved aside the P-40s and still worked over the B-25s, but the Japanese leader had his orders to protect the barges. Three P-40s and two Zeros went down and the Japanese broke off the attack and went back to their elephantine charges crawling along the sea.

It should have ended there. But on the way back to Kanaga Field Whip saw a dream come true. He stabbed the air with his finger. "Alex, do you see them? Down there… ten o'clock low, and they're going in our direction."

Alex Bartimo looked and his grin might never have stopped if he hadn't wanted to talk.

"Luvverly, luwerly. How many you make out?"

Whip studied the air below them. At what he guessed was five thousand feet at least eighteen enemy bombers. "They look like Bettys," Whip said.

"You have just passed your aircraft recognition test, old fellow."

Whip looked at the other aircraft in their formation. "I don't think anyone's tumbled to our friends down there."

"The bloody P-40s are asleep."

"Leave 'em be. I think we ought to go downstairs."

"Wouldn't be right not to say hello. Besides, they're on their way to Moresby from the looks of things."

Whip switched to squadron frequency. "Heads up, troops. Kessler, Hoot, Mac, Dusty.

You read?"

The answers came back immediately; they were listening. Only those four bombers held Whip's interest. Only those four planes and his own were gunships. The other B-25s were mosquitoes.

"Okay, and this is only for the four people I just called. All other aircraft stay with the main formation. You other troops, look below."

"Whoo-ee."

"Eighteen fat goldfish."

"I think the boss man's got an idea."

"If we make our move now we can set 'em up."

"Okay, okay," Whip called in impatiently. "
Just
you four. Slide off to the right and form up on me."

Whip's bomber eased off to the side and began losing altitude. The Japanese in all likelihood had seen the bigger American formation and they'd be paying strict attention to the fighters. The odds were they wouldn't think twice about a few bombers easing from the main formation. Why bother? They were no threat.

The B-25s were light without their bomb loads and they had plenty of height, and there was all that beautiful altitude to use in the long dive. Whip started down the gravity train, the other bombers holding precision formation. He stayed well behind the Mitsubishi bombers, building up tremendous speed, and came up behind the enemy formation about a thousand feet
below
their altitude. Then they came back on the yokes and the five gunships arrowed upward, still with tremendous speed, directly through the blind spot of the Japanese bombers.

"I'll start at the left," Whip sang out.

"Gotcha, boss," Arnie Kessler called in. "We'll work it from left to right."

The Betty bombers swelled in their sights, expanding swiftly.

The engines thundered sweetly and the gunships sailed upward on a smooth curve, and then Whip was able to make out details of engines and hatches and exhaust patterns back from the stacks, and he kept closing, right in to pointblank range, and he had his sights dead-center on the belly of the ship to the far left of the enemy bomber, and finally he squeezed the gun tit.

Twelve fifty-calibers shattered the sky. In an instant the tornado of bullets smashed into the bomber. One moment it flew serenely, its crew oblivious of the death climbing up beneath the airplane, and in the next instant the tanks were a mass of flames and the right wing had exploded clean away from the fuselage and the bomber twisted up and over in a maddened cartwheel that took it tumbling toward the other bombers.

Everything seemed to happen at the same time. Whip saw his first target plunge into the bomber to its immediate right and he knew there would be a hell of a collision. He got out of the way fast, skidding well over to the right and he brought his guns to bear on the third enemy aircraft. As he started to fire the bomber exploded. One instant it was there and the next it was gone, and he heard Arnie Kessler's triumphant cry in his earphones.

"Got the son of a bitch!"

Whip wasted no time, breaking away to the left and grabbing for altitude. The other four gunships were like killer whales in the midst of an enemy, hammering death blows from their terrible massed weapons. In those first few seconds of battle, steaming up from behind and below, Whip's first long burst had destroyed one bomber, which smashed into a second airplane. That made two. Arnie Kessler exploded the third. Hoot Gibson and Macintosh each nailed one. The sixth target trailed smoke and Dusty Rhodes didn't wait around to see what happened but poured a long burst into another Mitsubishi.

The Japanese, hanging doggedly to their formation, rear gunners firing desperately, went forward and down to build up speed. The Betty was powerful and she was fast and the Japanese pilots, once they'd gotten over the shock of what had happened to them, were taking the best way out — diving away from the American bombers. The B-25s went after them in hot pursuit, the pilots shouting wildly to one another. Dusty Rhodes and Kessler teamed up on one bomber lagging behind and literally shot it to pieces in the air. Pieces of airplane kept breaking away, flashing past them, and suddenly the enemy bomber was in an uncontrolled spin, plunging for the ocean.

They ignored that one and went to emergency power to run down the fleeing bombers.

But not for long. The voice that came over the common channel chilled every man in the B-25s.

"Blue Goose, Blue Goose from Rosebud —"

"Rosebud?" Alex Bartimo echoed the call sign. "Those are fighters. What the hell are —"

"Read you, Rosebud."

"Then start a long curve to the left
and start it now
. You've got about thirty Zeros closing on you. Break left, break left. We're right behind the Zeros and you can bring them closer to us."

Whip heard Coombs's voice on the intercom. "Jesus Christ, Major, he ain't kidding…

there's at least thirty of them back there —" Coombs's voice faded away as his turret guns opened up with a shaking roar.

The Zeros were almost on them in a beautiful bounce. They knew what had happened.

Those thirty fighters were escort for the Betty bombers and the B-25s had moved in just before their rendezvous for the final run into Port Moresby.

Now the Zeros were after the B-25s.

And they had them.

Except for Rosebud. Whoever the hell it was up there. Without that warning call…

The Zeros were just coming within range when Rosebud hit.

"
I don't believe it! I don't believe it
!" They could hardly recognize Coombs's voice from the screeching.

"What the hell's going on back there, Coombs?" Whip demanded.

"
P-38s. It's P-38s, Major! God, they're beautiful
! I don't believe it, I see them, but I don't

—
look at them
go.'"

Whip nearly broke his neck twisting around in the cockpit, looking back through his side window. My God, it was impossible, but there they were, eight silvery twin-boomed fighters, coming downstairs faster than a man's eyes could believe, and they sliced into the pack of Zeros with devastating effect. Before the Japanese were really aware of what was happening, at least seven were goners — burning, wings torn away, pilots pulped in their cockpits. The remaining Zeros broke wildly, twisting and corkscrewing in dizzying maneuvers to escape what had exploded in their midst. Several Zeros streaked past the B-25s, and the gunners had a brief but ineffectual blast at them as they went by.

Whip and Alex were pounding one another on the neck and shoulders, and the same pandemonium swept the other B-25s. They watched in wonder as the big fighters eased alongside. "Hey, Rosebud, you guys came along just in time. Thanks."

"Roger. You people weren't doing so bad yourself. Didn't anyone let you know you're not flying fighters? We counted eight bombers going down back there."

"Just funnin', that's all."

"You must have a hell of a sense of humor. You want a ride back home?"

"Negative, Rosebud. And thanks. I think those other people have called it a day. Hey, where'd you people come from, anyway?"

"Forty-ninth. We've been laying low until now. This was our first mission. Sayonara, you all."

The big Lockheeds went for altitude, the crewmen in the B-25s watching with wonder.

There was no effort, no gasping engines struggling. The P-38s swept upward with a grace and speed almost impossible to believe. Whip set course for Kanaga Field.

Suddenly he pulled his hands from the yoke. "Take it," he told Alex.

Alex watched as Whip slid back his seat, fishing in a pocket for a cigarette. Damn… he was into one of his blue funks again. The man's mood changed so swiftly. Elation one moment and this sudden depression the next. Whip had unexpectedly rounded a corner in his own mind and stumbled headlong into himself. After the first flush of excitement about the P-38s showing up, he had resented their presence. Oh, Jesus, was it really that bad? Had there been something kind, restrained in the way Lou Goodman had fought with him? Whip had fought his air war,
his
air war for so very long now that the resentment he'd felt at fighters that no doubt had saved the lives of most of the people in their formation was, well, it was goddamned irrational thinking. And unspeakably stupid, he reminded himself.

In the bomber holding course for New Guinea, now growing on the horizon, safe within his own element of flight, feeling the solid throb of the airplane beneath and all about him, Whip Russel began some uncomfortable soul-searching. That flash of resentment was still a physical shock to his system, and he wondered how long he had really been thinking this way. Lou Goodman had been trying to reach him, to tell him
something
, but the fat man had been walking on eggs and,
oh shit, Lou, I think I'm beginning to
understand, to see
—

The anger charged him with electric shock. Was it really so? Had Lou been trying to help? Or was this resentment he had felt toward Lou justified? Those P-38s out there, when they —

He drew up short in his mind. Good God, now he was trying to justify not being grateful because those fighters had snatched them from the brink of oblivion! Sure, his people would follow him anywhere, even to hell,
but did he have to take them there
? He sat back in his mind to take a long look at himself and he was disturbed. He knew what it was for a man to look at events with the tunnel vision that comes when you've got the only chair in town. As if the goddamned war had to be fought his own way.

"Hey, boss, we got troubles."

A glance through his window. Arnie Kessler's bomber. Even as he watched he saw the propeller blades of the right engine slowing, the blades knifing into the wind as Arnie feathered the system.

"How bad is it, Arnie?"

"The left fan is doing fine. I can make it to Kanaga okay."

"Maybe we'd better go for Seven-Mile."

"Nah. As that kangaroo with you would say, it's a piece of cake. We're pretty light, boss.

Kanaga's fine."

"Okay." He didn't need to tell anyone else to modify their power to stay with Kessler.

They rode it back together, pushing over a saddleback in the Owen Stanleys with no sweat. But they would be landing at four thousand feet and it wasn't going to be easy.