Whip (9 page)

Goodman's face was like stone. "I know
that
too."

"We're losing almost as many people to ground fire — ground and ships — as we are to the fighters. Why?

Because we're not flying these things the way the people who built them intended them to be flown. If we were going by the book we'd be upstairs anywhere from eight to fifteen thousand feet, dressed up in perfect formation and dropping our bombs in patterns. The trouble with all that — and, goddamnit, Lou, I know you know this also, but you told me to spell it out — is we aren't flying that way. If we played tin soldier games at those altitudes and the Zeros latched on to us there wouldn't be room on their fighters for all the pretty American flags they'd be painting.

"So" — and Whip's shrug was as eloquent as his intensity — "we go down low. That way we know we can hit 'em where they live. We can put the bombs where they do the most damage, and on the deck we've got a better chance against the Zeros. They can't come up beneath us in belly attacks. They've got to play it topside all the way and that gives our gunners a better chance. Not much of a better chance, but you take everything you can grab. But it's
still
not enough."

Whip took a deep breath and suddenly he bolted from his chair. It was another sign of that band-saw impetuosity, the staccato movements of a man's body trying to keep up with his mind.

"I don't want a goddamned medium bomber, or a light bomber, or even whatever it is they call an attack bomber. That's all fancy-name crap for airplanes that are getting shot to pieces. You know what I want, Lou?"

Goodman waited, impassive.

"I want a gunship." Whip stopped his pacing as if he'd smacked into an invisible wall and he turned sharply, a fist thudding into a palm. "A
gunship
, damnit. I want to be able to take my people on a run right into the teeth of the Japs and all their flak, and I want me and them to have the chance to come out of that run, and all in one piece. I want to be able to go into a bomb run and I want to chew the hell out of the flak positions that are waiting for us. I want more firepower going
at them
than they can throw up at us.

You ever see those Jap destroyers, Lou? They're fast and they're good but their sides are made of tin,
tin
, goddamnit, and if I've got enough punch I can blow holes in those things with just my guns. The guns I want. The guns, damnit, that we
need
."

Whip turned and his eyes bored into Lou Goodman. "We're the best," he said, suddenly quiet, but with no loss of the intensity that had gripped him so fiercely. "But time is running out for us too. If we don't get better equipment in the air, well…"

He threw himself back into his chair. "We've got to change the odds. We've got to turn our airplanes into weapons, for Christ's sake, not some toys from a Sears catalogue."

Lou Goodman let the silence hang in after Whip's mixture of tirade and unspoken plea.

He knew-what was meant. There had been those reports from Eglin Field in Florida.

New experiments with bombing. They'd thrown away the book because everyone knew the book was a joke.

The new concept was skip bombing. You came in on the deck, you came in low and you stayed low, and the theory had it that if you dropped your bombs from a certain angle and a certain speed the bombs would skip — bounce — across the water just like a kid skipping a flat rock across the surface of a pond. And it worked. That was the real wonder of it. The damned thing
worked
, and it promised an accuracy of delivery that was almost too much to believe.

But it wasn't enough, because a bomber had to hold that run on the deck, and during that long, intolerable period of boring into the target you were a setup for flak. You had to have a way of knocking out, suppressing, the hellish firepower the Japanese threw up at you.

Lou Goodman created a vision of a B-25 bristling with fifty-caliber machine guns. It would be a bitch. There would be bracing problems, vibration, center of balance to consider, ammunition supply and feed and —

"It's not going to be that easy," Lou said, the quiet in his voice matching that of his friendly adversary. No one else in the room spoke. It was between these two.

Whip had a look of sudden disbelief. "Who the hell said it would be easy? Jesus Christ, Lou, its an engineering problem we're talking about. I don't want a goddamned miracle!

I want solid engineering, ordnance work. Cutting, sawing, hacking, bolting together."

Again he was intensely alive, springing back into the thickets they faced. He threw out his arm, stabbing the air.

"You know what we brought with us in those planes of ours? The best mechanics in our outfit. The
best
. And we scraped together every goddamned piece of metal we could find.

Parts and pieces and bits. Aluminum and steel and galvanized iron and tin and God knows what else. We borrowed and stole every tool we could find. Those ships of ours are flying junkyards. Every one of my men is here to work on those planes. They're going to work day and night with your people, Lou. Day and night and I don't give a shit who sleeps or doesn't. But we're going to rebuild those airplanes into gunships and when we go back north we're going to make it a whole new ball game."

Lou Goodman had made a steeple of his fingers and he peered over them, owl-eyed. "I repeat, it's not that easy. I — "

"
Jesus
! Don't tell me how hard it is! Tell me
how
you're going to do it!"

Goodman stirred. He stalled for time so he could speak with the kind of clarity that would have meaning to these people who strained so hard to get back into a war with the right kind of weapons.

"Okay, Whip. Now you listen for a while, all right?"

"I _ "

"Just can it, Whip."

Whip Russel narrowed his eyes and the two men stared at one another, but there was more bridge than gulf between them, and Whip nodded slowly.

"All right, Whip. Let me take it from your point of view for a moment. We're agreed that between my men and yours we have the bodies to do what you're planning. Gunships out of B-25s. We agree it's never been done before — "

"Catledge has worked it all out."

"Just shut up," Goodman went on smoothly. "
It's never been done before
." Goodman's repetition was quiet, forceful, and it hung in the air, visible for them to see and to ponder.

"Until it's a fait accompli we don't know what problems will crop up. All right; we'll accept there are, there will be problems, and like all other horseshit like this, we'll cross those bridges when we come to them. We'll do what has to be done.

"We know generally what we need; armor plating and the galvanized metal and the bracing and the ammo feed chutes and the gas exhaust blowbacks, and all the thousand little things for this job. We'll accept that. I'm short on manpower here on Garbutt, but you know that and you've filled in the holes with your own people. They may know a hell of a lot less than either they or you think they do, but we can teach 'em in a hurry.

We've got a whole field of wrecked and broken airplanes and I think we can convince the people from those iron birds to give up a few points. As for the rest of it" — Lou Goodman coughed gently and shifted again in his chair — "well, the food stinks and the beer is warm and the women they all got warts and chancres — at least from what somebody told me because I haven't seen a dame in months — so we don't have to worry about social life interrupting what has to be done."

For the first time a small ripple of laughter went out among the men in the room. Jesus, the old man's bought the idea! The thought swept among them and they eased their tension and —

Lou Goodman dropped his bomb in the midst of their uplifted spirit. "There's one problem."

You had only to look at his face to understand that the colonel meant what he said. No levity, nothing hidden. The room sobered — at once.

Goodman gave it straight out. "We don't have the guns. We do not have the machine guns you need to do what you want with your airplanes." The finality of Goodman's tone matched his words. "There's no use crapping in the sand about this to any of you.

We can handle everything, even the ammunition. We've got boxes of fifty-caliber ammo up the gazoo. Only God, and not even Douglas MacArthur, knows how the supply system works. So we have more ammo than we know what to do with, but we do not repeat do not have the machine guns for this job."

Goodman waited out the silence and the inevitable questions. Dick Catledge was first to break the ice. "There are other planes on the field. Maybe — "

"Would you give up your weapons from your aircraft for another outfit?"

"No."

"Forget it then."

"Isn't there anything in the pipeline, Colonel?" Rankin asked.

"If there is, I don't know about it. Besides, nothing comes to us directly. It goes through the system, friend. From the Pentagon to Pearl Harbor to MacArthur's headquarters and then to Far East Air Forces and then it gets spread out wherever the head people say. It's a big and a clumsy system and in many ways it's stupid but it's there, like God, and you got to go to their church."

Whip gestured idly for Goodman's attention. Of all the men in the room he alone had caught the drift of what Goodman was trying to tell them, but without spelling it out like an instruction manual.

"If you don't have, ah, access to this stuff, Lou, who does?"

Goodman didn't answer at once. He swung around to face his desk and for several moments he shuffled papers idly. "According to certain records which mysteriously, and by persons unknown, somehow ended up on my desk, two days ago, at a dusty little hellhole known as Bowen, a cargo ship unloaded several dozen crates. From what I understand, those crates contain certain critical war items. They were unloaded at Bowen because the ship suffered damage in a storm and the captain was afraid it would never make it to South Australia. The plan was to drop it off at Bowen and then take it south on the coastal rail line."

Lou waited for the questions that came like arrows from the group.

"
What
certain critical items?"

"They include air-cooled fifty-caliber machine guns. The M2 model, I believe."

"Where the hell is Bowen?"

"Due south of here there's a fair-sized harbor facility known as Rockhampton. Between here and Rockhampton, isolated from the rest of the world except for a narrow road and the rail line, lies the port of Bowen. There are no Americans there. Just local people.

Perhaps a handful of Aussie troops with antiaircraft, bored to death."

Whip rubbed the stubble on his cheek. "If they got these fifties there why the hell don't you just go get the damn things?"

"A good question, Captain," Goodman retorted. "They have not been assigned to Garbutt Field. I have no authorization to simply take them. I
did
try, as a matter of fact. I made a signal — Christ, I'm getting to sound like these people here — I sent a priority message to FEAF. I pleaded and cajoled to the best of my ability, which is considerable.

No dice. The guns are assigned to some purpose the meaning of which is clear only to MacArthur and his minions."

Whip looked at Psycho and Alex Bartimo, and leaned forward on his chair.

"Lou," he said. "Tell me more about the setup at Bowen…"

9

Baked to a grizzle by the remorseless sun, a pimple on the long rail track running along the eastern coast of the huge island continent, injected with a semblance of purpose because of its crude port unloading facilities, grim and weathered as they were, Bowen felt the war only from a distance. It was a war in which they had never seen the enemy, although he was not safely far from where the citizens of Bowen plodded through their days and nights. The Japanese presence was threatening, yet had no more direct substance than heat waves shimmering in the pitiless sun.

The vision-slurring heat was another matter; its effect upon the skin was immediate and real. The
unseen
presence of the Japanese was worse, for the war had moved inexorably closer, and when it became a bitter struggle in the mountains and jungle and grassy hills of New Guinea it had its own frightening overtones, for parts of New Guinea were administered by Australians. It was an extension of the island continent, it was a touch, an arm, a moment of the people and its land. The Japanese came in and they smashed aside the courageous but woefully inadequate defenses of the Australians, and the people of Bowen, who had never seen a Japanese soldier or heard a Japanese airplane, knew that this invisible enemy was killing and maiming Australian soldiers. But no one
really
believed this pissy little place would be selected for the attention of the Imperial Emperor, or whatever it was they called that funny little man in Tokyo. After all, when you really gave it some thought —

So early the next morning, with the sun huge and eye-knifing just over the horizon, the people of Bowen were totally unprepared for the swift strike from the eastern sky. In a classic move the enemy struck directly from out of the sun so the hapless defenders on the ground could barely see a thing as the bombers thundered overhead. The townspeople for a long and terrible moment were convinced their end had come, but the garishly painted Japanese bombers howled overhead and went into steep turns that took them directly for the port's dock facilities. From the center of town there was only that one clear look at the enemy planes and the orange ball marking the wings and fuselage; then the bombers were some distance away, hammering at their chosen target.

Brave Australians fired ancient rifles and the one machine gun assigned to the community defense, but everyone knew the effort was little more than a display of local honor. And they were more than willing to let the Japanese tear up the makeshift docks at the close of the rail spur, which immediately after the bombing attack began was enveloped with a thick pall of acrid smoke, drifting before the wind upon the town and nearly smothering its inhabitants.