Mac wingate 7, p.7
Mac Wingate 7, page 7
“I wouldn’t put my money on it.”
Wingate left Cowan with Betty Andrews and took his place in the mid-upper turret. They were a little south of Lyons when the fighters hit them again. There were two of them. Messerschmitt 110s with twin engines and long, sleek bodies. They came from above and behind and they came together; flying one behind the other and no more than a couple of hundred feet apart. It was obvious to Wingate as he put in his first burst at the lead fighter, that the whole damned Luftwaffe was expecting them. They were below the radar beams and they couldn’t have been tracked as accurately as this simply by visual contacts from the ground.
Little flames showed the positions of the attackers’ guns—machine guns in the wings, twin cannons in the nose. He thought about the cases of H.E. stored in the fuselage just under his feet. No way they were going to survive if these attacks kept on.
The fighters swept past, a mere fifty feet clear of Mac’s head, then turned and circled and came back again. He could track them by their exhaust flames and by their silhouettes against the bright moonlit sky.
He fired again, allowing the same kind of deflection that he would in shooting at a flying woodcock with a shotgun and laying his sights a few degrees ahead of it. Then the hydraulics in the turret seized. The gun stuck where it was. He could fire it but he couldn’t move it and if the thing worked manually he didn’t know how to switch systems. He was helpless. The Messerschmitts were pouring shit into the bomber and all he could do was sit and take it. Even the guns in the rear turret had quit firing. He concluded that Ed McGrady was having similar problems.
He reported to Hazlitt, then dropped down into the fuselage. Cowan was lying in the main gangway and Betty Andrews was working on him in the light of a flashlight. He stepped over them and went aft. Brad Manganaro was manning the starboard waist gun and from the flashes that appeared from the rear turret now, McGrady seemed to have gotten his stoppage cleared. Wingate turned to the port waist gun in time to catch the third attack coming in. But before he could hit the firing button, the lead fighter ran into the stream of shit that McGrady was sending at him. It flamed at once, throwing the fighter behind into brilliant relief, then veered to port, went into a flat turn, and hit the fields below in a broad mushroom of fire.
The second fighter broke off the attack. The experience of seeing his leader disintegrate in flames before his eyes had jarred the pilot’s confidence. He hesitated, then slipped out of range before Wingate could fire. But then he came back again in earnest.
He came in from the port beam again, turning steeply to bring his guns to bear. He closed. McGrady opened up but Wingate waited. He had assessed the pilot as new at the game, uncertain at first but now determined to prove his ability. He was going to commit himself all the way. The Messerschmitt opened fire, cannons flaming, machine guns making little flashes from the leading edges of the wings. Still Wingate waited.
They closed. The German wasn’t fifty feet from them when he broke off the attack. His whole underbelly came into silhouette and Wingate fired. He pressed both thumbs against the firing button and kept them there. The Messerschmitt slid past, began to pull clear, then checked. There were no flames and no obvious fragments of fuselage spinning out from the plane. But it had lost control of itself. It wouldn’t give any more trouble. It was clear what had happened. One of the rounds that the B-24 had been spraying toward it had killed the pilot. Wingate watched it begin to climb more and more steeply, until finally it stalled, dropped a wing tip, and plunged into the open countryside more than a mile away.
“Throw everything out,” Hazlitt was saying over the intercom. “We’re changing course. They’re waiting for us. We’re dead if we stay south. We’ll try and make it over the Alps. There’s no other option.”
Wingate snapped, “Everything? Listen, I’ve got a whole team waiting in the mountains for this stuff! Greek partisans dependent on it. We’ve brought a thousand pounds of it all this way ...”
“It’s a thousand pounds too much, Mac,” Hazlitt’s voice cut in. “Dump it! I’m going to start climbing now.”
It was the answer Wingate himself would have given if their positions had been reversed. He didn’t like questioning the pilot’s orders. Hazlitt was the one in command. But he couldn’t deprive those guerrillas of vital supplies without putting in some kind of protest.
Manganaro had to open the bomb bays manually. Even there the hydraulics had failed. Below them through the open hatchway, Wingate could see the broad countryside below hurtling past in the moonlight. Farms, barns, huddled stock, tore across his field of vision.
Betty Andrews was protesting at the top of her voice, the sound clearly audible over the beat of the, three remaining engines. “These are medical supplies, you dumb bastards! Men are going to bleed to death and die because of this!”
She offered a token physical resistance, then gave up and went back to attend to Cowan. As she did so, Wingate and Manganaro started tossing out the boxes of supplies. They dropped through the hatchway and out through the open bomb doors below, hitting the slipstream. At once they were tom away out of sight toward the tail.
Hazlitt called over the intercom. “Hold it when you get to the explosives, Mac. D’you think you could rig up a detonator for them?”
“I doubt if it needs a detonator from this height. It’s got a reputation for instability,” Wingate replied.
“We’re coming up to the Rhone. There’s an airfield the other side of it. Looks like they’re putting up fighters. Might be a nice gesture if we helped them.”
Wingate went forward. Peering through the Perspex windshield he could see the faint glimmer of a gooseneck flare path beyond the bend in the river. In the surrounding darkness there glowed the dark red exhausts of half a dozen aircraft moving around for takeoff.
“What height are we at?” he asked. He wanted the boxes to hit with as much jar as he could get.
“A couple of thousand feet,” said Hazlitt, eyes still on the scene beyond the river.
“That should do it,” Wingate calculated. “Take me straight down the runway. Brad and I will see how fast we can pitch them out.”
They ditched the rest of the medical supplies. Wingate still had reservations about the explosives. A cannon shell had ripped into one of the boxes on that first attack. He’d felt the shattered wood with his own hand. And still nothing had happened. They were going to take an awful lot of shit from that airfield when they made the run across it. Was any of it going to be worth it?
It was then he discovered the truth. The box was still where he’d left it, the shattered end toward the aluminum skin of the aircraft. But there had been some confusion in the stacking. Four of the top row of explosives boxes didn’t contain explosives at all. They contained Betty Andrews’s medical supplies. The shot had plowed into a case of bandages, then reamed its way upward through three more medical boxes before passing out through the compartment roof. Hazlitt’s scheme just might work.
Wingate and Manganaro, stood fore and aft of the hatch into the bomb bays, waiting for the signal from Hazlitt.
“Steady,” said Hazlitt.
Wingate picked up the first box by the rope handles and turned with it toward the open hatch. It weighed about fifty pounds and as he stood with it swinging in his hands, feet braced on either side of the opening, he could feel the vast suck of the slipstream trying to tear it from his grasp.
The broad surface of the river raced past below and Hazlitt said, calmly, “OK—now.”
They picked up the boxes beside them, turned with them, and dropped them through the hatch in quick succession. Wingate dropped three, then four. Still there was nothing from below to indicate that they were detonating. His mind raced, independent of his body, trying to calculate the speed at which a box of this mass would drop, trying to anticipate when the first of them would hit the ground. Far below, the yellow gooseneck line still flashed past.
Five boxes passed through Wingate’s hands before his doubts were answered. The Liberator was shuddering from the impact of the flak it was taking. Long streamers of tracer passed across the open hatch below. The smell of cordite began to fill the fuselage. Then the scene below lit up as if someone had fired one gigantic magnesium flare.
Manganaro muttered, “Jesus!” and threw a forearm momentarily over his eyes, before turning again to the remaining boxes and tossing another out of the hatch.
“Magnifique!” came de Lille’s voice over the intercom.
Wingate dropped another box. It spun in the slipstream and was sucked out of sight. As he turned for another, he wondered where de Lille had been all this time and what had suddenly changed his attitude. An hour ago he’d gone crazy when they had been defending themselves over northern France. They were still over France. They were slinging explosives at it—and suddenly it was “Magnifique!” For Christ’s sake, why?
He grabbed the last of the boxes and flung it out. Manganaro called, “OK, Tiny. That’s it. Let’s get the hell out of here!”
He hand-cranked the bomb doors closed and dropped the floor hatch. Wingate caught a glimpse of the scene behind them through the plastic blister wrapped around the port waist gun position. A sheet of flame hung over the main buildings. Aircraft were ablaze in the wooden dispersal areas and a couple of blazing fighters blocked the runway. Any doubts Wingate had had about the effectiveness of the H.E. vanished. It worked all right. Yet he was sorry to see it gone.
De Lille appeared from the tail section and took Wingate by the sleeve. “The gunner,” he said. “Take a look at him, Captain. I had to lift him out of the turret. I took over the gun from him. It—it may be too late.”
Ed McGrady was lying where de Lille had propped him, just outside the rear turret entrance with his back against one of the bracing members. Wingate bent down, lifted his chin, and shone a flashlight into his face. McGrady’s eyes were wide open, bloodshot and staring. He was quite dead—limbs quite limp, no pulse in his neck. A line of heavy machine gun slugs had slammed right across his chest and almost cut his flight jacket in two.
Wingate nodded to himself. It was too late, all right. McGrady looked younger in death than in life, lolling there with his eyes wide and scarcely a wrinkle on his face. What goddamn luck! He’d never make that final trip now and he’d never go back to the States.
There was a blanket that someone had stuffed among the jumble of bracing struts behind McGrady. Wingate took hold of it and pulled it toward him. The only thing left to do for McGrady was give him some decent covering until someone could bury him. The blanket snagged on something and Wingate gave it a sharp pull. It came free, revealing some dark huddled mass beneath it. He draped the blanket over McGrady, who was now lying clear of the gangway where de Lille had moved him, but as he did so something about the dark shape that he had uncovered caught his attention. He threw the flashlight onto it.
It was alive, shivering in the cold. He had heard of some crews that flew with a dog aboard as a mascot. He dismissed the idea. This wasn’t a dog, it was human. As he realized it, a depressing suspicion struck him.
“Out!” he snapped, prodding at the object with his foot. “Come on—I know who you are. Out, before I put a bullet in you!”
The object moved, hesitated, then gradually uncurled and stood up. It was the kid that Wingate had met on the firing range—Kenny Fields.
“Let’s have it,” said Wingate.
“I—I followed you,” the boy said, at last. “I got in the plane when they were loading it. I’m going to see my Dad.”
“That’s all we need!” Wingate sighed.
Chapter Four
Hazlitt coaxed the crippled bomber higher, nursing it through the increasing turbulence that swept up from the Alpine slopes, easing it through the clefts in the snowy ridges, listening all the time to the growing protests of the engines. They’d been badly hit. The degree of bank had been cut down to a mere 15 degrees by the damage to the port aileron, and fuel was draining out from one of the main wing tanks.
It was bitterly cold. Wingate sat under a blanket with one arm around the boy. Both of them shivered. In the shadows to his right, Betty Andrews was tending to the wounded Cowan. Only de Lille seemed to ignore the temperature and the lack of oxygen. Despite Hazlitt’s instructions, he was back in the rear turret defying the Luftwaffe to come again. His personal success in the previous encounter had given him the smell of blood.
“He’s not going to make it, Mac,” said Betty Andrews. “He’s unconscious now. He’s lost too much blood. He needs a transfusion.”
Wingate checked with Hazlitt over the intercom. “What do you suggest, Wingate?” Hazlitt growled. “We toss him out with a parachute? You’ve got a qualified nurse back there—do what you can for him.”
Hazlitt was right. Outside, the barren peaks of the high mountains towered up into the moonlight through the lower cloud layer, beautiful and bleak. There was no question of landing, and anyone parachuting into that scene would freeze in seconds.
Wingate leaned back and waited. The thin air made any kind of action impossible. Even sitting was an effort and it was increasingly difficult to keep his thoughts together. Lack of oxygen made him dizzy. He wondered if there were any oxygen supplies around the plane, and if he could bring some to Cowan. The more he thought about it, the less could he come up with an answer. Any demand on his concentration was a waste of time.
Hazlitt muttered, “Five more minutes. Hang on.”
They were in the center of the massif now. Out of the window, Wingate could see the gaunt snow-covered slopes soaring way above the wingtip. Hazlitt couldn’t make enough height to clear them. He was taking the Liberator right through the middle of them. He was some pilot—cool as ice, rock steady in his judgment. All they could do was pray that his judgment was right.
Wingate began to tick off the seconds in his mind—sixty, a hundred, hundred and twenty ... He’d reached the three hundreds when he felt the aircraft suddenly check and drop. Outside, sheer walls of ice blocked out the view. The world turned a translucent green under the moon. This was it. How long would it be before someone picked them out of the melting mouth of a glacier, in the valley below? Twenty years—thirty?
Wingate grasped the kid. His head was clearing. If they slammed into the side of a mountain, that would be it. But if somehow they hit one of the lower slopes, at least the boy might get away with it. It was all a question of how he survived the crash.
Seconds ticked past. The cliffs of ice outside remained unbroken, continuous walls of greenish glass. A steady vibration shook the metal flooring under Wingate’s ass, eased, then finally ceased. The roar of the engines had eased. It seemed that Hazlitt was going to try to make the impact as easy as possible.
The intercom crackled. Hazlitt’s voice said calmly, “Relax. We’re over the top.”
It was twenty minutes before Wingate felt human again. Hazlitt had taken them down to five thousand feet. It was warmer and there was air to breathe. Manganaro handed out coffee from a stainless-steel thermos and passed around bars of candy. He said, “It’s anybody’s guess how long Tiny can keep her airborne. I’ve never seen a ship with so much shit shot out of her—and never mind the alliteration. What he’s figuring is that he can keep her up until we cross our lines. Then he’ll put her down as soon as he can. Meantime, let’s hope we don’t run into any more Messerschmitts.”
“Where are we now?” asked Major Andrews. She had been cradling Cowan in her arms for the past half hour. Now she laid him back very gently on the floor.
“Northern Italy,” said Manganaro. “Crossing the Po. Last time I heard, our guys were crowding Naples. Figure like—three hours flying time, unless ...” He shrugged and turned to Cowan lying in the shadows. “How’s he doing?” he asked.
“He didn’t make it,” said Betty Andrews, simply, covering Cowan’s face with his blanket. “He didn’t really have a chance, not the way he’d been hit. Wherever we’d been when it happened, he’d probably have bled to death.”
“Uh-huh,” Manganaro muttered, as if it’s what he had expected. He turned away from them and disappeared forward toward the flight deck.
“Betty, I’m sorry,” said Wingate. She was cut up by what had happened to Cowan. He could tell it by her voice if not her face.
“Aw, come on, Mac,” she said, brightly. “It’s what we’re at war for—to kill one another. He wasn’t the first, he won’t be the last.”
Wingate sighed. “I guess not,” he admitted.
They lapsed into silence. They crossed the Amo, still losing height. A little flak opened around them like so many opening fists of flame, then disappeared. The river gleamed momentarily in the fading moonlight, and then was gone.
The sky finally paled over to port. The clouds took on a blue tinge, then a hint of purple, and finally blushed pink.
“Take the port waist gun, Mac,” said Hazlitt. “It’ll be light soon. We can expect some trouble.”
Wingate left the kid with Betty Andrews, half asleep now inside his blanket, and went aft. By the time he had plugged himself back into the intercom, Hazlitt was talking to de Lille.
“You still in the rear turret, General?” Hazlitt was asking.
“Of course I am still in the rear turret,” de Lille’s voice snapped, in sharp staccato syllables. “Why would you expect me to desert my post?”
The son of a bitch, thought Wingate, systematically scanning the sky through the Perspex blister in the bodywork. He could imagine de Lille sitting stiffly upright in McGrady’s seat, gun grips in his hands, thumbs on the firing buttons, taking personal responsibility for the outcome of the war. Still, he had to admire the bastard’s shooting. Without him, they’d never have survived that final Messerschmitt attack.
A little light flak came up from isolated positions, mostly 20 millimeter or heavy machine gun. None of it worried them and they ignored it. There was more activity on the roads now, armor and troop transports moving north. It looked to Wingate like a pretty major pullback by the krauts. Further south, there were signs of recent heavy bombing attacks—a bridge blown, a railroad junction battered into a spaghetti of twisted rails. He noticed most of it out of the corner of his eye. His main concern was still with possible fighter attack.
