Eagles at War (49 page)

There were some shouts and a spatter of rifle fire from guards in the other cars. Then four American fighter planes burst through the low clouds, silver shadows against the gray, red dots winking from their wings. Streams of bullets kicked up lines in the snow before blasting splinters from the wooden cars. Ahead an enormous column of steam roared to merge with the clouds, as the engine blew up. The fighter planes pulled around in a tight treetop-height turn for another run at the train.

Lyra ran through the storm of machine-gun fire, oblivious to the screams around her, plunging forward into the forest, away from the train, away from Dachau.

She blundered straight ahead for almost half an hour, hurtling through the brush, leaping over bushes, branches whipping her face, keeping the pistol in her grasp as she somehow summoned the energy to press on, to fight the overwhelming exhaustion that pulled at her limbs and her lungs. She slipped as she raced down the side of a stream, twisting her knee, and pain swept through her. Bruised and shaken, she was up again, bounding on as if there were no end to her energy, as if she could run forever. A wall of rocks loomed ahead and she turned abruptly to her right to pitch forward down a steep slope, rolling and tumbling. She arose slowly, light-headed and weak. Gasping for breath, she stumbled toward the sanctuary of a huge spruce tree, its lower branches immersed in the snow. Scared and bleeding, she dove like a fox into its burrow, digging under the outstretched branches to the dark shelter of the tree.

Heart thudding, she let her breath subside as she pondered her chances. It was growing dark and it was snowing even more heavily now. Unless they had dogs, it would be difficult to find her. Many people had run away—there would be lots of trails. Most of them were infirm, weaker than she—they'd be found first. And the guards wouldn't be looking for her specifically, not unless some of the fainter hearts tried to shift the blame to her.

If she could stay alive in the forest for a day or two, then find a village, she might be able to hide out until the end of the war. In the meantime, she was free.

Her entire body was stinging from the brambles she had burst through, and her knee was swelling. It pained her even to reach out to gather handfuls of snow. Alternately licking it for moisture and pressing it against her face, she drew comfort from it. When her thirst was somewhat slaked she took a sip from the canteen. It was a raw red wine, rough and sour—and absolutely the most delicious drink she'd ever had.

The spruce tree hung over her like a brooding tent, insulating her from the outside world. She burrowed down gratefully into the many years' accumulation of needles, nesting in their thick bed, lying perfectly still to preserve body heat, trying to ignore the myriad signals of pain being sent from torn muscles and scratched flesh.

She went through the last hour in her mind. Now she understood Helmut's fascination with combat. She had killed and killed with pleasure. If she had to, she would kill again.

Lyra fell into an exhausted sleep; she awoke aching in every muscle but sensed that her strength was returning. Lyra drove the still bloody knife into the bed of pine needles again and again, scouring it until it felt smooth and smelled clean. Then she cut a slice of the sausage off, chewing slowly to let the rich fat pour energy into her. As she chewed she thought, I will survive. No matter what happens, I will survive. I will go to Ulrich, and we will be happy.

*

En route to Tokyo/March 10, 1945

Colonel James Lee directed the red-lensed instrument light at his wristwatch. It was exactly twelve midnight. A little over an hour to go. The long flights over water in the B-29 were tedious but worrisome. The airplane was a dangerously flawed masterpiece, marred by immature systems brought together too fast and too soon. He ran a constant eye over the engine instruments, watching for any telltale creep-up in temperature or drop in pressure. The flight engineer, Vito Apollonio, was a good man, but with the B-29 you always had to be careful. It was a long way back to the Marianas, a very long way on three engines, and an impossible distance on two. Iwo Jima was available now as an emergency strip, but it wasn't a pleasant alternative.

"Nav, how are we doing?"

"We're right on the button, on time and on course . . . Colonel."

"Colonel," with that period of hesitation, the insufferable skip that said, "I'm being courteous to the rank, not to you." On previous missions the navigator had always used the friendlier "Skipper." It confirmed what he had already sensed—his own crew was freezing up on him, distancing themselves. The rumor mill was running—LeMay was supposed to be ready to fire him. They'd already pulled his squadron from him, booting him up to a make-believe job of "Deputy for Radar Photos."

Lee could still laugh at himself. It was all being done for the wrong reasons. He had been an advocate of low-level bombing for months, taking his ideas to whoever would listen, even though it made him persona non grata with the previous XXI Bomber Command leader, Brigadier General Possum Hansel.

Lee never had a chance to discuss the matter with the new commander, Major General Curtis LeMay, whose gruff style and no-nonsense manner made him virtually unapproachable. LeMay had decided to risk everything on low-level bombing—and he'd arrived at the idea independently. No doubt some "helpful" assistant on LeMay's staff had hinted that Lee felt himself to be the author of the new strategy.

With characteristic bluntness, LeMay had called him in and chewed him out, leaving no doubt in Lee's mind or anyone else's who was responsible for the new technique. He hadn't asked Lee for an explanation—he simply told him explicitly what the situation was.

The darkness hovered in the cavernous cockpit of the B-29
Virgin
Effort,
both a blessing and a curse. It concealed them from the enemy, but reemphasized that each plane was an island, a self-contained entity, isolated in a bomber stream headed for enemy skies. Lee glanced at his copilot, Captain Mauru Nunes, a lawyer in civilian life, cupping his hand over his flashlight as he busied himself over the flight manual, committing the emergency procedures to memory. How nice it would be to be like that, to have only this mission on his mind.

The broad band of instruments on the panels in front of them danced in the phosphorescent reflections of the ultra-violet lamps. Lee sensed a telltale buzzing, a minor disharmony in the propeller synchronization, and he dropped his hand to the controls to adjust them.

They were flying at only three thousand feet, taking advantage of a sixty-knot wind following them from 150 degrees. If they'd had to climb to the old bombing altitudes the winds would have been one hundred knots faster and even more directly a tail wind—great for ground speed but ruinous to accurate bombing. Worse, the tail wind became a head wind on the way home, disastrous if you were damaged or short on fuel.

Unseen ahead of them, eighty-knot winds were racing across the Kanto Plain, knocking down radar antennae and disrupting surface communications. The Japanese picket ships that plotted each passing of the widely spaced B-29 fleet sent back message after message to the waiting Navy shore receivers. But because the Army was responsible for the air defense of Japan, the Navy didn't pass on the news of the coming danger to them.

Virgin Effort
droned forward on autopilot, the crew silent at their stations. Lee saw the irony in his situation. He had been dead wrong to line up with McNaughton against Caldwell—but he hadn't been called on that yet. Instead he was in disrepute for something he hadn't done. Although his crew's bombing record was the best in the 73d, they hadn't been selected to be among the pathfinders, to be first over the target and to lay down the strings of napalm-filled incendiaries that would light up a yellow cross in the heart of Tokyo. Instead they were far back in the bomb stream, the fifty-fifth plane to take off on the late afternoon of March 9th. From the Marianas airfields on Guam, Saipan, and Tinian, so dearly bought from the Japanese, the greatest force of B-29s ever launched had grumbled off the ground. Three hundred thirty-four of the very heavy bombers formed a three-hour stream of imminent fiery death pointed at Tokyo. Many had already turned back, most with problems in their temperamental Wright Cyclone R-3350 engines.

He leaned forward and reset his directional gyro. Well, the hell with it. He knew better than anyone that LeMay arrived at his own ideas independently and had never said otherwise. But his swift rise to the rank of colonel had made more than one man jealous. The back-biting was probably just jealousy. If the business with McNaughton would only blow over, he could afford to wait out the war. He'd seen enough combat—they could send him back to the States to be an instructor pilot if they wanted.

There was simply no way to get next to LeMay. The man was a machine. Short, stocky, with a pugnacious jaw that began to bristle with a coarse black beard by mid-afternoon, he was first of all terrifyingly demanding. He had taken command on January 20th. The first few raids he ran were conventional, repetitions of those of the past even as to the results: few bombs on target. Then weather had almost shut the effort down in February. Visual bombing was impossible, and the B-29s' radar sets were incapable of precision bombing on anything but a coastal target.

LeMay found himself in charge of the second biggest armament program of the war—only the supersecret Manhattan Project was more expensive—and it wasn't working. He decided on radical changes, exactly like those Lee had advocated. Against the advice of his staff people—and with only conditional support from above—LeMay ordered the B-29s to go in low, loaded with incendiaries. Precision bombing was out, area bombing was in; he was going to finesse the shortcomings of the bomber with new tactics.

There had been some squawks—some alarmists on the staff feared the Japanese flak and fighters and had actually used the word "murder." But LeMay thought otherwise and Lee agreed with him. The Japanese had virtually no radar-controlled low and middle altitude flak and their night fighter defenses were spotty.

"Apollonio, how's our fuel consumption?"

"We're right on the curve, Skipper. Looking good."

Ah, a loyalist. I'll remember that, Lee thought. Sergeant Apollonio was a tall, skinny blond kid who told rotten jokes as he babied the engines along, nurturing them like a mother hen. Tonight all four were running smoothly, as if they enjoyed the flight at low altitude. So far the USAAF had lost more B-29s to engine failures than to enemy action.

Knowing that the navigator would have tuned in the Jap English-language propaganda station, Lee reached down to his radio junction box and switched to ADF, the Automatic Direction Finder. Incredibly, the Japanese were playing a record of "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes"—he couldn't believe what he was hearing.

They made landfall at the tip of the Chiba Peninsula, and Lee called for climb power as they began the gradual ascent to seven thousand feet, their assigned bombing altitude. They were turning toward their Initial Point, just north of Goi, when a long oblong of yellow flame burst through the black emptiness ahead of them, as if a flaming samurai sword had slashed through Tokyo's belly. It was the first pass of the pathfinder force. As Lee watched, the crosspiece came in, another swath of yellow as the napalm-filled incendiary bombs etched their terrible mark on the heart of the city. He should have been there, dropping the first bombs.

Searchlights suddenly shredded the darkness, reaching high in the sky, frantically searching for them at thirty thousand feet. Flak bursts began to explode well above them in a cascade of white, yellow, and red bursts that streamed away to be absorbed in the light scattering of clouds. Visibility was good, ten miles or better. He felt the familiar palpable rise in tension within the aircraft as everyone became alert, busy about their jobs, no longer joking on the interphone.

Lee concentrated on flying the B-29, listening with pleasure to the competent professional comments of the crew. They were going to drop five-hundred-pound clusters of M-69 incendiary bombs, nasty little six-pound devices that scattered as they dropped. When they hit they spewed a liquid jelly that stuck to any surface and burned like phosphorus for ten minutes. Each bomb created a puddle of fire a yard across, and Tokyo was about to receive an overwhelming flood of fire puddles.

He could see the fires breaking out everywhere, interlocked discs of oscillating flame, undulating together, the shock waves—visible in the pall of smoke—merging kaleidoscopically in overlapping circles that rippled through the transparent layer of low clouds, a quivering patchwork quilt of merging explosions.

"Damnit, shift the target." Lee knew it was not the Imperial Palace that bothered the bombardier—it was the old
Appointment
in Samarra
idea, that it was challenging fate to shift from a designated target to another.

An explosion lit up the sky to their left. The flak had finally felt its way down to the correct altitude. In the center of the red splotch a B-29 and its crew often had been killed. The bombardier came back on: "I've got the middle of the black area centered. I think we'll be far enough away from the Imperial Palace."