Eagles at War (54 page)

Caldwell had swung the cargo door back and buckled himself into the harness by the . 50-caliber Browning machine gun. He plugged in the intercom and said, "Go get him, tiger."

Hafner's bulky shoulders loomed from the dorsal gun position of the Ju 52. He was both comfortable and content. Squeezed into the ring turret, his bulk was supported by his arms and shoulders while his legs dangled on either side of a leather strap. He'd had a special interphone cord rigged to run to the pilot—most of the 52s coming out of the factories now didn't have them installed.

It's a good thing we didn't have a bigger airplane—it would be much more obvious. This way we'll sneak down the coast, pick up the escort, and be home free.

He scanned the sky as he used to on the Western front, quartering it systematically, methodically checking every sector, high and low. He started when, low on the horizon, he saw the glint of wings in the sunlight.

He pressed the intercom button and said, "Holzamer, put on full power. We're being followed. I don't know what it is. Looks like a twin-engine bomber of some sort, but whatever it is, he'll be faster than we are."

Hafner methodically checked out the two 13-mm MG-131 machine guns mounted in the swiveling ring. Only fifty minutes to the rendezvous point, he thought. Damn. If we can evade for a while, perhaps the Russians will see us coming.

Hafner swung the guns around and warmed them, sending a burst out into the sea.

I should have arranged to have the fighters meet us halfway.

The old warrior, broken but unbowed by three wars, forced himself to scan the rest of the sky, to tear his eyes from the slowly growing dot that had transformed itself into the silhouette of an oncoming Douglas C-47.

"It's a Douglas, Holzamer. He'll be fifty kilometers an hour faster than us."

There was a double click of acknowledgment.

Hafner reached down into the navigation bag he had stowed in the lower part of the turret. In it was a white flag he'd planned to use with the Russian fighters.

"Holzamer, let the American plane come alongside. He's probably not armed."

Again the interphone clicked, and Holzamer reduced power.

"Not too slow, Holzamer. Just ease off and let him come up on us. The main thing is not to have him call in any fighters on us.

What a joke it would be to spend the war developing a jet fighter and wind up dying in an old crate like this.

The gray outline of the Junkers suddenly blossomed in the sunlight, its white colors and red crosses gleaming. When Bandfield had fought in Spain, the Ju 52 had been a bomber. As clumsy as it looked with its fixed gear, corrugated skin, and the oddly canted wing-mounted engines, he knew the Junkers was nimble.

He spoke into the interphone. "He's slowing down, Henry. Looks like a hospital plane, all white with red crosses."

"You believe that, and I've got a bridge I want to sell you. What the hell would the Germans be doing risking a flight east when the war is almost over? Is the turret manned?"

"Wait a minute."

The C-47 was straining at an indicated 190 miles per hour. Hoffman reached down into his kit bag and handed Bandfield a small pair of field glasses. Bandfield nodded to him that he had the airplane and Hoffman shook the wheel.

It took a minute for Bandfield to adjust the glasses to his eyes, and almost thirty seconds to acquire the Junkers in his visual field. When it loomed up he murmured, "Holy shit!"

He had trained the glasses on the cockpit of the Junkers, then moved it slowly back to the ring-turret. There, wearing goggles but bareheaded, his hair more silver than blond over his scarred and twisted face, was the unmistakable looming presence of Bruno Hafner.

"My God, Henry, you were right. It is Hafner. He's waving a white flag."

"The bastard must be heading for the Russian lines. Let me warm up this machine gun and you make a pass alongside him. Any way you can talk to him?"

"No, the radios aren't compatible, and we don't even know what frequency he'd be on. I got my doubts about this—Bruno won't surrender. He's got two guns in that turret, looks like thirteen-millimeter. I don't want to get our ass shot off right when the war is ending."

The voice that came back on the interphone was not that of his old friend Henry. Instead, suffused with excitement, but unmistakable in his authority, Lieutenant General Caldwell said, "Colonel Bandfield, I'm not interested in your fucking opinions. You bring this airplane alongside the enemy. Approach so that I can shoot from the left side. Get within two hundred yards at the most."

"Jesus, Henry, think about it. Our fuel state is lousy. If you don't nail him first, we'll be swimming home. Let me call back to get some fighters sent up. We can just shadow him till then."

"Call up the fighters, Bandy, but I want this airplane placed alongside the enemy."

Bandfield thought, The fucker's playing John Paul Jones with me—but he banked in toward the Ju 52. In the right seat the usually cheerful Karl Hoffman went white-faced as he realized what was about to take place.

"I've
got
to try to get him to come back to American territory, Bandy. I'll stand in the doorway and signal him to return. If he doesn't, I'll shoot his ass down."

"Holzamer, it looks like they've got a machine gun mounted on the left side by the door. There's a man in the doorway ..."

Hafner's tone changed as he recognized him. My God, it's Caldwell. I'll bet that Bandfield is flying the airplane. The old bloodlust surged within him, a hot burning like a youthful awakened sexuality, filling him with passion to revenge the battle over Guernica, to make the two of them, old friends and ancient enemies, pay for his years of suffering.

He tried to keep his voice calm.

"Ah, Holzamer, he's signaling us to turn back to land. I want you to start a gentle turn to the right, as if to comply. Turn about thirty degrees and level out—then I'll start firing."

Bandfield watched the Junkers, one hundred yards away and no more than fifty feet above the mirror-smooth surface of the sea. It began a shallow bank to the right to the pebble-studded beaches of Germany's coastline. Preoccupied as he was, Bandfield was struck by the idyllic peacefulness of the scene, the waves curling on the beach, the little silver lines of streams running down to the water, beach houses, a small village. Who could believe that a world war was raging to a close just a few miles to the south?

"He's turning, Henry. I'm going to stay outside, about one hundred feet above him."

Just as Hafner had planned, the C-47's nose turned in toward the Junkers, narrowing Caldwell's field of fire. In a single fluid motion, Hafner raised the machine guns, fixed the C-47 in his sights and fired. The first burst slammed into the starboard engine, danced along the leading edge of the wing and into the cockpit, smashing the windscreen and tearing Hoffman's head into a bloody pulp, then pulverized the hydraulic system. The wounded airplane staggered as Bandfield jerked it into a climbing turn to the right.

Henry Caldwell swore as he aimed the . 50-caliber machine gun down at the Junkers now in a steep left turn, passing under the C-47. He fired and missed.

"Bandy, turn left."

Bandfield shoved the throttles forward as he sensed the number two engine losing power. Glancing to the right past Hoffman's lifeless body he saw the needle of the hydraulic gauge fall to zero, just as he felt the lurch of the landing gear free-falling to the down position. The control wheel hammered in his hands, frantically signaling that the plane was edging toward a stall. There was only one sane course of action, to break off combat and head toward shore.

Hafner, fevered with the combat lust that had been denied him for years, watched the C-47 stagger into a turn, its landing gear partially hanging down, smoke streaming from the right engine. His killer instinct came boiling to the surface. He would not let Bandfield get away this time.

"Turn around, Holzamer, I want to finish him off. Approach him from the left so that I can get a shot at the pilot."

In the Junkers cockpit the grim-faced Holzamer shrugged and applied full power, maintaining the steep left turn, his wingtip almost touching the water.

"He's slowing down, Colonel, we'll be able to catch him easy enough."

Caldwell, exhilarated, combative, called, "Bandy, he's coming at us. Make a sharp ninety-degree turn to the right, now!"

Without hesitation, Bandfield turned, pouring power to the left engine, ignoring the sound of Hoffman's crimsoned body flopping against the side of the cockpit.

Like two battered ships of the line the transports moved toward each other, the radius of their turns edging ever nearer to tangency.

Holzamer struggled to keep the fear from his voice. "He's turning into us, sir, it's going to be close."

Both pilots leveled their wings to avoid a head-on collision, and the two old transports turned warplanes passed level, Hafner and Caldwell firing simultaneous broadsides.

Bandfield eased into another right turn, conscious that a stall was imminent, that when the air burbled and the wing lost lift, the drag of the hanging gear would snap them inverted into the sea. The stubborn Holzamer, an old campaigner caught up in the battle, pulled hard in a near vertical bank to position the Junkers to the C-47's left rear.

Hafner was firing up at them, over his right wing, the lines of his bullets stitching through the rudder and dancing down the length of the cabin.

Bandfield racked the C-47 up into a protesting ninety-degree turn, felt the pre-stall trembling, and popped the nose forward as he rolled level. Caldwell fired a long muzzle-burning burst that reached into the cockpit of the Junkers to kill the pilot. He traversed his gun, running the line of bullets back to hammer Hafner, still maintaining his vicious fire into the rear of the American plane. As Hafner fell forward in his turret, killed instantly as Caldwell's bullets tore through his head and chest, Caldwell slumped in his harness, blood flowing from a dozen wounds.

The war-weary Junkers hesitated for a moment, then dove straight down into the sea, disappearing in a wild ring of white water.

Bandfield, wounded in the right arm and covered with Hoffman's blood, gazed back at the shambles of the cabin. Hank the Hawk, suspended in his makeshift harness like a fly in a spider's web, hung over his machine gun, his head pointed toward the cockpit, looking strangely at peace.

Even with all the trim rolled in, it took all Bandfield's strength on the wheel and rudder to keep the C-47 airborne. He wanted to go back to Caldwell, to help him if he could, but it was impossible. With the gear down and the engine out, he struggled to keep it flying straight and level. If he'd relaxed an instant, the battered C-47 would have stalled and spun in.

He headed for land, miserably aware that if Caldwell was not already dead, he would be before they landed. Saddened as he was, he knew that it was the ending Caldwell wanted. Now there would be no court martial.

_***

_EPILOGUE

Muroc, California/September 18, 1947

"Good God almighty, would you look at that!"

Hadley Roget pointed up at the huge Consolidated Vultee XB-36 droning overhead, the roar of its six pusher engines rising and falling like waves on a beach.

Charlotte Bandfield squealed and put her hands over her ears. George, clutched in Bandy's arms, waved frantically as the enormous airplane wiped its shadow over the crowd, then began a slow climbing turn to the left.

The XB-36 was just one in a succession of marvels passing in review at the ceremonies marking the first day of existence for the new United States Air Force. Similar ceremonies were going on all over the country, but Muroc was the place to be, because the leading edge of aviation was assembled in its dusty hangars. Now they were watching the fly-bys. The first had featured the stalwarts of the past, the war-winning Mustangs, Thunderbolts, and B-29s. Then a flight of Lockheed P-80s roared by on the deck, their shimmering exhausts churning up dust from the salt flats.

"Hadley, we were born twenty-five years too soon. The next ten years are going to be the most fantastic ever."

Roget ran his fingers over the stub of his crew-cut, as if he were searching for the lost glory of his hair. "Boy, I know it. They gave me a briefing this morning, then took me on a tour of the hangars. They've got jet fighters and bombers coming down the pike that would make your eyes water."

"What do you think young George here will get to fly?"

George Bandfield was almost eight, and was too preoccupied to give more than a passing glance at the airplanes flashing past him. The desert sun was melting his Eskimo Pie, sending vanilla rivulets down his uplifted arm.

"Rocket planes, probably, and maybe by then they'll be letting women in, and Charlotte can be his copilot."

Charlotte, a dignified eleven, looked up and said, "If I fly with Georgie,
I'll
be the pilot and Georgie will be the copilot."

Patty nodded in agreement as they strolled to a halt at the western edge of the swiftly growing air base. She was as absorbed in their new house-building business as she had been in aviation, and she surveyed the matrix of streets, still void of buildings but a clear forecast of the ultimate size of the base. She was mentally laying out the buildings, computing the square footage, mentally putting a bid together. She let her eyes wander around the crowd standing with them near the cluster of five parachutes being used to cover the massive memorial being dedicated to Lieutenant General Henry Caldwell. She wondered if it would be as imposing uncovered as it was now, with three huge cargo parachutes draped over what was obviously an aircraft, mounted on a pylon. Another covered a statue. The fifth, a smaller one, was fifty feet away at the intersection of two streets, both empty of buildings for as far as she could see.