Wingmen (9781310207280) (28 page)

He swept his
eyes over his instruments, saw nothing amiss, and focused briefly
on the panel clock. Five minutes until the target. He had complete
faith in the navigation of the task force. He knew if they said the
island would be under at such and such a time, it would be. He
stretched and rubbernecked and noticed the beginnings of dawn—the
lightening around the edges of the great bowl of sky that always
preceded the sunrise.

Something on
the surface of the ocean caught his attention. He stared hard. The
white brush marks of waves breaking on a coral atoll. It was an
enemy atoll, an outpost of Japanese filled with deadly aircraft,
accurate guns, and burrowing troops of the kind that had sniped at
him and Duane Higgins as they huddled in foxholes on the miserable
island of Guadalcanal.

Daylight comes so quickly out
here
, he thought. Already the stars were magically
disappearing, and the sky was turning a deep royal blue. He looked
back and saw that all eight of his Hellcats were indeed there. With
that reassurance he led them into their first combat experience as
Fighting Twenty.

The black mass
of the island of Marcus was below them. There were no enemy
fighters. On land, the first of many bombs burst like flowers
blooming in the clinging darkness, throwing out brilliant streamers
from fiery red centers.

They made a
complete circle of the island in the growing light, looking for
enemy aircraft, but found none. The small group of Avengers came
around again and dropped their remaining bombs on buildings and
vehicles, airstrips and towers. Several raging fires were easily
visible now. A heavy cloak of black smoke began to rise and drift
with the light tropical breeze.

Jack went to
his throat mike. “This is Banger Leader. Looks like we caught them
on the ground, fellas. Let’s take it on down.” His own voice in his
ears sounded amazingly calm and composed, and he hoped it sounded
that way to his pilots. He waggled his wings once, then peeled to
the right, and headed down. Fred and the second section followed in
smooth coordination.

Jack watched
the island grow in size and detail as he dove. From this viewpoint
it looked smaller than the pictures and the maps at the briefing.
Jack could take in its entire length in a single glance. Acres of
vegetation had been cleared away for airstrips. Clusters of
buildings squatted at the ends of the runways; a few of them now
were engulfed in sweeping flames and clouds of boiling black
smoke.

He searched for
the Avengers, but they were nowhere to be seen. And then he found
their target: a row of twin-engined aircraft, still vague in the
early morning light. He adjusted his course to sweep in over them,
holding his altitude to two hundred feet, remembering all too
clearly how he had lost the wingman at Buka by strafing too low and
getting caught in the explosion of an enemy bomb. It was better if
the enemy planes were armed and gassed; then they would burn
easier, and fewer passes would have to be made. Jack lined up the
aircraft in his sights and checked once more for Fred. The targets
filled his gunsight. He squeezed the trigger.

The pass was
over in seconds and the enemy planes—they were Bettys he was
sure—had indeed been armed and gassed. Jack touched his rudder
pedals lightly to sweep his concentration of fifty-caliber slugs
and tracers back and forth through the neat row of planes. Before
they could clear the area the planes began to burn and explode. One
in particular went up with a violence that caused him to duck
involuntarily and pull to the right. Then it was over, and they
were over the black water, which was turning dark blue. And Jack
glanced over to check on Fred. But Fred wasn’t there.

To Fred, the
skipper seemed especially precise, confident this morning. When he
went down, he did so without hesitation. And when he reached his
altitude, it was as though his aircraft moved on solid, unseen
rails holding it in place. Fred found himself flying the same way,
as he watched morning come to the island of Marcus, which he had
first heard of three days ago. It looked much the same as some of
the islands in the Hawaiian chain. Those were the only real, live
Pacific islands Fred had ever seen. The only difference lay in the
fact that this one was inhabited by the Japanese—nefarious beings
who shot at pilots in parachutes and themselves died in droves in
banzai charges.

When Fred
followed the Skipper down, and they began their first pass over the
row of dark, twin-engined aircraft (
so that’s a Betty
, he’d thought), he had
tried to spot some Japanese. They were totally invisible, of
course. There was not even any antiaircraft fire yet—at least none
that he could see. As far as you could tell, this was just another
training mission, with dud bombs and color-coded tracers that would
tell who had shot the best when it was all over. At least it seemed
that way, until the first Betty went up like a volcano and caught
Fred’s Hellcat in its blast.

Fred opened
fire a split second after the skipper did, and he watched his
tracers tear into the ground around the nose of that first Betty,
throwing up chunks of material and firing showers of colorful
sparks into the air. Then they were over the rest of the Bettys,
and some were already starting to burn. Then a big orange-red
blossom of fire and smoke enveloped his plane and hurled him
upward. Before he could emerge from the other side of the black
cloud, something hit his plane from beneath with a solid “thunk”;
instinctively, Fred had pulled the stick to the left to escape the
rest of the explosion. He knew almost instantly, though, that
something was terribly wrong with his big blue fighter.

The first thing
he noticed was the vibration. He’d had enough hours in the Hellcat
to know its every bump and shudder, and this one he felt now was
all wrong. He fought back a feeling of overwhelming fear and looked
around for the rest of the division. How the hell could they
disappear so fast? He continued turning to the left, feeling out
the new vibration, until he was out over the water. Then he checked
his instruments and found his oil pressure dropping slowly, his
cylinder head temperature climbing perceptibly. He had no idea what
was wrong, and throttled back to save the engine. As his air-speed
dropped through 180 knots, the entire aircraft shook and shuddered
like a frail building in a windstorm. He immediately gave the
engine more throttle. The shudder passed.

“Oh, Jesus,”
Fred said out loud. Here he was, in a shaking, dying plane a mile
off the beach of an enemy-held island, all by himself, with the
carrier an impossible two hundred miles away.

His first
thought was of the radio. “Banger One Three to Banger Leader. I
am—” He stopped, realizing that he could be telling the enemy,
too—that he was a lone cripple. Just then, the engine gave a
heart-stopping gasp and backfired and began running rough. Fred
pulled out his plotting board, found the course back to point
option, and vowed to put as much distance between himself and
Marcus Island as his faltering engine would allow.

Oh, Skipper
, he said to
himself,
what did I
do to deserve this break?

“Banger Leader
to all Banger elements. Did anyone see him go down?”

Jack didn’t
need to say who it was he was talking about. The other six pilots
could see the gaping hole in the formation where Fred should have
been, as they formed up to head back to the
Constitution
. Jack, Fitzsimmons,
and Hughes had circled the island once, while the second division
strafed again, burning all the visible aircraft on the field below.
But Fred hadn’t shown up. He had simply vanished, so quickly that
no one had seen him go.

Jack had fought
back the sickening feeling rising in his throat, and they had
continued their attack; they were diving on the antiaircraft guns
that were now spotting the air with dirty brown explosions and
showing their positions with little spits of flame in the green
jungle below. When the next wave of
Essex
and
Yorktown
bombers glided in with heavy
bombs, the fighters broke off the attack and formed up on the
course back to the task force.

“Don’t worry,
Skipper,” said Fitzsimmons. “He’ll probably be waiting for us back
at the ranch.”

“Cross your
fingers,” said Jack.

They flew the
rest of the long trip without speaking. Once, they spotted a flight
of Avengers on their way to Marcus, high above them, but neither
group of planes took any formal notice of the other. Several
minutes before they spotted the outer destroyers of the task force,
Jack thought he saw something on the surface of the water, and he
went down to look. It was nothing—an illusion, a trick caused by
light refraction, or a broaching fish, or Jack’s imagination. When
they reached the ship, they landed without fanfare and turned their
aircraft over to the hustling plane pushers.

On his way down
to the ready room, Jack went through the hangar deck and looked at
all the Hellcats there. Fred’s wasn’t among them. When he reached
the ready room, he went straight to the debriefing officer to ask
if he had any word on Fred, even though he knew what the answer
would be. “No word yet,” said the officer. “But he’s still got half
an hour of fuel, so he could show up at any time.”

“Sure,” said
Jack. He dropped into his reclining seat and closed his eyes. And
thought:
The rest
of the squadron mustn’t see me like this. Men die in war. It’s
happened before; it’ll happen again. Only why did it have to be
Fred?
“Okay,” he said aloud. He stood up, dropping his
plotting board, headgear and lifejacket into the chair. “Let’s get
this debriefing over with. We’ve got another strike in two
hours.”

The pilots
chattered away as if they were impervious to what had happened. The
returning men were pressed for information on the progress and
difficulty of the strike. But Jack knew they were watching him,
knew they looked to him for how they should feel about losing a
member of the squadron in battle.
They must see that life goes on
, he
thought.
But why
did it have to be Fred?

His part of the
debriefing was short. It was, after all, a simple strike without
airborne opposition. Jack showed the intelligence officer where
they’d strafed the Bettys, corrected the map as to the position of
a radio tower, and tried to point out where the antiaircraft
batteries were that they had attacked.

When he was
through he felt no better. He went topside to watch the launch of
Constitution
’s second strike of eight Hellcats under
Duane Higgins and twelve SBDs under Boom Bloomington. The frenetic
activity on the flight deck did nothing to cheer him up, so he
headed up into the island to the flag plot compartment where the
progress of the strike was being monitored by the air officer and
his staff. No one there had received any word from other ships as
to the whereabouts of missing pilots, so he went back down to the
ready room and the rest of his charged-up pilots.

Jack reached
the ready room at the same time as two stewards carrying a huge
platter of sandwiches and several jugs of coffee. But he didn’t
feel like eating. In three minutes all the food was gone, but he
didn’t notice.

He tried to
force his mind away from the increasingly apparent fact that Fred
was not coming back. He talked with the other pilots about their
parts in the mission. He tried to tell himself that it was amusing
how their stories got exaggerated; soon the whole Japanese air
force and most of the Imperial Army began appearing on the little
island of Marcus and was single-handedly destroyed. But he kept
coming back to the fact that nothing this day and many days
afterward would be amusing—the only man he had ever really cared
about, he knew now, was missing, and probably dead.