Wingmen (9781310207280) (60 page)

The Zekes they
had attacked were racking around and coming for them. Jack
chandelled up five hundred feet, throttle wide open, rolling out on
the tail of a turning Zeke and snapping off a burst before losing
him. Again he was unable to observe the results; again he checked
Fred; he was still there, as before. Up to this point they’d had it
easy, with speed and altitude to their advantage, but now things
were different. The Zekes were on their level, closing in, lining
up for passes. Jack counted five. Far ahead of them, to the east,
he saw aircraft going down in fire and smoke and wondered briefly
if that could be the other divisions of Fighting Twenty or perhaps
Hellcats from another ship. But they were too far away to help him
and Fred. Jack pressed his throat mike. “Weave,” he said, “cover
each other.”

“Roger.” Fred’s
Hellcat abruptly left Jack’s wing and soared out to the right. Jack
banked sharply to the left, checking Fred’s tail, just as he knew
Fred was checking his. It was a standard defensive maneuver: If
enemy fighters were closing either Hellcat from behind, the wingman
would be in position after a simple turn to hit the attacker with a
deflection shot. At the limits of the weave, both fighters turned
back towards the center, crossed over, and repeated the pattern. On
the second weave, a Zeke turned onto Fred and came under Jack’s
guns. He snapped off a quick burst, trying to conserve ammunition,
and the Zeke dove away below. Jack resisted the temptation to
follow him down—the Hellcat was heavier and could catch up with
ease—because the Japanese pilot’s comrades were now on three sides
and high. Goddamn it, where was the rest of the squadron.

“Behind you,
Skipper.” Jack looked and saw the two clean little fighters curving
in behind him. He moved stick and rudder to turn toward his
wingman. When he did, he saw that another Zeke was closing Fred
from behind. There were just too many…

“Behind you,
Trusty.” Jack had time for a single burst, then hauled it around to
try to follow the Japanese fighter. Damn the Zekes on his tail! He
would take his chances with Fred’s shooting. Jack lost sight of his
wingman as he followed his target down and away. The enemy pilot
was fatally inexperienced. His turns were rough. Still he headed
down. Jack centered him in his sights, squeezed off a burst. The
tracers seemed to arch out ahead. He fired again, holding it down.
A puff of black smoke chuffed back. He hung on grimly, firing
continuously. The Zeke started burning. Debris tore off, fluttered
back. An explosion! His victim collapsed into a falling tangle of
burning junk, and Jack racked his heavy fighter around and up,
looking for Trusty—or a friendly aircraft of any kind.

A burning Zeke
was falling, a parachute was blossoming, and Fred Trusteau was hot
on the tail of another. The two aircraft twisted through the air in
a strange and deadly dance. As he watched, the enemy fighter
trailed flames and smoke, fell off on one wing and headed down.
Jack turned for Fred, trying to join up again.

“Join up,
Trusty, let’s get out of here,” said Jack. He saw Fred turn toward
him, in an elegant, plunging roll. His wingman was flying like the
ace he was.

“Look out—”
Tracers zinged past his canopy, slugs chewed into his wingtip, and
Jack snapped into a roll without thinking, acting purely on
instinct. Suddenly they were all around him, looping, rolling,
firing. Jack lost sight of Fred then as he fought for his life, not
flying level for more than a few seconds at a time, evading the
Zekes only by virtue of his experience and his desperate need to
survive. He lost altitude steadily, never able to climb long enough
to get safely back above them. He was almost to sea level, out of
flying room and time when the rest of Fighting Twenty arrived.

He would
remember those minutes of combat for the rest of his life, as
though they were a strange and marvelous dream burned too deeply
into his mind to forget. He leveled off one final time, below the
tops of the trees on the islands. Above him, the rising sun painted
the fluffy clouds pink and gold. All around him were deep green
islands and blue waters—and drifting black columns of smoke. He
knew he could go no further, that it could be minutes, even
seconds, before they closed in on him and killed him. He had done
his best, and it just wasn’t good enough. Fear, though, made him
look over his shoulder to see how close they were, to see how long
he still had. What he saw, to say the least, was far more
comforting.

The big blue
fighters cut down on the Zekes with unmatched ferocity. Even as he
watched, two Zekes exploded in flames and tumbled down. As a third
caught fire, the rest turned to meet the new threat from above. But
it was too late. Jack circled and climbed and watched the
slaughter. A fourth Zeke stonewalled with the water, a fifth landed
in a bloom of flame on a nearby island. Parachutes began to drift
down, as a sixth and then a seventh Zeke went down. Amazed, awed,
Jack lingered and watched two more Japanese planes destroyed, and
then he remembered Fred.

It seemed like
hours since he had heard from him. He went to his throat mike.
“Trusty, where are you, Trusty.” There was no reply.

A pair of
Hellcats crossed in front of him; the pilots waggled the wings and
held up their fingers showing the number of kills they had. Jack
ignored them, then realized with a start that he couldn’t hear
anything on what had to be a cluttered circuit.

He tried again.
“Any Banger aircraft respond. This is Banger Leader, come in
please.” Nothing. Jack wrenched around in his seat and looked at
his antenna, a short stubby mast aft of the cockpit. It was gone,
shot away.
Fine
, he thought. Where would he go?

He checked the
time. 8:20. Rendezvous would be in ten minutes. Maybe Fred was
already there. Jack looked around quickly, getting his bearings by
the morning sun climbing above the horizon, and headed back the
same way they had entered the lagoon area. Antiaircraft fire
followed him, but he didn’t notice. One thing alone occupied his
mind.

What was the
reciprocal course on which they had come? Subtract one eight zero
from two four zero. Zero six zero. Jack increased speed, turned to
zero six zero as he crossed the reef and headed out to sea. He had
to be here. He flew for five minutes, nearly losing hope, before he
found the Hellcat.

It was at one
thousand feet but slowly losing altitude. As he approached, he saw
it was streaming smoke, a wispy white trail that hung in the air
behind it and drifted with the wind. Jack increased throttle to
come alongside. His heart rose into his throat as he realized who
it was. The Hellcat was missing part of its rudder and left
elevator surface. An aileron was gone. Oil oozed from the engine
and smeared the fuselage and canopy. As he came abreast, he saw the
pilot—grimly staring straight ahead, seeing nothing. He held the
stick in both hands. Jack had found his wingman.

Duane and the
seven Hellcats following him lost the First Division in the circle
and climb to fifteen thousand feet, halfway to the target. The mix
up was partly his fault, partly sheer chance.

When the time
came to make the circle and climb, Higgins noticed that Second
Division had joined up completely wrong. It was barely light enough
to make out numbers on adjacent aircraft, and he saw with a start
that he was escorting the last section of Hardigan’s division,
Fitzsimmons and Hughes. He signaled his wingman, Bracker, who saw
and understood what had happened, and was about to signal the rest
when they entered the turn. Hoping the rest of the flight would see
what he was doing. Higgins dropped back to allow the First Division
to pull ahead, and the rest of his division to catch up. As he and
Bracker fell out of formation, the second section of his division
pulled alongside and passed them, causing Duane to curse helplessly
at their oblivious manner of flying. He then led Bracker down and
under the second section of his division to come up on the correct
side of them, turning and climbing all the while. Just when he
thought they should be moving into the correct configuration, they
passed through a thick layer of clouds that had them flying
nerve-rackingly in the blind, still climbing and turning, until
they were out of it.

When they were
in the clear again, Duane checked around in the growing light and
found that all eight aircraft of the Second and Fifth Divisions
were nicely in place, in perfect formation. And then he checked on
the First Division. They were nowhere to be seen.

It took him ten
minutes of flying in the wrong direction to discover that he had
leveled off at fifteen thousand feet on two six zero instead of the
correct heading of two four zero. He cursed again, this time at his
own stupidity and the blithe way his squadron mates had of
accepting his error and following him off into the wastes of empty
ocean. Knowing that the Skipper and his division would now
undoubtedly arrive at the target many long minutes before they
would, Duane turned back toward Truk, to two three five—five
degrees short of the original heading of two four zero. He
increased speed to two hundred knots, hoping his dumb followers
would have the sense to keep up.
Screw them
, he thought. He, at least, would
not leave the skipper to tangle with God knew how many enemy
fighters without assistance. He hoped almost desperately that he
wasn’t too late, remembering another time, at Guadalcanal, when he
and Jack had lost the main body of a flight and gone in alone
against dozens of Zeros, and had almost been killed. He wouldn’t
let that happen this time. The eight Hellcats arrived over Truk
fifteen minutes late.

His first sight
of the breathtaking beauty of the atoll and its mountainous islands
included a flight of six or seven Hellcats chopping a formation of
Judy dive bombers into flaming ruin, low on the water to the
northeast of the reef. He led his eight fighters past the fight,
knowing that it couldn’t be the Skipper. Next he sighted falling
planes near the center of the atoll amid spotty flak. He hurried
toward them, increasing speed to be ready for whatever turned up.
What did turn up was a gaggle of Zekes chasing a single Hellcat
around and around, dropping close to the water and swirling back up
again. Had he had time to observe, Duane could have determined that
it was indeed the skipper. Now he could see only that the lone
fighter needed help. They tallyhoed and went down.

Never in his
life had Duane seen such a battle. The Zekes were well trained and
aggressive, but the heavier, faster Hellcats fell on them
recklessly from above. Duane got his first with a simple six
o’clock shot. The enemy fighter burned quickly, alerting the
others—too late—to the danger from above. He reeled in another with
a short burst that sent the lithe little fighter into a desperate
split-s at five hundred feet. Duane almost followed, but instinct
held him back, and he watched the Zeke dive straight into the water
from a doomed maneuver. When he had time to catch his breath and
look around, he found not another Zeke in the air. Two of his
Hellcats cut victory loops in the sky over the lagoon. Then someone
was calling on the radio that millions of Jap fighters were taking
off from an airstrip near the northern edge of the reef. The
Hellcats around him stumbled over themselves to find the action, a
deadly, rampaging gang of killers. Duane almost followed them, but
instead he found the skipper.

Duane saw the
zero two on the fuselage as Jack Hardigan’s plane flew right across
his nose, at lower altitude. He curved in behind him, calling
repeatedly on the radio but getting no answer. Hardigan was flying
fast, leaving the area on the return heading, and Duane tried but
could not catch up. He followed at a distance, a little mystified.
Five minutes after crossing the reef another Hellcat appeared
ahead, trailing smoke and descending. Duane watched the two
fighters join up and continue toward the task group, and he wanted
to stay with them, but the chatter from the radio said that another
rhubarb was forming up over the airstrip on Eten Island. He got
close enough to determine that the damaged Hellcat was Trusteau,
and then he peeled off and headed back. If anyone could help
Trusteau, it was the skipper.

Back over Truk
again, Higgins found the battle and eagerly joined in, adding
another kill to his growing score. The rest of the squadron added
another seven. It was, as Bagley would say later, a field day….

After the fight
over Eten, Higgins gathered the elated pilots, including Hughes
from the First Division, and headed for
Ironsides
. His own personal bag of
three and the excited bragging of the other eight men made him
think that everything was all right. But he discovered when he
landed that an error of his had again caused the loss of three
pilots: Fitzsimmons, Trusteau, Hardigan.