Whip (14 page)

Whip took the front seat, fired up the rackety sixty-five horsepower engine, and taxied away from their position beneath the trees. He didn't bother with any routine. He simply pointed the old airplane down the runway and went to full power. The engine backfired and wheezed but the tail came up quickly enough and they lumbered into the air. The old Piper had one rule it demanded from its pilot and everything would be fine. You flew in slow motion. At seventy miles an hour,
if
the Piper felt like performing that day.

At first the weather was lousy, with scattered rain showers and broken clouds sometimes all the way down to the treetops. The longer they flew the higher the ground rose beneath them, so that they were climbing constantly in a confidence-shaking clatter of the engine, but the ground seemed always to be at the same distance beneath them. It was more than watching carefully for sudden hummocks or high trees. There were showers that almost wiped out visibility and that was a great way to fly into a hill. If they got caught in clouds or those heavy showers their instruments would do them little or no good, for the gauges in the clattering old fabric bird were strictly for blue-sky eyeball operation, and neither man relished whirling out of the sky because they couldn't tell which end was up.

But the weather was also perfect cover against any Japanese fighters that might have been on the prowl. A Zero would have eaten them alive, but no sane Japanese would be wandering down among the upsloping hills in clouds and rain.

There was yet another aspect to what was happening. The old Piper swayed and shook and bounced as they flew along in their circuitous ascent. They were doing more snaking than flying. The smell of gasoline, the banging sounds of turbulence, and the constant rocking of the wings and wallowing of the machine was its own brand of music to the two men.

"Hey, remember that first cross-country I gave you in one of these?" Goodman shouted.

Whip half turned from the front seat, the grin all across his face. "How could I forget? I got lost."

"Got lost? You skinny little bastard, you
never
knew where you were that day! You even missed the ocean!"

"Got any idea where we are now, fat man?"

"Shit, no. Except that I'm climbing into jungle country in an airplane that can barely rise as fast as the ground is coming up." Goodman sobered as he studied the trees through swirling mists. "More to the point, do you have any idea of where the hell we are?"

A greasy chart was pushed into the back of the cabin. Whip's finger stabbed against the paper. "See that ravine? There's a river crosses here from the northwest. It's about five miles ahead of us. We fly up the ravine and break through a mountain pass. The field we want is about fifteen miles northeast of there."

Goodman studied the chart. "You couldn't prove it by me," he muttered.

"Fat colonels got lousy eyesight. I read that in a magazine once."

"Turn around and pay attention to where the hell we're going."

A sudden downdraft dropped them like a rock and Whip skidded off to one side to avoid trees looming in their direction. The hard maneuvering was exhilaration to Goodman.

For the moment it was flying in the old days again and the war was another place and another time.

Fighting rough air all the way they crossed the ravine-river checkpoint on the chart.

What had been rough before became a tumbling invisible waterfall of air now as they eased into the ravine. Whip had no time now for idle chatter. He was fighting and flying the little airplane with constant attention. They bounced their way wildly through the ravine, broke out and headed across tumbled, tree-covered hills without a single reference along the ground. Yet Whip had been here before and he knew what he was doing. Suddenly Whip banked the Cub. Goodman looked to where he was pointing: three strange mounds arranged in pyramid fashion.

"That's it," Whip announced.

Goodman studied the surface. You really had to look hard to see the field. A light drizzle was falling and if you hadn't known just where to look for those three mounds you couldn't ever have known an airstrip was down there. Whip rocked the wings and brought the Cub around in a rolling dive toward a space just to the west of the three markers. Was he going to land in the middle of all that goddamn growth down there?

The Cub bounced and jostled toward the earth, and at the last moment, as Goodman braced himself for what seemed an inevitable crunch with a tree, the bushes and trees directly before them melted away to the sides. Goodman had a glimpse of men hauling away foliage and a path was cleared magically. They rolled to a stop in less than six hundred feet, and by the time Goodman turned about to look behind him the foliage was replaced and any sign of an airstrip was gone. Moments later netting and tree fronds were heaped over the Piper and the airplane disappeared. Goodman was impressed.

He didn't waste any time. With Whip and two officers who'd been roughing it out here Goodman went on his own-style inspection. To one side of the old desert lake, hills reared steeply, and natural caves had been expanded to provide rough living and working quarters. It spoke well for the initial planning. Old parachutes, canvas, even woven grass gave good overhead security against rain and the elements, and also kept the inevitable insects from an inside-cave rain on the occupants. In its crude form it was all there.

Roughhewn workbenches for armament and technical details. Radio sets sealed well against the rain, and antennae cleverly run up the trunks and upper branches of trees.

Along the airstrip proper the heavier and larger trees had been set up on rough rollers so they could be moved quickly out of the way of moving aircraft. Whip and his people had put together an ingenious system. Whether it would hold up under the pressure of operational flights and the oftentime downpour was something else again. Goodman had less than huzzahs for the lake bed. The natives had pounded it down but the water runoff was questionable. The consistency of the soil would hold a man, but what it would do under the weight and pressure of bomber wheels was something else again. He made a mental note to see about having the area of the lake bed that was used for the airstrip mounded along its center so that mud collection might be avoided.

In almost every direction there were hills and mountains, thickly forested and carpeted with foliage. In every direction but the south, toward Australia. There the land fell away sharply, and it was in that direction the bombers must fly for takeoff and from which they must land. No matter in what direction the wind might be blowing. And the wind, if it was strong enough at certain times of operations, could be a killer — or stop a mission from taking off. It was for just such contingencies that Lou Goodman had been forced to have his showdown with Whip Russel. One day the little tiger would be wildly gung-ho to strike a certain target. The moment for the attack, in terms of the enemy, would be perfect — but such moments sooner or later must be accompanied by field or flight conditions begging for a disaster. The showdown would come then, and the only real strength Lou Goodman would have with Whip would be that handshake at Seven-Mile Drome.

Well, it's going to work,
if
… And God knew there was going to be an absolute avalanche of ifs, ands or buts when it came to running a combat strike outfit from this stone-age airstrip. But it
could
work, and the key would be in-the-field maintenance, being able to keep these machines ready for flight. The heaviest logistics — bombs, ammo, fuel —

would be a running affair of supply from Seven-Mile, where the B-25s could stage, and then slip up to the dry lake bed. They could —

"How does it shape up, Lou?" Whip looked at him expectantly.

"It's impossible," came the reply. "It can't work, it won't work, but" — he shrugged, and on his face was that crazy grin Whip remembered from the old airfield days — "it's the only game in town. We'll give it a shot, little man."

Whip nodded. "Fat man, you've got a deal. Let's head back for Seven-Mile."

They cranked up the little L-4 and taxied into position, the natives and other men waiting for the signal to move aside the brush and trees on their hidden rollers. Whip gave the signal and the takeoff run was suddenly clear. Just before he went forward on the throttle he saw it.

On one side of the strip. The sign that hadn't been there before, that read
Kanaga Field
.

"Why, you old bastard…" But the words were spoken to himself. Even after all these years that fat bastard behind him still knew how to keep his feelings bottled up. Well, almost.

They took off and rushed down the mountainside.

14

Thirteen days after they flew back to Garbutt Field the job was finished. The B-25D

bombers had been transformed into winged weapons the likes of which no one had ever seen before. No airplanes flying anywhere in the world had the punch of these machines.

They had been patched and cleaned and if they lacked the new-shine gleam of bombers fresh from the production line, they were far more impressive with what had been done to them.

Whip spent several hours just
looking
at his own airplane. The B-25D he had known was no more. In its place was the killer of which he had long dreamed. The strike bomber which could carve a hole out of air or wood or water or metal or enemy guns as it bored in to its target.

Yet he must approach these new aircraft with caution, with exquisite attention to detail.

The transformation went deeper than the eye. The manner of operation was altered.

Tactics would be more severely demanding. They had to learn quickly, and they had to know these aircraft before they committed them to combat with the enemy. So Whip Russel and the other pilots and crew members were brought up short in their own enthusiasm. It was back to basics.

"You've got to know every last and small detail about these iron birds," Whip told his men. "You people will draw up new weight and balance charts. You will graph your e.g.

down to the last digit. You will be required to answer any and all questions about these airplanes.
Before
you take them up for your first test flights you will know them inside and out. You will approach everything you're going to do as if you were seeing these airplanes for the very first time. None of you, and that includes me, has any experience in what we're going to be flying. And you will stay at it day and night. Any questions?"

The airplanes had started out in life as stock B-25C and B-25D models. Standard equipment, twin-engine medium bombers distinguished by tricycle gear and twin rudders. Squared lines, almost ungainly, but a sweetheart to fly, and without any vices to trap the man who wasn't constantly wary of what was going on about him every moment in the air. It was the kind of airplane the crews came to know well, and to trust, because if you knew the B-25 and achieved intimacy with the machine, then that symbiotic relationship between man and iron meant a pilot could perform in remarkable fashion. No single case could have more dramatically emphasized this point than the older B-25B models that were used for the first strike against the heart of Japan in April of 1942 from the wildly pitching deck of the aircraft carrier U.S.S.
Hornet
.

A bomber is, after all, a machine of clearly specified performance, and the B-25 calls for so many thousands of feet of racing down a runway, accelerating constantly, before it is able to drag itself with its fuel, crew, bombs and other weight into the air. The pilot's flight manual, the bible of all operations, spells out in no uncertain terms what you can do and what you should
never
try to do, because if you violate the tenets of the manual the odds are you'll kill yourself and prang some nice expensive metal that had been sculpted into the form of an airplane.

There was an old saw: Thou shalt maintain thy air speed, lest the ground reach up and smite thee.

Well, there were times to throw away the book, and when the need arose for a fast, long-ranging bomber on a navy carrier to rattle the homeland cages of the Empire, which had yet to experience high explosives going off in the front yard, about the only hardware around that could even be considered for the job was the B-25. At first blush the idea of using the Mitchell for the mission was laughable and ridiculous. Large medium bombers were not and are not made for carrier operations, and they take too long and too much runway to claw their way into the air. The people who occupied the conference table chairs in the Pentagon wanted an airplane that could haul a ton of bombs into the air and fly for a range of twenty-four hundred miles — but it must start this phase of its life from the deck of a carrier on the high seas.

There was an added fillip. The people who recommended the B-25B for this impossible task knew it was all the more impossible because the airplane, to meet the mission needs, would have to struggle into the air with a gross weight of 31,000 pounds. Pilots who had read the flight manuals and who were familiar with the flying characteristics of heavily overloaded airplanes hooted and made rude gestures. But the navy pilots, to whom a pitching wet carrier deck was home, were less rude about the idea. People who lived every day with the necessity of beginning flight in a manner that horrified ground-based aviators, considered "impossible takeoffs" from a carrier deck unacceptable profanity.

Navy pilots joined army pilots (who, strangely enough, were all spirited volunteers for what they were told was almost guaranteed to be a suicidal mission) in a remote Florida airfield, where they imparted their expertise to their landlocked friends. The impossible had been done before; Whip and his men could do no less now.

Whip planned to fly his strikes with a combat formation of eleven bombers. The magic of eleven emerged from studies of tactics and his own enormous experience. It was a number of aircraft sufficiently large to mount a murderous punch, yet not so large that the formation became unwieldy. It was also small enough so that each pilot would know what to expect from the other men; from the shared intimacy of long hours in the air they could function as one machine, skidding and sliding together when adversity called for such maneuvering, rather than rigid and even fanatical adherence to maintaining formation, as tactics had been taught them in the training schools, while the Zeros clawed them to shreds. And when everything was going to hell in a handbasket, the men who could
as a team
throw their machines wildly through the air, who violated the rules, sometimes, even often, got in a pause from enemy mauling, as well as the chance to get in their own licks.