Whip (4 page)

Goodman's right hand went forward on the throttles.

With full power the tail came up quickly and he sped along the runway, easing into a turn away from the field as he came off the ground and punched up the gear. All the cops had was a glimpse of a silvery machine disappearing in the distance.

Goodman's plan was simple. Just fly the four of them to a field about a hundred miles away. Make a telephone call from the isolated airport to a friend who had a motorcycle shop in the small town. Two hours from then, Whip and his friends would ride
into
Los Angeles, not away from the scene of the killing. It was a good plan and it worked, but not exactly the way Goodman had planned.

He was at four thousand feet when he finally glanced to his right. He was so startled he was unable to voice the anger that had continued to build within him.

Whip Russel sat in a half-trance, fingers caressing the control yoke, his eyes wide and staring. Lou Goodman knew the signs. The anger melted away. "All right, kid," he said as softly as he could over the hammering roar of the engines. "You take it."

Whip looked at him, startled and delighted. Suddenly the tough kid from the motorcycle gang was another youngster to whom the sky had miraculously beckoned. Lou Goodman told him what to do, how to handle the yoke gently, to pick a point on the distant horizon and fly toward that point, how to mix experience with feeling. He let Whip stay on the controls with him during the flight and the descent into the small field, and after he made his telephone call to the friend with the bike shop, only three of the gang rode motorcycles back to Los Angeles. Whip returned with him, never off the controls for a moment, never thinking of anything but the flying that had so abruptly, exhilaratingly, overwhelmed him.

"They never did tumble to what we did that day," Goodman said.

Whip sprawled across the packing-crate couch. "You'll never believe it." He grinned crookedly. "I got a job. Down in San Diego. I got a job and I spent every goddamned dime on flying lessons. Later, I guess it was about two months before Pearl Harbor, I got my civilian license and signed up. They were really pressing for people. I didn't meet their two years of college, but since I had my ticket, they looked the other way, and the next thing I knew I was in flight school as a cadet."

"You seem to have done pretty well, son."

Whip kept his gaze on the can in his hands. "It's been a long road, Lou." He looked up slowly. "I lost touch. What happened to you?" He laughed suddenly and the crinkles appeared in crow's-feet back of his eyes, above his cheekbones. "I just never figured you for a uniform."

Goodman grunted as he heaved his bulk to a more comfortable position. A cigarette appeared in his mouth and he scraped a kitchen match on the floor beside him to light up. "I never figured on it myself," he agreed. "Right after you disappeared, the government sent people around looking for maintenance facilities. Well, I had the bike shop, and that auto repair station, and I owned the airport and part of another one, and before I knew what the hell was happening I had contracts up the gazoo for rebuilding engines and airplanes and starting contract flying schools. Everyone knew the war was coming, Whip, and they were dishing out the money like it was coupons. Christ, I was making a bundle." A long sigh came from the man fondly remembering better days.

"Then suddenly it was December seventh, and I wake up in the morning, and I'm an expert in aircraft maintenance. I didn't tell the army that;
they
told
me
. The next thing I know I'm sworn in as a major and they tell me I'll be fixing their goddamn airplanes, and they sent me to Pearl to pick up some of the pieces there. I told them to junk what was left, and they put me on a boat loaded everywhere with parts and pieces and a bunch of kids who were supposed to be mechanics, and — " He shrugged to bring the story to its conclusion. "I've been here ever since. Oh, I make the rounds from here to Moresby and down south, and that sort of thing, but Garbutt Field" — he thumped his desk — "this is home plate."

Whip locked eyes with him. "They tell stories about you, Lou. They call you the miracle man."

"Sure, sure, Whip. I build iron airplanes out of straw and scorpion crap. Don't believe everything you hear."

"Never figured you for being modest."

"They said it was part of being a colonel."

Silence came gently between them for long minutes. Finally Lou Goodman shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "Whip." He saw the other man look up, knowing they were about to cross sensitive ground. "I don't want to walk around it, Whip. I heard rumors.

You know, about Melody."

He saw Whip's eyes narrow, and the cold steel that came into his face made Lou Goodman begin to believe the stories he'd heard about Russel from other pilots. What he'd seen when those bombers came into Garbutt Field was signature enough to any pilot with experience: there had been a touch of brilliance in that flying and the man who'd led the formation. But this went beyond that. A legend had been growing in the theater about the man who flew the bomber with the death's head painted on each side of the nose, who did things with the Death's Head Brigade that should have been impossible.

There was pain in that expression, as well, and Goodman knew they were both seeing Melody Russel. Remembering what she looked like. The young girl who adored her brother, who went everywhere she could with him until she signed up as an army nurse, and was rushed through training, and was sent overseas in the late fall of 1941. To a place called Bataan, in the Philippines.

"I don't know too much, Lou." The words came forth strained, tinged with a bitterness that had to be there. "The last report I got was that she was captured. That last stand at Corregidor. She was supposed to fly out, all the women were, during the last evacuation.

They took out the women by submarine." Whip blinked rapidly. "But she wouldn't go.

She refused to leave the wounded."

He didn't say any more, and Lou Goodman didn't press it, because what the hell was there to say? They both knew what must have happened.

Lou Goodman was surprised, then, when Whip found his voice again. And what he told the colonel also told Goodman, more than anything else, just how extraordinary a change had taken place in this man.

"I try not to think about it too much. It could kill me, and some other people too. This hate thing. If I hate that much I don't think, I just see red and all I want to do is to kill.

But that's a mistake because then I'm going up against the Japanese with hate as my overriding compulsion. I had a hell of a time fighting that down. I mean, you can't go into this war without thinking ahead every step of the way. Every step you can, anyway.

Otherwise you make mistakes, the kind the Japs love you to make. They've got us outnumbered and the Zero is a killer, it's a hell of a lot more fighter than our people have to fly, and there's nothing more those guys would love to find than a bunch of B-25s without some real discipline to the way they handle those bombers. So I try, I try as hard as I can, not to hate, because it will eat me alive." He gestured to push away what might have been an obvious but wrong conclusion on the part of his audience. "Oh, I think about her, Lou, but I try to remember what she was like, that she'll be the same way, older and more experienced, when I see her again, but she'll still be my kid sister and…

and, oh, shit, Lou, you know all the words."

Lou Goodman gave him a few moments. "Sure, kid, I know." He forced life back into his own voice. "I hear you cut your teeth at Midway."

He could almost feel the relief in Whip at the change in subject. Whip nodded slowly. "It was Midway, all right. We were flying the Marauders then. The same 22nd Group you got here at Garbutt." He laughed harshly, but without bitterness, because Whip, Lou Goodman was learning quickly, was never bitter about the business of killing with airplanes.

"Midway. What a hell of an introduction to a war…"

5

At that same moment of reminiscence between Whip Russel and Lou Goodman, shared over the precious cold beer dragged to its last regretful swallow, Midway was also the topic of discussion elsewhere on Garbutt Field. The men of the Death's Head Brigade had assembled within what was laughingly called the Officers' Club, a tarpaper-covered wooden shack embroidered with grass and reed walls. However, despite the warm beer and the stale cigarettes and the scratchy phonograph and the brutal heat and the insects that crawled, buzzed, burrowed and stung, it was infinitely to be preferred to the drab nothingness of the tents assigned to the newly arrived men as temporary quarters. The tents shared with the club the same heat, dust and insects, but lacked the beer and heat-warped records scratching away their memory-jogging tunes of distant dance halls and Saturday night dates.

Captain Benjamin Czaikowicz, fondly christened "Psycho" by his fellow pilots, looked sadly about the dusty abortion of a club. Psycho was a Polish boulder of brawn and muscle and a gifted pilot, almost blind in his devotion in following Whip Russel in combat. Psycho flew the number two slot in the 335th Bomb Squadron, to the left and just behind the black airplane that led the pack.

Psycho shook his head. "There's a breeze in here," he murmured. "I think." He gestured to the other men. "There must be a breeze. See those flies over there?

They're doing slow rolls where the breeze comes around that corner. But maybe it's not a breeze at all, hey? Maybe it's the flies. Maybe they make the breeze."

First Lieutenant Alex Bartimo leaned against the bar with elbows at perfect angles of ninety degrees, fingering the dust on his beer can. Of all the men suffering the dusty heat and the insects, only Alex jarred the eyes. He didn't
fit
. The other men were slobs.

Theirs was the uniform of the day, and the night, and it didn't matter because they had nothing to wear but ragged and stolen clothes. Alex Bartimo, who flew copilot in Whip Russel's airplane, was not and never had been a slob. Never. No matter what he wore, which at this moment consisted of old trousers cut into shorts with neatly hemmed edges, a shirt fashioned into what might pass for a rakish vest, and, sneakers.
White
sneakers. In a supply situation generously described as chaotic, Alex had discovered by the peculiarities of the quartermaster a case of white shoe polish. His sneakers were always white. No socks. Yet the man — not his attire — was impeccable. He was a polished reflection of hygiene and a once-upon-a-time social world. He was also an enigmatic sore thumb in a crowd of ragamuffins.

Alex sighed at the question of flies and a breeze murmured by his hulking companion.

"Wrong, old man," he said in clipped, precise wording. "They do not maybe make the breeze, to quote your colorful and oafish term. They are adept and adroit, but I daresay you are too thick in the skull to appreciate aerobatic skill. It lies beyond your comprehension, which is why the Japanese do so much damage to that crudely flown machine of yours."

The other pilots of the Brigade smiled tolerantly. Psycho always walked into the verbal sandtraps and Alex always neatly buried him. Yet a man would have to be blind not to discern the deep bond between the two pilots.

There were other pilots in the club, too, men from the B-17 bombers, others from the Marauders, still others from transports and still more without any aircraft at all. A few fighter pilots sat at a far table, uncomfortable in the midst of bomber teams who went to war at a range beyond the reach of the fighters.

A B-17 pilot edged to the bar with Psycho and Alex. He motioned to the latter, receiving the cool response of a nudged eyebrow. Alex Bartimo was clannish to a fault with his own men. But this man eased his curiosity into the open. "You're the copilot for this Russel, aren't you? The guy who leads your outfit?"

Alex Bartimo blinked his eyes. Once.

"I hear they call him Whip. Like that bullwhip he's got painted on your airplane, with the death's head. Is what they say about that guy true? Really true, I mean?"

It was a mistake. It could have been a mistake. Conversation among the Death's Head Brigade crews went stock-still. The pilot who'd voiced the question stared from one unmoving face to another. The B-17 driver stiffened, staring from one man to another.

"Hey… come off it, you people. What the hell did I say to rattle your cages?"

Psycho leaned sideways on the bar, massive forearms bearing his weight. The dumb Polack was suddenly gone, and in his place was a very large, very sensitive man. "We're touchy about the captain," Psycho rumbled, and you could tell from the tone of his voice that it
was
Captain, and not captain. "Very touchy. Most of us would be dead without that — that guy, as you call him."

The B-17 pilot, Tod Chippola, shook his head. "You people are reading me all wrong."

He hesitated, and they waited. "You fly in here like a parade review at Kelly Field, and we recognize the things you're flying, and it dawns on us what outfit you really are.

We've heard a lot about you."

He laughed harshly. "You're touchy about the captain?" He laughed again. "I'll tell you people something," he said as he looked around the club. "Any son of a bitch in this room wants to give up a seat in one of those B-25s, I'm your replacement." Again he looked around. "No takers? Shit." He stared directly at Psycho, and he wasn't backing down an inch. "You think we'd rather sit here on the ground with that wreck we got out there in the desert? I'll buy a pilot's seat in your outfit, for Christ's sake."

Tension flowed away into the heat. Psycho took the measure of the other man, rested a beefy hand gently on his shoulder. "The next one is on me, friend."

"Sure."

Czaikowicz pushed a beer slowly at the B-17 pilot. The barriers came down even more.

"You want to know about this fellow who leads us?" He jerked a thumb at the man in shorts and white sneakers. "You ask him," he said of Alex Bartimo. "He's been with the captain longer than any of us." Psycho grinned hugely. "They flew and fought together before the rest of us ever met Whip Russel."