Fortress Falling (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 2)

by William Peter Grasso

  Shit, Tommy thought, he hit a tree, I’ll bet. He hit a fucking tree. It isn’t the first time someone did that.

  “THE PROP’S RUNNING AWAY,” Iverson shrieked.

  “Just pull it back, Pete,” Tommy said, fighting to stay focused and keep his own voice calm as he and Tuttle released their bombs. Then he added, “Jimmy, you and Joey give us top cover. I’ll stay with Pete.”

  “Roger, boss.”

  Tuttle climbed away while Tommy closed in on Iverson’s wingtip. His altimeter read only two hundred feet. He could swear he was lower than that. More disturbing was his airspeed; matching pace with Iverson, they were barely making one hundred forty miles per hour.

  It only took a quick glance at the nose of Blue Four to confirm Tommy’s guess as to what had happened. There were several feet shaved off the normal thirteen-foot diameter of the propeller arc. The front lip of the elliptical engine cowling was bashed in all around its circumference. The oil coolers in the bottom of that cowling—if they weren’t ruptured and leaking precious engine oil—probably had their airflow blocked by the misshapen cowl lip.

  Yep, he hit a tree.

  “How’s your oil temp, Pete?” Tommy asked.

  “Climbing.”

  Yeah, no kidding. Those coolers aren’t getting any air.

  “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, Pete. Set your manifold pressure to twenty-eight inches. Can you do that?”

  “Yeah, boss. It’s about there now.”

  “Good. Now bring your RPM down until your jaw stops rattling.”

  There were a few moments of silence on the radio as Iverson teased the prop lever backward. “There,” he reported. “It feels okay at twenty-two fifty.”

  “And the oil temp’s still on the gauge?”

  “Yeah, boss. Seems to be holding…for now.”

  “Swell. But we’ve got to get you a little higher if we’re going to get you all the way home…but at that power setting the climb has to be verrry gradual. And your airspeed might get scary slow.”

  “Maybe I should just bail out,” Iverson said.

  “Negative, you’re too low. Now listen to me. First thing we’re going to do is a gentle right turn, about twenty-five degrees. That’ll put us on a heading straight back to A-90.”

  It’ll also put us straight into the high ground west of the Moselle if we don’t gain some altitude.

  They made it through the turn without a loss of altitude.

  But they did lose a few miles per hour of airspeed.

  “Pete, I’m going to start orbiting above you. Slow as you are, I can still keep pace that way, but I’ll have a better view of what’s going on around us.”

  He didn’t say the rest of what he was thinking: So if you go in, maybe we can have a place picked out where there might not be any Krauts.

  Four minutes later—and two miles from the Moselle River—Iverson said, “I can’t hold her, Tommy. Airspeed’s down to one-oh-five. Oil temp’s pegged out. Where should I put her down?”

  “The road junction dead ahead, Pete. Put her there. It’s nice and flat.”

  With a violent shudder that threatened to loosen every rivet in his ship, Iverson’s engine seized.

  “Well, I’m landing for sure now. I’m gonna belly her.”

  “Affirmative. Belly her.”

  It was just a matter of seconds before Blue Four was plowing through the soft mud, her lower fuselage digging in like a knife through butter. She came to a quick stop still upright, something that would have been unlikely if Iverson had tried a wheel landing in all that muck. She would have flipped on her back almost certainly, and he would have been trapped inside.

  But escape might have been a moot point if his skull was crushed or his neck broken.

  Her seized engine smoked but nothing was on fire. Exiting the aircraft was as simple as climbing over the canopy rail and stepping off her wing to the soggy ground only inches below.

  Tommy breathed a sigh of relief as he watched Iverson jog away from his aircraft. That relief didn’t last long, though. A few hundred yards to the north, a light vehicle churned slowly across the muddy ground toward the wreck. A squad of men on foot hurried behind it in a ragged column.

  That truck doesn’t look GI issue to me, Tommy thought.

  Any doubts he might have had vanished as pieces started to fly off the downed jug. They’re shooting her up. Got to be Krauts. And it looks like there’s a heavy machine gun on that vehicle.

  He couldn’t see Iverson anymore, but at last sight he’d been somewhere on the far side of Blue Four from the Germans, moving away from them.

  Probably running like hell now, too, the poor bastard.

  Tommy put Eclipse into a diving turn and locked the vehicle—now obviously an armored car—into his gunsight. He was sure the German machine gunner had seen him coming by now and was lining up on him, too.

  First shot wins…and I’ve got the range over him.

  Tommy’s first burst of .50-caliber bullets splashed short. With gentle back pressure on the stick—Put her right on the pip, Moon—he walked the next burst across the armored car. It veered crazily—seemingly unguided—as Eclipse roared past.

  When he pulled around for another pass, the car was motionless. The squad on foot was nowhere to be seen.

  Now where the hell is Iverson?

  Tommy could see several boxy, lumbering shapes rolling across the ground to the west, headed for the wreck. He knew exactly what they were: Shermans.

  He did a wide orbit around them, displaying the jug’s silhouette and markings as clearly as he could, to lessen the odds a trigger-happy GI gunner might mistake him for the enemy. As he completed the circle, he could see them waving at him as a man scrambled onto the deck of the lead tank.

  That’s got to be Iverson. Lucky bastard’ll be back at A-90 before the sun goes down, probably.

  He climbed to rejoin Tuttle and Nardini, who’d been orbiting high overhead, too high to make out what was happening on the ground below.

  “Did you get that last call from Halfback?” Tuttle asked.

  “No,” Tommy replied. “Been a little busy. What’d he want?”

  “They need some eyes over that damn fort again. Sounds like something big’s going on down there.”

  “Did you tell them we’re low on ammo and down a ship?”

  “Yeah, but they didn’t care, boss. They say they need help now, and we’re closest and available. By the way, I’m positive the voice on the radio was Clinchmore.”

  If it was Lieutenant Herb Clinchmore—a pilot from the 301st doing duty as an air support officer with the ground troops—that meant the unit calling for help was probably 37th Tank…

  My brother’s outfit, Tommy told himself.

  Chapter Ten

  Sean Moon wasn’t sure what aggravated him more: leading the tanks of Baker Company up this narrow, treacherous switchback along the steep hill leading to the back side of Fort Driant; the fort’s howitzers firing noisily but harmlessly over their heads; that even on this clear morning they had no air support covering their flanks; that the class they were supposed to be receiving was actually on-the-job training under fire in the use of Bangalore torpedoes; or the thought that Colonel Abrams might still be pissed off—even days later—over his navigation error in the fog that had delayed their arrival and kept 37th Tank under strength and forced to cool its heels for the better part of a day.

  And if the colonel’s still mad at Baker Company, maybe that’s why we got assigned this shit detail with the engineers and their stupid Bangalores. I fucked up, and now my whole company’s getting fucked over.

  It didn’t matter that Captain Newcomb had assured him nothing could be further from the truth; the colonel knew better than to expect things to always go perfectly. Everybody has problems, Alvin, Abrams had told Newcomb, but it’s what you’re doing about them that matters. And what you did about your little mistake turned out okay.

  Still, Sean was convinced that error
—his error—had moved Baker Company to the top of Colonel Abrams’ shit list.

  Another salvo from the fort’s batteries—100 and 150-millimeter howitzers in steel turrets—roared over the tanks of Baker Company. The howitzers were no threat; they couldn’t be depressed low enough to engage them as they climbed the road to the fort. But they were firing toward the Moselle, no doubt at GIs trying to cross that river in assault boats just south of Metz. If this attempt to cross was like all the others before, the guns of Fort Driant would shatter those flimsy boats and send the surviving GIs treading water back to the riverbank from which they’d come. It didn’t matter if they tried to sneak across at night, either; the German guns had the Moselle valley around Metz zeroed in.

  It pisses me off, too, Sean thought, because Fourth Armored’s already been across the Moselle—waaaay across the Moselle—down by Nancy. But the brass think that place ain’t good enough to move the rest of Third Army across. So Patton wants to take the direct route, crossing at Metz and blasting straight to the Saar River and into Germany…but this fucking fort won’t let him.

  And so far, ain’t nobody made a dent in the damn place.

  A fort…can you believe it? Where the hell are we, in the Middle Ages or something?

  Captain Newcomb’s voice came over the radio. “All right, this is the place,” he said. “Provide cover and suppressing fire for the engineers while they put these contraptions together.”

  Contraptions: the Bangalore torpedoes. A long, thin explosive charge made up of pipe sections that could be assembled to a fifty-foot length, pushed into a field of barbed wire, and then detonated to cut a path through the wire and set off any integrated mines. The tanks had transported several dozen of the unassembled torpedoes on their hull decks. Now it was time to put this technology from The Great War to use against a fort of the same era.

  “This gotta be the thickest fucking barbed wire setup I’ve ever seen,” Sean called down from the turret hatch to the engineer sergeant supervising the unlashing of the Bangalores from Lucky 7’s deck. “You sure we got enough of these things to blow all the way through?”

  “My captain says three torpedoes, full length, at each breach point should do the job,” the engineer replied.

  “You mean we gotta push one through, blow it, and then set up another one, push it through—”

  “Yeah,” the engineer interrupted, “you’ve got the picture. Just make sure you keep the Krauts’ heads down while we’re laying this pipe out.”

  “You ever used a tank to push one of these thingamajigs before?”

  The engineer didn’t bother to answer, but Sean could tell from the look on his face the answer was no.

  “I thought so,” Sean said. “Ain’t infantry supposed to be the ones shoving these things through the wire?”

  “They tried, over on the other side of the fort,” the engineer replied, “but most of them got killed before they set off even one torpedo. We had to wait until dark before we could untangle and retrieve their bodies.” Then he added, “Besides, this hill is much too steep to push the Bangalores by hand. They weigh almost a hundred pounds at full length. That’s why you’re here.”

  “I’ve got news for you, pal,” Sean replied. “This hill’s too steep for these Zippos, too. Maybe we can creep up them a ways in low gear, but that’s gonna be about it.”

  He glanced down the slope, where several companies of infantry were assembled to assault through the wire once paths were blown open for them. “It might even be too steep for those poor bastards to climb on foot, lugging all that ammo and shit.”

  Sean scanned the parapet high above them with his binoculars as Fabiano manned the .50-caliber machine gun on the turret roof. “Over there, Fab…two fingers right of our muzzle…some Jerries are taking a peek at us. Play ’em a little chin music.”

  A long burst from the .50 cal made the Germans drop back behind their fortress wall. The noise of it also scared the daylights out of the engineers working on the ground behind Lucky 7.

  “Keep it up, Fab,” Sean said. “They’ll be sending more Krauts over to this wall once they figure out what we’re doing.”

  The engineer sergeant ran his hand across the tank’s name painted on the turret. “How’d you come to call her this, anyway?” he asked.

  “Easy. She’s my seventh tank since North Africa,” Sean replied.

  “What happened to the other six?”

  “What the hell do you think happened to them?”

  “So what makes this one lucky, Moon?”

  “Call it wishful thinking, okay? Now let’s hustle it up with them damn stovepipes, before I have to christen Lucky Eight. We’ve been sitting still too damn long.”

  Sean looked into the distance to see a flight of P-47s orbiting wide of the fort. “Oh, great. Look who finally showed up. At least now we’ll know if any Kraut armor’s coming up the road behind us.”

  The engineer sergeant asked, “Why the hell are they all the way over there?”

  Sean gave him a look like that was the world’s dumbest question. “Because they don’t want to get knocked down by one of them big lead eggs the fort’s throwing at the Moselle, that’s why.”

  Blue Flight was orbiting north of Fort Driant, being the eyes in the sky the ground-pounders had requested. Tommy watched as the fort’s howitzers fired, trying to follow the tiny dot of each round before it vanished from sight as it arced the few miles east to the Moselle. There must be GIs trying to get across there, he told himself. Doesn’t look like they’re doing too good. Even from this distance, the river’s surface looked like it was being churned by geysers. The riverbanks were faring no better, the thick smoke of countless fires rising from them in ominous black columns.

  A lot of vehicles burning, Tommy told himself. GI vehicles.

  Looking down on the turrets of Driant, he couldn’t believe how impervious they’d been to anything thrown against them, from high explosives to white phosphorous to napalm. Nothing had made a difference. This fort—this monument to another age of warfare, an age everyone had thought long obsolete—was proving invulnerable to everything the US Army had in its arsenal.

  The GIs had long known the observation posts on Fort Driant—high, strongly reinforced towers protruding from the central blockhouse—gave the fort’s gunners a superb view of the Moselle valley for miles above and below Metz. From that vantage point, they could direct the fire of the other Metz forts, as well.

  I’d love to shoot up those OPs, Tommy thought, but it’ll be just like all the other times—it won’t do a damn bit of good. It’ll just make those artillery observers keep their heads down for a second, maybe even give them a headache or make their ears bleed, but that’s about all. It’s just like those flak towers we try to shoot up. Unless you can knock the damn thing down, you’re just etching your name in the concrete and steel. And once you’re gone, they’re back to business as usual.

  I wish to hell we could do more for our guys on the ground.

  Somebody’s got to do more.

  It seemed to take forever to get the first Bangalore torpedoes rigged. Lucky 7—Sean Moon’s tank—was the first to move forward, pushing the torpedo’s long pipe into the barbed wire with a bumper the engineers had fabricated from a log and hung low off her bow. The whole enterprise must have sounded so easy on paper.

  “Hold up, Ski,” Sean called to his driver before the tank had moved fifty feet. “We ain’t pushing nothing, dammit. The snake just slipped under the hull.”

  The Bangalore torpedo—snake in GI slang—was snagging in the wire, kinking the pipe sections and disengaging the contraption from the tank’s makeshift bumper. The other two tanks pushing the torpedoes up the hill weren’t doing any better, either. Standing in the turret hatch, Sean motioned for the engineers huddled behind his tank to get out of the way so she could back up. Not thrilled to lose their cover, but not looking to get crushed, either, they reluctantly complied.

  “Okay, Ski,” he said, “t
hey’re clear. Back her up.”

  “What’s the matter?” the engineer sergeant called up to Sean.

  “Your little toy’s falling apart. Go straighten it out so maybe we can get this shit job done sometime this fucking year.”

  The engineers kept shooting apprehensive glances skyward, as if expecting holy hell to come crashing down on them at any moment.

  “Don’t worry about the Kraut artillery from the other forts,” Sean told them. “Not yet, anyway. They ain’t gonna shoot at us unless we clear this wire. They don’t like to waste rounds, either.”

  Right now, clearing the wire was anything but a certainty. They all knew it.

  Machine gun fire from the fort’s parapet began to chew up the ground around Lucky 7, sending the engineers scampering for cover behind her hull again.

  “Let me put a couple of rounds from the big gun up their asses, Sarge,” Fabiano pleaded as he returned fire with the .50 caliber.

  Sean could tell his gunner was getting nervous manning the big machine gun out in the open. He was sure Fabiano’s real motive for wanting to fire the main gun was to be back inside the steel cocoon of the Sherman.

  “Negative,” Sean replied. “They’ll just bounce off those walls like all the other rounds we’ve fired. Just keep putting fifty cal right past their fucking heads, like the rest of the platoon is doing.”

  Fabiano did as he was told. The German machine guns stopped firing abruptly.

  “There,” Sean said, “that’ll keep their heads down. And keep your drawers on, Fab. Those Kraut MGs are too far away and with too much of a vertical interval. It’ll be pure luck if they hit anything at all.”

  “But I’ve got the same bad vertical interval as them, Sarge.”

  “Yeah, but you’re shooting bigger bullets with better range and a flat trajectory. Just keep scaring the shit out of them.”

  The engineers were still clustered behind the tank. Sean yelled down to them, “You guys having a prayer meeting or something? Get this fucking show of yours on the road before we take our marbles and go home. Where you gonna hide then?”