Dandridge didn’t seem convinced. “I want to believe you, sir. I really do, but…”
“But what?”
“It’s just that…I don’t…oh, never mind. Can we at least do it my way, though?”
“Your way?”
“Yeah. Let’s get everybody a couple of thousand feet higher. I want that altitude cushion to be really fat.”
They relayed their plan to Wheatley. He didn’t object but had a question: “We are still over friendly territory, right?”
“Yeah,” Tommy replied. “We’re a good ten miles behind the lines right now. By the way, any word from our escorts?”
“Affirmative,” Wheatley replied. “They’re up at angels twenty, keeping an eye on us.”
As Dandridge turned down the gain on his controller, he told Tommy, “We’re going to need something to aim at.”
“I’ve got a point picked out already,” Tommy replied. “Look at one o’clock. There’s a road junction that forms a t, with a railroad crossing just beyond the junction.”
“I see it, sir. But couldn’t we use one of those little towns all around instead?”
“Bad idea, Sergeant,” Tommy replied. “There’s likely to be GIs in those towns. They might not understand why some aircraft type they’ve never seen before is diving straight for them. Don’t be surprised if they start shooting at her. A road junction’s a lot safer—especially one with no traffic on it.”
“I see your point, sir.”
“Have you ever stalled a Culver before, Sergeant?”
“No, sir.”
“It would’ve been nice if we could’ve spoken with the pilots who flew the Culvers out here. They could tell us whether she drops a wing or not when she stalls. Or maybe even goes into a spin. Where the hell did they go?”
“Major Staunton sent them back to England, sir. Apparently, Eighth Air Force didn’t think they’d be needed here anymore.”
“Well, if we wreck both Culvers those pilots certainly won’t be needed.”
The look on Dandridge’s face made it plain once again: he didn’t like that prospect at all.
He lined the Culver up on the road junction, still several miles distant. But another problem presented itself. “How will I know when to start this dive, sir? I can’t even see the target in the monitor. It’s off screen, low.”
“Then we’re going to have to use our eyeballs, Sergeant. I’ll tell you when you’re at a good point to start diving. Wait for it…”
Ten seconds later, Tommy said, “Now.”
“Okay, here we go,” the sergeant said. “Throttling back, easing back on the elevator.”
Dandridge kept his eye on the television monitor, watching the Culver’s airspeed steadily sink from 120 miles per hour down to 60. She’d only lost about one hundred feet of altitude, but she didn’t want to slow down any more.
“I can’t hold her nose up, sir. It’s started dropping already,” Dandridge said. “That’s keeping it above stall speed. I told you I wouldn’t have enough elevator.”
“Give her a minute, Sergeant.”
But the Culver wouldn’t stall. She just kept mushing forward in a gentle descent.
“I didn’t think this would work, sir.”
“Wait a minute,” Tommy said. “Try this—kick her rudder left and right.”
“What’ll that do?”
“Slow her down.”
“But I can’t control the rudder separately, sir. It’s coordinated with the ailerons. I’d have to uncouple them…and that’ll take a minute. We’ll miss this pass.”
“Then kick the ailerons, Sergeant.”
Dandridge began moving the joystick rhythmically left and right as he held back pressure on the elevators. The Culver waggled, trembling on the brink of a stall. He couldn’t read the Culver’s airspeed indicator on the video monitor because the image was shaking violently.
“She’s in a pre-stall buffet,” Tommy told him. “Keep it up. She’ll stall. Give her a chance. Just watch she doesn’t spin.”
It didn’t take long. The wing waggle bled off what was left of the Culver’s flying speed and pushed her into the stall. Her nose dropped sharply and the little ship began a steep downward plummet.
“Okay, good,” Tommy said to a very nervous Dandridge. “Pretty clean stall, no spin. Do you have the road intersection in the camera?”
“Nope.”
“Yeah, I figured. You’re looking short. She’ll raise her nose a little as she gains some speed. Help her out with a little up elevator.”
A few anxious moments later, Dandridge said, “Okay! I’ve got the target. Gee, Lieutenant, you’re right! I don’t have to give it much elevator at all to stay on track.”
“Okay, don’t get target fixated. When she’s at twenty-five hundred feet, start to pull out.”
It only took a few more seconds for the Culver to drop to that altitude.
“Okay, I’m easing in up elevator,” Dandridge said.
“Good. Now watch her airspeed and feed in the throttle when it starts to bleed off. You’ll lose about another thousand feet or so before she starts to climb again.”
Two minutes later, the Culver was back cruising at 3,000 feet, with the mothership in trail at 8,000 feet.
Tommy asked, “Do you think you’d have any trouble keeping her on target in a dive like that?”
“No, sir. I don’t think so. It seemed to work just like you said it would.”
Wheatley’s voice came over the interphone. “The nose kept getting in the way with all that s-turning, so we didn’t get to see the whole thing. But what we did see looked pretty good. I didn’t think that Culver was ever going to stall, though.”
“I’m betting the baby’s going to stall a whole lot easier than that,” Tommy replied.
Dead serious, Wheatley said, “You can count on that.”
“Well, what do you think, guys?” Tommy asked. “You want to try another one?”
No one could think of a reason not to.
The second practice dive went even better than the first one. There were no jitters this time. Dandridge took the Culver through the stall and into the target run like he’d been doing it his whole life.
“Only one thing bothers me, sir,” he told Tommy. “We’re not going to get a practice run with the baby.”
“Why not? We’ve still got two days before the Torpex shows up.”
Dandridge’s face turned ghostly pale. “Oh, I don’t know about that, sir. Major Staunton’s not going to like that idea. Not one bit.”
“Can’t hurt to ask, though, Sergeant.”
“Just so it’s you doing the asking, sir.”
They were over Fort Driant now, flying the Culver in a wide orbit to check for radio interference to both the television and flight control systems. There seemed to be no problems; the television reception was excellent, and even in the low gain setting that simulated a B-17’s control responses, the little drone was operating perfectly.
“Okay,” Dandridge said, “the first test for interference passes with flying colors.”
From 10,000 feet altitude, they turned their attention to the defenses of Metz stretching below them. Being totally familiar with the terrain, Tommy could pick out five of the forts easily. Dandridge and the mothership’s pilots couldn’t pick out one on their own.
“They blend into the terrain pretty well, don’t they?” Tommy said as he pointed out each one. “All the forts west of Metz are contained within the two rivers that flow together at Ars-sur-Moselle. That’s the town just off our right side, built along the banks of the Mance River. Ars is further identified by the two highways intersecting on its east side and the railroad track crossing the Moselle. Fort Driant is the one about a mile west-southwest of the highway intersection.”
“I see it,” Dandridge replied, “but it doesn’t look like much of anything.”
“True, but look real close inside the bell shape of the fort. You see those four rectangles with three dots lined
up in each of them?”
“Yeah, I see them, sir.”
“Those rectangles are the gun batteries. The dots are the individual gun turrets. We’re going to be aiming for one of those two batteries in the middle.”
“And those batteries aren’t visible from low altitude, sir?”
“Hardly at all, Sergeant. You can’t tell real well from up here at angels ten, but the fort is sitting on a very steep rise. From the base of that rise, where our GIs are, you can’t see anything of the fort at all. Even flying toward it at the same height as the peak, you can’t see much of it. Everything on the premises barely sticks up above ground level.”
“That’s not good, sir.”
After another orbit of Driant, Dandridge said, “I think we’ve got a problem, sir. The Culver’s camera is only about two miles from the fort right now, but I can’t make out any of its details on the video at all. I mean, looking at it with just my eyes, I can see the details because of the variations in color—and there’s really not much of that, just different shades of brown and gray. But the camera only does shades of gray. I have no idea how I’m going to put the baby right on the money with this image to work with. I’m going to need something prominent to aim at. Every place else we’ve targeted has something tall sticking up, some big structure or something.”
He paused, a distraught look on his face, and then added, “If I don’t have the target acquired by the time we’re two miles out, I’m probably going to miss, for sure.”
“Maybe we should try some approaches to target from a couple of different directions,” Tommy said, “and try to get the sun angle and shadows working for us.”
But Lieutenant Wheatley’s voice was in their headphones. “Okay, we did what we’re supposed to do. We’re heading back now.”
Tommy keyed his mic to ask Wheatley to delay the return to base and then thought better of it. There was a good chance the discussion would turn acrimonious, so he’d prefer it to be face-to-face, without the entire crew hearing it. Few things short of bald-faced cowardice tended to diminish officers in their men’s eyes than watching them engage in a pissing contest. He already suspected Wheatley was a prune: an inefficient pilot in Air Force slang. Inefficient was just a polite way of saying lousy, poorly skilled, chickenshit, or any other derogative term you could think of.
I think the guy’s a little flak-happy, he told himself, meaning Wheatley’s concern over anti-aircraft fire seemed all out of proportion to the threat. He’s going to balk at anything keeping us up here a second longer than necessary.
Tommy made the awkward crawl from the nose into the cockpit. He explained to Wheatley the need for more experimenting with the video image. Before he was halfway through his explanation, the pilot was shaking his head.
“No way, Moon,” Wheatley said. “That’s not authorized for this mission. All we’re supposed to do is test your stall and dive theory and check for radio interference. We’ve done all that, so I don’t see any reason to keep stooging around up here, making a target of ourselves.”
“I think you’re worrying about flak a little too much, Paul. I’m telling you, I fly this patch of sky every damn day. Unless you’re down on the deck, you aren’t going to draw any fire…and we aren’t anywhere near the deck. Near as we can tell, nobody’s even shooting at the drone way down below us. If we’re going to have a problem with the television setup, we’d better know about it now.”
“Not going to happen, Moon. Checking out your harebrained schemes isn’t part of my orders. Better find yourself a seat because we’re heading back to A-90 now.”
“I think that’s a mistake, Paul. We’re not flying over Hamburg or Berlin here. We’re pretty safe at 10,000 feet…and we’ve got fighter cover overhead just in case the Luftwaffe decides to make one of its very rare appearances.”
“I don’t give a damn what you think, Moon. This is my ship and you’re just a fucking little guest along for the ride. Now get lost, because I’m busy here.”
Little really rubbed Tommy the wrong way. It wasn’t just a generic adjective; it was an insult a tall man would hurl, meant specifically for a short guy like him.
Insulted or not, there wasn’t much point trying to continue this argument while they were up in the air, so Tommy returned to the nose compartment. But he was now sure of one thing: I’m right…this guy’s a prune. And an asshole. Yeah, it’s his ship and all, but he’s a weak sister if I ever saw one.
Dandridge’s unenthusiastic reply to the news the mission was over: “I figured as much, sir.”
He went back to struggling with the video equipment as he piloted the drone in a gentle orbit far below the mothership, having one last try to get a picture of the ground he could use. But Tommy could tell by the look on his face he wasn’t getting it.
Chapter Nineteen
Major Staunton’s answer was a firm, if apologetic, no. “There won’t be any test dives of the BQ-7 baby. We can’t risk it. It’s the only aircraft we’ve been allocated for this mission. We’ve proven your theory with the Culver, Lieutenant Moon, and that will have to be good enough.”
Then he showed a tactful, almost fatherly side neither Tommy nor Dandridge had ever seen before. “And I’ll do you the favor of not bringing up your little suggestion to the baby’s pilots. They didn’t sign on to this project to be guinea pigs.”
True, the pilots would be on board—but not in control of their ship—as a test dive was conducted by remote control. All they’d have to do was manually fly the plane out of the dive from an altitude that yielded plenty of cushion. Of course, they’d have to do the takeoff for the test and land the ship afterwards, but that was routine stuff.
He’s got the guinea pig analogy all wrong, though, Tommy thought. Hell, every pilot flying combat is a guinea pig. But it’s not my call. If the brass think the test we did today answers their aerodynamic questions, well…so be it.
“Besides,” Staunton said, “we could never get the baby heavy enough without the Torpex on board to simulate her actual flight characteristics for the mission. We’d have to load her full of fuel, which introduces a host of problems all its own.”
“What kind of problems, sir?” Tommy asked.
“First off, there’s the problem of getting the fuel load authorized. I’m sure Eighth Air Force will say no. Second, we wouldn’t use much of that fuel. Either the baby flies around for hours burning it off, which is incredibly wasteful of precious aviation gasoline and increases the chances of it being shot down or simply malfunctioning, or it lands overweight and has to be defueled. I’m sure you’ll agree, Lieutenant Moon, that landing overweight is asking for trouble. And as I understand the SOP, any fuel we pump out will be unusable in another aircraft.”
Tommy didn’t know anything about what Air Force higher-ups would or would not approve, but as to flying around just to burn off fuel, the major was dead right: it would be incredibly wasteful. An overweight landing ran the risk of structural damage to the ship, maybe even resulting in a gear collapse and threat of a raging fire. A crash and burn item, in pilots’ jargon.
One thing the major had wrong, though: the business of not being able to reuse gasoline defueled from one aircraft in another. That might be the stateside regulation—or something done in an Air Force that had more fuel than it knew what to do with—but here in a combat theater, starved for aviation gasoline as they were, they’d have no qualms whatsoever about putting that fuel in their jugs. Whatever the technical objections to doing so—be it water buildup, contamination, or anything else the tech boards could come up with—the guys under the gun in the field would find a way to use it.
That left the daunting question of targeting Fort Driant through the indiscernible view of the television camera. “Obviously, there’s too much contrast in the image,” Staunton said.
“I tried the full range of contrast available at the monitor, sir,” Dandridge replied. “Nothing made much difference at all. You can’t paint any contrasts in the imag
e if everything in it is at or near the same point on the gray scale. And if we turn the gain down on the camera any more, the image will probably just white-out on us.”
There was a thoughtful silence, broken when Tommy said, “We’ll have to mark the target to make it more distinguishable.”
Staunton asked, “Are you thinking of marking it with smoke, Lieutenant?”
“No, sir. I was thinking fire, actually.”
“Right,” Dandridge added enthusiastically. “Smoke will be hard to pick up on the monitor. And it drifts, too. But flames—they’ll show up real good.”
Staunton scratched his head. “How on earth do we start a fire in the precise spot we want on that fort?”
“We get my squadron to drop napalm on it, sir.”
Skeptical, the major asked, “Can we involve your pilots without compromising the secrecy of this mission, Lieutenant? You’re fully aware it must remain a secret.”
“Sure, sir, we can keep it a secret. We’re told to do lots of stuff without being told why we’re doing it.”
Staunton fell deep in thought. It was impossible to tell if he was reasoning why the idea might work or scheming how to shoot it down. When he finally spoke, it was as if he wasn’t yet sure which side of the issue he was on.
“We’ll get the artillery to do the marking,” he said. “That will be simpler and less compromising to our mission.”
“No, sir, it wouldn’t be,” Tommy replied.
“What would you know about artillery, Lieutenant? I thought you were a pilot.”
“I am a pilot, sir. But I’ve spent some time as an ASO with the ground troops coordinating air support for them, so I’ve learned quite a bit about artillery, infantry, and armor operations.”
“ASO…that stands for what, exactly?”
“Air support officer, sir.”
“All right, then,” Staunton said, “share some of this expertise you’ve acquired with us.” He made expertise sound inconsequential.
Fortress Falling (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 2) Page 16
