The Fighting Agents
Page 8
“I’m just going along for the ride, thank you, Colonel,” he said.
Douglass nodded and motioned for the driver to continue.
Canidy walked into the revetment. The crew chief, a young technical sergeant, threw him a casual salute.
“Good morning, Major,” he said.
“Morning,” Canidy said. “You’ve wound both rubber bands, I presume?”
“Yes, Sir,” the crew chief said.
Canidy, with the crew chief trailing him, walked around the airplane, making the preflight check. He found nothing wrong and nodded his approval of the aircraft’s condition.
They walked back to the nose of the aircraft, where the crew chief held out a sheepskin flying jacket to Canidy, and then when Canidy had put his arms into it, steadied him as he pulled sheepskin trousers over his uniform trousers.
Canidy started to climb the ladder to the cockpit, which sat between the twin engines. And for the first time he saw what was painted on the nose. The Flying Tiger’s shark’s jaw, and “Dick Canidy,” in flowing script, and beneath it five meatballs.
“That was very nice of you, Sergeant,” Canidy said. “Thank you very much.”
“The Colonel thought you’d like it, Major,” the crew chief said. “He was your squadron CO in the Flying Tigers, wasn’t he?”
“Right,” Canidy said. It was not the time for historical accuracy.
He climbed into the cockpit. The crew chief climbed the ladder after him, carrying sheepskin boots. Canidy, not without difficulty, put them on, and then the crew chief helped him with the parachute straps, and finally handed him the leather helmet and oxygen mask, with its built-in microphone.
“Go get a couple, Major,” the crew chief said. “God go with you.”
Canidy smiled and nodded.
The crew chief climbed down the ladder, then removed it from where it hooked on the cockpit. Another crew member, as Canidy ran the controls through their limits, rolled up a fire extinguisher. Then he and the crew chief looked up at the cockpit, waiting for Canidy’s next order.
Canidy looked down and saw they were ready for him.
This is not the smartest thing I have ever done, Canidy thought. I know better. Only a goddamn fool goes off voluntarily into the wild blue yonder, from which he stands a good chance indeed of dying in flames.
The alternative was sitting around Whitbey House going nuts. Christ only knew what Donovan had in mind for Jimmy Whittaker. And at this moment, Eric Fulmar was somewhere in Germany wearing the uniform of an SS-Obersturmführer (first lieutenant). If the SS caught him in that, they would be inspired to see that his death was preceded by their most imaginative interrogation techniques.
It was either this—which by stretching a point could be considered flying a reconnaissance mission himself that otherwise the Air Corps would have to make—or drink. Or go nuts.
He flipped the Main Power Buss on, then adjusted the richness control of the left engine. He looked down from the cockpit.
“Clear!” he called.
“Clear, Sir,” the crew chief called back.
Canidy leaned forward and held the ENGINE START LEFT toggle switch against the pressure of its spring.
The left engine began to grind, and the prop began to turn, very slowly. Then the engine caught for a moment, bucked, and spit. The prop became a silver blur.
There had been time to think. He was just along for the ride. He was riding Douglass’s wing, throttled back at 25,000 feet so as not to outrun the bomber stream of B- 17Es at 23,000 feet. Douglass had the responsibility for the flock of sheep. All Canidy had to do was maintain his position relative to Doug.
The first thing he thought was that this was where he really belonged. He was a pilot, and a good one, a combat-experienced pilot. And also an aeronautical engineer. He knew what he was doing here. He should have fought this war as a pilot.
But other thoughts intruded. Experience was relative to somebody else’s experience. Relatively speaking, he was an old-timer in the intelligence business, not because he’d done so much but because hardly anybody else had done anything at all. The Americans, as the British were so fond of pointing out whenever they found the opportunity, were virgins in the intelligence business.
There had been a cartoon one time on the bulletin board at MIT in Cambridge: “Last Weak I Cudn’t Even Spell ‘Enginnear’ And Now I Are One.”
There should be one on his corkboard in his office, he thought: “Last Year, I Didn’t Even Know What An Action Officer Was, But Look At Me Now!”
And I am now possessed of knowledge, he thought, that would scare the shit out of those guys in the bombers. They have been told so often—by people who believe what they are saying—that the “box” tactic—which provided a theoretically impenetrable fire zone of .50-caliber machine-gun fire—is going to keep them safe from harm that they tend to believe it.
They question what they are told, of course. They’re smart enough to figure out—or have learned from experience—that German fighters will get past the fighter escort and then penetrate the box. But they hope that the fighter escorts will grow more skilled and the .50-caliber fire zones will be refined so that things will get better, not worse, and that all they will really have to worry about is flak.
I know that the Germans have flight-tested fighter aircraft propelled not by airscrews but by jets of hot air. I know that these aircraft will fly two or three hundred miles per hour faster than our fighters, which means the Germans will be able to just about ignore our fighter escorts. And I know that the best aerial gunner in the world isn’t going to be able to hit a small fighter approaching at closing speeds over eight hundred miles per hour.
And I know that unless we can stop the Germans from getting their jet fighters operational, there is going to be an unbelievable bloodbath up here.
It is for that reason that I can intellectually, if not emotionally, justify sending Eric Fulmar into Germany. If we can find out from the guy he’s bringing out what the Germans need to build their jet engines, maybe we can bomb their factories out of existence before they can start turning out engines. In the cold, emotionless logic of my profession, that justifies dispatching an agent, even running the risk that if he is caught, the Sicherheitsdienst will begin his interrogation by peeling the skin from his wang, before they get down to serious business.
“Dawn Patrol Leader,” Douglass’s voice came over the air-to-air. “Dawn Patrol Two. We just crossed the German border.”
Under the black rubber oxygen mask that covered the lower half of his face, Canidy smiled. What seemed like a very long time ago, when he and Doug had been assigned to fly patrols at first light looking for Japanese bombers on their way to attack Chungking, they had, feeling very clever about it, chosen “Dawn Patrol” as their air-to-air identity. Errol Flynn had recently played a heroic fighter pilot in a movie with that name.
“If you see Eric, wave,” Canidy said to his microphone. He immediately thought, Now, that wasn’t too smart, was it?
“No shit?” Douglass replied. This time Canidy didn’t reply.
Five minutes later, Douglass came on the air again.
“Blue Group Leader. We have what looks like two squadrons of ME-109s at ten o’clock. Baker and Charley flights, hold your positions. Able will engage. Able, follow me.”
Canidy looked for the German fighters and found them, maybe twenty-five black specks in a nose-down attitude, obviously intending to strike the bomber stream from behind and above.
The Germans preferred to attack from above, preferably from above and to the rear, but from above. Diving at the P-38Fs on their way to the bomber stream beneath would give the Messerschmitts a considerable advantage. With the American fighters between the B-17s and the Germans, the B-17 gunners would have their fields of fire restricted unless they wanted to run the risk of hitting the P-38Fs. And with just a little bit of luck, machine-gun and cannon fire directed at the P-38Fs might strike one of the bombers beyond them.
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br /> Canidy waited until Douglass was out of the way, then tested his guns (he had tested them over the English Channel, but it was better to test them again than to find himself nose up against a Messerschmitt with a bad solenoid and no guns) and pushed the nose up and to the left and stayed on Douglass’s wing.
He felt his hands sweating inside his gloves, and knew that it was a manifestation of fear.
The attacking Messerschmitts split into two groups, one to continue the attack on the bomber stream, the other to engage the American fighters. The tactic had obviously been preplanned.
The P-38Fs had not been able to gain much speed from the time they left their original position to rise to the attack, but the Germans were running with their needles on the DO NOT EXCEED red line, and the closing speed was greater than Canidy expected. He was sure that his three-second burst had missed the Messerschmitt he had aimed at.
Turning outside of Douglass, he felt the world grow red, then almost black, as the centrifugal forces of the turn drained the blood from his head.
The twin 1,325-horsepower Allison engines, with their throttles shoved forward to FULL EMERGENCY MILITARY POWER indent, were screaming. Full Emergency Military Power was hell on fuel consumption, and cut deeply into the operational life of engines, but the extra power, when needed, was worth the cost. When they came out of the 360-degree turn, they were running a little faster than the Messerschmitts. They gained on them slowly and followed them through the bomber stream.
The tracers from the bombers’ guns seemed to fill the sky; there was a real possibility that he would be hit, and that prospect was frightening. But the fear was overcome by what Canidy, very privately, thought of as the animal urge to kill. Man—because he fancied himself civilized— liked to pretend he entered combat reluctantly. And he prepared for combat reluctantly. But once he was in it, he was far less removed from the savage than he liked to believe. He wallowed in the prospect of killing the enemy.
The pair of Messerschmitts he and Douglass were chasing pulled out of their dives. To be sure of a killing burst from his battery of eight .50-caliber Brownings (the mark, Canidy thought approvingly, of the experienced fighter pilot; “don’t shoot until you can see the whites of their eyes”), Douglass, who had crept ever closer to the German before him, was taken by surprise. His P-38F could not respond in time, and he had lost his opportunity to fire.
Canidy was two hundred yards behind him. Without thinking of what he was doing, he moved the nose of his P38-F from the Messerschmitt he had been following to the one that had gotten away from Doug. The plane vibrated for a moment from the recoil of eight heavy machine guns, then he aimed at the first plane, this time firing a three-second burst.
He saw his tracer stream move from just in front of the Messerschmitt to the engine cowling, then to the left wing. There was a hint of orange, and then the wing tank exploded.
Canidy pulled up abruptly and looked around for the other fighter. He couldn’t find it for a moment, and then he saw it, smoke pouring from its engine nacelle as it spun toward the cloud cover below. He looked for a parachute but didn’t see one.
And then Douglass was on his wing.
“Two more,” Douglass’s voice came over the air-to-air. “How the hell are we going to explain that?”
“That’ll make seventeen for you, won’t it, Colonel?” Canidy replied.
“Bullshit!” Douglass said, then switched frequencies. “Blue Group Able, this is Blue Group Leader. Form on me in Position A.”
The P-38Fs scattered all over the sky began to turn and to resume their original protective positions over the B-17 stream.
Canidy reached inside his sheepskin jacket, then inside his uniform jacket and came out with a Map, US Army Corps of Engineers: Germany.
It wasn’t an aerial navigation chart, but rather one intended for use by ground troops. It could also be used by a pilot who intended to navigate by flying close enough to the ground and following roads and rivers. Canidy had taken it with him to the final briefing, and copied onto it the course the bomber stream would fly. Once they had joined the bomber stream, over a known location, it was not difficult to plot from that position and time where the head of the bomber stream would be at a given time.
It wasn’t precise, but Canidy had had experience in China navigating with a lot less. He looked at his watch, then scrawled some arithmetic computations on the map. He put a check mark on the map. The way he had it figured, the lead aircraft of the bomber stream was now passing over a relatively unpopulated area of Germany, southeast of Dortmund. He made some more marks on the map, then touched his air-to-air microphone switch.
“Dawn Patrol Two,” he called.
“Go ahead,” Douglass replied a moment later.
“There’s something I want to see,” Canidy said.
“Say again?”
“I say again, I’m going to have a look at something I want to see,” Canidy said. “I’ll be back in about two zero minutes.”
“Dick, are you all right?” Douglass asked, the concern in his voice clear even over the clipped tones of the radio.
“Affirmative,” Canidy said.
“Permission to leave the formation is denied,” Douglass said.
Canidy ignored him. He dropped the nose of the P-38F and headed east. He knew that Douglass could not simply ignore his responsibilities as fighter escort commander; so Douglass would not follow him.
Canidy dropped through the bomber stream, more than a little surprised that at least one gunner didn’t get excited and take a shot at him. In a P-51 or a P-47, that probably would have happened. But the twin-engine, twin tail boom shape of the P-38F was distinctive. There was no German plane that looked even remotely like it.
When he passed through 11,000 feet, he took the oxygen mask from his face and rubbed the marks it had made on his cheeks and nose, and under his chin. He loosened the snaps of the sheepskin jacket. It was cold, but not nearly as bitter cold as it had been at 25,000 feet, nearly five miles up.
He dropped to 2,000 feet and trimmed it up to cruise at 300 miles per hour. If the air were still, that would have moved him across the ground at five miles per minute. The air wasn’t still, of course, but it still helped to have that stored in the back of his mind. He was making, roughly, a mile every twelve seconds.
His chronometer showed that he had left the formation thirteen minutes before when he found what he was looking for. The River Eder had been dammed near Bad Wildungen, making a lake with a distinctive shape. He passed east of it, far enough so that if there was antiaircraft protecting the dam, he would not be in its range.
He reset the second counter on the chronometer.
Almost exactly six minutes later, which would put him thirty miles from the dam, he spotted what had to be the River Lahn. Right, he thought, where it should be.
He banked sharply to follow the river south, and dropped even lower toward the ground. He would be very vulnerable if he was attacked from behind and above. He was counting on not being detected until he had seen what he had come looking for. He was also counting on the probability that whatever Germans were airborne would be directing their efforts toward the bomber stream and its escorts, rather than trying to look for one lone fighter on the deck.
He saw first the medieval castle on the hill in Marburg, then he dropped his eyes just ahead of him and to the right.
And there it was, the Marburg Werke of Fulmar Elektrische GmbH.
He retarded his throttle and extended the flaps, and when it was safe, lowered his wheels. Technically, lowering the gear was a sign of surrender. But in order to surrender, there had to be someone to surrender to, and there was no German in sight. He lowered his wheels to slow the P- 38F down. He wanted as good a look as he could get.
He passed so low and so slow that he thought he could see surprise on the faces of the workmen who were erecting fences and framework for camouflage netting around and over the new, square, windowless concrete block building.
He wondered if Eric was down there and could hear, or perhaps even see, the American fighter as it climbed steeply into the sky.
He hadn’t seen anything of great significance. And he wasn’t even sure that the Germans really intended to use the Marburg facility’s electric furnaces to make the special alloy steel parts for their jet-propulsion engines. But it was important that he have a look for himself. Now that he’d done so, he was glad that he had—even if his fund of knowledge was not appreciably greater than it had been.
The odds were that he would be responsible for mounting a mission against that particular factory. He wanted to know what something that would certainly cost American lives looked like. And he would now be in a position to recommend the path attackers would take. Having been there, he was now an expert.
As he came out of a cloud layer at 15,000 feet, he saw the bomber stream above him. When he reached 20,000 feet, .50-caliber tracers from several of the bombers began to arc in his direction.
That was bad, but worse would follow. There was a mob instinct. If the guy in the next plane is firing at that airplane, maybe he can see something I can’t, like Maltese crosses on the wings. Why take a chance?
Canidy put the P-38F into a steep dive away from the bomber stream, to get out of range, and when he felt safe, he went to 23,000 feet and caught up with the fighter escort. He got there just as a swarm of Messerschmitts based near Frankfurt began their attack, and the fighter formations broke up to repel it. He didn’t find Douglass until long after the bombing run, when they were headed home.
When he pulled beside him, Douglass took off his glove so there would be no question but that he was giving Canidy the international aviation hand signal known as “The Finger.”
The commanding officer of the 344th Fighter Group went on the air-to-air.
“You goddamn sonofabitch,” he said. “I was worried about you.”
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