When he had one foot on the entry ladder, I tapped him on the shoulder. He turned very suddenly, regarding me with obvious shock.
“Buenos días,” I said. Then I cracked him in the face with my pistol. Son of a bitch mercenaries.
I rolled him over to the side of the road, his clutch of bills scattering across the plain in the arid wind. Turning, I stole a glance at the departing transport, watching impassively as it lumbered into the sky. There was no hurry to get into the cockpit; it wasn’t going to be too much trouble catching up to them anyhow.
98
I had some time in a P-38, but it wasn’t much, and I’d gotten it many years before. Still, she was an airplane and I knew I could handle her.
After a short rundown, I switched the fuel pumps on, checked the power to idle, and spun number one. The Allison caught immediately and thundered to life. In thirty seconds, I had both engines powered and the flaps set for a shortfield takeoff. I cranked the window shut, then pulled the canopy down and latched it, giving the road a quick scan as I advanced the power.
The Lightning broke ground in a quarter mile. I kept her level at fifty feet as I brought up the gear, then the flaps. Roaring low across the road, I held the nose down to build up some smash, the airspeed increasing rapidly until I was flat-out screaming across the desert at better than three hundred.
The transport had climbed out heading north while I was running in the opposite direction, but I had a quick fix for that. I took a breath, then hauled back hard on the control yoke. The g’s laid on like falling bricks as I pulled the bird into the vertical, the altimeter spinning like a turnstile as I shot through three thousand feet in just seconds. Then I laid the Lockheed on her back and rolled her smartly upright, completing an Immelmann turn. Just like riding a bicycle.
I couldn’t see the transport, but I had an easy hundred miles an hour overtake on that crate, and they couldn’t have been more than a few miles ahead.
Searching the skies as I sped north, I coolly noted the burning hacienda below. There was no undoing that horror, but this bird was under new management now.
I flew on another minute without picking up anything. The sun was over the distant mountains now, a brilliant white disk arcing toward the heavens. I banked east into the blinding light, holding a hand low to shield my eyes as I bored on.
Then a fleck loomed above and ahead, growing rapidly in the windscreen. I made the coldest smile of my life, turning dead-on for the big plane as a very old feeling arose inside me.
I brought the power up, checked the props at high, and cinched down my harness as I closed in fast on the aircraft ahead, thinking things over as much as you can in half a minute, assessing the weight of what I was contemplating.
These weren’t men I was chasing. Fifteen minutes ago they’d come down that hill bragging about how they’d killed other men and women—including the one I’d vowed to save. They left an injured comrade behind to die in the dirt on foreign soil, then did nothing when their commander executed him. And they did it all without any conviction, only for the money.
No, these weren’t men. They were something less.
I gave it one final thought as I waited for any hint of remorse to grab me.
Then I charged my guns.
99
I wanted them to see me first.
I came in hot on the port side, chopped the power, and g’d off the excess airspeed with a few quick turns, settling in on their wingtip like I’d been riveted there.
Towhead was in the left seat. He turned with a startle when he saw the Lightning on his wing, then he went positively pale when he made my face. Ensenada, Agua Caliente, maybe the hacienda. He’d seen me somewhere before and knew damn well who I was—and what it meant.
That’s right, Towhead, know fear, choke on despair, see Death in my face. Go wherever you want, pray to whoever will listen. You’re not going to make it.
And we both know it.
Faces were pressed against the side windows, haunted eyes staring out. That was good. I wanted them to know, too. Wanted them to feel it.
I goosed the throttles, pulled even with Towhead. He beamed hatred at me through dark eyes, his jaw set tight. I gave him a last, cold glance, pointed a finger toward him, held it there.
He rolled into me suddenly, mashing the rudder down and slewing his nose around tight. A blaze of machine-gun fire erupted from the front of the transport, tracer fire arcing past my windscreen in a white blur.
I pushed down hard and cut underneath him, crisscrossing away in a scissor maneuver, avoiding a collision by mere feet.
That son of a bitch had two big guns up front. That was really good. Now I had an opponent, not just a duck.
Towhead turned back east and dove to pick up airspeed, trying to shake me in the sun. I gave chase, pushing the manifold pressure up, feeling the superchargers kick in as I closed on the transport like a diving falcon.
I came on dead astern and took aim. Desperate men were firing machine guns at me from waist slots on either side but they couldn’t get the angle. They may as well have been throwing rocks.
I fired a short burst for effect, marking the path of the tracers as they passed above and to port of the diving transport. A gentle push on the nose and a small kick on the rudder were all it took to align my fire. Then I squeezed the trigger.
A column of fire shot forth from the nose as the four Brownings erupted in deadly synchronicity. Shards of metal began peeling off the left engine and wing of the transport as my shots struck home. An inspection panel blew off, a silver blur tumbling end over end as it flashed by. A wisp, then a funnel of smoke began trailing back from the damaged powerplant as spewing oil fried on white-hot exhaust pipes.
Towhead pulled up aggressively as I squeezed off another volley. That one missed as I went whistling by underneath him, less than fifty feet away, jacked solid on adrenaline.
I rolled into a hard turn and pulled like hell, damn near curling the wingtips as I muscled the Lightning back onto the six of the smoking transport now two miles ahead.
There was nowhere left on earth for him to hide now, not with that black plume pouring out of his engine. He knew it, too, and he had the big plane laid full out in a dive, no doubt exceeding whatever redline speed the manufacturer had placarded. But I wasn’t in any mood to admire his skill.
Sliding up to a high position, I closed in rapidly then went barreling past at full power, checking the transport in the canopy-top mirror as it shrank behind me. Towhead was making for the high mountains, where he could check my superior turning ability. He might have a chance there. It was time to end this.
I streaked ahead, counted off ten seconds, then rolled the Lightning into a 135-degree bank, slicing down in a Split-S, the sun at my back as I zeroed in on him at a combined speed of better than five hundred miles an hour. I brought my ship into firing position at an angle to his nose, forcing him to commit. He couldn’t turn away now or I’d carve him up—he had to meet me head-on.
Towhead didn’t disappoint. He banked into me and nosed up, bringing his guns to bear. Bright wicks of flame reached out through the sky toward me, wicked steel whizzing by at twice the speed of sound.
I lined them up in the gun sight as they neared but held my finger off the trigger a little longer. I wanted to be close.
I could feel the impact of his bullets striking my own plane, hear the percussive thump thump as they punched through the wing, but I bored straight in, not wavering an inch. Closing, closing.
At one thousand yards I let fly.
A stream of metal poured into the center of the transport and swept aft in a wave of destruction, curving indentations sprouting along the fuselage wherever the .50-caliber slugs bit in. Men were dying in the back of that flying tomb.
Then I pushed my nose down a few degrees, squinted into the sight, and toggled the cannon button. I gave ’em the whole nine yards, holding the button down hard until I could feel the weapon clacking emptily in front of me
. I could almost see Towhead’s face as he profaned me.
The heavy shells rifled forward, tearing into the nose of the transport. There was an odd second where nothing seemed to happen, then the cockpit simply vanished in a gray-green haze, chunks of glass and aluminum blowing loose and pinwheeling into the dirty morning sky.
I pulled up hard as I shot by the shredded plane, throwing my head back in time to catch a glimpse of her through the top of the canopy as she wobbled forward, belching smoke and a swirling tail of flame.
But she didn’t go down.
I watched in disbelief from above for several seconds, fairly well stunned that she was still in the air after I’d poured enough lead into her to take down a B-29. Letting out a choice maternal expletive, I banged my fist on the glareshield, then swooped down behind her, prepared to finish the job.
I followed her for twenty seconds, my finger on the trigger, closing in from her six to point-blank range. But I didn’t fire. There was something about the way that ship was hanging on, hemorrhaging oil and churning smoke, nosing ever downward, giving up altitude but not the fight. The Sierra de Juárez mountains loomed ahead marking near-certain doom, but they weren’t giving up the ghost.
Caution gave way to curiosity. Wary of the waist gun, I pulled forward, banked a little closer, edging toward the crippled aircraft. Initially I couldn’t understand why no one was firing at me, but as I got nearer I saw why. A smear of blood marked the blown-out glass of the midship window, an arm flapping in the slipstream, a red spatter trailing aft along the pockmarked fuselage. Inside, I could see another man writhing on the floor, his comrades tending to him. They all looked up as my Lightning loomed into view, the injured man spitting blood as he cursed me in defiance. The others watched me, making no move to raise a weapon, their vanquished eyes telling the story.
I bumped up the throttles, inched toward the cockpit. Towhead was still there, strapped in his seat. But he wasn’t a towhead any longer—he wasn’t much of anything any longer.
The other pilot was still at the shot-away controls, fighting like hell to keep his ship in the sky, his face and flightsuit mottled with blood. I couldn’t tell if it was his or Towhead’s, but he looked like he’d been hit. He glanced out at me, exhaustion and fear and the swirling wind clouding his features. I just stared numbly back, dumbfounded by the sudden sympathy I felt for him. There was no denying the raw heroism of his actions.
The scene triggered a memory from the war. During an assault on Rabaul, I’d pulled alongside a Mitsubishi I’d shot up, the surviving pilot sawing back and forth on the controls of his crippled plane, fire blooming on the control panel in front of him. Our eyes met for just a second—he seemed to be looking to me for help even though we both knew he was finished. But I felt nothing for him at that moment. It was a war and they were the enemy, and it was just that simple. I slipped behind them and finished them off with the Hellcat’s six fiftys, concerned only with saving my carrier from another possible threat.
Over time, however, that memory began to haunt me, his face appearing again and again in my sleep, the profound sense that I’d somehow wronged him impossible to bury. I don’t know why that one affected me so much; the rest of my engagements were just business. There was just something about that look of helplessness in his face and my guilt over denying him the right to finish his hopeless fight on his terms.
I carried that one with me a long time—managing it, locking it inside, suffocating it under my shell—until Pete died and the darkness broke through. They can order you to kill other men, and they can tell you it’s your duty, but they can’t tell you how to reconcile it, never help you live with it. On that one, you’re on your own.
As I replayed that episode, I looked on at those mercenary butchers, those assassins. I knew they weren’t the equal of the men I’d fought during the war, weren’t entitled to any consideration or pity, flat out deserved to die.
But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t execute them like that, no matter what they were, not under those circumstances. Towhead was gone anyway. I’d gotten my pound of flesh from him and then some. If by some miracle they made it now, so be it.
There was nothing I could do for them, though. I flew alongside awhile, jousting with my emotions, watching the struggle play out. Finally, I just eased the power back and drifted wide, falling away, inexplicably hoping to see their plane begin to climb.
The transport crawled ahead, still smoking and losing altitude, the Juárez range closing around them. I watched them go, chastened, dispirited, utterly devoid of any feeling of satisfaction. Then I banked away, leaving them to the Fates as I headed west.
Adiós, Towhead.
100
The state of hyperalertness that combat demands fades quickly. Inside of two minutes I had the shakes. It had been one hell of a morning, and it was barely six o’clock. I reached into my coat pocket for my Luckys and felt an unusual object inside. I pulled it out to see what it was then stopped cold, shot through with a sudden chill.
It was the black bag Helen had pulled out of Bravo’s safe. She must have stuck it in my pocket while we were huddled together in the living room.
Holding the aircraft level with one hand and shaking the bag with the other, I managed to loosen the leather drawstring from the eyeholes. I turned it over and dumped the contents on my lap.
There were two things of tremendous interest inside the bag. The first was several bundles of hundred-dollar bills, stacked tall like Dagwood sandwiches—a good fifty thousand easy. I whistled at the sight of all that cabbage.
But the second item was immensely more valuable.
Seeing these things suffused me with a gut-deep sadness as the last image I had of Helen stabbed back at me.
I wrestled the money back into the sack and then stashed the other item in my flight jacket. A flash went off in my head. I nodded in self-approval as I thought it over, then banked toward the towering pillar of black smoke on the horizon.
* * *
I came in from the north, dropping down to two hundred feet while slowing to one fifty. No one was moving near the fallen citadel, but at the base of the rise I spied a panel truck on the side of the road where the airplanes had been.
I made a sharp bank toward it and swooped in low, maybe fifty feet over the heads of several men who dove for cover as I whooshed by. It took me a few seconds before I made them for Oriental—had to be the Ching Hwas. Then some hero whipped out a pistol and began squeezing off shots at me. That confirmed it; only they would make a play that overarchingly stupid.
I caught myself smiling in the rearview mirror. The Ching Hwas, forever late to the dance and never dressed for the occasion. Silk suits on the Frontera. Whodathunkit?
“This one’s for you, Lino,” I said as I lined up their truck in my gun sights, half a dozen smallish men fleeing in all directions as I toggled my guns and laid waste to their ticket home.
It was so easy I should have been ashamed, but that didn’t make it any less spectacular when the gas tank blew—that truck leaped at least ten feet in the air before landing upside down in a ditch. Must have been some hand grenades on board or something.
The meeting between Sam and the Chings pretty much became a weekend convention after that one.
I kept on going, heading south several miles over the desert toward Ojos Negros, searching for just one thing.
Then below I saw two horses, one gray, one brown, and a single rider, south of the highway and moving fast. The horseman veered off defensively as I approached.
I blew past him, rocking my wings several times while I brought the plane around. When I neared again, the rider was stopped on his mount, pointing a rifle at me. That guy had guts.
I rolled my window down and gave him a vigorous wave as I passed. This time he recognized me, lowering his rifle and holding up a hand as I roared by.
I slowed to one twenty for the third pass. As I came overhead, I dipped the left wing and flung the tightly bound bag o’
Ben Franklins out toward the rider below. Then I advanced the power, retracted the flaps, and cranked up the window.
At two hundred miles per hour, I rolled ninety degrees wing low and pulled the aircraft around in a tight turn a hundred feet above the deck. I drew a bead on the rider and made for him, the distance between us fading in a rhythmic blur.
As I neared, I saw Vito, riding hard on the gray mustang, the black bag held high in his upraised hand. He was headed west, toward Agua Caliente.
I gave him another wing rock as I sped by, then I cranked in a turn to the north and pulled the Lightning into the emerging dawn.
As I climbed away, I saw another horse, chestnut in hue, galloping free across the open plain, a trail of dust rising high in her wake.
101
The gas tanks were still half full, and I was less than a hundred miles from the border. I decided to keep her low, duck radar, and sneak across into California. She was a hot ship and I still had a few rounds left, but I didn’t want to tangle with any U.S. Air Force jocks in F-101s, not today at least.
With a little luck I could be in Thermal before most folks were even awake. There was an empty hangar there at the far end of the field, and it was plenty big enough to stash a P-38.
I was taking a chance, but I didn’t have another plan, and I was pretty sure I didn’t give a damn. I was tired and I was bleeding. I needed a cigarette, I needed a doctor—I needed a good stiff drink.
My next stop would be the compound in Rancho Mirage. He would be waiting to hear from me. But that was okay.
Frank Sinatra and I had a great deal to discuss.
EPILOGUE
LODI, CALIFORNIA 1962
I crushed out the Lucky in the ashtray and cold-stared my empty glass. It was well past two, time to be turning in. Instead, I signaled the tender, who gave me a half-interested look.
One for Our Baby Page 29
