Fitzpatrick grinned disarmingly. "If you make him ops officer, he'd be in line to get a squadron. Then what would old man Ruddick say?"
Coleman fondled his secret like a worry bead. Occasionally, it was good to keep Fitz a little uncertain.
"Don't sweat it, buddy. Let me handle it, I'll be sure it works out right."
Understanding flashed in Fitzpatrick's eyes.
"Ah, I get it. You'll set him up?"
"No. We will."
*
K-10, Korea/August 24, 1950
Four hours before, he had put his head down on his maintenance officer's desk to take a brief nap, still soaked in sweat from the hands-on exertions of repairing a shot-up Mustang. Now the barking sounds of engines running up dragged him from a sexy dream about swimming nude with Saundra, a torrid mixture of an Esther Williams film and their wedding night. Not that Saundra would ever have been uninhibited enough to swim nude. He worried sometimes about the strength of his erotic dreams—just the image of the pliant mound of hair between her legs was enough to awaken him, rigid with desire.
But now fatigue soaked him like oil in a wick. He had been rousing himself to a peak two or three times a day flying ground-support missions against the North Koreans, and it was difficult to sustain the high level of energy needed for his other work. He was still doing the maintenance officer's job, and trying as hard as he could to satisfy Coleman as operations officer. From a career standpoint it was great; the operations officer really ran things for the commander. If he could handle the work and get a good performance evaluation, it could get him promoted, maybe even get him a squadron someday.
But Coleman had changed so much since his promotion. He'd never been friendly before, always making snide little jokes, different than he was with his white friends. With them, he was almost too agreeable, seeming to try to get along with everyone. He had a talent for taking what they said and feeding it back to them in some crazy fashion. He'd been particularly funny kidding about regulars staying home and the reserves doing all the fighting.
Almost everyone in the squadron had arrived by different routes. Few were regular Air Force. Marshall had requested to return, and, after incredible delays—he suspected the problem was that he was Negro—had finally been called up. Coleman had been involuntarily recalled—he talked unselfconsciously about the big salary he'd been making at McNaughton Aircraft, obviously not caring that Marshall had been fired from the job he'd filled. There were only a few guys like Fitzpatrick, lifers who'd stayed in only for the flying. What a pair they were—Fitz had the guts, but didn't want any glory; Coleman surely wanted glory, but Marshall wasn't sure how much he had in the way of guts.
Ever since Coleman had become commander, he'd proved impossible to work with. The other men didn't seem to be having the same problem, but then they didn't have the same responsibilities.
It had been tough enough just being maintenance officer. The airplanes had all the routine difficulties of old equipment—leaking seals, corrosion, and no spare parts—and the runways caused continual problems. They were made of PSP, pierced steel planking, sheets of mild steel perforated with round holes that allowed the viscous Korean mud to squish through. Interconnected and laid on a dry field, PSP was adequate to spread out the fighter's footprint. But when the rains came, the PSP sunk in, buckling and rolling like a living thing under the weight of the overloaded Mustangs, expressing geysers of mud through the steel like blood from a wound. The long nose of the F-51s (he still couldn't get used to the change in nomenclature; they'd been called P-51s till 1948) wiped out all forward visibility on the ground, so you S-turned as you taxied to be able to see forward. All the slipping and siding looked comical, but it ripped the tires like cheese on a grater and imposed crippling side-loads on the landing gear. Taking off was bad and landing was even worse, for brakes became useless on the slime-coated runways.
The Mustangs were worn-out hulks scabbed from wherever they could be found. Some were from Dean Hess's "Bout One" unit, which had been trying to train the Republic of Korea Air Force. The rest had been pulled grudgingly, like hibernating bears, from storage in Japan. More were supposed to be on their way from stateside National Guard sources.
The Mustangs were in use because, in staff jargon, they were the only assets available. It was hard to imagine. Only five years before, the United States had the greatest air force ever seen, with 243 groups and almost seventy thousand brand-new airplanes. Now they were flying scrapyard rejects. The few Lockheed Shooting Star jets stationed in Japan couldn't operate out of the primitive Korean fields. The F-80s had to fly out of Itazuke, Japan, to Korea to patrol over the Han River area, then return. Their lack of range was exactly the same problem the German fighters had encountered against Great Britain, only here the waters of the Korean Strait were even colder and bleaker than the English Channel.
Worse than the old airplanes was the infernal combination of bad weather and low standards of training. The Air Force was literally killing itself in Korea, throwing itself repeatedly upon the sword of unpreparedness. The week before there had been seven accidents in thirty-five minutes—eleven men killed—when fog suddenly shut down the airfields at the end of a strike mission. No one had seen anything like these Korean fogs, far worse than any English pea-souper. They would generate spontaneously, submerging the base in an impenetrable blanket of moisture redolent of the human night soil used as fertilizer by the Korean farmers.
This week they'd already lost two pilots to bad weather. The prevailing northwest winds dragged in frigid Siberian moisture to clamp the humid Korean summer down on them with heavy cloud cover and torrential rains. But weather didn't make any difference to Headquarters—air power was the only thing slowing the North Koreans down, and that meant the Mustangs had to launch on call, whatever the conditions.
The F-51's primitive instrumentation often malfunctioned; the artificial horizon would tumble in a sixty-degree bank, then take minutes to recover. The pilots were forced to employ the rudimentary techniques of prewar air mail flying, using needle, ball, and airspeed to penetrate weather. For navigation, they had only the defective Detrola automatic direction finder, whose needle pointed the same way whether you were going to or from the station. The Detrola was suspected as the prime cause in both of this week's accidents—it looked as if the Mustangs, lost in the clouds and low on fuel, had followed the needle away from the station into a barren hillside. Marshall had to go to the crash sites to see if there was anything to be learned, but there wasn't enough left of men or machines to conduct an investigation. In a few weeks, the poor pilots' families would have the closed-casket funerals back home, unaware that the military coffin would contain only scraps of flesh and 150 pounds of sandbags to simulate the weight of the body.
Marshall rolled over on his back and stared up at the droplets of moisture gathering on the tent ceiling like sweat on an elephant's belly. What was it with Coleman? Was it the race business all over again, just like it had been at McNaughton? Or was he getting to be too sensitive, too quick to plead racism as an excuse? He seemed to be popular enough with the other guys in the squadron.
Marshall wondered if it was because Coleman felt defensive about having taken his job at McNaughton. Good Lord, if anyone should be angry, it should be him! He'd lost his job and a chance at the history books.
The tent flap opened and Fitzpatrick stuck his head in. "The skipper wants to see us on the double."
Wordlessly, Marshall followed Fitzpatrick, splashing along the PSP path leading to the operations tent where Coleman greeted him with, "Sleeping in, Captain? Maybe if you didn't spend so much time eyeballing the white nurses, you wouldn't be so tired."
Marshall wanted to throw himself at Coleman, but controlled himself. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"I heard all about it—last night a couple of nurses came in the club and you damn near went crazy."
"Major, for your information I wasn't even in the club last night. And if I was
, who I look at and how I look at them is my business."
"Mind your tone, Captain. I've got the book on you, and you know it. The Air Force may be integrated, but we haven't reached the interracial dating stage yet. Now shut up and listen."
Blood pounded in Marshall's head, but he kept silent. It was like a nightmare from the past, his father's old warning about never looking at a white woman, never talking to one first. But someone had made this up—Fitzpatrick?
"We just got a frag order in—two Mustangs to recce a valley near the west coast—here are the coordinates. They have reports of a column of friendly Korean troops ambushed and cut up."
He handed them the flimsy and pointed to the spot on the map, just north and west of Pohang. "A column of ROK troops is retreating down this valley. A forward air controller just sent us word of a possible ambush there by North Korean People's Army troops. The FAC is flying a T-6 right around the valley, reporting no flak, but suspicious movement on the hillsides." He tapped the valley with his finger. Marshall noted that Coleman's nails were clean, manicured. He was glad he was wearing gloves over the ground-in grease of his hands.
"I want you and Fitzpatrick to check it out. Even if you don't see anything, go down and plaster the side of the hills with machine-gun fire to see if you can raise any action. If you see something, call the FAC and we'll launch another flight."
Marshall said, "Right. Who will take over the scheduling and briefings for me this morning?"
'Til find somebody who can manage it in his spare time."
Face burning, Marshall saluted, spun on his heel and walked out of the tent. Coleman was goading him, trying to get him to be insubordinate. Why didn't he just fire him? But as he walked, he thought, I can take everything that bastard can dish out.
Fitzpatrick had been silent the whole time, but sloshed out behind him in the rain, a grim smile on his face.
Even in the driving rain, the old Mustangs looked pretty, with the blue flashes painted along their sides, the jagged bolts of lightning on the tails. Marshall was flying Zero Hero, the name left over from World War II, just like the plane. Someone had put some tuned pipes on a shackle under his wing—in a dive it gave off a tremendous howl that was supposed to frighten the North Koreans.
Despite Coleman's emphasis on the importance of the mission, Marshall expected a cancellation call to come. The lowering black clouds spilled rain like a burst water balloon, and visibility was less than one hundred yards down the muddy runway. Fitzpatrick taxied behind him at a distance in Eighter From Decatur, avoiding the swirling spray of liquid mud being thrown up by the propeller of Marshall's Mustang.
"All right, Captain Marshall, let's go. What are you waiting for?"
Marshall shook his head at the insulting transmission and called "Dallas One rolling," as he applied power. The Mustang skidded to the left until speed made the rudder effective. He took scant comfort from the fact that Fitzpatrick was following in a muck cyclone.
Thirty minutes later, they contacted "Boxcar," the forward air controller. Marshall didn't envy the FAC's job, flying an unarmed T-6 trainer low and slow over enemy territory, usually with an airsick Army officer in the backseat to evaluate the opposition forces.
Boxcar vectored them to clearing over the valley north of Pohang. Marshall led Fitzpatrick in a gentle bank at ten thousand feet; below he could see a two-mile line of stopped traffic along the winding valley road. There was no shooting.
"Dallas Two, I'm going to make one low-level pass to take a better look. Watch for flak."
Marshall metered his speed carefully, letting down to arrive at the entrance to the canyon at four hundred miles per hour. He flashed over a road filled with trucks, tanks, and jeeps, a few burned out, most of them filled with troops.
The troops weren't moving. Could they all be dead? He pulled back sharply on the stick, letting the G-forces build in a climb back toward the entry point.
Marshall hated to go back down. If there were any antiaircraft, they'd be waiting. But he knew Coleman would want to know numbers, dispositions, estimates of casualties, the whole mess. Deliberately he let down slowly to traverse the column at two hundred miles per hour.
The carnage reminded him of the old Budweiser painting of Custer's last stand. The North Koreans had ambushed the convoy, killing the first and last tanks, then slaughtering the troops with heavy machine gun and mortars. It must have been over in seconds, for only a few bodies littered the ground; most were clumped in the center of the trucks, as if they were trying to hide under each other. Others hung over the vehicle sides, some head and arms down, held by just a leg, others bent in the middle like sacks of flour. Great splotches of blood, black in the valley's shadows, drenched the sides of the vehicles and the ground beneath them. As he flew, his whistling passage seemed to shake a black velvet cloth ahead of him as successive waves of birds rose up from their feast on the dead. Breathing hard on the oxygen to overcome his nausea, he pushed the throttle forward to climb out.
As he cleared the ridge line, glad to be away from that valley of death, a battery of 37-mm flak guns blasted his aircraft, shattering the rear of his canopy and stitching holes through his wing and fuselage. He tried calling "Dallas Two, I'm hit," but his radio was dead. Circling above, Fitzpatrick saw the flash of fire embrace the Mustang.
"Boxcar, relay to Base, heavy flak batteries at south end of valley."
Fitzpatrick's mouth suddenly went so dry he barely croaked, "Uh, Dallas, send another flight. Dallas One was hit on his second pass and is streaming fuel. Doubt if he'll make it back."
The FAC said, "Roger," and switched frequencies to call "Mosquito Mellow," the airborne controller.
Marshall's Mustang shuddered like a snapping whip as the big Merlin engine backfired. He leveled off at eleven thousand in an eerie mouse-gray translucence where vaporous columns of moisture drooped like stalactites from the lighter ceiling above to the ominous black deck of clouds below.
The barrage of shells must have missed his radiator—the engine was still running cool. If he was lucky, he might be able to nurse it back. He glanced to his left rear, vainly hoping to see Fitzpatrick on his wing. If he went down, it would be nice to have someone to know where.
Slowing the airplane down to 140, he reached forward to twist the knob that would cage the tumbling artificial horizon and lock it into position to stabilize. When he released the caging knob, the instrument's face tilted crazily again, rotating slowly like a bright coin dropped into deep, clear water. If he got back, it would be on basic instruments, the "needle, speedle, and airball" of flying school. Using the magnetic compass, he set a course of 170 degrees to take him along the coast, back close enough to the base for the Detrola automatic direction finder to guide him in. He'd just fly till he was sure he was well out to sea, then let down and creep back to the shore. He might be able to make it if the engine kept turning and the Detrola did not. He mentally computed his odds as about one in five.
Time stretched out like drooping strands of taffy as Marshall repeatedly checked his wristwatch. After an eternity, he figured he was in position and throttled back, praying that the engine would pick up power when he needed it.
The battered Mustang slipped into the enveloping black clouds like a spoon into pudding. Ordinarily so docile, the tired fighter protested its wounds, groaning and swaying beneath his hands. At the lower left of the instrument panel, diagonally below the useless artificial horizon, was the turn needle, no bigger than a paper match. His inner ear deceived him, telling him that he was turning, and it took a force of will to apply the strong stick and rudder forces necessary to keep the needle standing straight above the gunmetal ball centered in its liquid race. It was a primitive instrument, its fragile glass arc much like a hardware store level, and his life depended upon it.
He thought: The ceiling on takeoff was less than two hundred feet, but the rain was intense. Maybe it lifted.
He managed a wry laugh at himself.
Really whistli
ng in the dark, now. If the ceiling wasn't high enough, he'd probably never know the difference and just disappear with a splash. The mean-green sea around Korea was cold, as harshly unforgiving as the country it surrounded.
A spot spread out below him, changing from hellhole black to a shiny ebony, and then, as he came closer, to a lacy green-white froth. He advanced the throttle, exulting as the faithful Merlin responded with grudging backfires. Pulling his oxygen mask aside, he gulped in the salt-tanged air, happy still to be flying. He looked hopefully at the Detrola. The needle should have been homing in on the K-10 beacon like a hound dog on point, but instead it rotated mindlessly.
He glanced around the panel. Uh-oh. Coolant temperature's finally rising. Not too much time left now.
His hands sweating beneath his gloves, mouth dry, Marshall visualized the coast again, mentally computing how far he'd flown. If he had calculated correctly, a right turn should take him toward K-10. If he'd gone too far, he'd be down in the drink; if he had not come far enough, he'd smash into one of the mountains that reached up like angry fists along the coast.
And no one would ever know. The lonely thought oppressed him. It was bad enough to die, but to go anonymously like this, spat out of an alien sky to be swallowed up by an alien sea was too evil. Saundra, his family, no one would ever hear of him; his body would . . .
Enough of that! I'm going to drag this dog home!
Boxcar had relayed a message back to Fitzpatrick to return immediately. No relief flight could be launched because weather had shut down the base. When he was forty miles out, he called in "Base, Dallas Two."
"Roger, Dallas Two." Fitz recognized Coleman's voice. "Any word on Dallas One?"
"No, his radio's out or else he went in. Last I saw him, he was streaming fuel bad, heading due south along the coast."
"Roger, Dallas Two. We've alerted the rescue people. You're going to have to divert. We're socked in here. Suggest you try K-2, they're reporting a three-hundred-foot ceiling and a half a mile vis. Over."
Air Force Eagles Page 14
