Call to Duty

by Richard Herman

  And yes, I’ll try to get leave and meet you on Saturday, the 19th of February, in London for what you so intriguingly refer to as a “dirty weekend.” I am due some leave so there shouldn’t be a problem, unless some op gets in the way. But the lousy weather this time of year has been the deciding factor.

  The censor will no doubt razor that out, he thought. Time to get even with the pompous bastard. He scribbled:

  I need to change the subject. I’m writing this in the mess and keep getting strange looks. I’m either moaning too much when I reread your letter or I’m panting with my tongue hanging out.

  Now that will get you wondering what was in Willi’s letter, Zack mused.

  I just returned from a course on munitions.

  Actually, it was more like a research project than a formal class. I’ve become some type of “Bomb Wallah” and supposedly know all there is to know about the subject. I suppose it helps to do the job more efficiently. But I don’t think a future employer will be impressed. Did you know there is a special tribe of Germans that inhabits all bomb dumps? Those little buggers do nothing but sit around all day and think up things that can go wrong. Then they go and test their latest theory on some poor hapless guy or airplane. Damn bombs can be as dangerous to us as to the Germans.

  One of those Gremlins was hard at work yesterday. The armorers were winching a big bruiser into a bomb bay when the machinery went totally wrong. The bomb dropped to the ground and went rolling out from under the aircraft and merrily along the ground. They had a devil of a time getting it stopped. As usual, P. was there and when they asked him what to do, all he said was ‘put it back on.’ Problem solved. He’s a cool one.

  Zack knew the censor would have fits if he mentioned that it was a four-thousand-pound bomb that looked like a huge garbage can and he and Ruffy were testing it for the first time in combat. The brass had thought it was too heavy for the Mosquito, but 140 Wing had proven them wrong.

  He would tell her more in person about what he had learned from watching Group Captain Percy Charles Pickard. In Zack’s estimation, Pickard was the best leader he had ever met and was directly responsible for the outstanding success of the wing.

  Oh, the bomb worked very well, he recalled, his pen still. What death and destruction had he and Ruffy caused when they dropped that bomb? It was all so clean and antiseptic for the crews. All they saw of the target was smoke and maybe some flames. Later, Intelligence might show them reconnaissance photos of bomb damage. But those photos were impersonal and could have been taken over London. It was the same with his squadron mates. Impersonal. A person was there in the morning and then he was gone, never to return. No mess, just pack up his things while the commander wrote a letter to his wife or parents. For a time, the others might remember him; what he looked like, his personality, his voice. But because of some unwritten rule, the men would not talk about him, probably because it would remind them of their own mortality. Then the memory would fade, saving them from confronting the reality of his death; the charred remains, a dismembered body so totally smashed and pounded into the aircraft’s wreckage that the two were inseparable.

  Sammy, the wingman he had lost over Dunkirk, materialized in Zack’s mind. Every detail was there, his face, his wispy mustache, the way he left the top button of his tunic undone, and his bright blue eyes. Zack could hear his voice as clear and true as if Sammy were with him. He closed his eyes, leaned back into his chair, and let the memory carry him. I hope it wasn’t my bombs that killed you, he thought. I’m glad I haven’t forgotten, he said to himself. And I won’t, he promised.

  A whiff of a half-remembered tobacco smoke assaulted his nose. He glanced up and saw the rotund figure of a man standing in the foyer—the man from the house at Wimbledon. Images of Chantal came rushing back and a longing hurt mixed with guilt feelings beat at him. It wasn’t right that he should be involved with Willi while she was in danger. He forced himself to concentrate on the man and masked his guilt feelings. What the hell is he doing here? he thought. Why am I caught in a vicious circle and keep running into people I’d like to avoid? What the hell is going on?

  Slowly, he reasoned it out. It was not a vicious circle or some perverse fate, but one of the ironies of life that the phrase “it’s a small world” becomes especially true in wartime. In spite of the scale of the war and the millions of people involved, certain operations overlapped geographically and Zack figured that because he was occupying the same space and time, they were likely to run into each other. A change in assignment could alter all that. But that would mean he would not see Willi until the war ended. Did that mean he was betraying Chantal? Damn, he thought, I haven’t practiced guilt in a long time.

  He finished the letter, stuffed it in an envelope, and dropped it unsealed in the box for the censor. Ruffy found him an hour later. “Pick wants you over in operations. Seems there’s an ops on. Must be a bit of a flapper because Embry’s here from Two Group.”

  “It’s a small world,” Zack said, mystifying Ruffy.

  The acrid aroma of the pipe smoke and the light blue haze tinting the air hit Zack the moment he walked into the room. An uneasy feeling of foreboding captured him and he half-expected the portly little man from the house in Wimbledon to be there. But only the squadron leaders who commanded the three squadrons that made up 140 Wing were in the room with Pickard and Embry. Then he saw it, a cloth-draped target model sitting on a table, waiting to be revealed. But why had he been called in? He sat down in the rear of the room and waited. The tingling sensation that had always warned him when something was wrong stirred.

  Embry stood up. “Right then, we’re all here. The French Resistance has made an unusual request.” He pointed to a map of northern France that was tacked up on the wall and circled the town of Amiens. “The Gestapo is holding over seven hundred Resistance workers in the jail at Amiens and are being their normal bloody selves and have sentenced a hundred of them to death. Needless to say, the Resistance would like to do something to prevent that but find themselves powerless. Jerry had been most adept at penetrating their operations in this sector. That’s why so many Resistance workers are in the bloody place to begin with.

  “The Resistance has asked the RAF to bomb the jail, blow the walls down, kill a few guards, and effect a jailbreak to allow the poor bastards a chance to escape.” Embry was looking directly at Zack and watched the young pilot stiffen. “This is where you come in, Mr. Pontowski. You do seem to have some skill for this type of thing. The French have assured us that the prisoners would much prefer to take their chances with our bombs than die at the end of a German rope or in front of a firing squad. This is a chance to do something very worthwhile and send the Gestapo a message they won’t forget.” He walked over to the scale model and whipped the cover off. “Gentlemen, your target.” It was an exact replica of the prison at Amiens.

  The three squadron leaders crowded around the model, looking at it from different angles, picturing a bomb run. “Which squadron leads the attack?” one of them asked. Pickatd smiled, his faith in his men reaffirmed. The 140 Wing was made up of three squadrons: 21 being British, 464 made up of Australians, and 487 from New Zealand. They all wanted to go and he would not show favoritism.

  “I’ll flip a coin later,” Pickard said. “Right now, each of you pick your six best crews while we work out the navigation and details. It should be on within the next forty-eight hours. I don’t need to remind you that mum’s the word.”

  “You’d never do that,” one of the men laughed. They filed out of the room to see what crews they had available and check on the status of their aircraft. Zack’s commander, a cool New Zealander, stopped and said, “If you want, you’re on.”

  “I want,” Zack replied, ignoring his inner alarm bell.

  The squadron leader nodded, pleased that his best pilot was volunteering. He pointed at the model. “You best get on with it. Please see that they don’t have us doing anything stupid.”

  Embry turned the m
ission planning over to Zack and two navigation officers and retreated into a nearby office. The man from Wimbledon was waiting for him, puffing on his pipe. “I hope it went well,” he said. Embry nodded. “Make sure you attack at lunchtime. Most of the prisoners should be out of their cells and in the dining hall, which should make it easier for them to escape. Also, could you pay special attention to the guards quarters? The Germans will be sitting down to dinner and it would be nice to dispatch a few of them.” He gave Embry an encouraging smile. He had no intention of telling Embry that many female prisoners, the young and pretty ones, were kept in the guards’ quarters to serve as prostitutes. “We do have another reason,” the pipe smoker added. “The French collaborator who has sold many of our agents to the Gestapo has been invited to lunch. We don’t know which day, but then we mustn’t overlook any opportunity.”

  “I’m sure we can spare a SAP or two,” Embry said. “A SAP,” he explained, “is a semi-armor-piercing, hard-nosed bomb. It should do the job.”

  “This raid is more important than you know,” the man told Embry. “The collaborator has managed to feed most of our new network, code name Sosies, to the Gestapo. Sosies has a priority one.” He puffed on his pipe and let that sink in. Priority one meant that the Sosies network was critical to the Allied invasion preparations. “The Germans don’t know it, but they have captured Sosies’s leaders. Quite a gold mine of information there. We must get them out.” Or kill them with our bombs, he mentally calculated.

  “I’ll have Mr. Pontowski make sure we target the guards’ quarters,” Embry promised. “He is very good at that type of thing.”

  TWELVE

  The Burma ADIZ

  It was a three-way battle—Gillespie versus the goat versus the weather. The captain’s strategy was simple, make the goat his ally, his friend. He wasn’t fighting the heavily loaded MH-S3, the twenty-two tons of metal, fuel, mechanical gadgetry, electronic wizardry, and human flesh called Rascal One. Instead, he was seducing the beast to his will, making it want to do what he wanted. The designers of the helicopter thought in aerodynamic terms: the control of pitch, roll, and yaw; thrust vectors, stress analysis, center of lift versus the center of gravity translational lift; and thousands of other technical concerns, all capable of being reduced to mathematical abstractions and force-fed into a computer. Now the young captain was living with those results and he made no attempt to recall the formulas or forces at work on his machine. He had mastered them all in pilot training and they were part of his nature. Now, Gillespie concentrated on what the goat was telling him, instinctively understanding the signals and coaxing the beast to do the right thing, which in this case was to stay airborne and on course.

  And Gillespie was winning. But the weather was not going to give the two MH-53s an easy victory as they beat their way into Burma’s airspace, penetrating Burma’s ADIZ, the Air Defense Identification Zone.

  A steady stream of water was leaking out of the overhead panel onto the center console. An electrical short was the last thing he needed. “Can you cover it up?” Gillespie asked the flight engineer. The sergeant grabbed a poncho and spread it over the console. “I thought these puppies were watertight,” Gillespie mumbled. “We’re leaking like a sieve.” A hard bump punctuated the light turbulence they were flying through, twisting and shaking the aircraft. Gillespie automatically stroked the flight controls, coaxing the goat to do the right thing. He was flying totally on instruments, relying on the magic that went on behind the instrumental panel and in the black boxes that gave the MH-53 the ability to penetrate a monsoon rainstorm flying three hundred feet above the terrain.

  The copilot concentrated on navigating, constantly crosschecking the Doppler/inertial navigation system with the ground mapping radar and the Global Positioning System monitor, GPS, to keep them on course. He kept hoping for a break in the rain so he could rely on old-fashioned map reading to fix their location. But it was not to be, so he kept up the cross-check, trying to keep everything in agreement. He kept the whole system honest by relying on DR—dead reckoning—as the final arbiter. The old, time-tested technique of flying a compass heading for a specified time was still basic to navigation. Another hard bump lifted them out of their seats and drove them against their lap and shoulder harnesses.

  The stream of water stopped. “Something must have snapped back into place,” the flight engineer allowed. He removed the poncho.

  The intercom crackled. “We’re drowning in water and puke,” one of the gunners complained. “I’m talking Niagara Falls back here.”

  A shudder twisted the helicopter to the right. Again, Gillespie compensated. Sweat, not water, was oozing out from under his helmet. His eyes darted from the horizontal situation indicator to the terrain-following radar to the altimeter and then across the engine instruments. All was well. “A few of the troops sick?” he asked.

  “About half,” came the answer. “The big colonel is chucking his guts all over the floor.” Mackay was suffering from a violent case of motion sickness and adding to the mess in the cargo compartment. “The sergeant major is sleeping like a baby,” the gunner added.

  “How we doing on fuel?” Gillespie asked. The copilot and flight engineer conferred, checking the fuel remaining against what the flight plan called for. Again, all was well. They had enough fuel to make their landing zone and then extract Delta Force, but they would have to refuel on the way out. “No way we can hook up in this crap,” Gillespie said. If fuel did become a problem on the way home, he would find an isolated clearing in the jungle and land to wait for a break in the weather. Then they could take off and join up on E-Squared’s MC-130 for a drink of JP-4.

  “IP in one minute,” the copilot said.

  The gunner in the rear passed the word when he heard the copilot announce they were one minute out of the initial point. The flying time from the IP to their landing zone was two minutes and fifty-seven seconds. Relief spread over the sick men as they realized their ordeal was almost over.

  The rain came down harder when they overflew the IP, a sharp bend in a river with a prominent rock. No one saw it. “It’s okay,” Gillespie said. He sensed it was all coming together. He turned to a new heading as the copilot started the elapsed time hand on the clock. Gillespie peered into the weather, trying to get a visual on their landing zone. Nothing. But he wasn’t worried. At exactly two minutes and fifty-seven seconds, Gillespie pulled on the collective and reduced airspeed with the cyclic. Instinctively, he compensated and kept them from sinking like a rock. They hovered. “We’re here,” he announced.

  “Yeah, but I don’t see a goddamned thing,” the copilot growled. They were hovering over a solid canopy of trees and blow-drying the green foliage beneath them. There was no sign of the clearing that had been chosen as their LZ. A quick check of the GPS monitor indicated the LZ was at their three o’clock position.

  “We’ll circle in an expanding search pattern,” Gillespie said as he pivoted the helicopter to the right. They had barely entered the first circuit when the clearing appeared. Gillespie calculated they had missed it by less than two hundred meters after flying blind in a driving monsoon rain, at low level, for three hours. He’d settle for that any day of the week.

  He settled the MH-53 into the clearing and the security team ran out the back to secure the landing zone. Rascal One had landed and within two minutes, he had a thumbs-up from the team. A sergeant directed him to taxi the goat closer to the trees, where they could better camouflage and hide it. Just before he cut the engines, the copilot broadcast the code word telling the orbiting MC-130 carrying the two colonels that they had safely landed. Then they heard Rascal Two, the second helicopter, report in, also safely down.

  “Check that out,” the copilot said. The rain had slackened off to a slight drizzle and the low clouds were clearly visible, four hundred feet above their heads. “Someone up there likes us.”

  Orbiting at thirty-four thousand feet and a hundred miles south of their position, a USAF rec
onnaissance RC-135 monitored the two transmissions from the helicopters, which were immediately followed by a short message from the command MC-130 to the NMCC in the Pentagon reporting that the teams were safely inserted. Since the RC-135 had not monitored any “hostile” transmissions that indicated the helicopters had been detected, it maintained radio silence. The aircraft commander moved the RC-135 farther south and reestablished a new orbit as the MC-130 returned to Udorn. The recce bird would continue to monitor Chiang’s communications while the two assault teams moved into place. If it detected any sign that the Americans had been discovered, it would immediately down-link with the NMCC. The first phase of Operation Jericho had been successfully completed. The assault teams had been inserted without being detected by Chiang’s defense net. Now phase two began. The two teams, Fastback and Bigboot, had to move through the jungle to reach their initial positions for the attack.

  Landing Zone Alpha, Burma

  “You’re looking better, Colonel,” Kamigami said.

  Mackay was glad to admit that he was feeling much better after getting off the helicopter. His queasy stomach settled down almost immediately once his feet were on solid ground and was demanding to be fed. He gingerly nipped at one of the granola bars he liked to carry in the field and waited to see if his stomach would accept it. No problems. He took a bigger bite and checked his watch. They had been on the ground six minutes and should be moving out.

  The captain leading Fastback reported in. “We’ll be ready to move out shortly,” he said. “One of our shooters is still puking his guts up. Severe motion sickness. I had to replace him with Marston from the LZ team.”

  “Good choice,” Mackay said. Kamigami nodded his approval. The intense training program he had put Delta through had anticipated using the LZ security team as a backup to Fastback and every member had cross-trained to be part of the assault team. Mackay checked the clearing one last time. Camouflage netting had been spread over the helicopter; foliage had been carefully cut and placed, further concealing the aircraft; the LZ team was out of sight, already established in covering positions where they could intercept anyone approaching the clearing. Fastback formed up and moved silently into the jungle. Mackay, his RTO, and ammo bearer were sandwiched in the middle. Kamigami attached himself to Mackay’s small command and control unit for the first part of the trek. They maintained radio silence, confident that Bigboot, the second half of the assault force that had been inserted by the other helicopter, was also moving.