On Glorious Wings

by Stephen Coonts

  “A shrewd lie. He knows something, that one.” Turk hesitated, then he looked at the Manchu. “You don’t miss much. Have you seen a man with a Berdianka? You know, one of those old model rifles. You know, with a soshki? One of those wooden props to hold up the barrel?”

  “I know,” Shan Bao nodded. “There was one. A man named Batoul, a half-breed, has one. He meets frequently with Comrade Chevski in the woods. He threw it away this day. Now he has a new rifle.”

  “So,” Turk smiled. “The ship is warmed up?”

  Shan Bao nodded.

  “I have started it every hour since you were taken and have run the motor for fifteen minutes. I thought you might need it. Did you have to kill many men getting away?”

  “Not one.” Turk smiled. “I’m getting in. When I give the word, start the motor that opens the doors. I’ll be going out.”

  Shan Bao nodded.

  “You did not kill even one? It is bad. But leave the door open in the cabin. I shall go with you. I was more fortunate—I killed one.”

  Turk sprang into the Grumman. The motors roared into life. Killed one? Who? He waved his hand, and the doors started to move, then the Manchu left the motors running and dashed over. He crawled into the plane as it started to move. From outside there was a startled shout, then the plane was running down the icy runway. A shot, but the Grumman was beginning to lift. Another shot. Yells; they were in the air.

  He banked the amphibian in a tight circle and headed for the mountains. They’d get him, but first he’d lead them to the coast, he’d let them see for themselves that something was wrong.

  In the east, the skies grew gray with dawn. The short night was passing. Below him the first ridges of the mountains slid past, dark furrows in a field of snow.

  Shan Bao was at his shoulder. Two planes showed against the sky where he pointed. Turk nodded. Two—one was bad enough when it was a fast pursuit job. One was far ahead of the other.

  Madden’s eyes picked out the gray of the sea, then he turned the plane north along the coast to the mouth of the Nahtohu. That was the place—and that long reeflike curving finger. That was it.

  Ahead of him a dark plane shot up from the forest and climbed in tight spirals, reaching for altitude. Turk’s jaws set. That was the plane that got Lutvin. He fired a trial burst from his guns and pulled back on the stick. The two planes rose together. Then the pursuit ship shot at him, guns blazing.

  Turk’s face was calm, but hard. He banked steeply, swinging the ship around the oncoming plane, opening fire with all his guns.

  Suddenly the gray light of dawn was aflame with blasting guns as the two ships spun and spiraled in desperate combat. Teeth clenched, Turk spun the amphibian through a haze of maneuvers, side-slipping, diving, and squirming from position to position, his eight guns ripping the night apart with streaks of blasting fire. Tracers streamed by his nose, then ugly holes sprang into a wing, then he was out of range, and the streaking black ship was coming around at him again.

  In desperation, Turk saw he had no chance. No man in an amphibian had a chance against a pursuit job unless the breaks were with him. Like an avenging fury, the black ship darted in and around him. Only Turk’s great flying skill, his uncanny judgment of distance, and his knowledge of his ship enabled him to stay in the fight.

  Suddenly, he saw the other two planes closing in. It was now or never. He spun the ship over in a half-roll, then shoved the stick all the way forward and went screaming for earth with the black ship hot on his tail. Fiery streams of tracer shot by him. His plane shot down faster and faster.

  The black, ugly ridges of the mountains swept up at him. Off to one side he saw the black shoulder of a peak he remembered, saw the heavy circle of cloud around it and knew this was his chance. He pulled the Grumman out of the power-dive so quickly he expected her wings to tear loose, but she came out of it and lifted to an even keel.

  Then, straight into that curtain of cloud around the mountain he went streaking, the black pursuit ship hot on his tail. He felt the ship wobble, saw his compass splash into splinters of glass as a bullet struck, then the white mist of the cloud was around him, and he pulled back on the stick. The Grumman shot up, and even as it zoomed, Turk saw the black, glistening shoulder of icy black mountain sweep below him. He had missed it by a fraction of an inch.

  Below him as he glanced down he saw the streaking pursuit ship break through the cloud, saw the pilot grab frantically at his stick. Then the ship crashed full tilt into the mountain at three hundred miles an hour, blossomed into flame and fell, tangled, burning wreckage into the canyon below.

  The Grumman lifted toward the sky, and Turk Madden’s eyes swept the horizon. Off to the south, not a half mile away, the two Russian ships were tangled in a desperate dogfight.

  Opening the Grumman up, he roared down on them at full tilt. Shan Bao crouched in his seat, the straps tight about his body, his face stiff and cold. In his hands he clutched a Thompson machine gun. The nearer ship he recognized instantly. It was the specially built Havoc flown by Arseniev. The other—

  The pilot of the strange ship sighted him, and, making a half roll, started for him. Madden banked the Grumman as though to escape, saw tracer streak by. Then, behind him, he heard an angry chatter. He made an Immelmann turn and swept back. The pursuit ship was falling in a sheet of flame, headed for the small bay at the mouth of the Nahtohu. The other ship swung alongside, and Turk saw Arseniev raise his clasped hands.

  Shan Bao was smiling, cradling the Thompson in his arms like a baby.

  “He thought he had us,” he yelled. “Didn’t know you had a behind gunner.”

  “A rear gunner, Shan,” Turk said, grinning.

  Hours later, the Grumman landed easily in the mouth of the Nahtohu.

  “See?” Turk said, pointing. “A breakwater, and back there a stone pier, a perfect place for landing heavy armaments. It was ideal, a prepared bridgehead for invasion.”

  Arseniev nodded.

  “Lutvin, he was a good man, but I wonder how he guessed?”

  “As I did, I think,” Turk told him. He sensed a difference in the coast line, a change. The chart showed no reef there, yet the breakwater was made to look like a reef. As it was, it would give the Japanese a secure anchorage, and a place to land tanks, trucks, and heavy artillery, land them securely.”

  “That Chevski,” Arseniev said. “I knew there was something wrong, but I did not suspect him until he ran for a plane when you took off. But Granatman found the photographs in his belongings, and a code book. He was too sure of himself, that one. His mother, we found, was a Japanese.”

  Turk nodded.

  “Lutvin suspected him, I think.”

  Arseniev shrugged.

  “No doubt. But how could Chevski communicate with the Jap who flew the guarding pursuit ship? How could he communicate with Japan?”

  Shan Bao cleared his throat.

  “That, I think I can say,” he said softly. “There was a man, named Batoul. A man who wore unty, the native moccasins, and one with thong wrappings about the foot. He came and went frequently from the airport.”

  “Was?” Arseniev looked sharply at the Manchu. “He got away?”

  “But no, comrade,” Shan Bao protested gently. “He had a queer gun, this man. An old-fashioned gun, a Berdianka with a soshkin. I, who am a collector of guns, wished this one above all. So you will forgive me, comrades? The man came prowling about this ship in the night. He”—Shan Bao coughed apologetically— “he suffered an accident, comrades. But I shall care well for his gun, an old Berdianka, with a soshkin. Nowhere else but in Siberia, comrades, would you find such a gun!”

  THE RAID

  FROM THE WAR

  LOVER

  by JOHN HERSEY

  A war correspondent during World War II, John Hersey became one of the towering literary figures of his generation. His first novel was A Bell for Adano, which won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize. His prodigious literary output included The Wall, The Child B
uyer, White Lotus, The Algiers Motel Incident, Hiroshima, and, in 1959, The War Lover, a magnificent novel about the crew of a B-17, The Body, engaged in the strategic air war against Germany prior to D-Day.

  The novel is narrated from the viewpoint of Boman, the copilot. He worships the pilot, Buzz Marrow, who is the war lover, the warrior who leads them and brings them home. And yet, on the last mission Boman finds that Buzz is human clay, a man who has kept his fear well-hidden, even from himself. The book was later made into a great movie starring Steve McQueen as Buzz and Robert Wagner as Boman. Restored B-17s were used to film the flying sequences.

  No one ever captured the world of the bomber crews better than John Hersey, so we’ll let him tell it. We will fly now with Boman and Buzz and The Body, which had survived repeated fighter attacks and was heavily damaged, flying on only three engines, when a large-caliber flak shell tore the nose off the airplane. She began to spin . . .

  Marrow had one miraculous reflex left which pulled us out of that incipient spin, but I, still bellied down over my seat with my feet in the opening of the trapdoor, was so busy trying to put together in my mind what was happening that I think I lagged by several seconds in my realization that we were not, after all, falling. I was aware of a powerful, buffeting column of frozen air shooting up past my feet like a twister of prop wash forced through a funnel, and it seemed to me that we must have developed exactly that: a funnel, with the nose of the ship opened out as the outer cone, and the narrow passageway coming up between Marrow’s seat and mine, the constriction of the trapdoor, serving as the spout; and out of the neck came this little directed hurricane at thirty-four degrees below zero. When my ears recovered from the crack of the first explosion, which like nearby thunder had been at a much higher pitch than one associated with its cause, I began to react to another unpleasant noise—a distinct sound of an engine running rough, if not altogether away. There seemed also to be sprinkles of air coming from my left, and I assumed there must be some holes in the instrument panel, but I was keeping my head down and holding on, and I had no desire to look. I was experiencing, within, a rush of feelings as swift and cold as the wind at my feet. I had been fearful before, when I had seen the Messerschmidts begin their dive at us, for it had seemed as if I knew that this pass, of all the enemy waves we had shouldered during the day, was the one that would cause us trouble, and I had been gripped by the paralyzing, numbing fear that had made my tussle with my flak suit so absurdly futile. The explosion had in an instant converted my terror to rage. It was not a noble anger at the Hun, but rather a fury of incredulity that this shame—yes, my first thought was of infamy—could be mine. I did not admit into my mind the possibility of being killed, but lying on my belly I had a picture of the boys in the hutment talking about the dope, Boman, getting himself shot down and having to spend the rest of the war in a prison camp, and I hammered with blind fury at the thought that this was happening to me. All this, of course, flickered through me in an instant, and was mixed together with my sensory reactions to our plight. It was only then that I realized, through a long habit of feeling with my body the relation of forces in flight, that we were more or less level; we were flying, not plummeting.

  I pulled myself up in my seat, and before plugging myself in, I took one look at Marrow and saw that aside from a tiny cut in his right cheek he seemed not to have been wounded. Then, with a wonderful selective speed that was the fruit of experience, I turned my eyes to the manifold-pressure gauges, and I saw that the arrow for the number-two engine was jumping around like the needle of an oscilloscope, and, not wanting this time to cut an engine without Marrow’s knowing, because on only two we would lose a lot of air speed and drop out of the formation, yet wanting to hurry because the unit was shaking enough to tear itself out of the wing, I tapped Marrow’s shoulder, pointed at the number-two engine, beyond him, with a whole mitt, and then turned the glove in a flipping motion that simulated turning off a key. Marrow shrugged. How eloquent, in its indifference, that lift of the huge shoulders was! I killed the engine, and this time, in spite of all the vibration, the prop feathered in an orderly way. Our indicated air speed dropped at once to about a hundred and thirty, which was twenty-five miles per hour slower than the formation.

  I looked out and saw that we were directly beneath our own squadron, perhaps three hundred feet down, and I had a vivid feeling of thankfulness that we had a good deal of formation, two whole task forces, in fact, to drift back through before we would be alone, straggling.

  Vivid, I say. My senses, reactions, thoughts, and emotions had developed that remarkable post-critical fleetness and intensity which I had experienced once before, on the Kiel raid, the day the plane caught fire.

  We were washing around, and Marrow, holding with bulldog jaws till the last moment to the one skill that was the essence of his narrow genius, his marvelous reactive skill as the manipulator of an aircraft, was fiddling with trim-tab wheels and throttles, to steady our line of flight. Our yawing, and the wind through the trapdoor, and the holes in the instrument panel, and Marrow’s having shrugged, and the fact that some of our instruments had gone dead—everything I could observe made me think it was inevitable that we would bail out. I refrained from buckling on my chute just out of a rather morbid curiosity, mixed with admiration, I admit, for Marrow’s smooth, automatic response to what was happening. I believe that Marrow had already broken down in every way but the one that mattered. Like a frog’s leg that will kick, or a lizard’s tail that will lash, after amputation, the essential force in Marrow—the flying touch—was holding onto its vitality, when all the rest was gone, and was keeping us aloft. I assumed, though, that we would bail out soon, and I was planning the steps—hand Marrow his chute from under his seat, pass one back to Negrocus, strap my own to my chest and click it on, right and left, and then move—when something happened that made me realize we couldn’t do that. We couldn’t leave.

  I looked down through the trapdoor, and I knew the front end was blown out, and I knew I had just come back up from the front end, and my relief, my personal, self-interested relief at getting out of the greenhouse was so strong that I really had forgotten those other two up there, from the moment of the shock, and now I saw a hand. A left hand. It groped out, and then I saw the head, Max’s, and he was dragging himself; the reaching hand and arm pulled him along, and the other arm was limp. I saw, as he moved rearward through my frame of vision, that his right leg was blown off right up to mid-thigh, pruned clean off, it appeared, though he was trailing tatters of flying clothes and was bleeding, and the furious wind made everything seem confused. He crawled into the lower level under the trapdoor. I knew we couldn’t push Max out for a jump in his condition, and we couldn’t leave him, so we couldn’t bail out.

  Right behind him came Clint, on his hands and knees, dragging his parachute, and he looked to be in one piece, and he crawled back, and slowly but methodically he took off his gloves and jettisoned the escape hatch, and he kneeled at the edge of the hole, perhaps praying, and he put his parachute on and then put his gloves back on and remained there, kneeling, looking down through the opening into the clear afternoon, with his hand on his rip cord.

  Just when he was about to go out, as I supposed, I had a sudden idea, an impulse, “Well, now, I shouldn’t let him do that.” Since the lower compartment was confined and shallow, I could reach down and touch him easily from my seat, to dissuade him from what he planned, but then I thought, “The lucky bum, getting out of this thing before it goes to pieces,” so I didn’t reach out, for a moment. It seemed he would be blown out by the wind, or slide out, because of the fluid of poor Max that was spreading and freezing. And quickly I did reach down and touch him. That was all it took. Clint gave up the idea. He didn’t even look up at me.

  But I, as I leaned down, saw Max, lying on his back, writhing, and he was still conscious, that was the worst of it, and I saw that whatever had blown his leg off had also blown his oxygen mask off, and his goggles, and h
is helmet; his face wasn’t the least bit scratched. Max was rational, and I saw him raise his left hand and, with a pathetic begging expression, point to his mouth, so there wasn’t but one thing to do, the idea of which terrified me more than anything I’d ever known, and that was, recognizing that Max was going to die of anoxia and cold before he could get down to a hospital bed with white sheets—I had lost that wonderful clarity of thought—I hadn’t listened to all those lectures you’re supposed to listen to in training—I was going to have to go down there in the wind and give him my mask. Butcher Lamb, mild Butcher Lamb, the radio bug, who liked to read Westerns on missions, had pointed my way on that the day Jug Farr passed out.

  As I started down Clint peeled his mask off, and I don’t know whether Clint had any thought that he himself might not be conscious much longer without a mask at that altitude, and I doubt whether he had any feeling that he was performing an act of truly selfless love, which he was, even when, having slipped the mask over Max’s face, he got his reward from Max—a deeply moving look of contentment, for Max, using his good hand to hold the rubber against his face, settled back like a baby with a bottle; you could see him ease down and relax.

  The only trouble was, the tube of the mask wasn’t plugged into anything. I reached a walk-around bottle down to Clint, and he hooked Max into it. Clint ripped a big piece of flying suit from what was left of Max’s pants and wrapped it and tied it, bloody as it was, around Max’s head for warmth.

  I thought of the spare mask back on the bulkhead of the lower turret compartment, and I decided to tell Butcher Lamb to bring it forward for Clint. I realized then that I wasn’t connected with the interphone system, and I pushed my headset wire into the jackbox and heard a man screaming.

  It was Junior Sailen, in the ball turret, screaming, really screaming, and a man screaming makes a horrifying sound. He was trapped in his ball turret. Knowing that we had two engines out, for he could see them from his post, and not having a parachute with him, and not being able to get out even if he had it, unless he were exploded out, which he may have expected to be, Junior had reached a pitch of helplessness that a dependent man could not bear. At times distinct messages came through his screaming, “I’m trapped . . . Come help me . . . Get me out,” with some of the words drawn out into held notes. Everybody who was on interphone was forced to hear him, as he had turned his jackbox to CALL, which cut through all other talk. A piece of shell had come through the plexiglass of his turret and had knocked out the electric motor that made the turret gyrate and revolve, but also another piece, or perhaps the same one, had sheared off the handle which would have enabled him to turn himself up and get out. Fortunately our ball turrets were supplied with a second, external crank for elevation, so that a man outside the turret could move it.