When in doubt, go ask an expert. And not an officer, either. I ankled my fat butt down to the airfield, found organized chaos. They had not bothered to throw up even minimal hangers, it never rains here, not enough to worry about. This was the end of the rainy season, they might get an inch a month, good years. A deluge here would be a heavy dew, back in Connecticut. They had thrown up tin roofs on stilts so the mechanics could work in the shade, and slightly more elaborate shelters for barracks. Tin walls on those, more or less. More gaps than tin, you get the picture. It was not noon yet, and already pushing a hundred degrees.
I found a mess hall, backed up to the HQ and tool crib. I made my pitch, and was directed to an older sergeant, Danny Ferguson, who found me a cuppa joe and a cruller of some obvious improvisation. “So, you want to hang as many guns off a Trimotor as possible, and shoot up ground forces. You won’t do much against tanks, but they won’t be able to shoot back. Their guns won’t elevate that high. Trucks on the other hand, that would be a different story.” He nodded to himself in agreement with himself.
“Tell me about it. I was nearly shot down a couple months ago, a little west of here, someplace. My wife was killed.”
He looked at me long and hard, pastry forgotten in hand. “You? You’re that guy? They done you dirty. That was a fucked-up situation, that was. You ought to know, we found your wife… Her body. We were out on a salvage run. A few weeks after the battle. She got a decent burial. Not to get too graphic about it, but we could read her dog tags. Brendan. Somebody Brendan.” A lot unsaid, and thanks, Sarge.
“Maeve. Yeah.” Greif just hit me like a big mallet, and not a padded one either. I had to turn away, hide my tears. Ferguson didn’t speak, I was grateful. He knew. We all knew. But what can you do? You can keep going. One thing at a time. One of these days I could have about five nervous breakdowns in a row, but not right now.
Eventually, I could talk again. “Well, you have my thanks. This whole war is a fucked-up situation.”
“Tell me about it.” He shrugged and sighed at the same time. “Well, back to the job at hand. We have a couple Tris, we could mount maybe five .50s on top of the wing, fire them with cables. Lots of drag, and you would not be able to change belts without being an acrobat, but sure. No biggie.”
“We had a hole cut in the roof of our, Maeve’s, Trimotor. Had a machine gun mount. I don’t know if they ever had to use it.”
“Yeah, I remember that crate. It burned. Here.” He looked up, gathering thoughts, figuring out how to explain things to a dummy like me. “That hole was farther back, well past the wing’s internal structure. I’m not poking holes anywhere in that area. The fuel tanks are right there. I was planning to build a table sort of a deal, a foot above the wing. But that would make the guns even harder to load. This is a fucked-up idea, you realize that, right? I could add some hand rails, but still, a hundred and thirty mile an hour slipstream is no joke. The prop wash is brutal.”
“I see. And no chance of mounting a real cannon on a plane?”
“Jesus.” He pondered. While he thought, I stole another cruller. Too sweet, must have been made by a Chinese cook. Fuck it, food. “If you took the center engine out, and had a real long barrel 37mm, you might survive a few shots. A Vickers One-pounder, what the Brits call a pom-pom gun, would work, sort of, but just the barrel and breech weigh in at five hundred pounds. It’s a crazy idea.”
“Could it be done?”
“Who knows? Who would test it? I don’t have a lathe big enough to turn and true a barrel that long, there are gas ports to think…” He trailed off.
“What?”
“I could weld a big steel pipe down the middle of the cockpit, and shoot through that. I don’t know what that would do to the velocity. You know, a silencer takes a lot of the power off a bullet when you fire a round through one. Plus, a two engine Tri, with another ton of load will be slow as shit in January.”
“Would it fly?”
“Oh, sure, stall speed is under sixty miles an hour, you won’t lose that much. Be a sitting duck for fighters though. And god help you if you lose another engine. It would fuck up a tank, you hit it in a soft spot. All kinds of ammo for that gun, armor piercing, HE, all kinds of shit.”
“Incendiary?”
“Probably. Who knows? Tracers for sure. I’m a mechanic, not an armorer.”
“Let’s do both. Make the machine gun one, quick and dirty, something to see if it works. Then think about the Vickers model, take a week or two, no more. Test it on the ground, and I will find another fool to help fly it.”
“You going to take it up?”
“My idea. My job. I’m just a copilot on Tris, but there are lots of crazy pilots.”
“Yeah, and they don’t last too goddamn long, either.” He shrugged. “No skin off my ass. Two days, a day and a half for the machine gun one, and I’ll let you know how the other one works out.”
“Can’t ask for more than that, Danny, can’t ask for more than that. We have a deal. I’ll see if I can’t float you a little incentive bonus. Call it overtime.”
“Deal. I’ll call HQ when I have something to show you. I don’t want you breathing down my neck on this. Clear?” He nodded to himself again. At least he was in agreement. I was willing to take his word for it.
“Of course. Deal.”
>>>>>>>
I was still shaken about Maeve’s body being found. I thought I had papered over the pain, but the paper ripped like the veil in the Temple, whatever that was. Something in the bible, someplace. Fuck the bible, I knew that words on paper were not going to help me get over this pain. I went back to HQ, found the non-com in charge of burials, got directions to the cemetery. It was way over on the quiet side of the base; I walked, to let my brains settle a little. And there she was, one of a long row, ranks and files of GI issue head stones. All proper and correct. I didn’t have a flower, I left a tear. And back to work. There is a war on, you know.
First order of business was to telegraph Ray Reynolds, have him find me a ton or two of fireworks, skyrockets, and have them shipped to Karamay ASAP. Done.
I sent a telegram back to Barbara, there was little news, none of it good. The Panama Canal had been severed, and there were some reports of gunboats, torpedo boat destroyers, and perhaps U-boats, up and down the St. Lawrence River. Sea travel had stopped, all along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts.
Argentine sources had confused and fragmentary reports of a naval battle near the Falkland Islands, a British possession that Argentine coveted. It pretty much had to be the Anglo-Germans and somebody, the USN and/or the Imperial Japanese Navy, but nobody was saying anything. It was much like the Battle of the Indian Ocean last spring; those results were still unclear. One could suppose that the USN or part of it, had been trying to round the Horn into the Pacific, and been not quite stealthy enough. But that was just guessing.
She did not want to say more, not even over a supposedly secure telegraph line. It was a pretty safe bet that both sides, the Germans and us, were sending out horseback parties to tap into enemy communications lines. Shit, I knew for sure that rival newspapers and competing bookies and other sports betting syndicates had been doing the same back in the states, for years and years. These two con men, Fred and Charley Gondorff, had played games like that for decades all up and down the Mississippi.
They might set up a phony bookie joint, set the clocks back, tap into legit telegraph lines, allow the mark to bet on races that had already been run, every trick in the book. They might even cut a wire and send one false result to a big bookie joint. You could make a lot of cash money with a good setup, a pair of wire cutters, and a bent telegraph operator. I knew of one case in Buffalo, where some grifters got caught because they didn’t imitate the operators “hand” well enough and the recipient got suspicious. Fun and games. People got shot. And that was just for money, not the fate of nations. Nations hell, continents. High stakes gambling for real.
This desert was the original c
avalry country; all sorts of nomads and land pirates had been roaming these steppes and drylands for thousands of years. Cossacks and Mongols, all sorts of bad ass motherfuckers. Now they had trucks and tanks. And machine guns. Progress, that’s what that shit is called. Fuck it. Worry never helps.
I had caused all the trouble I could, so I laid my weary ass down to rest. And remember Maeve. I might have been praying in my sleep, or cursing, what’s the difference, anyway? I slept better than I should have, something to be grateful for.
>>>>>>>>
The next day was pretty much of a day off, the hurry up and wait equation was in the wait phase. Fine with me. The Officers Club had a few ratty books on a shelf, I grabbed a couple of Zane Greys and went right back to the rack.
It was harder than I hoped, losing myself in the illusory West, the constant noise of the radials did not help, of course. Eventually, I gave up, put my shoes back on and went looking for trouble.
As usual, trouble is not hard to find. After grabbing a late lunch, checking the telegraph, I wandered down to the flight line, risking the wrath of Danny Ferguson. It turned out that I was right on time to see him loading the last belts into oversize boxes on top of the wings.
“I got all fired up with this idea, worked most of the night on it. I don’t think this will screw up the airflow too bad. This is the low-pressure side anyway. Only one way to find out, right?”
“They put wing walkers, all sorts of crap up there. I remember seeing a ping pong table once. I think they used golf balls.”
“Anything for a few bucks,” he laughed.
“It only had to work for a couple of photos…” I agreed. “Silly season stories. I kind of miss those days.”
“Not too much silly anymore.” He made a face, and spat. I could only agree. “You want to fly this bastard?”
“I only feel competent to co-pilot on these big guys. You got somebody handy?”
“Your job. Non-com pilots’ dugout is over there.” He pointed. I went.
It was a barracks as well as a bomb shelter, a long trench, roofed with pine logs and sandbags, more like a prairie sodbusters home than anything military. I guess they wanted to get their beauty sleep even when zepps were bombing them. It might have been fifteen feet wide and a hundred long, with inner earthen partitions to bear the load. A canteen sort of a place was built on to one end, that part was only half underground, four or five feet deep, so it got a little light.
The usual collection of oddballs was sucking down java, and revealing the wisdom of the world, standard operating procedure. What was not normal was that most of the pilots were female. Not normal in the rest of the world, of course, here it was SOP. I helped myself to a cuppa, made my needs known. There were a certain number of significant looks exchanged, a long silent pause, and an angular woman with very short blonde hair stood, reluctantly; “I’m Alde Johannsen. I’ll do it. Test run?”
“Yeah, basically to see if the guns will shake anything major loose. There are four .30s and a .50, we might as well try two, then four, and then all five. You agree?”
“Let’s start with the big guy, add the others. We want the recoils to balance, correct?”
“Sounds good to me. You’re the expert.”
She gave me one of those looks that women specialize in giving to stupid men. You know. “There are no experts in ideas this crazy. Let’s go.”
Alde proved her professionalism by checking and double-checking every component of the Tri, and I followed right behind, kicking tires and twanging control cables, seeing if the elevators, ailerons, and rudder all moved freely. You can’t get out and tighten a loose nut at five thousand feet. I had the feeling that I was the loose nut for coming up with this idea, but I kept that comment to myself. Too many people around to agree with me.
Ferguson showed us the gun controls; “I gave you three chains hanging down to fire the guns. Clumsy, but it ought to work. The center one is the .50. the other two are the .30s. And I put a link on there, so you can get all three at once.” The link was a wooden toggle with three holes drilled in it. Yeah, it ought to work. Lots of shit ought to work. Sometimes it actually does work. Then they call you a genius. If it doesn’t work, they call your next of kin, tell them to make funeral arrangements.
I found the control tower, got permission to use the dive-bombing range for up to five passes, they were refueling and loading more bombs, we clambered on board, dogged the doors, strapped in, and off we went.
>>>>>>>
Ferguson knew his stuff, the plane handled well, it was a little bit slower, but a similar amount more stable. I had forgotten to arrange some sort of sight, but he had thought of that, and loaded us up with tracer rounds. The .50 was a shock, so loud it hurt. And it did wrench at the fabric of the Trimotor, but it did not deflect our flight path, and seemed bearable. Earphones were a definite necessity, however. Alde concentrated on one much battered Renault tank, and we could see the hits, most rebounded and spun off, tracers drawing crazy scribbles in the sky. She dropped a wing, close enough to the hard pan to tighten my asshole a few notches, and swung around to try again. With three guns, the impact on the target was noticeable, Ferguson had aimed the guns’ angles so the bullets converged in a vee, a hundred feet or so out in front. That spot was no place you wanted to be standing, not a doubt in the world. The furrow the stream of bullets plowed up in the sand and gravel was quite visible.
And with all five guns hammering, the impact spot was pretty goddamn impressive, if you like hell on earth. In the split second the focus of the vee raked across the tank, chunks of armor were ripped off and thrown in to the air with such force that I was afraid one of them might get high enough to hit us. No kidding, it was scary. And deafening. Alde gave me the thumbs up, the guns sputtered to silence, and she headed back to the barn. Looked like one of those crazy ideas of mine paid off. Makes you feel worthwhile, actually. A comforting illusion.
Post-flight checkout was even more exhaustive than the pre-flight, the tail had suffered a few scratches from the cartridges and links flying back in the slip stream, but the bolts holding the guns to the corrugated metal of the wing seemed sound enough, the metal had not deformed. I told Ferguson about the lack of sights, and he said that there would be little problem in hooking something up in front of the pilot’s seat. “Unless you think the co-pilot should be the gunner?”
“Good thought. That might make more sense. Thanks.”
“Keep It Simple, Stupid.” He grinned. “My motto. K.I.S.S.”
“And a good one it is. Every time you make something foolproof, they invent a bigger fool.”
“Words to live by.” He shrugged, “What’s next? The cannon ship is coming along, another two days, max.”
“What’s next? I go talk to people, see if Alde wants this berth as a permanent gig, line up some more targets, more training, see if Urum-chi can make more of these, or if they have to go back to Xilin Gol, you know. The usual. Logistics, personnel, and training.”
“S.O.P.”
“Business as usual. Carry on, as the fucking Brits say.”
“Fuck them.” He agreed. “We wouldn’t be in this mess, if they hadn’t turned yellow-belly.”
That was not quite true, but fuck it. This was not a debating team. Close enough for government work.
>>>>>>
I went back to Zane Gray, and now I could sink into it, a little of the pressure was off. I could have gone to the Telegraph Office, but I had done my good deed for the day. If they needed me, they knew where I was. I fell out at eight, got almost a good night’s sleep before a messenger woke me with a telegram from Barbara.
“WOMAN NAME COOKIE HERE STOP SAYS SHE IS PREGANT YOUR CHILD STOP PLEASE ADVISE STOP B WERTHEIM STOP ENDS”. Somehow, I didn’t think, “Oh, fuck me dry!” would be a proper military response.
I sent back; “LONG STORY STOP PLACATE HER STOP WILL EXPLAIN IN PERSON STOP SHE IS NOT TRUSTWORTHY BUT MAY NOT BE LYING STOP THIS TIME STOP KAPUSTA STOP ENDS” Amazin
g how tongue-tied a professional writer can be when he has to write something in real life.
I wanted a drink, three fucking drinks, but I went to breakfast instead. There was food, I ate it, that’s all I can swear to. Priorities. I could get back to the Recon Train and back here in time for the test of the cannon ship, but it would be pushing it. One pregnant junkie was not worth risking the development of a new weapon. One life, well, two, against X number of soldiers. Not a valid equation. So, then… Go find Alde Johannsen.
She was not in the Non-com Pilots’ Canteen, nobody knew where she was, so I walked over to harass Ferguson, and there she was, sitting in the pilot’s seat of the gun ship, supervising the installation of the sight. “Hey,” I said cleverly.
Without taking her eyes off the job, she said, “Danny said you wanted the co-pilot to be the gunner, but that will never work. Too slow. I have to aim the whole plane. The co-pilot has to look out for enemy action, find more targets, and try to get us out of here if I get hit.”
“Makes sense. Does this mean you want the pilot’s job?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Been flying milk runs, shuttling fat ass officers from here to yonder since I got to this damn forsaken desert. I’m bored.”
“You forgot to say, ‘no offense’.”
She didn’t move her eyes from the job at hand. “What?”
“Fat ass officer? Like me?”
“Oh, are you an officer? Who knew?” That was reassuring, in a back-ass-ward sort of a way. She stuck her head out the window, yelled to the mechanic on the ladder, “A hair left… That’s good.” She finally put her eyes on me. “You’re not all that fat. Let’s give this a walk around, and go test it.”
“Deal.” I ignored the other comment. “I’ll go phone the Tower, get us a flight window.”
“I was thinking of going out west a hundred miles and seeking what they call targets of opportunity. A real test. Game?”
Black Bear Blues Page 9
