Quest of the Seventh Carrier

by Peter Albano

  The Aichi rocked as anti-aircraft artillery set up a furious barrage, brown smears like thrown mud against glass, storming all around. Brent felt the aircraft slow as Takii reduced speed and lowered his dive brakes. “Targets of opportunity!” cracked in his earphones and Saiki’s D3A nosed into its dive.

  Within seconds, fifteen Aichis were plunging into a burning exploding hell — an inferno that lashed back at its tormentors with 88-millimeter cannons and 20 millimeter and 40 millimeter guns and innumerable machine guns. Shells exploded in curling bursts raining tentacles of smoking red-hot shrapnel-like brown octopus, tracers racing toward them in burning streams. The bomber on Brent’s right lost a wing, sprayed a white cloud of gasoline from a ruptured tank and exploded with a blast that jarred Brent’s plane like a battering ram.

  Brent could not believe his eyes. Saiki was veering away from the AA toward a large building at least two miles from the field. It appeared to be a warehouse from a commune or collective farm. “Shishi leader, you have missed the target!” Takii shouted into his microphone. No response. Brent heard other pilots trying to raise the bomber leader. Still no response. To Brent’s horror, four D3As were following Saiki on the useless attack, but not Takii and ten others. Targets of opportunity had been the command. They were not bound to their leader.

  Brent heard Takii’s voice, “We will evict them from that hangar,” the old man growled, peering into his ring and bead sight. Brent could see the target — a huge hangar, still untouched, with four multi-engined aircraft spread on the apron in front of it. Swarms of ant-like ground-crew personnel were pulling and pushing with small tractors and their bare hands in attempts to bring the big planes to the runway and take-off positions.

  Despite his racing pulse, a stomach which was caught in his throat, Brent was remarkably clearheaded. The engine roared, dive brakes shrieked as they shredded the air into turbulent rapids and the bandage was ripped from his face. The earth rushed up and hell vomited firebrands of lava in his face, the dive bomber buffeted by explosions. But Takii never faltered, the Aichi plummeting on its target like a dart thrown at a bull's-eye from point-blank range.

  The thrill of battle. He had bet his life against the courage and skill of other men and rolled the dice against chance, too. The ultimate gamble. That was the challenge of it. There was nothing more to bet.

  The dive flattened and Brent felt the wicker seat begin to sag under his increasing weight. Suddenly, the bomber leaped upward and the engine's roar heightened with the lightened load as Takii pulled the bombs’ toggle release. At full-throttle, the Aichi banked to the left and swooped within a few feet of the main runway, escaping its own bomb blast. As G-forces pushed Brent hard against the side of the cockpit, a great concussion jarred the bomber and Brent saw the entire front of the hangar lift skyward and disintegrate in a yellow-orange flash as all three bombs exploded. “Banzai! Banzai!” they both shouted at each other.

  Joy was replaced with fear as Brent smelled smoke. Were they hit? They would have no chance at this low altitude. It would be over in seconds. But they were flying through clouds of smoke and he realized the cockpit had filled with fumes from burning tanks and aircraft.

  All around bombs were hitting; hangars, bombers and fighters exploding and burning, and AA guns in sandbagged emplacements spitting thousands of tracers at the dive bombers. One Aichi made a perfect release but never pulled from its dive, crashing into a hangar with its bombs. Another pulled up sharply over a nest of twenty-millimeter guns which shot out huge chunks of aluminum from its fuselage. With a dead pilot, the big plane slow-rolled at an altitude of a hundred feet and with its belly to the sky, hit a runway in a two hundred-foot smear of flames and tumbling wreckage.

  “Fighter. Fighter taking off,” Takii shouted. Dead ahead. I will give you a shot to your left.”

  Feeling the bomber vibrate and buck as Takii opened fire with his two 7.7-millimeter machine guns, Brent cracked the gun to the port side over the wing. A short burst by Takii, an angry shout of “Missed, missed,” a quick bank and a black ME was streaking off their port wing not more than thirty feet away. Already, the fighter was off the ground and its wheels were retracted. They were so close, the pilot’s face filled the third ring. His goggles were up and he was very young, like a college freshman. His eyes were blue and tufts of blond hair stuck out from his helmet. There was a surprised look on his face when Brent pressed the trigger. It was a short burst, not more than twelve rounds. But perfectly led and at short range, every round was “good”. Struck by sledgehammers, the young man jerked spasmodically like a criminal dying in an electric chair, bits of skull, brains, black helmet, and blond hair exploding into the slipstream. Rolling slowly, the black fighter caught a wing tip on the edge of the runway, flipped, rolled and cartwheeled in a spectacular pinwheel of flung wreckage and burning fuel.

  “Banzai! Banzai!” Takii shouted. Brent felt the bomber vibrating again as Takii pressed the tit on his stick. Flashing over a revetment, Brent got off a short burst at a fighter half-pushed from its protection. It was surrounded by prone figures. But the ME appeared to be undamaged. Brent heard Takii cursing. “The Arabs have patrols up. The surprise was not complete. Be alert, Brent-san. You may have much work to do before we sight Yonaga.” The pilot stabbed a finger straight up. Craning his neck, Brent could see fighters far overhead, tumbling and twisting in a great sprawling dogfight.

  As Takii banked toward the Sea of Japan, Brent said a short prayer for Yoshi Matsuhara.

  Locked in a personal duel with the checkerboard fighter, Commander Yoshi Matsuhara had drifted far to the west over Inchon with the Sea of Japan on the horizon. He had caught a glimpse of Ishikawa engaging Rosencrance’s blood-red machine, but that fight had drifted far below and to the south. He had no interest in Taku at the moment, his only thought was to remain alive long enough to kill the devil Friessner. But the man was a master fighter pilot.

  Friessner’s opening gambit had been a diving attack out of the sun. However, the German had not been ready for the new power of the Zero’s 1,700-horsepower Sakae. Catching a glimpse of the diving ME in his rearview mirror, Yoshi had waited until the leading edge of the Messerschmitt’s wing blazed before jamming the throttle to the wall, pulling back hard on the stick and kicking the rudder into an impossible loop and half-roll that would have destroyed a lesser aircraft. With G-forces slamming him into his seat, turning his head to concrete and blurring his vision, Yoshi saw his wings bend and felt the main spar vibrate with the stress, but the fighter held together and the ME flashed below him.

  A sharp move of the stick with a matching movement of his left foot for rudder control, and the Zero plunged after the ME which had rolled into a dive, the usual Arab evasive maneuver. Expecting the ME to flatten its dive in an attempt to regain the advantage of altitude, Yoshi turned with it and led it for a difficult full deflection shot. For a fleeting instant, the wings of the Messerschmitt stretched across the glowing blue reticle of the gun sight and the reflected dot was on the center of the fuselage, just behind the canopy. Yoshi squeezed the tit. But miraculously, the ME vanished, a dozen rounds smoking off into a void. Friessner had sharpened his dive and curled in a wide sweeping chandelle to the east. Yoshi pounded the instrument panel. Weighing a half-ton more than the Zero and with the new 1,900-horsepower Daimler Benz engine, the checkerboard pulled away quickly and climbed again to four thousand meters where it banked sharply into Yoshi’s flight path.

  Yoshi lips twisted into a leering, sneering expression of hate and joy. The German was committed to a head-on attack. He would kill him with gunfire or ram him. He coiled his right hand like spring steel around the stick and tensed his feet on the rudder pedals, ready for any change in the ME’s run. But the ME held steady, growing rapidly in the gun sight at a combined closing speed of almost nine hundred miles an hour. There was no advantage in fire power. Both machines had two twenty-millimeter cannons and two 7.7-machine guns. Nerve and accuracy would prevail. Yet, the Japane
se did own one advantage; he sought death, the German fought for victory and survival.

  Both pilots opened fire simultaneously. Tracers whipped by Yoshi, his cowl ripped and sparked as bullets hit and sliced off. The ME not only filled his sights, it filled his whole forward vision. “Banzai!”

  Yoshi shouted, instinctively bracing himself for the collision. But the ME flashed over him, missing by a breath, its oil cooler actually scraping his canopy, backwash jarring the little fighter like a passing tsunami. Cursing, Yoshi smelled smoke. His first thought was fire, but, immediately, he realized he smelled exhaust from the Daimler Benz and cordite from the guns.

  Yoshi horsed the stick over sharply and matched the move with his left foot, forcing the fighter into a tight turn, wings almost vertical, wracking the Zero around to bring its guns to bear. The ME had pulled up hard into a loop and was completing the half-roll of its Immelmann turn when Yoshi centered the controls and thumbed the tit. Bullet strikes flashed white on the ME’s fuselage and Yoshi screamed with joy. But the sturdy fighter slewed around in a flat turn and opened fire.

  Yoshi cried with pain as his windshield shattered and bits of glass bounced off his goggles and slashed his face. Instinctively, he slammed the stick to the side, kicked right rudder and rolled under the ME, belly to belly. Red fluid sprayed the cockpit. But the Japanese realized he was not wounded seriously; the fluid was hydraulic fluid from a severed line behind the instrument panel. All of the needles of his instruments showed zero and a gale whipped through the cockpit. He smiled grimly. He could still fight but he had lost priceless time. Friessner was boring in for the kill.

  The Zero leaped and shuddered and the stick jerked as bullets slammed into its tail and fuselage. More holes in the wing and a jarring explosion and bright flash as a cannon shell exploded just behind the cockpit. The Messerschmitt was firing through a turn at three-quarter deflection. Desperately, Yoshi pushed the stick to the right and stomped hard on the left rudder pedal, throwing the little fighter into a flat, skidding turn. The tracer stream veered off to the left and Yoshi pulled back on the stick and balanced with the rudder. He needed altitude — the fighter pilot’s most valuable commodity. Risking a high-speed stall, Yoshi pulled the stick back still further into his stomach with all his strength and called on Amaterasu.

  But Friessner had corrected like a man who had read his enemy’s mind, whipping his fighter around and hanging on to the Zero’s tail as if connected by a cable. Although the ME could not climb with the Mitsubishi, the range was so short a killing burst was possible. More tracers snapped past and a chunk of aluminum was blasted from his wing as Friessner eased into his killing angle and walked his rudder to keep his enemy in his sights. “Kimio. Kimio,” Matsu-hara said to himself. The canopy cracked with a loud report, his instrument panel and radio shattered and long rips appeared along the right side of the cockpit.

  Then Yoshi saw the two aircraft; a blood-red machine in pursuit of Taku Ishikawa’s diving Zero directly in his path. Only a thousand meters above, the two planes raced toward Yoshi like a streak of lightning. Taku was firing and his shells and bullets mixed with Friessner’s in a smoking, flashing cross fire, enveloping Matsuhara’s Zero in a blizzard of crisscrossing tracers. Four aircraft at full military power hurtling into a tiny corner of the sky large enough for only one of them. A gigantic collision. They would all be killed in a colossal explosion that would be seen for thousands of kilometers. Yoshi cried with joy. What a glorious exit.

  At the last instant, Taku Ishikawa eased his stick forward. Matsuhara actually saw Ishikawa’s intense face as the Zero flashed under him and then up into Friessner’s tracer stream. At the precise moment Ishikawa and Friessner met hub to hub in a cataclysmic explosion that rivaled the violence and brilliance of a newly created sun, Yoshi caught the red ME in his sights and pressed the tit. At least eight cannon shells ripped the belly of the fighter from oil cooler to tail wheel. Streaming coolant and smoke and slaking aluminum like the skin of a red snake, the fighter rolled onto its back and whipped through the roiling smoke and raining debris astern of Yoshi. A form dropped and a parachute opened.

  Yoshi turned his head slowly. A great black-brown cloud hung behind him and bits of smoking debris rained toward the ground. The red ME was burning and spinning to the earth. A single white parachute drifted above it.

  “You took it from me, Taku Ishikawa,” he said. Was it the ultimate sacrifice for a comrade? An accident? A gesture of contempt for Yoshi’s fighting ability? Or did Taku simply rush to the gates of the Yasakuni Shrine ahead of him. Perhaps, Taku Ishikawa was even trying to kill him. He would never know. But one thing was certain. It had been settled in the sky.

  Instinctively, he reached for the switch on his microphone. Then he remembered the radio was junk. His instruments were out and he had no way of knowing oil pressure, temperature, manifold pressure and fuel levels. He shrugged resignedly as he headed out over the Sea of Japan. “The gods will decide,” he said. “I am in their hands.”

  Brent Ross and Yoshiro Takii were over the Sea of Japan when they sighted the smoke eighty miles to the southeast. Within twenty minutes, the Arab convoy came into view just north of Tsushima Island and midway between Korea and Japan. Japanese aircraft were circling like vultures over carrion and both transports were burning, the smaller, Al Hamra, dead in the water with a thirty-degree list to port. She was in sinking condition and crewmen were pushing away from her in small boats and rafts. Some were swimming. The other, the larger Mabruk, was burning but still underway. She had turned north and was making for Vladivostok. Both Gearings had sustained bomb hits, nevertheless, they appeared in fighting trim, zigzagging at high speeds off Mabruk’s bows and firing furiously, adding their AA to Mabruk’s.

  While Zeros continued to circle high overhead, six Aichis began their dives. At the same time, four Nakajima torpedo bombers bored in on both Mabruk’s bows in an attempt to put the merchantman “on the anvil.” The sky was filled with a pox of brown bursts and tracers streaked toward the bombers. The lead Aichi twisted into a slow spiral and exploded in the sea a few yards from Mabruk’s bow. A near-miss rained tons of water on the transport’s stern and then a bomb hit directly on her bridge, hurling the entire flying bridge straight up a hundred feet on a yellow tongue of flame, pieces of steel plate, broken antennas and men spiraling in every direction. Another near-miss and a hit amidships. But the big ship plowed on.

  “Water sinks ships, not air,” Takii shouted into the intercom. As if in answer to his entreaty, the B5Ns bored in closer through a forest of geysers thrown up by exploding shells. One bomber flipped on its side, caught a wing tip in the sea and cartwheeled, disintegrating and flinging its torpedo high in the air like a great silver cigar. Another exploded in a bright red ball like a Fourth of July pyrotechnic. But the two surviving B5Ns dropped their torpedoes and veered away. The big ship turned toward one, but it was impossible to avoid both. She fairly leaped from the sea as a torpedo caught her squarely on the port beam. Immediately, she began to list and slow.

  “Better. Better,” Takii said. “Now we will expend unexpended ordnance.” Brent felt the Aichi bank and Takii gestured ahead to Al Hamra which had turned turtle. A hundred men had scampered up on her red-leaded bottom. “Sharks,” Takii said. Then solemnly, “One run for Morisada Mochitsura. Then they will prefer the sharks.”

  Takii throttled back and made a single leisurely run over the hull. Brent felt the plane vibrate as two 7.7 machine guns spit 600 rounds a minute. A steel scythe cut through the screaming survivors, knocking them from their feet and rolling them into the crimson sea which was slashed by the fins of dozens of sharks on a feeding frenzy. “Dinner is served,” Takii laughed into the intercom. Brent felt ill.

  They found Yonaga two hundred miles southwest of Tsushima Island. She was headed into the wind and pennant one was at the yardarm. Two sections of the CAP swept in close, inspected the Aichi and then shot up into stiff climbs. A dozen other bombers and fighters were ci
rcling counterclockwise awaiting their turns to land. One B5N, badly shot up, fired a red flare and began its approach. Brent looked around. “Not very many,” he said to himself. “Christ, we launched ninety-three aircraft.”

  Almost as if Takii could see into Brent’s mind, the old man spoke into his microphone, “More will straggle back and, remember, the pilots of damaged aircraft were instructed to land in Japan.”

  Brent was looking over the tail far into the northern horizon when he saw it, a lone Zero with holes in its wings and fuselage, flying low to the sea and very slowly. It had a red cowl and green hood. “Yoshi,” he cried, joyfully. And then the exuberant words survivors of battles inevitably shout at each other, “You made it. You made it. Thank God.”

  Brent felt the plane bank and the engine slow as Takii began his approach.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The debriefing was solemn yet tumultuous: solemn because only eleven of the twenty-seven Aichis participating in the two strikes had returned, tumultuous because Lieutenant Yoshiro Takii attacked Lieutenant Daizo Saiki the moment Saiki entered the room.

  “Cowardly ronin!” Takii shouted, leaping to his feet and gripping the handle of his sword. Brent stood with the pilot but did not attempt to restrain him.

  Saiki drew himself up haughtily. “Those words can turn to blood in your mouth,” the bomber leader retorted heatedly.

  Takii pushed his face within inches of Saiki’s while pilots and gunners crowded around. “You avoided the AA,” he shouted. “You bombed a farm — chickens and goats — while the rest of us flew into the mouth of hell!”

  “I bombed the most formidable target — the largest hangar,” Saiki said, not yielding an inch.

  “Bullshit!” Brent said. “I saw you. You veered away from the target — took three or four of the guys with you while enemy fighters were taking off. Some got into the air because you’re gutless. It cost us — it cost us lives of good men.”