Took stock in the morning, the Intelligence Officer said the attackers were Pathans and Uyghurs. Most of the drivers were Europeans, without IDs, but there was one Rittmeister, a cavalry captain with two pips on his shoulders. He was not very talkative, lacking most of his head, and the few other survivors just spat curses at us in whatever language they favored. They were led out into the scrub, shots were fired, and the squad came back. End of story. One living driver, who had a few words of English, was tied up and saved for later. The rest of us set to digging more trenches in the gravel. Love it. Dreams come true. So do nightmares.
A harassed looking Lieutenant came and rescued us from the shovel brigade; “You two are pilots? Come with me.” No please involved. We stacked our shovels, grabbed our rifles, and followed. Once standing, we could see that poor old Spirit of New Haven was a few twists of corrugated tin, and the other Tin Gooses were also cooked and thoroughly perforated. Some may have been able to be cannibalized into flying again, but not easily. The Pursuit jobs on the east side of the field, were all there, but even from here, we could see shattered glass and punctured tires.
The HQ tent was in little better shape, full of bullet holes. A cluster of officers were standing around the wireless corner, they didn’t look too happy. We saluted the major, he didn’t look in much better shape than anything else in Karamay. One arm was in a sling, and seemed shorter than it should be. “Captains Kapusta reporting for duty,” Maeve said. “I assume you need us to fly messages back to Jiu-quan?”
“You assume wrong, Captain. The bastards shot up Pilots Quarters, most of them are dead or wounded.” He sort of flipped his truncated left arm at us. “See?”
“Yes, sir. Your orders?”
“Reconnaissance and interdiction. There have to be more of those bastards out there. Find them and blow the living shit out of them. Can do?”
“Sir, yes sir.” I didn’t bother explaining that I was a very minimal pilot, and Maeve was not combat trained. Do or die.
“We will keep planes fueled and ready, you go out west, strafe anything you can see, come back and do it again.” He saluted. It hurt him. We saluted back, and ran for the Pursuit Field.
They had two Curtisses cranked up and running, ladders on the sides. I had Maeve explain as much as she could in about ninety seconds, and she clambered in her job, off we went. All I really knew was how to pull the trigger. Damn, that bird had a lot of power. I tried to feather the throttle, but the torque from the engine wanted to twist the plane right out of the air. I learned how to correct, then had to open it up to keep up with Maeve. She kept very low, much lower than I was comfortable with, but fuck comfort. The dust whipped up by her prop forced me to move to her left, where the air was cleaner and much less turbulent. The hard ground was just a blur anyway.
Something dark on the horizon. A line of trucks coming right at us. The P-6 has twin .30s in the nose, I cut the throttle a little, fell behind Maeve in cleaner air, and followed her right down the line of trucks. They tried to scatter, but had almost no time to veer out of the way. We nailed them. Then she made a wide loop, and came back to hit them again from the rear. That was a mistake, she had given the Pathans time to unlimber their Spandau machine guns and draw beads on her. Bastards could shoot, no doubt of that. The air must have been full of lead, her engine was smoking before she lined up with the convoy, and flaming a split second later. Her engine failed, and she crashed right into the second truck from the rear. I screamed something not even I could hear, and slapped the throttle to the firewall.
I hosed them down, I don’t know if it did any good, I was probably too high for accuracy. I wanted to follow her down in, but I knew that was not going to help win the war. I raced for the sky, whipped back over and took a look. Two or three trucks were burning, the rest were scattering to any cover they could find. I was crying, but dared not take off my goggles to wipe my eyes. I checked the compass, fuel, lowered the revs and headed to the barn. It was not noon yet, and my life was broken. Fuck this game.
>>>>>>
They didn’t say a word when I landed. They barely had the balls to look at me. I lifted my goggles, the tears ran down my face all at once, cutting runnels in the dust and oil black. I did not wipe my face. The Major was standing at the edge of the field, the bandages on the end of his left arm, stump were soaked with blood. I had no emotions. I walked to the Major, said, “This is not my duty station. You want to get me back to Urum-qi or you want me to start walking?”
“You can take the Curtiss.” He didn’t express sympathy, say he was sorry, I didn’t expect him to, either.
“You have dispatches? I will take them as soon as the plane is refueled.”
“Half an hour.” He saluted. I didn’t. I wanted a drink, I didn’t try to find one. I went to piss, got a bottle of nasty desert water for the flight, and accepted a briefcase of dispatches from that same Lieutenant. He started to say something, tried two or three times and then just saluted. Yeah. Fuck you.
Four and a half hours, I didn’t hurry, stayed high, out of trouble. I went for Jiu-quan so I could talk to Isis, use the radio. And the shit was obviously coming down. Until I got to Urum-qi, the desert was streaked with dust plumes, all headed east. I couldn’t count them. Hundreds. My camera had burned up in the Tri-Motor anyway. Did not look good for the men in Karamay, but something had died inside me. I would do what I could for them, but all that seemed academic at this point. My single plane would not have done them all that much good anyway. We had just traded one pursuit plane for three or four trucks. That was a losing proposition anyway you looked at it. Tanks. Troops. Maybe dive bombers would help. But not from me. I was done.
It had been foolish to come with Maeve, and seeing her die was not any less stupid. Not something to be glad about. If I hadn’t tagged along, then maybe… Fuck maybe. Things were what they were. She was gone, and I was in danger. Flying was never fun, never desirable to me, and now it was… Anathema. Good word for a horrible reality. I was a writer. I could feel the words welling up inside me. If they were good words, useful words that might help win this fucking useless war, make it all end, then fine.
There was actually one war I wanted to fight, and it was ten thousand miles east of here. Could I make it happen? I could die trying. Close enough.
>>>>>
Jiu-quan was a bustle of preparation, no slackness here. A trio of Pursuits intercepted me a half hour out from the city, looked me over real closely, then escorted me to one of the several airfields around the town. The sun was setting behind me, my shadow on the field looked like the ghost of a vulture.
The airfield was outside the Wall, hangers and offices clustered up at the Wall’s foot. Typical Chinese efficiency. Waste a perfectly good wall, when you could build what you needed with only three?
I was met by four officers, captains on down, I had to show ID, they asked me a lot of questions, took my dispatches, and read them on the spot. They conferred, made a few phone calls, then a driver and the youngest Lieutenant drove me inside the Wall to HQ. To my surprise, the commander was that profane General Stillwell, now a Major General, and even more interestingly, Hodak and that Remus were full Colonels under him. They were in a tight discussion in the back of the room, people standing around with maps and papers ready in hand.
I could not believe that the center of the conference was two women, both uniformed as Lt. Colonels, Aneko, and my old buddy Isis, Nadia Yelena Akhtiorskaya. Horses do shit. I waited my turn, they bribed me with endless cups of foul coffee, and a chair, so I was content. At least I had stopped crying.
“Captain Kapusta,” Stillwell pointed at me with an imperious finger, “You have a report?”
“Karamay is under siege, trucks and troops, no tanks, I didn’t see any bombers. Their pilots were wiped out, they have pursuits, but no flyers.”
“Then why are you here?”
“My wife and I flew one… Sortie, I think you call them. She… Was killed. I am barely a pilot, certainly
not a fighter pilot. Look at me. They sent me back with dispatches. I saw hundreds of columns of trucks headed to Urum-qi. A few planes, flying cover for the convoys. There is a major push coming right down your throat, but you must know that already.”
“Thank you. Take a break, get some clothes on, eat.” I was still half dressed, boots but no socks, a flight jacket and a tee shirt, no tie, of course. “Report back for duty at six hundred hours. Hunter, show Captain Kapusta the mess tent and… BOQ. My condolences, Captain.”
“Thank you, sir. Are you going to send me back to Dalny?” My voice broke. “I might be of some good back there.”
“I’ll have orders for you in the morning. Dismissed.” I turned to leave, he called me back. “I know you don’t want to hear ‘Well Done’, but we do appreciate your work and your sacrifices. Carry on.”
“Thank you, sir.” And I meant it.
>>>>>>>
Hunter took me to the QM, I got a new uniform, then changed in the shower. I found the Officers Club, in a mud brick building that looked older than god’s granny, had flapjacks and coffee. I ordered a drink, vodka, and then could not bring myself to slug it down. I just stared at it. It stared me back down. Screw a bunch of booze. One would be too many and all they had would not be enough. The realization that I was over hooch hurt almost as much as not having Maeve across the table. A lot.
I sat there in a black study, until somebody touched my shoulder, light and fearful as a bird’s wing. “It’s after midnight. They want to close the bar.”
“Who?” I looked. “Isis? What…?”
“Am I doing here? I thought you might want to talk to somebody. I have been waiting for you for over an hour, but you were oblivious.”
“Oblivious. Yeah. That sounds good. I would like to be oblivious.”
She pointed at the glass on the table. “There it is.”
“Nah. I don’t feel like drinking.”
“You get hit in the head or something?” She walked around so I had to look at her. “You look normal.”
“I…” Words. Give me words. “I had a shock. My wife is dead. I don’t want to … disgrace her memory with booze. I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to not feel this pain.” I stood. “You say they want to close?” I threw money on the table. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Show me to the BOQ, I suppose.”
“There is a moon out, if you want to sit and talk.”
“Yeah. I guess.” I probably could not sleep. Anyway. Talk? What was that good for?
She led me to a pile of bricks in the shadow of a wall. Nice soft bricks. Wide flat ones. She stood, I sat, trying to see her in the reflected moonlight. “What are you going to do now?” she asked.
“I don’t care. Whatever they tell me to do. Nichevo.”
“It does matter.”
“To who?”
“To me. I want to get out of here.” Her voice hissed.
“Out of Jiu-quan?”
“Off this fucking bloody continent.”
“That’s why Cookie was fucking me. That’s what she wanted. No dice.”
“Aja Janova is a junkie and a fool. I am neither. And I don’t want to fuck you. I will if I have to, but only because I want what I want. I am honest. You are my ticket out of here.”
“Dream on. None of us are going anywhere. Except straight to hell. And it might be an improvement.” I really wanted that drink now. Who was this woman? Who could tell how many men she had had, used, whatever the words were. Did I want to be next? Then again, what difference did it make? We were partners in the Dance of Death. “Let me explain a few things to you. If the Krauts don’t kill us, then Patton and his assholes will make sure we never get back home. We are too dangerous to them. God fucking save us, we are the best army they have left. They would not dare bring us back.”
She lit a cigarette, turning her shadowy face into a cameo of ruddy light. “I’m not a fool. I know all that. I know more than do, perhaps.”
That took a while to sink it. She was no fool. Fact. She had come up in a harder school than I could imagine, and my life had been no bed of roses, either. “What do you know?”
“In a word? Aneko. We were not made officers for our looks. Stillwell is as far from being a fool as any man on earth.”
“Not a doubt. Hodges and Eppie are pretty damn sharp too.”
“Agreed. If we can hold the Germans here and in Irkutsk, if we bleed them hard enough, blunt their thrust, they will be done. They have only one army left. They have no reserves. They are a shell. If King Edward had not signed the treaty, the war would have ended within a year from pure exhaustion. The British have no fighters left, no Commonwealth. The Germans and the British have so many troops tied down in Africa, they are a paper tiger. They have more planes than pilots to fly them. Goering never paid much attention to tanks. He is a pilot, that is all he knows. But good pilots take a long time to train, bad pilots kill themselves. They thought they could roll over the Japanese. They think the Japanese are inferior little yellow children. They have found out differently.”
“I see. You are sure?”
“Aneko is sure. Stillwell is sure. As long as your Patton keeps the factories churning out planes and tanks and artillery, it is forgone conclusion. Already Generalissimo Chaing is negotiating to join Hodges’ forces. He has many millions of men. The Reds have many more.”
“We can trust those bastards?”
“They are Chinese. First and last. They want their country back. The Japanese are willing to trade China for South East Asia. As long as they control the seas, the Chinese will be forced to dance to their tune. The oceans are the prize.”
“And the Imperial Navy Just destroyed the Combined British and German fleets in the Arabic Sea.”
“You do see. A new kind of war, a global war. And we have won.”
“So how does that get us back to the States?”
“That should be obvious.”
“The Japanese do not trust Patton.”
“They do not want a divided United States. They do not want an expansionist United States. They do not want a racist state full of religious fanatics. Japan had problems with Christians a few centuries ago. They never forget.”
“You have that right. Never.”
“They know us, they see we can work with all races.”
“So at some point, they want us to go back home and settle Patton’s hash for him?”
“Correct. The States are in turmoil. The wars with Mexico and Canada are very unpopular. Families have been torn apart, the men shipped over here for being the wrong race or color or religion. Where can that lead?” She asked the payoff question.
“To an insane state like Goering’s. The Japanese have to fear that. The largest, most productive state on earth in the hands of the Klan, the Mob, and the Intelligence Bureau. Obvious once you look at it the right way. They would have to expand or collapse. Simple math.” I was impressed. She had it all put together. “So, what do we do now?”
“You come home with me and get some sleep. You are dead on your feet. I have a couch, a divan. In the morning, or early afternoon, we talk to Vinegar Joe, and decide where we need to be.”
“A couch?”
“I sleep on a pallet on the floor. A mat, like the Japanese do. The couch is probably large enough for you.” She stood and reached for my hand. I let her take it. I did need all the help I could get.
>>>>>>>>
I did sleep, but only until the sirens went off at dawn. I managed to get my boots on and my tie around my neck before a runner burst in; “General Stillwell’s compliments, and would Captain Kapusta and Colonel Akhtiorskaya, report to HQ, ASAP.” With that, he was off on a dead run. I could hear no bombs, all the airplane engines were going away, no ackack fire. A warning then. I raked my hair back, waited a very few moments for Isis, and off we ran. Stillwell was waiting for us. “Kapusta, I need a reconnaissance flight, and I need it right now. Yes?”
“Yes
sir,” What can you say?
“We have a two-seater warming up. Colonel, you can run a camera?”
“Yes, sir. I can.”
“Go out west, find the enemy. Give me a count, as many pictures as you can get. Stay high, keep out of trouble. I need you for more important things, but we are short of pilots right now. Most of my pilots are in trucks for Karamay.”
We just saluted, an aide ran us to the airfield, we threw on fleece jackets and gloves and climbed aboard. A mechanic charged my single front firing machinegun, and asked Isis if she knew how to shoot the one mounted behind her cockpit. She nodded, and he locked the belt in place and cocked the action. And away we go. The last place in the world I wanted to be, but that’s the breaks of the Army game. I whispered to Isis just before they threw the prop, “Shoot one roll of film. See if there is a clipboard with paper to take notes. I am going to be busy trying to not get shot down. This sucks. Get it done and go home.”
“I understand.” She said, her lower lip was trembling. Yeah. I know how that feels. Get the job done and try to live through it. The old Army game. SOP.
It had been about fourteen hours since I landed, the pilots should be close to Karamay by now. We had three hours or a little more to Urum-qi, another hour to Karamay. We didn’t even get close. A little more than half way to Urum-qi, the desert was streaked with dust trails, all headed right to Jiu-quan. It looked like they had looped north of that city, and hooked around to attack our home base. That might have meant that Karamay had gone under, or maybe not. Not my job. I climbed as high as I could, tried to keep the eastern sun on my tail, and told Isis to start shooting film.
There were literally hundreds of lines of trucks coming at us. I could spare only glances, searching the sky was much more important. There were a few planes above the truck convoys, but they seemed to be old and slow, Observation planes, not dive bombers. Figured. If the southern strike was mostly Afghans and Pathans, then they would not have many pilots. I wondered what was going on up north on the Trans-Siberian, but I didn’t let conjecture take over my mind. I cut a twenty mile circle in the air, a little more than a half hour, all I could see was lines of trucks running hell for leather toward Stillwell. He wanted recon, he was getting it.
Polar Bear Blues: A Memoir Of The Endless War (The Endless War. Book 1) Page 28
