Soldier Spies

by Griffin, W. E. B.

  And there was a frightening pain in his knee and lower leg. The pain was intense, but what frightened him was the possibility that his shot-up, still-stiff knee was about to collapse on him.

  He didn’t remember pain as he had applied pressure to the rudder pedals. But there was a reason for that: The adrenaline fed into his system by fear had overcome the pain.

  Now that he was no longer quite so terrified, the pain had registered. It was a strange pain, dull, like a toothache, and with it came an uncomfortable sensation he couldn’t quite describe. It was as if the bones of his leg and knee were collapsing. When he pushed on the rudder pedal, the upper leg seemed to fold downward into the knee and lower leg.

  It was perhaps only a sensation. There had been extensive nerve damage when he had taken the Jap slug in his knee, and the doctors had told him that he could expect to experience “ghost” sensations while nerves that were not wholly destroyed regenerated. So maybe faulty nerves were sending the brain erroneous signals.

  He hoped that was the case. If his knee collapsed, they were in deep trouble. It would be impossible to fly this airplane with only one functioning leg.

  He reached up and pulled back on the throttles, then forced himself to very slowly bring the bucking, screaming aircraft from its near-vertical dive to lesser angles, and finally to something approaching horizontal.

  But the airspeed indicator showed he was near stall speed. And when he looked out the window, he was horrifyingly close to the ground. He pushed the throttles forward and felt almost instantly the surge of power, then a pull to the right. His eyes flew up to the instrument panel and out the window. The outboard engine on the port side had stopped, and the inboard engine was smoking.

  Desperately, he searched the overhead control panel for the ENGINE FIRE switches, and threw the ones for the portside engines. Then he cut the smoking engine and feathered its prop.

  He was 500 feet off the ground on two engines, but he was in straight and level flight. His hands were shaking on the wheel, and he felt a strange coolness in his lap. He had pissed his pants.

  He checked the instrument panel. The master artificial horizon was at a crazy angle. He looked over to the horizon on the copilot’s panel and saw that the burst of machine-gun fire—or was it a cannon shell?—that had killed Ester had taken out the copilot’s panel as well.

  He glanced around for the flight engineer: I need some help to fly this sonofabitch!

  The flight engineer was nowhere in sight. But Ester was: As Bitter watched, a fist-size lump of his brain tissue slipped out of his shattered head and then hung there, suspended by a vein or something.

  Bitter threw up before he felt nauseated, the vomitus landing in his lap.

  He grabbed the intercom mike.

  “Somebody come up here!” he ordered.

  He looked at the magnetic compass mounted on the top of the windshield. The Plexiglas window had been shattered within an inch of the compass, but the compass seemed to be working. He checked by steering right and then left.

  The compass responded by swinging. That meant, since it was working, that he was headed northeast—in other words, into Germany, in the direction of Berlin.

  The flight engineer appeared, looking dazed.

  “Navigator and bombardier are dead, sir,” he said.

  “Get the copilot out of his seat,” Bitter ordered. “And then get Major Ester out of the way.”

  Bitter started the B-17 on a slow and level 180-degree turn. It took all of his concentration. His inexperience with B-17s was made incredibly worse by having all his power on one wing. And when he applied much rudder pedal pressure, a burning pain shot up and down his leg from his ankle to his crotch.

  When he next had time to look up, he saw that the flight engineer had pulled Ester along the narrow aisle and covered his head and torso with his sheepskin jacket. A moment later, another of the crewmen appeared, and between them they manhandled the copilot from his seat.

  The odds, Bitter thought, strangely calm, against getting this airplane back on two engines are staggering. And even if I can get it to a decent cruising altitude, there will be swarms of fighters waiting to take us out. The only chance we have is to keep doing exactly what I’m doing now: flying it 500 feet off the ground, headed in the general direction of England.

  The flight engineer leaned over him.

  “Everybody in the back is okay,” he said.

  “What about the copilot?” Bitter asked.

  “He’s bleeding bad,” the engineer said, and then asked what was on his mind: “Are you going to crash-land it, sir?”

  “If we lose one of the two engines we still have, we’ll crash, period,” Bitter said without thinking.

  He looked at the inboard port engine. The propeller was turning slightly in its feathered condition. The switch was still on, but there was no smoke.

  He thought it over a moment, and decided there was nothing to do but try. If it caught on fire again, there was no more CO2 to put it out. But maybe it wouldn’t catch on fire; maybe it would even run.

  He took it out of feather, and the propeller started to turn. He found the gauge and saw there was some indication of oil pressure. He moved the throttle half open, then threw the feathering switch again. The blades began to turn, and then began to rotate, forced by the wind.

  He looked at the ENGINE RPM indicator, aware that he had no idea at all whether it was operating.

  And then, before he heard the burst of noise, the indicator needle leapt. Now he had three engines. That might be enough.

  He looked at the airspeed indicator. He was making 230 miles per hour. The fuel gauges, if they were working, showed just over half full. There was no reason he shouldn’t try to make it back to England, even if he didn’t know where England was, except in the most general terms: somewhere west of where he was.

  He saw a fighter plane above him and ahead of him. Without thinking about what he was doing, he pushed the nose forward. It was a fighter pilot’s response, a dazed fighter pilot’s response: If you don’t have a chance to get above your enemy, go down on the deck and pray he doesn’t see you.

  He was now 200 feet off the ground, close enough so there was the sensation of speed.

  God takes care of fools and drunks, he thought. If I set this thing down anywhere here, I’m liable to kill myself trying. If I don’t kill myself and everybody on here, we’ll all wind up as prisoners. What I’m going to do is try to take this sonofabitch home on the deck. When I get to England, we can all bail out.

  An hour later, he passed a coastline; and an hour after that, with his fuel gauge indicators approaching zero, he saw another coastline ahead. By then he had calmed down. If he had managed to take the airplane three or four hundred miles 200 feet off the deck—sometimes actually flying between hills and around church steeples—there was no real reason he couldn’t get it on the deck at the first airfield.

  He pulled gently on the wheel. What he needed now was some altitude so that he could see an airfield. He picked up the microphone and summoned one of the crewmen to the cockpit.

  “I’ve never landed one of these things before,” he said. “And there is a good chance that the landing gear is damaged. When I find a field, what I suggest you do is bail out. Tell the others.”

  The crewman came back in five minutes, just before he spotted a group of B-17s circling an airfield, obviously landing.

  “We’ll ride it down, sir,” he said.

  “Then you sit over there and read me the landing checklist,” Bitter ordered. The crewman looked in revulsion at the ghastly, bloody flesh-and-brain -matter-splattered copilot’s seat, but he finally sat gingerly down and started looking for the checklist.

  Bitter tried the radio but got no response. The only thing to do was simply break into the circle of landing aircraft and chance that he wouldn’t get into a collision. Then he realized there was no greater danger breaking in among the aircraft about to land than waiting around at the end of
the line.

  “Skipper,”a voice came over the earphones, startling him.“That’s Horham. If you think you can make it, Fersfield is about twenty miles. Steer 270.”

  Bitter decided that trying to make another twenty miles was less risk than breaking into the traffic here, and turned so the vertical marker on the compass covered the 7 in 270.

  There were no airplanes in the air over Fersfield, which was a relief. Which was immediately replaced by terror when there was a sharp blast right beside him in the cabin. He looked and saw that the flight engineer had fired a flare out the copilot’s side window.

  “What was that for?”

  The flight engineer gave him a strange look.

  “Wounded aboard,” he said. “We fire a flare when we have wounded aboard.”

  Ignoring the pain that shot through his knee and leg when he worked he rudder pedals, Bitter turned the B-17 onto its final approach path, retarded the throttles, and had several hasty, terrifying thoughts:

  Flaps! What the hell kind of flaps do I use? Are they working?

  The gear! How is this big sonofabitch going to handle when I put the gear into the slipstream?

  The flaps and the gear.

  Am I now going to dump it, after having brought it this far?

  How am I going to steer this sonofabitch on the ground if my knee goes out?

  Or I faint?

  Should I go around and pick up altitude and let the others bail out?

  One of the questions was immediately answered: “Gear going down,” the flight engineer’s voice said, then: “Gear down and locked.”

  “Twenty degrees flaps,” Bitter ordered.

  The airspeed immediately began to drop, and control went mushy. He pushed the throttles forward.

  “Twenty degrees flaps,” the flight engineer reported.

  He was now lined up with the runway, approaching the threshold.

  He was afraid to cut power. He suspected the seventeen might sink like a stone without it. He would fly it onto the ground, as a fighter is landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier, and pray that he would be able to stop it once he was there.

  But almost instantly he recognized that had been the wrong decision. The B-17 was high above the runway. He reached out for the throttle quadrant and pulled the levers toward him. And still it wanted to fly. He pushed the wheel forward and the wheels touched and chirped, and then it bounced into the air again. His hands on the wheel were shaking.

  He touched down again and raised the nose, and it bounced again into the air, then touched down a third time and stayed down. He tapped the brakes, tapped them again, and again, and was aware that every time he pushed hard he was making an animal-like noise—a cross between a moan and a shriek—when the knee flamed with pain.

  But finally, with five hundred yards of runway left, the B-17 shuddered to a stop.

  He gunned the port inboard engine enough to get him off the runway, then he chopped the throttle again and flipped the MASTER switch to off.

  He exhaled. When he inhaled, he smelled the vomitus in his lap, and something else foul. And there was a stabbing pain in his knee and leg. And he felt a clammy sweat soak his face and back and was sure he was going to pass out.

  But instead, without warning he threw up again. He was dimly aware that crash trucks, and ambulances, and a parade of other vehicles were heading toward the airplane. He looked at his wristwatch. His whole arm was trembling so severely that he could not see where the hands were on the face of his watch.

  [FOUR]

  When Lt. Commander Edwin H. Bitter, USN, exited the aircraft, Lt. Commander John B. Dolan, USNR, was there to greet him. But his welcome was not exactly what Bitter expected.

  When Bitter put his arm around Dolan’s shoulders to take the weight off his knee, Dolan’s strong arm went around Bitter, and he looked at him with concern and compassion. But what he said was:

  “Goddamn you! I told you, you should have told that little shit to fuck himself!”

  “The little shit’s dead, Dolan,” Bitter said, and made a vague gesture toward the airplane.

  “We thought you were all dead,” Dolan said furiously. “The last time anybody seen you, you had two engines on fire and you was in a spin. The Air Corps’s not too smart with spins. I was just getting up my courage to call Canidy.”

  “Did you?” Bitter asked. Over Dolan’s shoulder he saw Sergeant Agnes Draper, standing beside the Packard.

  “I was about to, goddamn it,” Dolan said.

  Bitter saw medics carrying a blanket-covered body to an ambulance.

  He looked at Sergeant Draper. She was chewing her lips. And then she started to walk toward him.

  And then Lt. Colonel D’Angelo was there.

  “Are you all right, Commander?” he asked. “Something wrong with your leg?”

  "I hurt it in the Orient,” Bitter said. “I must have strained it again. I wasn’t hit. I’m all right. I was lucky.”

  D’Angelo went into the aircraft, then returned as Sergeant Draper walked up and said,“I’m very glad to see you, Commander. Are you all right?”

  “Sergeant Haskell just told me you brought it home,” D’Angelo said.

  “I didn’t have much of a choice, did I?” Bitter said.

  D’Angelo handed him a miniature bottle of Jack Daniel’s bourbon. Bitter unscrewed the cap and drank it down. He felt the warmth in his stomach. D’Angelo handed him another and he drank that down, and that was a bad idea, for he threw up again without warning.

  The humiliation was bad enough, but he saw pity in Sergeant Draper’s eyes and that made it worse.

  “Get a jeep, Dolan,” Bitter ordered.

  “A jeep?”

  “Look at me, for God’s sake!” Bitter said, gesturing at his blood-covered flight gear. “I don’t want to mess up Canidy’s goddamned Packard!”

  “We’ll just get that high-altitude gear off you, Commander,” Dolan said, and very gently started to undress him.

  “When he’s through with the crew,” D’Angelo said, “I’ll send the debriefing officer over.”

  “I don’t know what the hell I can tell him,” Bitter said.

  “I’ll tell him to make it brief,” D’Angelo said. “What I want to know is how you got it out of the spin.”

  Bitter looked at him.

  “The last sighting had you in a spin,” D’Angelo said.

  Bitter was genuinely astonished at his response, which came without thinking.

  “I’m a naval aviator, Colonel,” he said. “They teach us how to get out of spins.”

  D’Angelo’s face flashed surprise and even annoyance. Dolan chuckled heartily, and D’Angelo glowered at him, but then smiled.

  “Dumb question,” he said,“dumb answer.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Bitter said. “I don’t know why I said that.”

  “Raise your leg, Commander, please,” Sergeant Draper said, and Bitter felt a tug at his leg. Sergeant Draper was on her knees in the muddy grass. His sheepskin trousers were down around his ankles.

  Colonel D’Angelo put his arm around Bitter’s shoulders to steady him.

  “Right now, Commander,” D’Angelo said, “I think you have the right to say any goddamn thing you want to.”

  Sergeant Draper pulled the sheepskin trousers off his feet, and then stood up and smiled at him.

  “You’re in pain, aren’t you?” Agnes Draper asked—challenged—softly.

  “If Dolan can come up with some ice and a rubber sheet, it will be all right,” Bitter said.

  “Well, let’s get you home, Commander,” Dolan said, and wrapped his arm around him. Agnes took Bitter’s other arm and put it around her shoulder. And between them, Bitter hobbled to Canidy’s Packard.

  [FIVE]

  When they got to the BOQ, Dolan sent a white hat after ice: “I don’t want any excuses, just come back with ice.”

  Then they set Bitter down gently on his bed.

  Dolan gave him three ounces of rye, stra
ight, with an almost motherly admonition:“Drink it all; it’ll be good for you.”

  The ice arrived in a garbage can carried by one of the white hats and Lieutenant Kennedy. A moment later, the other white hat came in with an oilskin tablecloth.

  “I didn’t know where to get a rubber sheet,” he said.

  Bitter raised the lower part of his body so the tablecloth could be put under it, while Dolan made an ice pack with a torn sheet. Then, very matter -of-factly, Sergeant Draper ordered Commander Bitter to loosen his belt and undo his fly.

  She took off his shoes, then pulled his trousers off.

  There was only a moment before a major arrived for postflight debriefing. He handed Bitter a miniature 1.5-ounce bottle of medical bourbon. Surprising himself, Bitter twisted the cap off and drank it down.

  Agnes Draper took the ice pack from Dolan and gently patted it in place on Bitter’s leg.

  The debriefing officer was good at his work. He skillfully drew from Bitter the story of what had happened on “Danny’s Darling.” Twice, Agnes Draper took Bitter’s glass from him and added rye.

  And both times he found himself looking into her eyes.

  And then he caught himself staring at her as she stood leaning against the wall, her breasts straining the buttons of her blouse, her stomach pressing the front of her skirt. And he sensed that she knew what he was looking at and didn’t care.

  But she left with the others when the debriefing officer was finished.

  “If the leg is still giving you trouble in the morning,” she said on the way out, “you’d better send for the flight surgeon. Right now, what you need is another belt of rye, and some sleep.”

  Bitter fell asleep wondering what Sergeant Agnes Draper’s belly looked like when she wasn’t wearing a uniform skirt.

  When he woke up, Sergeant Agnes Draper was sitting on his bed, pinning his shoulders down.

  “You were having a nightmare,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said.