“What about the little planes that came with them? What are they called?”
“They’re called PQ-14,” Pruitt replied, “and yes, they were flown here by real live pilots, too. They were built to be target drones for anti-aircraft gunner training. They’re just wooden airframes built around a small engine. You never saw one before?”
“No, sir. Never saw one before in my life. But I’m confused. What do target drones have to do with all this?”
“They fly with the same radio-control system used on the B-17….excuse me, the BQ-7. I guess I’d better start getting my terminology right. Apparently, the geniuses who thought all this up want to use them to test for radio interference in this area before they put up the big bomb.”
“I see, sir. That BQ-7 sitting out there—it didn’t land here loaded with explosives, did it?”
“Of course not, Tommy. That’d be much too dangerous. Besides, it couldn’t get off the ground loaded with all those explosives plus enough fuel to make it to us in one hop, and having to make a refueling stop en route would increase that danger exponentially. So it’ll be armed here, before it’s launched on its mission.”
“Whew…that’s a relief. So where do I fit into all this, sir?”
“You’d ride with the mothership and act as liaison for the radio wizards so they figure out how to hit the right fort and not endanger any of our own troops. That ship can do a catastrophic amount of damage if it comes down in the wrong place. I can’t think of a man better suited to this task than you, Tommy. You’ve got the talent for getting conflicting sides of a situation to work together. And you move on from setbacks better than just about any junior officer I’ve ever served with. And from the little I’ve been told about Operation Aphrodite, setback seems to be its middle name.”
Colonel Pruitt let it all settle in for a few moments before asking, “So what’s it going to be, Lieutenant. Are you in?”
“Absolutely, sir.”
The sudden onset of hard rain on the metal roof of the Quonset began its noisy symphony. There would be no more flying for the 301st today.
“The weather guys say we’re probably in for a couple of days of rain and low ceilings,” Pruitt said. “It’ll be a good chance for you to get familiar with the Operation Aphrodite personnel and equipment. And remember what I said, Tommy—not a word, not even a hint, about the project and what it’s supposed to do to anyone.”
“Yes, sir. I understand.”
“Good. I’ll tell you what, Tommy…since you won’t be going anywhere the rest of the day, I’ll have the Aphrodite project officer come over here to get you all indoctrinated and set up with the necessary clearances. Can’t have you getting shot by the MPs the minute you set foot on Zebra Ramp.”
“Zebra Ramp, sir?”
“Yeah, that’s what we’ve named that area where the Aphrodite ships are parked.”
Major Rick Staunton wasn’t a pilot. In fact, he didn’t wear airman’s wings of any kind. But he was an electrical engineer—a radio wizard—and he was the man in charge of Operation Bucket, the plan to put an Operation Aphrodite flying bomb on Fort Driant.
He looked anything but a field grade officer. His ill-fitting khakis were smudged and rumpled, hanging on his short, pudgy frame as if they’d been stuffed into a damp and dirty duffle bag for days. The major’s leaf and Air Force insignia pinned to his open collar were carelessly out of alignment. The thick Coke-bottle lenses in his wire-rimmed eyeglasses seemed impossibly heavy and about to fall out at any second. He raced about with short, rapid steps as if speed walking, always seeming preoccupied with matters elsewhere.
He asked Tommy what he knew about radio and electronics and then seemed annoyed with the honest answer: “I don’t know much of anything about it, sir. I can tune a dial. That’s about it.”
“But you are a pilot, aren’t you?” Staunton sputtered, seemingly oblivious to the silver wings embossed on his flight jacket and the leather flying helmet, complete with goggles and dangling headset wires, in his hand. “Don’t tell me I’ve been sent someone who’s not a pilot.”
Tommy took a long, hard look at this strange little man standing before him and came to two conclusions. First conclusion: He’s shorter than me. I just barely made the height requirement to join the service. He wouldn’t make it. Second conclusion: This guy’s one of those academics they dragged into the service for some special job in this war, gave him enough rank so everyone but the big brass would have to leave him alone and didn’t bother explaining anything else about the military and how it worked. How else could he possibly not know I’m a pilot just by looking at the get-up I’m wearing?
“No, sir,” Tommy replied, pointing to the wings on his chest. “They sent you a real live pilot.”
The major replied with only a grunt. Tommy couldn’t tell if it meant he had accepted the obvious or was simply underwhelmed by it. Without saying another word, Staunton walked outside into the pouring rain and took the wheel of a parked jeep, gesturing impatiently for Tommy to get in.
“It’s just rain, Lieutenant Moon. Not even an almighty pilot will melt in it.”
Tommy’s smile belied what he was thinking: This guy’s sure got the art of condescension down pat.
Tommy figured the drive to the other side of A-90—a circuitous run around the airfield’s perimeter—would be made in stony silence. He was surprised when Staunton turned to him and said, “If you ask me, Lieutenant, the use of our babies against some insignificant target like this fort everyone’s so concerned about—this Operation Bucket—is a colossal waste of an expensive strategic asset.”
“Babies, sir?” Tommy replied. “You mean the flying bombs?”
Staunton didn’t bother to hide his annoyance. “Yes, of course that’s what I mean, Lieutenant.”
“And you consider Fort Driant an insignificant target, sir?”
“Do I stutter, Lieutenant? Don’t ask me to repeat myself again, if you don’t mind.”
“Well, sir…with all due respect, the GIs fighting and dying in droves trying to take that damn fort don’t consider it insignificant. For them it’s a matter of life or death.”
“If wouldn’t be if they knew what they were doing, Lieutenant.”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but competence isn’t the issue here. It’s firepower. And right now, the advantage is with the Germans. Take my word for it. Those GIs need all the help they can get right now. And if we can give it to them, I’ll be glad to help.”
Staunton smirked, rejecting Tommy’s assertion as if he and he alone knew some truth the rest of the US Army Air Force did not. They fell into silence, listening only to the murmur of the jeep’s engine and the patter of rain on her canvas roof until they arrived at Zebra Ramp.
General Bradley had wanted this discussion with George Patton to be face-to-face, but the bad weather was keeping his personal plane on the ground just like every other Allied aircraft in eastern France. A shouted conversation over a staticky, barely readable landline would have to suffice.
“George,” Bradley said, “when do you plan to tell your corps and division commanders about using the Operation Bucket flying bomb against Fort Driant?”
“I don’t plan on telling them a damn thing, Brad, until that contraption is ready to take to the air.”
Bradley wasn’t sure he heard that correctly through the static. “Say again,” he said, “slower this time.”
There was no mistaking Patton’s words on the second try.
“Dammit, George, you’ve got to give them plenty of warning. We don’t want any of our boys within five miles of the fort when that thing gets airborne. They’ll need time to pull back.”
“Believe me, Brad, when I give them the word, they’ll get out of the way on the double.”
“But George, this whole thing is so fantastic—and so unknown, even to your generals—that if we do it your way, they might not have enough time to appreciate the uncertainty of this thing and react accordingly. You need
to tell them now, so they can make the appropriate plans to protect their men.”
“Bullshit, Brad. This weather’s not going to break for several days. Maybe a week. If I tell them now, they’ll just sit on their hands until the big bang comes. But I’m going to keep trying to take that damn fort right up to the last damn minute. If it turns out I don’t need the favor from Tooey Spaatz and his Buck Rogers contingent, well…c’est la guerre.”
“No, George, that won’t do. I don’t want any poor son of a bitch caught with his pants down when this thing falls out of the sky. Consider this an order: your men in the Metz area are to have twenty-four hours’ notice before Operation Bucket is executed. Not a minute less.”
The landline connection was deteriorating steadily. Bradley wondered if Patton had actually understood the order when he replied, “Okay, Brad. I’ll do that.”
No bickering, no counterproposal. Just “Okay, Brad.” That’s so unlike George Patton.
Of course, Bradley knew all too well Patton’s talent for interpreting—or just plain ignoring—orders he didn’t like. Maybe that’s the game he was playing right now. And in Omar Bradley’s mind, that game could come to a disastrous conclusion.
Bradley would send a communiqué reiterating the order immediately. If it was in writing—even without a specific reference revealing the nature of Operation Bucket—at least his ass would be covered should the unthinkable happen. But in the long run, it would make no difference. Barring a needless catastrophe costing the lives of hundreds—maybe thousands—of his GIs, Bradley knew he could never impose a price on George Patton for ignoring it.
I might as well shoot myself in the foot, Bradley thought. George is like a cat. He’s got nine lives, and he’s only used up three of them by my count.
Besides, I need him, warts and all.
Chapter Twelve
Tommy Moon had been inside a Flying Fortress before. The 301st Fighter Squadron had shared an airbase in England with a USAAF heavy bomber squadron, and the pilots from each had spent some time getting a good look at how the other half lived. The bomber jockeys were always jealous of the fighter’s speed and maneuverability. The fighter jocks yearned for the spacious cockpits the B-17 crews worked in, with room to move around and stretch your legs occasionally. You could even pee and defecate in a chemical toilet if necessary. But the bomber boys insisted that actually using the toilet was too inconvenient at altitude, requiring the user to peel off multiple layers of flight clothing in the subzero cold and lug a portable oxygen bottle with him lest he pass out on the can. For the gunners, a toilet break was out of the question. Any one of them not at their station during a mission could get them all killed if German fighters suddenly attacked.
Their solution? They urinated in empty beer bottles and threw them overboard when they reached their target. Sometimes they didn’t wait that long.
Still, to a fighter pilot, trapped in his seat for the duration of a flight, it sounded better than trying to use the P-47’s facility, a relief tube of small diameter. Using it while trying to fly at the same time was an awkward affair and usually resulted in pissing on your legs and at least one hand. If you tried to use the tube a second time on the same flight, the outlet would undoubtedly be frozen, causing the tube to quickly overflow into the cockpit.
Should a fighter jock have to defecate before making it back to the ground and the nearest latrine, well…that’s why he had more than one uniform.
This B-17, though—correction, this BQ-7—looked far different on the inside than the ones he knew back in England. Its interior was practically empty, except for the cockpit instrument panels, flight controls, and the two pilot seats. Everything else—machine guns, powered turrets, oxygen system, bombsight, navigator’s station, bomb racks, even the chemical toilet Tommy so envied—had been removed to save weight.
He did notice some components the operational bombers didn’t have, electronics units and wire bundles jury-rigged haphazardly into place. He wasn’t sure what they did, but he was about to find out. It would be Tech Sergeant Ira Dandridge’s job to give him the two-dollar tour.
“You’ll get used to Major Staunton, sir,” Sergeant Dandridge said, rolling his eyes in acknowledgement of his boss’ many quirks. “He’s a brilliant guy. The trouble is, he doesn’t mind telling you. But he knows more about this project than all the rest of us put together. Bear with him and you’ll learn a lot.”
“If you ask me, the guy needs a good dose of the front lines,” Tommy replied.
“But don’t tell him that, okay? Let’s get you started here, Lieutenant.”
They settled into the pilots’ seats. Directing Tommy’s attention to an odd-looking box suspended behind the left seat, Dandridge said, “That’s one of two television cameras on board. Are you familiar with television, sir?”
“I saw it at the New York World’s Fair in ’39, but that’s about it.”
“It’s pretty amazing stuff, actually,” Dandridge continued. “Basically, the camera breaks the image it sees before it into several hundred horizontal lines of video information and scans the entire field of those lines from top to bottom many times a second. This creates video frames similar in concept to the frames in a strip of movie film. We broadcast this video information to the mothership—the CQ-17—where the drone operator—that’s me, by the way—can see it on a video monitor, just like I’m looking at it right now.”
“I think I get it,” Tommy said. “This camera lets you see all the flight and engine instruments, just like a pilot would.”
“Just the flight instruments, sir. The engine gauges are out of frame.”
Sensing Tommy’s concern, he added, “It’s not like we could do much if we had an engine problem, anyway. We control the throttles and absolutely nothing else.”
“Yeah, I see your point. You said this was one of two cameras. Where’s the other one?”
“It’s in the nose, where the bombsight used to be. We’ll take a look at it in a little bit.”
“And that one gives you the view ahead of the ship?”
“Correct, sir.”
“Okay,” Tommy said, “you’re looking at these television images in the mothership. What happens then?”
“I use what I see to actually fly the baby remotely.”
“By radio control?”
“That’s right,” Dandridge replied. “I have a control box with a joystick and switches that let me control the elevators, ailerons, rudder, and throttles.” He pointed to a device that looked like a small electric motor bolted to the center instrument panel. A metal rod extended from a crank on the motor to the throttle levers. “This is the servo that gives me control of the throttles,” he continued. “For the elevators, ailerons, and rudder, we’re wired into the baby’s autopilot.” He tapped the controller for the C-1 autopilot mounted at the rear of the center pedestal. “We use the autopilot amplifiers and servos to control those flight surfaces.”
“Why couldn’t you couple your remote-control stuff directly to the control column like you did with the throttles?” Tommy asked. “Why go through the autopilot?”
Dandridge sighed, like that was a sore topic. “That’s how it was originally configured, sir,” he replied, “but it was a disaster. The baby was much too easy to overcontrol. We wrecked four of them before we gave up—nothing but stalls, spins, and smacking into the ground. Then we wired it through the autopilot, and that gave us much gentler responses.”
The rain was falling harder, sounding like a continuous stream of ball bearings was being poured on the thin aluminum skin of the bomber. To Tommy, it sounded too much like the sound of bullets striking his aircraft, something he’d heard more times than he cared to remember.
To Sergeant Dandridge, though, the driving rain presented a different nightmare. “These old ships leak like sieves in the rain,” he said, pointing to thin but steady streams of water running into the cockpit from deteriorated window seals and the big sheet metal patch where the top turr
et used to be. “We’ve got to be very careful to keep the water out of the electronics units and wiring. A short circuit—even a little corrosion on the connectors—could cause us to lose radio control of the baby.”
Dandridge pointed to several black metal boxes strapped to the floor behind the pilots’ seats. Wire cables like stout rope were plugged into the boxes. “That box there is the transmitter that sends the TV signal to the mothership,” he said, pointing to the nearest one. “The one beside it is the receiver that picks up my signals from the mothership and feeds them to the autopilot and throttle servo. Those boxes behind them are the inverters and power supplies. These units pull a hell of a lot of juice. It’s a good thing so many of the ship’s systems that used electricity have been removed or deactivated. Otherwise, her electrical system wouldn’t have been powerful enough for all them and this Castor set-up, too.”
“Castor?” Tommy asked.
“Yeah, that’s the name they gave this upgraded control system. It replaced something called Double-Azon. That was our original control system for Aphrodite, but it just didn’t work worth a damn on the babies. Too crude.”
“I heard about that Azon project,” Tommy said. “It stood for azimuth only, right?”
“That’s right, sir.”
“So you were trying to use two of those systems together, with one for azimuth, the other for pitch?”
“You catch on real fast, Lieutenant.”
“Yeah, we knew about those radio-guided bombs with Azon. It was like giving the bombardier one more chance to get it right after he pickled them away. Didn’t work real well for that, either, though, did it?”
“No,” Dandridge replied, with a sad shake of his head. “It sounded great in theory, but…”
After a moment of awkward silence, Dandridge said, “Let me show you the rest of the installation here, sir, and then we’ll check out the mothership.”
Fortress Falling (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 2) Page 9