He popped open the hatch and stuck his head out.
It only took a second to tell they were Germans. The shape of their coal scuttle helmets gave them away. The sound of bullets striking the turret and hull was so much louder with the hatch open.
Pulling his head back inside, he told Fabiano, “Traverse right, thirty degrees rough. Krauts in the open, range forty yards. Hit ’em with the coax.”
The gunner swung the turret to Sean’s mark. “Yeah, I got ’em.” Then he hesitated. “You sure they’re Krauts, Sarge?”
“Yeah. Fire that fucking thirty cal, dammit.”
Under his breath, Fabiano mumbled, “God forgive me, maybe.” Then he pressed the foot switch that fired the turret’s coaxial machine gun.
“There you go,” Sean told his gunner. “Now keep firing, traverse as necessary.”
Then he told Kowalski, “Ski, turn right to two o’clock.”
“We’re gonna be driving right at ’em, Sarge,” the driver replied, his tense voice climbing in pitch.
“That’s the idea.” Then he addressed Bagdasarian, his brand new assistant driver, sitting next to Kowalski, manning the bow machine gun. “Bags, anything in front of us now is fair game. Knock them down. Got that?”
“Affirmative, Sarge. Loud and clear.”
Gotta love these new guys, Sean thought. They don’t talk back to you. They don’t know shit, either, but Ski will keep him straight.
Within seconds, Kowalski was doing just that, shrieking at Bagdasarian, “SHOOT HIM. SHOOT HIM, FOR GOD’S SAKE.”
In the split second it took Sean to pivot the periscope forward, Bagdasarian had begun to fire. But the rounds were short, splashing on a low parapet, doing little more than spraying dirt at a German soldier with a panzerfaust on his shoulder.
It seemed everyone on board Lucky 7 was screaming, “SHORT! SHORT! BRING IT UP!”
Fabiano didn’t need to be told to traverse the turret and bring the coaxial machine gun to bear. But that would take precious seconds.
Through the prism of the periscope, Sean watched the life-or-death struggle unfold—like he had so many times before—in slow motion.
Here we go again. One lunatic Kraut with nothing but his uniform for armor—with one crappy little rocket on his shoulder—against us here in the belly of this iron beast.
He’s gotta be some stupid volunteer, all hopped up on Dexedrine or something, like all them hardline Krauts are.
The fucking idiot.
But that fucking idiot is just a second away from killing us all.
It probably happened all at once: the German squeezing the panzerfaust’s trigger; the tank’s bullets ripping him apart.
The rocket streaked past the turret, missing by little more than a foot.
Then Sean and his crew heard nothing but the sound of their hearts pounding in their ears, louder even than the roar of Lucky 7’s engine.
Another shriek from the bow. Kowalski again, this time without words.
Just an anguished cry.
“What happened, Ski?” Sean asked.
It took a few seconds for Kowalski to put together his answer. “Ahh…ahh, shit…it’s…it’s nothing. There was another Kraut out there. I just ran over him.”
“Did he have a rocket?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Well,” Sean said, “it don’t matter now, does it? Turn left to ten o’clock. Pour the coals on. Catch up with the rest of them.”
There was a thud from the rear of the tank. The engine faltered for a moment as the acrid fumes of explosives assaulted their senses.
Kowalski backed off on the drive levers, let the engine recover, and then resumed the race out of the fort.
“What the fuck was that?” Fabiano asked. “We blow a fan or something?”
“I don’t know,” Sean replied. “Ski, what’s your panel telling you?”
“Temps are all going up. Still making good RPMs, though.”
“Then get us the hell out of here.”
They made it back through the breach in the wire before Lucky 7’s engine got balky. Kowalski was able to keep her crawling along at far from top speed. But it was enough to get them back to the assembly area.
Once they’d gotten well beyond the wire, Sean finally felt safe to open the hatch and ride with his head out. When he looked over the rear of the tank, though, he got a surprise: there was a dead German hanging off her aft deck. He was missing an arm and most of his face. Also missing: half of the engine air inlet grille. There was nothing but mangled metal where it used to be.
Son of a bitch! That Kraut must’ve cut the grille away and tried to stuff a grenade down the manifold. Wasn’t his lucky day, though: doesn’t look like the grenade went all the way down. If it had, we might all look just like him right now.
So I guess it’s our lucky day.
It took a close second look to realize why the German was still attached to the tank: his web gear was hooked on the pickaxe strapped to the aft deck.
His own grenade ripped him to shreds. He couldn’t even get himself blown off the old girl. Stupid bastard…that’s what you get for volunteering.
At first, the battalion intel officer, a captain, had no interest in the dead German. But he returned a few minutes later with a booklet on Wehrmacht uniforms and insignia in hand.
“This guy’s an officer cadet,” the captain said. “We heard some rumors that Driant was staffed with cadets instead of line troops, but this is the first actual proof we’ve seen.”
“Figured,” Sean said. “Officer cadets. Volunteers. Uncle Adolph’s got those lunatic bastards hook, line, and sinker.”
Fabiano asked, “So what’s the big deal, Sarge? That means they’re rookies who don’t know nothing, right?”
“No, you moron. It means they probably take this fight to the last man bullshit real serious. You won’t see no cadet throwing up his hands and yelling kamerad like when them run-of-the-mill Krauts surrender.”
Sean looked to the intel officer and said, “So maybe it makes more sense if we just go around this fucking city, sir, and stop getting our brains beat in?”
“That would be nice, wouldn’t it, Sergeant? But there’s just one thing: it would take at least two more divisions than we have at Metz right now to pull that off. If we just go around, we won’t have anybody keeping all these lunatic bastards fixed in place. Our backsides will be wide open. We’ll walk ourselves right into a trap—a double envelopment.”
Sean smiled knowingly. “So let me guess the rest, Captain. We won’t have enough troops in place until we get the gas to bring them all here, right?”
“You catch on real quick, Sergeant.”
Chapter Eighteen
By 1400, the overcast had finally broken up. There were nearly four hours of prime flying time left before sunset, and the P-47s of 301st Fighter Squadron roared into the sky to make the most of it in support of 3rd Army.
Once all the fighters were airborne, the CQ-17 mothership got her turn on the runway. Tommy Moon was riding in the nose in what was usually the navigator’s position. Since it was a local flight in visual conditions, he—the only person on board familiar with the area—would be the navigator, for all practical purposes.
Just forward of him was Sergeant Dandridge, in what would have been the bombardier’s seat if this aircraft was on a conventional bombing mission. The Norden bombsight had been removed, replaced by Dandridge’s remote-control equipment.
“Pretty good view,” Tommy said as he looked through the plexiglass nose. “I’ve never gotten to see the runway ahead of me drop away like that.”
“Really?” Dandridge replied, a little surprised. “How come, sir?”
“Simple. My ship’s big ol’ nose is always in the way.”
There was one other difference between taking off in the jug and this modified B-17: speed. In the three minutes they’d been airborne, the swift jug would’ve been halfway to Nancy. This lumbering beast was barely beyond the T
oul city limits. But the unobstructed scenery unfolding before the mothership’s plexiglass nose was spectacular to behold: the muted yet gorgeous colors of the French countryside in fall, the red brick clusters of quaint towns which—from this distance—looked out of a storybook rather than the scenes of recent, brutal combat. Gazing to the horizon, Tommy knew he was looking into Germany, whose border was some fifty miles to the east.
“Here’s the procedure,” Dandridge said. “In a minute, we’ll do a one-eighty and keep climbing. Once we’re at about three thousand feet, they’ll launch the PQ-14.”
“And there’s no pilot in it, right?”
“That’s right, sir. The team on the ground will control the drone through takeoff and climb. Once I visually acquire it, control will pass to me.”
“You’ve done this before, I take it, Sergeant?”
“Oh, yeah. Lots of times.”
“So it’s okay to put the little ones up without a pilot, but the real deal—the baby—always needs actual pilots to get off the ground?”
“That’s right, sir. We just don’t have enough control authority through the baby’s autopilot to risk a takeoff. The system’s good…but it’s not that good. It’s only designed for gentle maneuvers at cruise. With the PQ-14, though, there’s no autopilot involved. We’ve got direct control of its stick, so we can do anything a pilot can do. Of course, it helps that it flies like a big toy, too.”
As Dandridge did a final check of his equipment, Tommy said, “I’m a little surprised Major Staunton isn’t coming with us.”
“He never comes on the missions, sir. Maybe we should have brought this up earlier, but…well, here’s the deal: Major Staunton is prone to airsickness. They say it could be dangerous if he flies.”
“Hell, yeah, it could be dangerous,” Tommy replied. “Puking into your oxygen mask is a great way to choke to death.”
“He’s come along on a few of the low-level test flights we’ve done, when we didn’t need to use oxygen. But it was a nightmare each time. And the smell…it takes forever to get rid of it.”
A voice in their headphones reported the Culver was airborne.
“Culver?” Tommy said. “That’s the code name for the PQ-14?”
“Not really a code, sir. That’s the name of the company that makes it. It’s as distinctive as anything, I guess.”
“So we’re dealing with motherships, Culvers, and babies.”
“Exactly, sir.”
The mothership had almost completed its 180-degree turn, giving them a view back toward A-90 through the expanse of the plexiglass nose. Tommy thought it would be easy to spot the little airplane painted bright yellow climbing toward them.
But he didn’t see it. “Where the hell is she?”
“It’s pretty hard to spot when you’re looking at it almost dead on, sir.”
“But do you see her, Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir. It’s at eleven o’clock, about in line with the third rivet from the bottom on the optically flat panel.”
Tommy slid closer to share Dandridge’s point of view. It took a lot of squinting, but he could just make out the forward silhouette of the tiny Culver. Just barely.
“It’ll get a lot easier to see once it turns, sir,” Dandridge said. “Those yellow wings will be hard to miss.”
The drone’s ground control team was on the radio again. “Almighty Four-One, this is Groundhog. We have good control. Standing by for acquisition.”
His face pressed against the television monitor’s hood, Dandridge fiddled with its knobs, trying to get a stable image from the Culver’s single camera. With a few careful adjustments, what was just a pattern of slowly rolling diagonal lines on the screen became a steady image of the Culver’s very spare instrument panel and the view over her nose.
“There,” Dandridge said, with a hint of relief. “That ought to do it.”
Then he was back on the radio. “Groundhog from Almighty Four-One, video acquired. Repeat, video acquired. Level the Culver on heading two-four-zero for handoff.”
“Roger, Almighty.”
Dandridge told Tommy, “If all goes well, sir, once we take control we can fly it over the target area and make sure there’s no interference of any kind. Then we’ll see if we can actually pull off a steeper approach to target, like you suggest.”
“How’s that going to work, though?” Tommy replied. “Don’t the Culver and the baby have very different flight characteristics?”
“Sure they do. The Culver, as you can see, is much more nimble. But I can tone down the gain on the controller to make her respond more like a B-17.”
“I see,” Tommy replied. “Sounds like a plan.”
He glanced at the airspeed indicator on the bombardier’s panel. It read 120 miles per hour.
“I realize we’re still climbing,” Tommy said, “but won’t we be going a good bit faster once we’re up at altitude?”
“Not on this flight, sir. The Culver climbs at about this speed and cruises at one-fifty. We need to keep her in front of us so we can maintain visual contact.”
“How about with the baby?”
“A little faster, sir. About one-eighty. If we go much more than that, it gets harder to precisely put the baby on target. If your aim’s off a little bit, you may not be able to correct in time.”
Tommy was silent for a few moments, recalling the discussion at his first briefing with Major Staunton, where getting the baby to descend steeply seemed to be presenting a challenging aerodynamic problem. As far as he was still concerned, that was the least of their problems. But he wasn’t surprised at their failure to comprehend. They were electrical engineers, not pilots.
“I’m still a little amazed you guys are worried about getting an airplane to go down,” he said. “Hell, at those speeds, you’re close to dropping out of the sky, anyway.”
“You fighter pilots really like going fast, don’t you, sir?”
“You bet, Sergeant. Speed is life up here.”
Dandridge was on the radio with the ground controllers again. Everyone was happy with the flight’s progress so far. The countdown to changeover of control from ground to air was begun:
“Three…two…one…TOGGLE. Your airplane, Almighty.”
“I’ve got it,” Dandridge replied. He played with the switches on his control box, putting the Culver through a few test maneuvers. First, a series of s-turns, and then a brief drop of the nose followed by a sharp nose up. Finally, he put the drone through a barrel roll.
“Everything feels good,” Dandridge said.
“Pretty responsive,” Tommy added. “I assume you haven’t turned down the controller’s gain to mimic a B-17 yet, right?”
“Correct, sir,” Dandridge replied, his tone polite but with a distinct touch of Can’t fool you, can we?
To save time, the mothership would only climb to 10,000 feet, half her usual operating station of 20,000. Still, it would take twenty-five minutes to get there in her unhurried, spiraling ascent, as she gradually worked her way north toward the fortress of Metz. Every minute they climbed, the Culver—which Dandridge had leveled off at 3,000 feet— was slipping farther below them.
“This is crazy,” Tommy said. “When you’re at twenty thousand and the baby’s way down, almost on the deck and out in front of you, she’s about five miles away. Aren’t you afraid you’ll lose her?”
“No, sir,” Dandridge replied. “It’ll be leaving a smoke trail from that canister on her tail. And it is painted bright yellow. But once we’re on course to target and the cameras are working right, I don’t need to see the baby at all.”
“That’s all well and good, Sergeant, but maybe we should experiment with how to put her into a steep dive first, while we’re still within a mile or so of the Culver and can see exactly what she’s doing. At least we’ll be high enough to make mistakes and get away with it.”
“Sure, we can do that.”
Dandridge called to Lieutenant Wheatley, the mothership’s pilot, a
nd asked that he start s-turning so as not to overtake the Culver during the experiment.
“Okay,” Wheatley replied, “but I don’t know why we’re bothering. Four degrees pitch down is all you’re going to get if you’re simulating the baby. We did the math on this a long time ago.”
Dandridge turned down the gain on his controller to mimic a B-17’s responses. Then he put the Culver through the first test dive. True to Wheatley’s word, a shallow, four-degree descent was the best the controller could wring out of her.
“It’s just like we’re bringing it in for a landing, sir,” he told Tommy.
“That’s great if you’re trying to hit the Empire State Building, but I’m betting you won’t even see your aiming point on top of Fort Driant at that angle. Hell, you may not be able to see the fort at all.”
Dandridge looked perplexed. “So how do we do it differently, sir?”
He didn’t sound like he expected a viable answer.
“I’m saying we stall her, Sergeant, let her nose drop all by itself, then just make gentle adjustments to the dive as necessary.”
The look on the sergeant’s face was as if he’d just heard blasphemy. “But, sir, we went through this already. The system doesn’t have the elevator control authority for that.”
Tommy replied, “We know you don’t have the control authority to order up a steep dive, but I’m betting you sure have enough elevator authority to make the minor corrections necessary to keep her on target once she dives all by herself.”
“How can that be, sir?”
“Believe me, Sergeant, I do this for a living. Like I told you before, the only time you’ll need a lot of elevator authority is when you want to pull out of a dive real fast. We’re not going to have that problem when we attack the fort.”
“But what about now, sir? Will we be able to pull out of the dive?”
“With the altitude cushion we’ve got? Probably. Only one way to find out, though.”
“We’re going to be in deep shit if we lose a Culver doing unauthorized maneuvers, sir.”
“These things were meant to be destroyed, Sergeant. They’re target drones, for cryin’ out loud. If what we learn saves the lives of a whole lot of GIs on the ground, it’d be a small price to pay if we wreck one. Or both.”
Fortress Falling (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 2) Page 15