Sean replied, “That’s what they tell me.”
Cutter was back on the radio. “Okay, we’re on the top floor. There’s about ten dead Krauts and maybe five or six wounded. There’s no fight left in any of them.”
“Any of your guys wounded?”
“No. We’re okay. But what’re we gonna do with their wounded?”
“You got a medic with you?”
“Negative, Sarge.”
“Then take their weapons and move ’em out of the way.”
There was a long pause before Cutter replied, “Roger.”
“We’re coming in through the windows now, Cutter. Do not fucking shoot us, you hear me?”
It was nearly 0430 when the baby’s engines were fired up for the fifth—and final—test of the Torpex’s ignition circuit. Sergeant Inzetta’s exhausted technicians had toiled through the night, reworking every connection on the ship’s grounding bus bar. Then they’d conducted four painstaking tests to ensure there was no stray voltage on the wires that would detonate the explosives prior to impact with a target.
Each of those four tests had passed. The trace on the oscilloscope had remained as straight as a ruler; the needle of the voltmeter connected as a confirming backup hadn’t so much as quivered.
Just one more test. If it passed, they would’ve done everything required to ensure the baby’s pilots would not be the victims of a premature detonation…
Like those two unfortunate Navy pilots had been.
Her four engines now stabilized at idle, the mechanic on the baby’s throttles gently revved them to cruise RPM.
Inzetta’s bloodshot eyes were glued to the green glow of the oscilloscope’s cathode ray tube. He fiddled with some knobs on the instrument’s face, getting the trace line as thin and sharp as it could be.
He knew he was tired, and being tired could lead to mistakes.
Mistakes that could get people killed.
But they just needed one more good test.
He nodded to the tech on the arming switches. “Go ahead, Bob,” he told him. Those three words—so simple, yet so critical—nearly caught in his throat.
It was impossible to hear the click of those two toggle switches over the engine noise. But Rocco Inzetta felt them being activated.
So did Major Staunton, who was looking over Inzetta’s shoulder.
And at the very instant they felt the switches go over, Rocco Inzetta thought he saw that perfectly straight green line on the oscilloscope quiver, like a string vibrating as it was pulled taut.
It couldn’t have lasted more than a fraction of a second.
“It’s back,” Inzetta whispered, surrendering to yet another soul-crushing failure.
Staunton barked, “What did you say?”
“It’s back, sir. We’ve got stray voltage again. I saw it.”
“BULLSHIT,” the major said. “There was nothing there. Perfect flat line. We’re good.”
“No, sir,” Inzetta replied. “With all due respect, I saw the line trace a little voltage. It was small, barely perceptible, but it was there.”
“Sergeant, you’re seeing things. I think you’re too tired to be objective. But regardless, we’ve got the fifth good test.” He pointed to the tech monitoring the voltmeter and asked, “Did the needle kick?”
The tech shook his head. Maybe it was because that’s what he really saw.
Or maybe he knew that’s what Staunton wanted as a reply.
“Then that’s all we need to know,” Staunton said. “The mission is on.”
Rocco Inzetta was too tired to argue. As he felt himself surrendering to the unavoidable, he felt a wave of relief come over him:
It’s out of my hands. It all belongs to Major Staunton now.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Just before dawn, Sean made his way down the tunnel to speak with Lieutenant Chenoweth. Unfolding his sketch of the defenses he’d set up, he told the lieutenant, “We hold the whole bunker now, sir, from the basement to the top floor. That means we hold the whole tunnel from Bunker 3 to Bunker 4, too. As you can see on the drawing here, I’ve got two .30 cals on the ground floor, with interlocking fields of fire that protect the bunker as well as the outside tunnel entrance. The rest of the infantrymen are on the top floor, with good fields of fire in all directions.”
Chenoweth nodded and then pointed to two arrow-shaped symbols drawn on the bunker’s top floor, asking, “What’re these?”
“Bazookas, sir. We’ve got two, with a couple of rockets between them. They’re set up at the ends of the building so the backblast won’t roast any of our own guys.”
“Good plan,” Chenoweth replied. “Best thing about it is that we don’t have to wait for the Air Force to shut those guns up anymore. We won’t need to go outside when we blow the door. We just go down the tunnel to your Bunker 3.”
“My Bunker 3, sir?”
“Yeah, yours, Sergeant Moon. You stay there and keep those dogfaces you found straight. Take the big radios with you, too, so you can keep the whole damn Army informed of what we’re doing.”
“No problem, Lieutenant. Got you covered.”
Chenoweth asked, “Those GIs with you…have they eaten anything?”
“They won’t starve for a while,” Sean replied. “They scoffed down whatever food the Krauts left behind.”
“Good, because we’re about out of K rations. I can’t even feed my own guys now. No way we can feed forty more.”
“Yeah,” Sean replied, “I hear you, Lieutenant. So when are you gonna be ready to blow the door?”
“In about five or six minutes, I think.”
“And what happens after you blow it, sir?”
“We wait until the gas clears and then we storm ourselves a gun battery.”
The sun still wasn’t up when Tommy arrived at Zebra Ramp. There was a flurry of activity around the baby: pallets loaded with the Torpex were being positioned alongside the ship, waiting for the delicate loading process to begin at first light. But when he stepped into the operations tent, it was obvious that something wasn’t quite right.
“Did the arming system test fail again?” he asked Sergeant Inzetta.
The despair in Inzetta’s eyes seemed to be saying yes, but he was shaking his head no.
“What’s wrong, then?”
“Dandridge got a little banged up last night, sir. Truck accident.”
“Is he okay?” Tommy asked.
“I guess so, sir.”
“Where is he?”
Inzetta pointed toward the mess tent.
When Tommy saw Sergeant Dandridge, he definitely didn’t look okay. Both his eyes were blackened. There was a blood-spotted bandage covering half his forehead. He appeared to be favoring his left arm; moving it was obviously painful.
“I’m all right, sir,” Dandridge told Tommy. “Just a couple of bumps and bruises, that’s all. Damn truck we hitched a ride back to base on got run off the road. Ended up nose down in a ditch. The guys in the back—me included—got thrown around pretty good.”
“No,” Tommy said, “you’re not all right. You’ve got a head injury. You can’t fly with that. Not until a doctor signs you off.”
“I don’t need a doctor, sir. I told you, I’m okay.”
Tommy wasn’t having any of it. He took Dandridge by the arm—his good, right arm—and started to lead him out of the mess tent. “I’m taking you to see the flight surgeon, Sergeant. He’ll decide if—”
“NO,” Dandridge said, pulling his arm away. Then, less stridently, he added, “I mean, no, sir. Let’s not do that. Please.”
“Why the hell not, Sergeant?”
“Because I’ve got to fly this mission, sir. I’ve got to. It’s important for a whole lot of reasons.”
Tommy looked at him skeptically. “Is Major Staunton putting you up to this?”
“No, sir. This is my own decision. And putting the baby on the money is my job, nobody else’s. I’m not going to let some fill-in take over now an
d screw everything up.”
“I still wish you’d come with me to see the flight surgeon, Ira.”
Dandridge was startled by Tommy’s use of his first name. Never before in his time in the Army Air Force had an officer done so. But every reason he’d ever been given for that strict protocol—like the erosion of respect for superiors bred of familiarity—suddenly didn’t seem to have any validity. He’d never respected Lieutenant Tommy Moon more than at that moment. And he could tell the feeling was mutual.
Within minutes, Sean and the radio operators were on the top floor of Bunker 3. With their antennas stuck outside the building through the gun ports, they quickly established contact with 5th Division HQ. When they reported how much of Fort Driant was in their hands, the voice from Division sounded as if he either didn’t believe them or considered their transmission a German ruse. The voice requested the information be repeated three times, each request with a different challenge from the code tables. Only after each of the three challenges received its correct authentication did Division seem to take them seriously. The attack on the gun batteries was to continue without delay, they were told, and progress reports were to be sent every fifteen minutes.
“Sounds like they want us to do this all by ourselves,” Sean fumed. “Might be swell if they sent some reinforcements.”
But he knew it would be a while before they’d see any help. As long as the other forts were still hurling their protective fires at Driant, no GIs would be setting foot inside its perimeter. It would take the sunrise—and the ensuing return of Ninth Air Force planes over those forts—before that could happen.
Sergeant Cutter’s walkie-talkies provided decent communication from floor to floor. Sean’s set came alive with news from the ground floor: the engineers and infantry from the cellar of Bunker 4 were streaming in from the tunnel.
“Okay,” he replied, “that means the door to the batteries is gonna blow any second now. Put the lieutenant on when he gets there.”
Looking down from the top floor, they didn’t so much hear the explosion as feel it; like the single thump of a heart’s pulse beneath your fingertips. What they could see, however, was far more dramatic: the jet of dust, debris, and hot gas venting from the tunnel’s outside entrance, forming a thick gray cloud spreading rapidly across a vast expanse of ground.
Lieutenant Chenoweth’s voice spilled from the walkie-talkie now. “As you can see,” he said, “we did the deed. I figure about an hour before we can go back in. Good thing that door between your bunker and the tunnel still works or we’d be getting a good dose of that blast down here in the cellar right now.”
Sean replied, “When you do go back in, how about me and some of my guys go with you, sir? You could probably use the help.”
“Negative. The best way you can help now is make sure no Krauts jump our asses. So stay where you are.”
Kowalski looked at Sean and said, “Gee, Sarge, the lieutenant just did you a favor, and you look disappointed. You really want to go back down the tunnel that bad?”
Sean wasn’t sure what bothered him most: that he really did want to go back into the tunnel and take those gun turrets or that Kowalski had read him like a book.
But there was little time right now for self-analysis.
“Mind your damn business, Ski. But if you really want to know, I think I’ve done a little too much volunteering for one week.”
Sean keyed the walkie-talkie, asking Chenoweth, “What do you want me to tell HQ when I report in every fifteen damn minutes?”
“Just tell them the God’s honest truth. If that’s not good enough for them, tell them they can come out here and do it themselves.”
Sean smiled. He’d relish the opportunity to say precisely that.
As the morning sun began to climb above the horizon, Sean figured three things would happen shortly: the bombardment of Fort Driant would stop; the Germans within Fort Driant would try to take back Bunker 3 and the tunnel with an assault along the fort’s earthen roof; GIs with tank support would re-enter Driant’s perimeter to continue the assault.
By 0800, only two of those three events had come to pass. He’d seen the formations of American planes high overhead, on their way to pummel the Moselle forts for another day. Within minutes of their sighting, the guns of those forts ceased their bombardment of Fort Driant.
A few minutes after that, German soldiers—seeming like hundreds but probably no more than fifty—began to swarm from the north and east corners of Driant, converging on the battle-scarred terrain surrounding Bunker 3.
“What do we do?” Sergeant Cutter asked, the fear driving his voice up an octave.
“It’s simple, Cutter,” Sean replied calmly as he prepared map coordinates to transmit to headquarters. “We call in our own artillery now. Any Krauts left standing after that, we shoot them.”
He called in the fire mission and then told Cutter, “Tell all your guys that when I call out SPLASH, duck down behind something real solid. A lot of those rounds are gonna hit real close, and some’ll be airbursts. A bunch of shit may come flying through the windows.”
A minute later, the rounds from several GI artillery batteries burst all around Bunker 3 in a time-coordinated volley. Sean was right; some shell fragments did whiz through the gun ports, bouncing around the corridor until their energy was spent. The only GI hurt in the bunker was a man who, in wonder, picked up a fragment after it came to rest on the floor. He didn’t realize it would still be sizzling hot. It burned a few layers of skin off his hand.
The Germans outside weren’t so lucky. Their assault force, suddenly thinned as if a steel rake had culled it, became disorganized and fell back.
“Gotta love those cannon-cockers,” Sean said.
There was a call on the walkie-talkie from the first floor. “We got a problem, Sarge,” the voice told Sean. “There’s a runner here from Lieutenant Chenoweth. He says the door didn’t blow.”
“What? Send him up here,” Sean replied.
The runner was one of the infantrymen who’d joined them in the tunnel yesterday. To Sean’s incredulous question, he replied, “Really, Sarge, it’s no bullshit. The fucking door did not blow. Bent a little, but it’s still closed tight as a bank vault.”
“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Sean said. “What’s the lieutenant gonna do now?”
“He wants you guys to cover him real good, because the engineers got to go out to the half-tracks and get more C-3.” The runner paused and then asked, “The half-tracks…they are still there, right? They didn’t get blown up or nothing with all that artillery?”
Pointing him toward a gun window, Sean replied, “See for yourself. It’s a fucking miracle, I guess…but they’re still intact, near as I can tell. Probably got the shit dinged out of them, though. Okay, tell the lieutenant we got him covered.”
A few minutes later, four of Chenoweth’s engineers popped from the tunnel door and sprinted to the half-tracks.
“Hey, look,” Cutter said, “the Krauts are rolling out some kind of gun from behind Bunker 4!”
Sean watched as the GI infantrymen tried without success to pick off the four-man crew pushing a 37-millimeter anti-tank gun into firing position. “You ain’t gonna get ’em as long as they’re behind the gun’s shields,” he said. “Let’s see what those bazooka guys of yours can do.”
“But what if they start shooting that thing at us?” Cutter asked.
“Just keep your fucking heads down, that’s all,” Sean replied. “That puny little peashooter can’t hurt you in here. I shot this bunker up with my tank’s main gun plenty and didn’t hurt nothing or nobody.”
The bazooka crew didn’t think they could hit the German piece. “It’s too far,” the gunner said.
“Bullshit,” Sean replied. “It’s about one-fifty yards. Trust me. I’ve been here before.”
The bazooka man gave him a skeptical look but lined up the German gun in his sights. “One-fifty, you say?”
“Yep.”<
br />
Meanwhile, the German gun crew got off their first round. It struck one of Sean’s dead tanks, exploding against its hull but damaging nothing.
“Not very smart,” Sean mumbled. “That’s a wasted round. Probably scared the shit out of them engineers in the half-tracks, though.”
He tapped the bazooka man on the helmet. “You gonna shoot sometime today, pal, or what?”
With a deafening WHOOSH, the rocket left the tube and flew toward its target. It missed, striking the ground and exploding just a bit short, spraying a geyser of dirt into the air.
“Well, you got ’em dirty, at least,” Sean said as the loader rammed in another rocket. “Bring your sight picture up just a hair.”
The bazooka fired again. This time, it flew straight into the shield of the German gun, the ensuing explosion raising the piece several feet off the ground and flipping it over backward.
The four men of the German gun crew lay motionless and exposed around their overturned weapon. Whether they were dead, wounded, or just stunned, the GIs in Bunker 3 couldn’t tell.
“You can shoot ’em to your heart’s content now,” Sean told Cutter.
Then they watched with satisfaction as the engineers, hands filled with crates of explosives, ran back into the tunnel.
Sean checked his watch; it read 0830. He walked over to the radio set.
“Gotta check in with HQ,” he said. “Too bad we got a big fat nothing to tell them.”
By 0900, Tommy had been back and forth between Zebra Ramp and Operations at the 301st several times, shuttling the latest weather reports to the Flying Fortresses’ pilots and status updates for the squadron’s switchboard to pass on to 3rd Army. The weather was deteriorating faster than anyone had imagined. Already, patchy clouds had yielded to the thick cumulonimbus announcing the coming of bad weather.
As he returned to Zebra Ramp once again, the baby was still cordoned off; the loading of the Torpex was still underway and probably would be for at least the next three hours. But it was a flurry of activity around the mothership that caught his attention. Her number 2 engine was uncowled, with mechanics clustered around it on A-frame ladders and oil drums serving as maintenance stands.
Fortress Falling (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 2) Page 27