Maybe she knew her fate…and refused to accept it.
Maybe the ordnance crew had loaded the Torpex incorrectly, shifting her CG too far forward.
Or maybe she was just too heavy—and too war-weary—to break gravity’s hold.
This is all wrong, Pym told himself. I either throw the book away…
Or I’m going to die right here.
And take this whole airfield with me.
It was just a simple reflex, requiring no thought, no calculation on Captain Pym’s part: he jerked the control column all the way back.
And the baby rose. Hesitantly, but she was at least climbing.
He was sure he could count the leaves in the treetops as they cleared the airfield boundary.
Only as the co-pilot was retracting the landing gear did they notice the oil pressure indication on number 3—the one with the faulty transmitter from the mothership—had fallen to zero.
Major Bob Kidd—Rocket Man—was airborne, too. He’d wasted no time flying to A-90 that morning to join the 301st, hoping to beat the deteriorating weather. The orders he received from Colonel Pruitt were simple: he was to get airborne and loiter several miles west of Fort Driant, awaiting instructions from Almighty Four-One, the mothership, to perform a BDA—a bomb damage assessment—following a special air operation.
Once airborne, however, he decided to deviate slightly from those orders. He’d perform the BDA, no problem. But it couldn’t hurt to have a look at the fort before the special air op—whatever that was—so he’d have a better frame of reference to determine if they actually had caused any damage. He’d been over Driant any number of times in the last few weeks, and no matter how it had been battered by shells and bombs, it always looked the same to him: pockmarked earth and impregnable structures that didn’t seem to be harmed in the least.
They may have to blow the top right off this hill for me to tell if this special air op did any good at all.
The only stroke of good luck had been that both the engineers’ half-tracks still ran, despite sitting still and in the open on Fort Driant since yesterday afternoon. They’d been battered thoroughly and punctured occasionally by shell fragments, but their thin armor, coupled with the defilade in which they’d been parked, had managed to save them from destruction. Still, both had useless radios due to severed whip antennas, and one had a shredded front tire.
“Don’t matter it’s got a flat,” Sean told the half-track’s reluctant driver. “It’ll drive good enough to get you out of here.”
But still, there were only two vehicles. A half-track was designed to carry a twelve-man squad of infantry. Their wounded alone—including Sergeant Cutter’s battle-fatigued captain—filled up one vehicle bed.
The other half-track—the one with the shredded tire—would become an armored weapons carrier for the machine guns and their crews. The rest of the GIs—some fifty men—would have to walk.
“This pullout,” Sean told the squad and section leaders, “it’s gonna be in three groups, real orderly. We don’t want no big crowd gathering in front of the bunker or the tunnel so one fucking shell gets you all. You guys on the top floor with me…we’re gonna cover everybody else’s withdrawal. We’ll be the last ones out. The track with the wounded guys goes first. The infantry who was in the tunnel with the lieutenant will provide protection for it.”
He drummed his fingers on one of the radio sets, still awaiting its batteries from the oven. “If we get one of these bastards to transmit, we’ll try and call in smoke to cover us. If we can’t…well, your mama told you there’d be days like this, right? Now, next out will be the engineers and the rest of the guys on the first floor. The gun wagon will go with you. Then us guys upstairs will bring up the rear.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Captain Pym wrestled the baby through her slow, circling climb. The oil pressure on number 3 remained firmly planted at zero on the gauge. But the oil temperature indication was normal, and, most importantly, the engine was still running smoothly.
“By the book, we should shut her down,” his co-pilot said.
“Fuck the book,” Pym replied, “and we’re not going to tell them shit about this, either. What they don’t know won’t hurt them. If that engine was really out of oil pressure, it would have crapped out already.”
Level at 2,000 feet over the ordnance drop zone, control of the baby was passed to the mothership. Pym took a deep breath and said, “Okay, it’s showtime.”
Both pilots left their seats, snapped on their parachute packs, and moved aft to the arming switches for the Torpex. Carefully lifting the guards on the two switches, each pilot held one toggle in his fingertips.
Pym tried to push the thought from his mind that flipping that switch just might be the last thing he’d ever do. But his voice was full of that fear as he asked his co-pilot, “Are you ready?”
He wished he hadn’t said it like that. It sounded too much like an abbreviated form of Are you ready to meet your maker?
The co-pilot tried to speak his answer but couldn’t. Perhaps he, too, was feeling his imminent demise. The words stuck in his throat.
The best he could manage was an affirmative nod.
One more deep breath by each man, and then their fingers began to push both switches toward the Armed position.
On board the mothership, Tommy watched as the two parachutes blossomed in the baby’s wake. “Well, it looks like those guys got out okay,” he said. “The baby’s all yours, Sergeant.”
But he didn’t get an acknowledgement. When he looked to Dandridge to see why, he found his head slumped against the sidewall, the control box dangling from his lap.
“Someone get down here and take care of Dandridge,” Tommy called over the interphone. “He’s unconscious.”
“Who’s flying the baby?” It was Lieutenant Wheatley’s voice, sounding panicky.
“I am,” Tommy replied.
“So what the hell happened to Sergeant Dandridge?”
“I wish I knew,” Tommy replied. “All I know is he’s out like a light. That knock he took on the head…maybe it finally caught up with him.”
“Can you really fly the baby, Moon?”
“I’m giving it one hell of a try.”
Wheatley asked, “You’re just going to dump her, right?”
“Yeah, I’m going to dump her…right on Fort Driant. Give me a left turn. Come around to a heading of one-zero-zero degrees.”
Wheatley didn’t sound convinced. “Are you sure you’re going to be able to pull this off, Moon? You put that thing in the wrong place and—”
“Tell me something I don’t already know. And yeah, I’m going to try my damnedest to pull this off. Now am I going to get that heading change, or what?”
Wheatley put the mothership into the turn Tommy requested. Then he said, “I need authorization for this, Moon.”
“You do, eh? What are they going to say? No? Bring the baby back and land her? Or sure—go ahead and waste this chance by dumping her in the middle of nowhere? Are you out of your fucking mind, Wheatley?”
“Have it your way, Moon. But if this whole thing goes to shit, I’m blaming you.”
Yeah, sure, pal. And if it works, you’ll be first in line to take the credit, I’ll bet.
The heated radio batteries were rejuvenated enough to work. Sean used the first one to call Division HQ, asking for artillery smoke to cover their withdrawal. He got to the last of the four parts in the fire mission request—“Adjust Fire”—when that battery ran out of juice.
The radio operator asked, “You think you need to repeat that, Sarge? They might not have gotten the last couple of words.” He’d watched the transmitter’s output meter sag and then drop to the bottom of its scale.
“Nah, I ain’t gonna use up the other radio yet. If they can’t figure out I’m gonna adjust fire by now, we might as well hang it up.”
He expected it would take a minute, maybe a little longer, for that first adjustment round to land.<
br />
Two minutes passed, and they still hadn’t received the report of Shot, over.
“That other receiver…it is working, right?” Sean asked.
“Yeah. It’s still got good juice, Sarge…until we transmit, anyway.”
Thinking out loud, Sean said, “Let’s hope somebody out there even has smoke shells. I seen ’em run out before.”
One of his tankers was riding shotgun in the half-track carrying the wounded. Using a walkie-talkie, he broadcast, “Hey, Sarge…we’re kinda sitting here with our dicks in our hands waiting for that smoke. We gonna move or what?”
What Sean and his men didn’t know was that the light artillery, who usually fired the smoke from a mile or two behind the front lines, was withdrawing in accordance with Patton’s belated order. The battery designated to take the fire mission was still on the road, almost four miles west of Driant. They had to stop right where they were, unhook their 105-mm howitzers from the deuce-and-a-halfs towing them, quickly lay the battery, break out their few boxes of smoke rounds, and start shooting. And while all this frantic activity was going on, the men in the battery’s fire direction center had to use the map to determine, as close as humanly possible, where they were on the face of the earth, down to eight-place coordinates.
The base piece—the howitzer firing the adjustment phase of the mission—didn’t get its first round off until nearly four minutes after Sean’s request for fire.
When the call, “Shot, over,” finally spilled from the radio, Sean acknowledged with the standard, “Shot, out.” Then, after releasing the push-to-talk button on the mic, he mumbled, “About fucking time.”
Fourteen seconds later, the smoke appeared, nowhere near where it was needed. Any smoke screen based around that first round would do Sean and his GIs no good at all.
“That’s fucked up,” Sean said, “but it ain’t our fault. That gun battery don’t know where the hell they’re at, because we sure as hell know the coordinates for every inch of this damn fort by now.”
But they didn’t have a lot of time—or a lot of battery juice—to engage in a lengthy, multi-round precision adjustment. One correction would have to do.
“Left one-five-zero, down one-five-zero,” he transmitted. “Shell smoke, fire for effect.”
“Ooo, they ain’t gonna like a shift like that,” the radioman said. “Too damn big.”
“Too damn bad,” Sean replied. “We’re the ones supposed to get what we want here.”
The lone smoke round seemed to incite the Germans in and around Bunker 4. They began to pour machine gun and rifle fire down on Bunker 3 and the half-tracks.
It was a pointless effort, though, at least as long as the GIs were protected by the half-tracks and the bunker’s unyielding walls.
“Hold your fire,” Sean told his men. “Let ’em waste their ammo. We’re gonna need ours when we make our move outta here.”
The volley of smoke rounds arrived. “Well, it ain’t perfect,” Sean said as he watched the wind billow the smoke toward Bunker 4, “but it’s close enough for government work.”
Grabbing the walkie-talkie, he called for the infantrymen in the tunnel to start moving. Joining forces with the lead half-track, that vehicle and the men on foot around it made a slow bee-line toward the perimeter wire. They expected German fire as they neared the fortified trench on the fort’s southern boundary.
To their relief, they received none. The trench appeared empty.
Sean took a look at the smoke screen. “It’s holding up pretty good,” he said. “I figure we got about two minutes before it blows away. In the meantime, the Krauts can’t see us for shit.”
He ordered the next wave of GIs—the engineers, the men from the first floor, and the gun-wagon half-track—to get moving.
The Germans might not have been able to see the GIs, but they knew they were beyond that smoke somewhere. So they kept firing blindly.
One lucky, sweeping burst from a machine gun took down three men. They were lifted onto the bed of the gun wagon as the exodus continued.
Sean and his men on the top floor prepared to make their exit. He took one last look at the smoke screen and then told his radioman, “Tell them cannon-cockers to repeat…if you can.”
The radioman keyed the mic, began to speak, and then stopped. There was no point in continuing. The battery was dead again. A shake of his head was all the info Sean needed.
“GET MOVING, RIGHT FUCKING NOW,” Sean ordered, and fifteen men were barreling down the staircases before he’d finished the sentence.
As they neared the doorway that marked the line between protection and vulnerability—perhaps life and death—Sean added, “Don’t bunch up, you guys. Let’s not give ’em a compact target.”
To a man, they had never felt their grasp on life so tenuous as the moment they began that hundred yard run to the wire.
But they were making it. The bullets that whizzed past never found their mark until—just yards from the wire—Sean heard a CLUNK and the radioman running beside him tumbled forward to the ground as if pushed by a giant hand. Without breaking stride, Sean dragged him through the opening in the wire and behind the safety of a tree.
The radioman screamed the whole way. When he got behind the tree, he began to struggle with the harness strapping the radio to his back. “Help me, Sarge!” he wailed. “It’s burning like a son of a bitch.”
It was only then Sean realized the radio set on the man’s back was sizzling. A bullet had pierced the radio’s case and ignited its dead battery. He wasn’t shot. The back of his field jacket was on fire.
Within seconds, the radio was discarded and the fire extinguished.
Sean heard a sound he’d never expected: the putter of a small engine. It took him a few seconds to realize the sound was coming from directly above them.
He looked up to see an L-4 observation plane pass slowly overhead, just above the treetops.
As the sound of the L-4’s little engine faded, he could hear another sound from the sky, this one the deep rumble of multiple engines. But he couldn’t see the high-flying aircraft through the clouds.
Major Kidd—Rocket Man—had the feeling that something was very wrong: There are still GIs on Driant. And we’re only a couple of minutes away from this “special air ops.” I’ve got to put this thing on hold, whatever the hell it is.
He called the Air Liaison at 5th Division HQ and reported what he’d just seen.
The reply: “Negative. All friendlies clear. Mission is a go.”
Orbiting the southern boundary of the fort, he could see two tanks—obviously Shermans—near Bunker 3. From his vantage point, they looked perfectly serviceable, maybe with their crews still on board.
But in the diminished light from a darkening sky, he couldn’t tell those tanks were charred, burned-out hulks.
Both were from Sean’s platoon. One of them had been his Lucky 7.
The Air Liaison said, “Repeat, mission is a go. Clear the area.”
Orbiting at 8,000 feet, Colonel Pruitt was wondering how long he’d be able to see Fort Driant through the thickening cloud deck below him.
Jimmy Tuttle, flying Blue Two on the opposite side of the orbit, told himself, This is going to be an abort, any second now. I can feel it.
They’d both heard what Rocket Man had reported. The possibility of accidentally incinerating GIs with napalm gave them both a sick feeling in their stomachs.
But it wasn’t their call anymore. At this point, they had no choice but to execute their part of the mission.
Tommy was growing more confident by the minute that Bucket was actually going to work. The baby was handling like a big, compliant truck, without any unsettling quirks.
More docile than the Culver, even. Just so she stalls clean.
The television reception was flawless.
But then he’d heard Rocket Man’s report of GIs still on Driant…
Plus Division HQ’s insistence the mission was a go.
And
that confidence suddenly felt like a mortal sin.
The ship’s radio operator had crawled down to the nose and pulled Dandridge up to the cockpit, where he regained consciousness. Wanting to do something—anything—to alleviate Dandridge’s suffering, he put him on oxygen. That seemed to help, but the stricken sergeant complained of a monumental headache. In a pained whisper, he described it: “It feels like someone’s trying to split my head open with a wedge.”
“We can’t fly any higher,” Lieutenant Wheatley had said as they leveled off at 5,000 feet. “I think the altitude’s killing him, and it’ll take less time to get him back on the ground once we’re done up here.”
Five thousand feet put them in the lowest deck of scattered clouds and afforded poor visibility of the ground. Tommy triggered the smoke pod beneath the baby’s tail. The white line it painted across the sky in her wake helped. But not much.
The damn clouds are white, too.
“Get her below this cloud deck,” Tommy told Wheatley, “or I won’t be able to see the baby at all.”
He really wanted the mothership—and the baby—to be higher for the attack. But that was out of the question now.
I’d better stall her right on the money, he told himself, because as low as she’s going to be, I might not have enough sky to get her on target.
There was still the hope that the napalm would make ground visibility not much of an issue. All he’d have to do was aim for the bright light. He gave the signal for Colonel Pruitt to make his run.
They’d find out in a few moments just how bright that light would be. Pruitt’s dive had begun.
“I’m lined up dead on a gun battery,” Pruitt reported. “I don’t know which one, though. But those three circles in a rectangle are pretty hard to miss. Releasing…NOW.”
As he pulled out of the dive, Pruitt asked, “Looks like I’m right on the money. Do you want that second load, too?”
Fortress Falling (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 2) Page 29