by Paul Lally
‘Shove the raft through the nose, we’ll hand Ava down.’
‘I don’t need any help. I’m fine.’
Ava stood by her seat, weaving slightly, holding her blood-soaked, wounded arm. Then she fainted, but the professor broke her fall by grabbing her shoulders in time.
More tracer fire, more planes.
‘Go, go, GO!’
Mason tossed the raft down the crew spiral staircase and followed. I grabbed Ava’s feet, Friedman her shoulders and we half-walked, half- stumbled after him.
Roaring engines and cannon fire as the fighters made another strafing pass. The clipper shuddered from hits up on the flight deck. Had we stayed any longer we would have been mincemeat.
I steered our small group forward into the cramped mooring compartment, where Mason had dropped the bomb. It took only seconds to unlatch the boarding door and swing it open.
We manhandled the raft up and over the hatch coaming and let it drop into the water. As it fell I yanked the cord releasing the CO cartridge and the compressed yellow sausage hissed and twisted and swelled into our instrument of escape.
‘Mason, you go and I’ll hand Ava down.’
‘Got to set the charge.’
Satisfied, he straightened up from the Norden bombsight and patted it affectionately. ‘Bye, bye baby.’
He dropped into the raft and steadied it. Ava came to as she landed and Mason propped her up to one side. The Professor went next. The wind had picked up and the water was getting choppy. He had trouble getting his feet planted on the raft’s rubbery floor.
Mason shouted, ‘C’mon, doc, c’mon, she’s gonna blow.’
I ended his indecisiveness by grabbing a pair of short-handled oars, and half-jumping, half-climbing, got into the raft and pulled him down with me. I heard the roar of flames before I saw them.
Sheltered in the lee of the clipper’s bow, right wing was now ablaze.
The Luftwaffe pilots knew their work and were busy exacting revenge on the perpetrator of the crime, the evidence of which still loomed in the distance, a slowly rising smoke column at least forty-thousand feet high by now. The sun made it a rose-colored thing of beauty, but it was a beast.
Another fighter pass, more machine gun fire that Orlando returned with his waist gun. His tracers followed the departing fighter in a futile gesture. He barely had a deflection angle to be a serious threat. But even so, machine gun fire coming from our dying plane must have made them a little nervous. But not enough to make them leave. They wanted the plane and they wanted us.
Mason and I paddled down along the fuselage, diverted around the port sponson and arrived at Orlando’s gun position. The gun barrel swung hard left as he began firing again.
The Messerschmitt’s cannon fire steadily marched across the water towards us in a splash of white spray, and then struck the starboard wing and danced across it, each shell shattering metal into pieces and engines into wrecks. The wing tanks exploded and the shock and heat wave rocked us up against the fuselage and back again. As I watched, half of the wing drooped into the water like the broken wing of a bird.
‘Abandon ship!’ I shouted.
‘Go ahead,’ Orlando bellowed. I’ll give you covering fire.’
‘And die a hero? Like hell you will. We need you to fight another day.’
‘I said GO.’
‘This is not a god-damned war movie. I order you out of that airplane, or I’m coming in there and pulling you out.’
Orlando frowned his displeasure, but then moved like a cat. Seconds later he was beside me paddling for all he was worth, so hard that I could barely keep up with him. I managed to say in between struggles for breath,
‘It’s a good thing... I didn’t have to come in... and get your sorry ass.’
‘You needed covering fire. Out here they’ll shoot us like fish in a barrel.’
Just enough daylight to make out the dark outline of the river bank about a quarter mile away. It may as well have been a hundred miles. Paddling the rubber raft was slow going, and the fighters were making passes like a training mission, except we were the target.
The Dixie Clipper gave us a brief head start by dying like the fighter she had been. The Norden bombsight detonated as promised, ripping her nose off in a white-hot flash of light. As if on cue, the fire on the starboard wing reached the fuel tanks and exploded, which drove burning metal shards into the sponson’s fuel tanks, which in turn sealed the deal in a tremendous blast of reddish-yellow fire and roiling black smoke that blossomed into a small mushroom cloud over the Columbia River and she sank almost instantly.
All those miles, all those ports, only to end up on a river bottom in the middle of nowhere. And we would follow soon if we didn’t get the hell to shore.
Fat chance. The lead fighter had spotted us and zoomed in for the final kill. The cannon fire from his first attempt landed to starboard, but each towering white column of water was grim proof of what would happen on his next pass.
Orlando and I paddled even harder. Mason and the Professor leaned out of the edge and used their hands. Ava stared at me, her pain-drawn face a mix of hope and despair. The familiar approaching snarl of the Messerschmitt again, and I unconsciously bunched up my shoulders in preparation for the bullet strike.
The distant POP-POP-POP from his nose cannon as he roared over us and Ava screaming, me screaming, cannon fire striking to the left, but close enough to drench us.
Suddenly a new engine sound: not the Messerschmitt’s distinctive howl but a deeper, double-throated, turbocharged roar, and a flash of olive drab and chattering nose guns as a Lockheed P-38 twin-engine Lightning flashed overhead in hot pursuit of its prey.
The Messerschmitt climbed in a frantic chandelle to escape its larger, heavier opponent, but the P-38’s twin engines gave it superior climbing and turning power and it kept narrowing the gap, its fifty-caliber tracers reaching out like a spider’s web to trap its victim. Black smoke began streaming from the enemy’s engine just as I lost sight of it in the glare of the rising sun.
Mason said, ‘More of ours over there, look.’
Ten or fifteen fighters, both Nazi and American, this time, swirling and swooping across the pale blue sky in a graceful yet deadly dance with only one outcome.
The meleé lasted less than five minutes, with two Me-109’s shot down and the rest escaping. One of ours got chewed up pretty badly, with its pilot hightailing for home, one engine feathered and his wingman flying alongside like a worried mother hen. The remaining squadron of P-38’s made a low pass over us and waggled their wings in salute. We waved and cheered back. The throaty roar of their engines faded long after they disappeared in the dim morning light.
Ava said, ‘Uncle Georgie saves the day!’
‘He called them up?’ I said.
‘Had to be. He’s an old cavalry guy, and in the movies they always show up in the nick of time.’
‘Ziggy was right,’ I said. ‘This would make a great movie.’
Less than five minutes later, two P-38’s escorted a U.S. Navy PBY Catalina seaplane, flying low and slow up the river. The pilot spotted our yellow raft and landed. Five minutes later we lifted off from the scene of the crime while a medical corpsman worked on Ava’s wound. Professor Friedman assisted with calm assurance, instructing the young sailor as if the two of them were in an operating theater.
Ava floated in the peaceful embrace of morphine as she murmured to Friedman, ‘I thought you said you couldn’t stand the sight of blood.’
‘For you I make an exception.’
A lot happened in the next eighteen hours, nine of which were spent by Orlando, Mason, the professor and me collapsed in sleep, wedged in the cramped seats of an Army C-47 transport that had picked us up in Seattle after our Catalina landed there. Ava was with us, too, lashed to an army stretcher rigged into the fuselage, her bandaged arm snugged into a sling, her wounded artery neatly sutured, a blood transfusion to make up for what she had lost, and an army nurse to grant
her every wish.
I slept through refueling stops in Oklahoma and Iowa, and finally woke up somewhere over Lake Michigan, or so I guessed from its familiar shape. I went to check on Ava. The nurse spotted me coming and rose to protect her charge. But she needn’t have bothered. Ava lay there like Sleeping Beauty, hands folded peacefully, her chest slowly rising and falling.
I said quietly, ‘She’s really something.’
‘All of you are.’
Ava was right about ‘Uncle Georgie.’ He had foreseen the problems of our flight and ordered Sons of Liberty fighter planes scrambled in case they were needed, which they most certainly were.
I learned this and a lot more during Patton’s and my conversation in Seattle on a military telephone connection that made him sound like he was in inside a sheet metal shed in a hailstorm. I briefed him about Inspector Bauer tailing us and how Ziggy was the inside man and how that explained the attack on Couba Island.
‘I never did trust that little prick,’ he said.
‘We did.’
‘He’s dead and you’re alive. That’s all that matters.’
‘How bad was the attack?’
A brief pause. ‘A hell of a lot more Nazi sons-of-bitches died for their country than ours.’
‘Captain Fatt...’
‘May he rest in peace and may we avenge all their noble deaths.’
I had been holding the photos of Abby and Rosie as he was saying this and told him about Bauer’s threat to my family.
‘Don’t worry, captain. Key West ain’t that big a town. We will turn it upside down and shake it until they drop out safe and sound.’
Those words rang in my ears as I stood staring down at Ava, unable to do anything but wait for this flight to come to an end. Where exactly remained a mystery. They had refused to tell us before we took off, citing ‘security’ reasons.
Fine. Well and good. But now time to use a little muscle. I headed up to the cockpit.
‘Mind a visit, fellas?’
The two officers turned to me. The pilot a first lieutenant, the co-pilot a smooth-faced second looie.
The pilot said, ‘Thought you were going to sleep all the way home.’
‘Mind telling me where exactly ‘home’ is? Pretty closed-mouthed about it back in Seattle.’
He smiled. ‘You know how those MI boys can be.’
‘You’re not one of them. Spill the beans.’
He tapped the compass. ‘Right on course. ETA in about three hours, barring some dicey weather in western Pennsylvania. It can be tricky this time of year.’
‘Where exactly are we arriving?’
He exchanged raised eyebrows with his co-pilot, and then shot me a grin. ‘Can you keep a secret, sir?’
‘With the best of them.’
‘Well, seeing how you folks managed to pull off a miracle, somebody high up on the totem pole wants to have a little chat with you and hear all about it.’
He paused for effect.
I played along and said, ‘And that person would be...?’
‘President Perkins, of course.’
‘Baloney.’
The four of us sat in reverential silence upon plush-cushioned Chippendale chairs arranged in a neat row along a dark-blue carpeted hallway, with Ava in a wheelchair beside me.
The complicated millwork on the white walls and ceiling a testament to the Philadelphia craftsmen who had first built Independence Hall back in the 1700s. Today, the temporary seat of the Federal Government until Washington D.C. was finished re-building. And, true to that army pilot’s word, we really were here to meet the president.
Raining heavily when we arrived. And when we piled out of the limousines, our armed escort put up a black forest of umbrellas that blocked the view of the Liberty Bell and George Washington’s statue in the courtyard square. But I already knew what the man looked like. That, plus the fact that I was about to meet his direct successor kept me more than occupied.
I sat closest to the double doors leading into the president’s office.
From inside came muted voices, sometimes sharp and questioning, other times low with laughter. I couldn’t make out the words, so I finally gave up and leaned my head back against the wainscoting.
Ava patted my hand. ‘Hang in there, my darling, we’re almost home. Mother says she killed the fatted calf and she can’t wait to start carving.’
‘Need a rain check. Heading for Key West.’
‘Any word yet?’
‘I would have heard.’
She held my hand but said nothing.
The murmuring voices crew louder, more distinct, the double doors swung open, and a naval aide-de-camp decked out in full dress blues and a gold-braided aiguillette bowed slightly.
‘The president will see you now.’
The army nurse reached for the wheelchair but Ava stopped her.
‘That’s no way for an actress to make an entrance.’
She rose a shakily, took my arm and steadied herself.
‘Co-pilot to pilot; ready for takeoff.’
I led our small entourage into the spacious office. The floor-to-ceiling windows transformed the grey rainy day into silvery lightness. From behind a massive oak desk, President Perkins stood up, came around and joined a beaming General Patton on the other side.
Perkins’s familiar, stern, no-nonsense face melted into a radiant smile as she opened her arms as if to embrace us all. ‘Home are the sailors, home from the sea! And what an honor for me to thank you for the great service you have done for our country.’
What followed was a slightly awkward version of a receiving line, and I marveled at how pointed her questions were, no detail too small to have been overlooked. Perkins had seen many of Ava’s films and complimented her on her acting skills; she knew of Professor Friedman’s earlier work in nuclear physics and was gravely attendant when he expressed his gratitude for being granted asylum in the United States. She had a mutual friend in Lieutenant Mason’s home town and they shared a brief reminiscence. As for Orlando and me, she a Pan Am loyal customer and knew our Caribbean routes as well as I did, or so it seemed.
I’m sure Perkins had been briefed on our backgrounds long before we arrived. Presidents can’t possibly know these things in advance. But how they handle the information makes all the difference. Perkins made you feel like you were the only person in the world who really mattered, and that everything you had to say was important, worthwhile and grand. I told her she had my vote in the fall elections. America needed leaders like her if we were to get out of the mess we were in.
‘One vote at a time, Captain. That’s my plan.’
After the pleasantries had concluded, two butlers rolled in an heirloom silver tea service that looked like Paul Revere had finished it just before he made his famous ride. Over sips of the best coffee I have ever tasted in my life and delicate cookies that disappeared in my mouth before I even chewed them, Perkins conducted the debriefing as well if not better than General Patton.
From what we told her and what her sources on the ground confirmed, the Columbia River target had been destroyed, the plutonium neutralized, and the nuclear weapons clock reset to zero as far as she was concerned. Professor Friedman was confident it would take the Nazis twelve to eighteen to weaponize enough uranium to start making bombs again.
The president said grimly, ‘They’ll never get the chance.’
Patton grunted his stern approval.
The briefing concluded, she rose gracefully. With Ava holding my arm, we stood there looking at each other the way you do when the party’s over and it’s time to go home. I was anxious to do just that.
‘My friends,’ the president began. ‘I want to thank you for your bravery, your courage, and your absolute refusal to quit until the job was done. It’s an admirable trait that Americans will strive for in the days to come.’
She took a step toward me. ‘Mr. Carter, you have a commission waiting for you as a full colonel in the Army Air Corps, should
you choose to accept it.’ Before I could say anything, she turned to Orlando. ‘The same holds true for you, Major Diaz. If ever we needed help from experienced people like you, we need it now.’
Mason got promoted to lieutenant commander and Friedman was heading directly to a top research job at the Pentagon.
‘Miss James, I’m afraid I can’t offer you anything but a promise to watch all of your movies with the greatest of pleasure.’
Ava smiled. ‘I appreciate that, Madame President, but I’m taking a break from make-believe until this is over.’
‘What will you do?’
She glanced at General Patton. ‘Oh, I think Uncle George will find something interesting.’
He smiled and rubbed his hands together. ‘Don’t worry, I will. But we need to celebrate your safe return first - all of you, for that matter - including you, Madam President. When Helen puts on a feed, she doesn’t spare the horses.’
‘I appreciate the offer, general, but pressing business keeps me from accepting.’
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘But thanks all the same.’
Patton was instantly grave. ‘I know what you mean, Carter. I’d do the same thing if I were you. Unless...’
He and the president exchanged a quick look. She pressed a button on the desk top. Seconds later the double doors swung open and there stood Rosie and Abby.
‘Daddy!’
She ran to me and I scooped her up in my arms, a skinny, trembling, frightened, crying kid who I kissed and hugged and went weak in the knees and had to sit down. Rosie’s calming hand on my shoulder, her familiar voice, and Ava’s too, and nothing left to do but rub my kid’s hair, tell her that I loved her and cry.
Patton was right. Ava too. Helen Dortch Longstreet hadn’t actually killed a fatted calf, but the food, drink, music and conversation at her antebellum mansion on Couba Island was of biblical proportions. Helen, cigar and all, made the rounds of rooms filled with happy guests, making sure everyone we felt welcomed, especially Abby and my mother, who had stared at a Gestapo kidnapper’s gun barrel for days.
According to the general, the battle for Couba Island had gone pretty much as I had figured. Caught flat-footed by the Kampfschwimmer, his men had been beaten back soundly. But after we flew the Dixie Clipper out of harm’s way, he rallied his men and mounted a counterattack that eventually drove the enemy to the beach and those who survived back into their assault rafts for a ragtag escape