Aces

by T. E. Cruise

  Nah, it wasn’t love. Steven just looked forward to seeing her. Every night he’d bring her chocolates, cigarettes, and whatever else he could swipe from base camp that he thought she might like. Each night she’d be waiting for him, eager to give the gift of herself. She didn’t have much English, but she managed to tell him stories about growing up in her village, where there were rice paddies, and forests full of gaudy parrots and chattering monkeys. Madame Marie had recruited Monique when she was just eleven, during a trip to French Indochina—a place called Viet Nam.

  Monique wasn’t her real name of course, but Madame Marie gave all her girls French names. Monique had claimed that she didn’t remember what her real name had been. He accepted that. Madame Marie’s pleasure rooms were designed for such sweet little lies.

  Monique was still busy inhaling him, but he didn’t think he had much left to give her from last night. Anyway, the sun was full up, even if he wasn’t.

  “You leave so soon?” she pouted as he eased himself free of her multiple delicious embraces.

  “My heart’s just not in it this mornin’, li’l darl’n,” Steven said, emulating the lazy drawl of the veteran pilots in his squadron.

  “You no bloody like me no more?” Monique demanded, sitting up in bed.

  Steven had to smile. Rangoon was a British post. “I like you fine, honey,” he said. “But we got a feeling over at the base that it might start raining Japs today.”

  A few days ago the Japanese had made their first bombing assault against Rangoon. The squad had gone up to meet them, and the ensuing dogfight had painted fire and smoke and blood across the sky above the city’s timeless pagodas. When it was over, Rangoon’s waterfront was ablaze from Jap bombs, but sixteen of their planes had been downed, as had four of the squadron’s P-40s. One of the squad’s pilots had been killed, but the other three were okay, despite the Japs’ attempts to strafe them while they were helplessly suspended beneath their parachutes.

  Steven grabbed his baggy khaki trousers off the floor and shook them out before stepping into them. Scorpions and centipedes were uncommon above the ground floor in city buildings, but Arnie had gotten into the habit of checking his duds since last summer at Toungoo training camp, where there’d been all types of creepy-crawlies. He checked his ankle-high, rubber-soled work shoes and laced them on. He retrieved and donned his sleeveless gray sweatshirt, then shook out his New York Yankees baseball cap before putting it on his head.

  He felt himself lucky to have been assigned to Rangoon, away from Chennault, who was pretty much a stickler for rules and regs. If the old man had been around, there was no way that Steven would have been out of uniform, never mind spending his nights with Monique. But Chennault was at the A.V.G. headquarters camp, in Kunming, China, and that was almost seven hundred miles away, at the opposite end of the Burma Road. Cappy Fitzpatrick, Steven’s base camp commander, didn’t give a flying fuck about rules and regs, as long as a guy had his shit together up in the air, where it counted.

  “You kill lots of Japs for Monique today, okay, honey?” Monique smiled.

  “I sure hope so.” Steven muttered, more to himself than to her. He gave her a kiss for good luck as he reached past her to unwrap his holstered Colt .45 from the teak bedpost. He shrugged into the shoulder rig, fastening its strap across his chest.

  That dogfight a couple of days ago had been the squad’s first taste of combat, and Steven had been a part of it for only a short while. He’d managed to lock on to the tail of a Jap Ki-27 fighter, and let loose a burst, but his guns had jammed before he’d done much, if any, damage. Defenseless, he’d had to drop out of the fight and return to base. It had been a frustrating and worrisome experience. Cappy had said that every guy has reason to doubt himself before he’s experienced combat; that no one could know for sure how brave he was until he’d experienced his baptism by fire… Steven wanted to get his personal baptism over and done with, so that he could begin enjoying himself.

  He had another worry that nagged at him constantly. He hadn’t yet stopped kicking himself in the ass for letting himself be filmed by that newsreel crew a couple of months back. He’d been drunk at the time, but that was no excuse for such stupidity. Here he’d gone to all this trouble to create a new identity for himself, and now his mug was being flashed on movie screens all over America. He could only hope that anyone back home who knew him would not see the damned thing and alert his parents.

  He shook out his leather jacket and slung it over his shoulder. The sun had just come up, but already the temperature felt close to ninety.

  On the jacket’s back was sewn a large silk patch emblazoned with the Chinese flag, and a message in Chinese characters identifying him as an ally aviator fighting on behalf of China. Somebody had come up with the patches after one of the guys had suffered a close-call crash landing. The poor guy had been in trouble for a while, trying to convince some hostile Chinese peasants that he wasn’t some new kind of Jap.

  He kissed Monique good-bye a final time, and then tramped downstairs. A couple of the other guys from the squad who were shacking up here were waiting for him in the front lobby. One of them had the distributor cap to their Jeep; taking the cap with you when you parked was the surest way of making sure the vehicle would be there when you returned.

  Steven cheerfully paid the doorman ten bucks on the way out. By Steven’s way of thinking, ten bucks a night was cheap as hell just to get to sleep in a soft bed with clean sheets, and with indoor plumbing just a short walk down the hall. Monique was the icing on the cake.

  Outside in the alleyway, away from the bordello’s perfumed air, the stench hit him like a slap in the face. Back to reality, Steven thought as he and the others piled into the Jeep and rolled out of the alleyway.

  Rangoon was a British bastion. From what he had learned so far, he guessed that meant that it was a good place for foreigners to do business. But the places of light and pleasure, like the Silver Grill, or Madame Marie’s, were few. Mostly, Rangoon was a dark and crowded place, teeming with filth. The acrid stink of excrement and unwashed bodies mixed with the diesel fumes and the bluish haze of thousands of charcoal cookfires to hang like a mist in the stagnant air.

  They drove through a food market, already open for business and busy, even at this hour. The produce venders had their boxes out on display; fruits and vegetables with warts and hairs, colored so impossibly scarlet or green that they made you shudder. There were the fishmongers with their piles of glistening gun-metal-gray squid, and baskets of writhing eels. The butchers were open. Some of them were hacking portions off their rusty slabs and glistening limbs of beef and pork, hanging from hastily erected bamboo scaffoldings. The meat shimmered with flies that rose and fell with each swipe of the cleaver. Another kind of butcher sold things that were alive in cages: white ducks with orange beaks and feet; trembling rabbits; crying puppies.

  Steven and the others kept their hands on their automatics as the driver slowly made his way through the crowded market street, honking his horn to cut a path for the Jeep. They didn’t let down their guard until they were on the relatively open road at the outskirts of the city. They hated themselves for their fear and suspicion, but they all felt it, just the same. It was just too strange here in Rangoon. The poverty and misery were too overwhelming. The only possible response, firsthand, was fear and loathing.

  He thought about his father, who donated so much money to charity. Steven had never really understood what that meant, until he’d come here. Nothing, not even his travels across America, during which he’d seen some pretty bad things, could have prepared him for Rangoon. If what his father contributed to charity helped even a little bit in places like this, well, then his father was doing something important. He hoped he would remember to tell Pop that, next time he saw him…

  It was roughly fifteen miles to base camp from the outskirts of Rangoon. Steven tilted his cap down over his eyes and slouched in the back seat of the Jeep. He would have liked to doze away the
slow ride—along a narrow road that tunneled through jungle greenery—but sleep was impossible. He was too keyed up wondering if today he might finally enjoy his first victory. He sure had come a long way in the months since he’d left his job at Donovan Air Charter.

  Back around the middle of May, Steven had used what was left of his sign-up money to buy himself a railway ticket to San Francisco. Once he was in Frisco he’d made contact with Cappy Fitzpatrick, who was in charge of the group of volunteers setting sail via freighter for the voyage to the Far East. They’d arrived in Rangoon in August, and had enjoyed a couple of weeks of free time in which to explore the city until the rest of the A.V.G. had arrived. Soon after, Chennault had showed up, to take all two hundred and ten of them—pilots and ground support personnel combined—on an uncomfortable railway trip to the training camp he’d set up in Toungoo, about a hundred miles to the north.

  The Toungoo camp was an abandoned RAF base. Once Steven and the others had set foot in it, they’d understood why the Brits had left. The heat and bugs would have been bad enough, but steamy Toungoo, which was in the process of being reclaimed by the jungle, was also home for rats and snakes and bloodsucking bats… Well, he hadn’t exactly seen the bats suck blood, but other guys had said they had, and he believed them.

  There had also been disease. Steven had suffered a nightmare bout of dysentery, but he managed to get over it and hang in. A lot of guys hadn’t been as lucky, and had left the A.V.G.’s employ on stretchers.

  Toungoo had been bad news, but the A.V.G. fleet of P-40 Tomahawk fighters had been just as unfriendly to the men. A lot of the guys had gained their experience flying multi-engined aircraft. For them, getting acquainted with a single-engine fighter had been like learning how to fly all over again. There’d been a lot of crashes, especially during landings. Steven remembered how Chennault got progressively angrier and more frustrated as the accidents ate away at his precious fleet, and his sparse inventory of spare parts.

  It had been sometime in the fall that one of the pilots, remembering how the Japs, who were an island people, were supposed to be afraid of sharks, received permission from Chennault to have the P-40s’ noses painted up like ferocious man-eaters. Meanwhile, the old man’s stateside contacts had asked the Walt Disney Studios for their help in coming up with an insignia for the A.V.G. The Disney people had devised a tiger wearing a pair of little wings, leaping though a V for victory. Chennault loved it. From then on, the A.V.G. were The Flying Tigers.

  Now, bouncing along in the Jeep on his way back to base, Steven couldn’t help smiling, remembering how the old man had been so contemptuous of him after reviewing his “career” at Donovan Air Charter, and after having laid eyes on him. As it turned out, Steven had been one of the A.V.G.’s better pilots, right from the start. While he hadn’t the shooting expertise of the veteran fighter pilots, Steven had cut his teeth flying his pop’s single-engine jobs, so he at least hadn’t needed to unlearn a lifetime’s worth of experience, unlike those poor multi-engine veterans…

  The news delivered via radio of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had cut short Chennault’s “kindergarten.” Thinking back on it, Steven figured that had been just as well. School had already cost the Tigers a dozen planes, lots of ammo, and the life of one man. If they’d kept on training, pretty soon there would have been none of them left for the Japs to pick on. As it was, they could put up only some fifty airplanes at one time, and they had to split their numbers to try to protect hundreds of miles of territory against the Jap air force, one of the best in the world.

  That second week in December, the A.V.G. squadrons went their separate ways. Chennault took the majority of the A.V.G. to Kunming. Cappy Fitzgerald led twenty-one airplanes to Rangoon.

  It was just a little after 6 A.M. when the Jeep pulled into base camp. The grounds, and the packed dirt airstrip, had been hacked out of the banyon trees and jungle creeper. There were several hangar tents for the airplanes, a supply tent that also housed the squadron’s radio equipment, a mess tent, and a tent that served as operations room and bar. The motor pool—a couple of Jeeps, and three lorries laden with oil and fuel drums—was hidden under camouflage netting. Several orderly rows of smaller tents where the men slept were staked out under the shelter of the tall palms.

  “Cappy wants all pilots in operations,” one of the motor pool guys said as the Jeep came to a halt.

  Steven made a quick detour to the mess tent for a mug of coffee, and headed over to operations, where he found himself a folding chair in the back. Cappy was up on the raised platform at the front of the tent.

  Cappy was in his thirties, Steven guessed. He was only about five feet, nine inches tall, but he was broad-shouldered, and Steven knew from personal experience that Cappy was very strong: the guy could whip Steven in arm wrestling anytime. Cappy had a thick black moustache, and curly black hair. He was dressed for flying in high boots, khaki pants, and an olive green T-shirt. He had a holstered .45 cinched around his waist, and his leather jacket draped over a chair.

  Cappy was joking with some of the guys seated up front. “Tell us your secret for success!” the guys were demanding. In the previous battle, Cappy had singlehandedly accounted for two Jap bombers and two fighters. That meant an extra two grand, so far, in Cappy’s pay envelope this month. The A.V.G. was paying its pilots a bonus of five hundred bucks per confirmed kill.

  “All right, listen up,” Cappy shouted. “I want to go over the mistakes we made last time. First off, I’ve been told those radios the old man managed to scrounge up have finally been installed in our planes, so we should be able to communicate with each other, and the base.

  “Okay, about the battle a couple of days ago. I guess we now all know that the old man was right when he warned us against one-on-one dogfights. The Jap fighters can outmaneuver us every time in individual duels, so what we’ve got to do with them is just what Chennault taught us to do against bombers: get above the enemy, and power dive on him. Bounce the suckers with all six machine guns blazing, and then haul ass away from them, circling and climbing to repeat the maneuver. Everybody got that?

  “Second, it’s a safe bet that there’s gonna be one fuck of a lot more of them than us. Fortunately, they like to fly in tight formations. What we do is pick out the thickest concentration of the enemy for our dives. That way we’re likely to hit something on each pass. Finally, I want you to concentrate on bombers. Don’t let yourselves be decoyed by Jap pursuits looking like they’re turning tail and running away. Stay with the bombers! They’re easier targets, they’ve got bigger crews, and they’re the real danger to the city and our base—”

  “Hey, Cappy! What’s going to keep the fighters off our tails?” Stan Jenkins called out. Jenkins, close to forty, had been a captain in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Word had it that the corps had offered to promote him to bird colonel to get him to stay. Jenkins would have been base commander, but he’d turned down the job, explaining to Chennault that he didn’t want to deal with the paperwork.

  Before Cappy could reply to Jenkins’ question, one of the radio men entered the tent and made his way to the front. He whispered something to Cappy, who nodded.

  “All right!” Cappy announced to the group. “We’ve received word from one of our coastal spotters that a large force of bombers accompanied by fighter escort is heading this way. For a change, we’ve got all our planes on the ready line.

  “Now, getting back to Stan’s question,” Cappy continued. “We’ll work it this way. We’ll split up into two flights. Ross will lead Flight One against the fighters. It’ll be their job to keep the fighters occupied. I’ll lead Flight Two against the bombers.” Cappy quickly divvied up the pilots.

  “Any questions?” he demanded, looking around. There were none. “Then let’s saddle up, cowboys! We’ve got about fifteen minutes to get our asses in the air to meet ‘em!”

  Steven was first out of the tent. He shrugged on his jacket and zipped it up while he was running to the airstri
p, where the ground crews were busy preparing the planes. He stopped short when he saw that his own P-40 was not on the ready line. He looked around, and saw his plane—with its engine cowling off—parked just inside the hangar tent.

  Steven saw the chief mechanic pacing up and down the ready line, directing his men, and hurried to intercept him. The chief saw him coming and shook his head. “Sorry, Steve. She’s just sprung a coolant problem. She ain’t going nowhere.” He hurried away.

  Steven just stood there, too angry to say anything, or even to curse.

  “Tough break, kid.”

  He turned. Cappy was standing behind him. “Your first time out, your guns jam.” Cappy shook his head. “And now this…”

  Steven nodded. “Now I’m still not going to know if I’ve got the guts to make it as a fighter pilot. I’m worried about what you said. That the longer a guy waits, the worse it’ll be for him…”

  “What I said?” Cappy looked mystified, but then he smiled wearily. “You talking about that baptism of fire shit?” He rolled his eyes. “Kid, I was drunk…”

  “You’re just saying that now.”

  Cappy sighed. “Ah shit, this serves me right for getting drunk and shooting my mouth off to impressionable young kids…” He tossed Steven his canvas flight helmet. “Go on, you can take my plane.”

  Steven stared at him. “You mean it?”

  “Go on, move your ass! Before I change my mind—”

  “I’m gone!” Steven laughed. “Thanks, Cappy!” he yelled over his shoulder as he dashed to the ready line.

  The rest of the olive green and brown, camouflage-painted P-40s had been started up, and were taxiing out onto the runway. The ground crew stood clear as he climbed into the cockpit of Cappy’s fighter and strapped himself in. He pulled on the canvas flight helmet and then murmured a prayer as he went through the complex start-up procedure, worried that now Cappy’s airplane would malfunction.