Aces

by T. E. Cruise

  “Yes, Sir,” Greene said. He realized that Bolten was waiting for him to say something more. “Her due date is sometime in the middle of January.”

  “Splendid, splendid,” Bolten murmured. He looked uncomfortable. “I say, Blaize, I was wondering, with your wife due to deliver in just a couple of weeks, perhaps you’d rather I removed you from the flying roster for a while?”

  “Whatever for, Major?”

  “Well, some chaps get a bit…” Bolten hesitated. “Wobbly in the knees; superstitious, shall we say, at such times. I thought, perhaps, that was why you’re acting so… peculiarly.”

  “Major, I do appreciate your concern,” Greene said coolly, but there are plenty of RAF chaps with wives and kiddies to fret about just now flying in combat. Nobody’s taking them off the flight roster, now, are they?”

  Bolten seemed to flinch at Greene’s tone. “Suit yourself, then, Captain,” he muttered.

  Greene, sensing that he’d hurt Bolten’s feelings, realized that he was behaving like a cad. He’d been taking out his frustrations on a superior officer who was only relaying orders that had come down from on high. “Sir, I apologize for my behavior. I do appreciate your offer. It’s just that I feel bad enough as it is, losing out on any opportunity of becoming an ace. I’d much rather be flying with the rest of the squadron, even if we have been reduced to tank busting.”

  “Which is risky enough,” Bolten pointed out. “And taking into account our area of operations, even more valuable to the war effort than shooting enemy fighters.”

  “Maybe,” Greene sighed.

  Bolten rolled his eyes. “Off with you, then.”

  On December 29, the Squadron’s ten airworthy Hawker Hurricanes sat like drab butterflies, drying their wings in the sun, as Greene and the other pilots made their way to the ready line. The Hurricanes wore desert camouflage colors: mottled brown and tan on top, sky blue on the bottom, with British roundels on the fuselages’ rear quarters, and the wings. Normally, the Hurricanes were armed with eight Browning .30-caliber machine guns, but to equip the fighters for their tank-busting duties, six of those guns had been stripped away, replaced by a pair of 40-millimeter cannons. Each cannon, its long barrel jutting out like a bayonet from its pod nestled beneath the wing, was loaded with twelve armor-piercing shells.

  The Hurricane was a big plane. Its cockpit was about ten feet off the ground. Greene, wearing his soft canvas helmet and goggles, burdened down with his parachute, and a Web-ley .38-caliber revolver in a canvas flap holster strapped around his waist, needed a stepladder, and the assistance of the ground crew, to climb into the cockpit. He strapped himself in and tested his radio.

  “Your flight’s cleared, Captain,” Corporal Leonard’s voice came in over the earpieces built into Greene’s helmet. “Best of luck.”

  “Thank you, Corporal,” Greene said into his throat mike. He slid forward the Hurricane’s canopy and locked it into place, and then started his engine. As he began taxiing across the sandy airfield, he checked his watch. It was just noon. With any luck he and the boys could go Hun hog-bashing and be back in time for tea. Greene hoped that would be the case. He had a letter he wanted to finish writing to Suze.

  (Four)

  Hubert Place, near Russell Square

  London

  29 December 1942

  It was a little after ten in the morning when Suzy Greene, peering out the bay windows of the parlor-floor flat, decided that it was now or never if she were going to go for a walk. The sky was a blustery gray, threatening rain, and it did look chilly from the way that people were hurrying by all bundled up. Still, her doctor had told her to get at least a little exercise each day.

  She moved slowly through the flat to the hall closet. These days, slow was the only way she could move. Her stomach was hugely swollen. She couldn’t believe that she still had a month to go until her due date. From the way the boy—she was certain that it was a boy—had been kicking all morning, she felt as if any moment he was going to punt his way through her belly.

  She pulled on a couple of Blaize’s sweaters, and his old tweed overcoat: his were the only garments she had that could make it around her middle. She’d gone shopping for maternity clothes a while ago, but with the war shortages there hadn’t been much to choose from in the shops. She wrapped a scarf around her throat, pulled on her mittens and earmuffs, and left the flat.

  She shivered, turning up her coat collar against the wind as she waddled as quickly as she could past the red-brick rowhouses that lined Hubert Place. Folklore had it that pregnant women weren’t supposed to get cold, but she guessed that didn’t hold true for pregnant women transplanted to gloomy Britain from balmy California. Growing up in Los Angeles must have thinned her blood, or else it had to do with the lack of central heating in England. Whatever it was, she hadn’t been truly warm since she’d set foot here, she thought, as she passed by the British Museum.

  The truth of it was that she’d never really felt all that comfortable here in Britain. It hadn’t been that bad back in the spring, when the weather was balmy, the gardens freshly green and vibrant with flowers; and Blaize had been with her. Blaize had been so happy to be home, so anxious to show her London, that somehow she’d seen it all through his eyes, and never felt like a stranger.

  But once Blaize had graduated from fighter training school—so handsome in his blue uniform, his white-silk pilot’s wings stitched above the breast pocket—he had to go off to the front, and leave her all alone in the Hubert Place flat. His going seemed to take the light and life out of London for Suzy. The cold, damp, lonely nights seemed to last forever, and the shadowy, bombed-out buildings seemed to leer at her like skulls. Blaize’s friends tried to make her feel comfortable, but Suzy couldn’t shake the feeling that nobody here really knew her or cared about her. A few times she’d been on the verge of wiring her parents and asking them to arrange her transportation home. She hadn’t, because her husband was an Englishman, and as his wife, she felt, she should loyally reside in the country he was risking his life to defend. It wasn’t much, but it was something she could do to demonstrate her love.

  For all of that, she was very thankful that Blaize had said that he was willing to move back to California once the war was over. Suzy couldn’t wait to see palm trees, and to experience a day without rain, and to have something decent to eat again.

  She also couldn’t wait to have this baby. It hadn’t been an easy pregnancy. Of course, she was grateful to be pregnant. God, it had seemed as if they’d been trying forever. Not that it hadn’t been fun trying…

  She just wanted her body back, thanks very much.

  At the corner of Montague Street, she paused, wondering how far she should press on. She decided to stroll a bit through the manicured greenery of Russell Square. It turned out that her spirit was willing, but her ankles were weak. Halfway through the park she had to sit down on a bench to catch her breath.

  An elderly man, wearing a derby and a velvet-collared gray chesterfield overcoat, carrying a newspaper tucked under his arm, came along and sat down beside her. He had pink cheeks and a white, walrus moustache, just like the English gents in the Esquire magazine cartoons. Suzy tried not to giggle. He nodded to her, and then hid his face behind his copy of his London Times.

  She’d rest just a bit longer, she thought, and then head back to the flat for a nice hot cup of tea, and some cookies…

  She shoved her mittened hands into the pockets of the overcoat and felt something hard that had slid through a hole in the left pocket, to become caught in the coat’s lining. She carefully worked it free and pulled it out of the pocket. It was a slender, leather-bound volume; a book of poems, by Yeats. She’d never seen it before. When she opened it she was delighted to see that many of the poems had been annotated by Blaize. She began to read—first a poem, and then Blaize’s comments—and quickly lost track of the time. As she read his inked notations she could hear his voice in her mind. Discovering the book was like being tre
ated to a visit with Blaize, and, a teeny bit, served to assuage her loneliness.

  (Five)

  Near Buerat-el-Hsur

  Greene led his flight along the Via Balbia coast road. Off his starboard wing was the brilliant blue Mediterranean, the molten African sun casting glittering diamonds across the waves. To his left was the limitless desert, the ochre dunes stubbled with green and brown tangles of brush, and the purple hills shimmering in the heat. There was no substantial cover down there, no decent place for men and machines to hide. To the American bombers, the Huns infesting the dunes and ravines would look like military miniatures arranged on a yellow-tablecloth battlefield. The Germans would fight back with flak guns, tank fire, and heavy machine guns, but would mostly count on their fighters for protection.

  “Look sharp, now, lads,” Greene said into his throat mike. “We’ve left our lines behind.”

  The formation of ten planes broke apart, spreading out inland and flying low, hoping to flush out their armored quarry.

  The objective was to destroy the Afrika Corps’ tanks patrolling the perimeters of the Hun’s Buerat position. Hopefully, any enemy fighters in the area would have been drawn off to intercept the Yanks’ bombers and their fighter escort just now on their way across the Gulf. The refitted Hurricanes were not armed for dogfighting.

  As Greene watched the desert terrain rushing by beneath him, he thought about what Major Bolten had said about the Hawker Hurricane being outmoded. The more he pondered how Bolten had maligned the Hurricane, the angrier he got. Part of his indignation stemmed from guilt, of course. He himself had been awfully disappointed when he found out that the 33rd was equipped with Hurricanes instead of Spitfires or Supersharks. He’d been even more upset when he learned that the filters fitted onto the Hurricanes’ Rolls-Royce Merlin engines to protect against sand and dust further decreased the planes’ performance capabilities. But after a few weeks spent flying his Hurricane, Greene had found himself grown quite fond of her. She was easy to land, easy to repair, and a stable gun platform. Most important, her rather old-fashioned metal and wood frame, covered over with fabric, allowed enemy fire to pass through her without doing the terrible damage that bullets did to the newer fighters of monocoque metal skin construction.

  Anyway, a pilot had to have tender feelings toward an airplane that had safely seen him through four victorious dogfights. If only there could have been a fifth, Greene thought longingly.

  The flight came up low over a high dune, roaring past a line of seven Panzers strung out single-file, rolling westward across the sand.

  “Tally-ho, lads!” Greene told his flight as it split up. “Good hunting!”

  Greene banked hard right, swinging out over the sea. The G-force braided his belly around his spine as he slid sideways into a rolling turn that put him into position for an attack dive an the Panzer column. Greene began an approach that positioned him to be third in line for a crack at the Huns.

  The Panzers were kicking up clouds of dust, scuttling like mottled yellow and tan desert tortoises across the dunes as the first Hurricane went at them. Greene watched as the pilot used his machine guns to zero in on a tank, and then cut loose with his 40 millimeters. Orange fire spouted from the barrels of the cannons as the spent shell casings tumbled from ejection ports cut into the pod housings. The rounds impacted around the tank, sending up high pillars of sand. Meanwhile, the tank’s turret was coming around, and its cannon barrel rising, like an angry scorpion’s stinger. The first Hurricane peeled off as the second airplane came in toward its different target. The first tank fired its cannon and cut loose with machine gun bursts as the second Hurricane’s Brownings stitched twin lines toward its tank. As its machine-gun rounds closed on its target, the Hurricane’s cannons began firing, scoring two direct hits. The Panzer’s turret lifted off in a geyser of flame. Thick black smoke began pouring out from the busted tank’s innards, blowing across the desert, and obscuring the retreat of several other Panzers fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time.

  Greene picked out a target and began his own power dive. He used his two machine guns to guide his aim, and when the time was right he fired five rounds from each of his cannons. The guttural coughing of the heavy guns reverberated inside the Hurricane’s cockpit. Greene could feel the vibrations numbing his fingers on the stick, and the cannons’ heavy recoil measurably slowing the aircraft. His cannon spray was kicking up a cloud of dust around his target. One round struck the tank’s tread, sending metal linkages flying. The Panzer was hamstrung, but still dangerous. As Greene flew by, its turret tracked him with cannon and machine-gun fire.

  He was swinging around for a second pass when he saw one of the Panzers fire its cannon at a banking Hurricane and score a direct hit, swatting the plane out of the sky in a puff of fire and smoke. One of the other Hurricanes immediately attacked that tank, raining cannon fire on it until it exploded.

  Greene finished off the Panzer he’d crippled in a six-round burst, and then climbed, to look for another target—he still had eight cannon rounds left. The rest of his flight was now scattered across the sky, Panzer hunting. It was understood that everybody would make their own ways home.

  A sound like distant thunder was filtering into Greene’s cockpit above the drone of his own engine. He looked to the west, and saw that the Yanks had arrived at Buerat. Greene saw clouds of gray smoke rolling inland, carried by the sea breeze, as the silvery B-17s scattered their bombs. Black carnations of anti-aircraft fire were spreading their petals within the stately bomber formations. Orange tracer fire was licking upward toward the B-17s as all around them fighters swirled like angry hornets.

  Greene’s attention was caught by a moving dust cloud beneath him. He banked and dived for a closer look: it was a Hun armored car darting on its eight tires like a centipede across the sand. As he dived on the car, its rear-mounted machine gun stuck out its orange tongue at him. Greene answered the insult with a burst from his own machine guns, and three rounds apiece from his cannons. A 40-millimeter shell clipped the rear-left fender of the armored car, and it went veering out of control, roaring up a dune and then flipping onto its side, spilling men as it rolled like a barrel into a bramble-choked ravine. It came to rest sitting upright on its eight tires. Greene came around to give it his remaining cannon rounds, and this time he managed to turn the damn thing into twisted, smoking metal.

  As he climbed he saw several of the armored car’s crew running across the sand, but he let them go. He still had some ammo left in his machine guns, but he wasn’t the bloody sort to go strafing helpless men.

  With his cannons empty, there was no point in hanging around. Anyway, he was running low on petrol. Greene climbed, to put himself out of range of small-arms ground fire, and headed back toward the sea, thinking that he would follow the coast road back to his own lines, and home base. He was about over the Via Balbia, when he saw a solitary Yank B-17, in some distress, flying low over the water, about a quarter mile offshore. He closed in slowly on the big four-engined bomber, giving its crew plenty of time to notice his British markings, and then made a slow circle around the faltering craft. The Flying Fortress had Jazz-a-Bell painted on her nose, just beneath the cockpit. The foot-high, light blue letters curved beneath a painting of a scantily clad blonde riding a saxophone in the manner of witch on her broomstick. The painting was the only good-looking thing about the bomber. Machine-gun fire had raised ugly pockmarks upon her skin. Her number-two starboard engine was half blown away, its prop slowly windmilling in the slipstream. Her tail and belly gun-turrets had been shot up, and she had a gaping hole in her starboard side, just forward the waist gunner’s position.

  Suddenly Greene’s radio crackled to life. “—tle friend, this is Jazz-a-Bell. Come in, if you read me, over. Hello, little friend, this is Jazz-a-Bell. Come in if you read me, over.”

  Greene keyed his throat mike. “I didn’t know you chaps had our frequency, over.”

  “We didn’t. I’ve had
my radio man hunting up and down the dial ever since we spotted you. This is Lieutenant Feldman, of the United States Army Air Force 301st Bombardment Group. Please identify yourself, over.”

  “Captain Greene, RAF 33rd Fighter Squadron. Can you chaps make it back to Benghazi? Over.”

  “That’s a damned good question, Captain.” Feldman dryly laughed. “We were doing fine blasting Jerry into little pieces, but then the fighters came at us. There turned out to be more enemy fighters than we expected. Sure as hell more than our escort could handle. Before we knew it, the bomber formation was all alone. We kept a tight box and managed to hold off the Italian bandits all right—a B-17 can take a hell of a lot of machine-gun fire—but then we got chewed up by one shit-storm of Messerschmitts armed with rapid-fire 20-millimeter cannons. The Huns took out my tail gun and my belly turret, hit my starboard engine, and put a real nice hole in my starboard side. We began losing altitude, and had to drop out of formation. We were hoping to come across some stray little friends once we reached the coast. We could use some fighter escort to cover our ass, which is feeling mighty naked with our tail and belly guns out of commission. Glad we found you—”

  I’m sure you are, Greene thought. But then, you don’t know that all I’ve got to cover your ass with is a measly pair of .30-caliber Browning popguns that are just about out of ammo.

  “With your help, we should be able to make it home,” the bomber pilot was continuing. Leastways, we’re going to try, but the plane is shaking so hard I can feel my teeth fillings about to fall out… Over.”

  “Why don’t you get back over land, and parachute? Or better yet, ditch into the sea? There’s no threat of enemy ships around here. Just radio in your position, and wait it out in life rafts until the flying boats come for you. Over.”

  “‘Fraid I can’t do either, Captain. You see, I’ve got hurt men here. Matter of fact, of the ten of us, six are in no condition to go parachuting or swimming.” Feldman hesitated. “And I got to say, I’m not all that sure I know how to splash her down in one piece. Over.”