“Is that Jansen?” Parrish asked. “Somebody sure got lost in the clouds.”
They could hear a microphone being keyed. Maybe Jansen was about to reply with an excuse…or a wisecrack of his own.
But that click was all they heard. The aircraft ahead disintegrated before their eyes. It was like watching a silent film; just the horrific image of a brilliant flash and then a fireball lasting less than a second. There was nothing left of her but a puff of smoke and shimmering pieces of what looked like tinsel from a Christmas tree fluttering down to the sea’s surface.
Tommy’s first thought was some Russian with extraordinary marksmanship skills must be on their tail. “JACK, BREAK LEFT,” he told Parrish, who promptly complied.
Tommy broke his ship in the opposite direction, giving him a clear view of the clouds and empty open sky behind them.
Shit, if there are some Russians stalking us, they must’ve dropped back into the clouds. But wait a minute…if somebody blew Jansen up, he would’ve been shooting from a thousand yards away, maybe more.
Nobody’s that good. Or that lucky.
Something else took Jansen down.
He called the Royal Navy’s lead ship. The voice on the radio cheerfully asked for Tommy’s position report.
“Not exactly sure where we are above this overcast,” he replied, “but something sure as hell just blew one of my guys up.”
There was silence for a moment, then the British voice said, “Butternut Leader, give us a continuous carrier on frequency and we’ll give you a position fix. Stand by, then on my count…”
Tommy held down the transmit button when requested.
It took only seconds for two vessels to home their direction-finding receivers on Tommy’s signal. The ships were dispersed by almost ten miles, far enough that the angle of their intercepts was fairly wide and quite accurate in pinpointing his position.
The British voice urged, “Butternut Leader, execute immediate turn to heading two-seven-zero.”
“Roger,” Tommy replied. “But why? What’s the deal?”
The reply was cold and brief: “Unable to discuss, over.”
Then the Royal Navy command ship broadcast an uncoded warning order advising its surface ships to cease firing immediately.
There was no point continuing the mission. They couldn’t see the vessels they were supposed to be protecting.
And something had already gone terribly wrong.
Radio reports were now indicating deteriorating weather conditions all across northern Germany. Colonel Pruitt pulled the plug and ordered the ships of the 301st to return home. They’d be in a race to beat the lowering ceiling at Bremen. If it was socked in, they’d have enough gas to make it all the way to Frankfurt, courtesy of the drop tanks they’d had the foresight to strap on at the last minute.
Tommy had formed a pretty good idea of what had happened to Jansen, as had all the other squadron pilots: the Royal Navy ships had been firing—at what and why were unknown to them at the moment—and one of those shells scored a million-to-one hit on Jansen’s aircraft as it arced downrange to its target. It was one of those things that all logic pointed to but would never be proven conclusively. All the evidence had disintegrated in the explosion of Jansen’s plane.
Tommy was last to land. As he entered the landing pattern, he began to have serious doubts he’d even find the runway. He nearly failed to see the church steeple they’d used to mark the turning point to final approach, only catching sight of the spire as it was about to slip behind his ship.
Shit…my turn to final’s going to be wide. I’ll have to fudge it back to the left…
But how much?
If I don’t pick up the runway lights by the time I’m down to two hundred feet, I’m screwed…and I’ll be heading to Frankfurt.
He asked the tower for another barometric pressure check. It had dropped slightly in the five minutes since the last readout. Resetting his altimeter to the new baro pressure instantly cost him 30 feet on the dial—350 down to 320.
Whatever the altimeter’s reading, he still couldn’t see the ground.
A great way to fly right into a smokestack, ain’t it? There’s plenty of them around here. The highest one’s 312 feet. I’d better be on the damn glide path…because those stacks aren’t too far from it.
The altimeter crept down to 220 feet. Patches of colorless, shrouded earth began to peek through the clouds and then a grayish ribbon of what had to be water.
Okay…there’s the river. I’ve got about five seconds to get the runway in sight.
His left hand reaffirmed its grip on the throttle, ready to ease it forward and abort the landing attempt.
Three…two…one. Okay, two hundred feet and I’ve got nothing.
He was already pushing up the throttle when he caught that first flash of welcoming light: the airfield’s rotating beacon. Then some runway lights—two short, parallel rows of faint white dots glimmering through the mist—popped into view. They weren’t outlining the entire length of the runway, maybe just the first quarter of it…
But it’s enough to get me lined up. Just got to slip a little more to the left…
And then her tires kissed the runway’s pavement in only the second landing Tommy had made in Moon’s Menace.
How about that approach, girl? A real nail-biter.
We did good, though.
But let’s not ever do that again, okay?
It took most of the day to piece together what had happened over the Baltic. Tommy and Colonel Pruitt were participants in the conference call, an ad hoc board of inquiry into the mysterious loss of an American pilot and his aircraft. When they emerged from the conference room after the call ended, they were both speechless.
But they faced a roomful of their anxious and angry pilots who were entitled to know what had happened. They’d have to find the words quickly.
Colonel Pruitt began the debrief. “Gentlemen, let’s just say that any of us who lived through the war have seen our share of fuckups…but this one takes the cake. We’ve come to a conclusion as to what happened: the Royal Navy’s been wanting to demonstrate to the Russians their all-weather capability for surface warfare using radar. Especially since the Brits have sent a few more big-gunned cruisers into the Baltic. Today was just the kind of limited-visibility day they were looking for, when everybody knew there couldn’t be any aircraft spotting for them. I don’t imagine I have to tell any of you just how limited that visibility was, right?”
A murmur of agreement rippled through the pilots.
Pruitt continued, “So they figured this was a good day to flaunt that radar capability, something we all know the Russians lack. Whatever radar sets they’ve got, we and the Brits gave them—and most of those don’t work anymore due to lack of parts and neglect. So this is how they set up their little demonstration: last night, British destroyers towed three derelict freighters to about ten miles off Rostock so the Russians would have front-row seats. Then this morning, from twenty miles west, a few of the British battle cruisers proceeded to blow the shit out of those freighters using radar-directed firing data.”
He paused to take in the stony silence in the room.
“Now you might ask why the hell didn’t they tell us there was a live-fire exercise going on in our area of operation? That, gentlemen, is what we’ve taken the rest of this damn day figuring out.”
Pruitt’s throat had gone dry. Rather than hold up the debrief, he said, “Captain Moon, take it from there.”
“Yes, sir,” Tommy began. “To pick up where the colonel left off, yeah…there was a live-fire exercise going on in our area of operation. That’s something we’ve always been advised of in the past and, as a result, we stay well clear of for the simple reason that…well, I don’t need to remind you why. Now here’s where it all goes to shit: the Brits tried to advise us. At least they started the process down through channels, and that was at 0500 this morning, when the alert—marked URGENT—hit the British com
munications center at Kiel. But that center says they’re real shorthanded, and they claim they’re swamped with Urgent messages, so it took hours—four, to be exact—before that message came up in the queue and was disseminated down to Bremen. By that time, the squadron was already in the danger zone and…well, you know the rest.”
Another captain asked, “Weren’t those Royal Navy ships using their aircraft-detection radar? And if they were, why the hell didn’t they know we were in the area?”
“Good question,” Tommy replied, “and it’s got a simple answer: they weren’t using it. Took it down for maintenance, in fact. With that solid overcast, they weren’t expecting any aircraft overhead at all.”
A lieutenant raised his hand. “Sir, are we absolutely sure that’s what happened to Tony Jansen? I mean…what are the odds?”
“We all know the odds are pretty damn small,” Tommy replied. “But Parrish and I saw the hit. I’ve seen jugs go down more times than I care to remember, but they never just vaporize in flight like that. Break up, yeah…vaporize, no. But even a jug doesn’t stand a chance against an eight-inch shell. You’ve all seen the films of what happens to an aircraft when it takes a direct hit from a standard flak round, and this would be a hell of a lot worse. As far as your first question goes, the answer’s no. We’ll never be absolutely sure. But a wise old crew chief of mine had an expression that seems to fit the bill here real well: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s still going to shit on your head. Any other questions?”
There were none. Colonel Pruitt had his voice back now. Returning to the front of the room, he dismissed the pilots. But Tommy lingered.
“Why don’t you get yourself some chow, Half?” Pruitt said. “Then maybe Happy Hour at the club should start a little early today.”
Tommy didn’t look in any mood to unwind. “I still feel responsible, sir,” he said. “I know we had bad information—hell, we had no information—but I didn’t know where we were, and I didn’t know where my guys were. And one of them…”
His voice trailed off.
Pruitt sat down next to him. “You’re not really telling me that you blame yourself, are you, Tommy?”
“Let me put it this way, sir…I’m always worried about what the new guys don’t know…and I keep finding out the hard way. If I’d known Jansen couldn’t fly on instruments real well, I would’ve put him under the hood and—”
“Wait a minute, Half. What does that have to do with anything?”
“If he’d stayed with me and Jack when we climbed through the soup, that shell would’ve whizzed right by and we’d have never known the difference.”
“Yeah…and if shit was gold we’d all be millionaires. You’ve been at this game long enough to know better, Tommy.”
But Pruitt had been at this game long enough to know when one of his pilots needed a break. For all practical purposes, Butternut Flight was finished; two planes didn’t make a flight.
And Butternut was a stupid name, anyway. State flowers, my ass.
“I’ve got a little deal for you, Tommy,” Pruitt said. “Third Army’s screaming for ASOs. I’ve got an idea they’ll be on the move again real soon and they’re going to need all the air support they can get. Now I feel real bad I screwed you out of your last leave, and you didn’t get to see your brother and all, so…”
“I’ll take it, sir,” Tommy replied. “Probably my turn to play ASO anyway, right?”
“Affirmative. And make sure you pass through Frankfurt on the way to Czechoslovakia and spend a night or two with that little French assassin of yours. By the way, that’s an order, Captain.”
Colonel Yanov continued to remain silent. As far as Harry Truman was concerned, the Soviet political officer they’d kidnapped was a worthless asset. His staff members only had to see the president’s face every time the Russian’s name came up to know how he felt.
“So what should we do, Mister President?” Secretary of State Byrnes asked. “Give him back?”
“Hell, no, Jimmy,” Truman replied. “I’m beginning to think Stalin doesn’t want him back, anyway. He’d rather have a million barrels of gasoline instead, if everything General Marshall tells me is correct.”
“You might be right about that, sir,” Byrnes said. “After we turned down the offer to swap Yanov for that pilot of ours—”
Truman interjected, “The dead pilot?”
“Yes, sir. The pilot we believe is dead. But perhaps there’s another approach we should consider. Suppose we publish some fabricated information and attribute it to Yanov. You know, things that would get Moscow’s goat and cause them to do something rash.”
Truman waved off the suggestion. “All I’m concerned with is that we don’t do anything rash, Jimmy. We’re on a tightrope, you realize. If we fall off it, we’re either back at war, and my name is Mud to the American voting public, or Stalin is walking all over us in Europe, and my name is still Mud. Quite frankly, I’m not sure what we get if we make it all the way across the tightrope without falling off. Perhaps just a continuation of this shitty status quo, where we and the Russians play pointless games with each other ad infinitum?”
Admiral King, the naval chief, offered, “That’s why we need to put an end to this charade of joint occupation right away, Mister President. Even these little incidents that keep coming up can be a shield for larger transgressions. We should launch Operation Curveball immediately.”
His voice calm as always, General Marshall replied, “That’s exactly the kind of saber-rattling that will knock us off this tightrope the president’s worried about, Admiral. We must be patient. When the Soviets are desperate enough, they’ll show their hand in a way that will positively brand them as aggressors. Then—and only then—should we activate Curveball and force them out of Germany.”
Those words had a calming effect on Truman. Whether Marshall was being his staunch supporter or merely a brown-noser didn’t matter right now.
Returning to a more analytical frame of mind, the president asked, “Are we being realistic about this Russian shortage of gasoline? Even though we cut off the direct fuel shipments, we did build them all these refineries during the war, and the bulk of the Nazi refineries in Yugoslavia and Austria are in their hands. So why are they running out of gasoline?”
“It’s all a question of maintenance, sir,” Marshall replied. “We cut off the spare parts and engineering support to the refineries we built, and the Germans certainly can’t provide support for the refineries that used to be theirs. Soviet industry can’t pick up the slack because their economy is in shambles. They can’t even feed their people let alone produce a wide range of specialty machine parts.”
“Our economy and everyone else’s is in shambles, too,” Truman added.
“A false equivalency, sir. We have enormous war debts, but our means of production are still intact and robust. The Soviets have the debt, too, but their means of production are crippled. Getting back to the question of gasoline, the Russians are out of fuel, plain and simple. They cannot sustain combat operations for more than a few days. We can last far longer. Months, if necessary, with no return to wartime production levels necessary. If we’re going to move against the Soviets in Germany, we must do it before their industries have the time and opportunity to recover.”
Truman replied, “Whatever we do, General, it better be damn quick. It may not seem like it to you, but the 1948 elections are just around the corner. And I still don’t see the plausible incident you keep promising me that will justify action against the Soviets.”
Marshall tried to speak but Truman cut him off. “I pray, General, that we have the wisdom not to let one of these stupid little skirmishes bite us in the ass and erupt into full-scale war for no goddamn good reason.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jim Pearson was sure they were lost. The translator he’d hired in Pisek, a Czech named Jan Kostka, might’ve been fluent in Russian, German, and English, but he wasn’t proving to be much of
a navigator. Ever since they’d set out, he’d been blaming the Michelin map Pearson had provided, cursing it in multilingual strings of profanity of which the reporter could understand only small fragments. And they’d only traveled about ten miles east from Pisek.
“I think we should’ve gone left at that last fork in the road,” Pearson said as he downshifted the reluctant Peugeot on an uphill grade.
Kostka replied, “Perhaps it would be better if we just turned around and attempted this trip tomorrow in daylight.”
“No good, Jan. I told you…I’ve got a deadline tomorrow afternoon. We need to reach the Russians, do some interviews, then drive all the way back to a place with decent phones so I can file my scoop. If we didn’t leave until morning, I’d never make that deadline.”
“How are you so sure the Russians will even talk to you? They distrust everyone.”
“Oh, they’ll talk. Everybody loves to talk, especially about themselves.”
Patton certainly liked to talk, Pearson recollected, even if what he told me was complete bullshit. Imagine Ol’ Blood and Guts trying to sound like some slick politician…like he’s not chomping at the bit to kill every Russian he can get his hands on. What a lying sack of shit.
But once those comments he made about Nazis being no different than Republicans and Democrats make the front pages, the shit’s really going to hit the fan back home.
If he’s planning on running for office—and what general isn’t?—he won’t be able to get himself elected dogcatcher.
And when I get this scoop with the Russians, I’ll be the only guy to report from both sides of this conflict before it even happens.
Hell, I’ll be the next Edward R. Murrow.
The first rounds struck the front of the Peugeot like a blacksmith’s hammer against his anvil, showering sparks onto the windshield and peeling back the flimsy metal of the bonnet as if it was tissue paper. Unable to see ahead through the mist spewing from the shattered radiator, Pearson slammed on the brakes. That brought the mortally wounded car to an abrupt stop, which propelled Kostka’s head into the windshield.
This Fog of Peace (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 4) Page 24