“COFO Reddy’s comin’ out with the last six o’ our Nancys. The other four o’ our flight that made it is headed back to the barn to rearm. Reddy wants to know if we still alive an’ got our bombs . . . since I didn’t report back after we started our last attack. Don’t know why he ask that,” she added brightly, “since I heard the ‘Fifteen’ ship tell ’im we’re okay!”
Fred groaned. He didn’t like formation flying and hadn’t done very much. He considered himself a good pilot, but ever since he started, flying Walker’s only observation plane, he preferred not having to worry about running into his own people. “He wants to know if we’ll join his attack?” he prodded.
“Oh yeah. That. Yes.”
“Then send ‘yes’!”
Fred kept climbing until he saw the incoming flight. When it passed him, he fastened on to Reddy’s plane, easily distinguishable by the bright yellow streamer trailing a few feet behind his wing. Directly alongside, Fred waved at his nominal commander. Orrin pointed at him and then made a spiraling gesture beside his right ear before pointing down at the Dom fleet. Fred looked. The enemy frigates, maybe twenty of them in two lines, were sprinting ahead, trying to stay beyond the reach of TF-11’s guns while racing to get between the two Allied forces. The Dom “battlewagons,” or ships of the line, were shaking out into a battle line of their own, poising to range up and administer the coup de grace when TF-11 was inevitably slowed by the blocking frigates. Fred craned his neck around. It wouldn’t be long after that before the rest of Second Fleet arrived, and he realized that the Doms were trying to bring on a decisive, general fleet action in the shadow of that big stupid rock. They’d have to name it Malpelo, he thought grimly.
Now on the far right of the formation, Fred would attack the seventh ship back with two bombs on his first run. Reddy would designate the targets for the next—probably the leading ships in the second line.
“Taall-ee ho!” Kari called, receiving the order, and the formation dove, each ship diverging toward its designated prey. Nancys had proven themselves to be pretty good little dive bombers, as long as the angle of attack wasn’t too great. And angles always varied somewhat from pilot to pilot based on their skill level and experience. Fred was the first to admit he wasn’t much of a dive-bomber yet, and kept his own angle at about forty-five degrees. Not the most accurate, he supposed, but easier to get out of without hitting a tall mast—or the water. And it wasn’t like Dom ships could easily evade. . . . He concentrated on the growing form below. Another side-wheeler, of course, kind of nicely built. Looks more like an Impie DD than the older, galleon-like ships the Doms started the war with. Course now folks figure they already had these for a while. . . . Men grew more distinct on the bright wooden deck, some scrambling for cover, others still. Some were firing muskets up at him. He bored in.
“Ready!” he shouted.
“Ready!” Kari cried back.
“Drop!” he yelled, and almost instantly, the Nancy bounded upward as a hundred pounds fell clear and he pulled back on the stick. There was a thwack . . . thwack-thwack as musket balls hit the plane, more felt than heard, and he shouted back at Kari, always mindful of the time she’d been hit from below.
“I’m fine!” she shouted back, scolding. “Near miss long! Near miss long!” she reported. He frowned, but nodded. Orders were not to automatically retarget a near miss since an explosion close alongside might do as much or more damage than a direct hit, but he still preferred a hit. All seven planes made it through and were climbing now, passing over the second line. More musket fire flared below, but they were out of range. The flight tightened up, still climbing, and Reddy ordered a turn. Finally, Fred could clearly see the effect of their strike. Two Dom ships were dead in the water, burning, and several more were bunched up, black smoke piling high from their stacks. He couldn’t tell whether they were damaged or if the shattered line was just the result of the confusion they’d sown. Either way, they’d slowed the advance.
“Near line!” Kari called, relaying the order to attack the second line of ships they’d passed over. Fred’s target this time would be the lead enemy vessel and they’d be diving from a lower altitude, but that was fine with Fred. He could still make his forty-five-degree approach. The flight continued its careful, somewhat leisurely turn, and aimed back at the enemy.
“Taall-ee ho!” Kari shouted, her voice high-pitched and tinny.
“Roger that!” Fred replied, waiting a moment longer to get his angle before pushing forward on the stick. “Stand by!”
The ship below looked identical to the first; three tall masts with taut red and gold sails drawing nicely. A tall funnel between the main and foremast belched black smoke. High, thin geysers marched toward the ship just aft of his target, and he remembered that Orrin’s plane had a .50-caliber machine gun in its nose, just as a great cloud of splinters exploded from the side of the Dom frigate. Wish I had one of those! Course, he doesn’t have any more bombs. . . . Refocusing his attention on the top of the mast before him, he mentally adjusted when to call for Kari to drop. They’d be shooting now, he knew, even if he couldn’t see them. Most of their shots would go wide, or pass beneath and behind, but he and Kari were doubtless rushing right toward a few that were rising to meet them. “Drop!” he yelled.
“Bombs away!” Kari shouted, and the plane leaped again, just as a sustained thwack-thwack-thwack shivered through its frame.
“Near miss short hit!” Kari cried, just as Fred began to realize the sound and vibration he heard and felt hadn’t gone away. “Big hit!” Kari crowed. “Maybe got the boiler!”
“I think we’re hit too!” he shouted through clenched teeth, the stick between his legs starting to rattle violently in his hand.
“Yeah? Oh!”
“What’s ‘oh’?”
“We fixin’ to lose the starboard ale-eron!”
Fred risked a quick glance and saw that it was true. They’d taken a lot of hits, more than he’d have thought possible. Must’ve packed the best shots in the whole damn Dominion on that ship, he realized sickeningly when he saw that several balls had struck amazingly close together and shattered an area around the inboard hinge pin. The aileron, though still attached and still operating, was definitely loose and banging around. Instinctively, he reduced power and pulled the nose up a bit to slow the plane, then applied a little right rudder to throw it into a slip. The vibration eased slightly, and only then did he notice how fast and hard his heart was pounding. He took a deep breath. “Send that we’re all shot up and gonna try to make it back to Maaka-Kakja!” he instructed.
“Okay,” Kari said. “We gonna make it?”
Fred hesitated only an instant. “Sure, kid. Get the wing floats down, wilya?”
“Sure,” came the uncertain reply. “But I’m getting oily. I turn around an’ my goggles got all fuzzed. I think they get us in the oil pan.”
Fred swore, then looked at the oil pressure gauge. Sure enough, the needle was starting to bounce—and drop.
“Shit!”
“Why shit?”
“Because we’ve just been shot down. Again!” He looked at distant Maaka-Kakja, looming large on the horizon and a good five miles beyond the advancing battle line, or about fifteen miles away. Then he looked around at the sea, barely a thousand feet below. They were getting close to TF-11 now, its eight battered ships doggedly churning to meet their friends. “Look, I’m still gonna try to make the Makky-Kat,” he said. “We could set down forward of TF Eleven and hope they pick us up as they pass—before we sink. But even if they do, we’ll be stuck in the same boat as them, with the whole Dom navy roarin’ down. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather do my fighting in the air from now on.”
“Maybe they could pick us up an’ patch us up; then we go to Makky-Kat,” Kari suggested doubtfully.
“No way. They won’t stop that long, and I don’t blame them. We’d be lu
cky if they picked us up.”
“What about the battle line?”
Fred judged the distance, then glanced back at the Dom frigate column. Their last attack had hit it hard, but all the planes were headed back now, to rearm, and the two lines, minus five ships, were already shaking back out and pouring on the coal. They were faster than TF-11 and would likely get ahead of it—which meant they might be the first ones close enough to pick up Fred and Kari, if they went down short of the Second Fleet battle line. Fred would rather die than be back in the hands of the Doms, and he knew Kari would too.
Suddenly, all their options evaporated when the starboard aileron tore away. Still attached by the outboard cable, it nearly jerked the stick out of Fred’s hand, slamming his knuckles painfully against his thigh. The Nancy rolled hard to the right even as Fred fought against it, the aileron banging and flapping and tearing itself into fluttering streamers of shredded fabric. With a heroic effort, knowing he was probably straining against a damaged cable pulley now as well, Fred managed to right the plane and keep it somewhat level, but he didn’t know how long he could. “Send the Mayday! Tell TF Eleven we’re gonna set this thing down on their nose after all. They can pick us up or run over us, their choice. But when that cable parts completely, I’m liable to lose horizontal control!”
“I’m already sendin’!” Kari shouted.
USS Simms
“We’re about to have more guests,” Lieutenant Ruik-Sor-Raa told his executive officer, Lieutenant (jg) Gaal-Etkaa, when the latter joined him by the rail. USS Simms had already picked up the crews of two planes that day, a total of three battered aviators. One pilot had been lost when her plane sank before she could be hoisted clear, but she might’ve been dead already. Ruik hoped so. The rest were in the wardroom/sick bay being treated for injuries alongside Simms’s other wounded from the last two days. Currently, she was leading a “forlorn hope” squadron of four of the remaining TF-11 DDs, including Icarus, Achilles, and Tindal, in an effort to cut off the Dom frigates before they could squeeze Hibbs’s last liners and the two most heavily damaged DDs against the bleak, rocky monolith of Malpelo. The geometry of the chase was such that if Hibbs turned east to round the island, his pursuers would catch him more quickly. If the fifteen or so Dom frigates achieved their goal, the chase would end with the same result. Simms, Achilles, Icarus, and Tindal had to keep the choke point clear.
“Yes,” Gaal said, “if they make it.” The Nancy fluttering down to the sea in Simms’s path was clearly in trouble, having difficulty staying level, and gray smoke was beginning to cough from her exhaust. As the plane drew closer, all could hear that its engine was laboring as well.
Gaal gauged the double line of Dom frigates, edging up and closer to starboard, then glanced back at the Nancy. “We can’t stop for them,” he warned. “Even if they don’t wipe out.”
“No,” Ruik agreed. “But we will recover those people. That’s Lieutenant Reynolds and Ensign Faask out there.”
Gaal didn’t reply. He hadn’t met the two aviators himself, but they were well-known to all of Second Fleet by reputation, and few ’Cats or men, on land or sea, wouldn’t risk everything for them.
“Send for them to try to land ahead of us, then match our speed as we come alongside. We’ll do our best to snag them. Signal Achilles and the others behind us to try the same if we cannot.”
“Ay, ay, sur,” Gaal said, pacing to the voice tube cluster by the helm, but Ruik eased farther forward as the battered plane clawed at the sky, trying to stay aloft long enough to meet his request. The smoke was thicker now, and he could hear the engine dying. “Quickly, Bosun!” he called. “Assemble line handlers with grappling hooks along the starboard rail. Stand by to pull that plane alongside, secure, and get its people out!”
“Ay, sur!” Simms’s chief bosun turned and blew several blasts on his whistle, followed by bellowed commands.
Close, close, Ruik thought. Even as Fred and Kari’s plane struggled to achieve just a few hundred more tails of flight, the battle line of Dom frigates was beginning to close. Without the waagons to slow us, we will reach position first, so they mean to slow us themselves. All but Icarus had heavier guns than the Doms, and the enemy would soon be in range to receive some serious discouragement—if they could be discouraged. He doubted it. Simms had survived heavier immediate odds at the battle off Saint Francis—but she’d been fresh then, and when that engagement ended, the battle had been over. Now she was battered, leaking, and her engine was beginning to wheeze after thirty-odd hard hours of sporadic combat and high-speed steaming. And even if she survived the coming action, she’d quickly face an even larger battle.
Not far ahead, the Nancy dipped abruptly toward the freshening sea; then its nose came up and it stalled, dropping maybe three tails before pancaking down on top of a swell. Ruik held his breath for the instant that it seemed a wing would catch and flip the little plane over, but then it settled, bobbing upright, with gray-white smoke boiling up and away from the still-whirling prop. Even over the machinery sounds of his ship and the crash of the sea against her side, Ruik heard the death rattle of the Nancy’s engine.
“Two points to port!” he called to the quartermaster at the wheel. “Steady as she goes!”
“Our bow wave will push it away,” Gaal counselled.
“The crew has done this twice already today,” Ruik replied. “They will succeed, whether Lieutenant Reynolds can control his plane or not.”
Gaal grunted skeptically when they saw the smoldering plane crest the bow wave and quickly dip low, beginning to spin as helplessly as a leaf. With a stunningly loud, clattering roar, the Nancy’s prop raced, and the rudder nearly banged against the port elevator. Its spin arrested and the nose pointed at the ship, Reynolds practically aimed to ram—just as his abused engine finally seized and his prop slammed to a jarring stop. Almost instantly, the oil-streaked, superheated engine caught fire with a rush of orange flames.
“Hey!” Fred cried. “Hey! Get us outa here!”
“Heads up!” roared the bosun. “Now!” he added. Half a dozen grapnels arced into the air, trailing lines behind them. Three slammed through the fabric of the port wing, catching in the spars, and one splashed into the water just beyond Fred, narrowly missing him. Flames were licking greedily up around the fuel tank forward of the engine, and if there’d been a leak in that, it would already be too late. Still, they obviously couldn’t pull the burning plane toward the ship.
“Cut a rope and grab on!” Ruik yelled. “We’ll pull you up!”
“What about the damn flashies?” Fred demanded, his voice high.
“Do it!”
Kari didn’t wait. She was covered with oil and coughing uncontrollably, but with a seemingly effortless leap, she hopped up on the wing, cut a line attached to a grapnel with a knife in her hand, and dove into the sea.
“Pull her in!” the bosun roared. “Lively now!” In seconds, Kari torpedoed through the water and came bumping and slapping up the side of the ship like an oily otter. Seeing his friend hadn’t been eaten, Fred snatched the rope draped behind his cockpit—but paused. He didn’t have a knife. Quickly, he pulled the grapnel up from the depths, snagging it momentarily on the hull of his plane. With a shouted curse, he yanked it clear. Then, with a final glance at the burning engine just behind him, he clutched the grapnel in both hands, closed his eyes, and plunged into the sea.
He was coughing water when Simms’s ’Cat destroyermen laid him gently beside Kari, who’d gagged on the smoky, oily phlegm in her throat and vomited on the deck. Fred shook off restraining hands and jumped to his feet. “Gotta sink my plane!” he shouted.
“No need, Lieuten-aant,” Ruik told him, gesturing aft. The Nancy was burning fiercely now, sinking already. Fred gulped water from a cup a ’Cat handed him, then nodded aft. “Good riddance. Piece o’ crap plane.” He appeared to gather himself and looked at Ruik, who seemed
to be deciding whether to grab his arm and support him. “I didn’t mean that. Got us here, even shot to hell.” He looked at Kari. “How’d you know there wasn’t any flashies? I thought they’re always drawn to ships.”
“We didn’t, not for sure,” Gaal supplied. “But we’re going fast, and they’re rarely in the bow wave.”
Fred turned pale beneath the black smudges on his face, but then shrugged and managed a salute and a sheepish grin. “Oh well. I’ve been in the water before. Maybe flashies don’t like how I taste. And your ship was a fine sight bearing down, even when she almost ran over us! Request permission to come aboard, sir.”
Ruik grinned back. “Delighted to have you both. Let’s get you down to the wardroom and checked out.” He nodded to starboard. “The Dom frigates are closing, and things will shortly get hot, I imagine.”
Straits of Hell Page 29