Whip (7 page)

"For the first time in this insane mission I finally had something to do. Poor Melo collapsed, but I had no time to help him, of course. Whip ordered me back to the tail.

When I got there I had a bit of tidying up to do. Most of the seat cushions were burning away merrily, and I managed to fling them away through one of the side gun positions.

"I didn't know the tail gun was wrecked, so I thought I'd have a go at it. I had a perfect view of what was going on behind us, and I was just in time to see a Marauder take a full dose from a couple of Zeros. It exploded and went straight in. I tried to fire and found the gun useless. So I went forward again. It was quite a journey. Whip was jinking about so violently I was thrown from side to side and more than once knocked off my feet. How Melo, wounded as he was, had done this very same thing was a mystery to me. I came upon him by the cockpit and started to give him some first aid, but he brushed me off, murmuring that Captain Russel might need help at the controls.

"Back into the right seat I went, and I was startled to see blood trickling down the side of Whip's face. He'd taken a grazing bullet along his scalp, and he ignored the wound and the blood. What I didn't know was that Whip had a few pieces of cannon shell in his left leg, and that flying the aircraft through its maneuvers had been sheer hell for him. But he never let on.

"No sooner was I strapped in than we seemed to be in the middle of the whole bloody Japanese fleet. I've never seen so many warships before or since. They were everywhere.

Just before us an aircraft carrier swelled in size as we raced at it. The entire side of the vessel, as well as the nearby warships, blazed with fire — all those guns having a crack at us. We were so close — I hope I never again have the pleasure — that even the smaller cannon and the machine guns were firing, and the air about us had come alive.

Tracers, all kinds. Glowing, burning, shining; whatever. It was all there, and we were flying right through the middle of it. Have you ever flown at night in a snowstorm and put on your nose light? The whole world is incandescence rushing at and around and all about you. It was something like that.

"Funny. Until now, with the war some six months old, I'd never seen a Japanese flag. I thought about it right then and there because I was being provided my first view.

Overdramatic, of course, but there it was. The Rising Sun, fluttering from the carrier's mast. I stared at the flag, and Whip bored straight in toward the carrier, absolutely ignoring the hundreds of guns firing pointblank at us.

"Those Japanese were fast. The carrier was already heeling over, turning into us, as Whip held the Marauder straight and true. Then he shouted his command, and waved with one hand to the bombardier, his name was Johnson, down in the nose, to yank the release. Johnson gave it a go and the torp dropped away, and everything quite became a blur in here because we were almost onto the carrier by now. I mean, it was still well
above
us. Whip shouted, '
Pull
!' and I grasped the yoke with him and we both hauled back as hard as we could. I still remember all those Japanese staring at us with their mouths open as we raced scant feet over the deck. How we missed the planes there, and the masts, is a mystery I'll never fathom.

"The moment we crossed the deck we dropped back to the water, dodging a destroyer that had opened up on us. We had more speed now because we'd lost the drag and weight of the torp and we'd burned quite a bit of fuel. Whip was actually banging on the quadrant, beating his fist against the throttles and prop controls, trying to get more speed out of the aircraft. It seemed to work, and we were truing out at better than three hundred, and the Zeros coming after us weren't doing very well. We were too low and too fast for them to fly a pursuit curve. They had to hang in straight behind us. Johnson was out of the nose now, and he went aft to see what he could do to help those poor fellows back there.

"I hadn't realized how badly the Marauder was shaking. Whip's face was white from his wounds and the strain, and he told me to take it, to stay low and just keep flying as fast as we could go. He sat there, utterly exhausted.

"Johnson worked his way back to the radio compartment to get a homing signal from Midway. Useless. Everything had been shot to pieces and the antennae were all blown away. But at least we had a real chance now. The Zeros had given up their chase, and I pulled up a bit and came back on the power. The engines were badly overheated, and easing the power also saved us from the wild buffeting and vibrations that had been getting worse all the time.

"Our navigator, despite some rather nasty wounds of his own, had Johnson hold him up so he could use the small plexiglas dome to shoot the sun and get our bearings to return to Midway. It wasn't quite that easy. Something came loose, somewhere, and the aircraft began to shake worse than before, and one man couldn't hold her. Whip and I flew together and it took all our strength to hold her in the air.

"We were afraid we might explode at any moment. Fuel was coming out in a heavy spray from the tanks that had been holed. One spark and that would have been it. I'd been telling you about Gogoj. He came up front, looking all the world like a giant blood-soaked rag, and he went right to work, transferring the fuel into the two tanks that were still whole. Otherwise we'd never have made it back.

"You can imagine what the machine was like. She was a wreck, from nose to tail, and I still don't know how we kept her in the air. I'd never handled a B-26 before, and now was not the time to start taking lessons. So Whip flew, and I helped, and it was the most incredible piece of flying I've ever seen. He came in to Midway holding hard right aileron and left rudder, like a drunk sliding out of the sky. When we'd put down the gear and given it a visual, we saw that the left tire was all chewed to ribbons. An absolute mess. A wrong move and the gear would have snapped, and we would have ended all that with a cartwheel down the runway. But Whip played her like a master, holding her off the left gear, until finally she settled. We went hard for the brakes. Nothing. They'd been shot away. The impact of hitting that gear and riding on metal was unbelievable. We were banged about so badly the entire instrument panel tore completely off its fastenings and ended up in our laps. But we made it, stopping in the center of the runway.

"I had to walk around that machine, to see what she looked like from the outside. And I didn't believe it. The left gear, the doors, the whole bottom of the nacelle was a shambles.

Fuel dripped from the tanks, hydraulic fluid and oil spattered on the ground. She leaked in a dozen places. Every one of the eight propeller blades was chewed into a jagged mess. The entire top edge of the left wing had been blown away. All our antennae had been shot off. The engines were filled with holes. The rear turret was a bloody mess.

There was blood all over the interior, and some of it had sprayed outside. The tail turret was a sieve. There were more than five hundred major holes, rips, gashes, tears and, well, we quit counting on only one side of the machine. It didn't seem much use to go on, because obviously that airplane was unflyable long before we got past that carrier."

There was a long silence. Someone pushed a fresh beer at Alex. Men began to move their bodies. They'd been oblivious to heat and dust and their own stinking perspiration.

A captain rose to his feet. "Lieutenant, would you mind just one more question?"

Alex shrugged. "Be my guest."

"What," asked the man, "the hell are you doing with the Death's Head outfit?"

Alex chuckled and even the ponderous Psycho grinned hugely. "It's very simple, really,"

said Alex. "I like them."

"Man, that's for sure. You're with them even though you don't have to be here. But that's what I mean. I was trying to figure out how the hell you get away with it. You're Australian, and yet — "

Alex gestured to stave off the rest. "Who, my dear fellow, is going to tell?"

The pilots laughed and the captain waved his capitulation. "Lieutenant, it sure as hell ain't going to be me. Welcome to the crowd."

7

Colonel Lou Goodman had spent the last hour in his quarters, rummaging through the memories the appearance of Whip had brought surging to the forefront of his mind.

Funny how these past six months had so effectively obliterated his past immediately before that period. Pearl Harbor had come with a clamorous explosion to his enjoyable, albeit hectic, life-style, and it had wrecked the affluence he had grasped. Yet, and he was not slow to make the self-admission, he had found a strange and stirring new purpose in what he'd been selected to do. A military figure Lou never had been and never would be, and his corpulence was tolerated only because of his brilliance in patching together combat aircraft from the lowest part of the scavenger barrel. In this respect he was a genius and his men recognized him as such, and without exhortation on his part — for the fat colonel was likely to be found in the depths of engines or under broken wings as often as his men — they would do anything for their commanding officer. Goodman would never have understood that he was an inspiration to his men. His sense of their belief and confidence in him was enough. Lou Goodman had not yet come to the realization, although it hovered along the periphery of his consciousness, that he was a man who felt and enjoyed immensely the fact that he was making a vital contribution to staving off the Japanese in this desert-ocean-mountain hellhole that formed the bottom of the bucket called the Southwest Pacific.

The appearance of Whip Russel had jogged him back to certain unpleasant memories he had forgotten with ease. Whip and his friends saw Lou Goodman as the ultimate wheeler-dealer, the man who had his ins with the law, who knew how to move through the thickets of a thousand shady deals, who knew who and what and where made the right wheels turn to his satisfaction. They had never known of a wife even fatter than he, to whom he was chained by his own honest love, and the knowledge that without his support, financially and emotionally, Rachel would disintegrate into a mass of frightened human blubber. Lou Goodman had made the wise move of sliding into his home his wife's favorite sister, a woman of lesser girth but possibly even greater ugliness, so that the two women might present an impenetrable wall to the stares and remarks of neighbors and what passed for friends. It worked well for Lou Goodman; his patience and largess was not unappreciated, and his wife kept for him an expansive study and bedroom, where by unspoken but mutual agreement he was not to be bothered by anyone. It was a welcome and an accepted haven within his own home, so that Rachel and her sister, Rebecca, would see Lou only at his own pleasure, or when some minor emergency required his decision-making powers.

Away from this quiet, regulated home life, Lou Goodman took to his daily affairs with what was almost a vengeance. He found himself unable to run his motorcycle shops, his airfields and his growing aircraft maintenance facilities without increasing involvement with the young men who gravitated to these interests. At a later stage in his life, when he should have been fading into obscurity, his being was filled with purpose, in the intricate interweaving of his own experience and essential wisdom with the problems and headaches of those who came to him.

Yet, and he was deeply satisfied with the realization, it was on Whip Russel that it all focused. That day in the Lockheed, the sudden flight to escape the police, he had gained a level of emotional consummation he was astonished to find in himself. Lou Goodman had never admitted it then, and he had never pondered the matter since, but now, at this moment, in his ramshackle, stifling office on Garbutt Field in northern Australia, he became aware that more than anything else, he identified with Whip Russel, his own —

Goodman's — thwarted dreams of his own youth. There it was, he realized, and he was amazed with the growing sense of reality about it all: that moment in the Lockheed, the caressing touch, the gaze of wonder, the song the skies were singing so subtly but powerfully to that young man… there it all was. Oh, Lou Goodman flew, and he was a good pilot, but he'd never known the furious joy of throwing himself with wild abandon into the heavens. He wanted, urgently, that this might be the chosen lot of the fierce-eyed youngster, and yet, Goodman knew as well, he must walk a careful line indeed through Whip's emotional instability. Whip could not be jerked suddenly from his world; it would be a gross violation of his own ethics; if nothing else, young men like Whip stood to the very end by their word.

He could not be thrust from his circle, but he could be weaned. And of all the difficult decisions Lou Goodman had made, it was
not
to press too greatly against the youngster.

Lou Goodman could do no more than simply be there, to let Whip reach out of his own accord.

He flew him in different machines, he explained, he answered questions, he taught him to fly, and finally he reached the pinnacle of stepping from the airplane so that Whip might take to the air for his first solo.

It went as he expected. Whip flew the small aircraft better than well. The touch of the born pilot, the hesitancy that could not disguise the brilliance still waiting to be fulfilled

— it was all there.

When Whip landed, Goodman walked back to the flight line, as Whip taxied the bright yellow Cub with gentle bursts of power, walking the rudder carefully, holding the stick well back. Lou Goodman stood to the side and waited until Whip shut down the Cub, until he tied the machine to the earth, closed the aircraft to the world.

He told Whip Russel only one thing. "I want you to remember this," he said. "No matter what happens in the future, no matter what you decide you want from the sky, no matter how tough you may find life, keep this in mind. No pilot ever has more than one first solo. You've had yours. You're now a part of that fraternity most pilots seem to talk about but can never really identify when someone calls them down for an explanation of what they mean." Goodman smiled. "That's because it's tough to talk with your heart."