Eagles at War (23 page)

Sweat poured from Lee as he urged his plane higher. The Navy pilots had agreed to level off at fifteen thousand feet, because the McNaughtons had no oxygen. They circled clockwise in two groups, the Grummans on the outside, trying to slow down enough to stay with the Sidewinders.

Ceaselessly checking his instruments, Lee began to wonder if the scramble was a false alarm. They flew for forty minutes, watching their fuel supplies creep down while the towering cumulus clouds that presaged the next rain showers crept up.

Suddenly, down below, he saw four bombers, escorted by eight Zeros, hurtling toward the line of ships offloading supplies at the beach. Lee heard the flight leader yell "Tallyho" and dive; Lee followed with the rest of the McNaughtons while a flight of Grummans immediately peeled off after them.

Lee was exultant. They wouldn't have had a chance at fifteen thousand feet against the Zeros; now they were going to be fighting on the deck, where the odds were more even.

He lined up a bomber in his sights and fired a quick sighting burst from the four machine guns. Then, his aim dead on, he lifted the nose slightly and fired the flat-trajectoried 37-mm cannon, the thump, thump, thump of its recoil slowing the Sidewinder. The left wing of the bomber tore away, its fat fuselage rolling seaward before disappearing in a salty geyser.

Lee wracked the McNaughton into a vertical bank, turning as tightly as he could, G forces hammering him into the seat, trying to clear behind him. He saw an F4F dispose of another bomber and two Zeros spinning toward the sea.

Reversing his turn, he glanced back to see two Mitsubishi fighters behind him, one on either side. He pushed over toward the sea a thousand feet below, the Zeros following, thudding 7.9-mm bullets and 20-mm cannon shells into his aircraft. Squeezing down, praying that if the weak-lunged Allison engine behind him couldn't outrun the Japanese it would at least absorb their fire, he headed for the beach, hoping to draw the enemy fighters across the Marine antiaircraft guns.

The lead Zero moved closer, wanting to finish the McNaughton off. Lee felt the airplane shudder as cannon shells slammed into the engine. The propeller disc dissolved to a slowly turning paddle before stopping. He put the nose down to maintain speed, trading altitude for distance toward the shore.

Professionals, their job done, the two Zeros turned away to seek new prey while Lee concentrated on the touchdown. He knew he wasn't going to make it to landfall, so he tried to get within swimming distance of one of the lighters offloading cargo.

With the shattered engine and stopped propeller, it was quiet in the Sidewinder until he jettisoned the car-door entrance to the cockpit. The rush of wind was deafening, and he could hear the hissing from the boiling coolant radiator. A glance at the instrument panel showed that he was out of airspeed and altitude. Cinching up his straps, he eased the shattered fighter into the water, touching down tail low. The Sidewinder slowed until the propeller struck, pole-vaulting it over on its back.

As the plane somersaulted tail first, his arm flailed out the side door and his face crashed into the gunsight. He felt a sickening crack in his forearm and a lightning rush of pain as water surged in around him. The plane sank straight down until it was resting, inverted, twenty feet below the surface. His left arm useless, Lee fumbled with his straps, trying to hold his breath when all he wanted to do was scream in agony.

*

Cottbus, Germany/October 1, 1942

Bruno Hafner was drowning in bad war news. Rommel was retreating in Africa, and the drive toward Stalingrad was slowing down. The old warrior was edgy, despite his satisfaction with progress on the jet fighter. The first Me 262 airframes were already assembled in the huge underground factory. Galland had readily agreed to let Hafner have them, as the best hope of getting jet engines into mass production. Even the new blades, made of the rarest metals, had a short life in the raging inferno of the jet, but now old Fritz had provided a solution.

Hafner picked up a turbine blade, a simple T-shaped fold of metal. Fritz, the master machinist, had ignored the need for rare metals and gone to the heart of the problem: heat transfer. He had taken a simple sheet of ordinary steel and made a hollow airfoil of it. Ducts permitted air to flow through the turbine blade, cooling it effectively and eliminating the need for rare metals. It was a million-mark idea—and it might just win the war. They had run one engine in a test cell at full speed for a hundred hours straight. Now they were running acceleration and deceleration tests, full throttle, back to idle, full throttle again, and the engine was chirping along like a canary bird. Production engines probably wouldn't do as well, but if they lasted even twenty-five hours, it would be enough.

And if it didn't win the war, it might be a bargaining chip afterward. A year ago it looked as if Germany couldn't lose; now the odds were shifting rapidly. Russia sprouted divisions like a hydra—was there no end to their manpower?

Hafner reached into the satchel beside him and pulled out a package of foreign magazines, sent in from Switzerland, looking for the article he'd snipped from
Aviation.
It said that a farmer in Nashville had brought suit against the McNaughton Aircraft Company because the high-pitched roar of an engine under test had caused his chickens to stop laying, and that the explosions had frightened his cows. A McNaughton Aircraft spokesman had said only that it was a necessary test of a radical new type of engine.

There had been intelligence reports that McNaughton had a jet engine under development—this confirmed it.

Hafner realized with a start that this opened entirely new opportunities. If McNaughton was having trouble with its engine, he might be able to open negotiations with his old colleague Henry Caldwell directly. They might be able to do business. Caldwell was an entrepreneur, even if he wore a uniform. He'd be willing to trade—if he thought the terms were right—and Hafner would see that they were.

He had known for almost two years of Lyra's contacts with Caldwell; perhaps it was time to play the cards he held on the pretty little Jewess.

***

Chapter 7

Northwest of Tula/November 18, 1942

They were sweeping too low for his taste over the tops of the green-black pine trees, the propellers of the red-starred Lisunov Li-2 transport churning twin crystal vortices from the snow-laden branches. Giorgi Scriabin hoped that the Messerschmitts would ignore the glistening signal that a victim was at hand.

Damn, I'm too old for this, Scriabin thought. He compressed himself into a ball beneath the rough Army greatcoat, trying to squeeze warmth from his fast-pumping heart into hands and feet long gone numb in the piercing forty degrees of frost. The Russians had kept the outward form of the license-built DC-3, but their version was sadly lacking in fit and finish. The faint warmth trickling from the cabin heater valve was swept away in the cyclone of wind sieving through the Li-2's cabin.

The harsh interior didn't bother Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov, hunched over a rough wooden desk, as icily indifferent to the cold as he was to everything but his work. With his narrow-set unblinking eyes behind a pince-nez and his unsmiling mouth under a Stalin-like mustache he was the personification of an executioner.

Within the next hour, Molotov would determine whether Scriabin lived or died. Caldwell had convinced Scriabin that the McNaughtons were sound—and he had not paid attention to the warning cues from his colleagues. Scriabin had made the recommendations, Molotov had approved them—and the planes were failures.

A mechanic leaned into the cabin and whispered to Molotov's aide, who hesitantly relayed the landing warning to the Foreign Minister as if it were a mortal offense. Molotov ignored him, picking up yet another file to scan.

Scriabin huddled on the floor where he could glance upward out the windows on each side. The leaden sky, a sump of weather-baggaged clouds, abruptly changed to green walls, and he knew that his fate would soon be decided. He could sense the Li-2 pilot's skill as they crept in at the edge of a stall, the plane hanging on the power of its engines, struggling to touch down on the very edge of the short, narrow strip hacked out of a forest. The landing was firm, and Scriabin could feel the gradual application of brake as they slowed in the snow. At the end of the strip, the pilot had to apply power to taxi off toward the reception committee—a dour-looking group headed by Colonel Arkady Kosokov, whose savage report on the inadequacies of the McNaughton Sidewinder had precipitated Molotov's unprecedented visit to the front.

The rear door swung open, and they could hear the ragged tinny sounds of a pickup military band in the background. Molotov moved slowly down the cluttered aisle; his mind might be indifferent to the cold but his muscles were not, and he almost fell climbing down the short aluminum ladder.

Scriabin stood to one side as the formalities went on. It was strange; all the rituals the Communists had so proudly discarded in 1918—the saluting, medals, and epaulettes, all the signs and privileges of rank, the military ceremonies—were now back in force and with a vengeance. He saw that fighter planes, McNaughton Sidewinders and obsolete Polikarpov I-16s, were tucked into bays thrust among the trees, expertly camouflaged with cut boughs that made them invisible from the air.

Kosokov was introducing Molotov to an ace, Major Ivan Poryshkinov, just back from a mission flown in a grimy bemedaled jacket and a leather helmet too small for his massive skull.

"So, Major Poryshkinov, tell me about the McNaughton fighter."

Poryshkinov, obviously ill at ease and not sure of what was going on, looked in wild-eyed desperation at Kosokov, who nodded impatiently.

"Major, I decorate you in honor of your honesty and of your victory over the German tank." He pushed the medal into Poryshkinov's hand, nodded contemptuously to Kosokov, and walked to the small wooden shack that sat at the side of the runway. He slid in the door and a covey of mechanics and pilots scrambled out, appalled to have been caught keeping warm instead of watching the ceremonies. Kosokov followed him. A moment later the door opened again, and Molotov beckoned to Scriabin to enter.

The room was no more than four meters square. An oil drum, its U.S. markings still visible, served as a stove, while boots and foot wrappings hung on the walls drying, lending their own distinctive stench to the smoky fug of the room. Yet it was a shield against the wind, and the temperature was above freezing, reason enough for the troops to pack it between sorties.

Kosokov was a fighter, and he was obviously not going to let the matter die on the basis of his pilot's comments.

"Don't pay any attention to Poryshkinov; he was still excited from the combat, and he was trying to say what he thought you wanted to hear. Believe me, Comrade Foreign Minister, the McNaughton is shit! We can't keep it maintained, and the ones we get in the air the Germans shoot down. You've read the reports I've sent in. Why can't we have some Spitfires, or even some Hurricanes? Or, if we have to have American junk, let it be P-47s or P-38s."

Kosokov now looked apprehensive at the direction of the conversation, but he spat out, "It was a killer on takeoffs and landings. The record shows that clearly."

"You really don't like any fighters, do you, Kosokov? Perhaps you'd be better off in a bomber regiment, or in the infantry?"

"In eight weeks of operation, we have lost thirty-two pilots. Almost four per week, more than one hundred percent attrition for the squadron."

Molotov's voice dropped half an octave. "Thirty-two. My, how tragic." He paused, letting the tension build, and when he spoke again, his voice was savage, chipping at Kosokov's ego like a chisel on marble. "Do you know how many people die in Leningrad
every
day
of starvation? Four thousand! And do you know how many we lost last June at Sevastopol? In three weeks, one hundred thousand! That's more than thirty-three thousand a week,
more
than four thousand a day! And you talk about four killed per
week?"

Kosokov was silent; he knew Molotov's mind was made up, that his own career and maybe his life were over, and that there was little point in pushing him further.

"The problem is not the airplanes, Colonel Kosokov. The problem is you. Certainly you are going to lose men; I would have been happier if you told me you had lost thirty-two hundred; at least you would have been doing something."