Devil's Due (Destroyermen #12)(144)
“Head up, Col-nol!” Shirley cried. “I winged mine, but he’s turnin’ aaf-ter you!”
Ben glanced at his mirror as he roared east over the bay. Everything down there, including Savoie, seemed to be shooting at him. “I see him, Shirley! I can’t shake him. Try to brush him off, wilya?”
“Yaah, hold on!”
“Ha!” Diebel shouted. “I got him! He didn’t expect that!” Ben wondered what Diebel did to turn the tables. No doubt something he’d learned flying Brewster Buffaloes against far better Japanese planes. Tracers whipped past, a couple of bullets tearing into Ben’s right wing. No time to ask him now.
“Break leff, Col-nol!” Shirley shouted. He did so without thought. In his mirror, he saw the Macchi-Messer blur by, tracers spraying. Then, right in front of him, was a Jap-Grik plane, coming straight on, two guns twinkling in its wings. Bullets hit his plane—not hard, he thought, compared to the Macchi-Messers—and he fired back. The green plane with red roundels exploded into fragments.
“Whaa-wee!” Shirley cried. “Got ’im thaat time! He’s . . . Ha! He craash into daamn Grik Bee-Bee! Don’t think he done much to it, though,” she added, disappointed.
“Colonel!” Came Diebel’s urgent call. “There is a fifth League plane! It must have been flying cover for the others! It is coming down. . . .” The transmission broke, but Ben saw what happened. Flashy Two had been climbing over the eastern docks when the Leaguer Conrad Diebel warned about swooped down, above and behind. He never had a chance. He was probably killed by the concentrated fire that shredded the canopy, because his plane just stood on its tail and fell from the sky, impacting south of Kurokawa’s compound. “Damn it, Conrad!” Ben whispered. There was a loud clatter as Ben’s M plane flew through a burst of machine-gun fire. He whipped the plane right and pressed his trigger again, blasting another Jap-Grik from the sky. His engine coughed and he quickly scanned his instruments. “Goddamn it!” he shouted. “My engine’s starving. Fuel lines must be shot up. I’m losing Prestone too, overheating. . . .”
“Get out o’ here, Col-nol,” Shirley’s little voice, full of anger and resolve, came to him. “I get thaat baas-tard thaat get Con-raad!”
“I know you will, Shirley,” Ben said, his engine running rougher by the moment. Another green plane came for him, but a P-1 took care of it. “I’ll never make it to Big Sal. I never trusted Tikker’s scheme for trapping us, anyway,” he added, trying to keep his tone light. Suddenly, there was a familiar but unexpected voice in his earphones. “Flashy Lead, Flashy Lead, this is CO, OR-One. Do you read, over?”
OR-1? Holy crap, it’s Chack!
“Roger, CO, OR-One. I read.”
“We are at objective Baker,” Chack said, meaning the south end of the bay, almost across from Walker, “and are securing Objective Chaarlie as we speak. There is fighting there, but if you come in east to west and don’t hit a hole, you should aar-rive among friends.”
“Thanks OR-One, I’ll give it a try. Did you hear that Shir—I mean, Flashy Four?”
“Aye. But I’m a little busy.” Her voice was strained with G-forces and concentration. “I’ll see you there, Lead.”
Ben said nothing more, hopeful Shirley would prevail, one-on-one. She’d always been the best. Now she was the last. Crossing the docks over a pair of burning, sunken Grik BBs, he tried to coax a little more altitude out of his ship before the engine crapped out entirely. “See you in a minute, CO, OR-One,” he said, as his poor, beloved P-40E began to buck. Behind him, except for Shirley’s duel with the Macchi-Messer, little activity remained over the bay. The pursuit ships had fought themselves out. He thought Big Sal’s squadrons got the best of it, but it was hard to tell. Either way, those that remained would be regrouping to escort the Nancys with their bombs. In just a few minutes, it would be over for him—one way or another—but the battle of Lizard Ass Bay was about to kick into high gear.
? ? ?
Maggiore Antonio Rizzo caught up with Kurokawa, Muriname, and their Grik guards beside a shattered, burned-out warehouse. There they stood while the drama played out overhead. Kurokawa and Muriname had been ecstatic when their planes first confronted the enemy’s, but their elation quickly turned. Muriname’s AJ1M1c fighters (the M in their designation standing for “Muriname”) might’ve been better than the Allies’ P-1s, but not the new C model, and their pilots, even the Japanese, weren’t even close. They simply didn’t have the experience, nor had they been taught by trained pursuit pilots. The massacre in the making was delayed by Rizzo’s Macchi-Messerschmitts, which took a terrible toll that seemed to please the Italian, but then the P-40s came. That had been a very close match between aircraft and pilots, but now they’d essentially wiped each other out, and the remaining P-1Cs quickly finished or chased away the last of Muriname’s planes. His torpedo bombers and a final squadron of escorts were up somewhere, but their target—the enemy carrier—hadn’t been found. Now more planes were coming: the little seaplanes with their bombs.
“We must sortie the fleet!” Muriname pleaded. “I cannot protect it in the harbor anymore!”
“Anymore,” Kurokawa scoffed sarcastically.
“Yes! My air force has been destroyed trying to protect your fat, slow targets! They must put to sea at once. The enemy light bombers will be above us momentarily.”