The Last Heroes (Men at War 1)

Douglass bent his head over his lap, obviously marking down the coordinates Canidy had given him; then he raised his head and shook it exaggeratedly: OK.

Canidy made a motion with his right hand: Go.

Douglass nodded and peeled off to his right, toward Kunming.

Now that Douglass was gone with the information, it was safe to try to send it by radio.

‘‘Kunming,’’ Canidy said to his microphone. ‘‘Dawn patrol leader. Twelve Japanese single-engine aircraft at nine thousand feet, course one hundred seventy-five degrees.’’

He waited a moment, redialed the transmitter frequency, and repeated the message. There was no reply to either call.

He turned the P40-B slowly, in a wide arc, maintaining his altitude. When he completed the 180-degree turn, the Japanese were now almost directly below him. He lowered his left wing and looked down at them, then straightened the wings and made a long, flat 360-degree turn. When it was completed, the Japanese aircraft were some distance ahead of him.

As he flew along, his hands inside his gloves were sweating, and he felt the chill when the sweat on his forehead encountered the cold air of fifteen thousand feet.

‘‘Shit,’’ he said, and he pushed the stick forward and tested his guns. The two .50s on the nose ahead of him spit fire. He could not see the .30s in the wing.

The gunsights on the P40-B consisted of crosshairs on a foot-high pedestal mounted on the fuselage in front of the canopy, and a foot-high pedestal eighteen inches in front of that. He lined the sights up on the last aircraft in the Japanese formation, the third aircraft in the right of the V.

He could identify the aircraft now. The facts he had learned about the Mitsubishi B5M in Rangoon came to him:

1000-horsepower 14-cylinder radial engine.

Crew of three.

1700-pound bomb load.

One flexibly mounted 7.7-mm machine gun facing aft. Two 7.7-mm machine guns in the leading edge of each wing.

Maximum speed 325 mph. Cruising speed 200 mph.

The Japanese observer-gunner had spotted him and frantically charged his machine gun, a Japanese copy of the Browning.

Canidy held him a second or two in the crosshairs of his gunsight, then raised his nose so that the crosshairs were now pointing twenty yards ahead of the Mitsubishi. He pushed down with his thumb on the machine-gun button.

The .50s, he realized, were off. The stream of their tracers was to the right of the Mitsubishi. But the stream of tracers from the .30 in his left wing stitched the fuselage from just forward of the vertical stabilizer. He saw the Plexiglas of the long, narrow canopy shatter. He held his position as long as he dared; then he pushed the nose farther down, diving first under the Japanese aircraft and then banking steeply for the nearest cloud cover.

As soon as the gray of the cloud surrounded the P40-B, Canidy put the aircraft into a steep, climbing turn, welcoming the feeling of invisibility the cloud gave him.

When the cloud began to break up at its tops he realized that he was ready to return to the fight, prepared now to compensate for the off-to-the-right firing cone of the .50 calibers. And he knew how to fight.

He would dive to pick up speed and then come up under the rear aircraft of the rear wing. That would severely limit the ability of the Japanese machine gunners to fire on him. He could fire on at least one aircraft before making a dive turn away from him. He doubted that they would try to pursue him. He was faster.

There were only three planes in the rear V now. The aircraft he had first attacked had left the formation. He looked for it but couldn’t find it. He changed his original plan and came up instead under the forward V, attacking the last plane in the right arm of the V, then the aircraft ahead of it.

He was still in position under the second aircraft when the .50s in the nose stopped, and a moment later the .30s in the wings. He was out of ammunition. He began a steep, diving turn to the left, looking frantically over his shoulders. In the fraction of a second he had it in sight, he thought he saw flickers of fire in the Mitsubishi’s engine nacelle, but he concluded that he was probably looking at its exhaust.

He straightened out and headed back to Kunming, dropping as he flew. Five minutes out of the airfield, he saw ten P40-Bs, flying in pairs, climbing out in the direction of the Japanese.

When he called the tower for permission to land, the radio worked perfectly.

One of the eager warriors of the Second Squadron, to whom the plane Canidy was flying was normally assigned, was waiting for Canidy when he taxied up to the revetment. He had his helmet on and his pistol, and Canidy realized that he had forgotten to wear his. The pilot obviously intended to race off after the others just as soon as his ship was fueled and rearmed. He was to be disappointed. There were four bullet holes in the aircraft fuselage, and two in the right wing. There had been no indication of any kind of damage to the controls or the engine, but John Dolan firmly announced that the plane wasn’t going anywhere until they had a close look at it.

The eager warrior, denied the joy of combat, furiously pulled his helmet off and threw it on the ground, smashing the right lens of his goggles.

Shaking his head, Canidy started walking toward the mess. Crookshanks appeared in what had been Canidy’s Studebaker. He had been relieved of it as soon as they’d reached Kunming.

Canidy opened the door and got in beside him.