The Last Heroes (Men at War 1)

‘‘She wouldn’t tell me last night,’’ Canidy said, ‘‘how she fits in this.’’

Cynthia looked at Douglass for permission. This time he gave it.

‘‘You’ll be an agent in this operation,’’ Cynthia said. ‘‘Every agent has a handler. I’m your handler.’’

‘‘How are you going to ‘handle’ me?’’ Canidy asked.

‘‘Take care of your pay, your travel, your training, your briefings, your last will and testament, do whatever I can to get you where you’re going as quickly as possible. In other words, be responsible for you.’’

‘‘You’re too young to be my mother,’’ Canidy said. ‘‘And too pretty.’’

‘‘I know, Dick, I know,’’ Cynthia said. ‘‘But I’ll just have to do.’’

‘‘Actually, I could do a lot worse,’’ Canidy said, meaning it. ‘‘Meanwhile’’—he switched his attention to Baker— ‘‘where are you going to be while I’m running around in the desert looking for Fulmar?’’

‘‘Mr. Baker is leaving tomorrow for Rabat,’’ Douglass said. ‘‘He will be there when you arrive. As soon as we can make it through the bureaucratic niceties and your briefings, you’ll go to Rabat.’’

‘‘Via Lisbon and Vichy,’’ Baker said. ‘‘An ordinary junior foreign service officer would spend a week being briefed at the embassy in Vichy before moving on to a consulate general assignment. If you didn’t do that there would be questions. You do understand, don’t you, that since Morocco is still a French protectorate, our consulate general there reports to our ambassador to France.’’

‘‘No,’’ Canidy said.

‘‘We’ll get into that in the briefings, Dick,’’ Cynthia said. ‘‘There’s a lot of material we have to give you.’’

‘‘Chief Ellis will stick with you through all of this,’’ Douglass said. ‘‘I’m sure you’ll find him helpful. He’s an old sailor.’’

‘‘He makes a pretty good guard, doesn’t he?’’ Canidy asked.

Douglass met his eyes.

‘‘Yes,’’ he said. ‘‘That too.’’

Kunming, China 18 January 1942

The sixteen B5M Mitsubishis the ground spotters reported en route to Kunming turned out to be, when Ed Bitter and his wingman found them, eight B5Ms and eight K1-27 Nakajima fighters.

‘‘What the hell are they?’’ Bitter’s wingman asked.

"Nakajima K1-27s," Bitter reported excitedly. ‘‘Get the hell back to Kunming.’’

It was the AVG’s first encounter with the K1-27s. They had been told that their P40-Bs were superior in several important ways, but that was theory. He was about to test that theory.

Bitter waited until his wingman was nearly out of sight before he pushed the nose down to attack formation. He wondered if that was prudent. It was insane for one man to attack a formation of sixteen aircraft, eight of them fighters.

He got a B5M on his first pass. He had put several .50-caliber tracers into the fuel tanks in the left wing, and the tanks had blown up. He just had time to consider, as he pulled away from the formation in a steep dive, that it was his third kill, when he looked over his shoulder. There were three K1-27s on his tail.

He had no trouble pulling away from two of them in the obviously faster P40-B, but the third, obviously a first-class pilot, kept turning inside Bitter’s turns, and once when Bitter looked over his shoulder he was chilled by little red bursts coming from the Jap’s wing guns.

He put the P40-B into a steep dive, dropping from seven thousand feet almost to the ground. When he saw the Nakajima was still on his tail, farther back than he expected, he knew that he could get away with what he planned. He pulled back on his stick, feeling the g forces force his body down in the seat. The world turned red and then nearly black as the blood drained from his head, and he prayed he wouldn’t black out.

He remained conscious enough to feel the life of the stick, and when his vision cleared, he was through the loop and the Nakajima was ahead of him, falling out of a loop he had tried to make inside Bitter’s, which he now realized he could not complete in time. He went through the fall and tried to dive to safety.

Bitter caught up with him, got on his tail, and opened fire. He saw the .50 tracers pass the Nakajima, and reminded himself that for every tracer there were four armor-piercing ball projectiles. He was certainly getting his fire in the Nakajima, but there was no sign of it. The guns stopped, first the .50s and then the .30s. He was now, except for speed, defenseless. He looked over his shoulder. The other two Japanese fighters, the ones he had lost, were now diving on him. He banked sharply to the left. In the last second he had the first Nakajima in sight; it burst into a ball of orange flame and disappeared.

He headed for Kunming, the P40-B’s throttle lever past the takeoff indent, as far as it would go, into full emergency military power. The Nakajimas on his tail fell farther and farther behind, and finally, convinced they had chased him off, broke off and started back to the bombers they had been sent to protect.

He had, he realized, shot down his third and fourth enemy aircraft, one of them a fighter. But then he had a follow-on, an unpleasant thought. As soon as it worked its way through the Japanese command structure that the Nakajima K1-27s were no match for the Curtiss P40-Bs of the American Volunteer Group, the Japanese high command would send in something better. The destruction of the AVG was at least as important as the bombing of China. They would send the best aircraft they had to win that battle. The AVG was already playing its ace, and there was no hole card.

He realized he was far more frightened of that prospect than he had been when the K1-27 was on his tail.