The casualties were horrific.
Willard Cromwell considered all aspects of the situation, and at the conclusion of his survey, Madman Cromwell came into being.
He modified his own flying boat. With mechanics and his own flight crew working together, they strengthened the struts and wires and rigging of their machine, finetuned their engines for extra power, and stole stove lids from wherever they could be found to surround their crew positions with armor plating. Then they mounted a longbarreled 37mm recoilless cannon in the nose gunner position, doubled the number of machine guns on the flying boat, and went hunting.
No one had ever attacked a submarine before with a screaming plunge in an aircraft infamous for its plodding gait and painfully clumsy response. Infamous the other machines were; not this widewinged bird. As Cromwell dove against his target, the forward gunner pumped heavy shells against the submarine, supported by three men hammering away with machine guns.
Cromwell aimed to drop his bombs right into the conning tower of his target if at all possible, and the only way to do that was to go right down to the deck in a steep dive so that the bombs would follow a properly curving ballistic arc and explode inside the submarine.
He sank two submarines, fought off several more, saved ships and lives, and met his comeuppance once again through no direct action of the enemy. Attacking a German sub on the surface in his usual brash dive, his bow gunner pumping shells at the enemy machine gun crews on deck, he was short of his aiming point for the conning tower. One bomb struck the flat deck and bounced wildly back into the air to smash into the tail of Cromwell's flying boat. By the good graces of the angels who look after such madmen, the bomb fuse failed to trigger, but the heavy bomb ripped through the airplane's structure, severing the controls to the tail surfaces. Cromwell and crew tore past the submarine just as his first bomb exploded within the Uboat.
The explosion not only ripped outward from the submarine hull, but also struck the flying boat like a giant hand slapping a mosquito. Into the water they crashed. The airplane shed pieces in a rapid but steady progression, each structural collapse easing the shock of deceleration.
When the moment ended, the submarine was sinking in a spume of steam, smoke and spreading oil, and Cromwell and crew in life jackets were clambering onto a section of the hull still floating as a somewhat leaky lifeboat.
A British destroyer raced to their aid and hauled everyone from the sea.
Cromwell ended up in another hospital, this time with a broken shoulder, minor burns, and many lacerations about his body that produced scars he would spend years displaying to awed friends. In the years that followed, Cromwell added to his already distinguished abilities by becoming expert in weapons and demolition. Judged by his superiors to be the recipient of a charmed life, he was sent on missions to trouble spots where British control slipped into disrepute and no small danger. He was as adept in learning languages as he was blessed with an extraordinary memory, and he became as much at home in dark alleys and back streets as he was in the cockpit of any flying machine.
By now, with the war years well behind him, Cromwell was a portly man of large stature and a huge handlebar mustache, assuming the appearance of the typical
"Colonel Blimp" of colonial England. And it was all appearance, for Cromwell beneath his outer flab was massively muscled, adroit, and flexible, and a dangerous man indeed with weapons of any kind, as well as with his powerful hands. He had spent two years in Turkey training with their professional wrestlers, a field exalted and held in honor for multiple generations. They taught him well, soaking his hands and much of his skin in stinging brine so they became tough and as hard as boards.
This was the man Indiana Jones had selected as his "shotgun," able to perform duties as a mechanic or weaponeer, a pilot or a skulker among the alleys of almost any city in the world. He was lethal in handtohand combat and yet, strangely, well steeped in academic lore, master of a dozen languages and with a memory that forgot nothing. Those people who thought they knew Indiana Jones well found it hard to comprehend his friendship with the harddrinking, unpredictable Cromwell. But Indy had chosen very well indeed. Cromwell was worth a dozen men.
And at this moment, in this remote farmhouse, amid wide fields in every direction, Cromwell was thick with whiskey and impatience. He brought shudders to the others in the room with another gutwrenching belch. "When in the blazes is Indy getting back here!" he thundered, a question they all knew to be rhetorical.
Indy would return from Chicago when he had accomplished the needs of his trip, and he had insisted on going it alone. Something very special and secretive had them on edge. Even the powerful and tough Ford Trimotor hidden alongside the biggest barn nearby seemed chained to the ground. They wanted to do something. Waiting scraped against their nerves, and they would have been surprised to know that this was precisely the situation Indy had carefully maneuvered. His team had to be able to function in perfect harmony, whether in action or in stopmotion, waiting as they were now without knowing the reasons why. If there was to be friction or a falling out, this was the time to reveal the problem and remove the fault at once.
"Most men who drink as much as you do," observed Gale Parker, watching Cromwell with mixed distaste and admiration, "would have passed out long ago.
Instead, you just seem to get as nervous as a cat trying to get out of a cage. How do you do it?"
Cromwell blinked at her. The fiery redhead, quite beautiful in a most rugged fashion, had caught him unawares.
Women usually expressed some emptyheaded prattling criticism. But not this one. They knew little of her. Even her accent defied identification, but Cromwell, adept at many languages, recognized Parker's linguistic flexibility with her first words. She was feminine, but imbued with a strength he recognized and respected: a physical strength as well as some inner force. He saw quickly that in many ways she paralleled Indy's own style. She had long been a loner; Cromwell knew the look in the eyes, and he respected any woman strong enough to maintain her presence of self in a world where she was surrounded by men who regarded women as intruders in "their" world.
What Cromwell could not determine, but was so well known to Indy, was that her appearance as an American, or at least someone from eastern or northern Europe, had been carefully manufactured and nurtured. Gale Parker was the name she adopted when she decided that she wished neither her Mediterranean background nor her real name, Mirna Abi Khalil, to signal that much information about her. Her father was Muslim, but Gale, at the time still a youngster known to her friends as Mirna Abi, spent her formative years with her mother, Sybil Saunders, in England's New Forest. The elder Saunders was a bona fide witch of the Wicca religion, and was the senior of an unbroken line of witches and covens going back fourteen hundred years. Born in 1899, as was Indy, Gale had devoted her entire life to intense discipline in academics and skills in the field, living off the land and learning to "read" the signs of wildlife, as well as recognizing the artifacts of her mother's native land stretching six thousand years into the past.
She tripled up on her academics, took strange herbs from her mother that let her rest fully on four hours of sleep every night, and earned her doctorate in ancient cultures by the time she was but twentyfour years old. Living in the New Forest, trained by masters of ancient traditions, she was intensely athletic, but in the real world rather than in field and track competitions. Mountain climbing, swimming, hunter tracking, acrobatics, even expertise in jujitsu learned from an elderly Japanese who had adopted his own lifestyle to that of the Britons, all these had created a brilliant versatility in one so young.