His wingman was right. The ocean was coming up too fast. He pulled on the stick and started to climb, losing air speed. For a moment it looked like the Zero would shoot right past him. But the Japanese pilot cut his throttle just in time to stay on his tail. More bullets slammed into Bobby’s plane. Smoke erupted from under the cockpit. “I’m on fire!”
“No, you’re not; you’re just smoking.” Jack had a better view of the damage from outside Bobby’s cockpit.
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. Now level out and turn toward me.”
“He’ll tear me apart!”
“Believe me, it’s your only chance.”
Bobby closed his eyes, said a brief prayer, leveled off, and turned to his right. The Airacobra flew straight as an arrow, a sitting duck for the Zero behind him. The Zero leveled off and opened up with both barrels. Bobby opened his eyes to see bits and pieces of his fuselage and wings jumping up around him. But nothing penetrated the cockpit. This alone was the American airman’s great advantage in 1942. Their planes were sturdy, their cockpits well armored. They couldn’t outfly the Japanese, but they could often outlast them.
How much more punishment could the Airacobra take? The plane seemed to be disintegrating around Bobby. Then he saw a flash of light. He glanced over his shoulder to see the Zero in flames, plummeting like a comet toward the ocean.
Jack’s tactic had proved perfect. He’d stopped trying to get a bead on the Zero and had pulled about sixty yards to Bobby’s right. When Bobby turned, straight and level, he’d drawn the Zero into Jack’s gun sights. The tactic would later be called “the Thach Weave,” named after the pilot who codified it and taught it to all Army Air Forces flight cadets. But in June of 1942 it wasn’t yet well known. Remarkably, Jack had instinctively figured it out for himself.
“Thanks,” Bobby said to him with relief and awe. “Thanks.”
But Jack remained all business. “You’re losing fuel.”
Bobby looked at his instrument panel and saw his fuel gauge dropping fast. The adrenaline was clearing from his bloodstream, letting him think more clearly—he confirmed the likely source of the smoke from the oil-pressure gauge. “I think I’m burning oil, too.”
“Head back and try to land her.”
Suddenly the sky flashed, followed by the sound of a deafening explosion. Bobby turned his plane for a better view of Dutch Harbor, on Unalaska Island. The entire airfield seemed to be on fire. While the Zeros kept the American Airacobras busy, Nakajima B5N2 torpedo bombers had snuck in and bombed the base.
“Shit.” Bobby sighed.
“Don’t think about it. Just get back and land that plane. Battle’s over anyway.”
Bobby knew Jack was right. Even though the dogfight still raged behind him, the Japanese had achieved their objectives.
He passed the enemy torpedo bombers going the opposite direction. But they didn’t break formation to hunt him down. They’d already succeeded in their mission. Now they were heading back to their aircraft carrier. A few minutes later, Bobby was flying directly over Dutch Harbor. They’d hit the fuel-and-ammunition depots. The airfield was a cauldron of rising black smoke and flames, surrounded by snowy, jagged peaks on one side and an icy bay on the other.
Fire and ice, Bobby thought to himself, glancing nervously at his fuel gauge. It had settled. Apparently his fuel level had dropped below the leak in his shot-up gasoline tanks. All he had to do was keep it slow and steady, and he ought to get back to Fort Randall still in one piece.
CHAPTER 33
THE CELLIST AND THE ORGAN-GRINDER
Karen never liked hoboes. She’d seen a lot of them in her young life, growing up as she had during the Great Depression and spending a lot of that young life on trains.
As a child prodigy, she’d traveled throughout the American Northeast, performing with her father at various venues, big and small, famous and unknown. Tanglewood, Jordan Hall, Alexander Hall, and Mortensen Hall were the more prominent stops during her so-called summer vacations, which were really just yearly concert tours organized by her father.
She enjoyed the travel, largely because she loved the New England countryside, and she enjoyed meeting artists of all genres and walks of life. She met Martha Graham in Boston, Sidney Bechet in New Jersey, and Rosa Ponselle in Connecticut.
But she dreaded the train stations because they were often haunted by destitute vagabonds riding the rails in search of work.
Her father, being a socialist, sympathized with the hoboes. It wasn’t their fault they were poor, he tried to explain to her. In fact, they should be respected, if not applauded, for battling to rise above their unfortunate circumstances. And battle they did. Karen would never forget leaving Boston on a night train and looking out the window to see railroad workers hunting the switching yard for hoboes, dragging them out of boxcars, and beating them almost to death with baseball bats.
Karen realized then that she disliked the hoboes because she was afraid of them. She wasn’t afraid they might attack her, mug her, or hurt her. She was afraid of becoming like them. And her father’s lectures only made that fear worse. After all, if they weren’t responsible for their own poverty, if they were simply victims of circumstance, couldn’t that same circumstance happen to anyone? Couldn’t it happen to Karen?
The answer was yes. Not only could it happen to Karen, it had happened to Karen. Now she was living like the hoboes she’d grown up to fear, walking long miles along the railroad tracks, hiding in the tall grass at the approach of a train, and jumping aboard for a free ride if an open boxcar passed by slowly enough. It was exactly what had always terrified her.
And yet she loved it. There was a strange peacefulness to the countryside, because the war was both behind and in front of her. Here, between the battle fronts, she had little to be afraid of. Karen never worried about violence. No one would attack her or mug her. Everyone was reserving their aggression for the enemy, it seemed, knowing they might have their fill of violence any moment if the Nazis came.
Even when Karen and Petr were discovered stowing away in boxcars, they weren’t dragged out and beaten like the hoboes she’d seen in the United States. Instead, they were offered a cup of tea and asked whether their dog was friendly. They were still dressed in soldiers’ uniforms, and everyone wanted to help a soldier, even if it meant helping a soldier desert.
The NKVD was nowhere to be found, either. Their agents were stretched too thin to bother with tiny villages and rural train stations. Even though those stations were on an important supply route, they were largely left to the management of locals. If trains started showing up in Tikhvin with half their cargo, or if there was any sign of theft or corruption between Moscow and Leningrad, no doubt the NKVD would have swooped in and found out what was going on. But that didn’t happen because, unlike politicians or army officers, the civilian rail workers were mostly honest and simple folk.
Karen and Petr rode more often than they walked. The trains heading southeast were mostly empty because little in the way of supplies was being sent from Leningrad to Moscow. There was the troop train Karen and Petr had originally ridden in, which they then hid from as it passed two days after they went AWOL. And there was a train filled with Leningrad refugees that passed them a week later. But mostly the railway was traveled by supply trains on the return trip from Tikhvin—locomotives hauling lines of empty boxcars.
The engines rolled along at little more than a walking pace, which made it easy for Karen, Petr, and Duck to jump on and off. But it also made the journey a very long one, especially since the trains often had to wait hours at a time for more important traffic to pass in the other direction.