The Mary Jane Mission Page 8

  “So, two or three hours later, all of a sudden a P-38 appears over the base, engines roaring away. But before it could land, it fell apart without an explosion. Those at the base saw the pilot fall free, under an open parachute. The medics rushed to him. It was the missing pilot with a bullet in his head. He had been dead for hours, according to the doctors who examined him. Not only that, but when they found the gas tanks on the ground, they were dry. Bone dry! And had been bone dry for hours! The base CO found this whole thing so outlandish that he demanded and received the signatures of nearly 200 witnesses.

  “What happened, you ask yourself? Did the pilot and P-38 go through some time warp? Perhaps. How can you account for it? Some hours were lost. That’s for sure.”

  No one spoke for several seconds.

  “General Cameron?”

  “Yes, Tiger.”

  “If the Mary Jane really has crossed the time barrier, wouldn’t the crew realize it?”

  “Not necessarily. As near as I can figure, what is hours to us is only minutes to them. They are not in our time for too long. Just long enough to be picked up on navy radar. Then they vanish. Why they are suddenly appearing here in 1990, I don’t know. Maybe, the triangle holds the truth to these stories. As far as the crew is concerned, they’re still in 1945 and flying the mission.”

  MacDonald had a question. “Assuming what you’re saying is true, wouldn’t they have clued in when they were in contact with Baker Two, whoever they were?”

  “Probably not. Baker Two were the scientists on Iwo Jima. They weren’t supposed to answer. Only listen.”

  “My callsign must have thrown them,” Les grinned.

  “What did you use?” Cameron asked.

  “Zulu Two-Four-Three.”

  The general smiled. “No doubt. Under the old phonetic alphabet, we used Zebra for the letter Z.” He exhaled heavily. “We have an alarming situation, nonetheless. The bomb — Fat Baby — is now armed. It is real, gentlemen. Let’s accept it, and we’ll all be better off. The quicker we realize it, the better. If this mission of theirs continues to its climax, then the Mary Jane could suddenly and without warning appear over Kyoto with an armed atomic bomb in her bomb bay. If the crew follows orders, they’ll drop it on a defenseless city and kill a quarter of a million people. What day, we don’t know.”

  MacDonald gulped at his coffee. “I still don’t believe it.”

  “What time was the mission’s H-Hour?” Les asked.

  Cameron shrugged. “I don’t remember. I was on Iwo with the scientists.”

  “Oh-seven-thirty,” Robert answered.

  Cameron looked over at his friend. “Oh, yeah. You were at the briefing.”

  “I just realized something, dad,” Les said.

  “What’s that?”

  “David lives in Kyoto. He’s right in the line of fire.”

  Robert’s eyes met his son’s. “I know.”

  “OK, listen,” MacDonald said. “Whether the Mary Jane has traveled through a time barrier or not–”

  “It has,” Cameron interrupted.

  “We have to convince her to turn around,” the navy captain continued.

  “You bet, captain. The bomb is armed. We can’t shoot her down.” Cameron looked to his side. “Here comes the breakfasts.”

  “Sorry, gentlemen,” the waitress apologized, blushing. “Your order was mixed up with someone else’s.”

  Cameron grinned. “That’s quite all right. We had a good, long talk.”

  Chapter nine

  GUAM

  Atop Nimitz Hill, Chief Petty Officer Richard Beatty had just come on duty at the NOCC — the Naval Oceanography Command Center/Joint Typhoon Warning Center. Standing near his desk, opposite a screen displaying a radar image of a cloud formation, he sipped his coffee and studied satellite photos of an area of the Pacific Ocean.

  Beatty worked as a satellite analyst for an organization composed of 148 men — five civilians, 28 officers and 115 enlisted from within the air force and navy. The NOCC provided weather forecasts and environmental support for the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans, from the bottom of the oceans to the top of the atmosphere. This vast expanse covered forty million square miles, representing forty percent of the earth’s ocean surface. The navy side of the JTWC — Beatty’s section — furnished the Seventh Fleet of the US Navy and the civilian communities of Micronesia with typhoon alerts and other destructive weather early warnings. In addition to the satellite pictures, he and the others were involved in constant surveillance of the ocean areas, thanks to reports from air force and navy weather planes and ships, weather stations on the islands, and data fed to them from the navy’s largest computer situated in Monterey, California.

  The pictures in front of Beatty had been taken only minutes before via a satellite 22,000 miles above the earth and had been absorbed through a receiving unit, inside of which a sensitized film was developed and prints made. To untrained eyes, the cloud formations would not mean a thing. However, to Beatty, a particular spiral-shaped mass of clouds 300 miles in diameter north of the Gilbert Islands stood out. He had a pretty fair idea what was emerging out there.

  Near or on the equator during this time of year, the ocean waters were quite warm. At least eighty degrees. The sun beat down day after day. Water vapor would condense and release its heat into the surrounding air. The air would start to rise and become warmer. As it warmed, it rose all the faster. Then it would pull in more moisture-laden air at sea level, which would rise and release more heat. Soon, a chain reaction would be set in motion, with destructive spiraling winds, huge cumulus clouds, strong rains, and a column of gently descending air in the middle. Add to this an easterly wave — a trough of low pressure — blowing from east to west in the inter-tropical convergence zone along the equator where the opposing winds of the two hemispheres meet, and a polar trough moving from west to east, and you had the makings of a serious tropical disturbance.

  Beatty set his coffee cup down. Once he saw the eye of the disturbance, he arrived at only one conclusion.

  A typhoon was beginning to spawn.

  * * * *

  MARY JANE

  At exactly 4:03 hours, the Superfortress navigator eyed his instrument panel from left to right — altimeter, compass, airspeed indicator, and clock. He pressed his intercom button and spoke clearly.

  “NAVIGATOR TO COMMANDER. ALTER COMPASS HEADING TO THREE-TWO-TWO.”

  “TURNING THREE-TWO-TWO,” a voice replied.

  As the navigator jotted the necessary notations in his log, he felt the aircraft climbing in the darkness. The island of Iwo Jima was immediately below them. The original ETA he had given to the commander near Asuncion was only off by one minute. Not bad for two hours flying time.

  In the cockpit, the pilot was calling out the altitude for the commander.

  “Seven thousand... Eight thousand...”

  Once the commander reached the required 9,500 feet, he leveled off.

  “Take over will you, Carl,” he said to his pilot.

  “Sure.”

  “I’m going to make the rounds.”

  The commander — Ian Clayton — unstrapped himself from his seat and stretched. Now he would begin the stroll to talk and to check in on each of the other eight crew members, starting with the tail gunner.

  In its day, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress was a very unique bomber. To start, the pilot and co-pilot had different titles than was common with other World War Two bomber crews. Aboard the B-29, the pilot was actually called the commander. The co-pilot was the pilot. Many new features were inserted into the Superfortress. It had a pressurized crew compartment in the nose and a pressurized thirty-foot padded crawl tunnel over the huge bomb bay that led to a second pressurized cabin in the rear. On the other B-29s, prior to the atomic missions, five computerized power-driven turrets were aboard where gunners could transfer control to each other. On the 509th bombers, this luxury was removed for the sake of speed and the weight of the atomic bomb, in t
his case the notorious Fat Baby, the 12,000-pound monster, twelve feet long and twenty-eight inches in diameter.

  The bomb bay of every B-29 held a maximum of 20,000 pounds of conventional bombs. The four engines developed 2,200 horsepower each. The wingspan was a then unheard of 141 feet, and by the time it was loaded for a conventional bombing mission, the B-29 could carry an all-up weight of 140,000 pounds. The B-29 altitude reached an impressive 31,000 feet. On March 9, 1945, three hundred B-29s wiped out fifteen square miles of Tokyo in a single incendiary. B-29s also dropped two deadly bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To the Mary Jane crew, the B-29 was the fiercest of all war machines. Most of the earlier bugs, such as engines overheating and catching fire in flight, and windows blowing out at high altitude, had now been dealt with. The Mary Jane crew had learned to cherish the B-29.

  * * * *

  In the aft section, Clayton tapped his tail gunner. Sergeant Gabriel Schwartz was a skinny young man who had shot down three ME-109s over Europe with a Liberator squadron, prior to his arrival in the Pacific. In the tight compartment, he was adjusting his gun sight, which controlled a pair of .50-caliber machine guns. When he turned to greet the commander, Schwartz grinned. The small adjustable spotlight on the sight outlined his face and curly hair. Clayton liked him.

  “Hi yuh, captain.”

  Clayton rested his hand on the lad’s shoulder. “Keep a good eye out there, Gabe. You’re the only eyes in the rear.”

  The gunner nodded. “I’ll do my best.”

  “This will probably be the last mission anybody carries out in the war. Shoot down two more bogies and you’re an ace.”

  “Fat chance of that,” Schwartz laughed.

  “You never know. Are you all set to take some good shots of the mushroom cloud?”

  “You bet.” Schwartz felt under his seat and yanked out a box camera. “It’s not that great looking, but it gets the job done.”

  “Film all loaded up?”

  “Ready to go, sir.”

  “Good man. See yuh.”

  “See yuh, captain.”

  Forward from the tail, the radar operator, Sergeant Mark Crosby, out of the corner of his eye saw Clayton open the bulkhead door. Crosby, the only married man aboard and one of the oldest too at twenty-five, was surrounded by mounds of equipment and instruments vital for the third atomic mission. Arranged on the shelves were direction finders, receivers, spectrum analyzers and decoders. His headset could receive different enemy frequencies in each ear. He would soon be listening for any enemy action, in addition to radar signals that could detonate the bomb before arriving at the target of Kyoto. Crosby was seated at his desk, smoking a cigarette, staring into his cylinder-shaped screen, when Clayton approached. The radar image — reflected radio waves that revealed the outlines of land masses — showed a small island passing directly underneath. With Crosby, Clayton peered into the screen to see the geographical image. When he pulled away, Crosby gave him the thumbs up.

  The gunners’ compartment behind the trailing edges of the wings was vacant for this trip, in order to keep the weight down. All the gun sights and armor plating had been removed, and the port and starboard blisters plus the central fire control position on top had been taken out and the holes smoothed over. Clayton stepped up to the tunnel opening and began his thirty-foot crawl. He emerged opposite the radio operator’s desk, manned by Staff Sergeant Nevin Brown, an overweight, balding man in a creased baseball cap, reading a pocket book under a dim light. A big band music lover, he adjusted his headphones, gave the commander a wave, and returned to his reading. Diagonal to Brown was the meticulous navigator, Captain Dwight Marshall. He knew his job thoroughly and Clayton trusted the dark, handsome man with his life.

  “Right on course, skipper,” Marshall said over the drone of the four engines, calipers in hand. As usual, Marshall sat bent over his desk, where he had a Mercator map spread out. It was his job to guide the mighty B-29 over 1,500 miles of near-open water to the target of Kyoto and back to base again on the tiny island of Tinian. As navigational aids, he relied on dead reckoning (where course, speed, time and wind drift came into play), the star shots of celestial navigation, and reports from the radar navigator.

  Across from Marshall sat another trusted crew member, the flight engineer, Sergeant Martin “Butch” Emerson, whose extra job on this mission consisted of helping the army explosives expert, an odd fellow by the name of Staff Sergeant Lawrence Ainsworth, known to the 509th as “Four Eyes.”

  Ainsworth was over forty, unmarried, and a vegetarian. He had very little hair, only tufts of red around his ears. He looked more like an absent-minded professor, or a bookworm, or a manager of a library in some out-of-the-way prairie town in South Dakota. His job, however, was one of the most important of all. He would perform the final arming of Fat Baby. Clayton glanced down at Four Eyes sitting against the bulkhead, who was still sweating from the work he had done on the bomb. Ainsworth didn’t acknowledge Clayton at first because he was busy cleaning his glasses and probably couldn’t see inside the compartment. When he put his thick glasses back on, he looked up into the eyes of the commander standing over him.

  “You OK, sergeant? You look... flustered.”

  The navigator and radio operator exchanged glances, then stared at Ainsworth.

  “Yes, captain,” the sergeant replied quickly and clearly. “I’m fine. It was getting a little warm in the bomb bay.”

  To steady his nerves, Ainsworth turned and studied the bomb’s control panel console just inches away from him. The console — thirty inches high by twenty inches wide — contained colored indicator lights, switches, and meters, and was attached to the bomb through the forward end of the bomb bay by a set of four cables, with twenty-four wires each. It was Ainsworth’s job to monitor the console for any malfunction during the flight.

  Clayton noticed a patch of powdery clouds drifting by through the Plexiglas nose as he made his way to the bombardier’s station. Captain Paul Lunsford, a cool-as-ice twenty-year-old Californian who took his job seriously, was waiting. Seated, Lunsford had his hand resting on the Norden bomb sight’s specially-constructed padded headrest, a device invented solely for the precise bombing accuracy of the atomic missions.

  Glancing at the left side of the bombardier’s control panel, located on the side wall to Lunsford’s left, Clayton saw that the altimeter, remote reading compass, clock, and airspeed indicator all appeared to be functioning. On the right side were the bomb switches and warning lights.

  “Don’t worry,” Lunsford announced with a grin. “I’ll drop the bastard right on target.”

  Clayton smiled and turned in the direction of the cockpit. He tapped the pilot, the dark-skinned Carl Loran, on the shoulder. Loran gave the wheel back to the commander as he sat down. Loran was a young pilot — mid-twenties — from Minneapolis, cool and efficient. Got the job done. Clayton’s type.

  Clayton was a dedicated Superfortress pilot, one of the reasons Colonel Phil Cameron had hand-picked him for the third atomic mission. Like Cameron, he had flown B-17s in the European campaign, where the two had met, following a posting to the same squadron in Great Britain. Clayton’s quick, perfectionist mind was a contrast to his slow-talking, Georgian drawl. On the ground, he was a good-natured individual, respected by his crew and others. But prior to every flight of the Mary Jane, Clayton became a different person. He’d take a trip to the bomber and hound the ground crew, making sure they checked everything. While they were busy working, Clayton would walk around the fuselage, pretending to see if any rivets were out of place and such, while out of the corner of his eye he would be watching the crew’s every move. Then he’d ask the crew chief, Bob Shilling, things like whether the brakes were checked, and sometimes would even do some unnecessary manual labor himself on the B-29, much to Shilling’s chagrin. To Shilling, Clayton was a pain in the ass.

  Clayton didn’t really enjoy flying. After three years in the Army Air Forces, he treated it more or less as a job, a way to
serve his country. He had wanted no part of the navy, the ground army, or the marines. Dropping a destructive plutonium bomb on Kyoto — the cultural capital of Japan — was part of that job. He was only obeying orders. He rationalized the mission the same way he had rationalized his way through his entire European tour of missions.

  As far as he was concerned, he wasn’t dropping bombs on people.

  He was dropping bombs on a point on a map.

  Chapter ten

  GUAM

  Inside his son’s den, Robert Shilling flicked at the TV channel selector, while he and Phil Cameron leaned back in their comfortable chairs. Cameron was reading Pacific Crossroads, the local navy newspaper that was delivered free to every government home on the island. Les was on Midway. The women and kids were out shopping this cloudy Monday morning. Cameron and Robert had the house to themselves.

  The two vets were both amazed to find that thirty-five cable TV channels serviced Guam. The Disney Channel, Country Music Television, The Movie Channel, and several Los Angeles stations flashed across the screen. Guam was no out-of-the-way post! Robert stopped at CNN, where a man was reading a weather report.

  Cameron looked overtop his newspaper. “What’s this, a storm?” he asked, curiously.

  Robert turned the sound up.

  The Typhoon Center on Guam, the TV man said, had been tracking a disturbance near the Gilbert Islands, two thousand miles from Guam. Although the system was moving slowly, a storm warning — an upgrade from a small-craft and gale warning where the winds were much lighter — had been issued for the Gilbert area.