Page 30 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
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Bell had a poorly paddedseat in the tight confines of the rear cockpit with the handle and pistol-style grip of the Lewis gun right behind his head. On each side of him were more of the dinner plate–sized forty-seven-round magazines mounted on pegs. Ahead of him, Whiddle worked the controls, checking for proper motion from each flap and aileron, as well as the rudder. Then he manually pressurized the fuel system and readied the magneto.
“Contact,” he called to the two mechanics standing ready by the propeller.
They forced it around with a grunt as Whiddle sparked the magneto. The Rolls-Royce Falcon V12 exploded to life, hot exhaust blasting down the pipes that ran along the fuselage.
Bell had to contain a grin at the raw power he felt shuddering through the airframe. It was like the feeling just before a wild horse broke out from underneath a rider. The power was all there, readyto erupt, but still held in check by the flimsiest gossamer thread. When the engine was up to proper temperature and pressure, Whiddle advanced the throttle with his left hand and a bit more of that power was unleashed. The F.2 began to trundle forward across the uneven field, wobbly on its narrow axle. The two mechanics walked along with her to make sure a wing didn’t dip too close to the grass.
By heading into the prevailing winds, the planes of the 22nd Squadron had formed bald stripes across the field in almost perfectly perpendicular lines. Today the wind had shifted a couple of points, forcing Whiddle to cut across some of the shallow ruts in order to keep the plane’s nose directly upwind. The takeoff was fast, bouncy, and loud as the motor pumped out over two hundred and fifty horsepower. The tail skid had come up almost the moment Whiddle put the throttle to its stop, and just a short time later the plane became unbound by gravity.
This time Bell couldn’t help but grin as Whiddle kept the plane level to build up speed and then they were rocketing for the heavens faster than Bell thought possible. He couldn’t see over Whiddle’s shoulder to check the altimeter, but he estimated they were climbing at almost a thousand feet per minute. Above the pilot on the top wing was a compass floating in a fluid-filled case. As they climbed, Whiddle set them on a northeasterly course to take them closer to the battle lines, but not close enough to attract any enemy interest.
They leveled off at twelve thousand feet. The sun shone bright, but did little to warm the March air. The bit of skin exposed around Bell’s goggles grew numb until he adjusted his scarf to protect himself. The air was thinner at this altitude, but Bell was a man in his prime who enjoyed perhaps two cigars a year, and so he had little difficulty keeping his breathing as normal as if he were standing at sea level.
He saw no snow on the ground and that all the fields still wore their winter mantle of mottled chaff. The trees were still skeletal figures except for the pines, which carried their cloak of green needles. The terrain reminded him of upstate New York farmland or the areas settled by the Amish in Pennsylvania.
But then in the distance he saw something different, something his mind tried to reject out of hand. He no longer saw pastures and fields ready for the plow and tiller. Instead he saw a spreading cancer that was consuming the countryside, a brown stain that looked to be fifteen or twenty miles wide and stretching to the distant horizon, more than a hundred miles away. Smoke obscured great swaths of it as thousands of field guns lobbed high-explosive shells across the human-caused mire. Where they hit, fiery cotton balls erupted and sent geysers of mud and dirt into the air.
This is what the two sides had been fighting over for the past three years, Bell thought gloomily, a swath of ground so corrupted by war it looked like it would remain a suppurating wound forever. From this vantage, Bell couldn’t see individual soldiers, but on the Allied side he saw convoys of vehicles stretching back many miles from the front, each bringing fresh shells for the insatiable gullets of the artillery. He imagined the Germans in their bunkers and trenches, hunkered down like moles waiting through a summer downpour, knowing that when the barrage finally ended the real gruesome business of war would begin.
Bell thought back to the optimistic opinion pieces he’d read as the war had gotten underway in the fall of 1914. The fools actually thought it would be over by that Christmas. Here it was, some three years later, and they were still at it, still wasting lives at such a prodigious rate that both sides’ populations would be affected for a generation or more.
Just then the smoke began to drift away from the ranks of Allied artillery, carried away by a gentle breeze and not replaced by fresh gouts of smoke and fumes. The guns had gone silent. If doctrine held, the British soldiers would now run from their trenches and charge into a defense they’d been assured couldn’t survive such a firestorm, but which invariably had.
Again the altitude was too great to see details on the ground and yet Bell strained to see any movement from the British lines. He thought back to the horror of the night attack by the German commandos and understood the fear striking the men on both sides of the front.
Whiddle’s gloved hand suddenly pointed to the east. Bell had been so intent on the spectacle about to unfold down below that he had neglected to check his surroundings. They were a lone fish in a sea full of sharks and he hadn’t been watching for fins.
He turned, expecting to see a flight of German fighters about ready to pounce on them. Instead he saw that, several miles behind the German lines, an observation balloon was being rapidly inflated with hydrogen. It was silvery and had a lattice of ropes across its skin like the strings around a sausage hanging in a butcher’s shop. Bell recalled his conversation with Uncle and how the Germans used the balloons for spotters to concentrate artillery fire to where it would be the most deadly.
If they didn’t knock down that balloon, the first waves of the British charge would be wiped from the face of the earth in a hellish maelstrom of fire and shrapnel.
Even as he cranked the rudder over to charge at the balloon, Whiddle jerked his hand over his shoulder at Bell and made a downward motion with his thumb. Bell looked down by his knees and saw the spare drums of ammunition for the Lewis gun. One of them hada daub of red paint on it. Bell intuited its meaning. Red meant fire. These were incendiary rounds, meant to ignite the hydrogen gas venting from a ruptured balloon.
He adjusted the safety belt around his waist so he could stand and released the lock holding the Lewis gun horizontal in its Scarff ring mount. Now he was free to train the weapon on any bearing in the sky. He popped off the drum of normal lead bullets and replaced it with the incendiary ammunition. After cocking the weapon with his right hand, he wrapped his gloved fingers around the grip, mindful to keep them away from the trigger.
He finally noticed that the plane was diving like a hawk, building up tremendous speed as it swooped downward over the German lines. The balloon was already the size of a barn, but not yet so buoyant that it had started to ascend. Bell saw that around it was a thick defensive perimeter of antiaircraft guns, both small-caliber cannons and machine guns on pintle mounts. The guns were already manned and ready, and even before the Bristol was within range, several opened fire, lofting shells with timed fuses that exploded in deadly clouds below and ahead of the hurtling fighter.
Soon enough the rest of the defenders let loose and the sky around the F.2 came alive with explosions of cutting shrapnel and strings of tracer fire that crisscrossed the sky in murderous ribbons.
They were still too far out of range when the balloon lifted off the ground, followed a second later by a wicker basket for the observer and a tether/communications line secured to a gasoline-powered winch mechanism. Bell had a brief flashback to a Long Island farm and a similar setup used by a German spy ring he’d recently broken up.
An explosion under the plane sent it tumbling for a moment and riddled the floorboards with a dozen whistling holes. Whiddle gotthe plane back under control and adjusted the nose a fraction to line up on the rising balloon. He was singularly focused and let neither flak nor machine-gun fire deter him.
He finally pulled the trigger on his Vickers. Although the gun was on a timing chain to prevent rounds from hitting the propeller, to Bell it sounded like a normal machine gun. The target was impossible to miss. The bullets puckered the silk envelope as they tore through it, but were going so fast they left behind tiny punctures that seemed laughable compared to the balloon’s enormous size. It was like shooting an elephant with a spitball.
They roared past the balloon, barely five hundred feet off the ground. Germans down below fired up at them with their rifles from trenches dug around the balloon’s encampment. Now it was Bell’s turn. He placed his left hand on the Lewis gun’s stabilizing handle and triggered the weapon. It came alive in his hands. White-hot phosphorescent bullets arced from the plane to the balloon in a continuous stream, while brass empties tumbled from the gun’s ejector. He saw the rounds hit the envelope, rippling it like it was caught in a hailstorm, but the balloon wouldn’t burst. He tracked around as they flew deeper into German territory, keeping his aim true, but still the balloon wouldn’t catch fire.
And then he remembered the flammable hydrogen in the envelope wouldn’t burn without the presence of oxygen. He raised his aim just as the Lewis gun was firing its last few rounds. Above the balloon was a perfect mixture of air and leaked hydrogen from the hundreds of holes the two guns had made. The tracers ignited the air in a blinding whoosh that burned through the top of the balloon in an instant, releasing a great mushrooming gush of hydrogen that exploded like a sun gone supernova.
The burning envelope immediately started falling to the ground.The poor observer didn’t even have the time to jump before the fiery shroud engulfed the basket and turned it into a pyre. Men on the ground scattered in stark terror as the flaming heap of silk and rope crashed on top of the winch in an incandescent shower of burning confetti.
Whiddle pulled back on the stick to reclaim the altitude they had lost and get them above the deadly flak. The ground fire had paused for a moment when the balloon went up like a Chinese lantern and now that the soldiers had regained their wits, the antiaircraft fire had returned with far deadlier fury.
The British pilot swung them around to head back west and the protection of the front lines when they were suddenly jumped from out of the sun.
There were three planes—all but invisible had Bell not looked up. As soon as he saw the fighters, he tapped Whiddle’s shoulder to alert him of the threat. Whiddle went into immediate evasive maneuvers, snaking left and right, but he had very little altitude to work with. They were effectively pinned.
