The Fly Boys Read online

  A new world brought fresh challenge.

  They rose to meet both.

  HERMAN GOLD

  He had a fine son, but a reluctant heir—and feared that Gold Aviation was destined to die with him.

  STEVEN GOLD

  Record-setting World War II flying ace and Medal of Honor winner, he knew the button-down world of his father’s company could never be his.

  BENNY DETKIN

  He wanted to kill Nazis, but when they sent him to the Pacific theater instead of Europe, he shot those Zeros right out of the sky.

  SUZY GOLD

  Still stunningly attractive, she sought the men who wouldn’t threaten her loyalty to the memory of her heroic husband.

  DONALD HARRISON

  A Gold only by marriage, he felt like the bastard son, challenged by both the brother-in-law and stepson who bore the stratospheric standards set by the…

  ALSO BY T. E. CRUISE

  Wings of Gold: The Aces

  Wings of Gold Book III: The Hot Pilots*

  Published by

  POPULAR LIBRARY*forthcoming

  Copyright

  POPULAR LIBRARY EDITION

  Copyright © 1988 by Warner Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Popular Library® and the fanciful P design are registered trademarks of Warner Books, Inc.

  Popular Library books are published by

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56707-7

  Contents

  ALSO BY T. E. CRUISE

  Copyright

  BOOK I: 1943–1945

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  BOOK II: 1945–1953

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  BOOK I:

  1943–1945

  * * *

  FLYBOYS OVER NEW GUINEA—

  Massive Bomber Attacks on Jap Strongholds—

  Philadelphia Tattler

  ALLIED TURBOJET PROJECTS REVEALED—

  Brits and Yanks Disclose Their Top-Secret Jet Airplane Research—

  Aviation Industry Weekly

  NORMANDY INVASION PRESSES ON—

  Nazis Fall Back After Bitter Fighting at ‘Omaha Beach’—

  Miami Daily Telegraph

  JAPS INITIATE AIRBORN SUICIDE ATTACKS AT LEYTE GULF BATTLE—

  Jap Pilots Crash Their Airplanes Into Our Ships—

  Call Themselves Kamikaze—‘Divine Wind’

  Boston Times

  FDR DEAD—

  Vice President Truman Takes Oath of Office—

  New York Herald

  JAPS VOW TO DEFEND HOMELAND DOWN TO LAST

  MAN, WOMAN, CHILD—

  Millions Mobilized in Civilian Defense Corps—

  Baltimore Globe

  HITLER DEAD—

  RUSSIANS TAKE BERLIN—

  NAZIS SURRENDER—

  Washington Star Reporter

  AWESOME NEW WEAPON USED AGAINST JAPAN—

  Jap City of Hiroshima Leveled by A-Bomb—

  Los Angeles Tribune

  * * *

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  (One)

  USAAF Advance Air Base

  Tobi Point, New Guinea

  19 August 1943

  Lieutenant Steven Gold, wearing khaki overalls, his .45 in a shoulder holster beneath his yellow Mae West, settled into the cockpit of his fighter. He pulled his canvas helmet over his close-cropped blonde hair and plugged in his radio earphones, but left the Lockheed Lightning’s plexiglass canopy raised against the sweltering tropical heat.

  He waited until his ground crew was clear, and then started the P-38’s twin liquid-cooled Allison engines. The engines sputtered in complaint for a few moments before wheezing to a roaring fury in a cloud of blue smoke. All along the ready line the fifteen other swallow-tailed, twin-engine P-38 fighters that made up the squadron were adding their voices to the clacking piston chorus.

  Lieutenant Gold affectionately patted the P-38’s scarred instrument panel. The joke was that his fighter had so many Jap bullet holes in it that the mess hall wanted to requisition it as a noodle strainer. It was true that the mottled green and tan exterior of the P-38 was pocked with patched holes, but it was also true that this mount had taken good care of her previous owner, a captain who’d been rotated out of the squadron after an illustrious twelve-kill career. The twelve scarlet “meatballs” on the fighter’s forward fuselage had been painted over. Her new owner would have to rack up his own score.

  But there’s not much chance of me racking up that score today, Steve brooded as he waited the operations officer’s red flag signal to take off.

  Today the squadron was flying a bomber escort mission, and Jap fighter resistance was expected to be light. A lot of pilots would have been grateful for that, but Steve thought the situation stunk. As far as he was concerned, multiple opportunities to wax Zeros was the only thing that could make up for being stuck out here in this godforsaken, vermin-infested jungle, literally under the Japs’ noses.

  Tobi Point was a forward air base tucked in between the emerald wall of vegetation and the indigo Solomon Sea. It was a tent and tin hut village under a camouflage-net ceiling, clustered around a single hard-packed airstrip less than seventy miles down the coast from extensive Jap airdrome complexes. The strategy behind Tobi was that a fighter squadron so near the enemy could, in addition to flying bomber escort, hit and run like a swarm of angry wasps.

  Until, of course, the Japs happened to find the wasp’s nest, Steve thought, and then reminded himself that fighter pilots were like toilet paper: absolutely essential, and totally expendable.

  Steve hurriedly turned down the gain as a deafening squawk of radio static filled his headset.

  “Big birds approaching, hombres,” the squadron’s leader, Major Wohl, announced. “Saddle up!”

  The major was from Texas, and liked to remind everyone of that fact by peppering his easy drawl with lots of “you-alls” and “hombres” and “buckaroos” and so on.

  “We’ll be moving out in a few minutes, men,” the major continued. “Lieutenant Gold, you-all come in, please. Over.”

  Steve keyed his throat mike. “Yeah, Major? Over.”

  “Lieutenant, this time around I want you-all to fly as my wingman, over.”

  “I don’t see why I have to sit on the bench, sir,” Steve protested. What a wingman did was watch his leader’s back. It was a crucial job, but in combat the wingman hardly ever got a taste of the enemy, unless it was sloppy seconds.

  “Lieutenant,” Wohl began patiently, “how old are you?” He paused. “Nineteen, I seem to remember.”

  “Roger, Major.”

  “And you’re already an ace, right? Lieutenant, you-all just lay back today. It’s gonna be a long war.”

  “Roger, Major,” Steve repeated, disappointed.

  “And don’t sound so down in the dumps,” Wohl chuckled. “You’ve only been with us a couple of weeks. You’re the new kid on the block. I want to make sure you know the program, how we operate. I run a tighter herd than Cappy Fitzpatrick, that old hombre you used to ride with.”

  “Roger, Major.”

  “All right, then,” Wohl sai
d, sounding satisfied. “Here they come,” he told his squadron.

  Steve, looking up, saw the bombers. There were twenty of them, flying high and looking like glinting silver crosses stitched in orderly procession against the deep blue sky.

  He lowered his canopy, trapping several two-inch, spindly legged mosquitoes inside the cockpit. He idly squished them against the plexiglass with his finger, thinking, Fortunes of war. Out on the airstrip’s edge the ops officer was waving his red flag.

  “All right, let’s ride,” Wohl said.

  Steve opened his throttles, building up rpm’s, waiting his turn as the pairs of P-38s moved out onto the airstrip. When it was his turn to roll, he felt a twinge in his knee as he worked the rudder pedals. He ignored the sharp stab of pain. He’d gotten used to it.

  Last April he’d been flying combat air patrol out of Guadalcanal, with Major Cappy Fitzpatrick’s fighter squadron, when a Jap managed to lock on to his tail, putting a bullet through his leg in the process of chewing up his airplane. Steve had managed to turn the tables on that Jap, knocking him out of the sky. It had been his fifth kill, the one that made him an ace, but at the time he’d had other things on his mind. His fighter was so badly shot up that he was forced to ditch at sea.

  Air-sea rescue eventually fished him out of the drink. He’d spent some time convalescing in the hospital, and then had a couple of weeks’ R&R, which he spent back home in California with his folks. When he came back on active duty, he was promoted to first lieutenant and assigned to Wohl’s outfit at Tobi Point. Since then, he’d flown a few routine patrols, but had not met up with the enemy. Steve was feeling a little anxious about that. He figured that surviving being shot down was like falling off a horse, the idea being to get right back into the thick of it to dispel any self-doubt about courage or competence.

  Once all sixteen fighters were airborne the squadron formed into four flights of four each. The bombers dropped down to about twelve thousand feet as the four flights of snarling P-38s rose to meet them. The fighters then took their positions all around the big bird formation—as Wohl would have put it, like cowpokes riding herd.

  It would be a short ride to the target, a Jap airdrome on the coast. Once over the target the squadron would fly high cover for the bombers. If enemy fighter resistance turned out to be as light as was expected, the P-38s were to do some mop-up strafing after the bombers were done.

  The bombers were light twin-engine airplanes: North American Mitchell B-25s and GAT AC-1s. They were attack bombers: deck-level lawn mowers modified with extra-capacity fuel tanks and a half-dozen .50-caliber machine guns sticking like whiskers out from underneath their chins. The bombers would go in fast and low, strafing the Jap airstrips while dropping parafrags: twenty-five-pound bombs suspended by midget parachutes. The parafrags wafted lazily down from the sky, giving the low-flying bombers plenty of time to get away before they exploded into wicked clouds of shrapnel.

  Steve heard a clicking through the static in his headset. “Hey, Lieutenant Gold,” somebody said. “Settle an argument some of us had the other day. Aren’t you Herman Gold’s son? Over.”

  “Roger,” Steve replied wearily, knowing what was coming.

  “Hear that, guys? I told you so! Hey, Lieutenant Gold! Your old man owns Gold Aviation and Transport, right? He’s got millions! Wasn’t it your father’s company that built these AC-1 BuzzSaw bombers we’re escorting?”

  “Roger,” Steve muttered as he scanned the clear blue sky and the thick green coastline for signs of the enemy. The P-38’s teardrop canopy afforded excellent visibility, if a pilot wasn’t too lazy to take advantage of it.

  “I guess we better take extra good care of these bombers, else Lieutenant Gold will tell his daddy on us,” another pilot cracked.

  “Or maybe Gold will just repossess his daddy’s bombers….”

  Steve forced himself to keep his mouth shut. He knew from past experience that this was a no-win situation. If you too readily joined in the joking, you were a horse’s ass; if you complained, you were a sore-ass. Meanwhile, he irritably thought that maybe Major Wohl was more spit and polish than Cappy Fitzpatrick, but at least Cappy knew enough to enforce radio silence en route to a target.

  Then Steve realized that there was no point blaming Wohl. What was really pissing him off was having his illustrious father’s reputation thrown up to him.

  “Hey, Gold,” another voice cut in. “How’s it feel to be rich? Over.”

  Steve ignored the remark.

  “What’s the matter, Lieutenant? Cat got your tongue? Your daddy could always buy you another….”

  Steve waited for Wohl to cut in and get him out of this, but he didn’t. Steve guessed he was on his own. He still didn’t immediately reply. He knew he had to handle this correctly. He was, as Major Wohl had put it, the new kid on the block. If he wanted to fit in, he was going to have to head-on defuse the issue of his famous father’s wealth and power.

  Come to think of it, maybe Major Wohl had realized that as well, Steve decided. Maybe that was why the major was allowing this hazing to take place.

  “It’s like this,” Steve began, keenly aware that the entire squadron was listening. “Sure, my family is wealthy. We live like royalty back in California. But home might as well be a million miles away. As much money as my old man has, it doeesn’t mean much out here. I can’t bribe the Japs to go down in front of my guns. I’ve got to shoot them down, just like anybody else. That answer your question? Over.”

  “All right, hombres, palavering time’s over,” Major Wohl cut in, sounding amused. “We’re approaching the target. The bombers are going in. Remember,” Wohl counseled, “we stay high while the bombers are on the deck. Lieutenant Gold, you will remember to stick close by me. Over and out.”

  Down below, Gold saw tongues of fire as the Jap antiaircraft ground fire commenced. The first wave of bombers was diving toward the compound of hangars and the network of tan airstrips cut into the dense green jungle. There were plenty of Jap heavy bombers parked in muddy, earth-embankment revetments alongside the runways, but no fighters. With nothing to do, the formations of P-38s cartwheeled in the sky like vultures as the marauding bombers did their on-deck dirty work. Every few moments Steve would break off searching the sky for the enemy in order to watch the lethal, silent aerial ballet unfurling down below.

  The bombers went in fast and low, braving the steady stream of antiaircraft tracer and cannon fire arcing up. They strafed a path with their machine guns, and then released their parafrags, which drifted down in a deadly snowfall. The first flurry of parafrags detonated upon contact with the uppermost palm fronds lining the airstrips. The scythelike bursts of shrapnel decapitated the palms, revealing Jap ground personnel and vehicles. Orange fireballs began to rise up out of the denuded jungle as other parafrags touched off fuel depots.

  The defensive ground fire had been silenced by the time the second wave of bombers made its pass. The wafting parafrags were disappearing into rolling clouds of oily black smoke.

  “Major Wohl,” one of the pilots called, “there’s no way we can go down on deck through all that smoke.”

  “Roger that,” Wohl replied.

  Steve was relieved. He hated going down on deck to strafe, where a fighter pilot’s attributes of sharp eyes, sharp flying, and sharp shooting did no good at all.

  On deck you had to fly as low as possible so that the defensive machine gunners couldn’t track you, but that just made you all the more vulnerable to small-arms fire. On deck you just mashed your trigger, blindly hosing the targets that passed beneath you in a blur, and if your mount was hit, you sure as hell weren’t going to get a chance to finesse or bail your way out of a flamer when you were indicating four hundred miles an hour seventy five feet above the ground. Chances were you’d end up plowing your own grave before you knew it.

  “Major, we’ve got to have us some action,” one of the pilots was complaining. “I’m gonna have me a raging case of the blue balls if I
don’t get my rocks off shooting something.”

  “Roger that,” someone interjected.

  Steve was feeling the same way. His neck muscles were aching from all the head-swiveling he’d been doing, looking for the enemy. He scanned his port side and looked away, but then something—hell, if he knew what it was, he’d bottle it and sell it to Uncle Sammy—made him do a double take.

  “We’ve still got plenty of gas,” another pilot cut in.

  Steve continued to stare into that dizzying, boundless curve of blue sky, until he’d reassured himself that what he was seeing weren’t just specks floating across his eyeballs. He already knew that what he was seeing wasn’t his imagination. A guy with a head full of dreams made for one shitty fighter jock, so he’d trained himself to leave his imagination in the ready room before going out on patrol.

  “We could swing out to sea and wax some of those tankers anchored offshore,” a pilot suggested.

  Steve keyed his throat mike. “Nix that. We’ve got company. Bogies—a whole slew of ‘em—at nine-o’clock level.”

  Silence, except for the cackle of static and whoosh of white noise coming over Steve’s headset, and then: “Bullshit! This is Captain Leeland, and I don’t see shit out there…. I—oh, wait a minute. I do see them now….” More static, sizzling like bacon frying. “Jesus, Gold! You’ve got some eyes.”

  “Roger that,” Major Wohl said expansively. “I count twenty.” He paused. “How many do you count, Lieutenant Gold?”

  Steve chuckled. “Twenty, sir. Over.”

  “Leeland, your flight will escort those bombers home,” Wohl commanded. “The rest of you follow me.”

  The squadron came apart. Leeland and his flight of four broke right, banking out over the sea in order to catch the bombers just now hugging the coastline on their way home. Wohl, with Steve as his wingman, led his remaining twelve fighters on a diagonal to intercept the rapidly approaching Jap fighters.

  Steve saw that they were Zekes: Mitsubishi Zero-Sen single-engine fighters. They were more maneuverable than the P-38, but lacked the speed, firepower, and sturdiness of the dual-engined American plane.