The Mediterranean Caper, Page 2

  Pitt had requested the purchase of the craft after he had transferred from the Air Force to the National Underwater Marine Agency at the request of the Agency Director, Admiral James Sandecker. Pitt still retained his rank of Major and, according to the paperwork, was assigned to an indefinite tour of duty with NUMA. His title was that of Surface Security Officer, which was nothing to him but a fancy term for trouble shooter. Whenever a project ran into unknown difficulties or unscientific problems, it was Pitt’s job to unravel the difficulty and get the operation back on the track. That was the purpose behind his request for the PBY Catalina flying boat. Slow as it was, it could comfortably carry passengers and cargo, and what was most important, land and take off in water; a prime factor since nearly ninety percent of NUMA’s operations were miles at sea.

  Suddenly a glint of color against the black cloud caught Pitt’s attention. It was a bright yellow plane. It banked sharply, suggesting high maneuverability, and dived through the smoke. Pitt slipped the throttles backward to reduce the speed of his sharp angle of descent and prevent the PBY from overshooting his strange adversary. The other plane materialized out of the opposite side of the smoke and could clearly be seen strafing Brady Field.

  “I’ll be damned,” Pitt boomed out loud. “It’s an old German Albatros.”

  The Catalina came on straight from the eye of the sun, and the pilot of the Albatros, intent on the business of destruction, did not see it. A sardonic grin spread on Pitt’s face as the fight drew near. He cursed the fact that there were no guns waiting for his command to spout from the nose of the PBY. He applied pressure to the rudder pedals and side slipped to give Giordino a better line of fire. The PBY thundered in, still unnoticed. Then, abruptly, he could hear the crack of Giordino’s carbine above the roar of the engines.

  They were almost on top of the Albatros before the leather helmeted head in the open cockpit spun around. They were so close Pitt could see the other pilot's mouth drop open in shocked surprise at the sight of the big flying boat, boring down from the sun—the hunter became the quarry. The pilot recovered quickly and the Albatros rolled sharply away, but not before Giordino drilled it with a fifteen shot clip from the carbine.

  The grim, incongruous drama in the smoke-ridden sky over Brady Field reached a new stage as the World War II flying boat squared off against the World War I fighter plane. The PBY was faster, but the Albatros had the advantage of two machine guns and a vastly higher degree of maneuverability. The Albatros was lesser known than its famous counterpart, the Fokker, but it was an excellent fighter and the workhorse of the German Imperial Air Service from 1916 to 1918. The Albatros twisted, turned and zeroed in on the PBY’s cockpit. Pitt acted quickly and yanked the controls back into his lap and prayed the wings would stay glued to the fuselage as the lumbering flying boat struggled into a loop. He forgot caution and the accepted rules of flying; the exhilaration of man-to-man combat surged In his blood. He could almost hear the rivets popping as the PBY twisted over on its back. The unorthodox evasive action caught his opponent off guard, and the twin streams of fire from the yellow plane went wide, missing the Catalina completely.

  The Albatros then made a steep left hand turn and came straight at the PBY, and they approached head-on. Pitt could see the other plane’s tracer bullets streaking about ten feet under his windshield. Lucky for us this guy’s a lousy shot, he thought. He had a weird feeling in his stomach as the two planes sped together on a collision course. Pitt waited until the last possible instant before he pushed the nose of the PBY down and swiftly banked around, gaining a brief, but favorable position over the Albatros. Again Giordino opened fire.

  But the yellow Albatros dived out of the spitting hail from the carbine and shot vertically toward the ground, and Pitt momentarily lost sight of it He swung to the right in a steep turn and searched the sky. It was too late. He sensed, rather than felt, the thumping from a river of bullets that tore into the flying boat. Pitt threw his plane into a violent falling leaf maneuver and successfully dodged the smaller plane’s deadly sting. It was a narrow escape.

  The uneven battle continued for a full eight minutes while the military spectators on the ground watched, spellbound. The strange aerial dogfight slowly drifted eastward over the shoreline, and the final round began.

  Pitt was sweating now. Small glistening beads of the salty liquid were bursting from the pores on his forehead and trickling in snail-like trails down his face. His opponent was cunning, but Pitt was playing the strategy game too. With infinite patience, dredged up from some hidden reserve in his body, he waited for the right moment, and when it finally arrived he was ready.

  The Albatros managed to get behind and slightly above the Catalinia Pitt held his speed steady and the other pilot, sensing victory, closed to within fifty yards of the flying boat’s towering tail section. But before the two machine guns could speak, Pitt pulled the throttle back and lowered the flaps, slowing the big craft into a near stall. The phantom pilot, taken by surprise, overshot and passed the PBY, receiving several well placed rounds In the Albatros’ engine as the carbine spat at near point-blank range. The vintage plane banked in front of Pitt’s bow, and he watched with the respect one brave man has for another when the occupant in the open cockpit pushed up his goggles and threw a curt salute.. Then the yellow Albatros and its mysterious pilot turned away and headed west over the island, trailing a black streak of smoke that testified to the accuracy of Giordino’s marksmanship.

  The Catalina was falling out of its stall into a dive now, and Pitt fought the controls for a few unnerving seconds before he regained stable flight. Then he began a sweeping, upward turn in the sky. At five thousand feet he leveled off and searched the island and seascape, but no trace of the bright yellow plane with the maltese cross markings was visible. It had vanished. A cold, clammy feeling crept over Pitt. The yellow Albatros had somehow seemed familiar. It was as though an unremembered ghost from the past had returned to haunt him. But the eerie sensation passed as quickly as it had arrived, and he gave out a deep sigh as the tension faded away, and the welcome comfort of relief gently soothed his mind.

  “Well, when do I get my sharpshooter’s medal? said Giordino from the cabin doorway. He was grinning despite a nasty gash in his scalp. The blood streamed down the right side of his face, staining the collar of a loud, flowered print shirt.

  “After we land I’ll buy you a drink instead,” replied Pitt without turning. Giordino slipped into the co-pilot’s seat. “I feel like I’ve just ridden the roller coaster at the Long Beach Pike.”

  Pitt could not help grinning. He relaxed, leaning back against the back rest, saying nothing. Then he turned and looked at Giordino, and his eyes squinted. “What happened to you? Were you hit?”

  Giordino gave Pitt a mocking. a sorrowful look.

  “Who ever told you that you could loop a PBY?”

  “It seemed like the thing to do at the time,” said Pitt, a twinkle in his eye.

  “Next time, warn the passengers. I bounced around the main cabin like a basketball.”

  “What did you hit your head on?” Pitt asked quizzically.

  “Did you have to ask?”

  “Well?”

  Giordino suddenly became embarrassed. “If you must know, it was the door handle on the john?

  Pitt looked startled for an instant. Then he flung back his head and roared with laughter. The mirth was contagious, and Giordino soon followed. The sound rang through the cockpit and replaced the noise of the engines. Nearly thirty seconds passed before their gaiety quieted, and the seriousness of the present situation returned.

  Pitt’s mind was clear, but exhaustion was slowly seeping in. The long hours of flight and the strain of the recent combat fell on him heavily and soaked his body like a numbing, damp fog. He thought about the sweet smell of soap in a cold shower and the crispness of clean sheets, and somehow they became vitally important to him. He looked out the cockpit window at Brady Field and recalled that his original
destination was the First Attempt, but a dim hunch, or call it a hindsight, made him change his mind.

  “Instead of landing in the water and rendezvousing alongside of the First Attempt, I think we’d better set down at Brady Field. I have a foreboding feeling we may have taken a few bullets in our hull.”

  “Good idea,” Giordino replied. “I’m not in the mood for bailing.”

  The big flying boat made its final approach and lined up on the wreckage strewn runway. It settled on the heat baked asphalt, and the landing gear bumped and emitted an audible screech of rubber that signaled the touch-down.

  Pitt angled clear of the flames and taxied to the far side of the apron. When the Catalina stopped rolling he clicked off the Ignition switches, and the two silver bladed propellers gradually ceased their revolutions and came to rest, gleaming in the Aegean sun. All was quiet.

  He and Giordino sat stone still for a few moments and absorbed the first comfortable silence to penetrate the cockpit after thirteen hours of noise and vibration.

  Pitt flipped the latch on his side window and pushed it open, watching with detached interest as the base firemen fought the inferno. Hoses were lying everywhere, like highways on a roadmap, and men scurried about shouting, adding to the stage of confusion. The flames on the F-105 jets were almost contained, but one of the C-133 Cargomasters still burned fiercely.

  “Take a look over here,” said Giordino pointing,

  Pitt leaned over the instrument panel and stared out of Giordino’s window at a blue Air Force stationwagon that careened across the runway in the direction of the PBY. The car contained several officers and was followed by thirty or forty wildly cheering enlisted men who chased after it like a pack of braying hounds.

  “Now that’s what I call one hell of a reception committee,” Pitt said amused and broadly smiling,

  Giordino mopped his bleeding cut with a handkerchief. When the cloth was soaked through with red ooze he wadded it up and threw it out of the window to the ground. His gaze turned toward the nearby coastline and became lost in the Infinity of thought for a moment Finally he turned to Pitt. “I guess you know we’re pretty damn lucky to be sitting here.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Pitt woodenly. “There were a couple of times up there when I thought our ghost had us”

  “I wish I knew who the hell he was and what this destruction was all about?”Pitt’s face was a study in speculative curiosity.

  “The only clue is the yellow Albatros.”

  Giordino eyed his friend questioningly. “What possible meaning could the color of that old flying derelict have?”

  “If you’d studied your aviation history,” Pitt said with a touch of good-natured sarcasm, “You’d remember that German pilots of the First World War painted their planes with personal, but sometimes outlandish, color schemes.”

  “Save the history lesson for later,” Giordino growled. “Right now all I want to do is get out of this sweat box and collect that drink you owe me.” He rose from his scat and started for the exit hatch.

  The blue stationwagon skidded to a halt beside the big silver flying boat and all four doors burst open. The occupants leaped out shouting and began pounding on the plane’s aluminum hatch. The crowd of enlisted men soon engulfed the aircraft, cheering loudly and waving at the cockpit.

  Pitt remained seated and waved back at the cheering men below the window. His body was tired and numb but his mind was still active and running at full throttle. A title kept running through his thoughts until finally he muttered it aloud. “The Hawk of Macedonia.”

  Giordino turned from the doorway. “What did you say?”

  “Oh nothing, nothing at all,” Pitt let his breath escape in a long audible sigh. “Come on—I’ll buy you that drink now.”

  2

  When Pitt awoke, it was still dark. He did not know how long he had slept. Perhaps he just dozed off. Perhaps he bad been lost under the black cloak of sleep for hours. He did not know, nor did he care. The metal springs of the Air Force cot squeaked as he rolled over, seeking a more comfortable position. But the comfort of deep sleep eluded him. His conscious mind dimly tried to analyze why. Was it the steady humming noise of the air conditioner, he asked himself? He was used to drifting off under the loud din of aircraft engines, so that couldn’t be it. Maybe it was the scurrying cockroaches. God knows Thasos was covered with them. No, it was something else. Then he knew. The answer pierced the fog of his drowsy brain. It was his other mind, the unconscious one that was keeping him awake. Like a movie projector, it flashed pictures of the strange events from the previous day, over and over again.

  One picture stood out above all the rest. It was the photograph in a gallery of the Imperial War Museum. Pitt could recall it vividly. The camera had caught a German aviator posing beside a World War I fighter plane. He was garbed in the flying togs of the day, and his right hand rested upon the head of an immense white German Shepherd. The dog, obviously a mascot, was panting and looking up at his master with a patronizing, doe-like expression. The flyer stared back at the camera with a boyish face that somehow looked naked without the usual Prussian dueling scar and monocle. However, the proud Teutonic military bearing could be easily seen in the hint of an insolent grin and the ramrod straight posture.

  Pitt even remembered the caption under the photo:

  The Hawk of Macedonia

  Lieutenant Kurt Heibert, of Jagdstaffel 91, attained 32 victories over the allies on the Macedonian Front; one of the outstanding aces of the great war. Presumed shot down and lost in the Aegean Sea on July 15, 1918. For some time, Pitt lay staring in the darkness.

  There would be no more sleep tonight he thought. Sitting up and leaning on one elbow, he reached over a bedside table, groped for his Omega watch and held it in front of his eyes. The luminous dial read 4:09. Then he sat up and dropped the bare soles of his feet on the vinyl tile floor. A package of cigarettes sat next to the watch, and he pulled out one and lit it with a silver Zippo lighter. Inhaling deeply, he stood up and stretched. His face grimaced; the muscles of his back stung from the back slapping he had received from the cheering men of Brady Field right after he and Giordino had climbed from the cockpit of the PBY. Pitt smiled to himself in the dark as he thought about the warm handshakes and congratulations pressed upon them.

  The moonlight, beaming in through the window of the Officers’ Quarters, and the warm clear air of early morning made Pitt restless. He stripped off his shorts and rummaged through his luggage in the dim light.

  When his touch recognized the cloth shape of a pair of swim trunks, he slipped them on, snatched a towel from the bathroom and stepped out into the stillness of the night.

  Once outside, the brilliant Mediterranean moon enveloped his body and laid bare the landscape with an eerie ghost-like emptiness. The sky was all studded with stars and revealed the milky way in a great white design across a black velvet backdrop.

  Pitt strolled down the path from the Officers’ Quarters toward the main gate. He paused for a minute, looking at the vacant runway, and he noticed a black area every so often in the rows of multi-colored lights that stitched the edges. Several of the lights in the signal system must have been damaged in the attack, he thought. However, the general pattern was still readable to a pilot making a night landing. Behind the intermediate lights, he could make out a dark outline of the PBY, sitting forlornly on the opposite side of the apron like a nesting duck. The bullet damage to the Catalina’s hull turned out to be slight and the Flight Line Maintenance crew promised that they would begin repairs first thing in the morning, the restoration taking three days. Colonel James Lewis, the base commanding officer, had expressed his apologies at the delay, but he needed the bulk of the maintenance crew to work on the damaged jets and the remaining C-133 Cargomaster. In the meantime, Pitt and Giordino elected to accept the Colonel's hospitality and stay at Brady Field, using the First Attempt’s whale boat to commute between the ship and shore. The last arrangement worked to everyone’s
advantage since living quarters aboard the First Attempt were cramped and at a premium.

  “Kind of early for a swim, isn’t it, buddy?”

  The voice snapped Pitt from his thoughts, and he found himself standing under the white glare of floodlights that were perched on top of the guard’s shack at the main gate. The shack sat on a curb-lined island that divided the incoming and outgoing traffic and was just large enough for one man to sit in. A short, burly looking Air Policeman stepped from the doorway and eyed him closely. “I couldn’t sleep.” As soon as he said it, Pitt felt foolish for not being more original But what the hell, he thought, it’s the truth.

  “Can’t say as I blame you,” said the AP. “After all that’s happened today, I’d be real surprised if anyone on the base was sound asleep.” The mere thought of sleep triggered a reflex, and the AP yawned.

  “You must get awfully bored, sitting out here alone all night,” said Pitt.

  “Yeah, it gets pretty dull,” the AP said, hooking one hand in his Sam Browne belt and resting the other on the grip of a .45 Colt automatic, clinging to his hip. “If you’re going off base, you’d better let me see your pass.”