“Perhaps not on this scale, but I assure you…!”
Dennis turned to Orrin. “Sir,’ he said with more gravity than Orrin had ever heard him use, “as the senior officer on the scene who has the only f… lipperin’ clue what the flyin’…” He stopped. “Oh goddamn, Lieutenant! Just rear up an’ take charge o’ this chickenshit outfit!”
“Jesus, Silva, I can’t do that!” Orrin objected, his young face reddening in the lamplight.
“Of course not!” the Imperial practically squealed.
Silva raised the Thompson SMG he’d been holding innocuously by his side and yanked the bolt back. “Lieutenant Reddy, you’re fixin’ to hafta take charge after I shoot all these useless sons-o’-goats!”
“Just wait, damn it!” Orrin shouted. He spun back to face the Imperial “commander.” “Look, I don’t want your job and I sure don’t want you fellows dead, but I do have a plan!” He pushed his way through the suddenly very quiet and attentive officers in the room to a map spread on a table. “The Doms are all around here,” he said, drawing a crescent with his finger. “Some big fires are burning here”-he pointed again-“between the enemy and this little river, probably started by Chack and Blair’s artillery.”
“Yes,” muttered another officer. “A great tragedy, all those trees!”
Orrin looked at the man and blinked. “Uh, okay. The thing is, those guns can’t reach any farther. We can! Maaka-Kakja ’s planes!”
“For what purpose?”
“We brought fuel for the planes that landed on the lake, but we don’t need all of them for this. You pull all your troops back to the city, and we rig fuel cans with mortar bombs and drop ’em on the enemy! The whole valley north of the city will go up in a wall of fire, and the Doms we don’t burn will have no choice but to pull back! By the time the fire simmers down, you should have reinforcements from the coast!”
“Madness!” cried the “tree” officer. “To burn the enemy alive! It’s monstrous, simply monstrous! And all those trees! The beauty of the valley will be lost!”
“You’re all nuts,” shouted Orrin in return. “You’d rather lose the battle and get nailed to a post-and maybe lose the whole damn war-than kill the enemy and burn a few trees?” He looked at Silva. “I should’ve let you shoot ’em!”
“Still can,” Silva said.
“Now, now!” cried the first Imperial. “This is madness! We’re all on the same side, by Imperial decree. I will respect that. You have your own command, so please do as you think best with it! I’ll pass the word to Commodore Luce and the others! Just leave us.”
“I need some mortar bombs,” Orrin insisted.
“As do we all. I don’t know if any can be had, but if so, you’ll have to get them from… oh, blast! I still can’t remember his name! The artillery gentleman! Now, if you don’t mean to shoot us, please leave us to fight our battle!”
Orrin turned without saluting and strode out the door, followed by his fliers. “Silva,” he said sharply.
“Sir?”
“Take a dil and get me some mortar bombs… I don’t care how you do it.”
“You bet! C’mon, Larry, you fuzzy little salamander. Let’s go get some bombs!”
Half a dozen ’Cats followed Silva and Lawrence into the noisy, fiery night.
“What we do now?” another ’Cat asked Orrin.
“Let’s go see how many planes we can gas up enough to do the job, and still have enough fuel to burn the Doms out of this place!” He looked back at the HQ. “This joint’s even more screwed up than things were back in the Philippines when the Japs came! I didn’t think that was possible!”
Within an hour, Silva returned with almost forty bombs; Orrin had eleven planes with tanks topped off, each with two five-gallon gas cans slung under it’s wings. They hadn’t figured out a way to secure the bombs to the cans in a way that would ensure the contact fuses were pointed down when the ungainly weapons were dropped, so they decided to try something like what Orrin had heard First Fleet did in the west, except in this case the observers would toss a couple of bombs at the same time the pilots yanked a release lanyard on a gas tank. If they hit close enough together, swell. Some would, certainly, and their next pass with their second cans would connect the dots. Orrin knew “real” incendiaries were now in production at Baalkpan and Maa-ni-la, but they wouldn’t have them here for some time.
“I’m almost surprised that crazy-assed Imperial gardener hasn’t sent troops to stop us,” Silva said as he propped his and Orrin’s plane, and then sat down in the observer’s seat when the engine caught and farted to life.
“Me too,” replied Orrin, shouting over the sudden rumble of engines up and down the dock.
“Watch where your giant shoes go!” Lawrence suddenly protested from within the fuselage.
“Well, move your damn lizardy face out from under ’em!”
“Lay off, you two!” Orrin said. The moon had dulled behind the smoke, and there was less visibility on the lake now. “I need to concentrate- and you do too! Don’t forget, there’re still some other ‘lizardy’ things out there!” He paused. “Besides, why’d you bring Lawrence this time?”
“What, you wanna leave him back there with that buncha dopes? I doubt any of ’em has ever seen his type before. Hell, they’d have ’em on a leash-or in a fish tank-by the time we got back.”
“Just as well,” Orrin said. “After the stunt you pulled, I’m not sure we should go back! Listen, as soon as we’re up and get some altitude, send a report to Makka-Kakja about the mess here, and what we’re going to try.”
“Okay,” Silva responded doubtfully, “I’ll try. They may have trouble readin’ my writin, though!”
“Just do your best,” Orrin directed. “Use the ‘air’ frequency. You’ll have a better chance of getting through that mush offshore.” With that, he advanced the throttle and the “Nancy” accelerated across the water.
Once they were airborne and the rest of the pickup squadron, mostly from the 10th Pursuit, had formed on them, Orrin banked wide around the valley to the south of the lake, almost to the sea. There, the sky was clear and the bright moon was almost overhead now. He circled to the east, near the Sperrin Mountains, and tried to view the battle for New Dublin, but all he saw was a bright glow on smoky clouds beyond the cggy peaks. He steadied up on a northeast to southwest flight path that put the greater enemy concentration directly ahead.
“We’re first,” Orrin shouted back. “The rest of the guys’ll try to lay their eggs just beyond ours, and then the next plane’s in succession! It’s gonna be tough in the dark. Hell, it’d be tough in daylight, but there’s not much else we can do. If we leave it to those rear area… gentlemen at their supposed HQ, your Jap buddy’ll have to fight this whole campaign all over again.”
“He may be a Jap,” Silva returned, “an we ain’t exactly ‘buddies,’ but if he has to start over, I guarantee his campaign-with our guys-won’t be anything like this one! These New Brits ain’t like our Marines, but they ain’t bad soljers, I hear. I can tell you their Navy men are damn good-but their Navy’s kept ’em from havin’ to fight a big land war before, an’ except for that Blair fella-accordin’ to Chack-they don’t much know how.” He looked over his shoulder at the glare beyond the moun- tains. “An’ which it looks like ol Chack an’ Blair are stuck in pretty good. Chack damn sure knows how to fight!”
“Yeah, well maybe we’ll have a look after we’re done here.” Orrin nodded back toward the lake. “As I said, maybe we ought not go back there. Now hang on!”
Suddenly, the nose pitched down and the plane aimed for the edge of the now-much-larger fire burning on the enemy’s left flank. Orrin’s warning had really been just a figure of speech, because Silva couldn’t hold on with a ten-pound bomb in each hand. The “Nancy” hurtled downward, and if it hadn’t been for the sudden fusillade of musketry crackling toward them, it would’ve been frighteningly difficult to tell how low they were getting.
“Get ready!” Orrin yelled. Musket balls began striking the plane. “Now!”