Watching the tanks burn was gratifying. After a few minutes, they heard the deafening explosions of 120-mm shells cooking off. The four fires were still burning intensely as they turned and headed toward the rally point.
The green Laron Star Streak touched down in the meadow and taxied slowly toward the tree line, bouncing slightly on the uneven ground. Ian shut down the engine, pulled up his goggles and shouted, “I need a reload and about three gallons of gas!” He put the “safing” pin in the firing lever for the M16s and crawled out, over the receiver extension tubes. Doyle hopped out of the plane, and even before the others emerged from the trees, he started punching the release buttons and pulling out the empty magazines. Then he loosened the wing nut for the brass catcher door and shoveled the empty 5.56-mm brass and the empty magazines into a nylon sleeping bag stuff sack. Mary ran up, carrying five loaded thirty-round magazines, and breathed, “These are mixed one-in-three, just like the last ones.”
Doyle popped each of the fresh magazines into place, and tugged on each to ensure they were firmly latched. He pronounced, “What I want you to do now, please, is go and get me another five spare loaded magazines. That way I can pick out an empty stretch of road somewhere to land and do my next reload by myself, without having to come all the way back here.” Mary quickly did as she was told.
While she was gone, Doyle pulled back the charging handles of each of the five M16s, and let them fly forward, chambering rounds. Then he reached underneath each rifle and firmly tapped the forward assist buttons with the heel of his hand to ensure that each of the bolts was fully engaged.
As she poured gas into the main tank at the rear of the fuselage, Margie asked, “How did it go, Ian?”
“I caught some infantry in the open, and I shot up a couple of slick Bell Hueys on the ground. I made three passes at them from different directions. That was about ten or twelve miles southwest of here. Then I ran out of ammo. I think I got at least twenty guys, and probably made the helicopters unusable. It wasn’t exactly like making a ‘guns run’ in a Falcon, but it works! I got the whole thing on video. I turned the camera on just before I made my first pass, and left it on for the next two passes. I was so pumped that I almost forgot to turn the camera off after I ran out of ammo and started heading back.”
Mary returned with the extra magazines. As she handed them to Doyle, she said breathlessly, “These have the last of our .223 tracers. They are mixed one-in-five in this batch. Any reloads after these, and you’ll be shooting straight ball.”
He snapped back, “That’s okay, Mary. I’m getting used to how these guns shoot. I’ll have it down to a science after this sortie. If I open up from two hundred meters at a fifty-mile-an-hour ground speed, I can see the tracers hitting right where I want them. I won’t need the tracers to help me with my aim much longer.” He ran his hands over the wings, tail, and fuselage, searching for new bullet holes. He found none. Doyle handed the sack that held the fired brass and the five empty magazines to Mary, and then stowed the extra magazines in the canvas tool bag at his feet. He smiled and joked, “Well, I gotta go. I’ve got important people to kill!” Less than a minute later, he was airborne, headed west.
At the same moment, Blanca’s Star Streak was turning sharply, with its left wing pointed straight down at the treetops. Blanca leveled the plane out and began her third strafing run. It was a mixed convoy of Humvees, two-and-a-half-ton, and five-ton trucks, five miles east of Moscow. By now, they were nearly all off to the sides of the road, and their drivers were taking advantage of the scant cover wherever they could find it. With great concentration, she lined up the improvised gun sight and flipped the shift lever, starting the M60 to work.
She estimated that she had expended at least two hundred rounds each on the two previous runs, so she had about five hundred rounds left. With a ground speed of only forty-miles-per-hour, she had a very stable platform and plenty of time to “paint” all of the trucks in the convoy. She stabbed at the rudder pedals, to keep the nose lined up on each of the trucks as they came in turn before her gun sight. She smiled, finally understanding Ian’s professed love of CAS missions. It was a thrill.
Her first pass had stitched right up the middle of the convoy from behind, taking it completely by surprise. Her second pass, from west to east, had concentrated on the trucks on the north side of the road. She narrowly missed the telephone pole that lined the north side of the road. On this third pass, perhaps too predictably, she traversed the trucks in the ditch on the south side of the road, flying from east to west. Blanca began to hear bullets pinging into the plane, and she could see numerous tears in the fabric in the wing above her. Despite the hits, she decided to finish the run. The trail of bullets from the M60 passed the last of the vehicles, and Blanca quickly pulled back on the fire control lever to conserve ammo. Curiously, she noticed, the lead Humvee had two tall antennas instead of just the one she saw on the others. She wondered if this meant that it was the convoy commander’s vehicle. She would have to ask one of the “ground pounders” when she got back.
Blanca banked the Laron sharply, and shoved the throttle forward. The surge of power palpably pushed her back into her seat. It was time, as her husband so colorfully put it, “to de-ass the A.O.”With the large number of hits her plane had taken on the third pass, Blanca knew that she didn’t dare attempt a fourth. As she turned back north, a .30-caliber bullet went through both walls of the rear cockpit. On its way, it went through the tops of both of Blanca’s thighs. The wounds were not very painful at first, but the sight of them badly frightened Blanca. They bled heavily from the start. The slipstream splattered blood all over the rear cockpit. She thought that she had to land soon, or she would bleed to death. After a half-minute of sheer panic, Blanca gained altitude, got her bearings, and turned the plane toward Valley Forge. The throttle was still wide open, and despite the low altitude and the extra drag of the missing canopy, the plane was up to a ground speed of eighty miles an hour.
Blanca wrapped a long scarf that her mother-in-law had knitted for her around her thighs. It might slow the bleeding down a little, she reasoned. If nothing else, it was reducing the splatters of blood that were gradually painting her uniform and goggles. She looked up at her left wing, and then her right, and was horrified to see that many of the bullet holes had transformed themselves into long rips in the fabric. A flap of fabric eighteen-inches square was flapping frantically on the bottom of the right wing. Realizing her peril, Blanca pulled the throttle halfway back, slowing the plane to less than fifty miles an hour. As she continued toward the valley, the tears in the fabric continued to worsen, and the rudder controls started to feel mushy. Despite her reduced airspeed, large patches of fabric kept tearing away, albeit at a slower rate. Blanca looked back up at the wings and muttered to herself, “Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay.”
She could see the meadow opening in the distance. She tightened both sides of her seat harness, and crossed herself. She repeated “Hail Mary” in Spanish three times. Blanca dipped the plane’s nose down, and tried to turn left toward the valley. The rudder did not respond. In desperation, she pushed the left rudder pedal down until it stopped, and tipped the control stick to the left, gradually dropping the left wing tip. Ever so slowly, the nose started to walk around to the left. Once she was lined up on the meadow properly, Blanca throttled back even farther, spilling off airspeed, and she leveled the wings. The plane’s stick felt unfamiliar. Just as the plane cleared the near edge of the meadow, it started to stall.