They had raced across the desert close to the ground at better than 300 knots, a maneuver flatly forbidden in flight school. Here it was perfectly acceptable.
Like drinking in the Officers' Club, even if you were a long way from being old enough to vote.
They had come across a railroad engine, puffing along tracks in the desert, dragging a line of boxcars. The squadron com mander had signaled to Archie that they should engage the tar get 'Take the locomotive," he had ordered. "I'll get the boxcars."
Second Lieutenant Archer Dooley, Jr., had gotten the locomotive, enjoying the sight of his one-tracer-round in-five stream of.50-caliber projectiles walking across the desert, and-as he raised the Mustang's nose just a hair-moving into the locomotive's boiler.
As he flashed over the locomotive, the locomotive had blown up. His first kill. Then there was a ball of fire, from which rose a dense black cloud of smoke.
As Archie pulled up to make a second run at the train, he realized that the ball of fire was several hundred yards from the railroad tracks. What else had they hit, he wondered, even by mistake, that had exploded like that?
Then, as he lowered the Mustang's nose for his second run, taking care not to collide with the squadron comman der's Mustang, he realized that the squadron commander's
Mustang was no longer in sight. And then he realized what the ball of fire really was. At the time, it seemed probable that the squadron commander had been hit by ground fire.
The squadron commander had told him that some of the trains were armed with antiaircraft machine guns and light cannon, mounted on flat-cars. Because his attention had been fixed on the locomotive, Archie hadn't noticed anything on the cars behind it.
That night, at the Officers' Club (empty, as always, of females-long-legged, firm-breasted, or otherwise), he learned about the Group's promotion policies: Everybody got to be a first lieutenant after eighteen months of commissioned serv ice, which meant he had about ten days before that happened.
There were two ways to get to be a captain. If you lived to serve twelve months as a first lieutenant, then promotion was automatic. But promotion came a lot quicker in another cir cumstance. The senior first lieutenant was the squadron exec utive officer (senior, that is, in terms of length of service in the squadron, not date of rank). If the squadron commander got either killed or seriously injured (defined as having to spend thirty days or more in the hospital), then the Exec took the
Old Man's job and got the captain's railroad tracks that went with it.
Four weeks and six days after Archie reported to the squadron, the squadron first sergeant handed him a sheet of paper to sign:
HEADQUARTERS
4032ND FIGHTER SQUADRON
23RD FIGHTER GROUP
IN THE FIELD
2 MARCH 1943
THE UNDERSIGNED HEREWITH
ASSUMES COMMAND.
ARCHER DOOLEY, JR. CAPT. USAAC FILE
201 DOOLEY, ARCHER, JR. 0378654
COPY TO CO, 23RD FIGHTER GROUP
He hadn't gotten to work his way up to executive officer.
The young man who had become the Old Man and the Exec had both gone in on the same day, the Old Man when his
Mustang ran into a Kraut antiaircraft position that had gotten lucky, and the Exec when he banked too steep, too low to the ground and put a wing into the desert.
That left Archie as the senior first lieutenant in the squadron.
The colonel had driven over from Group in a jeep, told him to cut orders assuming command, and handed him two sets of railroad tracks, still in cellophane envelopes from the quartermaster officer's sales store.
Archie had pinned one set of captain's railroad tracks over the embroidered gold second lieutenant's bars still sewn to the epaulets of his A-2 horsehide flight jacket, and put the other set in the drawer of the squadron commander's-now his-desk. If he ever had to go someplace, like Group, he would pin the extras on his Class A uniform then.
Being a captain and a squadron commander was not at all like what he'd imagined. A lot of really unpleasant shit went with being the Old Man. Like writing letters to the next of kin.
He hadn't actually had to compose these, thank
God. There were letters in the file that some other Old
Man had written, full of bullshit about how your son/husband/brother/ nephew died instantly and courageously doing his duty, and how much he would be missed by his fellow officers and the enlisted men because he had been such a fine officer and had been an inspiration to all who had been privileged to know him.
Not the truth, not about how he'd tried to bail out but had been too close to the ground and his 'chute hadn't opened; not that he'd been seen trying and failing to get out of the cockpit through a sheet of flame blowing back from the engine; not about how he'd tried to land his shot-up airplane and blew it, and rolled over and over down the runway in a ball of flame and crushed aluminum. Or that they really didn't know what the fuck had happened to him, he just hadn't come back; and later some tank crew had found the wreckage of his Mustang with him still in the cockpit, the body so badly burned they couldn't tell if he had been killed in the air or died when his plane hit. He didn't have to type the letters, either. The first sergeant just took one from the file and retyped it, changing the name.
But Archie had to sign it, because he was now the Old Man and that's what was expected of him. And he was always getting bullshit pep talks from some major or light colonel at Group that he was supposed to pass down the line.
Like what he remembered now, staring down at the
Kraut staff car:
"Dooley, what interdiction means is that you and your people are supposed to engage whatever you come across, like one fucking Kraut with a rifle, one motorcycle messenger, not pass him by to go looking for a railroad locomotive, or something you think is important, or looks good when you blow it up. The motorcycle messenger is probably carrying an important message. Otherwise he wouldn 't be out there.
You take out a Kraut staff car, for example, you 're liable to take out an important Kraut officer. Interdict means every thing that's down there. You read me, Captain?" "Yes, Sir."
"And pass the word to your people, and make sure they read you, and read you good." "Yes, Sir."
And Archie had passed the word, and gotten dirty looks. And now there was a Mercedes staff car down there, and it wasn't like being in a dogfight, it was like running over a dog with your car; but you had to do it because you had told your people they had to do it, and Archie believed that an officer should not order anybody to do what he wouldn't do himself.
Archie banked his Mustang steep to the right, lined up on the cloud of dust boiling out under the wheels of the Mer cedes, and when he thought he had him, closed his finger on the trigger on the joystick. When he saw his tracer stream converge on the Mercedes and he didn't have to correct, he thought he was getting pretty good at this shit.