That was, in effect, what they were. A handful of bigger shapes moved on the ground, grinding through American barbed wire and into the U.S. trenches. "Son of a bitch," Moss said, and the wind blew his words away. "The limeys and Canucks have barrels of their own."
They looked different from American barrels, of which he'd seen one or two. He flew lower for a better look, figuring that the more he could put in his report, the better it would be. That battalions of American infantrymen were getting much more intimately acquainted with the barrels advancing on them than he could in an aeroplane never once crossed his mind.
The lower he flew, the stranger the enemy barrels looked. They were forward-leaning rhomboids, with tracks going all the way around the outside of their hulls. He wondered why the Canucks-or was it the limeys?-had settled on such a stupid design till he saw a barrel climb almost vertically out of a trench into which it had fallen. However odd the setup seemed, it had its merits.
Instead of mounting a cannon in the nose like U.S. barrels, the ones currently pushing back the American infantry carried two, one on each side, mounted in sponsons whose design-if not the actual pieces of forged iron themselves-had been taken from the secondary armament of warships. Some of the barrels mounted machine guns in one or both sponsons instead of cannon.
"I wonder whose are better, theirs or ours," Moss said. He had no way to tell at the moment. American barrels still being thin on the ground, and used mostly to spearhead long-planned attacks, none was anywhere nearby to challenge the machines the enemy was hurling at the poor bastards down in the trenches.
Moss dove on the barrels, machine gun blazing. He walked his tracers across one, another, a third. As far as he could tell, they did the massive machines no harm. He cursed himself for a fool. American barrels were armored to hold out enemy machine-gun fire. Whatever you could say about the Canadians and the British, they weren't stupid. They'd do unto the USA as they'd been done by themselves.
He cursed his stupidity for another reason as well. The advancing foe loosed a storm of lead at his Martin one-decker. Ground fire had shot him down once already. Now again he heard the thrumming pop of bullets tearing through canvas.
Clang! That bullet hadn't torn through canvas-it had hit something metal. His eyes flicked over the instrument panel. Everything looked all right. If he was lucky, the bullet had ricocheted off the side of the engine block without breaking anything. If he wasn't lucky, he'd find out soon enough-most likely at the moment he could least afford to.
That clang, though, was an urgent reminder that he couldn't afford to linger indefinitely down here. He pulled back on the stick. The nose of his fighting scout rose.
As Moss gained altitude, Tom Innis made his own firing run on the advancing enemy. Perhaps profiting from his flightmate's experience, he didn't try to shoot up the barrels. Men were always more vulnerable. Banking toward the American lines-or what had been the American lines before the attack-Moss watched men in khaki dive for cover. He whooped with glee and shook his fist in the slipstream.
But not all the British and Canadians tried to shelter themselves from Innis' gun. They shot back at him as ferociously as they had at Moss. And a streak of smoke began streaming back from Tom's engine cowling.
"Get out of there!" Moss shouted-uselessly, of course. "Get out of there while you can!" He looked around for Dud Dudley and Phil Eaker-they'd have to shepherd Innis back toward the aerodrome. He'd be a sitting bird if the Canadians or British pounced on his crippled bus.
He swung the one-decker back toward the west. The smoke wasn't getting better. It was getting worse. "Climb, damn you!" Moss yelled to him, as if he could hear. The more altitude he gained, the farther he'd be able to glide when his engine quit. Moss knew all about that, the hard way.
Innis had to know it, too. But the Martin didn't get any higher off the deck. The only reason for that, Moss figured, was that it couldn't get any higher off the deck. And that meant his flightmate was in trouble.
Moss bared his teeth in an anguished grimace-it wasn't just smoke streaming back from the engine now, it was flame, too. The slipstream blowing in Moss' face made it hard for him to close his mouth again. The slipstream also blew the flames back toward Tom Innis.
He beat at them with his fist and arm. They spread faster than he could knock them down. "Land it!" Moss screamed. "Land it, God damn you!" He wasn't cursing his friend. He was cursing fate, without a doubt the most dreadful fate any airman could face. Better to yank out your pistol and put one through your head than go down in a burning crate, as far as he was concerned.
That was especially true if you were going down in a burning crate from, say, fifteen thousand feet. If you were only a couple of hundred feet off the ground when your aeroplane caught fire, you had a chance to put it down and get the hell out before you roasted, too.
You had a chance… The trouble was, every yard of territory here abouts was as cratered as the surface of the moon: the USA had had to blast the Canucks off the land before advancing through it, and then, even after having had it taken from them, the Canadians and the limeys had shelled it to a faretheewell to make sure the Americans didn't enjoy owning it.
With a healthy aeroplane, Tom Innis would have had more choices. Of course, with a healthy aeroplane, he wouldn't have needed to land in the first place. He did the best he could, steering for a meadow that still had some green grass mingled with the brown of earth thrown up from shell blasts.
"Come on. Come on," Moss whispered, his hand trying to move on the joystick as if he were landing his own aeroplane. Despite smoke and flames and what had to be mortal fear, Innis got the Martin down. You didn't need much in the way of ground to kill all the speed and hop out. "Come on," Moss said again as he buzzed overhead. "Taxi, taxi…"
The Martin nosed down into a shell hole and flipped over. It kept right on burning. Nobody came out of it. Nobody was going to come out. Moss knew that. If the fire hadn't killed Tom, getting the engine and machine gun slammed back into his chest would have done the job.
Infantrymen in green-gray ran toward the crash. Moss and his flightmates kept circling above it. Some of the infantrymen, their faces small pale ovals, looked up at them and shook their heads. No luck. It was over.
Moss felt empty inside as he flew back toward the aerodrome. It could have been me echoed in his mind again and again. It nearly had been him, not so long before. What was the difference between the way he'd put his damaged aeroplane down and how Tom Innis had done it? Luck, nothing more. You didn't like to think you were alive for no better reason than dumb luck. Was he an ace by dumb luck, too?
When only three returned where four had set out, the mechanics on the ground didn't need a handbook to figure out what had happened. "What went wrong?" one of them asked quietly. Dud Dudley was the flight leader. That meant he had the delightful job of telling them.
The surviving fliers went into Shelby Pruitt's tent. The squadron commander looked up from his paperwork. His mouth twisted. "Dammit," he said, and then, mastering himself, "All right, give me the details."
Dudley did that, too. When he was through, Moss spoke of the enemy barrels spreading havoc through the U.S. lines. That had seemed the most important news in the world when he'd spotted them. Now he had to flog his memory to come up with details.
Hardshell Pruitt took notes. He had to be a professional about the business of slaughter, too. He asked his questions, both about Innis' demise and about the barrels. Then he said, "All right, boys. I don't expect the three of you will be doing any flying tomorrow. Don't worry about morning roll call, either, come to that. You'll be recorded as present. Dismissed."