Pace spotted their target below them. The large twin tailplanes were clearly visible even though the aircraft’s dappled light and dark gray paint job blended with the sea far below. Time to open the dance. “Confirm, Me-264. Take him.”
The two Bearcats accelerated into a long dive. Unlike the midnight blue aircraft on the fleet carriers, escort carrier group planes were painted light gray with a gloss-white belly. It cut the shadows down making it much less likely that an alert gunner would spot them. Pace was coming in from high seven o’clock; his wingman from high-five. The Me-264 had a single 20mm gun in a turret above its rear fuselage. It could fire at one attacking aircraft, not two widely-separated ones. Suddenly, the German aircraft accelerated and black smoke trailed from its engines. They’d been spotted; and the pilot had cut in his GM-1 boost. For five minutes, the bomber would be almost as fast as the fighters chasing it.
Between dodging the stream of tracer 20mm shells from the rear turret and the GM-1 boosted engines powering the bomber, the two diving Bearcats were hardly closing the gap. It didn’t matter. Moskva’s Bearcats soared up and fired. They hit the Me-264 with long bursts of .50 caliber gunfire, from below and to the right and left. The thin black stream of smoke from the inboard port engine was suddenly transformed into a billowing cloud of black flame and dense smoke. The Me-264 abruptly slowed. The two Bearcats behind were able to close the range at last. Pace took careful aim. His .50s lashed the aft fuselage of the bomber. The 20mm tracers stopped abruptly. Gunner killed.
The Me-264 still had a 13.2 mm machine gun in the forward upper turret, a 20mm gun firing under the belly, two more 13.2mms, one in each waist hatch and a fixed 13.2 firing forward. For all that, the loss of the 20mm gunner was critical. It meant the German aircraft was virtually defenseless against attacks from above and behind. That’s where Pace and his wingman made their next runs, raking the bomber’s aft fuselage, walking their bursts along the structure into the wings. The gray beast below them was threshing, trying to defend itself but its fangs were being methodically drawn by the four fighters. Moskva’s two planes made another pass, this time for above and on the beam. Their streams of .50 fire raked the forward fuselage. That left the other upper turret silent. The aircraft was defenseless.
Pace was reminded of a history lesson he had once listened to, of a game when times were harder. A pack of dogs would be let loose on a blinded bear and the crowd would place bets on how long the bear would survive and how many of the dogs it could kill. This was different of course. It was possible, normal, to feel sorry for the bear. Nobody would feel sorry for the bomber below.
Pace swept in again, his aim undisturbed by defensive fire. His .50s streamed tracer, raking into the wing roots and walking sideways towards the engines. The starboard inner engine erupted into flames as his gunfire shredded its nacelle and the Me-264 angled downwards. As Pace’s aircraft pulled away, Moskva’s team made another pass. It was the killer. One of the long wings crumpled just inboard of a burning engine and the 264 went into a helpless spin. It fell from the sky and crashed into the sea. There, it exploded; its death watched dispassionately by the gun cameras on the Bearcats.
“We need bigger guns.” Pace’s voice was unemotional.
“They’re coming. The new ‘Cats will have 20mms, according to the scuttlebutt.”
“Hope they work a bit better than the last ones.” The Navy’s previous attempt at a 20mm gun had been a fiasco. The weapons usually jammed after a round or two. “Let’s go home.”
An hour later, the Bearcats were sitting on the hangar deck being rearmed and refueled. Their gun camera film had been taken and was being flown back to Washington. There, the kill would be confirmed. Inanna would take a file from her cabinet and delete another Me-264 from Germany’s shrinking maritime reconnaissance aircraft fleet.
Every reduction in the Luftwaffe’s small maritime reconnaissance fleet meant the fast carriers operating out in the Atlantic were that much safer. Without the aircraft to steer them to their targets, U-boats, even the Type XXIs, were virtually useless against the fast carriers. They would have to rely on luck to be in the right place at the right time. In the North Atlantic, that just didn’t cut it.
“We have a problem.” Major-General Klaus Marcks was not given to stating the obvious but there were times when a situation merited it.
“Captain Wilhelm Lang.” Colonel Heinrich Asbach also thought this was one of the times when stating the obvious was entirely justifiable. “The question is, how do we get rid of him? And should we?”
“We can’t, Heinie.” Marcks had a small group of officers who had been with him since the heady days in France, five years ago. The number was growing smaller as the Russian Front whittled them away, but he still depended on the survivors for advice and insight. Only a fool trusted his own feelings when there were other, better sources available. “The man has served on probably everybody’s staff over the years. He has powerful friends, the sort who could be very dangerous for this whole unit. He got us six brand new, fresh from the factory, self-propelled 150mm howitzers with a single telephone call. Do you want to take the chance that another call would send us to Archangel’sk? While he was assigned to a new post in the opposite direction?”
Asbach shook his head. It was not a chance worth taking. Even the name Archangel’sk had a horror associated with it, something quite unlike anything else on the Russian Front. There was a legend in the German Army. Archangel’sk didn’t actually exist anymore; it had become a gateway to Hell. That the units sent there just marched into the mist covering the city and vanished as if they had never been. It was pretty close to the truth. Being ordered to Archangel’sk was the nearest thing to a mass death sentence that could be given without actually ordering up the mobile gas chambers. He reached out and took another slug of brandy. His family owned one of Germany’s oldest brandy producers and he managed to keep the officer’s mess well stocked.
“Anyway, he isn’t actually a bad officer, Klaus.” Marcks lifted an eyebrow at that. “He knows the regulations inside out. He knows his duties and performs them well. It’s just that he has absolutely no experience at all. I guess that back in’38 we were just like him. Only, we spent all our time out here learning the reality of the war we’re stuck in. He spent that time in comfortable headquarters units, writing regulations and sending memos. He doesn’t know when the rules and regulations apply and when they do not. And he doesn’t really understand how the veterans think or listen to their experience. You heard the story about his nickname?”
“No?”
“He started off as being the ‘Perfectly Perfumed Prince’ and it got abbreviated to ‘Prince.’ When he heard about it, he assumed it was a term of respect, ‘Prince amongst men’ or something like that. A normal officer would know when to turn a blind eye. Not our Captain Lang. It was against regulations, so he forbade its use.”
“What do they call him now?” Marcks was genuinely fascinated.
“Well, the men started calling him ‘The Officer Formerly Known As Prince’ but that was too clumsy for general use so now they call him ‘Still’ because he’s still a Perfectly Perfumed Prince.”