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1938  I. Paul turned his biplane to face the onslaught, both machine guns blazing. The attacker banked away. Paul had seen the Red plane first. A rule to live by: see the enemy first. He knew where to find them. When you were making ground attacks and the enemy interceptors had better than a kilometer on your ceiling, of course they were going to pounce from above. So Paul had seen him. Now what? He wished to God he were in something besides a Heinkel 51. He had already got rid of his damn bombs at least. His squadron had completed its attack on the Red troops at the front, and were on their way back to base when they were bounced. The Heinkels had scattered and Paul was suddenly alone in the blue except for this persistent stinging fly which had singled him out for its prey. There was no cloud in the Spanish sky to hide in, and running was a joke. The Soviet was over 100 km/h faster than Paul's Heinkel. What jack-off had traded speed for maneuverability when they were designing this crate? A fighter that can't defend itself, thought Paul. What a novel idea. He was flying a coffin with wings. He cursed his misbegotten biplane while the Russian was up there laughing at Germany. The machine was Russian anyway. By now the pilot was probably Spanish. The Russians themselves had since gone home, leaving their lethal equipment to their communist allies. The Soviet-built Rata up there was a stumpy little thing with low cantilever wings, which could not be much more than fat ailerons. There were no struts or stays anywhere to dirty the Rata's lines and it was all smooth underneath. In flight, the Rata tucked its undercarriage within itself like a bird's legs, so the aircraft's biggest source of drag was its fat face. A nine-cylinder radial engine gave the Rata its blunt profile, more pronounced for the dwarfish length of its fuselage. It looked like a fly, and that's what the Reds called their I-16. Mushka in Russian. Mosca to the Spanish Reds. The Spanish Fascists called it Rata. Rat. Officially the machine was designated I-16. I for Istrabetil -- "fighter." They got that right, thought Paul, wondering why he couldn't be in something that could fight. The Rata was coming around again, fast. It could not go slow; its stubby little body would fall out of the sky. Paul waited until it was nearly upon him to play his only ace. What the biplane could do that the fast monoplane couldn't. TURN! Paul's biplane wheeled on itself. The faster aircraft overshot, hurtling the other direction. Paul pushed his throttle to the firewall, and the HE 51 puttered away in haste, all out at a miserable 342 km/h. The Rata skidded around, its noisy radial snarling. Paul jammed the stick forward. Stomach jumped into his throat. All the grit and litter from the floor leapt up into his face. Wires burred and strained. His top plane yanked hard on its struts, creaking as if to fly off the aircraft. The engine hesitated in the sudden reverse of gravity. Paul snorted, puffed the flung debris off his lips. The engine fired again and he dove at full-throttle, the whole machine shuddering. Black smoke of emergency-rich mixture belched from the S-pipes. Maybe he'll think I'm hit. But the Rata stuck to Paul's tail. And it struck Paul then, the sheer idiocy of trying to dive away from the Rata. With the HE 51's enormous wing area, a power dive was like pushing a feather down, while the Red crate dropped after him like a powered boulder. Paul kicked the rudder pedals. The Heinkel tumbled like an unwinding ball of twine, jumping this way and that. Stays whistled, twanged. Wood ribs groaned. Paul's ears pressed in with the descent. Wind buffeting the open cockpit grew warmer as he hurtled down, still not fast on Rata terms, but impossible to aim at. And maybe he looked dead. The ground bobbled up, and Paul pulled back on the stick, like pulling a sword from a stone. Felt himself pushed back into his seat, blood draining from his head, goggles become heavy on his nose. The Heinkel pulled out of its dive, wind screaming through the wires, engine whining. Paul looked back. The Rata was still above him, a compact vulture circling to watch him crash and so confirm a victory that did not materialize after all. Paul had been warned that it was death to follow a victim down like that. Apparently it was only death if he tried it. Watch your kill go down, someone will be on you before you get to see the crash. Which was what would be happening to the Rata right now if life were fair. And Paul could not figure out what had happened to the rest of his squadron. He'd heard of this, how the embattled sky empties in a heartbeat. But this was the first time it had happened to him. And how optimistic sounded the word "first" at this moment. When the Ratas had first attacked, Paul had tried to follow the HE 51 next to his, Gunter's, into a defensive circle as ordered. Each airplane would cover the tail of the one in front of it as the formation looped its way home. Too late Paul had realized that Gunter had broken formation and Paul was being led by the lost. The circle of death had disintegrated, and the squadron had gone all which ways. The staffelkapitan, if Paul lived to see him again, would shred him to chewable bits. The image Johann Lowenstamm cursing him out felt oddly homey and comforting. Paul had no radio to tell anyone he was in trouble, and the only aircraft trying to stay on his tail now was an enemy. Here it came again. Paul cocked his guns, wheeled his crate toward the Rata coming at him with its four ports spitting red. Did they never run out of ammo? The Heinkel's two machine guns were slower, synchronized to shoot through the propeller. Paul fired. Cordite tang filled his nostrils. The Heinkel shivered. His tracers arced down and short. And he was getting down to the red stuff. His mechanic had loaded colored tracer rounds in the bottom for a warning, so Paul never had to look at his counter to know when his breech blocks were about to rattle empty. They were almost empty now. They held only 500 rounds per gun to begin with. The Rata angled around for another pass. Paul had been told to open fire even out of range as the enemy attacked. The enemy would usually break off at 200 meters. Someone forgot to brief this Red on proper error-making procedure for an enemy. The Rata kept coming, close enough for Paul to hear the metallic chatter of its guns over his own engine's roar. White tracer streams seemed to be coming in straight lines of point blank. Bullets whiffled through the air over his head, poked holes in his Heinkel's parasol wing. Ragged perforations appeared in the fabric. When nothing but Red spinner and gun ports filled the space before his eyes, Paul squeezed the trigger hard. The Heinkel rocked with the guns' recoil, which abruptly deteriorated into the impotent clatter of empty breech blocks. O shit. Pushed the stick and ducked. The Rata flashed upward, green. The Republican tricolor bannered on its rudder, red, yellow, and purple winked right there. Then gone. Paul's Heinkel rumbled into the Rata's turbulent wake, then sailed into sudden calm. Paul heard only his own engine. He squinted into the sun. Did I get him? The sky was suddenly empty again. He nudged his Heinkel into a turning climb. Sighted a high speck. How had the Rata got so high so fast? That could not be. Hail clatter of bullets sprayed from the sun, whistling through his fabric wings, pinging and rapping where they hit metal. Heart jumped into another gear. Blood pulsed. An unreal clarity shielded his mind. Paul throttled forward, met with an immediate violent thumping of machinery wrenching itself apart. The bottom stay of his port wing pulled loose, sprung like a whip and gashed a rent in the lower plane. He throttled back, his crate still knocking and wobbling all over the place with the off-balance thumping of a broken bladed fan. His riddled portside wings flexed sickly. He pulled the control column. It flopped back into his lap without resistance. He loosened his harness to climb up in his seat and look behind him. Saw the elevators trailing lamely, nicely balanced but taking him no where but a level course. That made him nothing but a beautiful target. He dropped back into his seat, moved the control column back and forth. Nothing happened. Cables were out. Could not climb. Could not dive. I am dead. The Rata was turning around to finish him, when a shadow crossed over it. Paul had sighted the third aircraft before -- the speck high in the sky he had thought was the Rata. Closer now he made out its longer lines, an elegant angular shape with narrow tapering wings. It loomed over the ugly little fat fly. This was an eagle. The Messerschmitt 109 dived. The Rata never saw it. At least it did nothing evasive as the German fighter pumped both guns into it, stitched it up the back The squat Red ship sprouted a streamer of black smoke from under its engine cowling. Fire bloomed and swept back into the slipstream. Ailerons ignited. In the wind-lashed heat, the Rata quickly became a torch. It went down, a spinning fireball. There was no parachute. Paul hoped the pilot was already dead. Even Paul wished fire on no one. He squinted up at the ME, read the numbers off its fuselage. A 6 was painted fore of the black disk. They were all sixes, the MEs. The number 35 aft of the black disk was the airplane's own signature. The jaunty Top Hat emblem said the ME belonged to the second fighter staffel. The Messerschmitt climbed to join the other two airplanes of its Kette. They sped away high above him in a vee like geese. "Wait!" Paul cried aloud. Damn this thing. I am talking to wind. . . . |