The Last Mission Read online

  We ran into the beginnings of cloud cover over the Cabot Strait, and by the time we crossed onto Newfoundland, we had nothing below us but a gray haze. We watched the loop antenna oscillate in front of us, trying to find the exact bearing of the beacon. Our navigator’s recommended course was only three degrees off from the heading radioed in by our flight leader. Both of them could have been wrong, but there was confidence in numbers. We began our descent, and when we broke out at two thousand feet, the coastline was ahead and the airfield right under us. We lined up, made our landing, and then strutted out of the airplanes like twenty-five-mission veterans. Simple as it may seem, we were deliriously proud over finding Newfoundland.

  There was much less anxiety the next morning. The attitude among the crews was that if we could find Newfoundland, we could find Greenland. It was only eight hundred miles—a much shorter flight than the one we had just completed. We offloaded the supplies for Gander and onloaded some cartons for Cape Farvel. Three sailors were added to our crew. They were based in Greenland, or at least their ship frequently called in Greenland. Their search-and-rescue duties had brought them down to Gander, and we were bringing them back.

  Takeoff was easy, even though there were low clouds with only a half-mile visibility. We went on three-minute intervals so we would have plenty of room while climbing blindly through the clouds. The idea was that once we broke out above the weather, we would have no difficulty finding one another. That’s what a heady dose of success can do to you.

  We climbed through ten thousand feet, and we still couldn’t see our own wing tips, much less any of the other planes in the flight. At twelve thousand feet we went on oxygen, and by fifteen thousand feet it was so cold that ice was forming around the oxygen masks. Our leader called back to Gander to tell them that the cloud cover seemed to go up forever. “We get that up here sometimes,” Gander told us, with an infuriating lack of concern.

  One of our planes climbed to see where the top was. At twenty-five thousand feet, the sky was still leaden. “Visibility about as far as the outboard engines,” he reported. We were going to be in the soup all the way to Greenland.

  We couldn’t get into any kind of formation because we couldn’t see one another, so we all held a constant course and speed, hoping to maintain our initial three-minute intervals. Gander was now reporting zero visibility, so there was no point in turning back, and we were still too far out to get any information from Cape Farvel. We were flying in total isolation toward a destination that was ominously silent, under the guidance of a nineteen-year-old navigator. We were all loading up on sticks of chewing gum, except the three sailors who didn’t seem to be the least bit anxious. “At least you ain’t going to hit anything up here. On the ship, there’s always icebergs you can run into.”

  His name was Latterly. He was nineteen, but already an experienced veteran of the North Atlantic. Officially, he was a boatswain’s mate on a minesweeper. Actually, he was part of a rescue team that went looking for downed flight crews. Apparently there were enough pilots losing their way to keep him busy.

  “It’s like this all the time. Can’t see your hand in front of your face. The dampness gets right through to your underwear, and you can really freeze your balls off.”

  We already were.

  “Didn’t they outfit you guys with parkas and snowshoes and that sort of junk?”

  We told him that snowshoes weren’t standard Air Force issue.

  “Well, I guess I can see why they wouldn’t be in a Lightning. Those poor bastards hardly have enough room to scratch their ass. But you guys got all this room!” He opened his arms as if embracing a music hall. “They could easily fit you out with tents, snowshoes, maybe even a couple of kerosene heaters.”

  “Why would they do that?” our bombardier asked.

  “So you could hang out for a couple of days when you come down on an ice float. I mean, we bust our tails to get to you, but we ain’t magicians. It can take a couple of days to find you.”

  We were beginning to get the drift of his message. Planes bound for Greenland were coming down all over the Arctic Circle and their crews were climbing out onto the ice, wearing nothing warmer than their flight jackets.

  “You take them Lightning pilots,” he continued, shaking his head at the memory. “Six guys trying to fly six fighters to Greenland in the middle of the winter. Two hours out and they haven’t a clue on where they’re at. We had them on our radio and we’re running a direction finder on their signal. All we have is a bearing, because the guys at Cape Farvel can’t pick up their signal. But even with just a bearing, we know they’re still a hundred miles out at sea, and they’re telling us they think they’re over Greenland.”

  “What about the Cape Farvel beacon?” our navigator asks. “Couldn’t they lock onto it?”

  “Nah! That fucking beacon is down more than it’s on the air. They got these transmitters that were built for the desert. They’re always blowing parts.”

  We looked skeptical. He had to be pulling our leg. Why would anyone ever send desert equipment to the Arctic Circle?

  “Honest to God,” Boatswain’s Mate Latterly said, raising his hand as if taking an oath. “That’s the cargo we’re carrying. Parts for the Cape Farvel radio.”

  The irony was impressive. We were hoping to tune into a radio that would lead us directly into the airfield, but the parts that make the radio work were aboard our plane. The radio wouldn’t work until we got there, and we weren’t going to get there without the radio.

  “What about the Lightning pilots?” I asked Latterly, hoping that their story had a happy ending.

  “They were down to about five hundred feet, looking down on nothing but white, and up above them the sky was white. Honest to God, they didn’t even know which way was up.” Latterly finds that a lot funnier than any of the Air Force guys do. “And then one of them yelled out that he can see the field. Then another says that he can see it, too. They couldn’t make radio contact, but like I was telling you, that ain’t all that unusual. But they don’t see any smokepots, and the guys at the Cape always light the smokepots. It’s the only way you can make out the runway.

  “We were screaming at them that they were nowhere near the airfield. Like I said, we still had them a hundred miles out at sea. But they went right ahead, lining up for their landing, lowering flaps and dropping the wheels. And all the while we were telling them that whatever they’re looking at, it ain’t the runway. And then they just disappeared. As they got down low, we couldn’t read their voice radios. We figured they had landed. What we didn’t know was where. All we could do was start looking for them. So our skipper sets course straight up the bearing we had them on with our direction finder. We were making flank speed, because we knew they wouldn’t last long in the weather. But at the same time, our visibility was down to a few hundred yards. By the time we saw an iceberg, we’d be sliding across the top of it.”

  “The radio parts are in one of the cartons in the back?” our pilot asked, going back to our own worst-case scenario.

  “Sure. We’d have given them some of our stores, but like I said, their radios are weird.”

  “Then there won’t be any navigation beacon?” the pilot tried to confirm.

  The boatswain shrugged, as if the point were of little importance. “Who knows? Maybe they got it up and running again. But I know these parts are for their radios.”

  “What about the Lightning pilots?” I repeated.

  “Oh, we got them. After racing for about eight hours, with ice floats going by too close for comfort, we picked up their radio signal. We headed straight for it, and it kept getting stronger. And then, all of a sudden, a wall of ice appeared dead ahead of us. All I could think of was the Titanic.”

  “You hit it?” The bombardier is aghast.

  “No. We made an emergency turn, rudder hard over and backing one screw. We didn’t miss by much, but by enough. We didn’t get a scratch. But we ran an hour in one direction and then tw
o hours in the other and there was no way to get around this ice field. We were able to get a running fix and figure out that the radio signal was coming from about seven miles away, but we couldn’t talk to anyone. They weren’t listening—just holding down a key and transmitting. So four of us from the deck gang put out in a lifeboat, climbed up on the ice and started after them. The charts said they were in the water, but we knew they were up on top of the ice. I guess the Davis Strait was iced over as far down as the Labrador Sea.”

  “You walked in and got them?” I asked, my face shining in amazement.

  “What else could we do? The ship couldn’t make it. It took us about six hours to find them. And that’s about all the time we had. I don’t think they could have held out for another hour.”

  He stopped, but we were all hanging on his next word. What had finally happened to the Lightning pilots?

  Three of them had made perfect landings, rolled to a stop and idled their engines, waiting for a jeep to pull up with taxiing instructions. Two of them had plowed into ice ridges and bashed in their noses, right up to the propeller spinners. The last guy had sheared off his landing gear and slid on his belly, bending the propeller blades into spaghetti. The two guys who crashed had busted up their faces a bit, and one turned out to have a broken arm. But there they were, in the middle of nowhere, thinking they must be somewhere.

  They had decided that they must be in Greenland, somewhere north of the airfield. But “somewhere north” covered a lot of territory, so they didn’t really have a promising direction. Within a few minutes it was pretty obvious that they wouldn’t last an hour in the cold. They looked at the possibility of the three planes that were still serviceable taking off with two men in each cockpit. But taking off for where? Then they concocted a plan to have one of the planes take off and broadcast a radio signal. If they could make contact with the ship they had been talking to, they could announce that they were down and at least let the ship zero in on their location. One of the pilots fired up his engines and taxied back over his tire marks. When he started his takeoff run, the plane began to fishtail. He lifted off just enough to put the plane into a stall and drop it back onto the ice. He collapsed a wheel, set the plane cartwheeling, and wound up with his tail assembly crashed into the same ice ridge that had flattened the noses of the other two planes.

  Meanwhile, the cold had become numbing. They started one of the engines and huddled into its hot exhaust gasses. The heat was wonderful, but the gasses were choking. Next they doused a parachute with gasoline and lit it like a giant oil lamp. That kept them warm until the chute melted into the ice and put itself out.

  They fired all their flares, burned all their chutes, and set two tires on fire, both for the warmth and the column of black smoke that might be seen be rescuers, but the fog was so dense that even the smoke was quickly swallowed up. They went through all their Boy Scout tricks, and one by one they came to the obvious conclusion: they were helpless, no one knew where they were, and the temperature would be dropping through the long night hours. “Jesus,” one of them thought out loud. “When I was born in Alabama, what do you figure the odds were that I would freeze to death at the North Pole?”

  Another one laughed that as a boy he had loved to go into the icehouse during the summer just to cool off. One of them suggested a snowball fight. “This is the first snow I’ve ever seen. I ought to do something with it.”

  The sailor shook his head. “That’s what they were doing when we found them. Running around, throwing snowballs at each other. We figured that was why they had gotten lost. These had to be the dumbest officers in any man’s army.”

  He laughed at his own joke and then went back to the radio space to take a nap. He and the other sailors had taken the pilots back to Gander on a fishing boat, then they had been awakened early to catch our morning departure. They needed their sleep.

  “If we go down, I get his coat,” the pilot told us. We all tried to laugh, but it wasn’t coming easily.

  As best we could tell, our formation was breaking up. Radio checks from some of the planes sounded as if they were right on top of us; others were faint and far off. We figured our flight of B-17s was scattered all over the sky. No one was picking up the homing signal from Cape Farvel, and we didn’t have the heart to tell the others that the radio components were on our plane. We also thought we would spare them the sailor’s story about the Lightnings.

  We did all we could do. We began turning our landing lights on and off and flashing a high-intensity lamp out of the top turret. The hope was that we might keep one of the others from flying blindly into us. The flight commander had all the Fortresses blink their lights. We scanned the radio bands in hope of locating naval vessels in the area. We tried to raise Cape Farvel, and then Gander, on our low-frequency radios. There were no hits and no responses. We were absolutely alone, plowing through dense clouds at ten thousand feet. According to the navigator’s dead reckoning, we were only an hour away from the airfield, but we couldn’t see it and we couldn’t hear it. The navigator admitted that he might be off a bit, depending on the drift of the wind.

  “What’s a bit?” I asked him.

  “What’s the drift?” he answered.

  Were we like the Lightnings, headed up to an ice floe in the Davis Strait? Or had we fallen away to the south, aiming ourselves to splash down somewhere south of Iceland? Were we with the others, or had we pretty much gone off on our own? The morning’s cockiness was gone. The magnificent officers who had mastered Newfoundland were a bunch of scared young boys.

  We knew we couldn’t fly blindly until we ran out of gas, and we were convinced that we would never raise the beacon at Cape Farvel. Our only chance was to get under the weather and look for geographic contours that would give us a fix. The problem was that when we had left Gander, there was no “under the weather.” The planes had vanished into the fog as soon as they left the runway. But we had to at least try.

  Our captain raised the flight leader, who was faint and cracking up. We suggested going down for a look, and after a few minutes of static-interrupted discussion, he agreed that we should give it a try. We throttled back and dove below the artificial horizon on the instrument panel. There were no outside visual references and no change in the feeling of gravity planting us firmly in our seats. All we had was the rate-of-climb indicator that was a thousand feet a minute into the negative area, and the altimeter that was winding down rapidly. Visibility was unchanged. We still couldn’t see our wing tips.

  “Six thousand,” I said, calling out the altitude. And then, “Two forty-five,” to give the pilot our airspeed. He throttled back a bit more and pulled the yoke back slightly. He was beginning to worry about flying straight into the ground. I wouldn’t have started worrying until two thousand.

  Our ears were popping as we dropped into heavier air. “Five thousand,” I called. “Two forty.”

  “What do you think?” he asked. “Cut it off at two thousand?”

  “We’re not going to see anything at two thousand. I’d go down to five hundred.”

  He gave me an anxious glance.

  “We should still be over water,” I said. “We’re not going to run into anything.”

  “Maybe a thousand,” he answered. And there we were in an early game of chicken. Which one of us would dare to fly the lowest, when we couldn’t really be sure what was underneath us? Frightened kids trying to be brave like a couple of ten-year-olds on the steps of a haunted house. Which one has the courage to walk across the porch and all the way up to the door?

  “Five thousand.”

  He held our angle of descent, but eased down on the throttles. The four Wright Cyclones were no longer roaring. Just a hoarse whisper. We could hear the rush of the air.

  “Four thousand. Two five zero.”

  His hand was on the throttles. Don’t back off, I thought. We may need power in a hurry. Now I was the one who was hesitating before stepping up on the porch.

  There was
a rumble on the flight circuit, and then pieces of the flight commander’s broken voice. It seemed like we might not be over the same ocean.

  “He’s asking where we are and what we can see,” the bombardier told us.

  I keyed the mike. “Passing through three thousand and still in the soup.” There was a response, but none of us could make it out.

  I called out twenty-five hundred, then two thousand, and then I began counting down by hundreds of feet. Occasionally I threw in the airspeed, which was holding at around two fifty. When I hit twelve hundred, my pilot began adding speed and lifting the nose. We went into a shallow descent, easing through one thousand feet.

  That was the point of decision: stay here and we’d probably be flying until the fuel was gone; go lower and we might fly into a mountain along the western coast of Greenland.

  “Ease her down to five hundred,” I suggested.

  “Yeah?” It was a question.

  “We don’t want to go back up without looking,” I said.

  He nodded, and held us slightly below the artificial horizon. The altimeter kept easing down, past nine hundred to eight hundred, and then past seven fifty.

  “See anything?”

  All our faces were pressed against glass. No one saw anything. I checked our speed, which was dropping as our descent slowed. “Two twenty.” I studied the altimeter. We were at six hundred feet and winding slowly down to five hundred. Still nothing but haze, although it seemed to be getting thinner. I could see the wing tip out my window.

  “Let’s go to three hundred,” I suggested.

  “No way! Not when I don’t know what I’m heading into.”

  “I think we’re right on the margin. It’s thinning out. I can see the wing tip. Maybe even out further.”

  He pulled the nose level. “Five hundred feet. That’s as far as we go.”

  “And then what? Go back up into the soup and fly around in circles? If we don’t…”