1945

Earlier in the war, he would have pressed on along with the other bombers in his command since the B-29 could easily fly with three, or even two, engines. But orders were orders, and in the case of mechanical failure, he was to turn back. It wasn't something he could hide, as the problem forced him to shut down one engine. Thus, he had turned back to base and relinquished command of the other bombers to his number two.

Kutchinski wasn't concerned about being considered a coward for aborting the mission. The twenty-five-year-old major had seen enough aerial combat to satisfy any requirement for bravery. Instead, he was upset about missing a chance to rack up another score toward getting to go home. As a means of pacifying rebellious young officers who wanted out of the war, the military had reinstated the policy of rotating bomber crews back to the States after twenty-five combat missions. Today would have been sixteen if his plane, the Polish Pope, hadn't decided to act up.

With sixteen in, he would have needed only nine more, and that would only have taken a few weeks, a month at the most. Back home, he might have been discharged and given the opportunity to latch onto one of the civilian airlines. Kutchinski was convinced that air travel was the thing of the future, and he wanted on board an airline as quickly as possible. At the worst, he would have been given a military job training other pilots and would still have had time to make contacts with the airlines.

Aborting bombing missions because of mechanical failure wasn't done because there was so much danger from the Japanese planes and guns. In fact, the runs weren't particularly dangerous at all anymore. Jap interceptors were almost nonexistent, although the occasional kamikaze would try to ram a B-29, and Japanese antiaircraft guns had been battered into mush by other bombers.

But mechanical failure was a solid reason to abort because of the possibility of having to bail out over Japan, where there was the overwhelming likelihood that they would be killed out of hand by the angry Japs. Kutchinski and his men had heard too many tales of Americans being literally ripped to pieces by Jap mobs. Sometimes he wondered if he could blame the Japs. On previous missions they had flown over the Kyushu battlefields and seen the clouds of smoke reaching thousands of feet into the sky from the blackened and ruined land. What was occurring below in that tragic inferno was scarcely imaginable. Then they thanked the gods that had permitted them to join the air force rather than the godforsaken infantry.

Kutchinski's real fear was that there'd be a general stand-down because of a lack of targets before he could reach twenty-five missions, and he'd wind up being stuck in the military for the rest of eternity. No matter how the pie was cut, there were now too many planes and too few targets. Today they were to have bombed a valley where the Japs might be hiding some soldiers. A valley? What the hell kind of a target was a valley? Then he'd decided that it would have been a good one if it had helped him get to that magic number twenty-five.

"Major?"

It was Sgt. Tom Franks, the belly gunner, calling on the intercom. "What is it?"

"Ship on the water below us."

Kutchinski grinned. "That's where ships are supposed to be, Sergeant." Like the others on the Polish Pope, Franks was an original member of the close-knit crew, and none of them thought too much of military discipline when they were in the air and away from the base.

"I know that, Major sir, but I've been watching this one through my binocs and it looks like a sub. Aren't they supposed to be underwater?"

"Except when they're not," Kutchinski said. "What's so interesting about this one?"

Franks paused. "I don't believe it's one of ours."

Kutchinski turned the controls over to his copilot and went down the middle of the plane to the underslung glass bubble that housed the belly gun. Franks handed him his binoculars. They were high powered and unauthorized. Franks had won them in a poker game a couple of weeks earlier.

"Take a look," Franks invited.

Kutchinski took the binoculars and focused them. It was difficult because the plane was bouncing slightly and there were irregularities in the glass bubble, but he finally managed to get a good look. Yes, it was a ship, and, yes, it was a submarine. It was hard to tell its speed from their height, but the small wake indicated it was moving slowly. Kutchinski agreed with Frank's assessment that the sub indeed looked strange. He switched on the intercom and told the copilot to descend to ten thousand and circle the vessel.

"She'll see us and dive if she's a Jap," Franks complained.

"Better that than drop a load of bombs on one of ours."

"Ain't ours, Major," Franks insisted.