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Jungleland: White Hawk Aviation Stories #2

 

Sweating it out in the Belgian Congo as a civil war mercenary, with Sparks turning wrenches on his T-6 Texan, Hawk splits his time flying combat missions and, back on the ground, sparring with Ella, an attractive young missionary doctor, in the sequel to My Brother’s Keeper.

 

Chapter 1 - Ella

 

 

Oh my God, it was hot. Always so damn hot. I couldn’t wait to escape my cot under the mosquito netting in the morning to get off the ground, even though I knew it wouldn’t be any cooler when I got back and landed. Relief—even temporary relief—was worth every second of it.

The jungle was simply gorgeous in the first light from altitude. Lush and green, mist frosted the treetops making Africa the mystical land I had read about in my youth and watched Johnny Weismueller swing through in all those Tarzan movies. In my adolescent day dreams, I was always the great safari hunter.

Now, I was a hunter of sorts—but for much bigger game than lions and elephants—leading a two ship mission up a valley northwest of Kindu along the Lumamo River in Congo. We were flying old T-6 Texans, out on an early morning search and destroy mission. Most of the guys I had flown with in England against the Germans who stayed in the service, went on to make noise in jets over Korea. I’m sure that was exhilarating, but just not the same. This would be the closest I could ever get to climbing back into my P-51 Mustang again to sortie against Messerschmidts and Heinkels.

On my wing was Angel, one of the Cuban pilots who survived the Bay of Pigs fiasco and came to fight Fidel and Che again in Africa. We flew a loose formation, weaving up the valley, searching for Simba rebels our “intelligence” claimed were moving south. It was a messy business in the jungle, what with bandits and tribesmen moving in and out of alliances with the rebels and the Congolese Army depending on the greedy inclinations and the moods of their leaders that day. I didn’t try to sort it out. I just flew in the direction they pointed and laid down ordinance where they wanted it. There was nothing so far and we lazily drifted up and down the valleys northwest of the base. If there were rebels or bandits in the area, we sure didn’t want them paying a visit to our home away from home. They were known to be particularly ruthless and unforgiving. There’s no Geneva Convention in jungleland.

Angel and I stayed off the radio, using hand signals to avoid announcing our position to eavesdropping ears below. We loitered in a loose formation, burning off fuel as slowly as possible to stay on-station—and up out of the heat—as long as possible. We always traded extra ordinance for drop tanks.

Angel called ‘bingo’ first and we turned back towards the southeast for more gas in the tanks.

Sparks was there waiting on the tarmac, hands on his hips, surrounded by the ground crew recruited from the locals, as I taxied in, followed by Angel. Somehow, Sparks could tell just from watching us on final approach that we hadn’t seen any action and hadn’t fired our guns or launched any rockets, so he started motioning the guys into position to refuel us once we were idling by the tank farm.

I swung the tail around and stood on the brakes. The crew started climbing all over the wings, dragging a pair of hoses to the fill ports. Angel did the same to my right and his crew mobbed his plane as well.

Sparks climbed up next to the open canopy, a map in his hand being battered by the prop wash. He yelled in my ear, “It’s a pisser, God damn it. New intel. Damn brainiac idiots.”

I took the map and nodded. From the markings, our quarry was now evidently more to the north-northeast, so we’d patrol up that way next, heading north initially, then following the Lualabo River once we got to it.

Sparks slapped my shoulder and went to check that the fuel caps were secured. It would not have been the first time that all the avgas got sucked out of the tank from ground crew carelessness. They meant well, but the Afrika Corps recruits that he had to work with definitely weren’t as good as regular Air Force crews, so Sparks kept a close eye on them.

I waited for Angel’s crew to finish, then we taxied back out to the end of the runway. Maybe ‘runway’, ‘airport’, and ‘base’ were too kind to the scar of land cleared out of the jungle for us to fly out of to help President Tshome and the CIA fight this hot ember of the Cold War here in sub-Sahara Africa. I didn’t really care about the politics or economics. Only the flying. Though, it was pretty crude compared to what I enjoyed during wartime in merry old England.

Without sliding the canopy shut, I advanced the power and started my take-off roll. Angel was at my four o’clock and we climbed out, then turned north. The day was starting to heat up with the air getting bumpy, pushing us a little higher. We had a few months to go before the rainy season, so we flew nearly every day. When we got to the river, it was low and narrow in its banks, but still one of the best landmarks for pilotage. Angel and I turned northeast and began leaning out the mixture for best endurance.

Of course, it was no different here in Africa: hour after hour of nothing but the drone of your engine turning gasoline into noise, punctuated by mere minutes of the unmatched intensity of doing battle. Only in this conflict, our focus was targets on the ground, not dogfighting—like at the end of the war, when the Luftwaffe had been decimated and what opposition they did throw up was quickly smashed. At that point, we were like the Bears pummeling a hapless Northwestern junior varsity team.

It was another three quarters of an hour before anything happened. Sweeping southwest of the village of Nogabi, we started taking ground fire out of the jungle. The Simbas were amateurs with firearms. Their aim and firing discipline were so poor that they were often more an annoyance than a threat, but over the winter months they had started to improve somewhat. They almost always forgot, though, that tracers work both ways, so once they opened up on us, they basically painted a bull’s eye on themselves.

“Break left,” I radioed Angel and yanked the stick back and to the left in a climbing turn to circle around on the enemy location. I searched back over my shoulder for a road or trail leading out of the area to anticipate their possible direction of movement. There was a small scar coming down off the hill to the southeast.

As we came around three hundred and sixty degrees, lining up on the small section of the jungle sprouting red and green tracer rounds, the intensity of the fire began to wane as the rebels understood what was about to come their way.

“Take the road. Southeast,” I said to Angel.

He clicked his mike twice to acknowledge the one-two punch plan and began to drift back to be able to follow up my initial attack on the enemy positions with rocket fire on them as they inevitably fled down the road.

I banked hard and began to dive down on the hilltop. The tracers began to concentrate on my nose. I returned fire with my guns, spreading the field of fire left and right with a little dance on the rudder pedals. I felt the Texan shudder and buck a bit as rockets left the rails. I followed the plumes of their engines halfway to the target before I had to pull up, but noticed that the intensity of the enemy fire had waned considerably.

“Way to go, Batman,” Angel radioed. “Let me just clean up this little mess you made.”

Behind me Angel strafed the road, and fired his rockets in so close that he seemed to clip the top of the fireball from the warhead explosions.

I circled back and took a path coming back up the road, stitching it with .50 caliber fire. Angel followed in my wake for one more pass, just to be sure. As we joined up to circle the position, I noticed some misting from Angel’s right wing. He had taken a round in the fuel tank—an infamous golden BB—so I told him and he beat feet back to the base before all the gas leaked out of his tanks.

I still had an hour or so of fuel and some unexpended ordinance, so I lallygagged my way home, exploring every nook and cranny of interest along the way. I half-heartedly kept an eye out for targets of opportunity, but mostly looped, rolled and yo-yoed over the jungle, practicing maneuvers and enjoying the relative coolness of altitude. There wasn’t really much need to hurry back. I’d only have to loiter over the field waiting for the ground crews to deal with Angel’s wounded bird and maybe clean up the runway, if he leaked fuel or oil all over it.

I headed southwest and swung back around in a half-assed patrol of the jungle surrounding the base down that way. There was little out there, aside from a couple of villages and a mission cut out of the trees. I didn’t see any activity and really didn’t expect to. With the range on our planes, we were pretty safely tucked away from the rebel strongholds, though it never hurt to take a look-see to be sure that the intel on that wasn’t as bad as their other information. Me and Angel would probably be the first to know if they were close enough to overrun us, when Simba rebels sat down for dinner with us in the mess tent. Mainly, I just enjoyed the flying part—and its cool relief—while I could, until the reality of fuel burn brought me back to earth.

It was about an hour later when the base finally called all clear, so Angel must have made it back okay. I landed about twenty minutes later. Taxiing back to the hardstand, I noticed a woman standing next to Sparks chewing his ear off and pointing at me. He dutifully absorbed the abuse, as if a long suffering spouse, watching me shut down White Hawk II out of the side of his eye. He held her back with his arm as the prop blade spun down and finally stopped.

I slid back the canopy. The woman wriggled out from around the mechanic’s blocking move and headed towards me.

Sparks shrugged his shoulders at my hand motion query. He folded his arms over his chest to watch the show.

The woman didn’t even walk around the wing, but stooped to cut underneath to take a more direct line towards me. She disappeared under the leading edge and appeared at the aileron, then followed the trailing edge back to the fuselage, looking for the hand hold to get herself up on the wing.

I turned in the cockpit and watched her step up onto the wing and climb the incline up to me. I started to slide myself up to get out, getting my butt up on the back of the seat, but she got to me and blocked my way out.

“Just who do you think you are, mister?” she barked angrily with the authoritative voice of a medical professional at the very top of the heap. I had heard that tone in my brother’s voice more than a few times.

I just pulled off my helmet, but left my mirrored Ray-Bans on. Behind the lenses, I carefully surveyed her gorgeously animated face—even in anger, her lips wrinkled in a bit of a smile, as if this was half show, half genuine indignation. Her red hair was neatly pulled back in a ponytail, showing a freckled, fair complexion which had not yet been weathered and tanned by the sun, so she was new in country. Most of us outsiders knew each other well, but I didn’t recognize who this was. I had heard about a new doctor at the mission, though never imagined it might have been female.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” I asked.

“What?”

“I mean originally—not born and raised.”

She scowled and punched my arm with her fist…hard.

“Ow!” I guessed she had at least one brother.

“Was that you—of course it was. Who else would it have been.”

I unscrewed the plugs from my ears and the volume level on her voice got louder. Over her shoulder, I saw Sparks shake his head and smile.

“Listen, mister—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa there,” I finally interrupted, holding up my hand, palm out like a cop stopping traffic.

She stopped talking and stared hard at me. She punched my arm again.

I cocked my head to the side. “Really?”

“Where in the hell do you get off shooting up my house calls?”

“Hi. I’m Hawk.” I offered a handshake.

She slapped it away.

“All right. Doctor, I presume?”

“You’re damn right.”

“I’m still Hawk.”

“As if I cared.” She scowled at her own reflection in my sun glasses. “You could take those off.”

“I could.”

“You might have killed someone.”

“Well, I hate to tell you this, but that’s kind of the point when you’re getting shot at—you shoot back and not to tickle their toes.”

“I wasn’t shooting at you.”

“I didn’t say it was you. But tracer bullets don’t naturally fall up from trees.”

“But, I —”

“You should be careful out there.”

“I’m not part of that whole thing. I’m just here to take care of families.”

“Yeah, well, rebels and bandits have families, too.”

“Can you take those sun glasses off…Please?”

I did.

“Thank you.”

“Try again? I’m Hawk.”

She sighed mightily. “Doctor Mickleson.”

“Why so formal? We’re at least a thousand miles from the nearest maitre ‘d.”

“Doctor Mickelson.”

“Fine, then. If I ever need a prostate exam, I know who to call.” I stood up on the seat to let myself out the other side of the fuselage.

She pouted when I turned away, then behind my back I heard, “Ella. Ella Mickelson.”

I turned back and held out my hand again. “I am pleased to meet you, Ella.”

She eventually shook my hand, but clearly didn’t like it.

“And I am sorry about any misplaced ordnance that might have come your way. I had no intention of injuring any civilians…or you.”

“Yeah…well…please be more careful next time.”

“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” It was still morning.

“No, thank you.”

She spun on her heels, hopped down off the plane and marched away towards a muddy and battered Range Rover.

“Glad to meet you, Ella,” I called out. And I was.

But Dr. Mickleson ignored me and peeled out in her Range Rover, nearly spraying Sparks with clods of red clay.

“I guess she told you, doncha know,” Sparks said when I came up beside him. He smiled an evil, knowing grin.

“You know, I think I feel a fever coming on.” I put the back of my hand to my forehead.

“Maybe you should have that looked at.”

“Hmmm. Maybe you’re right.” We watched Ella get swallowed up by the jungle. “Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

 

***~~~***

 

 

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