The Sea Witch Read online

  The Sea Witch

  Stephen Coonts

  Stephen Coonts weaves three unforgettable tales of men and women at war, with the sort of dramatic military action and undercover technology for which he is known. Included in this collection are:

  The Sea Witch…

  When young Dauntless dive-bomber pilot is sacked for reckless behavior, he’s reassigned to a Black Cat squadron as the co-pilot of a giant Catalina seaplane, The Sea Witch. He’s thrown into a whole new world, where a Catalina carries five tons of bombs, a half-dozen machine guns, and a crew that walks a fine line between valor and a death wish. A daring night bombing mission against Rabaul forces the crew of The Sea Witch to band together as never before. Each man will soon find out what he’s made of..and not everyone will make it back alive.

  The 17th Day…

  Seventeen days…the average life expectancy of a British Aviator during WWI. Last three weeks, and you were practically a veteran. Paul Hyde dropped out of college to join the Royal Flying Corps, looking for a grand adventure. And grand it was, or so he assured himself when planes were crashing all around him. Today is his seventeeth day. Will be he be able to beat the odds?

  Al Jihad…

  Charles Dean is retired from the military, determined to be done with that part of his life. But when Julie Girard, the daughter of his old commander, seeks him out, he can’t say no to a simple lunch. What she has in mind isn’t quite so simple. She wants Dean to help her kill the terrorists who murdered her parents. She offers him three million dollars and the chance to avenge his commander’s death. But all is not as it seems, and before long Dean and Girard must use all their skills just to stay alive… This novella collection gathers these three evocative tales from New York Times bestselling author Stephen Coonts into one cohesive volume. Here is Coonts doing what he does best ― writing about men and women at war.

  Stephen Coonts

  The Sea Witch

  PREFACE

  Airplanes have fascinated me since my first airplane ride at the age of six.

  The Sea Witch resulted from daydreaming about the PBY Catalina, the most numerous allied seaplane of World War II and the one that made the largest contribution to the allied war effort. Manufactured by Consolidated Aircraft, the Catalina first flew in 1935 and was obsolete by 1941. Still, it was relatively cheap and in production when the war arrived; over four thousand of them were built before production ceased in 1945.

  The Catalina had two engines mounted in nacelles on the wing, a fully cantilevered design that was mounted on a pedestal to get the props well above swells and sea spray. The design was continuously updated with more powerful engines, acrylic glass blisters for the waist guns, improved armor and electrical systems, and self-sealing fuel tanks. The first versions were true flying boats, but later in the war retractable wheels were added to some versions so they could land and take off ashore or on water, increasing the plane’s utility at the expense of its weight-carrying capacity and range.

  Amphibious Catalinas flew into the 1980s as water-bombers and island transports. Even today a few are still flying as toys for the wealthy. Margarita-man Jimmy Buffett owned one for years, as did oceanographer Jacques Cousteau.

  Although painfully slow, cruising at about 100 to 110 knots, loud, unheated, unpressurized, and uncomfortable, the flying-boat versions of the Catalina could carry fuel for over twenty hours of flight, giving them extraordinary range. They were used in every imaginable role, including ocean reconnaissance, air-sea rescue, mine-laying, and antisubmarine warfare. A few squadrons in the western Pacific painted their Catalinas flat black and attacked Japanese warships and freighters at night. Between August 1943 and January 1944, Black Cat squadrons sank 112,700 tons of Japanese shipping, damaged another 47,000 tons, and damaged ten warships.

  You will find Catalinas at several aviation museums, including the San Diego Air and Space Museum, the Lone Star Flight Museum in Galveston, Texas, and the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. The best display, however, is probably at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida. A complete restored Cat hangs from the ceiling. Displayed on the floor under it is a cutaway version of the hull, complete with manikin pilots and crewmen, machine guns, a bomb sight, a drift-indicating instrument, radios, bunks, and a coffeepot. You can put your nose right up to the glass and really look.

  That display will fire your imagination. You are somewhere over the great ocean on a deep Pacific night, you and your mates have found an enemy ship, and you are going to attack!

  The Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey, perhaps the most revolutionary aircraft to enter military service since the first helicopter, is the airplane featured in the novella Al-Jihad. A transport that can land and take off vertically, the plane was number one on the U.S. Marines’ wish list for a generation, which was how long it took to design, manufacture, test, tinker, and get it into service. The engineering and aerodynamic problems were immense, and, many thought, insolvable. One of the largest was the necessity of keeping the machine aloft if one engine failed: The solution was an automatic transmission that allowed one engine to turn both rotors. The first flight of the Osprey took place in 1989, yet it didn’t become operational until 2007, eighteen years later. The machine takes full advantage of the latest computer technology to help it remain aloft and controllable.

  With two turboprop engines mounted on the ends of the wings, the Osprey has a unique look. One must be both a fixed-wing and helicopter pilot to fly it. I had the good fortune to fly the simulator in the late 1990s, an experience that eventually led to Al-Jihad. I also used the V-22 in the novel Cuba, published in 1999.

  The 17th Day was a short story that came from my fascination with World War I aviation. I have always wanted to write a novel about WWI aviators, but it hasn’t happened yet.

  The planes of the Great War were little more than flying shipping crates. Made of wood, fabric, piano wire, and engines that weren’t ready for prime time, they flew without armor, self-sealing fuel tanks, or, except late in the war, oxygen for the pilots. The fabric was treated with a chemical called dope to tighten it up, and the stuff burned easily. In fact, the whole plane was a flying match-head, especially when the fuel tank was spewing gasoline from bullet holes onto the hot parts of the engine. Amazingly, the pilots and gunner/observers flew without parachutes.

  The planes were also difficult to fly. These machines did not fly like the Cessnas and Pipers of our day. The margin between their stall speed and maximum airspeed was often painfully thin, which led to a great many stall/spin accidents, inevitably fatal. None of these WWI machines had brakes, merely a steerable tail skid. They had no altitude instruments, no electrical system, and only a rudimentary compass.

  Aeronautical engineering was still an occult art when these planes were designed, mostly by eye. If it looked about right, they gave it to a test pilot to see if he could get it off the ground. Even the designs that made it into service had a depressing habit of shedding wings in dives or turns and having fabric peel off.

  Early scouts flew with rotary engines, which had good power-to-weight ratios. The spinning engine — yes, the whole engine revolved around a fixed crankshaft — acted like a giant flywheel, imparting a tremendous torque to the airframe, which had to be overcome by design features and pilot input on the controls. These airplanes turned well in one direction, with the torque assisting, and poorly in the other.

  The rotary engine had many technical limitations, however, not the least of which was a very real limit to how big such an engine could be when mounted and flown on the airframes of the day. More complex water-cooled in-line engines replaced the rotaries. Needless to say, the science of designing reliable internal combustion engines was also in its infancy, so the
se motors had a deplorable tendency to quit in flight.

  The Royal Aircraft Factory S.E.5A (for Scout Experimental Model 5A), which is featured in The 17th Day, was powered by a French-built 200-HP Hispano-Suiza V-8 engine, one manufactured under wartime conditions with poor metallurgy. Still, the airframe was soundly designed, stable, and the machine made a good gun platform. Although it wasn’t as maneuverable as other designs, the S.E.5A was fast, capable of about 138 mph in level flight. It carried one synchronized belt-fed .303-caliber machine gun that fired through the prop arc and a Lewis gun with a fifty-round ammo tray on a Foster mount placed above the wing so it could fire over the prop arc.

  Today the best place to see World War I aircraft — originals and modern copies — in flight is the Old Rhine-beck Aerodrome in Rhinebeck, New York. The facility also has the best static collection I have ever seen of these airplanes and the biplanes of the 1920s. For that we have the late Cole Palen to thank.

  Airplanes, adventures, life and death in the skies …

  Come on, strap in and we’ll go flying.

  Stephen Coonts

  The Sea Witch

  ONE

  “I’m looking,” the skipper said, flipping through my logbook, “but I can’t find any seaplane time.” The skipper was Commander Martin Jones. His face was greasy from perspiration and he looked exhausted.

  “I’ve had four or five rides in a PBY,” I told him, “but always as a passenger.” In fact, a PBY had just brought me here from Guadalcanal. It departed after delivering me, some mail, and a couple of tons of spare parts.

  The Old Man gave me The Look.

  “You’re a dive-bomber pilot. What in hell are you doing in a Black Cat squadron?”

  “It’s a long story.” Boy, was that ever the truth!

  “I haven’t got time for a long story,” Jones said as he tossed the logbook on the wardroom table and reached for my service record. “Gimme the punch line.” Aboard this small seaplane tender, the wardroom doubled as the ship’s office.

  “They said I was crazy.”

  That comment hung in the air like a wet fart. I leaned against the edge of the table to steady myself.

  Hanging on her anchor, the tender was rolling a bit in the swell coming up the river from Namoia Bay, on the southwestern tip of New Guinea where the Owen Stanley Mountains ran into the sea. The only human habitation within two hundred miles was a village, Samarai, across the bay on an island. The sailors on the tender never went over there, nor was there any reason they should. If Namoia Bay wasn’t the end of the earth, believe me, you could see it from here.

  The commander flipped through my service record, scanning the entries. “Are you crazy?”

  “No more than most,” I replied. Proclaiming your sanity was a bit like proclaiming your virtue — highly suspect.

  “This tender can support three PBYs,” Commander Jones said, not looking at me. “We launch them late in the afternoon, and they hunt Jap ships at night, return sometime after dawn. Three days ago one of our birds didn’t come back.” He looked up, straight into my eyes. “The crew is somewhere out there,” he swept his hand from left to right, “dead or alive. We’ll look for them, of course, but the South Pacific is a big place, and there is a war on.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Until we get another plane from Australia, we’ll only have two birds to carry the load.”

  I nodded.

  “One of our copilots is sick with malaria, too bad to fly. You will fly in his place unless you’ve really flipped out or something.”

  “I’m fine, sir.”

  “Why did they get rid of you?”

  “The Japs shot three SBDs out from under me, killed two of my gunners. The skipper said he couldn’t afford me. So here I am.”

  The Old Man lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out through his nose.

  “Tell me about it.”

  So I told it. We launched off the carrier one morning on a routine search mission and found a Jap destroyer in the slot, running north at flank speed. When the lookouts spotted us the destroyer captain cranked the helm full over, threw that can into as tight a circle as it would turn while every gun let loose at us. There were four of us in SBDs; I was flying as number three. As I rolled into my dive I put out the dive brakes, as usual, and dropped the landing gear.

  With the dive brakes out the Dauntless goes down in an eighty-degree dive at about 250 knots. Takes a couple thousand feet to pull out. With the dive brakes and gear out, prop in flat pitch, she goes down at 150, vibrating like a banjo string. Still, you have all day to dope the wind and sweeten your aim, and you can pickle the bomb at a thousand feet, put the damn thing right down the smokestack before you have to pull out. Of course, while you are coming down like the angel of doom the Japs are blazing away with everything they have, and when you pull out of the dive you have no speed, so you are something of a sitting duck. You also run the risk of overcooling the engine, which is liable to stall when you pour the coal to it. Still, when you really want a hit …

  I got that destroyer — the other three guys in my flight missed. I put my thousand-pounder right between the smokestacks and blew that can clean in half. It was a hell of a fine sight. Only the Japs had holed my engine, and it quit on the pullout, stopped dead. Oil was blowing all over the windshield, and I couldn’t see anything dead ahead. Didn’t matter — all that was out there was ocean.

  My gunner and I rode the plane into the water. He hit his head or something and didn’t get out of the plane, which sank before I could get him unstrapped.

  I floated in the water, watched the front half of the destroyer quickly sink and the ass end burn. None of the Japs came after me. I rode my little life raft for a couple days before a PBY landed in the open sea and dragged me in through a waist-gun blister. With all the swells I didn’t think he could get airborne again, but he did, somehow.

  A couple days later the ship sent a half dozen planes to Henderson Field to operate from there. I figured Henderson could not be tougher to land on than a carrier and was reasonably dry land, so I volunteered. About a week later I tangled with some Zeros at fifteen thousand feet during a raid. I got one and others got me. Killed my new gunner, too. I bailed out and landed in the water right off the beach.

  Jones was reading a note in my record while I talked. “Your commanding officer said you shot down a Zero on your first pass,” Jones commented, “then disobeyed standing orders and turned to reengage. Four Zeros shot your Dauntless to pieces.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He says you like combat, like it a lot.”

  I didn’t say anything to that.

  “He said you love it.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Bullshit, sir.”

  “Sir.”

  “He says he pulled you out of SBDs to save your sorry ass.”

  “I read it, sir.”

  “So tell me the rest of it.”

  I took a deep breath, then began. “Six days ago another Zero shot me down after I dive-bombed a little freighter near Bougainville. I got the Maru all right, but as I pulled out and sucked up the gear a Zero swarmed all over me and shot the hell out of the plane, punched a bunch of holes in the gas tanks. There wasn’t much I could do about it at 150 knots. My gunner got him, finally, but about fifty miles from Henderson Field we used the last of our gas. I put it in the water and we floated for a day and a half before a PT boat found us.”

  “Leaking fuel like that, were you worried about catching fire?” Commander Jones asked, watching me to see how I answered that.

  “Yes, sir. We were match-head close.”

  He dropped his eyes. “Go on,” he said.

  “Kenny Ross, the skipper, was pissed. Said if I couldn’t dive-bomb like everyone else and get hits, he didn’t want me.

  “I told him everyone else was missing — I was getting the hits, and I’d do whatever it took to keep getting them, which I guess wasn’t exactly the answer he wanted to hear. He c
anned me.”

  The Black Cat squadron commander stubbed out his cigarette and lit another.

  He rubbed his eyes, sucked a bit on the weed, then said, “I don’t have anyone else, so you’re our new copilot. You’ll fly with Lieutenant Modahl. He’s probably working on his plane. He wanted to go out this morning and look for our missing crew, but I wouldn’t let him go without a copilot.” The skipper glanced at his watch. “Go find him and send him in to see me.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Around here everybody does it my way,” he added pointedly, staring into my face. “If I don’t like the cut of your jib, bucko, you’ll be the permanent night anchor-watch officer aboard this tender until the war is over or you die of old age, whichever happens first. Got that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Welcome aboard.”

  * * *

  The tender was about the size of a Panamanian banana boat, which it might have been at one time. It certainly wasn’t new, and it wasn’t a Navy design. It had a big crane amidships for hoisting planes from the water. That day they were using the crane to lower bombs onto a float.

  A plane was moored alongside, covered with a swarm of men. They had portable work stands in place around each engine and tarps rigged underneath to keep tools and parts from falling in the water.

  Five-hundred-pound bombs were being loaded on racks under the big Catalina’s wings. Standing there watching, I was amazed at the size of the bird — darn near as big as the tender, it seemed. The wingspan, I knew, was 104 feet, longer than a B-17.

  The plane was painted black; not a glossy, shiny, ra-ven’s-feather black, but a dull, flat, light-absorbing black. I had never seen anything uglier. On the nose was a white outline of a witch riding a broomstick, and under the art, the name Sea Witch.

  The air reeked, a mixture of the aromas of the rotting vegetation and dead fish that were floating amid the roots of the mangrove trees growing almost on the water’s edge. The freshwater coming down the river kept the mangroves going, apparently, although the fish had been unable to withstand the avgas, oil, and grease that were regularly spilled in the water.