On Glorious Wings Read online

  ON GLORIOUS

  WINGS

  Forge Books edited by Stephen Coonts

  Combat

  Victory

  On Glorious Wings

  ON GLORIOUS

  WINGS

  THE BEST FLYING STORIES OF THE CENTURY

  EDITED AND INTRODUCED BY

  STEPHEN COONTS

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

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  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this collection are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  ON GLORIOUS WINGS: THE BEST FLYING STORIES OF THE CENTURY

  Copyright © 2003 by Stephen Coonts

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  On glorious wings : the best flying stories of the century / [compiled by] Stephen Coonts.—

  1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN 0-312-87724-2 (acid-free paper)

  1. Aeronautics—Fiction. 2. Air pilots—Fiction. 3. Air pilots, Military—Fiction. 4. Air warfare—Fiction. 5. Air travel—Fiction. 6. Flight—Fiction. 7. Short stories, American. I. Coonts, Stephen, 1946–

  PS648.A365O5 2003

  813'.5080356—dc21

  2003046853

  First Edition: October 2003

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Introduction” copyright © 2003 by Stephen Coonts.

  “Bill’s First Airplane Ride” from Bill Bruce and the Pioneer Aviators by Major Henry H. Arnold. Copyright © 1928 by A. L. Burt Company. Reprinted by permission of the Arnold family, Robert Arnold, Henry H. Arnold III, Francis Lindquist, Gay Arnold Morris, Lyn B. Arnold, and Lee Arnold.

  “Learning to Fly” from Winged Victory by V. M. Yeates. Copyright © 1934 by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Archive & Library, and the executors of the author’s estate, Joy Elinor Vowles and Guy Yeates.

  “All the Dead Pilots” by William Faulkner. Copyright © 1950 by Random House, Inc., from The Collected Stories of William Faulkner by William Faulkner. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

  “The White Feather Ace” from G-8 and His Battle Aces magazine, February 1939. Trademark and copyright © 1939 by Popular Publications, Inc. Copyright © renewed 1967 and assigned to Argosy Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Argosy Communications, Inc.

  “For Want of a Fokker” from The Blue Max by Jack D. Hunter. Copyright © 1964, 1992 by Jack D. Hunter. Reprinted by permission of Key/The Middle Atlantic Press, 1035 Philadelphia Pike, Wilmington, DE 19809.

  “Cleveland Airport, August 1932” from Trophy for Eagles by Walter J. Boyne. Copyright © 1989 by Walter J. Boyne. Reprinted by permission of the author and Crown Publishers, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “Wings over Khabarovsk” from Night Over the Solomons by Louis L’Amour. Copyright © 1986 by Louis L’Amour Enterprises. Reprinted by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “The Raid” from The War Lover by John Hersey. Copyright © 1959 by John Hersey. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “The Milk Run” from Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener. Copyright © 1947 by James A. Michener. Copyright renewed © 1975 by James A. Michener. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster.

  “Chief White Halfoat” from Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Copyright © 1955, 1961 by Joseph Heller. Copyright renewed © 1989 by Joseph Heller. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster and Ted Heller.

  “Hell over Germany” from Bomber by Len Deighton. Copyright © 1970, © 2000 by Pluriform Publishing Company BV. Reprinted by kind permission of Jonathan Clowes Ltd., London, on behalf of Pluriform Publishing Company BV.

  “An Hour to San Francisco” from The High and the Mighty by Ernest K. Gann. Copyright © 1953 by Ernest Gann. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

  “Alone” from The Shepherd by Frederick Forsyth. Copyright © 1976 by Frederick Forsyth. Illustration © 1992 by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “LZ Ambush” from The Delta by Marshall Harrison. Copyright © 1992 by Lyford Books, a division of Presidio Press. Reprinted by permission of the Executrix of the author’s estate, Mary Ann Harrison.

  “Raid on Thud Ridge” from Rolling Thunder by Mark Berent. Copyright © 1989 by Mark Berent. Reprinted by permission of Putnam Berkley, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc.

  “Corey Ford Buys the Farm” from Flight of the Intruder by Stephen Coonts. Copyright © 1986 by Stephen P. Coonts. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Powder River MOA” from Sky Masters by Dale Brown. Copyright © 1991 by Dale Brown. Reprinted by permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc.

  “Retaliation” from The War in 2020 by Ralph Peters. Copyright © 1991 by Ralph Peters. Reprinted by permission of Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster.

  “Zero-G Dogfight” from Storming Intrepid by Payne Harrison. Copyright © 1988 by Payne Harrison. Reprinted by permission of Crown Publishers, a division of Random House, Inc.

  To everyone who ever looked up

  when they heard an airplane

  Contents

  Introduction

  by STEPHEN COONTS

  The Balloon Hoax

  by EDGAR ALLAN POE

  Five Weeks in a Balloon

  by JULES VERNE

  The Horror of the Heights

  by SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  Mary Postgate

  by RUDYARD KIPLING

  Bill’s First Airplane Ride from Bill Bruce and the

  Pioneer Aviators

  by MAJOR HENRY H. ARNOLD

  Learning to Fly from Winged Victory

  by V. M. YEATES

  All the Dead Pilots

  by WILLIAM FAULKNER

  The White Feather Ace from G-8 and

  His Battle Aces

  by ANONYMOUS

  For Want of a Fokker from The Blue Max

  by JACK D. HUNTER

  Cleveland Airport, August 1932

  from Trophy for Eagles

  by WALTER J. BOYNE

  Wings over Khabarovsk

  by LOUIS L’AMOUR

  The Raid from The War Lover

  by JOHN HERSEY

  The Milk Run from Tales of the

  South Pacific

  by JAMES A. MICHENER

  Chief White Halfoat from Catch-22

  by JOSEPH HELLER

  Hell Over Germany from Bomber

  by LEN D
EIGHTON

  An Hour to San Francisco from The High

  and The Mighty

  by ERNEST K. GANN

  Alone from The Shepherd

  by FREDERICK FORSYTH

  LZ Ambush from The Delta

  by MARSHALL HARRISON

  Raid on Thud Ridge from Rolling Thunder

  by MARK BERENT

  Corey Ford Buys the Farm from Flight of

  the Intruder

  by STEPHEN COONTS

  Powder River MOA from Sky Masters

  by DALE BROWN

  Retaliation from The War in 2020

  by RALPH PETERS

  Zero-G Dogfight from Storming Intrepid

  by PAYNE HARRISON

  INTRODUCTION

  If any one tangible item could be the symbol of the twentieth century, that item would be the airplane. No invention in the history of our species has had a greater impact on human life than the contraption born in a Dayton, Ohio, bicycle shop at the dawn of the twentieth century.

  For hundreds of years people could see how flying machines would revolutionize life on earth. Some of the very best brains of the past speculated on how a machine might be made to fly, and some of those ideas were very good. Still, numerous attempts that ended in failure caused early experimenters to be the butt of crude humor. The Wright brothers worked in secret for business reasons, but also because they didn’t want to be laughed at. When they actually achieved powered flight on December 17, 1903, few believed it. The reality of heavier-than-air flight had to be proven over and over again.

  Imagine yourself standing in a Dayton, Ohio, bicycle shop, about 1902, trying to explain Boeing 747s and stealth fighters to two bicycle mechanics busy tinkering with wood and canvas and piano wire on something they call the “Flyer.” Do you think they would believe much of what you said?

  Yet once a person saw a flying machine noisily soaring on canvas wings, swooping and gliding, moving at the will of the pilot through the great open spaces of the sky, his imagination was set free. Oh, to fly, to fly . . . like a bird on the wing . . . to fly free. . . .

  Man had conquered the land and the sea, and now the sky. It was heady stuff. An ancient dream had been fulfilled, and the world was never the same again.

  After a hundred years of flight, many people still feel a twinge of awe when they see an airplane accelerate down a runway or watch it move across the sky under a deck of clouds . . . at least I do.

  Engineers and scientists can talk until they are blue, but to me there is something a bit . . . magical . . . about the whole thing. An airplane is really just a magic carpet with wings, isn’t it? You get on in New York; two meals and a snack later you get off in Europe. And just what did you see in the interim? Some clouds, a movie?

  Even today, after a century of aviation, most people still feel some tiny sense of wonder when they see an airplane. Imagine the delight our grandparents and great-grandparents felt when they saw an airplane in the sky for the very first time.

  Early in the century the airplane came to symbolize danger and adventure. Danger sold well, so the first pilots posed as daredevils to raise money to finance their aviation adventures. Every crash—and there were many—only added to the delicious aura of courage and romance that surrounded those daring few who flew.

  Aviation as an industry could not live with the “dangerous” label. Emphasizing safety, the government stepped in, licensing the machines and regulating the companies that manufactured and flew them and setting standards for and licensing the men and women who sat in the cockpits.

  Flying became glamorous. The airplane was transformed into a magic carpet to whisk people to far-away places and extraordinary adventures. One has only to look at photos of the early years of air travel to see how well that image sold: The passengers are uniformly dressed to the nines, the men in suits and ties, the women in the latest fashions. Flying was the realm of successful, adventurous people living life to the hilt.

  In the 1950s the jet engine was married to the airliner. The number of people who could be quickly and safely carried across oceans expanded exponentially, which led to the most extraordinary exchange of people, technology, culture, thought, and philosophy between continents that the world has ever seen. For good or ill, the exchange stimulated quantum changes in the way people live worldwide, changes that occurred at an ever-accelerating pace: changes in mores and ways of thinking about problems which used to take centuries now happened in decades. The airplane transformed the world from a huge, far-flung place of curious people living different ways of life that they learned from their ancestors into a single, interdependent global village with a single, interdependent economy. And, alas, a single culture, a technology-intense westernized one that many people resent.

  Love it or hate it, the revolution caused by the airplane has just begun. The free flow of people, products, and ideas made possible by the airplane will continue to accelerate the rate of change in the twenty-first century. By the end of the next century, one suspects that nations as we know them will become obsolete, that mankind will live under some type of world government, with a world police force to maintain public order, which we now know to be an essential precondition to ever more sophisticated technology and a growing world economy.

  The warplane produced more complex emotions than barnstormers or airliners. As we look back at early military aviation, we must see it against the background of the nearly universal military experience of the age, which was mass armies of draftees, millions of them, slogging to the slaughter through mud, artillery barrages, machine-gun bursts, and deadly clouds of poison gas. The aviator aloft in the clean, blue sky, betting his life on his skill, honoring the valor of his foe, was almost a throw-back to ages long past. The fliers weren’t called the knights of the sky for nothing. Their courage and honor seemed the only bright spots in an age of universal, total war.

  Unfortunately the image was mostly propaganda. By definition, fighter pilots are assassins. Throughout the century the most successful fighter pilots have been men who slipped up on their unaware opponents, quickly shot them in the back and made their escape before the victims’ friends could successfully retaliate.

  Today, in the age of push-button aerial warfare, not the faintest whiff of chivalry survives. The winner of a battle in the skies is the man, or woman, who electronically detects his opponent first and launches a missile that the opponent cannot avoid. Aerial battles today are usually won by the pilot flying the most technically advanced fighter. Still, the vision of a hero or heroine playing a high-tech game with their life on the line fascinates us.

  Bomber crews—we could write ten volumes about the vast gulf between the romance and the reality of aerial bombardment. Fortunately we don’t have to. Some really great novelists have explored that field for us; excerpts of their work are included in this volume.

  The airplane’s ability to deliver an atomic weapon revolutionized human life: This capability led to the Cold War, which led to political and national alliances that touched the life of every human on the planet. It is not overstating the case to say that the world looks the way it does today because of the airplane.

  At the end of the century we have come full circle. Once again the airplane is a symbol of danger and vulnerability. At the dawn of the twenty-first century the airliner is both a flying bus for the routine carriage of extraordinary numbers of people and stupendous tonnages of cargo . . . and a tempting target for lunatics and terrorists, a flying sardine can packed with innocent people just waiting to be spectacularly murdered. As we learned on September 11, 2001, the airliner can also serve as a kamikaze missile to destroy large buildings, murder thousands, and crack the foundations of western civilization.

  The idea that civilization today is so vulnerable is troubling. That there are so many who wish to destroy it in the name of religion, or to right imagined wrongs, or simply because their piece of the pie isn’t big enough, troubles us profoundly. Once again we long for “the good old d
ays,” for the noon of the British empire when civilized people could travel anywhere on earth, free from murder and mayhem by the great unwashed.

  Since the airplane had such an extraordinary impact in the twentieth century, it was inevitable that stories about flying became an integral part of the literature of that century. Some of the very best writers wrote them. Some of the very best still do.

  I am always irritated by people who tell me that they only read nonfiction. They are missing a great deal. Fiction is art, and as such is far more eloquent than the dry language of the scientist or historian. Only in fiction can the true reality of our humanity, our mortality, be thoroughly explored. Only in fiction can we examine the vast gulf that usually separates perception and reality. Only in fiction can we marvel at the depth and breadth of the chasm between the world as it is and the world as we wish it to be. Only in fiction can the real truth of the human condition be told in words.

  Fiction is, by definition, written to entertain, but the fiction we find most satisfying is usually grounded in universal truths that speak to humans of every time and culture. Many of the stories contained in this book are of this type.

  One of the greatest advantages of fiction, to my mind, is the storyteller’s freedom to tell as much or as little of everyone’s story as he chooses. Only in fiction can we see the world and all its creatures as God sees it. We can hear the doomed aviator’s prayers as the night fighter stalks him, we can see the bombs rushing down, we can huddle fearfully with the people in the trenches awaiting random death. In fiction we can see everyone and everything and we can know the length and breadth and depth of the human reality. And fiction allows us to see the wonder of this great mystery we call flight.