Table of Contents

  PRELUDE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  THANK-YOU

  AMERIKA #1

  PRELUDE

  This is a work of alternate history.

  And while some persons, organizations, places, events, and incidents may have existed in the real world, they’re purely fictional in the author’s imaginary world where anything can happen – and does.

  COPYRIGHT

  Book cover design: Aaron Ijams

  Copyright 2016 Paul Lally

  All rights reserved

  ISBN-13:978-1540789532

  ISBN-10: 1540789535

  DEDICATION

  For Michael Duvall

  Honorable man, steadfast supporter, wonderful friend.

  1

  Better to fight for something than live for nothing.

  - General George S. Patton Jr.

  A lot can happen in six months. Especially when you’re at war. Six short months ago, tens of thousands of pristine, white, utterly harmless refrigerators and shiny new automobiles were rolling down assembly lines, bound for nervous Americans living in a neutral nation, unable to fight back.

  Remember that feeling? Sure you do.

  Six months before that, on December 8 th 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, the Nazis wiped out Washington D.C. and New York City with nuclear-tipped A-9/10 intercontinental missiles.

  In one fell swoop, Adolf Hitler vaporized the entire standing Federal government, not to mention the best and brightest on Wall Street, along with the rest of Manhattan. Then he screamed that Chicago, Detroit, Miami, Boston, and Baltimore were next unless we agreed to his demand to declare our neutrality and stay the hell out of the war raging across the world.

  For those of you too young to remember and those who’d rather forget, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins was the last man standing – in this case, a woman – the sole surviving member of FDR’s cabinet after the nuclear blast. Therefore, pursuant to the Constitutional line of succession, she became President Perkins, and wisely chose to spare millions of innocent American lives by authorizing the Neutrality Act of 1942.

  That’s right, the good old USA cried “Uncle.”

  What choice did we have?

  Lucky for us, it took a Nazi scientist who knew the truth and was willing to squeal on the Third Reich to set us straight and change all that.

  It also took a beautiful Hollywood movie star named Ava James and General George S. Patton to shanghai my partner Orlando Diaz and me to take part in a crazy-ass mission to kidnap Herr Professor from under the Gestapo’s nose and bring him back to America.

  We pulled it off, and boy, did he ever squeal.

  Turns out Adolf and his Nazi werewolves were fresh out of nukes and toothless as hags. What’s more, they hadn’t used rockets to deliver the weapons, just ordinary seaplanes launched from sea that had snuck beneath our air defenses masquerading as Pan Am airliners. As for their nuclear stockpiles, the scientist and his friends chose conscience over consequence and contaminated the ones they had left.

  Which is why Hitler had his hungry eyes on our nuclear program. In particular the stocks of fissile plutonium in Hanford, Washington, and he planned on grabbing it to make more bombs.

  What started out as a well-planned mission to keep that from happening became – thanks to a traitor in our midst – a desperate flight in my beloved Boeing 314 Dixie Clipper that took her life, but in doing so gave America – and me – another chance to go after the people whose atomic bombs had killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, including my wife Estelle and our baby son Eddie.

  Six months ago, President Perkins told Adolf and Hirohito to go screw themselves and get ready to fight. From then on, M-4 tanks, Jeeps, and airplanes started rolling faster and faster down re-tooled assembly lines, like the one I was standing on in the North American Aircraft factory in Glendale, California, looking down upon our answer to Germany and Japan. I lost count of how many beautiful B-25 Mitchell twin-engine bombers stretched back into infinity like a hall of mirrors, and that made me smile.

  I turned to my longtime friend and business partner Orlando Diaz, now a major in the United States Army Air Corps, who stood beside me on the catwalk contemplating the scene with Buddha-like calm.

  “What do you think?”

  A long pause. (Orlando’s like that.) “Our answer to Adolf, you mean?”

  “Exactly.”

  His “preacher voice” rose majestically above the clatter of riveting and pounding. “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.”

  “Ours too.”

  We watched in silence for a while before he tapped me on the shoulder. “You ready to head out?”

  I took one last look at those beautiful planes not yet painted for war, still missing guns and bombs and the willing young men to fight for the freedom to live their lives in peace.

  “Let’s do this thing.”

  Because the weather’s so damned perfect in California, North American workers performed the B-25’s engine run-ups, final systems checks, added armament – you name it – outdoors in bright sunshine and balmy weather. A far cry from where these olive-drab painted, Soviet red star-emblazoned airplanes were bound.

  In a series of hops, skips and jumps, the Women Air Force Service Pilots (WASPS) would ferry them up through Alaska, then across the Bering Strait to the U.S.S.R., where our Soviet allies were busy fighting a two-front war, holding off the Nazis east of the Ural Mountains, and the Japanese south in bloody Manchukuo, the puppet state in northeast China once known as Manchuria.

  Until the Soviet aircraft manufacturers like Tupolev, Illushin and Lavochkin could crank out more of their own fighters and bombers to fight the fight, America was more than happy to lend-lease them B-25s, C-47s, P-39s and whatever else we could roll off our ever-growing assembly lines.

  Talk about a two-fisted war.

  Make that four.

  President Perkins and Soviet Premier Stalin had been fighting back-to-back, covering each other’s flanks. That is, until four months ago an assassin’s bullet took the Soviet leader’s life. Let the Russian and American history books sing Stalin’s praises all they want. I for one, was damned glad that mass-murderer was six-feet under, and Premier Molotov was running Moscow’s show. At least he knew the value of a human life. Not much, granted, but at least something , as opposed to “Uncle Joe’s” genocidal ideas – even worse than Hitler’s – that had cost the lives of millions of Russian peasants by starvation, and thousands of military and naval officers by firing squads.

  Despite being hidden by a nondescript flight suit, I recognized Ava James’s legs the moment they poked out of the Soviet B-25’s crew hatch directly behind its nose gear. True, the suit disguised her Hollywood-starlet curves, but after spending time with her off the clock, I knew a good thing when I saw it, because I had.

  “This is the last of them, colonel,” she said. “Your signature, here, here and here. Need a pen?”

  “Got one, thanks.”

  “Figures.”

  Like Orlando, I, too, was now an Army Air Corps officer, thanks to a President Perkins’s direct commission after the Hanford raid. But unfortunately, so far, I’d been pushing an ink pen instead of a stick and rudder to do my part for the war effort.

  Don’t get me wrong, I was honored to serve my country in uniform, and being a full-bird colonel was a far cry from being a Pan American Airways flying boat captain, which is what I’d been in my past life, and then later the co-owner of a small charter airline in Key West with Orlando before the bombs went off that started our new lives in a world at war.

  “Don’t forget here, too,” Ava said.

  “Jesus.”

  “Russkies like lots of signatures.”

  “Give me a rifle any time.”

  I scribbled my name for what seemed the thousandth time as the “designated officer” responsible for overseeing the ferrying of “military aircraft, all types and models” to the Soviet Union.

  After I got my commission I had expected General Patton – the mastermind behind Hanford – to ship me off to work with Boeing’s B-17 Flying Fortress program. After all, thanks to Pan Am, my logbook had thousands of multi-engine hours from flying around the world. You name it, I’d been there: Buenos Aires, Singapore, Manila, New York, Lisbon. Instead, here I was, stuck on the west coast, California most of the time, bouncing from factory to factory, making sure the pipeline to the Kremlin stayed clear of gremlins. Not exactly what I’d hoped for.

  “Almost forgot.” Ava handed me an envelope.

  “What’s this?”

  “Search me.”

  “Who from?”

  A smile touched her serious face. “Uncle George.”

  General George S. Patton was Ava’s daddy. Only he didn’t know it, and she wasn’t about to tell him this late in the game. The extraordinary hero whose face belongs on Mount Rushmore considering how he saved our country’s ass was, as a young captain in the late 1920s, responsible for bringing Baby Ava into this world.

  Whatever Bible-thumping morality he claimed to have, surrendered without a fight to the seductive charms of Ava’s f

eisty, widowed mother who wanted a child but not a husband as part of their one-night stand. The Alamo fell, she got what she wanted, and that’s fine by me because I did too.

  I tore open the envelope:

  Colonel Samuel C. Carter, USAAF

  Aircraft Procurement and Distribution

  Western Defense Command

  San Francisco, California

  You are hereby ordered to proceed without delay to Elmendorf Field, Anchorage Alaska, and upon arrival report to Colonel M.R. Duvall USAAF, Commanding.

  Major Albert M. Archambeault

  For/General George S. Patton

  Ava pointed to the plane. “Let’s move it, darling. Uncle Georgie doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  “He’s not at the Presidio?”

  “A little Eskimo told me.”

  “Why Anchorage?”

  She pecked me on the cheek. “You’re cute when you’re confused. Know that?”

  “Hang on, I need to pack my stuff.”

  “Done and done. Your B-bag’s on the plane. Toothbrush, razor, change of shirts, underwear, and…” She leaned closer and whispered, “I was wondering what happened to that slip of mine.”

  Before I could answer, another WASP ferry pilot poked her head out of the B-25’s cockpit, cracked her gum with casual authority and said, “Pre-flight’s done, kiddo. Finish up with his majesty there and let’s get this Russkie bucket of bolts moving. There’s a war on, you know.”

  “You’re the best, Donna.”

  “Don’t I know it.” She ducked back inside and slid the pilot’s window closed.

  “Donna Lewis,” Ava said. “Best damned co-pilot in the world.”

  “You two are straight out of a war movie, know that?”

  She sighed. “Funny you should mention that. Warner Brothers has been hounding me about a script they want me for.”

  “Hollywood’s what – ten miles or so from here?”

  “About eight as the crow flies, but we’re heading due north where the snow flies. Get it? Snow?”

  Before I could groan, Orlando joined us. His grease-stained coveralls a badge of honor for his profession as one of the finest Airframe and Power Plant mechanics I’ve ever known. As young men, back in the early 1930s, we’d cut our teeth on Pan Am’s Sikorsky S-14s; me as a flight officer and Orlando as a mechanic. We fit each other like a greasy glove.

  Orlando rubbed the fuselage like he would a lover’s cheek. “She the last one?”

  Ava said, “Locked and loaded.”

  He squatted down and looked along the bottom of the fuselage. “Ivan’s going to be happy not having that piece-of-shit belly turret to worry about.”

  The notoriously hard-to-operate Bendix L-type ventral turret had not been installed in the last twenty bombers off the assembly line. Prism-directed, awkward to use, loathed by Army aircrews, North American workers had covered the opening with sheet metal and that was that.

  True, it made the bomber vulnerable to attacks from below, but knowing the masterful low-altitude flying skills of Soviet combat pilots – both men and women – they’d be hugging this Mitchell so close to the ground that an enemy fighter couldn’t squeeze a word in sideways, let alone a bullet.

  At least that’s the cover story I was selling to anybody else who got curious.

  In the turret’s place was a rubber-lined, self-sealing sixty-gallon fuel tank plus another collapsible rubber fuel tank in the crawl space above the bomb bay that bumped up the bomber’s capacity to over 1400 gallons.

  “What’s with the extra fuel tanks?” Ava said. “We never needed this much for an ALSIB ferry job.”

  I said, “Maybe Premier Molotov’s shooting for the moon.”

  “Very funny.”

  The reason for the extra fuel tanks was another part of the cover story, so I lied instead about how these particular Mitchells and twenty others – in both USAAF and Soviet markings– were classified as B-25B-CP’s (Coastal Patrol) variants. Sounded good to me and folks bought it hook, line, and sinker.

  Not Ava.

  She arched her eyebrows and she gave me the “look” she gave Clark Gable in Night Train . “Something you two boys would like get off your chests?”

  “Need to know,” I finally managed to say. “Sorry.”

  Orlando took my eyebrow cue and said casually, “How many planes you ferried this month?”

  Ava stewed for a bit at the brush-off, but she was a big girl and we were in a big war. “You mean me personally or the ladies?”

  “Both.”

  While Ava did the mental math, I pictured thousands of warplanes and transports flying along the Northwest Staging Route, the “air bridges” America and the Soviet Union built on the west coast and in the Midwest. Most folks called it the ALSIB, short for Alaska-Siberia.

  For months now, Ava and her fellow WASP pilots had been guiding fleets of Soviet Union-bound Aircobra’s Thunderbolts, Lightnings, Havocs , and Mitchells across the U.S. and Canada to converge first in Fairbanks, Alaska and then leap across the Bering Strait into Siberia, where Soviet pilots took over and flew them off to beat back the Nazi troops in the east swarming at them like fire ants.

  The B-25-CP variant was the cover story General Patton told me to tell the curious. What he neglected to tell me was what the hell the real purpose was. “Need to know” works both ways.

  Then again, compartmentalized information is the high-tensile, unbreakable thread that stitches diverse, unrelated components of the military machine into a workable whole, with single parts of that machine not knowing what the hell the other parts are doing, if it doesn’t directly affect them.

  In my case, I knew damn well these highly-modified bombers were no more coastal patrol models than I was Santa Claus. But that’s all I knew. The rest remained hidden beyond the military veil. I mean, why was Patton up in way-the-hell-and-gone Anchorage? His office was at the Army’s Presidio in San Francisco.

  Something was up. Had to be. And he wanted me there.

  Ava arrived at her mental answer, yawned and patted the fuselage. “This makes my fortieth Mitchell. But these are the first birds we’re taking to Anchorage instead of Fairbanks – ones with extra fuel tanks, no belly turrets or rear machine guns, and two guys with zipper-lips about what they’re really for.”

  To get this beautiful bloodhound off my track, I unzipped mine long enough to say, “Ferried any P-38s lately?”

  These twin-engine fighters had saved our lives after the Hanford raid. A handful to fly. Elegant too. But not for the faint of heart. I expected her to say “no.”

  “Ten so far,” she said. “They’re sweet, once you know they can kill you in a power dive if you don’t watch it.”

  “You mean the buffeting?”

  “Big time. Kelly Johnson and his boys over at Lockheed say it’s something called… I forget the word.”

  “Compressibility, but they’re working on a fix.” I said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s my job to know.”

  I felt smug and on top of things. I’d better be. My “war job,” if you could call it when I wasn’t doing General Patton’s secret bidding, was riding herd on American aircraft companies, like Lockheed, North American, Douglas, Chance Vought, and others, all of them smiling like mad at green lights and unlimited greenbacks from Congress to take the fight to Germany and Japan, and don’t spare the horses – or horsepower in the P-38’s case. Three thousand two-hundred of them in the twin-boom fighter.

  The coughing blast of Twin Wasp radial engines sounded from the nearby Mitchell. For a second, Ava and I exchanged a mutual look of pleasure. Watching and listening to an airplane come alive to do the job it was designed for, well… let’s just say it made me happy. Ava too. Always did, always will.

  “Ready to fly, Colonel Carter?”

  “Say the word.”

  Orlando said, “Hang on a second, where you headed, sir? We’ve got a four o’clock with Pratt and Whitney design.”

  I handed him my new orders. After reading them he frowned and started to speak but Ava beat him to it.

  “Hold that thought, major.” She pulled out another envelope. “Three guesses what’s inside, first two don’t count.”

 

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