Canidy was two hundred yards behind him. Without thinking of what he was doing, he moved the nose of his P38-F from the Messerschmitt he had been following to the one that had gotten away from Doug. The plane vibrated for a moment from the recoil of eight heavy machine guns, then he aimed at the first plane, this time firing a three-second burst.
He saw his tracer stream move from just in front of the Messerschmitt to the engine cowling, then to the left wing. There was a hint of orange, and then the wing tank exploded.
Canidy pulled up abruptly and looked around for the other fighter. He couldn’t find it for a moment, and then he saw it, smoke pouring from its engine nacelle as it spun toward the cloud cover below. He looked for a parachute but didn’t see one.
And then Douglass was on his wing.
“Two more,” Douglass’s voice came over the air-to-air. “How the hell are we going to explain that?”
“That’ll make seventeen for you, won’t it, Colonel?” Canidy replied.
“Bullshit!” Douglass said, then switched frequencies. “Blue Group Able, this is Blue Group Leader. Form on me in Position A.”
The P-38Fs scattered all over the sky began to turn and to resume their original protective positions over the B-17 stream.
Canidy reached inside his sheepskin jacket, then inside his uniform jacket and came out with a Map, US Army Corps of Engineers: Germany.
It wasn’t an aerial navigation chart, but rather one intended for use by ground troops. It could also be used by a pilot who intended to navigate by flying close enough to the ground and following roads and rivers. Canidy had taken it with him to the final briefing, and copied onto it the course the bomber stream would fly. Once they had joined the bomber stream, over a known location, it was not difficult to plot from that position and time where the head of the bomber stream would be at a given time.
It wasn’t precise, but Canidy had had experience in China navigating with a lot less. He looked at his watch, then scrawled some arithmetic computations on the map. He put a check mark on the map. The way he had it figured, the lead aircraft of the bomber stream was now passing over a relatively unpopulated area of Germany, southeast of Dortmund. He made some more marks on the map, then touched his air-to-air microphone switch.
“Dawn Patrol Two,” he called.
“Go ahead,” Douglass replied a moment later.
“There’s something I want to see,” Canidy said.
“Say again?”
“I say again, I’m going to have a look at something I want to see,” Canidy said. “I’ll be back in about two zero minutes.”
“Dick, are you all right?” Douglass asked, the concern in his voice clear even over the clipped tones of the radio.
“Affirmative,” Canidy said.
“Permission to leave the formation is denied,” Douglass said.
Canidy ignored him. He dropped the nose of the P-38F and headed east. He knew that Douglass could not simply ignore his responsibilities as fighter escort commander; so Douglass would not follow him.
Canidy dropped through the bomber stream, more than a little surprised that at least one gunner didn’t get excited and take a shot at him. In a P-51 or a P-47, that probably would have happened. But the twin-engine, twin tail boom shape of the P-38F was distinctive. There was no German plane that looked even remotely like it.
When he passed through 11,000 feet, he took the oxygen mask from his face and rubbed the marks it had made on his cheeks and nose, and under his chin. He loosened the snaps of the sheepskin jacket. It was cold, but not nearly as bitter cold as it had been at 25,000 feet, nearly five miles up.
He dropped to 2,000 feet and trimmed it up to cruise at 300 miles per hour. If the air were still, that would have moved him across the ground at five miles per minute. The air wasn’t still, of course, but it still helped to have that stored in the back of his mind. He was making, roughly, a mile every twelve seconds.
His chronometer showed that he had left the formation thirteen minutes before when he found what he was looking for. The River Eder had been dammed near Bad Wildungen, making a lake with a distinctive shape. He passed east of it, far enough so that if there was antiaircraft protecting the dam, he would not be in its range.