Night Moves (Doc Ford) - By RandyWayne White Page 0,113
location?”
Our expressions confirmed the truth, so the digitized voice continued, “Board of inquiry right, then. Sent me South Pacific not as pilot, kept wings but reassigned. Thought Japs would kill me on Saipan, second marines ground unit, wish they had. Never told my son or family, not Candice. Ashamed.” The old aviator shut his eyes, no way to joke about the tears now.
Dan said softly, “You won the Bronze Star, a Purple Heart. You’re a hero, sir. My god, a fighter pilot on the ground!”
“Killed my buddies. Lost my ship.” His eyes frantic, Sampedro looked at a photo of the tail section, 113, then typed, “Not worst of it. Classified. All cause that damn storm.”
A training exercise that had gone wrong, is what he meant, then let the keyboard explain in phrases that had the ring of confession:
Two Avengers, training for a special mission, had left Lauderdale an hour after sunset, each carrying only two men, not three. Sampedro flying FT-54, his radioman and gunner, nicknamed Dakota, sitting aft beneath a glass bubble, no contact between the two but for the intercom. Flying wing to wing with Torpedo Bomber 113, they had crossed the Everglades, bound for a target they had mock-bombed almost nightly, three weeks straight. Details were etched by rote into the old man’s mind: 98 nautical miles from Lauderdale, course 263 degrees.
The voice synthesizer explained to us, “Off Key Marco, feds had anchored three, four barges size of a battleship. No lights, shit, you imagine? Coachie Oxendine, me, Dakota, his radioman, Harley—like the motorcycle. All my friends special picked. Private quarters like kings, best chow. Fly nights, sleep days. Damn best at what we did, that’s why, and scheduled to fly Pearl late June. Then Guam in July. Special mission, didn’t know what. Feds in charge, all hush-hush.”
The digital voice paused, which gave Diemer the opportunity to tell us, “Mid-July, Guam. The Americans—you—were assembling the bomb.”
There are many ways to say that word, but the atomic bomb has earned a unique inflection.
“It was delivered in pieces,” the Brazilian continued, “most of it by one ship. A heavy cruiser, not a battleship. She carried your entire supply of enriched uranium. Lieutenant, I have to ask: were you training to escort that ship?”
“Classified!” Sampedro hissed, his real voice less tolerant than the synthesizer. The man looked at Tomlinson, which seemed to relax him, then switched the subject to the storm that had caught the Avengers from the southeast and ended it all. The two planes had lost visual contact. Storm thermals made it impossible for Sampedro to maintain heading or altitude. He had climbed to eight thousand feet, as required by procedure, and attempted to alert Lauderdale and Key West—no response.
Despite the digitized monotone, what came next was chilling.
“Lightning bolt hit our wing. Saint Elmo’s fire in the cockpit—blue like Hell, a nightmare. Didn’t know if we were over Everglades or Gulf. Told Dakota, ‘I’m taking us down to check.’ Second later, my windshield is full of Coachie’s ship. Going too slow, that’s what I remember, why the fuck he goin’ so slow? White strobes blinding me . . . can still see tail fins coming at my head—those damn big numbers!”
Torpedo Bomber 113. The tail section we’d found buried in the earth like a hatchet, the wreckage we had used sponges to clean one slow layer after another, appeared to brighten on the computer screen and caused the old man to cover his eyes.
The planes had collided. Chaos followed . . .
Ten minutes wasn’t enough time to finish the story. The nurse knocked and entered, Sampedro’s bedtime meds in an IV bag. When he refused, Candice returned with the nurse to plead with her grandfather, the nurse telling us, “Mr. Sampedro needs his sleep! Days here move right along. We keep our guests busy!”
The aviator zapped the woman with a sour look that only Candice noticed, so she kissed her grandfather’s cheek, saying, “Don’t tire yourself, paw-paw. For me?” then left us alone.
In his own raspy voice, Sampedro waited until the nurse was gone to comment, “Bullshit, days don’t move when you’re dying. Only the nights. That’s when I’m alive . . . memories . . . she doesn’t understand.”
Then he returned to the keyboard, still unsure, seventy years later, what had happened after his Avenger had knocked the tail off his wingman’s plane.
Sampedro remembered a night spent alone, adrift in the Gulf of Mexico, his Mae West inflated. He remembered telling his rescuers he had seen a