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Flight 19 to Magdeburg

Written by Jose J. Clavell

Prologue

Living Room

Captain and Frau McIntosh’s quarters

Formerly 1SGT and Mrs. Hudson's residence

Grantville, SoTF, USE

Spring 1635, 0955 hours local

Britt Strausswirt was bored. A day after being released from the Leahy Medical Center, she rested her badly sprained left ankle on the ottoman that her host’s wife, Gertrude McIntosh, had thoughtfully provided before departing for the market. Her husband, Captain Peter McIntosh, had gone to work and Britt was glad. The executive officer for the Horse Marines was needed at his job on the headquarters of the second battalion at the old Hudson farm and not babysitting a lame gyrene. Their three children were at their schools, leaving her alone, bored and lonely for the first time since her release from the hospital.

Of course, Britt had tried to keep busy. So far this day she had written to her parents, sisters, brothers, and each of her friends in the nunnery, but without any mention of her mishap. Partly that was because Britt knew that they were already worried enough about her choice of careers, but mostly it was because she was still trying to come to terms with the accident herself. Anything worse and it would have put a serious bind on my plans to die quietly in bed from old age, she thought, darkly amused.

There was nothing to see on television, although she still found the uptime technology almost magical. However, being city-born and bred, she could not get interested in the farming news and tips programs that comprised the morning fare of the school TV station, although the one about hunting boars had been disgustingly fascinating. It was still too early in the day for movies. Those were shown later at night when families gathered after the day’s work. She thought about doing some reading, but by this time, she had practically memorized her manuals, could quote Marine history as well as Corporal Wilson, and had perused the local paper cover to cover. Her eyes roamed the living room, looking for new material, and fixed onto a small magazine hiding under today's paper. The garish cover caught her attention, so she picked it up. The title, Astounding Time Travel Tales, made her smile. Robert, the McIntosh's oldest son, had, like many down-timers, fallen in love with the up-time genre of science fiction.

A quick examination showed that the stories were not the usual reprints of up-timer stories. Apparently, some of her contemporaries had decided to start writing their own. Britt smiled and shook her head at the notion, and started reading the first one. Its title, "Flight 19 to Magdeburg," and its aviation theme looked promising.

"Ouch!" Britt flinched. One look at the story and she had put her left foot down as she sat up in surprise. The pain that shot up from her ankle managed to take her mind from the homicidal thoughts running through it for a second. It didn't stop her from cussing, though. “Who the hell is this Jose J. Clavell and where I can find him to wring his neck?"

It was a rather rhetorical question in an empty house, but she felt somewhat mollified. After taking some pain medication, she leaned back and continued to read the story while trying not to grind her teeth, at least not much. At its conclusion, Britt couldn't deny that it was well written and that she had actually enjoyed it. She looked at the magazine again. "Oh, what the heck. But if I get my hands on this Clavell fellow, whoever he is. . . . Who's he trying to fool? Admiral 'Smith' and Lieutenant 'Strauss.' Sure."

Flight 19 to Magdeburg

by

Jose J. Clavell

Lawrence Wild Naval Air Facility, US Navy Yard

Magdeburg, Thuringia, USE

Early summer, 1634

1035 hours

John Chandler Smith was not a happy camper this morning. He and his chief of naval operations had been waiting by the side of the hard surfaced runway for the better part of half an hour. Colonel Jesse Wind, the chief of staff of the USE's fledging Air Force, was flying from Grantville to attend the first meeting of the combined chiefs of the armed forces. The meeting, long in the planning, was finally scheduled for early this afternoon.

Smith, as a courtesy to a fellow service chief, had decided to meet him at the airstrip. In truth, he also wanted an opportunity to talk to him in private before the meeting. That was a decision that he started to regret as he looked down at his very expensive and now one-of-a-kind wristwatch, confirming that Wind was already ten minutes late. At least the flash and thunder that had greeted his arrival to the strip was not the prelude to the summer thunderstorm that he had feared—though he still wondered about it since he couldn't see anything that could have caused it.

His aide-de-camp, Marine Second Lieutenant Brigitte Strauss, stood calmly by his side, a good counterpoint for his impatience. After a two-month association, he now knew that her outward calm was one of the intrinsic trademarks of her personality. That, and her bearing, which occasionally made him forget that she was not a product of the US Naval Academy at Annapolis like him, but one of the Marine's ninety-day wonders—albeit one of the better ones. Her calm and assurance also reminded him of his former aides, Eddie Cantrell and Larry Wild, and their endearing awkwardness.

As usual, a brief moment of grief tightened his throat as he thought about the two young men. He wished again that they could stand by his side once more. But, that was impossible. Larry had died at Wismar together with his one-seaman crew and Air Force Captain Hans Richter in what everyone now considered the first engagement in the new navy and air force history. It was an old-fashioned, great pyrrhic victory for both services that still smarted. Eddie barely survived but was now a POW in the Danish capitol. There, he was demonstrating a remarkable ingenuity by turning his situation around and becoming a valuable source of information, even under his captor's noses. A noteworthy feat, considering that he had lost his lower left leg during the battle.

As part of her duties as one of the Marine battalion’s most junior officers, Brigitte served as the Airfield Officer of the Day, in addition to being his aide. Of course, for Brigitte in particular, that was not a problem. She was one of the most organized and capable officers that Smith had ever seen. And truthfully, being the AOD was not as imposing a task as the title might imply. The strip saw an average of one plane a week.

Smith suspected that she wouldn't have minded if there had been a hundred arrivals a day. Brigitte had been bitten hard by the flying bug after watching her first Belle fly overhead last autumn. He suspected that she probably had one or two hours of bootleg flying under her belt. Her interest had become one of the items he wanted to discuss with Wind before the meeting. Smith believed it was high time to start cycling a few selected naval personnel through the available flight training slots. Aviation support could be as important to naval operations as it was to land operations. In fact, he already had in mind his first candidate for training: Brigitte.

That last thought passed through his mind as Strauss received the report of the petty officer in charge of the smoke signals. Smith had ordered them lit after he was informed that Wind had allowed one of his fledging aviators to navigate their flight all the way from Grantville. Hopefully, it would help them find their way. He found it commendable that the air force chief took any and every opportunity available for training, but he had started to wonder how long the colonel planned to let his surely lost-by-now eaglet wander around the countryside. So it was with great relief that he finally heard the sound of an engine in the distance.

Smith watched the growing dot in the sky and looked at his wristwatch again. Only fifteen minutes late this time, he thought. Wind’s kids were improving every day and maybe someday in the far-distant future they would make passable aviators. Something strange in the rumbling of the engine made him look up again. The sound was strange, but achingly familiar. The sound wasn't like the lawnmower-engine buzz of the Belles or the growl of the more powerful Gustav. A memory from childhood hit him like a hammer as he finally recognized it. It was the sound of a radial engine and it was not alone. Stunned, he watched as the lone dot in the sky become four. As the dots grew nearer, they sprouted wings.

“It looks like the air force is planning a show, sir,” a clearly delighted Strauss observed.

Smith looked down at her. Yes, that certainly made a heck of a lot more sense than what he had been thinking. “It looks like it, Lieutenant." He smiled before looking back at the approaching aircraft. “Funny that no planes other than Wind and his wingman were mentioned. In fact, Wind . . . wait a minute.” Smith felt his jaw fall open as he saw the airplanes clearly for the first time. “THOSE ARE NOT OUR PLANES!”

Smith immediately regretted his outburst and just as quickly forgot about it. He stood speechless as his eyes took in a sight seemingly out of a World War II history book. His mind went automatically through the aircraft recognition chart that he memorized as a child so long ago. The mid wing, barrel fuselage with a large Wright radial, powered turret aft of the greenhouse canopy and large star-and-bars national emblem: an Avenger Torpedo Bomber. It was the same type of aircraft that his late Uncle Larry learned to fly in WWII, along with his best friend and wingman, Ensign George H. W. Bush.

The first Avenger turned onto final approach. The rest of the small formation followed closely on its tail as it descended, landing gear, tail hook, and flaps fully deployed, carrier style. They must be running on fumes, Smith thought as he watched them land with minimal intervals between planes.

How in the world is it possible that I have these airplanes landing on my airstrip? He began to put the pieces together in his mind, and suddenly he realized that the solution to one of aviation's greatest mysteries lay before his eyes.

Smith remembered a long-ago late-night conversation with his first-division CPO during his nugget cruise in the Caribbean. They had been leaning on the fantail, laughing and shooting the breeze while watching their destroyer’s wake as they had done so many times before. After he made an idle inquiry about the Bermuda Triangle, Chief Hawkins had grown serious and after a moment's pause started telling him about the first of his many experiences in the area.

The Chief, then an eighteen-year-old Seaman Apprentice, had participated in the search for Flight 19 in late 1945. The five-plane Avenger formation had disappeared during a training bombing mission after reporting failure of their flight instruments and compasses. One of the aircraft participating in the search, a PBM Mariner flying boat, had also disappeared without a trace—another unexplained loss in the long history of disappearances that had made the whole area synonymous with mystery. At the time, Smith thought that Hawkins had been bullshitting him with tall tales but took it with the grace befitting a junior mariner learning at the feet of a master. After all, the Chief’s lessons stood him well during his time in Viet Nam and provided good guidance even after the loss of his lower leg forced him to change the path of his naval career and move onto the corporate ladder.

Anyway, the point was, Hawkins had told him that in their final transmission before disappearing, those ill-fated pilots had reported that they were low on fuel and preparing to ditch at sea. If these were the very same Avenger pilots, that would explain why they were landing in such a hurry. Smith looked on with admiration at their flying skills. Wind would kill to see his fledgling aviators exhibit a fraction of these talents, he thought. As he continued to watch them go about the business of getting their aircraft down fast and in one piece, an idea started to bubble in the back of his mind and a smile creased his lips.

The petty officer got his work detail into action and with hand signals provided directions to the parking apron to the plane now leaving the active runway. Smith was glad that all their practice runs handling plane mock-ups and the occasional Air Force flight now paid dividends as other sailors jumped in to help. The availability of trained ground crews was one of the selling points that he had planned to use on Wind to get him to assign dedicated aircraft to Magdeburg under his control—that and the lengthening of the runway and other facilities.

However, his plans were for the much smaller Belles and Gustavs, not something as large as an Avenger. For a moment, Smith feared that the available parking area was not going to be able to take all the planes. But, as the lead aircraft approached the designated spot, the pilot must have seen the same problem. ...