Black Bear Blues by Stephen Wishnevsky

Author:Stephen Wishnevsky [Wishnevsky, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

My crews were well dug in, the AA crews getting there as fast as they could hump sandbags, and I saw gangs of coolies headed back toward HQ to get more orders, I suppose. Other gangs were unloading field pieces, tanks, and car after car of rocket cluster drums. The cammo squads were not bothering with the trains, they were setting up tarps and flats to hide artillery emplacements from the air. I finally found what those secret furnace things were, they all had fires in them, and silk and paper hot air balloons over the flues, tugging at their hold-downs as the air inside got warmer. I noticed neat coils of rope and wire beside each one, and deduced that these were antiaircraft weapons. Propellers on planes chew through ungodly amounts of air, and if there was a wire in that air, it would just be too bad for the pilots. Good. I didn’t expect them to be too effective, but just like the rocket clusters, every little bit of diversion was a plus. And fuck them on general principles.

Anyway, what the hell, paper and bamboo are cheap enough.

>>>>>>>

They had built me a little sand-bagged observation post on top of our bunker, so I had a ringside seat for all the action. We had a few more hours before the Gothas bombed us. It did not work all that well for them, our pursuits were up high, hanging out in the sun-glare, and they got at least three of those big slow bastards. I wished we had a couple of Gun Ships, that would have given them religion, but we did all right. The dive bombers were right behind them, as if we hadn’t figured that out from all the other times they had done this to us. Fucking krauts, sneaky but predictable. They had not planned on us having pursuits up and hot, they may have figured on the rocket clusters and the AA, but those silly hot air balloons took them by surprise.

The furnace crews had enough time to inflate their flimsy constructions, a few dozen were bobbing at their moorings when the dive bombers roared in on the deck, barely clearing the Wall, dipping even lower for the attack. That got them under the AA bursts, under the exploding heads of the rocket clusters, but duck soup for the ground rifle fire and the balloons. Shit got real hectic there for a minute or two. There were dive bombers crashing everywhere, fouling each other, and any that chickened out, jettisoned their bombs and pulled out, flew right into the sights of the diving pursuits. A fucking mess. I went back to cowering.

When I dared to stick my head back up, there were black columns of smoke everywhere, but just as I was feeling a little upbeat, the next wave of dive bombers hit the hastily constructed fortifications at what had been the Railroad Gate in the Wall. I was thinking that Stilwell had missed a trick, they got plastered hard.

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