Lucky 666 by Bob Drury & Tom Clavin

Author:Bob Drury & Tom Clavin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

PART

III

Only those who will risk going too far can

possibly find out how far one can go.

—T. S. Eliot

19

“A MOTLEY COLLECTION OF OUTCASTS”

RECONNAISSANCE. THE WORD HAD TAKEN on a magical aura for Jay Zeamer since his reunion flight with Joe Sarnoski. And if he and Joe were now on a mission to recruit their own flight crew, there was no more fertile hunting ground than among the men who had volunteered for multiple recon runs. Even routine reconnaissance work during World War II was considered the most dangerous assignment a flier could draw. This was doubly true in the Pacific Theater, with its hellacious storms and vast stretches of uncharted ocean. Bill Benn’s death was evidence enough of this, and a man had to possess a certain kind of lone-wolf mentality to actually want to be sent aloft with no protective company. Jay had fought hard to participate in the large bombing formations that flew over Rabaul and northern New Guinea, or to be a member of the American squadrons searching for Japanese ships attempting to sneak down The Slot. But there was something about the notion of solo scouting missions over enemy territory that excited him even more. It may have been his renegade spirit, or perhaps the pull of his idol Eddie Rickenbacker, who famously roamed deep behind German lines during World War I seeking targets for Allied artillerymen.

Reconnaissance. It had never been for the faint of heart.

Rickenbacker’s exploits during the last war had been only the latest and most logical version of the age-old military practice of commanders seizing the high ground. Sometimes lost in Sun Tzu’s oft-cited counsel in The Art of War to always occupy the sunny side of the mountain is that the ancient Chinese military theorist wanted his troops on the mountain in the first place. Invading and defending armies had striven to fight from the heights ever since, but it took two millennia before a pair of French brothers conceived of scouting and mapping enemy positions from even higher ground—the sky.

When Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier first began experimenting with the idea of hot-air balloon flight in the 1780s they thought it was the smoke, and not the heated air, that lifted their egg-shaped silk-and-cotton contraptions off the ground. They soon learned better, and within a decade the Montgolfiers’ invention had been incorporated into the army of the First French Republic in the form of a new Aerostatic Corps whose balloons were used as observation posts during several battles of the French revolutionary wars, including the 1795 Siege of Mainz.

The mechanics of balloon flight became more sophisticated in the nineteenth century, and in 1861 President Abraham Lincoln urged his generals to incorporate a Balloon Corps into the Union Army. The invention of compact hydrogen gas generators made these uninflated balloons easier to transport around the front lines, and the Union aeronauts who piloted them worked with the Army’s topographic engineers to create the most accurate maps to date of potential battlefield sites. The Balloon

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