Eagles at War Read Online Free PDF

canopy was blown off. Jesus, he thought, if I'd had a parachute on, my head would have gone with the canopy! He aileron-rolled the plane on its back and pulled hard on the stick.
    Can't out-turn or out-speed the bastards; maybe I can out-dive them.
    The Hawk roared vertically down, wind shrieking around Lee's unprotected head, picking up speed every foot till it hit terminal velocity, near five hundred miles per hour, a mass of plunging metal butting up against compacted air, neither power nor gravity able to make it move faster. The starch-stiff control surfaces fed pressures back to him through the stick.
    The Japanese planes fell back, unable to dive as steeply or as fast, heading individually for the bombers that were distant spots in the east. A hunger for revenge replaced Lee's fear. He reefed back on the stick as hard as he could, forgetting about speed, G forces, and structural limits, popping his ears as he sent the little Hawk ricocheting skyward, converting speed and energy into altitude, soaring up into the sky like a silver-tipped arrow.
    Above the unsuspecting Nakajimas, Lee booted the rudder and snapped the stick forward, selecting two targets, one slightly above the other. The Japanese pilots were concentrating on rejoining formation, making the classic combat mistake of not checking behind them and about to die for it.
    Ammunition must be low, can't fire yet, he thought. He let the dainty little fighters grow in size. Silver with red cowlings and a red arrow stripe down the fuselage, they were flying slightly nose high as they slowed to join up. He could see the helmet and parachute straps on the nearest pilot, who was intently making the tiny control corrections, nudges of rudder and aileron, that would bring him into tight formation. Lee's bullets ripped into the pilot of the first Nakajima, then without interruption into the cockpit of the second. He was through them in a flash, both Japanese pilots dead, their fighters spinning drunkenly away, their comrades still unaware of an attack.
    Neck twisting, shoulders hunched, Lee scanned the sky behind him; it was as empty as his gun belts, as he turned back to the airfield.
    Chennault was leaping up and down on the flight line, swinging his hat in an arc. The engine was still running when the grinning, eagle-beaked colonel leapt on his wing.
    Lee switched off the magnetos, to hear Chennault yell, "Goddamnit, Lee, that's the way, dive and zoom, dive and zoom! You fried four of the bastards! I'm never going to let you go home!"
    Lee squeezed his nostrils tight with his fingers and forced air into his eardrums.
    "You let them shoot the canopy off! Who the hell told you you could use my airplane? Madame Chiang will be furious!"
    "Wish you'd been up there with me, Colonel."
    "If I had been, we'd have gotten them all, just like the old bull and the young bull. Dive and zoom!"
    *
    Salinas, California/October 16, 1938
    Clarice Roget didn't know or care about Hadley's business in New York any more than she knew or cared about the war in China. She pressed the head of the just awakened Charlotte Bandfield against her breast, blissful with a love that made up for all the children she had never had herself.
    How smart she'd been to lure Patty and Bandy into living with them! It gave her the family that Hadley's devotion to work had denied her, even while it gave Patty the free time for her reckless flying career.
    Clarice forgot all of the frustrations and anxieties of a lifetime of self-denial in the sheer pleasure of changing the baby's diapers on the sink drainboard. The simple domestic act made her feel like a real mother at last, making up for the disappointments in Hadley's ill-fated business ventures. He and Bandy had always been too far ahead of their time, building airplanes so technically advanced that they couldn't find buyers for them.
    The two men, fiercely loyal to each other even as they argued and fought, were a financially disastrous mixture of brilliant