ATOMIC TALES – Strange Invaders #44: UFO Dogfight

Over the Colorado Rockies – Late March

Agent One, Raymond “Ray” Tyler

“It’s frustrating…We’ve finally got Tanya Ruhoff locked up, but she’s giving us nothing.” I spoke loud and clear into my headset, to be heard above the growl of the A-24 Banshee’s twin engines. My tail gunner seat had great views of the Rocky Mountains zipping past below, but—with Agent Thirteen, “Lucky” Lucy Ryan, doing the flying—I had little to do but ponder our recent successes… and failures. “Tanya insists the Soviets are in the same pickle… Claims not to know any more about the bugs than we do…”

Lucy’s voice came back over my earphones. “Ever think the Russkie might be telling the truth, Ray? Maybe that pretty spy is as in the dark, too.”

“Then how come every time there’s an incident, she gets there before us?”

“I bet when she spots a lead, she can just go. We gotta fill out paperwork.”

“Maybe…” I sighed. “At least we got the Teragons a new bug to experiment on.”

Lucy laughed. “Hope this one doesn’t wreck the place—again.” The U.S. Science Bureau recently had a giant spider break loose and demolish a lab.

A voice broke in over our radio. “Less chatter, more surveillance, you two.” Agent Two, Buster “Ace” Freeman, somehow sounded both stern and jovial. On the ground, I’m in charge, but in the air, he’s the bureau’s top gun—and I think he enjoys that.

Plus, he was right. We’d been scouting all day, and my attention had flagged. I needed to keep my mind on the job before we turned back to Denver to refuel.

Using the giant locust we’d captured in Kansas, the Teragons had isolated the electro-magnetic frequency that most giant mutations give off. That frequency often jams our radios, but the Teragons figure following it could lead to large nests—and maybe whoever’s creating these monsters, too.

So, our scientists installed scanning gizmos into a pair of the agency’s A-24s. Our task was to track down spikes at that frequency, recon, and photograph anything we found. Then maybe we could call in strikes and hit the bugs before they hit us, for once.

First, though, we had to find those nests, and the mountains west of Denver, where we’d first encountered these strange invaders, covered a huge swath of real estate.

“Roger, Wing Leader,” Lucy replied. “I’ll make sure Agent One keeps his eyes on the ground and his head out of the clouds.” Both she and Ace laughed.

“Ve-e-ery funny,” I drolled. “Eighteen… How you holding up as Ace’s tail gunner?”

Agent Eighteen, David “the Kid” Daniels, looked about as old as his agency number, though he’d flown at the end of the Korean War. He also had experience in recon photography, which is how he won this assignment. Agent Nine, our normal top photographer, was out west, down an ant hole with Spider Squadron.

“Doing okay, sir,” Eighteen replied. “Though I’d rather be behind the stick.”

Ace laughed again. “With me as tail gunner? Keep dreaming, Kid. I’d be flying my Mustang if we didn’t need your recon seat. Speaking of which… You boys got anything on your bug finders?”

“Negative here,” I replied. “Not a bite all day.”

“Noth—” the Kid’s voice broke off. “Hang on… Some kind of interference…”

Then we heard it, too: radio static. My gizmo’s detection siren went off, and Ace blared:

“Bogeys… Coming in hot… Three o’clock, low.”

Radar showed Two’s Banshee flying five miles to our left. I craned my head that way, but saw nothing.

“One on us,” Lucy announced. “Ten o’clock, high! Ray, man the tail gun.”

A shiver jangled my spine. This mission was supposed to be scouting only.

“Roger!” I tightened my oxygen mask, opened the canopy, and twisted my cramped seat into its gunner position. Then I pulled the Banshee’s rear-facing twin thirty-calibers from under the cowling.

I’d barely unlimbered the guns when Lucy dived into a series of evasive maneuvers, banking and rolling to avoid whatever was coming at us. The wind howled all around, and I heard our wingmate’s cannon fire as I scanned for our enemy.

I spotted Ace’s Banshee doing a similar aerial dance, saw his tracer rounds zip through the clouds, glimpsed black shapes zeroing in on him and Eighteen: blunt heads, segmented bodies, a blur of gossamer wings…

“Ants!” I shouted.

“I see ’em,” Lucy replied. “Watch our six!” She threw our aircraft into a wingover, and I spotted a bright glow diving on us from above.

I rattled off a few shots. “Lightning bugs!”

Lucy’s voice returned as little more than a crackling hiss. “Too fast… too high.”

She rolled the Banshee again, and the enemy whizzed past, barely missing our undercarriage. “It’s a damn flying saucer!”

I couldn’t argue. The glowing greenish UFO resembled the object Ace and I had encountered near Green Point Air Base. It was disc shaped, thinner on the edges and fatter in the middle, maybe ten yards long and half that at its thickest point.

I saw no signs of windows or control surfaces, but this was no natural phenomenon. Somebody was piloting it.

“Form up!” Ace called. “We need—BUZZZT!—tect each other!” The rest got lost in static.

“Roger!” Lucy replied, angling our Banshee into formation with Ace’s. If we’d known this mission would turn into a battle, we’d have brought more planes.

The Kid whooped as his thirty-caliber turned a flying ant into green goo, like a bug against a windshield.

I took a few more shots at the UFO, but it darted away, circling us like a shy partner waiting to horn in on the dance.

The thunder of Lucy’s front-mounted fifty-cals shook our fuselage. “Got one!”

I swiveled and spotted a second blazing object diving on our little formation. “Another saucer: two o’clock high!” I tried to bring my guns to bear, but it was out of my arc of fire.

But the Kid had a good angle. He let loose with Ace’s tail gun, though I couldn’t tell if his shots hit.

ZAM!

A blinding bolt of light seared past us, barely missing our left wing.

“Holy…!” Lucy blurted. “What was that?!”

“Some k—BZZT!—electrical discha—ZZT!—Watch your—ZZZ!” Agan, static consumed Ace’s words.

I blinked the spots from my eyes just as a giant flying ant latched onto our tailfins.

“Lucy…!” I called, not wanting to shoot off our tail.

“I know! I know!” She spiraled the Banshee toward the ground, buffeting the ant sideways just enough…

My machine gun ripped off its head and wings. The ant’s pieces tumbled, disintegrating as they fell toward the snowy mountains below.

“Splash another!” I enthused.

But our deadly waltz continued.

Ace and Lucy yo-yoed our planes high and low, like angry hornets… The ants swooped in, trying to break our wings or scramble aboard our fuselage… Gunfire from the Kid and me kept the enemy off our tails… The two UFOs blitzed past, loosing deadly electric blasts.

“Woo, that—ZZZT!—close!” Ace shouted, barely avoiding a bolt close enough to sizzle his hair. “You—BZZT!—Kid?”

Eighteen’s voice almost got lost in the crackle. “Fine!”

We’d downed all but a pair of the ants now, though we hadn’t been able to shake the UFOs—whatever they were.

“Let’s show these—BZZT!—what—ZZZT!—flying is!” Ace called.

“Roger!” Lucy replied. She looped left into a steep climb while Ace looped right.

That brought an ant into my sights, and I took it down. At the same time, Lucy opened up on the nearest saucer.

ZAM!

It fired back, and only a high-G roll by Lucy avoided us taking the full brunt of the blast.

We both screamed as energy from the UFO’s weapon surged through our plane. My skin tingled, my teeth chattered, and a smell like burnt hair assailed my nostrils.

The Banshee stalled, and Thirteen fought for control as the saucer disappeared into the clouds below us.

Somehow, Lucy got our engine started again; her years as a World War II test pilot saved both our lives. When she straightened us out, our foe had vanished, but…

Ace flew his Banshee right at the final ant, guns blazing, while the Kid tried to bring his thirty-calibers to bear on the UFO dogging them.

The ant’s head exploded, and it pinwheeled across the sky, right into the glowing saucer, like a brilliant pool hall bank shot.

Ace and the Kid cheered as the UFO shuddered…faltered…

Then, like a Kamikaze, the damaged saucer dived into our wingmates.

Ace banked sharply, but the Banshee lit up, and fire blazed from its engine, as the saucer slammed into the plane’s left side.

Lucy and I screamed: “Nooooo…!”

The two wounded craft wheeled together in a deadly tarantella as they sank toward the cloud-shrouded mountains below.

Then the UFO split off, breaking into an ever diminishing cluster of glowing greenish globules as it fell toward the earth and disappeared from sight.

“Hang on!” Lucy banked and dived so quickly that she left my stomach behind.

But the crippled plane containing Ace and the Kid had already vanished into the cloud cover.

“Eject, Ace!” Lucy screamed into the radio. “Eject!”

No response—not even static.

I swallowed hard. “Can you go after them?”

With our foes gone, Lucy’s grim voice came over the headset loud and clear. “Not if we want to make it back to Denver. We were at the end of our rope, and that dogfight ate up our safety margin. Call in the coordinates. We’ll refuel and join the search as soon as we can.”

I tried to sound more confident than I felt. “We’ll find them. No matter what it takes.”

THE END

About “UFO Dogfight”

Here we go, the final phase of stories leading to the big climax of the Atomic Tales: Strange Invaders.

Maybe I’ve mentioned getting near the end before, but it’s true—even though I won’t reveal how close we actually are, at this point. I guess I’ll just borrow a movie title from our last episode and say this is “The Beginning of the End.”

I did some extra research on the A-24 Banshee aircraft for this chapter. The Banshee, which the U.S. Science Bureau has obtained as WW II surplus, was also known as the SBD Dauntless when it flew for the U.S. Navy.

I poked my head into the Internet Movie Database for Planes (yes, that’s a real thing) and found a flick to watch that features the SDB Dauntless, just so I could see the plane in action: MIDWAY (2019).

Imagine my surprise when not only was MIDWAY a pretty great film—and a highly realistic portrayal of the Battle of Midway, where the U.S. fought Japan in the Pacific—but the Banshee/Dauntless turned out to be one of the main types of planes flown in that battle. In fact, it’s the very plane flown by the hero of the movie, Dick Best (based on the real person; pretty much everyone in the film is based on someone real).

So, I got a ton of opportunity to watch the Banshee (the army name for the same plane) do its thing. At the time, fliers said SBD stood for “Slow But Deadly,” though clearly the aircraft wasn’t that slow, either.

Anyway, as with everything else in this series, I’ve tried to make this chapter and its aerial combat as accurate as possible. Please forgive me if I’ve failed in any way, and imagine the corrections in your mind as you read or listen.

I love the notion of World War II dogfighting against flying ants and flying saucers at the same time.

How could that ever happen?

Keep reading, listening, or however you’re consuming these stories…

You’ll soon find out!