“Jesus, now what?”
“Well, we gotta remember that he was never arrested, never indicted, never tried, and never found guilty. Who knows, he may be innocent of anything major.”
Jake thought of the supplies he’d “liberated” before the surrender. Did they make him different from Finch? “At any rate, he’s the type of person who actually could show up fat and healthy when everyone else is starving, and that doesn’t necessarily make him a crook. In fact, it might make him the kind of cunning son of a bitch who could help us.”
“Okay, Colonel Jake, then what does it really make him?”
“Someone we watch very carefully, Hawk. Either he’s telling the truth, or he’s doing things I don’t even want to think about.”
Hawkins took a deep breath as he realized what Jake was implying. “The killing on Lanai? Those seven guys who got caught by the Japs? You think he had something to do with that?”
“It’s almost too awful to contemplate, isn’t it? I can’t believe a fellow American would have anything to do with it, but I can’t get the possibility out of my mind. Nobody has any proof, and you can’t send somebody to jail on my hunches. On the other hand, if Sergeant Finch is such a damned great hustler, he may be an invaluable asset to us. We’re gonna use him, Hawk, but”-Jake grinned tightly-”we’re going to watch him like a hawk.”
The giant flying boat wasn’t particularly difficult to get or keep airborne, although keeping it on the straight and narrow in a stiff desert wind was a challenge, even for a skilled pilot like Colonel Jimmy Doolittle.
Below him were a series of rectangles painted in white on the flat and barren ground east of San Diego. They were approximately one thousand feet by one hundred feet and were intended to simulate a very large ship, and a ship that was anchored. Doolittle and Nimitz had concluded that anyone could hit a tank farm full of large and combustible oil storage tanks. It would take real skill to hit a carrier if, by chance, one was in Pearl Harbor at the time of the strike.
The priorities were ironically like those given the Japanese on December 7. First were the carriers. In their absence, the oil storage tanks. Nowhere on the list were battleships. Even if there were battlewagons in Pearl, they were to be ignored in favor of the carriers and the oil storage facilities. My, Doolittle thought, how the mighty have fallen. His personal opinion was that battleships were particularly dramatic dinosaurs that could do damage only if they were permitted to get within range. The purpose of a plane was to keep them out of range and to sink them.
After numerous attempts, Doolittle and the other pilots had come to the conclusion that the Boeing Model 314 flying boat was a lousy bomber, and that hitting any target was extremely difficult.
Of course, if they’d been able to use one of the new, secret Norden bombsights, it might have been different. High command, however, had nixed that idea. Too much chance of the bombsights falling into enemy hands, they’d said, which pretty much told him what they thought of his chances for survival.
This conclusion was further reinforced when Doolittle was informed that he would be promoted to brigadier general on his return, and not before. He understood fully. Enough generals had been killed or captured in this war. They did not need another one for the Japanese press to trumpet as a triumph. Colonels, even bird colonels, were a dime a dozen.
The massive plane came in over the target at five hundred feet. Five other planes flew at the same height over other, similar rectangles.
The original eight planes had been reduced to six because of maintenance problems and had been cannibalized for parts.
The bombardier signaled and released the bags of flour that served as dummy bombs. The plane shuddered slightly as the bombs were dropped, and Doolittle pulled hard to lift her out of harm’s way. In his mind he could visualize scores of antiaircraft guns shooting at him, while a dozen Zeros streaked downward to blow him out of the sky. He decided that he must have been nuts to have volunteered for this.
“Got some hits,” exulted Bart Howell from the tail of the plane. The skinny little engineer was usually airsick, but this time he actually looked happy. Then Doolittle saw the caked puke on the front of his coveralls. Doolittle laughed. Howell was giving his all for his country, even his lunch.
Howell had worked day and night to install and then modify the bomb chutes, and those efforts had caused Doolittle’s and the other pilots’ impression of him to increase immeasurably. So what if he sometimes was a pompous jerk; the pompous jerk knew what he was doing.
“This is the right altitude, isn’t it?” Howell asked.
“Yeah,” muttered Doolittle, “five hundred feet.” There had been a number of attempts at altitudes that were higher and safer, but the only consistent hits came from flying low. It was almost treetop level, only there wouldn’t be any trees on the ocean. Five hundred feet was almost tantamount to suicide unless something happened to distract the fighters. With surprise on their side, they might just be able to make it through the antiaircraft storm, but the Zeros would follow them and swat them into the sea. “God help us all,” said Doolittle.
Sergeant Charley Finch thought that he might just have outsmarted himself. Local Hawaiians had been very helpful in getting him in touch with someone who got him in contact with others who finally took him to the American camp. No one was suspicious of him until he actually made it to the American base and realized that the commanders were people he knew personally or had heard of.
Somehow, Captain Jake Novacek had gotten promoted to light colonel, and Sergeant Will Hawkins was, even more incredibly, a captain in this ragtag army. Neither event boded well in Finch’s opinion. Novacek had been in intelligence, G-2, which probably accounted for his suspicious nature, and Hawkins had been one of the straight shooters who’d always looked down on Finch’s schemes. It was unfortunate, but there was little he could do about it right now.
What Novacek had done was very impressive. The camp was well organized and the people well armed and disciplined. Finch was afraid it would be a little tougher nut to crack than had been anticipated. The presence of marines and army personnel meant that he could be in grave danger should the Japanese find the place and attack. These weren’t the confused and lost souls he’d led to destruction on Lanai.
Finch was pleased that Novacek had assigned him to work with the storage of supplies. Other than being a natural fit because of his background, the task enabled him to figure out how the American force was organized. It also surprised him just a little to realize that he now thought of the Americans as “them” and not “we.”
Finch hoped his position would give him a chance to feed himself a little better than the rations that were provided. Despite the fact that Hawaii was fertile and grew just about anything, food was a chronic problem. The guerrillas did grow crops in a manner intended to make the fields look wild, and they did get other supplies from sympathetic and supportive locals, but they seemed to be always on the edge of scarcity.
In one regard, Finch gave Novacek grudging respect. The group he was with was the central command, but there were satellite enterprises that were very important, and about which he could find out very little. The problem was that only a handful of people knew what they did and where they were, and he wasn’t yet one of them.
He’d figured out that there was a radio station somewhere nearby. Hell, that had been common knowledge way back with Omori. But something else was going on that required a lot of material, and he didn’t know what it was. There were some disturbing references to airplanes that couldn’t possibly be true. Novacek did not have an air force, so what were they talking about?