"Oh," she said.
"I’m going to jump onto some island called Buka."
"I know. I heard."
"How come you took your bag out of the car?" Steve blurted. "I mean, you must have-"
"I know what you mean," she said, very softly.
"Jesus!"
"I didn’t want you to be alone tonight," Daphne said. "If that makes you think I’m some kind of a wh-"
"Shut up!" he said sharply. "Don’t talk like that!"
"And I didn’t want to be alone, either," she said.
"Once, in the car," Steve said, "we were talking about something, and you leaned close to me and put your hand on my leg, and I could smell your breath and feel it on my face, and I thought my heart was going to stop. . . ."
They looked into each other’s eyes for a long moment.
Finally, softly, reasonably, Daphne said, "Steve, since you have to be at the airfield at half past six, don’t you think you should come to bed?"
(Two)
Port Moresby, New Guinea
0405 Hours 8 June 1942,
When Flight Sergeant Michael Keyes, RAAF, went to the tin-roofed Transient Other Ranks hut to wake him, Sergeant Steve Koffler, USMC, was awake and nearly dressed, in greens that still carried the stripes of a corporal.
Lieutenant Howard had tried to fix it so they could be together overnight, but the Aussies hadn’t let them. Steve had told Howard not to worry about it. He thought Howard had enough to worry about, like making his first jump, without having to worry about him having to sleep by himself.
"Briefing time, lad," Sergeant Keyes said.
"OK."
"First, breakfast, of course. The food here is ordinarily bloody awful, which explains the stuff we brought with us."
"I’m not really very hungry."
"Well, have a go at it anyway. It’s likely to be some time before steak and eggs will be on your ration again."
"Some time," shit. By tonight I’m probably going to be dead.
"I guess I better put this on now, huh?" Steve said, holding up an RAAF flight suit, a quilted cotton coverall.
"Yes, I think you might as well," Keyes said.
Steve put his legs into the garment and shrugged into it. There were the chevrons of a sergeant of the United States Marine Corps on the sleeves, and the metal lapel insignia of the Corps on the collar points. Staff Sergeant Richardson had taken care of that yesterday in Townesville, when Steve and the crew of the Lockheed Hudson were packing the Hallicrafters set and loading it into the airplane.
He had also given Steve a Colt Model 1911A1.45 pistol. Steve suspected that Staff Sergeant Richardson had given him his own pistol; only the officers and a couple of the staff sergeants had been authorized pistols. He thought that had been a very nice thing for Staff Sergeant Richardson to do.
Steve had decided the best-really the only-way to take his Springfield along was to drop it with the antenna set; it and his web cartridge belt and two extra bandoliers of .30-06 ammunition and a half-dozen fragmentation grenades had been wrapped in cotton padding, and then that bundle had been strapped to the antenna parts.
Now that Richardson had given him the pistol, at least when he got on the ground he would have a weapon right away. There was no telling how quickly he could get the Springfield out of the antenna bundle. If he could find it at all.
Steve took a couple of foil-wrapped Trojans from a knee pocket in the flight suit, ripped one of them open with his teeth, unrolled it, and then tied it around the top of his boots. Then he bloused the left leg of the flight suit under it.
As he repeated the process for the right leg, Flight Sergeant Keyes said rather admiringly, "I wondered how the hell you did that to your trousers."
"They call it ‘blousing,’" Steve said.
He strapped Staff Sergeant Richardson’s pistol belt around his waist, and then tied the thong lace around his leg through an eyelet at the bottom of the holster.
"Ready," he said.
"Good lad," Keyes said. "We have to get hopping."
They left the tin-roofed hut and walked across the airfield to the mess. Based on his previous experience-in the movies- with what war should look like, Port Moresby was what Steve had expected to find when he got off the Martin Mariner in Melbourne. The people here went around armed, and they wore steel helmets. There were sandbags all over the place, at the entrances to bomb shelters, and around buildings, and to protect machine-gun positions. This place had been bombed.
Their airplane, the Lockheed, had been pushed into a revetment with sandbag walls. There were other airplanes, none of which was very impressive. There were three bi-wing English fighter planes, for instance, that looked as if they were left over from the First World War.
In the mess hut, Sergeant Keyes took his arm and guided him into an anteroom under a sign that said,officers. Lieutenant Howard and the rest of the airplane crew were there: the pilot, who was a "flying officer," and the navigator, who was a sergeant, and the gunner, who was a corporal. Steve decided that in the RAAF, if you were a flyer, you got to eat with the officers.
But he quickly learned that wasn’t the reason Sergeant Keyes had taken him in the Officers’ Room.
"Good morning, Sergeant," a voice said behind him. "About ready to get this show started?"
Startled, Steve looked over his shoulder. There was another RAAF officer, an older one, with a bunch of stripes on his sleeve, standing by the door.
He’s at least a major, or whatever the hell they call a major in the RAAF.
"Yes, Sir," Steve said.
"We’re running a bit behind schedule, so I’ll just run through this while you eat, all right?"
"That’ll be fine, Sir," Lieutenant Howard said.
The officer gestured to the navigator, who picked up a four-by-four sheet of plywood and set it down on the table.
"Sit here, Sergeant," the navigator said, indicating a chair at the table beside Howard. Steve saw that Howard had already been served his breakfast, but hadn’t eaten much of it.
Steve sat down. The old RAAF officer went to the map.
"Here we are, in Port Moresby," the RAAF officer said, pointing. "And here’s where you’re going.
"Buka is an island approximately thirty miles long and no greater than five or six miles wide. It is the northernmost island in the Solomons chain, just north of Bougainville, which is much larger. Where you are going, here, is 146 nautical miles from the Japanese base at Rabaul on New Britain. There is a Japanese fighter base on Buka, another on Bougainville, and of course there are fighters based at Rabaul, along with bombers, seaplanes, and other larger aircraft. From his base, Sub-Lieutenant Reeves has in the past been able to advise us of Japanese aerial movements as they have occurred. These reports have obviously been of great value both tactically and for planning purposes, and now that they have been interrupted, getting Reeves’s station up and running again is obviously of great importance."
A heavy china plate was put in front of Steve. On it was a T-bone steak covered with three fried eggs, sunny side up. This was followed by a smaller plate with three pieces of toast and a tub of orange marmalade, and finally by a cup of tea.
I don ‘t like tea, hate orange marmalade, and, anyway, I’m not hungry. But unless I start eating that crap, they’re going to think I’m scared. I am, of course, but I can’t let these Aussies see that I am. And maybe if I eat mine, Lieutenant Howard will eat his.