In the seat next to his, Orson Sharp slurped from a bottle of Coke. He was serious about staying away from the “hot drinks” that were forbidden to him, but he needed a jolt, too. A couple of empties sat by his feet.
“You’re gonna be pissing like a racehorse,” Joe said. “What do you do if you’re up in your Hellcat and you gotta whizz?”
Sharp smiled what looked like a very secular smile. “Ever hear of a streetcar driver’s friend?” he asked. When Joe shook his head, his buddy explained the gadget. “Son of a bitch!” Joe said. “That’s a great idea. But what if it comes loose when you’re pulling a lot of g’s? You’ll have piss all over the inside of your flight suit, maybe all over the inside of the cockpit.”
“Hasn’t happened yet,” Sharp answered, “and I’ve flown that plane every which way but inside out. I’m thinking of writing a testimonial for the company.”
“Jeez Louise, I don’t blame you,” Joe said. “But what about your John Henry? How does it like the ‘friend’ when you weigh four times as much as you’re supposed to?”
“Everything hurts then,” Orson Sharp said matter-of-factly, which was true enough. “He’s not bruised or anything-I’ll tell you that.”
“Okay. I wish I’d thought of it myself,” Joe said. “Can you get ’em on the ship, or did you bring it aboard?”
“I brought mine, so I don’t know if you can get them or not. You’d probably do best asking the toughest-looking CPO you can find. If he can’t tell you, nobody can.”
“Makes sense. CPOs know everything-or if they don’t, they sure think they do,” Joe said. That had been a revelation to him since boarding the carrier. When he was in flight training, almost all his instructors were officers. He’d dealt with petty officers only when navigating the maze of Navy bureaucracy. Now he saw the senior ratings were the men who held things together. They might be able to run the ship better without officers than officers could without them.
A plane roared in and landed, up above their heads. The ship shook a little, but only a little. An Essex — class carrier displaced upwards of 27,000 tons; a few tons of airplane weren’t much next to that. Joe and Orson Sharp both said, “Dauntless,” at the same time. Engine noise was a dead giveaway-if you knew what you were listening for. By now, they both did.
“How does it feel, being a veteran?” Sharp asked.
Joe considered. A yawn interrupted his consideration. “Tired,” he said.
His friend nodded. “That’s the truth.” He took another swig from the wasp-waisted green glass bottle, then burped softly. “Excuse me.” His politeness was automatic; he’d been a gentleman before he became an officer. After one more swig, he went on, “We’re doing what we’ve got to do, though.”
“Oh, hell, yes.” Joe nodded vigorously. The Marines and Army men were on the ground in Oahu, and fighting their way south from the invasion beaches. It wasn’t easy or cheap-quit didn’t seem to be in the Japs’ vocabulary-but they were doing it. Some Japanese submarines still prowled around, but the enemy’s surface fleet in these waters had taken a KO. And enemy air power was on its last legs. Japan had proved naval air could beat the land-based variety. Now the USA was extending the lesson.
“Some of their pilots are awful good,” Sharp said. “I ran into this guy in an Oscar the other day. He could make that little plane sit up and beg and darn near”-he might have been the only man on the carrier who would have said darn near-“wag its tail. I had two more Hellcats with me, and we couldn’t touch him. He got out of stuff you couldn’t get out of. We never laid a glove on him-and I landed with a hole in my prop.”
“They can leave you talking to yourself, all right,” Joe agreed. “With those two little machine guns, though, they have a devil of a time hurting you, and you can get away from ’em easy as pie. As long as you don’t dogfight ’em, you’re okay.” He paused. “Did they patch you up or put a new propeller blade on?”
“New blade,” Sharp told him. “I could’ve flown without the repair if I had to-it’s only a.30-caliber hole-but why take chances? We’ve got the spares, and that’s what they’re here for.”
“Better believe it,” Joe said. “And pretty soon the Japs won’t have any planes left, or anywhere to fly them out of if they do. I don’t care how sweet a pilot you are. If you can’t get off the ground, you might as well pick up a rifle and go fight with the infantry.”
Before answering, Orson Sharp finished the Coke and set the bottle down by the other dead soldiers.
“That’s probably what happened to some of our guys after December 7.” His voice was grim.
“Yeah, it probably is.” Joe didn’t like to think about what had happened to American servicemen of any sort since Hawaii fell, but that would have been an extra humiliation on top of all the others. Not to be able to fight the way you’d trained so hard to do… “Time to pay ’em back.”
An hour later, he was in the cockpit again, buzzing towards Oahu. Orson Sharp was up there with him. Their orders were looser than they had been at the very start of the land campaign. They were supposed to shoot up anything that moved on the ground, knock down any planes that came up against them, and especially make sure the enemy didn’t have the chance to repair his airfields.
One of those fields, the one at Haleiwa, had already fallen into U.S. hands. As Joe flew above it, he saw bulldozers and steamrollers swarming over the strip to put it back in commission. He also saw artillery coming down nearby. The field wasn’t ready to use, not by a long shot. He preferred flying off a carrier deck to shellfire. Hellcats were well-protected planes, but nothing on God’s green earth would save you if you stopped a 75mm round.
As if to remind him of that, puffs of black smoke from antiaircraft shells burst all around him. The Japs put up as much flak as they could. This wasn’t nearly so heavy as it had been when he flew over the Japanese carriers and their escorts, though. That had been almost thick enough to walk on. It had scared him, too. Now he had its measure. You jinked a little. You sped up and slowed down. You tried not to give them a straight shot at you. Once you’d done that, you went on with your mission. Every so often, somebody got shot down. You just hoped your number wasn’t up that particular day.
That thought had hardly crossed his mind when a Hellcat, trailing smoke, fell out of the sky and crashed into a rice paddy down below. No way the pilot could have got out-it happened too fast. “Oh, you poor, unlucky son of a bitch,” Joe said. The flak must have murdered his engine-or murdered him, so he had no chance to pull up or bail out.
A machine gun turned its winking eye Joe’s way. Those coldly frightful ice-blue Japanese tracers zipped past the Hellcat. Joe’s thumb stabbed the firing button. Red American tracers jumped out ahead of the fighter. He had six machine guns, all of them firing heavier slugs than the Jap’s weapon. Joe wouldn’t have wanted to catch a.50-caliber round. If the wound didn’t kill you, the sheer shock of getting hit was liable to.
Only a handful of Oscars and Zeros rose against the Hellcats. So did one sharp-nosed fighter of a type he hadn’t seen before. That had to be a Tony, an Army machine with an engine based on the Messerschmitt-109’s liquid-cooled in-line powerplant and not the radial engine that powered both other Japanese fighters. Tonys were supposed to be fast and well-armed. This one, beset by half a dozen Hellcats, didn’t last long enough for Joe to tell much, though it survived more battle damage before going down than other enemy planes Joe had met.
If there were more of those, they could be a royal pain, he thought. The Tony looked a hell of a lot like an Me-109. Part of that, no doubt, was the engine, which dictated the shape of the plane’s front end. But he still wondered whether some German engineers had stepped in and given the Japs a hand.