After the twilight was completely gone that night there was only the occasional flicker of the moonpath through gaps in the clouds, and now and then a glimpse of the stars. And the red lights on the instrument panel. Nothing else. The universe was as dark as the grave.
Modahl eased his butt in his seat, readjusted his feet on the instrument panel, tried to find a comfortable position, and reached for his cigarettes. The pack was empty; he crumpled it in disgust.
“You married?” he asked me.
“No.”
“I am,” he said, and rooted around in his flight bag for another pack of Luckies. He got one out, fired it off, then rearranged himself, settling back in.
He checked the compass, tapped the altimeter, glanced at his watch, and said nothing.
“Can I walk around a little?” I asked.
“Sure.”
I got unstrapped and left him there, smoking, his feet on the panel.
The beat of the engines made the ship a living thing. Everything you touched vibrated; even the air seemed to pulsate. The waist and tunnel gunners were watching out the blisters, scratching, smoking, whatever. Pottinger was working on his chart, the radioman and bombardier were playing with the radar, Amme the mechanic was in his tower making entries in his logbooks.
I took a leak, drank a half a cup of coffee while I watched the two guys working with the radar, and asked some questions. The presentation was merely a line on a cathode-ray tube — a ship, they said, would show up as a spike on the line. Maybe. Range was perhaps twenty miles, when the sea conditions were right.
“Have you ever seen a ship on that thing?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” the radioman said, then realized I was an officer and added a “sir.”
I finished the coffee, then climbed back into the copilot’s seat.
When my headset was plugged in again, I asked Modahl, “Do you ever have trouble staying awake?”
He shook his head no.
A half hour later he got out of his seat, took off his headset, and shouted in my ear: “I’m going to get some coffee, walk around. If the autopilot craps out, I’ll feel it. Just hold course and heading.”
“Yes, sir.”
He left, and there I was, all alone in the cockpit of a PBY Catalina over the South Pacific at night, hunting Jap ships.
Right.
I put my feet up on the panel like Modahl had and sat watching the instruments, just in case the autopilot did decide that it had done enough work tonight. The clouds were breaking up as we went north, so every few seconds I stole a glance down the moonpath, just in case. It was about seventy degrees to the right of our nose. I knew the guys were watching it from the starboard blister, but I looked anyway.
We had been airborne for a bit over four hours. We had lost time searching the coast of that island, so I figured we had another hour to fly before we reached Buka. Maybe Modahl was talking to Pottinger about that now.
If my old man could only see me in this cockpit. When he lost the farm about eight years ago, five years after Mom died, he took my sister and me to town and turned us over to the sheriff. Said he couldn’t feed us.
He kissed us both, then walked out the door. That was the last time I ever saw him.
Life defeated him. Beat him down.
Maybe someday, when the war was over, I’d try to find him. My sister and I weren’t really adopted, just farmed out as foster kids, so legally he was still my dad.
My sister was killed last year in a car wreck, so he was the only one I had left. I didn’t even know if he or Mom had brothers or sisters.
I was sitting there thinking about those days when I heard one sharp, hard word in my ears.
“Contact.”
That was the radioman on the intercom. “We have a contact, fifteen miles, ten degrees left.”
In about ten seconds Modahl charged into the cockpit and threw himself into the left seat.
“I’ve got it,” he said, and twisted the autopilot steering. We turned about fifty degrees left before he leveled the wings.
“We’ll go west, look for them on the moonpath, figure out what we’ve got.”
He reached behind him and twisted the volume knob on the intercom panel so everyone could clearly hear his voice. “Wake up, people. We have a contact. We’re maneuvering to put it on the moonpath for a visual.”
“What do you think it is?”
“May just be stray electrons — that radar isn’t anything to bet money on. If it’s a ship, though, it’s Japanese.”
THREE
“We’ve lost the contact,” Varitek, the radioman, told Modahl. “It’s too far starboard for the radar.”
“Okay. We’ll turn toward it after a bit, so let me know when you get it again.”
He leaned over and shouted at me. “It’s no stray electron. Ghost images tend to stay on the screen regardless of how we turn.”
He was fidgety. He got out the binoculars, looked down the moonpath.
He was doing that when he said, “I’ve got it. Something, anyway.” He turned the plane, banking steeply to put the contact ahead of us.
As we were in the turn, he said, “It’s a submarine, I think.”
As he leveled the wings the radioman shouted, “Contact.”
Modahl looked with binoculars. “It’s a sub conning tower. About six miles. Running southeast, I think. We’re in his stern quarter.”
He banked the plane steeply right, then disengaged the autopilot and lifted the nose and added power. “We’ll climb,” he said. “Make a diving attack down the moonpath.”
“Going to drop a bomb?”
“One, I think. There may be nothing at Buka or Rabaul.”
He explained what he wanted to the crew over the intercom. “We’ll use the guns on the conning tower,” he said, “then drop the bomb as we go over. You guys in the blisters and tunnel, hit ‘em with all you got as we go by. They’ll go under before we can make another run, so let’s make this one count.”
Everyone put on life vests, just in case.
“Your job,” Modahl said to me, “is to watch the altimeter and keep me from flying into the water. I want an altitude callout every ten seconds or so. Not every hundred feet, but every ten seconds.”
“Yessir.”
He called Hoffman to the cockpit and talked to him. “One bomb, the call will be ‘ready, ready, now.’ I’ll pickle it off, but to make sure it goes, I want you to push your pickle when I do.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
MODAHL:
The theory was simple enough: We were climbing to about twenty-five hundred feet, if I could get that high under those patchy clouds, then we would fly down the moonpath toward that sub. We’d see him, but he couldn’t see us. At two miles I’d chop the throttles and dive. If everything went right, we’d be doing almost 250 mph when we passed three hundred feet in altitude, about a thousand feet from the sub, and I opened fire with the nose fifties.
I planned to pull out right over the conning tower and release the bomb. If I judged it right and the bomb didn’t hang up on the rack, maybe it would hit close enough to the sub to damage its hull.
On pullout the guys in the back would sting the sub with their fifties.
Getting it all together would be the trick.
HOFFMAN:
I opened the hatch on the bow turret and climbed astraddle of those fifties. I patted those babies. I’d cleaned and greased and loaded them — if they jammed when we needed them Modahl would be royally pissed. Dutch Amme, the crew chief, would sign me up for a strangulation. Modahl was a nice enough guy, for an officer, but he and Amme wouldn’t tolerate a fuck-up at a time like this, which was okay by me. None of us came all this way to wave at the bastards as we flew by.