Pacific Glory

ELEVEN

Mick grabbed a second cup of coffee and then dropped into a chair at the back of the ready room as the air intelligence officer got ready to start the brief. The whole squadron was there, and the Big E’s air-conditioning was barely keeping up. Topside he could hear cables scraping on the flight deck as the various flight deck crews, called “shirts” for their color-coded jerseys, got the launch ready. He’d been with Bombing Eight for seven months now, ever since his short stint in P-cola. It was going okay, so far. He wasn’t going to get promoted anytime soon, but he hadn’t managed to piss off anyone of consequence. Yet.

He flexed his hand. For the most part it was doing what he wanted, although it still didn’t look right. The flight surgeon had kept his word. The doctors back at Pensacola told him pretty much the same thing about his hand, that it was one of those borderline injuries that could be a ticket out of aviation if he was tired of it, or that he could do some surgery and rehab work and get the hand quasi-operational. Mick had opted for the latter, which had turned out to be a lot more painful than the original injury. He’d gone back to drinking, but the daily tempo of flight operations in the training pipeline meant that he had to keep it under control. He’d finally been cleared to go back to war and then caught up with the Enterprise, which had been in Pearl for Christmas through New Year’s just before the Central Pacific offensive really got under way. He had not exactly been a patient and understanding flight instructor, and the CO of his training squadron was beginning to complain about the number of “downs” Mick was handing out. Mick was failing new guys in their flight syllabuses, and he was beginning to complain about the levels of chickenshit and Mickey Mouse rules in the training command. The transfer orders came just in time.

It had taken him two weeks to catch the hops he needed to get out to Pearl and catch Enterprise. As the buzz of conversation in the ready room rose, he reflected on the events of New Year’s Eve. Glory had finally rejoined the living, and his groin quivered with the memory of that tumultuous night. He was sorry about his encounter with Beauty Vincent, but Jesus, that poor bastard took everything so seriously. It had been like meeting up with Sir Galahad and trying to explain why he’d spent the entire night with Maid Marian. Or somebody, he thought. Maybe it was Guinevere. Anyway, he hoped that hot little blond nurse had calibrated the poor bastard’s pecker once and for all. Marsh was an XO, and there was some hard fighting coming up. The Japs would fight to the last man, and they obviously expected the Americans to do the same thing. Now that the Marines were going into Guam and Saipan, there were rumors that the Jap battle fleet might come out, after having taken a powder through most of 1943.

“Gentlemen,” the air intelligence officer began from the podium. The room full of chattering aviators ignored him. The squadron CO, Commander Bill Blake, stood up, put two fingers in his mouth, and whistled. When the room got quiet, he nodded at the intelligence officer.

“Gentlemen,” the bookish-looking lieutenant commander began again. “The Japanese carrier fleet is at sea.”

There were low cheers around the room.

“As you know, our task force has been fighting off land-based air strikes for the past two days. The brass is calling it shuttle bombing. Carrier air comes at us from way out there, then goes to a nearby island strip, refuels, rearms, and hits us again on their way back to their home carriers.”

“There’s a cure for that,” the skipper said.

“Not until we know where they are, Skipper,” the briefer said. “As of this moment, we have not located the enemy carriers.”

“But they know where we are?” the skipper asked.

“As long as we’re tethered to Saipan, apparently they do. We’ve got picket submarines out looking, three hundred fifty miles or better, so we’re expecting a sighting report at any time. Your fighter buddies have been busy, but you guys won’t launch until we get a solid posit.”

“We know they’re coming from the west — why not go out there like they did at Midway and just find the bastards?” Blake asked.

“Because Admiral Spruance remembers what they brought with them at Midway. He doesn’t want to get sucked into a battleship-versus-carrier action. His mission, our mission, is to protect the landings going on right now at Saipan.”

“But, shit, we’ve got seven big-decks, plus eight light carriers. Surely we could spare a couple to go hunting Jap carriers? We only had three decks all in at Midway.”

“Skipper,” the intel officer said, “that decision’s way beyond my pay grade, okay? For now, let me show you what we think they’re bringing to the party.”

He put up a chart, provoking some low whistles from the front row, where the senior officers in the squadron sat. Mick couldn’t see the chart from the back row, but there seemed to be a lot of ships listed.

“Five big-decks, four light carriers, five battlewagons, the usual gaggle of heavy cruisers and tin cans. Pretty much the whole of what they call their Mobile Fleet. Probably six, seven hundred aircraft total, including the stuff they’ve stashed ashore.”

That number produced a moment of silence. The fighter squadrons from the three nearby battle groups had been scrambling all morning against raids from the west and north. So far, only a few Japanese planes had made it through the screen, including one that had almost scored on the Big E.

“As I said before, no bomber raids will go out until we have a much better fix on where their carrier formations are.”

“The day’s a’wastin’,” Commander Blake said. “It’s already fifteen hundred. If we have to go a couple hundred miles out and back, you’re talking swim call tonight.”

“If I may be permitted an educated guess,” the intel officer began, but stopped when everyone started laughing. The skipper waved his hand to shut it off.

“You guys are probably not going anywhere today. If it’s any comfort, the fighter people are claiming huge Jap losses, and I mean huge. Seventy bogeys down here, thirty over there, thirty-seven of forty-two over Guam, counts like that. Even by fighter pilot BS standards, that’s significant.”

More laughter. The fighter guys were notorious for inflating their scores, which their after-action gun camera films inevitably deflated. Bomber pilots, on the other hand, were always scrupulously honest. Every ship sunk was at least a cruiser, if not a battleship.

“Anyway, if half of what the fighter-biters say is true, when we do find the Mobile Fleet, it ought to not be too bad getting in.”

Easy for you to say, Mick thought. The ship’s intel officers stood behind them in every way — usually way behind them when the shit started. A lot depended on whether or not their own fighters could go with them. If not, even a few hundred Zeros over the Jap carrier formations would be no cakewalk.

The briefer went through weather conditions expected over the Marianas for the next two days and the general plan of movement. He stressed that Admiral Spruance would not leave his Marines uncovered, by which he meant that the American carriers would stay close to the invasion forces. That in turn meant that when they did launch, it could be a long flight, two hundred miles minimum, maybe more. Getting out to the targets would be guaranteed. Getting back aboard safely would not.

When the briefing was finished, the skipper stood up. “Guys, since none of us is really night qualified, it’s too late to go carrier hunting today. They can’t hide that many carriers for too much longer, and then we’re gonna throw the book at them. Hit the sack early, and be ready at first light.”

That night in one of the carrier’s two wardrooms Mick listened to the fighter pilots whooping it up over the day’s action. They were calling it the biggest bag of the war, with literally hundreds of Japanese planes shot down or destroyed on the ground and with relatively few casualties among the American formations. The battle groups were finally headed west to find the Jap carriers, and tomorrow promised to be the dive bombers’ day.

The entire squadron was in the ready room by 0700, waiting for the final brief and the order to launch. All available fighters had taken off at dawn, headed out for their combat air patrol stations seventy miles from the Big E. To the pilots of Bombing Eight, however, the day turned into one big washout. The fighters came back and went out again, but with fewer engagements being reported. The intel officer had come into the ready room twice to tell them that they were still waiting for locating data on the Jap carriers. By 1300, Mick had gone back to his stateroom for a nap. At 1430, a call came from the ready room: One of our subs has located the Jap Mobile Fleet with sufficient precision that a strike launch has been slated for 1530. The sub claims one carrier sunk, but lots more out there desperately needing attention.

Mick got up, washed his face, got his gear, and returned to the ready room. The final brief was short and sweet: Fly west by southwest for two hundred eighty miles and blast the Nip bastards. Frequencies and call signs were on their knee pads; the weather should be CAVU in the target area. Every American carrier was going to participate in the strike. Any questions?

There was only one problem that no one wanted to talk about: By the time they got back, it would be almost dark. Mick waited for someone to point out the obvious: A night recovery after an opposed strike and then a long flight back was a prescription for many accidents. Theoretically, all the pilots were night qualified, but in practice, except for some very specialized squadrons, this wasn’t true. They’d all done some night approaches on well-lit outlying fields at Pensacola, but, in general, combat operations were a daytime affair for the carrier Navy. One crash on the deck with a gaggle of waiting planes stacked up behind the bird farm, all low on fuel, could spell disaster for the whole air group, as Commander Oxerhaus had pointed out so vividly. No one said a word. The elephant in the room went unnamed.

“Bomber pilots, man your planes,” came over the announcing system.

Skipper Blake stood up. “Okay, guys: Here’s your chance to repeat Midway. Let’s go get ’em.”

As Mick strapped on his parachute and survival vest, one of the squadron’s two ensigns, Georgie White, came over to him. He and Mick had become pinochle buddies.

“Mick,” he said, “I don’t think I can do this.”

“The mission, or the getting back aboard part?” Mick asked.

“Night landing,” George said. “I can’t do that. I know I can’t do that.”

“Say something to the skipper?”

“Yeah,” Georgie said.

“What’d he say?”

“That if I downed myself, I’d regret it for the rest of my life.”

“That’s helpful.”

“Well, shit, I know what he’s saying. But the rest of my life will end the first time I try a night approach. I barely passed at P-cola, and even my instructor said, if it weren’t wartime, he’da given me a down right there and then.”

Mick checked his knee pads. “Here’s the thing, Georgie: We’re sending a couple hundred bombers against the Jap carriers. If the fighter-biters can be believed, which is always a stretch, there won’t be much opposition.”

“I know, I know.”

“But: We’re all gonna come back low on fuel and flying in the damn dark. One guy prangs on the round-down, the rest of us are gonna be in the soup.”

Georgie nodded.

“So if you really don’t think you can do that, don’t go. Don’t kill yourself and your gunner.”

“They’ll take my wings, Mick.”

“So you go do something else. Or go home. You’ve done your bit.”

“Jesus, man, I don’t know what to do.”

“Well, my advice? Go see the skipper, tell him you want out, that you don’t want to put other guys in the drink because you know you can’t do night landings. Is that the truth?”

“Yeah, I think it is.”

“Well, there you go, Georgie. Nobody can fault you for telling the truth. He can big-deal it all he wants, but really? It’s just another strike. I gotta go.”

Mick went topside to his plane and was strapped in by his plane captain. The Big E had already turned into the wind, producing a forty-five-knot relative wind across the deck. The shirts were all leaning into it as they directed the various aircraft to unfold their wings, lock them down, and then taxi into the conga line. Signal halyards on the island were standing straight out in the stiff wind, with the Fox flag two-blocked, indicating an imminent launch.

His gunner, Petty Officer Jimmy Sykes, was already in. A single thousand-pound armor-piercing bomb was slung under the fuselage. With that big a bomb, the wings were clean except for two drop tanks. Around him twenty-three dive bombers were already turning up, with some being signaled to the midships line for launch. A bluish cloud of engine smoke was streaming aft from all the waiting bombers. The plane-guard destroyers behind the carrier were shimmering in all the exhaust smoke. Mick looked around for Georgie but didn’t see him. Then a shirt was waving at him, and he slid the canopy forward and got ready for takeoff.

An hour and forty minutes later, they saw the first wakes, as the Japanese capital ships began to turn into their defensive circles. From fifteen thousand feet, the ships below were small black dashes on the dark blue sea, their wakes creating bright white lines that pointed right at them. There’d been no fighter opposition. Mick reluctantly concluded that, for once, the fighter guys had been telling the truth. A few flak bursts were popping below them, red winks blooming into dirty black shreds. On signal they dropped their external fuel tanks.

Commander Blake called the bombing order, told everybody to arm, and led the attack down against the biggest carrier. One after another, the dive bombers rolled onto their backs, pulled in, and started down.

“I’ve been here before,” Mick mumbled to himself.

“Look at all those damn ships!” Gunner Sykes said.

“Hang on, Jimmy,” he said. He split his flaps and rolled in.

He was the seventh bomber to roll down into a steep dive on a carrier that was already smoking. He saw enormous columns of water erupting all along the big ship’s sides, and the glow of a large fire aft on her flight deck. He felt rather than saw the antiaircraft fire coming from the escorting cruisers and destroyers, but he definitely saw the bomber ahead of him plant one right on the ship’s flight deck. There was a puff of dust and debris, and then a world-ending explosion as the ship’s entire flight deck mounded up and then collapsed into a ball of orange fire.

Mick pulled out of his dive and turned away. The Dauntless creaked and strained with the weight of that big AP bomb as he pulled left, trying to get flat.

No point in wasting another bomb on that baby, he thought. She was done for. He looked for another target as the skipper came up on the strike circuit and called off the rest of the bomb run, ordering the squadron to head west, looking for another carrier. At that moment, however, Mick saw a battleship pop out from under a cloud. He was lower than he liked to be, just over nine thousand feet, and there were more and more thumps of black flak appearing around him. What caught his attention was the fact that the battlewagon wasn’t circling. It was running northwest, as if trying to get away instead of protecting the nearest carrier.

Mick made a snap decision. Instead of following the rest of the squadron, he rolled in on the battlewagon and then went straight down until the big ship, looking more like a heavy cruiser now, began to fill his windscreen. He adjusted the telescopic sight of the Dauntless to point right at the ship’s bow and then, at four thousand feet, released the bomb.

Immediately he banked to the right and began to pull back on the stick, aiming to level off at sea level well forward of the target, scramble out of the engagement area, and rejoin the squadron.

“Holy shit!” Sykes exclaimed over the intercom.

“Did I get him?” Mick said, straining to get the words out as the g-forces flattened his face and made his vision go red.

“Oh, God, yes,” Sykes said. “Lookit that!”

Mick got the Dauntless level at about two hundred feet over the sea, banked right, and looked back at his cruiser. He saw an enormous column of black smoke, boiling with red and orange fire, rising from where the ship had been.

He pulled right again and flew back toward the evolving catastrophe, dipped the nose, and fired his forward guns. He didn’t care about doing any damage. What he wanted was for his gun cameras to record what had happened to the Jap cruiser. They flew through the fuming cloud of smoke and fire, the aircraft bumping and sliding in the hot turbulence. I must have hit a magazine, he thought. The ship had simply disappeared.

He climbed back up to altitude and started looking around. The Jap fleet was dispersing in every direction, with newly arrived formations of American dive bombers falling out of the sky to litter the sea with armor-piercing bombs. There were several stationary columns of black smoke mingling with the puffy white clouds covering the Philippine Sea. He glanced at his fuel gauges and pulled back on the throttle. No bomb, no more work for him to do. Time to loiter, join up with the squadron, and head back to the carrier. As he looked around, he realized that the sun was setting. He focused on the radio, made sure he was on the right freq.

A few minutes later, he heard Commander Blake gathering up his chickens after everyone had expended his useful ordnance. Mick listened for a few minutes, caught sight of some contrails to the north, and headed for the gaggle. He was very grateful for not having sighted a single Zero. Fifteen minutes later he joined up with the rest of Bombing Eight. There were two planes missing. He settled into the echelon formation and checked in with the skipper.

“Where you been, McCarty?” Commander Blake asked.

“Got me a cruiser,” Mick said. “I was lined up on that carrier, but she blew up. So I went hunting.”

“We did, too, McCarty,” Blake said. “We missed you.”

Oops, Mick thought. Gonna hear about this later. By rights, he should have followed them after breaking off his bombing run.

The sky to the east was getting darker by the moment.

“Are we in trouble, Lieutenant?” Sykes asked over the intercom. He wore a split headphone, one ear for intercom, the other ear set on the tactical frequency assigned to their squadron.

“Aren’t we always, Jimmy?”

There wasn’t too much interpilot chatter on the way back to the carrier. The pilots were concentrating on their fuel states and thinking about the landings to come. Mick had Sykes dig out the ditching checklist for their plane, and together they went through it. During the hour or so that it took to get back to the carrier, the skipper drew up a verbal order-of-landing list as a function of who would have the least fuel left when they caught up with the ship. Enterprise reported she was heading west to shorten the transit distance, but as everyone knew, that wouldn’t solve the darkness problem.

Mick ended up as tail-end Charlie on the list because he had the most fuel remaining, not having been with the rest of the squadron on their pursuit of other carriers. No longer in the heat of the moment, he knew he should have stayed with the squadron. It had just seemed the logical thing to do, he thought. No point in wasting a big bomb on a carrier that was already aflame from one end to the other, and he’d absolutely blasted that other big Jap. He also knew, however, that this wouldn’t help his reputation in Bombing Eight. Gunner Sykes had told him that he was already being called the Lone Ranger by some of the squadron pilots. There’d been some guys from his first squadron on the Yorktown who were now department heads in this squadron, and his reputation as something of a maverick had preceded him. He was also older than most of the replacement pilots coming to Bombing Eight.

One day he’d heard two ensigns talking about the “curious” fact that the Lone Ranger had been the only survivor from that medical evacuation crash off Guadalcanal. He’d braced them up about that, and they’d immediately retreated into ensign-versus-senior-lieutenant formality. The next day he’d had Sykes paint a white horse on the side of his barge. After that, Mick pulled into his own shell, flying as professionally as he could but keeping himself apart from the camaraderie of the squadron. People left him alone, and that was fine with him. He’d gotten a carrier at Midway and a cruiser today. They could talk behind his back all they wanted, but they couldn’t take those achievements away from him, and the gun camera would back him up. Fuck ’em if they couldn’t take a joke.

The skipper came up on the radio and declared that they had reached the rendezvous position with the carrier formations. Couldn’t tell it by me, Mick thought, looking into the well of darkness that was the sea below.

There was no moon, and a high, thin overcast was blocking most available starlight. Everyone started looking for a home. Any home. The skipper put the ten planes of his squadron into a circular orbit at eight thousand feet and reported in to the Enterprise. They could hear other squadrons doing the same thing, and it wasn’t long before the first ditching calls began to come out over the Mayday frequency. Then suddenly there was light, everywhere. Each of the big-deck carriers had its red and white flight deck lights on, and several battleship targeting searchlights were pointed straight up into the air to act as beacons for the returning planes. It looked like a Hollywood premiere night, and it was a heartwarming sight. Mick wondered what brave soul had made that decision. Probably Admiral Mitscher — Spruance wasn’t an aviator. Of course, if there were any Jap subs lurking nearby, the carriers would be meat.

“Bombing Eight, Big Easy, cleared for the break,” came the radio call. “Call your states.”

Commander Blake came up and read out the landing order by side numbers and then directed the first plane to make his approach. The rest of them were to follow him down to a five-thousand-foot holding pattern above the break circle, which itself was only a thousand feet above the sea surface.

“Which one’s ours?” Sykes asked from the gunner’s seat.

“Damned if I know,” Mick said. “That one, I guess. But if we have to, I’m gonna land on the first carrier that smiles at me.”

Sykes just laughed. “Hi-yo, Silver,” he said.

The first guy to make an approach was one of the ensigns. Mick watched his wing lights spiral down toward the back end of a carrier, presumably the Big E, line up on the deck, and then fly right over the carrier and back off the front end.

“Bolter, bolter,” came the PriFly radio call. “Try it again, two-niner. Next in line, hold in the break.”

Two-niner, he thought — that’s Georgie. With literally a ringside seat, Mick watched the struggling ensign pull his bomber around in the left-hand pattern, line up again, and this time settle into a pretty good-looking approach, right up to the point where he landed in a brief sheet of fire along the portside catwalks and then went cartwheeling over the side. An escorting destroyer immediately drove into the area of the crash and began lighting up the sea surface with searchlights, but all Mick could see was a cloud of steam and smoke drifting over the water alongside the carrier’s wide white wake. Georgie, Georgie, he thought. You should have listened.

“Green deck, green deck, three-one, commence your approach.”

Wow, Mick thought. Normally they’d have closed the deck down until they could inspect the arresting gear and clear away any debris. Side number thirty-one must be running on fumes.

He checked his own fuel tanks. After the nearly two-hundred-mile trip back, he was good for another fifteen minutes or so, assuming the gauges were working reliably. He continued circling at low cruise power, watching the other guys in the squadron trying to get aboard.

Three-one made it on the first pass. Three-six boltered twice and then was told to ditch alongside another escorting destroyer, having lost a main mount on his second attempt. The skipper got down on his first try, but the plane after him ran out of fuel during his approach, stalled, and then augured straight into the carrier’s wake before he could set up for a ditch.

God damn, Mick thought, this is going to cost us more planes than the Japs did today. Then he was startled by the appearance of a star shell off to the north, and then another and another. As he was figuring out what to make of that, one went off about ten thousand feet over the Big E, lighting up the carrier and the flight deck in its magnesium glare. Someone’s really taking chances tonight, Mick thought. As the parachute flare descended through the crowd of waiting planes, a second one went off back up at altitude. It turned the night into day, and the next three planes landed safely on their first pass. Then it was his turn.

“Here we go, Jimmy,” he said. “Hang on.”

He lined up on the carrier’s stern and watched the landing signal officer’s illuminated wands as he came onto the glide path. At the last moment, just as the LSO indicated the cut command, the star shell illuminating Enterprise’s deck winked out. There should have been another one lighting off above it. Instead, for a critical instant, Mick was totally blind. He got one fleeting image of the after five-inch mounts along the starboard side and then felt a terrific wallop as he landed. He reflexively firewalled the throttle, which was standard procedure in case the hook didn’t catch, and the next moment found himself flying off the bow and then settling toward the black ocean in front of him.

Still at full power, he pulled the nose up and braced himself for impact, but the Dauntless struggled back into the air and he was able to lower the nose, gain some airspeed, and exhale.

“Two-seven, state?”

“Two-seven, I’ve got enough for another pass, maybe two,” Mick called.

“Roger, two-seven, and execute your pattern. We have a green deck.”

“Two-seven,” Mick replied, acknowledging the order to try again. “You okay back there, Jimmy?” he asked his gunner. He thought he smelled engine exhaust.

“Uh, yessir, but we got a problem, I think. The deck’s gone, back of my seat. It’s breezy back here.”

“Two-seven, this is Boss.”

“Two-seven?”

“Two-seven, your tail hook has been found on the flight deck. Pick a destroyer, put her down, Lieutenant.”

Goddammit, Mick thought. Here I am with all the gas I need and now I have to ditch. Shit!

“Two-seven, wilco,” he acknowledged. He banked out of the pattern and went looking for a destroyer, of which there were plenty around the carrier. His night vision wasn’t totally back yet, but it was coming. More star shells were popping now above the formation. Where were you when I needed you? he wondered.

“Okay, gunner-man,” he said. “Swim call. Check your vest, turn on your light, and push on the back of my seat. Canopy coming back.”

Mick turned on his landing lights and flew past a destroyer some three miles off the Big E’s port side. He saw men rushing on deck to man their motor whaleboat and others assembling on the forecastle around the rescue swimmer davit.

“If I can do this right, we’ll hit flat, and then the nose will pitch straight down. Roll out either side and get away from it. If we go inverted, remember to follow your bubbles, and don’t inflate your vest until you’re clear of the aircraft. Just like in the Dilbert Dunker, only noisier, okay?”

“Got it, boss. Low and slow, please.”

“Low, slow, and flat,” Mick said and put down the flaps. He kept the gear up so that they’d be clean at water entry.

He flew past the destroyer, with his landing lights still on so they could follow him in the dark. When the destroyer skipper realized he was going to ditch on their starboard side, he turned on some searchlights pointed down at the water to give Mick a visible surface reference.

Those boys have done this before, Mick thought. He banked left into a one-eighty, leveled out about a half mile behind the tin can, and started slowing. The object of the game was a slightly nose-up flat stall just above the water and right alongside the destroyer. He started into his final turn.

As he came in on the destroyer, he could see he was going too fast, much too fast. If he did stall it, he’d be way out in front, and time was of the essence if they were going to be rescued. He poured on the power and went around. As long as he had gas, he could do that until he got it just right.

The second approach was better. He started the descent much farther back, and this time he felt the big bomber shuddering as it lost most of its lift only a few hundred yards behind the ship. He let her settle until he could no longer see water over the nose and then pulled slowly back on the stick. A moment later she hit with a gut-flattening bang and immediately flipped upside down. A wall of water flooded the open cockpit. Mick waited for the regulation three-count for the initial turbulence to subside, then hit his latches, felt the harness go slack, and kicked down, away from his seat, just as he’d done a dozen times in the Dilbert Dunker training back at flight school. A second later he was bumping his head on the wing, and then he popped up to the surface behind it. He fired his Mae West life vest.

He looked around for Jimmy but couldn’t see him, so he started yelling his name. The plane was going vertical now, submerged to the star emblem on the rear fuselage. Amazingly the landing lights were still on underwater, showing the silhouette of the sinking plane against green water. He thrashed around the tail, shouting for Jimmy, but still couldn’t find him. For the briefest instant, he thought he saw Jimmy’s waving arm silhouetted against the green glow under the plane. Shit! He was still in his gunner’s compartment. As Mick jackknifed to go get him, the landing lights winked out and the plane slid past him into the depths of the Philippine Sea, the portside horizontal stabilizer pushing him roughly out of the way. When he popped back up to the surface, defeated by his inflated Mae West, the ship’s boat was alongside and several hands were reaching for him. He forced himself to stop fighting and let them pull him into the bobbing whaleboat.

Damn, he thought. Damn, damn, damn!

“What’s that, Lieutenant?” a young ensign in a bulky kapok life jacket shouted at him over the noise of the boat’s engine. “You okay? You hurt anywhere?”

“Not yet,” Mick murmured. “Just my right hand. And my gunner.”

He let them position him in the back of the boat. Somebody threw a damp blanket over his shoulders. He wanted to ask them to look around for Jimmy, but he knew that was pointless now. There were white searchlights everywhere around the scene of the crash, and the gray steel sides of the destroyer were already closer. If Jimmy had been on the surface, they’d have seen him.

Mick closed his eyes against sudden tears. He wasn’t the Lone Ranger. He was fucking Jonah himself. Just like on the medevac plane.

One day later Mick sat down with the squadron’s informal accident board and debriefed both his part in the strike and the subsequent ditching. The board consisted of three officers, Bombing Eight’s XO and two lieutenant commanders from the Enterprise’s other bombing squadron. A yeoman sat at one end of the table, taking notes. Commander Blake and the ship’s assistant air boss were in the room, but they were there strictly as observers.

When Mick was finished, the board members had some questions about why he had lost control during the final moments of his landing and what, in his opinion, had happened to his gunner. Mick knew that the purpose of the board was to gather the facts while they were still fresh in everyone’s mind, not to apportion blame for knocking his tail hook off and losing his gunner in the course of the ditching. He described how the star shell had wiped out his night vision and then disappeared right when he needed it most. Then he recounted the ditching.

“Was Petty Officer Sykes injured during the strike operations?”

“No, sir. We were both fine. We went through the ditching checklist together on the way back. I didn’t like the first pass, so I went around to make sure we went in nearer that tin can. He was braced, vest on, and reported ready for impact.”

“Any idea what happened?”

“We hit pretty hard, despite my best efforts, and the plane flipped. Once the water came in, I lost comms with Sykes. I did what we were trained to do in the Dunker. Once on the surface I swam around the tail looking for him.” He hesitated.

“Yes?”

“Well, the landing lights were still on as the plane went down. I think I saw his arm sticking out of the gunner’s compartment as the plane sank. I’m not positive. She went down pretty quick, and then the lights went out. I got about a one-second look.”

The board members looked at each other, but no one commented.

“I tried to go down and get him, but my own life vest prevented it. Then the rescue boat was there and they were hauling me in.”

“So he may have been trapped in the aircraft?”

Mick sighed. “It’s possible, sir. Or he may have been unconscious or even dead, and it was his vest that was lifting him partway out of the gunner’s compartment.”

The XO asked him some more questions about his control settings at the time of impact and then asked the other members if they had anything else. Neither of them did. The XO looked up over Mick’s shoulder, nodded fractionally, and then had one more item for Mick.

“You broke off during your dive on that carrier. In your after-action report you said you didn’t think she was worth another bomb because she was already burning. Then you stated you rolled in on what you described as a heavy cruiser and hit her, causing that ship to explode and disappear. Is that all correct?”

“Yes, sir.” Mick’s right hand had begun to hurt again. He realized he was clenching his fists at the questions.

“We can’t document that, of course, because no one else saw it happen.”

“I dove on the explosion plume and fired my forward guns, trying to get it on the gun camera. But of course…”

“Yes, that film was lost with the plane. Okay: Why didn’t you join up on the rest of the formation when they headed west?”

“I lost track of them in the dive. By the time I pulled up, everyone else was gone. The sky was full of flak bursts, there were ships going everywhere, and it took me some time to avoid flak and get back up to safe altitude because I still had that thousand-pounder hanging.”

“Your radio working?”

“Yes, sir, but I was busy. The Japs weren’t happy that their carrier was burning.”

“And when you got clear?’

“I looked around for another target.”

“Did you try to communicate with the skipper while you were looking?”

“Uh, negative, sir. I figured they’d gone after another target and that by the time I rejoined, the action would be over.” Even as he said it, Mick knew his excuse sounded pretty lame.

“Oka-a-a-y,” the XO said. “And would the fact that you remained behind in the area of the carrier attack account for your having a relatively good fuel reserve when everyone came back?”

Mick flinched. That hurt. “Yes, sir, probably,” he admitted finally. “After I dropped my bomb, I went back to altitude and then looked around for a friendly gaggle. But I didn’t go anywhere; I just orbited high enough to stay out of the flak.”

“And your radio was working, right?”

He keeps saying that, Mick thought. He knew what the XO was implying. “Yes, sir. I could hear the chatter of an attack going on, but since I wasn’t there, it didn’t seem right for me to break into that looking for a steer.”

“So you orbited, and then?”

“Saw eastbound contrails, checked in, and joined up.”

“Was the cruiser you hit still burning at that point?”

“She was gone, XO,” Mick said. “I believe that bomb got into a magazine. She disappeared in one really big blast, and when the smoke cleared, there wasn’t anything down there. Not even any Jap tin cans.”

Mick heard a door open and close softly behind him but didn’t turn around.

“Well, okay, Mick, thank you. Let me remind you that this is an informal proceeding, not a court-martial or a pretrial hearing or anything like that. We have your written report, plus the report of other pilots, and we’ve interviewed the PriFly people and the LSOs on what happened out on the flight deck. Assuming you’ve recovered physically from your ditching, you will resume your normal duties.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“That is all.”

When Mick got up to leave, he saw that the skipper was no longer in the room.

A week later Mick received orders to join Composite Squadron Eleven, based on an escort carrier. The squadron exec knocked on his stateroom door and asked if he could have a minute. He told Mick that one of the escort destroyers, the Evans, was being detached the next day to join the Seventh Fleet, which was assembling to support MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippines. Mick would ride the Evans down to the area of Leyte Gulf and there transfer aboard the escort carrier Madison Bay.

“I’m being shit-canned, right, XO?” Mick asked, pretty much knowing the answer to his question.

“Um, not exactly,” the XO said. “There’s been a fleetwide draft for pilots to beef up the light carrier forces. They needed two bomber guys, and we and one other squadron got tagged to give up one each.”

“Unh-hunh.”

“Let me put it this way, Mick. Ordinarily the skipper would be throwing a temper tantrum in CAG’s office for having to cough up an experienced fleet pilot.”

“But this time, he just signed off and had another cup of coffee.”

“They requested you by name, Mick.”

“Sure they did.”

“The air boss weighed in, I think.”

“Ah. And losing my gunner, that didn’t help.”

The XO was silent for a moment. “About a quarter of the pilots who ditched that night were not recovered. We all know what happens when you go from a hundred twenty knots to zero in ten feet. If you’re not sitting just right, you break your neck. That’s most likely what happened to Gunner Sykes. So, no, that wasn’t it.”

“Too much Lone Ranger, maybe?”

“Maybe. Tell me this: Would you want you as your wingman?”

Mick had to think about that one. From a fighting competence point of view, hell, yes — but as a team player? “Wingman is fighter stuff, XO,” he said.

The exec just looked at him. Mick sighed and finally nodded.

“Anyway,” the XO said, “Evans will be alongside to refuel tomorrow morning sometime. You’ll highline over then. Ship’s bitch will have your paperwork ready by zero eight hundred tomorrow.”

Mick nodded. “Thanks for telling me in person, XO. Should I bother with departure calls on the CO and CAG?”

“Do as you please, Mick.” He closed the door behind him.

“Don’t I always?” Mick said to the closed door. The Carrier Air Group commander doesn’t know me, Mick thought. The skipper did, though, so no departure calls definitely meant he was being fired. He couldn’t win for losing.