Pacific Glory

TWO

Lieutenant Mick McCarty looked down at the Japanese Air Fleet with unalloyed joy. Talk about the world’s supply of fat targets. They’d flown out almost two hundred miles from the Yorktown and found absolutely nothing. One of the other air groups had already turned around, defeated. Their skipper, however, followed offensive doctrine: Start an expanding square search. That had led them to a lone Japanese destroyer, fifteen thousand feet below, who was etching a sharp white wake in the blue Pacific that pointed like an arrow back to the Jap carrier task force she was rejoining. They followed that unwitting Judas and found the carriers with about ten minutes of fuel to spare.

Two ugly gray flattops below were already executing their own doctrine: When Jap capital ships came under air attack, they put the rudder over and made a continuous wide turn that made it next to impossible for torpedo bombers to line up for an attack. It was also harder for dive bombers to settle into a stable powered descent — but not impossible, Mick thought, and the Dauntless dive bomber was nothing if not a stable diver.

The skipper divided the formation, one for each visible carrier. He went first, rolling onto his back and then pulling through to the vertical, flaps split. Mick was second man in the V and rolled in right after him. He still remembered asking his instructor at flight school why in the hell they had to go upside down to make a dive-bombing attack. Why not just push the nose over? The instructor had said okay, let’s try that. The engine quit thirty seconds later. Nose over, you pull negative g’s, which causes the fuel flow from a gravity-feed system to stop, along with the engine. Got it? Got it.

It was a beautiful sight, he thought as his excitement rose and the slipstream began its rising wail. The skipper was just a dot below him that became a Dauntless silhouette as he pulled his SBD out of its dive and shot across the ship’s stubby, three-tiered bow. A moment later a huge whitewater column rose right alongside the squirming carrier.

A miss, Mick thought, but probably good for some hull damage and some badly frightened engineers down in their boiler rooms.

Mick steadied his bomb-heavy SBD, gripping the stick harder than he needed to, judging the strain on the airframe by the pitch of the airstream. Lead him, lead him, he thought, aiming his bombsight at the point of the arrow-shaped white lines on the carrier’s flight deck, bending the Dauntless ever so slightly to match the carrier’s turning circle.

Watch your altimeter. He flicked his eyes down to the instrument panel. The altimeter was unwinding so fast he could only see the hour hand. Twelve thousand.

Lead her.

Ten thousand.

More lead.

Eight thousand. Six thousand. Steady. Keep bending into her turn.

Four.

Three. Details of the planes on the target’s deck were much clearer now, with little dots scattering all over like ants as the American dive bombers dropped down on them and the deck crews ran for cover.

No cover today, sunshine, he thought. Now.

The Dauntless bucked in satisfaction as the one-thousand-pound bomb left its hooks. He pulled back hard on the stick, having only about twenty-five hundred feet of altitude left in which to get flat. Altitude, as the instructors used to say, is your ultimate friend.

Got that right, he thought, as his eyeballs began to sag with the g’s.

He was dimly aware of flak thudding around him, but he had no time to do anything but will his barge to get flat and away from all this noise. He felt his chin strap bite into his chest as the g’s mounted and his head gained weight. Even his earphones were drooping off his ears.

“Go, Beast!” someone called over the radio. “You nailed his ass. Lookit it burn. Whooo-wee!”

“Cut the chatter,” came the skipper’s ragged voice. “Work him over. Maintain your interval. Kill him, don’t just hurt him.”

Through increasingly bloodshot eyes Mick finally saw the lighter blue of the sky instead of the deadly dark blue of the ocean lowering into his view and eased off a tiny bit on the stick. As the g-forces relented he was able to turn his head and look back at his carrier.

His carrier.

A fiery bolus of burning gasoline obscured the middle of the carrier where his bomb had hit. As he was looking, there was another big explosion, deep in her guts, sending more incandescent clouds of fire belching out her sides from down on the hangar deck. The carrier’s escorts were going every which way, trying to get away from the dive bombers, unaware that not one of the diving planes was interested in anything except that mortally wounded flattop.

We caught them pants-down, Mick thought, probably right in the middle of a launch cycle. Live bombs on the flight deck, avgas hoses everywhere, planes parked all over the flight deck, and all of it just dying to burn.

He leveled off, unconsciously lifting his toes as he realized he was only about twenty feet above the sea. He turned upward to regain some altitude and find the rendezvous point. He’d only carried the one bomb, so now the mission was to get his crate home in one piece without attracting any itinerant Zeros in the process. He turned back east, looking for his mates.

His backseat gunner came up on intercom and congratulated Mick for the direct hit. He looked back and saw that the carrier, his carrier, was now aflame from one end to the other and no longer making much way through the water. In the distance another huge column of black smoke was unfolding into the towering white cumulonimbus clouds, which hopefully meant that the other squadron had taken out the second flattop.

He punched the instrument panel in pure glee. I got a carrier! Hell’s bells, he thought, this was better than the winning TD at his senior year Army-Navy game. Word at the morning briefing was that these were the flattops that had come to Pearl Harbor. Revenge was sweet, super sweet. It was the best day of his life, and supposedly there were more carriers out there. With any luck, they could get back to the Yorktown, rearm, and come back to do it all again before the other two American carriers, Enterprise and Hornet, even got into the game.

There was lots of excited chatter on the radio, and then he recognized some call signs from the Enterprise squadrons. Apparently they’d found a third carrier about twenty miles away and reduced her to a floating volcano. The excitement really wore off when the skipper began calling for fuel-state reports from his various bombers. Mick glanced down at his own fuel gauges, blinked, and looked again. He reached out with a gloved finger and tapped both gauges, hoping at least one of them would move, if only just a little. He called the skipper and reported he was below bingo fuel. That got the tactical net quiet, because it meant Mick could not make it back to the carrier. He was going to have to ditch.

The skipper told him to climb gently to eighteen thousand feet and then go to max conserve. Mick felt a little better when seven other planes were given similar instructions. Assuming they got back to the fleet they’d theoretically have enough altitude to glide, if they had to, to get within range of the carrier’s escort destroyers. After that, all they had to do was survive the ditching. He briefed his gunner that they might be going to a swim call.

Damn, he thought. This’ll take all the fun right out of it.

With the help of an unexpected tail wind, the gaggle of seven gaspers made it back to their carriers. Mick shifted to the land-launch frequency in time to hear the air boss polling each of the starving seven as to their fuel state. The first two pilots reported that it was no-go for an approach. They were directed to find a tin can and ditch alongside. Number three thought he had enough to make a straight-in approach, but when questioned, he said he wasn’t sure. He, too, was told to pick out a destroyer and ditch.

Mick knew that the air boss, a tough, forty-five-year-old commander named Hugo Oxerhaus, wanted no part of a fatal stall right over the round-down followed by a fiery crash on deck. On the other hand, none of the carriers could afford to lose aircraft, especially with the Jap carrier fleet, or what was left of it, only a couple of hundred miles to the west. Besides, he could not abide the thought of ending such a day with a deliberate crash into the sea.

He studied his gauges as he began to let down, then set up switches to transfer everything still left in the wing tanks to the center tank. Might as well have one tank I can count on, he reasoned; the fuel tank gauges became unreliable below 5 percent. He heard his own call sign on the radio and rogered up.

“Request state,” the PriFly talker asked.

“Between five and ten percent,” Mick lied. He really did not want to ditch.

“Confirm you can complete an approach.” That was Boss Oxerhaus himself talking.

“Get me straight in,” Mick said. “If they wave me, I’ll have to ditch it.”

“You are cleared to the pattern for one approach,” the air boss said. “You bolter, no going around, got it?”

“Roger, out.”

Mick began his descent. He heard the fuel transfer pump whine angrily as it lost suction and shut it down. The center tank read 5 percent, barely, which meant that he really had no idea how much fuel he had left.

He waited until the last minute to configure the SBD for landing, then executed the Holy Trinity: Hook down. Flaps down. Wheels down.

The broad white wake of the carrier began to narrow as he made his approach. He could see the landing signal officer on his platform, arms out, green paddles fluttering in the stiff wind. The engine sounded fine as he set her up in the groove. The winds were perfect as he came over the round-down. He cut the power when Paddles gave him the chop signal. He held his breath as he felt the hook screeching down the deck, and then came the welcome, neck-wrenching yank of an arresting wire. He heard the gunner whoop with joy. He automatically advanced the throttle to full power in case the hook skipped all the wires or disengaged the one he’d caught and he had to bolter, or fly back off the bird farm.

The engine died in his hand.

The plane shuddered to a stop, its propeller windmilling even as the deck crew was signaling him to taxi clear of the landing zone.

He couldn’t do it. The hydraulics died with the engine. He couldn’t even raise the tail hook.

There was frantic shouting over the topside speakers, and then a crowd of flight deck crewmen swarmed the plane, manually disengaged the tail hook, and physically pushed the SBD over to one side of the centerline. Fifteen seconds later, another fuel-starved SBD swooped aboard.

Mick took off his flight helmet, wiped his sweat-soaked face, and released the canopy. He looked up. The first face in view was one of the landing signal officers, his paddles stuck under his armpit. He did not look pleased.

“Boss wants to see you in PriFly, Lieutenant,” he announced. “Now would be nice.”

Ten minutes later Mick was standing tall in the primary flight control tower, which was a glassed-in box on the island, overhanging the flight deck. His squadron commander, Lieutenant Commander “Dagger” Watson, was with him. They were both still in their flight suits from the carrier raids, their faces red with sweat and their hair matted down like wet moss by their leather helmets. Watson had told Mick to keep his mouth shut and let him do all the talking, assuming they got a chance to say anything.

Commander Oxerhaus was sitting in his thronelike chair, from which he could oversee the entire flight deck. He launched immediately into one of his by now familiar tirades, getting louder and redder in the face each moment: Lieutenant McCarty, known to the entire world as the dumbest aviator and biggest asshole who ever existed, had put the whole air group at risk with a reckless dead-stick landing on the flight deck in the middle of a desperately difficult recovery situation, with fuel-starved aircraft still behind him. He had disobeyed standing orders, obviously lied about his fuel state, and all because he was a little girl who didn’t want to muss her hairdo by ditching on a perfectly calm sea within sight of a rescue destroyer, and on and on. When he finally paused for breath, Mick’s CO got in a word.

“For what it’s worth, Boss,” he said, “Mick here planted a thousand-pounder right in a Jap fleet carrier’s forward elevator today. That should count for something, I think.”

“That’s just great,” Commander Oxerhaus snarled. “As I understand it, that’s his fucking job. It’s good to hear that once in his short naval career he managed to do his fucking job. Truth is, I don’t care what happens to a Jap carrier. I care about my flight deck, my flight deck crews, and maintaining some semblance of military discipline in the deck operations of this carrier. I’m taking this up with the skipper as soon as this cycle completes, and I’ll be demanding this asshole’s wings, got it? Now get out of here before I lose my temper.”

Watson nudged Mick, and they left the control tower. They went down several ladders until they reached the flight deck, where Watson stopped in the hatchway leading to the deck, took off his leather helmet, and scratched his itchy, wet scalp as the warm Pacific air mixed with engine exhaust streamed past them into the bowels of the ship.

“Sorry, Skipper,” Mick said. “I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Well, the way I see it, I brought my barge home. Last I heard, we needed every plane we can keep these days. I did at least help to destroy a Jap bird farm. Out of thirty-eight guys, only three managed to hit that bastard. Way I see it, no harm, no foul.”

“Mick, what if you had crashed on deck? Oxerhaus is right: Everybody behind you would be in the drink, which means we’d have lost four planes instead of just one. You took a really big chance. Okay, it worked out, this time, but the potential consequences just don’t balance out.”

Mick shook his head. “Skipper! We got three Jap carriers today. The barge drivers. The SBD squadrons. Three fucking carriers. C’mon!”

“We had help, Mick.”

“Who, the torpedo guys? I never saw any torpedo guys.”

“That’s because they’d all been shot down by the time we got there. Because they arrived first, all the Zeros were down on the deck, shooting fish in a barrel. The torpeckers gave us a free shot. Get the picture?”

Mick hadn’t heard that. “All of ’em?”

“All of them. They died so we could get a free ride. So don’t think you single-handedly did anything today, except that landing.”

“Well, shit, Skipper, I did hit the bastard. And from what I saw, I killed him.”

“The word ‘we’ even in your lexicon, Mick? I was there, too, remember?”

“Yes, sir, of course you were. But I’m sorry. This is bullshit. The plane’s back, I’m back, three Jap fleet carriers are toast, and everybody’s mad at me?”

The skipper studied his flight boots for a moment. “This isn’t the first crazy shit you’ve done, Mick. Some of these senior guys, they keep score, you know?”

Mick had no answer for that. The truth was hard to rebut.

“I hafta say, Skipper,” he said finally, “this is gonna be a day to remember. It’s wartime. Everybody takes chances when the chips are down. Hell, guys crack it up on deck on a good day for no obvious reason. I got us a carrier, for Chrissakes!”

“That’s not necessarily how the bosses will see it, Mick.”

“That’s because the bosses’re all too damned old, and got where they are after thirty years of peacetime.”

“We didn’t start this one, Mick, remember? The bosses are the best we have on deck. Admiral Spruance? He’s not even an aviator, but he got three Jap carriers today.”

“He didn’t get any carriers,” Mick said. “Guys like you and me, we got three carriers.”

“Like the air boss said, Mick — that’s your job. Spruance put you out there, and you did good.”

Mick gave up. “Screw it. I need a toddy.”

“Go easy on that stuff, Mick,” Watson said. “This isn’t over. You’ll have to see the captain sometime later today.”

“Aye, aye, Skipper,” Mick said, throwing up his hands in frustration. He headed for the ready room. When he got there, the rest of the bombing squadron pilots were whooping it up after the big strikes. Hands were waving, the tally of Jap planes shot down was growing by the minute, and the lies were expanding to fit their enthusiasm. Someone saw Mick come in, and they all started razzing him for the dead-stick landing, but he knew they were doing it with unfettered admiration. One of his squadron-mates jumped up on the briefing table, stood on one leg like a crane, and hopped across the table with his arms spread out, weaving from side to side, coughing like a sputtering engine and then squatting down on the table and letting out one truly noisy fart.

Everyone roared. Mick grinned, but he still wanted that toddy.

Drinking officially was not permitted on Navy ships, but an unofficial exception had long been in place for carrier pilots, as long as they kept it discreet. Mick retrieved his coffee mug from the board, unearthed the stash, and poured himself a round shot. The rest of the guys were picking on someone else by now, led by the squadron XO. Skipper Watson hadn’t come down from topside yet, so Mick decided he should do a team sneak-away before the skipper got back.

The bourbon washed his tailbone in its familiar warmth. He wanted another but thought better of it. Save it for after the carrier’s captain chewed his ass for the landing. The Yorktown’s skipper was a known war-fighter, though, and Mick figured he would humor the choleric Oxerhaus and then send Mick below with a stern warning and a wink. They needed pilots far too badly to take anyone’s wings, especially when the pilot involved in this little stunt had managed to pull it off and hit a carrier. He rinsed out the mug and put it back on the board, trying not to notice the mugs that were hanging upside down, denoting the guys who hadn’t made it back yet.

As he walked back to his stateroom forward of the ready room, he felt the carrier lean into a wide turn. There was the usual clanging and banging going on topside as the flight deck crews respotted the air group, elevatored any bent birds down to the hangar deck, and got ready to launch the CAP — the combat air patrol. As best he knew, no one had yet located the fourth Jap carrier, which could mean trouble later.

His flight suit stank of sweat, ozone, and hydraulic oil in equal proportions. He really wanted a shower but chose instead to switch to red light in the stateroom and just flop into his rack. His roommate hadn’t come back yet, but he was listed as ditched and recovered on the status board. They’d get him back aboard as soon as the rescuing destroyer could get alongside Yorktown for a highline transfer.

As he lay back he could hear the first of the CAP fighters taking off, its engine howling at full military power as it roared down the wooden deck. Then another. Go get ’em, tigers. Then he fell asleep.

The general alarm woke him a minute later, or at least it seemed like a just minute. He looked at his watch and saw that he’d been down for almost an hour. He could hear boots running outside in the passageway as the ship’s company ran for their GQ stations, urged on by the bong-bong-bong of the GQ alarm. He lay back in his rack. Pilots were supercargo when the ship went to GQ; they either mustered in their squadron ready room or stayed in their own rooms, preferably out of the way, while the fighter-biters launched to engage incoming bandits and the ship’s gun crews fought off any bogeys that got through the CAP screen. Then the captain came on the 1MC, the ship’s announcing system.

“All hands, this is the captain. Condition Red. Radar has many bogeys inbound. Our CAP is up and will engage, but stay alert. Air department strike down all topside planes and ordnance, and purge all avgas fuel lines. Engineering, double-check condition Zebra; Enterprise CAP reports torpedo planes in this strike. That is all.”

Torpedo planes, Mick thought. That’s all? That’s enough. He’d seen what Jap torpedoes could do to battleships in Pearl Harbor. He felt Yorktown begin to tremble as they brought the speed up to flank and began a sinuous weave. A weave won’t do it, guys, he thought. The Japs had it right: Start a circle and stay in it; a bomber might get through, but torpedo planes had a hell of time with those circles.

The ventilation went off, and immediately the tiny stateroom began to heat up. Mick’s room was on the starboard side. Two of the ship’s five-inch antiaircraft mounts were about a hundred feet from his room. He considered going to the ready room, which was air-conditioned, but remembered the rule: Once GQ sounds, stay put. Plus, if some pilots stayed in their rooms, they wouldn’t lose an entire squadron if the ready room took a direct hit.

The sound-powered admin phone squeaked.

“Lieutenant McCarty,” he said. “Solo.”

“Okay,” said the squadron admin officer. “Stay put.”

There’s an echo in here, he thought. “Roger dodger.”

He lay back on his rack and waited. It wasn’t long before he heard the familiar double thump of the escorting destroyers’ guns going off, joined a minute later by the louder booms of the light cruisers. When the bogeys penetrated the combat air patrol, the carrier’s screening ships closed in a circle around the bird farm to make the Japs work for it. Now that the escorts were lighting up the sky, Mick knew that some of the enemy planes must have made it through. At a certain point, pursuing fighters had to break off any pursuits to avoid flying into the curtain of ack-ack coming up from the screening ships.

He sighed, got up out of his rack, and strapped on his breathing apparatus, steel helmet, and life jacket. The sweat began to pour out of him with all that gear on. He opened the door and looked out into the passageway, which was empty. There were no watertight doors in either direction: If you saw water in this passageway, the carrier had already sunk. He stepped back into his room, latching the door open to get some more air.

Then Yorktown’s own five-inchers joined the shooting, rattling the furniture and light fixtures all around him each time they went off. The noise from the guns topside got louder as the massed batteries of forty-millimeter guns joined in. He thought he heard the whine of an aircraft engine coming in and then over the flight deck above, but there was no bomb. Then he heard another one, same deal, lots of close-in gunfire from the antiaircraft guns massed along the starboard catwalks, and that rising-pitch scream of an engine overspeeding, followed by a thumping boom somewhere back aft that shook the whole ship.

Bastard got us, he thought, but Yorktown seemed to shake it off, and the guns kept firing. The concussions were shaking the overhead light fixtures, and there was a fine mist of dust raining down from the cable bundles running through the stateroom’s overhead. He heard a siren down in the hangar deck but didn’t know what that meant. He realized he didn’t know much about the carrier herself, other than how to get a plane on and off the flight deck. He sat back down on his rack, still sweating profusely and now unable to lie down with all his survival gear on. It felt weird to be sitting in his stateroom while an intensifying air-defense battle raged one deck above him.

He suddenly found himself upside down on the deck, his ears ringing from a really big explosion. When he cleared his head, he sensed the room filling with smoke. He couldn’t see, then realized his helmet had slipped down over his face. He struggled to get up, but there was something wrong with the deck — it was curved up like the hump in a rug, and the aft bulkhead of the stateroom was flattened down over his shoulder. He tried to think, but his brain was still fuzzy from the shock. All he could do was lie there, trying to gather his wits.

“Trapped,” he said out loud, and between the rising heat and the smoke, he knew he was going to cook in there unless he did something productive soon.

He tried to move, but the bulky life jacket was caught on something. Then he heard a roar of steam out in the passageway.

That’s not right, he thought. The boilers are a couple hundred feet away. The temperature in the room began to soar. What air there was, was beginning to suffocate him.

Gotta move, gotta move.

First, gotta breathe.

He slipped the breathing apparatus face mask up over his face and pulled the lanyard. There was a brief puff of odorless smoke, and then clear oxygen streamed into the mask.

Okay, he thought. Get out of this kapok, and then get the hell out of this area.

Squirming like an insect shedding its cocoon, he pulled himself forward toward the door, untying the strings on his life jacket. The door itself was now out in the passageway somewhere, and the door frame was a crazy trapezoid of deformed metal. Deafened by the roar of a steam leak back down the passageway, he felt another bomb hit, starboard side and deep. These must be Vals, he thought. That’s armor-piercing stuff.

He finally got himself free of the life jacket and made it out the doorway. The passageway was getting dark, with only a few battle lanterns throwing yellowish light here and there. He looked up. There was smoke boiling along the overhead like a giant snake seeking a bolt-hole. The roar of escaping steam was louder out in the passageway, but now it sounded like it was coming from way back aft, behind the island. The smoke was filling the passageway in earnest, expanding down from the overhead toward the asphalt-tile deck, and the heat was getting worse, much worse. The battle lanterns looked like evil yellow eyes, opening and closing as the heavy black smoke searched for a way out.

Right or left? That was the question.

There was hell to pay back aft, steam, smoke, probably a big fire and structural damage. Forward? There was one hatch leading topside at the forward end of this passageway, but there seemed to be an awful lot of stuff heaped between him and it.

Another booming blast sounded off back aft, and this time a bolus of fire came whipping up the passageway. He got as flat as he could and covered his head and face mask with his arms as the flame front shot over him, singeing the hair off the back of his arms and head. Then it was gone. He looked over his shoulder. The smoke back aft had a deadly red glow to it.

Forward it is, he decided.

It was hard. He couldn’t stand up because of that maelstrom of hot smoke, coiling and writhing only inches above his head. Each time he got to a knee-knocker he literally had to throw himself over the frame, because by now there was only about twelve inches of air left down low. Just like football practice, he thought, as he wormed his way forward on his elbows and knees.

He finally reached the ladder vestibule leading up to the flight deck. Where the hell was everybody? he wondered. Were the rest of the guys trapped in the ready rooms back aft?

He reached up through the murk for the hatch handle, half expecting it to be jammed, but it wasn’t. He rolled over on his back to give himself some leverage and pushed up on the handle, then got to his knees to push it all the way open.

Big mistake.

The moment the hatch cracked off its coaming, the overpressure in the passageway slammed it back against the bulkhead, taking Mick with it before he could let go of the operating handle. His battle helmet came off, and his right arm jammed in the treads of the ladder leading topside. The smoke came at the new airway like an express train, bringing with it enough heat to scorch his flight suit and deform the face mask.

He heard a whumping at the top of the ladder and looked up through his rapidly fogging mask. The hot smoke column, filled with particles of unburned fuel, had found fresh air. Now it had ignited, creating a Roman candle up at the top of the ladder. Mick cringed at the bottom of the ladder, suddenly aware that it was getting progressively harder to get a breath of oxygen from his canister. How much time did he have left? He’d forgotten to set the timer.

Can’t go up the ladder, not into that.

Can’t go back to my stateroom.

Can’t get my arm out of this ladder.

“Oh, shit,” he mumbled.

He felt his mind wandering. He realized he’d stopped perspiring, and that wasn’t good, not in all this heat. His breathing apparatus made him feel like he was sucking on a bent straw. He began yanking on his arm to free himself from the ladder.

Hot. So goddamned hot.

Then he was free. So free that he was floating in midair and then crashing down again onto the steel deck of the vestibule. The ladder’s pins held, but it had come loose anyway because the pin brackets themselves had been broken by an enormous explosion deep down below.

Torpedo.

This time the big ship lurched sideways, and then a second torpedo delivered a punishing belt of energy to the hull that Mick felt in his own guts and knees.

Then he was underwater as the explosion plume from the first torpedo collapsed over the flight deck, dumping thousands of gallons of water down the hatch, washing him clean out of the vestibule and swirling like a drunken spider along the passageway until a knee-knocker stopped him short with an ugly sucker punch to the gut.

He tried to catch his breath, but almost nothing was coming from the canister. He looked up: The Roman candle was out. He realized he only had a minute. He scrambled like a crab along the deck, sloshing through warm saltwater, then scrambled up the ladder and finally into the vestibule, where he spilled out onto the flight deck like a sack of potatoes. An instant later, the Roman candle lit back off, belching a plume of fire thirty feet into the air from the hatch. He found himself rolling because the flight deck was no longer level — the big ship was developing a distinct port list. He rolled into the tie-down chains of a parked aircraft, ten feet from the portside catwalks.

He wiped the mask off his face and breathed in honest seagoing air, even though it was laced with gun smoke from the nearby catwalk AA batteries, which were still blasting away. He wiped his stinging eyes and looked out to sea. Here came yet another torpedo bomber. With his left leg still entangled in the tie-down, he could only watch in fascination as the gunners’ tracers converged on the black plane a few thousand feet off the port side, then cheered when it exploded in a white-hot fireball as the twenty-millimeters found the torpedo warhead slung under its belly. The only surviving fragment of the airplane, the radial engine with its spinning propeller still attached, came directly down at the ship and then clattered onto the flight deck like a saw blade fifteen feet from where he lay. The spinning prop dug big chunks of wood out of the deck, one of which whacked him in the arm before the engine cartwheeled its way right over the far side.

Mick lay back, laughing hysterically, and that’s how one of the flight deck fire parties found him, knees-up under a badly riddled fighter, lying in a soaked, scorched ball, still laughing about that lone propeller’s last fling.

“Crazy fucking aviator,” one of the damage control team guys muttered as they scooped him into a Stokes litter. The masts of a cruiser became visible above the canting flight deck as she came alongside to begin taking off the wounded.