Pacific Glory

FIVE

By early November, Mick had settled into the Cactus Air Force. They bombed, strafed, dodged friendly artillery shells whizzing through their assigned airspace, missed things and hit things. It was obvious from the radio that the ground troops were very happy that they were there. It was, Mick discovered, more fun than fleet work, and when they finally quit at sundown, he always felt like he’d done some good work for Jesus, as the major irreverently put it.

As his section came in for a landing one evening, later than usual, he noticed a couple of Seabee dozers working out on the narrow beach. One was dragging its blade backward, smoothing down the sand its treads were packing. The other was pushing over palm trees, dropping them onto the sand strip. When they all rendezvoused in the O-club tent, Mick asked the major about the dozers.

“As you saw, there ain’t really a beach here,” he said. “Not like back in the World, anyway. So they’ll tear up a fifty-foot-wide strip of palm trees parallel to the water, level it, smooth it all out, and then lay the dead trees back out on the sand. That way, when Washing Machine Charlie comes for his nightly look-see, he don’t see a landing strip. He sees a buncha dead trees. But if he could look closer, he’d see that each tree has a wire attached to it. One dozer can run the beach after dark and pull every one of those things out the way. Tomorrow evening, see me after chow, and we’ll go take a pasear down there.”

Oh-oh, Mick thought. He’d been hoping the major had forgotten about his crackpot idea of going up at night. He’d done night hops at P-cola during training; they all did, but it was tacitly acknowledged that only specially trained pilots would do night ops, and they would be fighters, not bombers. Dive bombers over water were strictly visual weapons. Bombers over water at night had no visual reference to tell them when to pull out of a dive, and all that light the major had joked about would be at the airfield and not out in the sound.

Supper was a metal tray of Spam chili served over a glop of sticky rice, captured from the Japs when the Marines’ own food supplies had run out. When Mick started to weep and wheeze from the chili heat, the O-club mess sergeant brought him some thick slices of bread and a quart of beer.

“Eat it all, boys and girls,” the sergeant said. “This is the last meat night unless we get us a transport sometime soon.”

Mick left the O-club tent an hour later, still trying to find his voice over the lingering fire of the chili. Thinking of Spam as meat required a certain suspension of disbelief, but it had actually tasted pretty good as soon as the fire overwhelmed his taste buds. The S-2—the intelligence officer — had provided the pilots with some special Spam cans to drop over the jungle. Spam on each end and a grenade with the pin pulled stuffed in the middle. The word was out that the Japs were starving, and the Marines thought it only fair to share.

Some of the guys had stayed to drink, but Mick was tired and didn’t want another hangover. Because of the late hour, there were, of course, no lights along the airfield or anywhere else within the American perimeter. He knew roughly where his tent was back in the margins of the airfield, but he’d never tried it on such a dark night. He fished out his red-lens flashlight to find his way to his hardstand tent. A figure with a rifle appeared out of the dark.

“Whoa, there, Nelly,” the Marine said softly. “Douse that fuckin’ light.”

Mick stopped and turned off the flashlight. “How do I find my way back to my tent, then?” he asked.

“You get one of us to take you, Lieutenant,” the man said, shining his own red flashlight on Mick’s flight suit for just an instant before switching it off. “Otherwise, a sniper will put one through your head.”

“They that close?”

“Oh, yeah. They send out onesies and twosies after dark, put ’em in trees out there in the jungle with a seven-seven. You show a light, you’ll git you a toe tag. Follow me, sir.”

Mick obeyed the unknown Marine, grateful for the help. It fascinated him how loosey-goosey things were here at Henderson Field as compared to the carrier Navy, and yet how well the Marines had wired their hard-won base to take care of important business.

The sentry left him at his tent, reminding him to show no lights and to make sure he knew the way to his bunker. Mick knew where the bunker was in relation to his tent, but he’d never actually gone down into it. By then he could see reasonably well using the meager ambient starlight, so he walked the thirty yards from the tent cluster to the bunker, which was basically a dozer-scrape in the ground protected by palm-tree logs and sandbags. He groped his way down the crude steps, turned right and then left through the direct-fire baffle, and turned on his flashlight. The bunker was twenty feet long, twelve wide, and some ten feet below the surface. There were three benches made of planks and ammo boxes shaped in a U around the sides of the bunker. The overhead, which was made of steel shipping pallets, was supported by palm-tree trunks spaced every three feet across the wet dirt floor. The air was even hotter and more oppressive than topside and smelled faintly of eau de latrine. There was an inch of muddy water on the floor, and a rodent of some kind scuttled away when he turned on his flashlight.

He backed up the sandbag steps and went to his tent, where he checked his cot for insects and snakes with the dim red light, arranged the mosquito netting, and dropped onto the cot with an audible sigh. He knew the Marines out in the bush had no such luxuries as a net and a cot, and he wondered how they stood the constant insect assault. He left both tent flaps open to get some air, although it didn’t seem to make much difference. He felt for the M-1 carbine under his cot and lifted it to lie next to him. He remembered the Marine gunnery sergeant during plebe summer indoctrination grasping a rifle in one hand and his crotch in the other while reciting: This is my rifle, this is my gun. One is for killing, the other’s for fun. He made sure it was chambered and then set the safety.

He exhaled forcefully, sending forth a cloud of garlic and hot sauce. He thought he could hear small insects falling to the ground outside the net. Damned good chili, even though he thought he could feel the Spam moving around a little. Spam did that.

The next day passed pretty much like every other day at Cactus. Evening meal had been so-called hand-grenade stew on more Jap rice. It was made by taking all the different kinds of canned C-rations, blending them together, and pronouncing it stew. The troops had even more interesting names for it, and the hot sauce was in great demand. Afterward, Mick started back to his tent but then remembered that the major wanted to see him. He went to the Ops tent to find him. The major was studying a sheaf of radio messages at the back of the tent. When he spied Mick, he waved him back.

“Coast watchers on Choiseul reportin’ three Jap heavy cruisers and some tin cans headed our way. They should arrive sometime between zero two and zero three hundred hours. I propose to go hunting, and I need me a wingman.”

“How much moon we got?”

“Little over three-quarter, twenty-three hundred moonrise, with clear air. I’ve got the dozers pulling palms right now. Let’s go take us a little walk.”

They went down a long path to the beach area, where one dozer was hauling palm trees off the flattened sand while two more waited at the far end of their makeshift runway. The major said the strip was a little over two thousand feet long.

“This won’t support an SBD,” Mick said, feeling the packed sand with his flight boots.

“I was able to ‘borrow’ some of the repair rolls of Marsden matting for this little deal. They gonna lay down one section of metal, wide enough for us to launch side by side, for one thousand feet of takeoff roll.”

“I understand that the main runway might not be there when we come back,” Marsh said, “but why can’t we take off on the main?”

“Because we won’t know the sneaky bastards are here until shells start landing. We’ll only get one shot at this, so we can’t launch early and take a chance that they show up late with us outta fuel. We have to wait for the shooting to start. Then we launch.”

Mick kicked the sand once again. “I can see us getting off here, but coming back?”

“They’re gonna leave this metal here once we launch. If they need it over on the main, they’ll roll it up, and then we’ll do it the hard way.”

“Automatic ground-loop,” Mick said.

“Nah,” the major said. “We’ll be at least a thousand pounds lighter when we come back. You feather the prop, keep her real flat, slightly nose up, and come in gear-up. Drag your hook like you was tryin’ to get a carrier wire, then ease her down into the sand. Piece’a cake.”

Mick looked at the major in the darkness. He was grinning like a Cheshire cat. Mick realized he was looking at a madman.

“Think of it this way, Lieutenant,” the major said. “This’ll surprise the hell out of them Japs. They’ll go back tonight, report goddamn night dive bombers operating over the ’Canal? Spook ’em good. We can only do it once, but they won’t know that.”

We’ll only do it once because we’re both going to be dead, Mick thought. “You do understand that the opportunities for vertigo here are just about unlimited.”

“What the hell, Lieutenant, you know how to do this. I’m a fighter guy, but I’ll just do what you do. C’mon, whaddaya say?”

The man is NAFOD, Mick thought. No Apparent Fear of Death, as they called it back at Pensacola. He had terminal cancer of some kind and didn’t care if he flew himself and his tumor into the sea.

Mick did care. On the other hand, the major had a point: The Japs would in fact be stunned. Right now they owned the night. American dive bombers working at night would really upset their planning. Even better, they’d have to assume there was an American carrier in the area that they hadn’t known about.

“Okay,” Mick said. “Just once, though.”

“That’s all the planes we have,” the major said helpfully. “Brief at twenty-three hunnert, strip-alert launch, probably go up around zero deuce thirty.”

The fun actually didn’t begin until 0240. Mick and the major had been sleeping in their respective cockpits at the northwest end of the ribbon of Marsden matting since 0030. Each of them had two of Mick’s five-hundred-pounders strapped under his wings and a full load of fifty-cal. The starting crews had draped mosquito nets off the wings and slept on the hard-packed sand underneath the planes.

At 0240 what looked like heat lightning appeared behind them out over the sound, followed by the rolling thunder of heavy guns. A minute or so later there were corresponding explosions inland, to their right, as the incoming began landing on and around Henderson Field. The crews scrambled out from under the planes to start their engines. Once they were ready, Mick saluted the major and began his roll. The major waited until Mick’s plane was ten lengths ahead of him and followed suit, not wanting his engine to ingest too much sand.

Between the moonlight and his fully night-adapted vision, Mick could see pretty well. He lifted off while still rolling on metal, cleaned up, flattened out to gain airspeed, and then began his climb. He didn’t look back — it was the major’s job to fly form on him. They went southeast, keeping low, and then curved back around to head way out over the sound to avoid flying through the arc of the shells being lobbed into Henderson Field by the Japanese ships. Mick couldn’t see the ships yet, but he could see their muzzle flashes.

“Arming now,” he called to the major. “Taking angels eight.”

“Roger eight.” The major sounded cool, calm, and collected. Mick did not feel any of those things. Takeoff had been the easy part.

At eight thousand feet they got a good view of what was going on at the airfield. There were some fires burning where the runway should have been. Closely grouped explosions showed where the cruisers’ salvos were landing.

We should have brought flares, Mick thought. He could see the guns flashing and the shells landing but still could not make out the actual ships.

“Can’t see ’em,” he reported.

“Me, neither,” the major said. “They gotta be creepin’ down there somewhere.”

“Let’s go down-moon,” Mick said, hoping for a silhouette. There was no point in making a dive into the gloom below if he couldn’t see the target. He put his barge into a gentle turn toward the azimuth of the moon and then continued around 180 degrees to fly away from the darkened ships below. After a few minutes, he told the major he was going to drop down to angels three and fly back up-moon. The major rogered and followed him down.

From three thousand feet he was able to see the flashes of all three ships firing and establish a rough lineup on their formation. He still couldn’t see the ships themselves, but maybe if they flew right by them, then went right and executed a two-seventy, they might get a silhouette. The problem with that was that they’d be bombing at right angles to the ships’ movement, whereas doctrine called for dropping along the ships’ line of advance to maximize the target footprint.

He told the major what he wanted to do. The major had a better idea.

“Let’s go down to five hundred feet and strafe ’em soon as we see ’em. If we can start a fire, even a small one, then we can bomb the little fucks according to Hoyle.”

“Sounds good to me,” Mick said. They were passing over the gun flashes, which now were much brighter than they had been. “Descending for a two-seventy.”

Once again the major followed him down, and as soon as they had the gun flashes ahead, he pulled abeam of Mick’s plane so they could both shoot at the same time. Mick was hoping that the sound of the Japs’ big guns had drowned out the roar of their own engines as he stared down into the darkness just below the flaring blasts of the cruiser’s outbound salvos.

There. Shapes.

“Tally,” he called.

“Roger tally. Light ’em up.”

They were maybe two thousand yards away when they started firing. Mick descended some more, carefully watching his altimeter to level off at three hundred feet. The major matched him perfectly. The ships’ masts were known to stick up as high as a hundred and fifty feet. At half a mile the ships were finally visible in the moonlight, and Mick concentrated on the middle of the three with both guns, laying down long bursts and seeing the tracers curving down into that dark mass of steel. They’ll know we’re here now, he thought.

“Break right, now,” he called as they flew over the ships. “Angels three.”

He knew they had to turn away from the trajectory of those big eight-inch guns or risk being shot down, if not by the main battery guns then by the mass of twenty-five-millimeter AA guns arrayed along each side of the cruisers. As they climbed out to three thousand feet behind the ship column, Mick looked back and saw a few lines of tracer trying to follow them out. He also saw a small red and yellow fire down there on the water.

“Angels seven,” he called.

“Roger seven. Bombs this time?”

“Roger bombs,” Mick said. “Pickle one bomb at tail-end Charlie like we briefed, then bank right, climb out, and do it again.”

“Copy.”

They maneuvered back astern of the ships, which were no longer visible in the gloom. The major was behind him, keeping close enough to see him but far enough back to give Mick time to dive, release, and escape. Once they gained altitude, the small fire became visible again. Mick lined up on that from seven thousand feet, waited until they were much closer, and then rolled into his attack dive.

This was the dangerous part. He had only a few seconds to line up on that tiny spot of fire, establish a lead, drop, and then make a climbing turn back to altitude. With no visible horizon reference, this was no time for target fixation, and he hoped the major understood that. He set out his dive brakes to give him time to line up and still keep an eye on his altimeter. As his altimeter passed through thirty-five hundred feet he released the first bomb.

“Bomb away and I’m coming right,” he called, cleaning the brakes up. “Taking angels seven.”

“Roger right to seven.”

There was a large flash of light from down below, followed by a second, dimmer one a few seconds later. As they climbed back up to seven thousand feet, Mick could see a much larger fire down below them. Even better, by the light of that fire they could now see two wakes. The Japs had finally figured out they were under air attack, and were executing air-defense doctrine: Speed up, start a circle.

“I see two wakes,” the major called.

“Roger two wakes and one fire.”

“Let’s take the easy way out,” the major said. “Go hit that bastard again. Those other pogues are gonna be too stirred up.”

“Roger,” Mick said.

“Dropping back,” the major said.

They rolled in again on the one ship that was most visible, with a large fire in her center. More importantly, she wasn’t turning. The other two had stopped firing on Henderson Field and were evading out to sea, away from Guadalcanal. They were firing wildly into the darkness, which made them more visible than before, but not like the one they’d hit.

“Rolling in,” Mick called. “Same deal as last time.”

“Roger deal.”

This time Mick aimed well ahead of the fire, then realized that its intensity had just eliminated his night vision. He had no choice: To aim, he had to look at the fire. He flicked his eyes at the altimeter but could no longer read it. He suddenly had no idea of where he was in the attack profile. In a moment of panic, he pickled the bomb and turned out.

“Bomb away,” he called. “Outbound for angels ten.”

The major didn’t reply, and Mick turned to look as he climbed out. He saw a large white shape rise up in front of the fire down below. “Missed it,” he muttered, not realizing his mike was hot. Then his night vision disappeared entirely when a very large explosion blossomed below them, a fireball that started out bright yellow and then turned to red.

“I didn’t,” the major said. “Nailed that bastard.”

Had to be a magazine, Mick thought. Not big enough for a main, but maybe one of the AA magazines. “I believe you did, sir,” he said. “Now for the hard part.”

“Na-a-h,” the major called. “Now you join on me.”

“My night vision is fucked.”

“I’ll turn my lights on,” the major said. “Piece’a cake.”

The big red fireball had gone out down below as they cleared the area. They couldn’t see what they’d achieved, but they didn’t see any more salvos headed onto the island, either. The major checked in with Base Ops as they made their first sweep over Henderson Field. It became obvious that the runway was out of action. There were several fires burning along the strip, although Mick couldn’t make out exactly what was burning. They went into a wide orbit overhead while the major coordinated the beach landing with Ops on a different frequency. He wondered if that cruiser had gone down or was now limping back to Rabaul. We’ll need to check that out in daylight, he reminded himself. A cripple in daylight offered a tempting target. Then the major came back up.

“Runway’s clobbered. They gonna run some vee-hicles down to the beach strip, put some headlights on the sand.”

“Hope those Japs have gone home,” Mick said. “Nothing like giving them an aim point.”

“Well, hell, if they start up again, we’ll have even more light on the beach, right? B’sides, they cain’t hurt sand.”

Mick grinned in the darkness of his cockpit. One crazy bastard over there. “The metal still there?”

“That’s affirma-hotchee, big guy,” the major said, “but they have to get it back over to the field. Some bigwig inbound from Pearl at first light, so let’s hustle-bustle.”

The major took the lead, flying a downwind leg at about five hundred feet along the beach. They could see four jeeps’ worth of headlights pointing out to sea on low beam. As they went downwind, Mick could see the lights but not the sand. Oh, well, he thought. When the major crashes and burns, then I’ll be able to see the sand.

He slowed his barge to minimum speed, deployed flaps but not wheels, and followed the major around. Hook down, flaps down, stand by to feather the mill and then polish this trusty bastard’s belly.

No, wait: The metal strip was still there! Wheels down, hook back up.

He felt a cold sweat on his back as he realized his near-fatal error. He swallowed hard. This was going a long way past crazy shit.

He scanned the dark ocean off to his left as he descended, half expecting a blizzard of eight-inch shells to appear among the jeeps parked below. Then he saw the major’s landing lights flare up as he crossed the imaginary threshold and landed in a swirl of blowing sand, rolling out the full one thousand feet of matting before coming to a stop.

My turn, Mick thought. He lined up on what he hoped was the centerline of the metal strip and set up his controls for a slow, nose-high, full-power approach onto a field he couldn’t see — and then he could: The troops down below had positioned over a hundred flashlights in the holes of the Marsden matting, all pointing back and up toward the approaching planes, establishing a centerline of tiny white dots.

Piece’a cake, he thought and put her down, carrier style, right at the leading edge of the metal. It was a noisy landing, with lots of bumps, but he was able to taxi back up the hard-packed sand and shut it down right behind the major’s plane. That’s when he realized how hard he’d been gripping the controls. The canopy came back and there was the major, standing among a small crowd of grunts who were all clapping and cheering. Apparently the word was already out on the main field: The two nutcases had driven the Japs away. As Mick climbed out he could see a clutch of dozers rumbling down the beach, rolling up the metal strip, while another one was already pulling palm trees back onto the beach.

Back at the main field the repair effort was in full swing, with more dozers pushing dirt and sand into craters while infantrymen fought some oil fires in the nearby jungles and the offline dozer drivers, blades in the air as shields, shot snipers out of the trees. The jeep took them to Operations, where they received another enthusiastic reception. Mick let the major tell the story, with much gesturing and a full measure of expanding aviation bullshit, two cruisers absolutely sunk with direct hits, the rest of them, at least five, hightailing it out of there in a big panic, all trailing smoke and fire. Mick perched on an ammo crate, sipping some coffee that one of the sergeants had thoughtfully laced with whiskey, while the major provided the night’s entertainment.

“Who’re the bigwigs coming in at sunrise?” he asked the sergeant, who was watching the show with a big grin.

“New skipper’s arriving,” the sergeant said. “Cactus Air Force is going uptown.”

Mick asked him what that meant.

“New skipper’s a brigadier general,” the sergeant said, rolling his eyes.

“That gonna take all the fun out of it?”

“Generals often do, Lieutenant,” the sergeant said. He looked at his watch. “You better get you some shut-eye. You’re launching again at zero seven hundred.”

The morning brief came and went, and they lifted off to go work the weeds. At three that afternoon, Operations called a stand-down for all hands so the new skipper could address the squadron pilots. Mick was surprised to see that the major wasn’t present for the evolution. Then he learned via the sergeants’ grapevine that the new general had grounded the major after learning about the night dive-bombing caper the night before. There went all the fun, Mick thought, just like the Top said.

The brigadier gave them the usual team effort, highest professional standards, the whole world is watching what we do here, it’s going to be a long haul, but victory will be ours speech. Then he said there’d be a beer muster in the O-club tent in thirty minutes. Dis-missed. They all stood at attention in the sweltering heat as the general walked off with his aide and the nervous-looking operations officer. By this time, Mick was the only Navy pilot attached to the Cactus Air Force, so he decided to let the Marines do their buzz-cut bonding all by themselves. He went to find the major.

The major, it turned out, was holed up in the sergeants’ version of a Navy Acey-Deucy club, which was a kluge of three CONEX boxes welded together behind high sand berms down near the beach. A lone generator struggled with wet air to provide power for two fans and one freezer. The freezer held the beer and was thus in the most secure part of the club. The major was visibly drunk but greeted Mick like a long-lost brother. A sergeant with one leg brought Mick a frozen beer and then left the two of them to talk.

“Why ain’t you at the big damn deal?” the major asked.

“Couldn’t find my XO, is why,” Mick said.

“Not XO anymore,” the major said. “They got a full bull in there now. I’m getting sent back to San Diego.”

“Aw, please, don’t throw me in that briar patch, B’rer Fox,” Mick protested.

“Ain’t like you think,” the major said, “but never you mind. You need to get up there, git you some face time.”

“Fuckit,” Mick said. “Face time is usually how I get in trouble. This beer ever gonna thaw?”

“Gimme that,” the major said. He pulled out a knife and cut away the top of the beer can, then passed it back to Mick. “Cactus snow cone.”

Mick chewed on his beery slush. “All it needs is a Spam sandwich to make it four-star,” he said.

A very young-looking second lieutenant showed up in the opening to the CONEX box. “Excuse me, sir,” he said to Mick. “Are you Captain, I mean, Lieutenant McCarty, sir?”

“Who the hell wants to know?” the major asked, suddenly looking like he might want to fight.

“Uh, excuse me, sir, Major, but the general wanted to know where the Navy, uh, lieutenant was, sir. On account of he was missing beer muster. Sir.”

The major gave Mick a sympathetic look. “Generals,” he said. “They keep score, don’t they. Better getcher ass up there, Lieutenant. Sir.”

Mick thanked the shavetail and told him he’d be right along.

“Major,” he said. “It’s been a professional privilege to be on your wing and to have you on mine. Thanks for last night.”

“Like I promised when we met,” the major said, “we had us an adventure, didn’t we. You’ll do to ride, old son. Now you better get a move on before I get drunk and embarrass the sergeants’ mess here.”

They shook hands, eye to eye, and then Mick left to go up the beach and past the pile of neatly arranged dead palms. By the time he got to the beer muster, the general had already left on an inspection tour of the airfield’s defenses, leaving the pilots to do what they did best. Mick joined right in. Sometime after dark, he staggered into his tent, his head already hurting from the formaldehyde preservatives in the beer, and dropped onto his cot. The last thing he remembered to do was to make sure his carbine, loaded and chambered, was safe like a steel baby in his arms.

In his dreams, a siren was wailing to the accompaniment of several police whistles. The sound of a giant buzz saw rose up and then drowned out all the lesser noises as he climbed toward consciousness. Then he was levitating, pressed up against the canvas fabric of his tent while his eardrums flattened inward and all the breath was squeezed out of his lungs by the explosion of a pair of fourteen-inch shells outside.

He fell back onto the dirt floor where his cot had been, stunned and spitting sand out of his mouth. A wad of rank canvas tent fabric and the mosquito net dropped down on top of him like a shroud, followed by the tops of several palm trees and then a rain of dirt and sand that seemed to go on for goddamn ever. The inside of his ears felt wet, and all he could hear now was a loud hum. Then he felt two more shells land, not so close this time but still near enough to press even more debris onto him with the double shock wave. He tried to draw a breath but got a mouthful of netting instead.

Bunker, he thought, twisting to get on his side. Gotta get to the bunker. He felt rather than heard more shells landing, some close, most distant, great big shells that hammered the ground with jaw-rattling power.

He tried to move sideways but couldn’t. It felt like there was at least one tree trunk pressing down directly on the tent, along with several hundred pounds of dirt, palm fronds, and other things. More shells were landing, but these were trending farther away, in the direction of the landing strip. They were also different. They weren’t pounding the ground but seemed to be going off in the air, followed an instant later by a hail of steel fragments shredding the palm groves and anything else that had the misfortune to be vertical out there.

He decided to relax, wait for help. As long as he stayed on his side he could draw a breath, and the mound of debris above him was probably protecting him from the shrapnel that was decapitating whole trees and reducing any unprotected airplanes to aluminum confetti. The shelling seemed to go on forever. He wondered if the major had gotten off on one of his night bombing sorties. Then suddenly it ended, abruptly as it had begun.

His head hurt, and he was thirsty. The air in his tomb seemed hotter than before, if that was possible. He wondered just how much shit was piled on the remains of his tent. Would they find him? Was there anyone left alive out there to even look? The general had told the pilots about the possibility of Jap battleships coming down from Rabaul to work over the airfield, especially after last night’s dive-bombing attack. Most of the guys had thought he’d been exaggerating, adding a little drama to his own arrival on the island and throwing some shit at the major. Mick had missed the speech, fortunately, because he would have asked the general if the battleships would still come now that there were night dive bombers on the island. He’d experienced some eight-inch howitzer fire during advanced flight training down in Texas, but these shells had been bigger. Much bigger. Maybe the general had been right. Mick hated that thought.

Breathing was getting harder. His lungs worked, but there simply wasn’t much breathable air.

Great, he thought. I’m gonna suffocate down here under all this debris. Okay, hotshot, he told himself; can’t just lie here anymore. Nobody’s coming to rescue your worthless ass. This is like the Yorktown: time to do something.

He wiggled around under all the debris to see what would move and what wouldn’t. He was able to reach the survival knife sheathed on his right lower leg and pull it straight up to his waist, but he couldn’t turn his hand to apply the big knife to the canvas. He squirmed some more, but his movements shifted something on top of him, and now his legs became immobilized as a load of sand slid down to bury them under serious weight. He was afraid to cut through the canvas only to admit a ton of sand right in his face. He felt the cold steel of the carbine barrel against his right cheek, but the rifle wasn’t going to get him out of here.

Buried alive, he thought, and then banished the thought. He felt something wet on his cheek. He hadn’t felt the sting of a cut, but it was definitely wet. He was able to get to the tiny flashlight on his flight suit with three fingers and turn it on. In the red glow of the light he could see a black stain on the canvas, a stain that was slowly growing.

Oh, Jesus, he thought. I’m in a crater, and the groundwater is filling it up. Just like all the craters he’d seen when he landed that first day.

He felt a drop hit his cheek, and then another.

Wait a minute, he thought. Groundwater would be coming up, not down. He flicked his tongue out to the side of his mouth.

Salty.

Not water.

Blood.

It was blood, and it wasn’t his. Not good.

He closed his mind against the ghastly images that were rising in his imagination. He’d made the mistake of looking down into the flight deck catwalks of the Yorktown as they were taking him over the side to that cruiser. The flight deck crews had used fire hoses to sweep body parts off the deck into the catwalks. As the wounded carrier listed farther and farther to port, the catwalks had become a scene right out of The Jungle.

He closed his eyes and tried to slow his breathing. He knew that when the air ran out he’d start breathing his own CO2, and that would put him to sleep. His ears were still humming like a big generator, so he wasn’t sure he’d even hear rescuers outside calling to see if anyone was under all the debris. The drip on his cheek continued. He closed his eyes and tried to think of a way out.

A while later, something hit his arm. He looked sideways in the dwindling light of the flashlight. It was a piece of rebar. It withdrew as quickly as he identified it. Then it came again, this time hitting his chest. He yelled.

Silence. He strained to hear something over the humming in his ears. Then he thought he heard voices. Angry voices. Disgusted voices.

The probe came again, this time barely visible, on his left side.

He understood. There must be a body on top of him. The probe had come up bloody, and the rescuers were moving on.

He yelled again, but it was really hard to get enough air. Even to him, his yell sounded more like a squeak. Then he remembered the carbine.

Was its barrel full of dirt? Would the damned thing explode if he fired it? So what? he thought.

He twisted his wrist, reached into the trigger guard, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

The safety was on. He tried to move the tab, but his fingers couldn’t get enough leverage.

With a desperate push, he got the safety off, put his finger back into the trigger guard, and pulled the trigger. The carbine bucked backward, slamming his right hand against the sand. It felt like it was broken.

The noise was overwhelming in his tightly packed dirt grave. Gun smoke filled the air pocket. His whole hand stung, and his fingers seemed suddenly full of pins and needles. He pulled the trigger again, not with a squeeze of his finger but more of a spasm. The second blast really hurt his bleeding eardrums, but he was determined. If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die trying, he thought, ears or no ears.

Moments later, hands were scrabbling through the dirt, and he got his first breath of clean air, and then another. It took them five minutes to dig him out. A face kept telling him he was going to be okay and not to fire the carbine anymore, okay, Lieutenant? The face looked to be fifteen, tops. Very young, and very scared. “Me, too, pal,” he mumbled, spitting out some more sand.

Once they hauled him out, they put him on a litter. He protested that he could walk, but the Navy pharmacist’s mate ignored him. “It’s okay, Lieutenant,” one of the kids said. “You’re gonna be fine, but let’s try the jeep just for grins, okay?” As they drove him out of the camp area, he saw in the headlights that the bunker, or the crater where the bunker had been, was already filling with groundwater. There were bloody things floating in that water. He repressed a wave of nausea as he realized that everyone who had sought shelter in the bunker was now hamburger.

Several oil fires up and down the taxiways and the hardstands illuminated the field. Mick couldn’t see what was burning, but the runway was really torn up and there were pieces of airplanes everywhere, even in trees. Amazingly, the Seabee dozers were already out, their diesel engines roaring at full power, some pushing loads of sand and jungle dirt into the huge craters while others jammed the wreckage of the planes into the jungle or laid their buckets down on fires to smother them. The occasional tracer round spat out from the edge of the field as perimeter defense troops dealt with snipers out in the near jungle.

The pharmacist’s mate had the jeep in first gear, which was painfully noisy to Mick’s bludgeoned ears. Mick asked him what had happened.

“Jap battlewagons,” the young petty officer said. “Fucked everything up. You could see ’em, offshore, big-ass clouds of fire, and then those shells comin’ in, wa-wa-wa, boom!”

“You were watching?”

“Yes, sir,” the kid said proudly. “I was sleepin’ in one of the meat wagons? Wasn’t nowheres else to go, so I opened the back doors and watched.”

“You didn’t run for your bunker?”

“Us medics don’t have no bunkers, Lieutenant. If we’re in a bunker, we can’t see where we’re needed, right?”

“Right,” Mick said, lying back at last. Medics, he thought. Someone back at pharmacist’s mate school had told them that they were invincible, God bless ’em.

A chief pharmacist’s mate was doing triage at the field hospital, which was a long tent surrounded by litters spread all over the ground. Mick said he wasn’t really hurt. “Other than this,” he said, holding up his right hand. “This doesn’t work so well right now.”

“No need to shout, Lieutenant,” the chief said, examining the hand. “I’m right here.”

Mick stared at the man. “I was buried alive, Doc,” he blurted out, surprising himself when he said it.

“Scary, was it?” the chief asked, making notes on his triage pad.

“Are you shitting me?”

“Not a pound, Lieutenant. Me? I’d’a drowned in my own piss. Listen, you want a Section Eight, I can start the paper.”

“Hell, no,” Mick said. “I want to go get that battleship. Tell the major I’m ready to beach-party with him again.”

The chief frowned. “Um,” he said. Mick had to bend forward to hear him over the bloody hum in his ears.

“What?”

“The major tried to take off when all this shit started. Hit a crater, ground-looped, burned.”

“Fuck!”

“Yeah,” the chief said.

“Shit,” Mick said. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

“That’s what everybody’s saying.”

“He told me he had a brain tumor,” Mick said. “That since he was gonna die anyway, he might as well take some Japs with him.”

The chief medic smiled. “Brain tumor, hunh? Not exactly.”

“I wondered.”

“Yeah, well, what the major had was a drinking problem. A flight surgeon had to clear him each morning before the brief. Thing was, I think that ol’ boy could fly better hammered than most of the boot pilots flying stone cold sober. So, yeah, they let him go kill Japs. You know he was an ace?”

“I believe it. He was a leader, is what he was.”

“That’s gospel, Lieutenant,” the doc said, rubbing weary eyes. “So, you ready to launch and go find some Japs?”

“I need some coffee,” Mick said, “and maybe one small taste of bourbon whiskey. But then? Hell, yes.”

“Bourbon whiskey,” the doc said, patting him on the shoulder. “That sounds familiar.”

His shoulder hurt when the doc patted him. Hell, everything hurt. Except his rapidly enlarging right hand, and that worried him.

He got his shot of medicinal whiskey, which was horrible, and then made his way to the Operations tent, which somehow had survived the bombardment. There was a new enormous crater in front of the tent, over which a plank bridge had already been built. The generator had been disabled by the blast, so the men inside were operating with flashlights. The big problem was that there weren’t any planes left. The Japanese battlewagons had blown Henderson Field into a mud-mire, and most of its aircraft were in charred pieces out among the few palm trees still standing.

“No planes at all?” Mick asked.

A Marine warrant officer looked up at him with bleary eyes, a cigarette going in each hand. “Yes, sir, there’s four. But there’s no gas.”

“If I can scrounge up some gas, can I get one of the four?”

“Could you sign for it with that hand, Lieutenant?”

Mick looked down at his right hand, which was now almost twice its original size. He tried to make a fist, but nothing happened. It still didn’t hurt.

“Well, fuck me,” he muttered. “Lookit that piece of meat.”

“Keep you and it out of that field hospital,” the warrant advised. “They got a new surgeon over there, came in with the general. Likes to cut shit off.”

“Might as well,” Mick said. “I can’t feel the damned thing.”

He went back over to the triage tent and told the chief pharmacist’s mate he couldn’t feel his hand anymore.

“You will,” the chief said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small pill bottle. He gave Mick two pills. “When it starts to hurt, take ’em both, and be sitting down when you do. Preferably somewhere safe. That right there is seriously strong stuff.”

Mick went out the back entrance and walked down what was left of the open-air flight line. When he came to the regular field hospital tents, he saw that many of the forms in their shabby litters had their faces covered in bloody blankets. There were only a few fires still going now out along the runway, and what sounded like a brisk small-arms firefight had erupted at the other end of the runway. He realized he could hear again. He rubbed the dried blood off his neck and crackled his eardrums a couple of times.

His right hand now felt like a lead boxing glove. The carbine must have broken it when he’d fired it underground, he thought. Otherwise he felt relatively okay. A little shaky-Jake, maybe, and his flight suit smelled like a latrine, but he was alive, unlike these poor bastards. He stepped into the hospital tent and asked a blood-spattered pharmacist’s mate for a sling. He rigged the sling, cadged a tin cup of coffee, and went back outside, where he sat down on a stump.

He felt like he should be writing a letter home to tell someone he was still alive. The only problem with that was that he had no one left at home to write to. His father had been the vice president of his hometown bank when the crash came. He’d committed suicide when the bank failed in 1929 and revealed some damning irregularities. His mother had withdrawn into mute madness a year later, and Mick, their only child, had thrown himself into his varsity football career at the Naval Academy. His mother was now in a state home for the insane. He wrote her letters from time to time, but the last time he’d gone back to see her, she might as well have been on Mars.

He surveyed the devastation around the field and decided to stay right where he was. It was like being back on a carrier after an attack. If an aviator couldn’t fly, he was expected to stay the hell out of everyone else’s way. For the next hour he watched more jeeps come grinding in to the field hospital, litters sticking out of their backseats, with far too many of them carrying people to the parking lot morgue. He slipped off the stump, leaned back against it, and went to sleep.

At sunrise, two R4Ds touched down on the freshly repaired main strip. They taxied up to the field hospital and shut down in a cloud of blue exhaust smoke. Mick recognized them as the military version of the redoubtable Douglas DC-3, rigged out as aeromedical transports. The field hospital people came out and began loading the most seriously wounded into the waiting transports. A Marine first lieutenant came over from the Ops tent, spoke to one of the pharmacist’s mates, and then headed for Mick. He was extremely thin from malaria and was walking with a cane. Mick figured he must have weighed a good ninety pounds.

“You Lieutenant McCarty?” he asked.

“Yup.”

“You’re supposed to ride the medical flight to Santo.”

“What for?”

“That,” the man said, pointing at Mick’s hand. “You can’t fly with that, so they want you there for treatment. There’s a real hospital there.”

“I can fly with the other hand, you know.”

“Hey, Lieutenant, I’m just the messenger boy, okay? That’s the word from the CO. If you can fly, you stay. If you can’t, you go get fixed.”

“What’d you do in real life?” Mick asked.

The guy grinned. “FAC,” he said. “Sniper shot my knee off. Now I run errands here at Ops. Good deal, hunh?”

Mick shook his head, got up stiffly, and walked over to the nearest transport. He was immediately conscripted to help load the wounded. When they saw he couldn’t use his right hand, they stationed him on the appropriate side of each litter so that he could carry with his left hand. Fair enough, he thought. My legs still work.

When they were ready to go, he told the loadmaster that he was supposed to go to Santo. The Army Air Corps sergeant looked at him blankly for a moment. “Ain’t no seats in there, Captain,” he said.

“It’s Lieutenant,” Mick said. “Naval air. I guess I can stand up.”

“It’s two hours, Lieutenant,” the sergeant said.

“The general said I have to go to Santo,” Mick replied.

“On you go,” the sergeant said. “Hustle up, though. They’re sayin’ there’s an air raid inbound from Rabaul.”

They launched five minutes later, bumping and banging over the rough repairs on the runway. Several of the wounded cried out in pain as the heavily loaded transport gunned it down the strip, its engines shooting flames out the exhaust pipes, and lifted reluctantly at the very end of the matting. Mick found himself a cubicle at the back of the plane in the life jacket locker. He put on a kapok so that it would support his head, sat down among the stash of life jackets, and leaned back on the remains of the Ops generator that was being sent on to Nouméa for repairs. Forward of him were racks and racks of litters hung on the sides of the transport, four high. He could see pharmacist’s mates and a couple of Navy nurses tending to the wounded, hanging bottles, wiping brows, handing out pills and sympathy. The pilots let some exterior air in as they climbed through five thousand feet, and for the first time since he’d been on the island, Mick experienced air-conditioning.

His right hand was beginning to throb, though. He pulled out the two pills. Take ’em both, the medic had said — but if something happens, I don’t want to be zombied up here, Mick thought. He decided to take one, keep one. In fifteen minutes he was sound asleep.

Seemingly seconds later he was yanked awake by the sound of twenty-millimeter cannon shells blasting through the back of the aircraft, and then pinned to the left side of the fuselage as the pilots tried to jink away from what had to be a Jap fighter behind them. Mick tried to gather his wits, but his brain was numbed by the pill. He felt the heavy shells whacking the generator at his back while others slashed by his head and down the full length of the transport. He heard screams as some of them hit wounded men, and then the Douglas went way over in a left bank, pulling g’s that forced Mick hard against the floor. The interior of the cabin was filling with smoke, and one engine absolutely didn’t sound right.

There was another hail of gunfire from behind the aircraft, and both engines quit in a gasp of oil and shattered pistons. The only noise now was that ominous airstream howl of an aircraft fully out of control, going down in a wide left spiral.

Well, fuck me, Mick thought. I’ve tangled with Zeros before, but now I’m gonna buy the farm as a passenger?

The smoke in the cabin grew thicker, and Mick instinctively turned his face into the stack of life jackets as the plane’s dive steepened, the sound of the slipstream outside rising to a crescendo. At least there were no more rounds slamming into the transport’s innards, but that fact hardly made a difference.

Going down, Mick thought. Gonna hit that concrete surface of the ocean at three hundred knots, and then we’ll find out if all the preachers were right or wrong.

Strangely he was not afraid. He’d been in combat, he’d had some near misses, and half the guys he’d been flying with were already dead. It was as if this were simply a natural outcome. He remembered the unofficial slogan of some of the Yorktown pilots: Fly Navy. Die Navy.

That refrain sounded a bit off to his drugged brain, but there was nothing he really could do about it, was there, he thought. He wondered if the pilots up front were already dead, but then the transport banked sluggishly back to the horizontal. He began to lean the other way, toward the aisle. The g-forces grew in his belly as the plane pulled up, leveling for a ditch in the Pacific.

No, no, no, Mick thought. Too fast, much too fast: You can’t ditch at this speed. You fly flat, pull up the nose, stall the bastard ten feet over the water, keeping her wings level, and close your eyes. Assuming you still had engine power. From the sounds of it, though, these guys were trying to fly that proverbial rock the instructors were always talking about.

The light coming through the portholes changed from white to blue, and he felt the nose come up and hold. He braced himself into the pile of life jackets and waited. The big generator behind him had probably saved him from the storm of bullets from that Jap fighter. Now he prayed that the thing was firmly lashed down or it was going to crush him when they hit.

He felt the tail keel pounding waves, and then the plane slammed into the water with a vicious crash. The chorus of screams from the wounded was overwhelmed by the roar of water along the plane’s sides. Then it was suddenly silent, but only for a moment. The groans and moans of the wounded men strapped to the hull of the transport were terrible to hear. The aircraft remained relatively level, but Mick already felt water rising around his ankles. He checked his own extremities, disentangled himself from his nest of life jackets, and looked forward along the aisle.

The interior was filled with dust. The patients were still all strapped in lengthwise in their tiers of litters on either side of the aisle. Then he saw the sheen of seawater on the floor. The light coming through the portside portholes was white at the top but going green at the bottom.

Get out, get out, get out! a soundless voice was screaming in his ear.

He climbed over a pile of equipment boxes and headed forward through the center aisle, trying not to look at the wounded men, their bandages all red with new bleeding, some moaning, some crying, bandaged hands reaching for him as he went forward.

There were three bloodied nurses piled up in front of the cockpit door, which itself was riddled with bullet holes. Two of the nurses were either unconscious or dead, but one was trying to extricate herself. He reached her and pulled her to her feet, very much aware that the water here reached his knees. The main hatch was on the left side, back by where he had been sitting. He started pulling her toward the back of the aircraft, but she resisted.

“The wounded,” she mumbled. “We have to get them out.”

He looked down at her. Brunette. Plain, round face; terrified brown eyes. Bloody uniform, hands, and wrists.

“How?” he asked. “They can’t swim, they can’t even float.”

“You’ve got a life jacket — where are the rest of the life jackets?” she said. “I’ll start unstrapping.”

“We have to open the hatch before the plane sinks any deeper,” he said. “Otherwise the water pressure will seal it.”

“You open that hatch, we’ll flood,” she said, and then she realized that it was hopeless. She was looking past him, back into the cabin, at the tiers of litters, stacked like the remains in a catacomb. The lowest tier was already awash. They were the most seriously wounded, and many were already unconscious. Mercifully, Mick thought.

He could see that she understood. Moving the wounded was impossible. Open the hatch, the plane would flood and sink rapidly. Leave it closed and they’d go down with it. At the rate the water was already coming in, there was absolutely nothing that could be done for the wounded. They were aboard the plane because they were so badly hurt they couldn’t even move. Now they were all going to die.

“Are they alive?” he asked her, pointing at the two inert nurses.

“I don’t think so,” she said in a small voice, her fingers brushing all the holes in the cockpit door. “There were so many bullets.”

Behind them there was a crash and a yell of pain as one of the Marines, who had managed to unstrap himself and his litter, fell to the floor, where he floundered faceup in foot-deep water. Other wounded men were shouting now to let them out, while still others, the ones who knew what was going to happen, just sobbed or cried for their mothers. The air was getting unbreathable as the plane settled into the sea, its heavy engines beginning to drag the nose down.

Mick sighed and took her by the arm, and together they sloshed back along the aisle, stepping over the man on the floor, who was now quiet, no longer struggling, his wide-eyed face already under half a foot of water. When they got to the hatch, Mick pulled the operating handle to the open position. It didn’t move. He grabbed a stanchion on either side of the hatch, swung both legs up against it, and pushed hard. His swollen right hand came back to life with a lance of pain that nearly made him faint, but the hatch handle moved a few degrees, and then a few more. A small wall of seawater flooded in, and as it did, the angle of the floor deepened toward the nose. He shoved the hatch up.

“Get out, now!” he shouted at the nurse, who seemed unable to function. She was still looking back at all the wounded strapped to what was going to become their coffin, her hands at her mouth, her eyes filling with tears. He would have pushed her into the gap at the bottom of the hatch, but it was taking everything he had just to keep that gap open. The structure of the plane gave off a low groan as the fuselage was subjected to reverse stresses, and then the plane began an ominous roll to the right. Even so, the water was streaming in now, much of it flowing aft from the cockpit door. A porthole on the right side burst, and the plane began to really fill. The roll to the right exposed the bottom of the hatch for a moment, and Mick, who’d been pushing on it to hold it open, felt himself falling into the opening as the hatch popped up. The river of water coming in threatened to sweep him back into the cabin, so he let go, grabbing the nurse by one ankle and pulling her out of the airplane as they went into the sea.

When they surfaced, the left wing was rising into the air above them, its engine spewing steam and oil beneath the badly bent propeller blades. The nurse was floundering right in front of him and crying hysterically. He grabbed the front of her shirt with his good left hand and started a half-ass backstroke to get away from the plane and the growing slick of high-octane aviation gasoline on the water. For some reason they were drifting forward along the hull of the transport. Mick felt something, a rumble of some sort, and looked up. The left wing was dropping back into the sea. He kicked hard, still dragging her with him, as the huge sheet of aluminum slapped the sea ten feet away, stinging his eyes with a flat, hard sheet of spray.

Right wing broke off, he thought. Momentarily exhausted, he stopped swimming and took stock of his passenger. She had fainted and was now a dead weight on him and the sole kapok. He treaded water for a few minutes and looked around. The blue Pacific stretched to the horizon in every direction. He thought he could see the tops of the Kavo Range back to the northeast, but he couldn’t be sure. Had the pilots managed to get out a Mayday?

He focused back on the plane, which appeared to have reached some state of equilibrium in the sea, albeit with just the very top-line of the fuselage and the tail fin showing. The only sounds came from the portside engine, which was making clicking sounds as it cooled in the ocean. The top of the main hatch was barely visible. There was no more screaming inside the cabin.

We need a raft, he thought. He’d seen what looked like inflatables lashed to the bulkhead right by the main hatch. Would the damned thing float long enough for him to get back inside and snatch a raft?

He shook the nurse, then yelled at her. Her eyes fluttered open and then widened in shock. “Wha-a-a…?” she exclaimed.

“Tread water,” he ordered, letting go of her as he began to untie his kapok. She went under immediately but then popped back up, spluttering.

“Take this jacket,” he said. “I’m going back inside, see if I can get a raft.”

She just stared at him blankly until he got the last string off and then dropped the already sodden life jacket into her arms. She failed to grab it, and a small wave began to take it away. He swore, retrieved the kapok, spun her around in the water, and manhandled her arms through the holes. He tied a single chest string and then let her float. She was sobbing again, her small fists pressing against her eyes.

The plane was now more than fifty feet away, barely visible except for the vertical stabilizer. He wondered why it didn’t sink but prayed for another five minutes as he set out for that hatch.

By the time he got alongside, the top of the hatch was underwater and the top-line radio aerial was level with his face. He saw a large wrinkle developing in the skin just above the hatch as the left wing flexed in the underlying swells. He took one deep breath and then went under the partially opened hatch and into the cabin. There was some ambient light, but not much. Everything was illuminated in seawater green. There were hundreds of white shapes suspended in the interior, which he realized were probably bandages. Hanging onto the hatch coaming with his left hand, he grasped around in the darkness where he thought he’d seen the rubber bundles. He made sure not to look forward into the main cabin. He couldn’t find the rafts, and now he needed air.

If she’s floating, he thought, there has to be an air pocket. He took a big chance and went all the way into the cabin and let himself float up to the ceiling, where there was indeed an air pocket. It was foul and extremely wet air, but it beat breathing water. He took a couple of breaths and went back down into the murk around the open hatch, which was now just a greenish square of light against the gathering darkness. This time he found one of the rafts. He tugged on it, but it was lashed down and he couldn’t find the release snaps. He was again running out of air. He began to panic as he heard structural breakup noises crackling in the water around him. He went up, got more air, and went back down twice more but could not find a way to release one of the rafts from the bulkhead.

On the third try his left hand found a D-ring. From his training days at Pensacola, he knew that D-rings were actuators.

Screw it, he thought and pulled hard. The raft began inflating in a noisy rumble of CO2. He grabbed one end of the raft, now beginning to bulge like a loaf of rubber bread, and pulled himself over to the hatch coaming. If this works, the pressure of inflation ought to break the straps, he thought. If it takes too long, the raft will inflate and be stuck inside the plane.

He pulled some more, trying to position the writhing bundle of rubber in the hatchway, but then he was out of air. He let go, went out the hatch, and lifted to the surface, accompanied a moment later by two loud bangs and then the entire fifteen-man life raft. By the time he got himself alongside the raft and his left arm through one of the straps, the plane’s tail had disappeared. There was no dramatic underwater convulsion. One moment she was there, the next she was gone, gliding like a razor blade into the depths with her cargo of the very unlucky.

He hung alongside the raft for a few minutes, getting his breath, and then rolled over the side into the raft. Then he sat up and looked around for the nurse.

He couldn’t find her.

He got up on his knees, trying to get his sight line a little higher, and yelled out over the empty waves. Even if she’d passed out again she’d be floating, he thought. I know I got that one strap tied on her. He stretched to see better and kept shouting. He tried to stand up, but the raft was too unstable. After ten minutes, he quit. She was simply gone. The seas were maybe one to two feet, but he could see at least a few hundred yards in every direction.

Nothing.

He sat back down on the rubber bottom of the boat and examined his throbbing right hand. It was no bigger, but it looked darker, as if there were blood pooling under the skin. He heard something in the water and looked up. A large dark gray fin was cutting through the water nearby. He remembered her bleeding hands. That might explain where she went, he thought, suddenly very glad for the raft.

The seas remained relatively calm, and the morning was not yet half over. Take the rest of the day off, Lieutenant Jonah, he told himself. He tried not to think of all those wounded guys, strapped down tight in their litters as the plane filled with water. He felt really bad about not having saved any of them, but on the other hand, what could he have done? Pushed their broken and bleeding bodies into the water so they could drown sooner?

Still.

He heard what sounded like an airplane engine and rolled over. He scanned the bright sky but couldn’t find it.

Japs? Coming back to machine-gun survivors? He’d heard all the stories.

The sky appeared to be clear, but then he saw there was a light haze at about five thousand feet. The plane seemed to be executing a square search, but there was no point in waving or doing anything else. If he couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see him, either. After a few minutes the plane droned off to the northwest, back toward Guadalcanal.

Mick got back up on his knees and took another look around for the missing nurse but still saw nothing except a few more shark fins in the distance. He rousted out the raft’s supplies bag, in which he found C-rations, water, and cigarettes. He drank one can of water but, after the horrifying scene inside the plane left the food alone. He ignored the two short-handled paddles strapped into the gunwales; he was too tired to start paddling. First he’d see which way the raft seemed to be drifting. There were some inflatable life jackets in another bag. He put one on but left it deflated. The jacket had a battery-operated light, which might come in handy if they came out later in PT boats or perhaps even sent a destroyer. He knew that rescuers would be out if, and only if, the pilots had had time to get a Mayday out when the Zeros jumped them. If not, nothing would happen until the aeromedical flight failed to arrive in Espiritu Santo. By then he would have done some serious drifting. He set up one of the sun flaps, lay down against the rubbery side of the raft, and dozed.

He awoke at sunset. The evening sky was red and orange, with enormous cumulonimbus towers building across the western skies. He scanned the horizon to see if he could make out any aspects of land but now saw nothing, not even the high ridges on Guadalcanal. The seas were still pretty calm. His face felt sunburned from the reflected light, but otherwise, with the exception of his throbbing right hand, he was none the worse for wear. The raft was equipped to sustain fifteen survivors for a week, so as long it stayed afloat and he stayed in it, and no Jap planes saw him, he would probably survive. He found one of the keeper lanyards, snapped it to his life vest, and then restowed the supplies pouch. He also found the flare gun and six rounds of flare projectiles. He made sure he knew where the bailing bucket was. If the weather on Guadalcanal had been any example, sea conditions could change rapidly out here. He still wasn’t hungry but forced himself to eat part of a C-ration and drink one more can of water. He remembered he still had one more pill. He fished around in his trouser pockets and produced one badly crumbled tablet. He took it anyway and went back to dozing.

He was awakened by a rainsquall around midnight. There was no thunder and lightning, just a sudden cold downpour that seemed to flatten the seas. He lay back, opened his mouth, and used the rain to rinse away the taste of the pill. With his head flat on the rubber bottom of the boat, he thought he heard, or more likely felt, a deep vibration in the water.

He sat back up. It was a starless night with the tail end of that rainsquall drifting overhead, but now he could definitely hear the rumble of one or more big diesels. PT boats? The engines sounded too big for that. A Jap destroyer? He shivered in the dark at the thought. He couldn’t remember if destroyers were diesel or steam, but he thought they ran on steam turbines. He cupped an ear and then turned in the raft to locate the sound, but it seemed to surround him. Whatever it was, it was coming nearer by the minute. Finally he thought he could pinpoint the direction. He wasn’t too worried about a collision — the rubber raft would bounce off the hull of a ship unless it was a direct, cut-it-in-half hit.

Should I signal? That was the question. What if it’s a Jap? He was pretty sure that he was roughly south and east of Guadalcanal. The Japs were based north of the island, so there was no reason for one of their warships to be this far south. That’s what the guys at Pearl Harbor had thought, too, he remembered.

The rumble grew louder, but he still couldn’t see anything in the rain-washed darkness. Then he could. A black bow emerged out of the darkness, low down on the water, pushing a gray-white bow wave ahead of it. He could see a line of holes along the near side and then what looked like a deck gun topside.

A submarine, running dark on the surface — but whose? He had only seconds to decide.

He reached down to his life vest and switched on the one-battery white light. It almost blinded him in the darkness, so he felt rather than saw the bulk of the sub slide by. Just for the hell of it, he yelled out, “Hey, rube!”

A moment later the raft wobbled in the water as the sub’s wake pushed it away. He felt the spray from the engine exhausts blowing in his face and smelled diesel oil. Then the engines slowed down. Had they heard him?

He broke out a paddle and used it to turn the raft so that he faced the direction of the engine noise. The sub was running totally dark, so he could only listen, but he kept the light on. It had a single battery that wouldn’t last long, but in the almost absolute darkness it shone like a lighthouse.

The engine noises seemed to die away in the distance. He quit paddling and sat back on his haunches, not knowing what if anything would happen next. He thought about turning off the light to save the battery, but if they did turn around, that would be the only way they’d find him. Maybe he should fire a flare.

Ten minutes later he was startled when something big nudged the raft sideways from behind him, and when he looked up, there was the submarine’s bow, right overhead. There were figures out on deck, shining red flashlights down on him.

“Douse that white light,” someone called. Mick switched it off.

A rope ladder came whistling out of the dark and thumped into the life raft. Mick didn’t hesitate. He pulled the ladder taut and scrambled up the slippery wet rungs until two strong hands pulled him on deck.

“Who are you?” a voice asked.

Mick identified himself.

“Pilot?”

“Yeah, Navy, but I was a passenger this time.” He told them what had happened. He heard a ripping noise alongside, and then the rope ladder was being pulled back aboard. He heard air escaping from the raft as it began to sink, and then arms were leading him to a hatch in the foredeck. He climbed one-handed down a really steep ladder, with one sailor below and another above. The hatchway and the entire interior of the submarine were also red-lighted. His ears popped when they shut the big round hatch at the top of the ladder.

An hour later he was sitting in the tiny wardroom with the executive officer. The submarine had submerged; the captain was concerned that another ship or sub might have seen Mick’s white light. Mick’s wet flight suit had been exchanged for someone’s spare khakis, and he was busy giving a debrief about his last twenty-four hours. The exec, a weary-looking lieutenant commander, just shook his head when he heard about the wounded on the evacuation flight. He looked at Mick’s guilty expression.

“You were not responsible for that,” he said. “Goddamned Japs did that. The plane was marked, right? Red crosses?”

“I think so,” Mick said. “It was still pretty dark when we took off. I never looked.”

“Bastards worship death,” the exec said. “We pulled a survivor out of the water, after we sank one of their tin cans? He was unconscious, bobbing around in a life jacket. When he came to, on deck? Found our doc working on him? He bit the doc’s hand and then rolled right back over the side. Now we don’t bother.”

“The Marines sure as hell don’t bother,” Mick said. “So where will you take me? Back to the ’Canal?”

“I guess we can,” the exec said. “Or you can come with us to Darwin.”

Mick grinned. “Gosh, XO, I’d have to think about that. Darwin, Australia, or Guadalcanal. That’s a real tough one.”

“Right,” the XO said. “Let’s find you a rack.”