But no-he hadn’t screwed the pooch this time. That was the shoreline south of Buffalo, where he belonged. He breathed a sigh of relief. He also tried to suppress the little stab of worry that went through him whenever he did this. Out in the Pacific, he wouldn’t have a shoreline to recognize. If he was going to find the enemy and find his way back to his own carrier again, he’d have to be able to use the navigation they were trying to pound into his head.
Can I? he wondered. He hoped so. He thought so-as long as he had a little while to think while he was doing it. “The Japs may not give you that kind of time, Joe,” he said in the cockpit. “Are you sure you want to go on with this?”
But that had only one possible answer. He nodded. He didn’t need to speak. He’d been doing this for most of a year now. He’d torn his life to pieces to do this. He wasn’t about to back away from it now.
And if that meant he had to take a few chances once he got up there… He shrugged. Then it did, that was all. His commissioning wasn’t very far away. He didn’t give a damn about becoming an officer for the sake of becoming an officer-though that would have his immigrant parents walking on air.
What he gave a damn about was that becoming an officer, becoming a pilot, would give him the chance to fly off a real carrier and take the war to the Japs. He’d been waiting for that chance ever since Pearl Harbor. It was so close these days, he could taste it. He wanted it bad.
By now, coming down on dry land seemed routine. Instructors had talked to the cadets about stuff like that, warning them against overconfidence. Joe had heard about guys who flew their planes into the ground just out of carelessness. He watched what he was doing, but he had to make himself watch it. That probably wasn’t so good.
No landing officer with wigwag flags here-just him and the F3F and the runway. He landed smoothly enough and taxied to a stop. As he killed the engine, he laughed at himself. Three years earlier, this plane had been on a carrier. If war had broken out then, say over the sinking of the Panay, it would have been in the front line against the Japs. Nowadays… Nowadays, it was good enough to train in.
Of course, Japan probably hadn’t had Zeros three years earlier, either. Things happened in a hurry nowadays, and that was that.
Another Grumman biplane came in and taxied up right behind Joe’s. Orson Sharp climbed out of it.
“Way to go, roomie,” he said. “You made those circuits and bumps look mighty good.”
“Yeah?” Joe still sometimes had trouble believing his roommate was pulling for him as hard as he seemed to.
But Sharp nodded. “Oh, yeah. We do ’em here, we can do ’em anywhere.” He didn’t ask about his own performance. Part of that was because Joe had been in front of him in the queue and couldn’t have seen him. And the other part was that the Mormon kid, unlike Joe, was confident about everything he did up there. He wasn’t a showoff or anything, but he was good, and he knew it.
Groundcrew men took charge of the fighters. Joe and Sharp walked side by side to the administration building next to the field. By now, Joe was used to having his roommate tower over him. Once you got up in the air, size didn’t matter any more anyway.
When they got inside, instructors separated them. Joe’s raked him over the coals for not following the landing officer’s signals fast enough. The gimlet-eyed men aboard the Wolverine had wasted no time radioing their complaints back to the base. They never did.
Joe took the heat and tried not to show how it stung. Actually, he thought he’d done pretty well. He’d done his damnedest-he knew that. If it wasn’t good enough… He’d just have to try to improve. You couldn’t argue. You had no excuses for anything less than perfection. A couple of cadets had complained and alibied when instructors criticized them. Joe didn’t know where they were these days. He did know they weren’t cadets any more.
When his own reaming was done, his instructor barked, “Any questions?”
“Yes, sir,” Joe replied.
The instructor’s eyebrows rose. More often than not-much more often than not-that was the wrong answer. But the instructor couldn’t presume ahead of time. “Go ahead,” he said, his voice chilly as the weather.
“Sir, we’ve lost a lot of carriers in the Pacific,” Joe said. “My question is, when do we start getting replacements?”
“Ah.” The instructor relaxed. Joe had found a question he could safely ask: it wasn’t one about his own performance. Something approaching warmth entered the older man’s voice as he replied, “Well, Mr. Crosetti, you have to understand I don’t know a whole lot more than you do here-not officially, anyway.”
“Yes, sir,” Joe said eagerly. “I do follow that. But you’re hooked into the grapevine, and I’m just a dumb cadet. I don’t get the time of day, let alone the juicy stuff.”
The instructor’s face crinkled into a wide smile. Joe hadn’t been sure it had room for that much amusement, but it did. The officer said, “We’re not talking weeks, but we’re not talking years, either.”
He caught himself. “I take it back. From what I hear, the first one is only weeks away. But we’re looking at next summer before we have enough hulls in the water to go back and take another shot at the Japs.”
“Next summer.” Joe weighed that. Normally, seen with the impatience of youth, it would have seemed a million miles away. But when he looked ahead at everything he still had to do to win a place on one of those carriers… “Well, that doesn’t sound too bad.”
LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO HAD ALWAYS SLEPT LIGHTLY. Lately, he’d been dozing and catnapping more than really sleeping. He didn’t like that at all. Air raids came every few nights now, and he expected them even on nights when they didn’t come. Worry kept him awake when sirens didn’t.
Tonight, though, the alarm was real. “Zakennayo!” he snarled as he ran for a shelter trench. “What good is it to have this fancy electronic warning if we can’t shoot down the enemy airplane once we spot it?”
As if to mock him, a couple of antiaircraft guns near the Haleiwa airstrip started barking. Wasting ammunition, he thought scornfully: they had about as much chance of hitting that stinking flying boat as he did if he stood up and threw rocks at it.
Through the guns’ racket, he caught the steady purr of the floatplane’s engines. The Americans made good motors; by comparison, a lot of Japanese aircraft sounded like flying washing machines.
Crump! Crump! Bombs fell, not too far away. Yankee raiders hadn’t hit Haleiwa for a few nights. This was the least of the airstrips on Oahu, as it had been when the Americans held Hawaii. Maybe they thought they would catch us napping. Maybe they were right, too.
A few more explosions, these more distant. Shindo wanted to hop in his Zero and go after the enemy seaplane. But night fighting was a risky business only now beginning to get specialists even in Europe, where there’d been more of it than anywhere else.
If he took off here, he’d be flying blind. He wouldn’t have radar technicians who could guide him to his target, the way English and German night-fighter pilots did. He wouldn’t have a swarm of targets to go after, either: just one seaplane on a nuisance raid. And he’d have a devil of a time getting down again, too, with all the fields on Oahu blacked out at night.
No, he had to stay where he was and do a slow burn. That, no doubt, was what the Americans had in mind. They knew how to get what they wanted, damn them.
More bombs fell, somewhere far off in the distance. Schofield Barracks? Wheeler Field? Even Honolulu? But for those distant explosions, the night was eerily silent, as most Oahu nights were. Sound could carry a long, long way.